Reviews and Comments

Which is to say, wow this book is cramming too much into too little space, and wow is it ever a white western perspective on it all. I suspect folks who are not book historians, librarians, or archivists might enjoy this book more than I did or my book club. There are some great parts about the ways in which knowledge gets destroyed (John Leland and the English Reformation!! YIVO and the Holocaust!!). But, see above re a very western perspective on all of this. (Apologies to all the dads out there who deserve a better book on the topic.)

Forget going for easy reads, I’m now going for well-written and so far omg yes

Abducted girl and then a lot of confusion and it all kind of was solved in the end, kind of

change of pace from the wholesome to the not lol

Read this in Teixcalaan recovery mode and loved it. I think I was supposed to find it optimistic and cozy etc etc and I did. But I also found deep sorrows hiding in its slant looks at how we live now. So: it's about stopping to rest but it's also about getting the purpose to do better.

I loved this as much as the first--the stakes of what it means to be a person and how we express that, along with what are memory and empire and language, are compelling and the characters radiate.

I almost forgot I had set this aside for a moment when my brain could concentrate and now I'm tired of waiting for that state so here we go!

less soap-opera than it was getting (good), the murder mystery was less great than some of the others (bad), and Ruth is living in Cambridge (wrong), but still pretty delightful

I love the first half of this book as a primer on what mutual aid is and how it’s different from the world of charity (although as an intro to the concept it will play better for lefty readers who already have some inkling of those problems). And I love the second half as a really practical guide to leadership and management, which is key for mutual aid group dynamics but also full of good material to use for reflecting on this in all sorts of dynamics. The book is short, sweet, and I now have a habit of giving it away to mutual aid friends

I don’t have to like the characters in the books I read (and actually as a former EngLit prof, find that way of reading for likeability or relatedness to be super limiting). But having said that, with every single Rooney novel, I struggle with frustration and wanting to shake the characters, especially the young women. I think this is probably the point of it all? This is gorgeously written, especially the third-person chapters describing the characters’ actions etc and the cinematic looking-at-ness of those sections (she tells you insistently what it looks like the characters are feeling from their actions rather than telling you how they feel). But I still wondered the whole time, as I have with Normal and Conversations, why I was reading it.

I guess I'm reading this now and so far am feeling about it the way I've felt about all Sally Rooney books: both amazing and tedious and I don't really understand why I keep reading them but I do

I somehow missed that this was going to have a paranormal element—the protagonist’s love interest really is stuck on the Q—and I didn’t love that element. But I liked the characters and the sex scenes were good and I would definitely date a 1970s punk dyke

Time for something a bit fluffier because my heart can’t take anything heavy again

I don’t think I really grasped all of this when I read it as a 18yo when it was first published. The long histories of trauma and the grip of the past. It’s just a tremendous book and even now I feel like I am barely grasping its glimmers.

This is sheer delight and smarts. I wanted a feminist working out of how gender and society interact with technologies, and this is it. I'm so taken I'm actually thinking I might listen to the CBC's recordings of the original lectures as I try to work out how this might help me thinking about feminist bibliography.