Ricky
Expected to really like this since I enjoyed the author's novel FINISTÈRE so much and I'm always interested in cult stories or whatever, but this fell a bit flat for me. I do appreciate how some of the messages of the guys teachings come through, but maybe I would have liked a stronger voice from the beginning talking about his experience and what he learned more explicitly.
Whenever I'm reading a book like this I'm always thinking about that spectrum when it comes to MM romance novels of the extent to which these books seem like they were written by and for women. This book is definitely pretty far along that spectrum. I also felt like there was something American in the tone which was kind of weird because it's taking place in England or whatever. I looked up the author and was unable to determine for sure where she's from. I think it said she worked for the Washington Post or something but I thought maybe she could be British and working there. But then in the book she says the snow is like powdered sugar and then I was like oh yeah this girl is American because I'm pretty sure British people don't say powdered sugar. I could be wrong but that was my smoking gun lol. Anyway the dialogue is all really bad from my perspective. The people in this book don't speak or think like people I know in real life and certainly not like men I know in real life. But people seem to like this book so I'm glad it exists for them.
Almost three decades ago I set the intention to read all of Thomas Hardy's novels and really stalled out after reading four of his more famous ones. I picked up the challenge again in the past couple of years and I'm finally up to nine. This is such a nice change of pace from the tone of his other novels. It's funny what passes as a happy ending in the world of Thomas Hardy though. I was really amused along the way to see all of the elements that feel very Thomas Hardy but in a different kind of story. Not that it's that different, but the tone feels lighter and maybe more playful.
I'm really surprised by how much I didn't like this book. I have really liked this author in the past but I did not at all care for how this book is written. It does some interesting things, but ultimately I can't say it came together very interestingly. Honestly the only thing that made me finish this book is that I was reading it for a Goodreads achievement. Fortunately I enjoyed the second half of the book better than the first half of the book which I hated, but even so I'm surprised that this book seems to be fairly acclaimed. I guess it all felt very mannered to me.
Essential queer memoir detailing life as an unapologetically queer person during the early to mid 20th century. Published in 1968 when its author was about 60 years old, it's wild that this book came out only one year after homosexuality had been decriminalized in England and Wales. (A dozen years before it was decriminalized in Scotland and 14 years before it was done in Northern Ireland.) There's something elusive about this book. The author clearly got through life with the need of a lot of defenses, so there might be even more distance than would be explained solely by his Englishness. I found myself thinking sometimes that Crisp would likely have been diagnosed as autistic if he had been alive in the 20th century. I wonder what his gender identity might have been had he been alive in this context. Anyway, it's a fascinating life story, engagingly told.
I stumble toward my grave, confused, and hurt, and hungry.
I sort of appreciate this book for trying to tackle a lot of difficult themes and topics, but it doesn't tackle them very well. and I really spent a lot of time reading this book thinking about whether a book has to tackle themes well and maybe it does and maybe it doesn't because maybe it's okay if books sometimes show how messy our civilization is. Also I had previously read The Outsider and I was aware that Holly was apparently a popular character but I couldn't really tell why from that book. It's definitely clear in this book. she's a very engaging character in this book. if I ever get around to reading any of the other books in this series, it will be because of her. I agree with a popular review on here that says that King is better at writing horror than thriller.
When I started this I was initially pretty optimistic. I like stories about gay expats. As it went on, I found myself rolling my eyes more and more often until I eventually just became annoyed by it. It's hard not to compare it to the work of Garth Greenwell, and the comparison doesn't do any favors for this book. I found myself really appreciating how comparatively well written and constructed Greenwell's books are, even the one about his hospitalization. Tbh, the writing kinda felt amateurish to me, and I get impatient with books where so many of the interpersonal interactions feel petulant. There are also longish sections that felt completely pointless to me. I just kept thinking about how smooth Greenwell's first two novels were. I suppose my biggest trouble though is that the characters and situations seldom felt real to me. From my perspective he doesn't have a good ear for dialogue. While reading this, I kept thinking the author must be another navel-gazing millennial, though I haven't gotten around to finding out if that's true yet.
It's hard to rate a book like this that has such mixed qualities. a lot of it is pretty good and for most of the book I thought I would rate it four stars, but unfortunately a lot of the weaker writing comes toward the end, from my perspective. and then some of the false notes toward the end made me question some of what came before it. It's an engaging story. largely historical fiction but certainly romance as well. I always like stories about literate people who use their understanding of literature to understand themselves and the world around them.
A hellhound falls in love with his neighbor, a writer of supernatural novels. It's actually pretty readable despite a worldview I would describe as muddled at best. The hellhound is sort of like Dexter in a world where all of the villains are involved in the sex trafficking of moral panic. Then there's a lot of weird stuff I assume is probably grounded in Omegaverse tropes. As much as I think of myself as someone who is entertained by transgression, interspecies intimacy is one kind of transgression that largely just makes me uncomfortable. I kept wondering if the author was a sexual assault survivor or if she just consumes a lot of material that creates the sense of a world that is consistent with whatever moral panic is the current rage. An author's unresolved personal issues bleeding all over the page can be an uncomfortable thing for me. Sometimes it can be compelling, but it often just makes me uncomfortable. Another thing that makes me uncomfortable is that way the female authors of this genre often seem to fetishize possessiveness and protective violence. It's definitely one of those things on my list of things in an MM romance that makes me feel like the book was written by and for women. I'm sure some gay men like that sort of thing, but it feels weird and heteronormative to me.
I saw this recommended somewhere online and I really don't get the affection for it. It's long, repetitive, and generally tiresome. None of the actions seem particularly motivated and the thoughts and dialogue are painfully bad. it's really endless. The writing is actually so bad that I just kept thinking about how funny it was that the audiobook narrator had to read it with a straight face. This book has one of my pet peeves in the genre where it feels like one of the people has borderline personality disorder and the other person is a stoic who's always apologizing. I don't think BPD is very much fun in person and it's not fun in entertainment either. I don't know if I'm completely opposed to the kind of age gap in this book, but although this kid is like 19, he acts like a child and that makes it creepy for me.
Imagine hearing the story of Marsha P Johnson and queer and trans liberation from a drunk millennial on an Instagram live. That is the experience of reading this book.
More of hagiography/pep talk/folk history than a true biography. It's really all over the place. meandering, and every anecdote is related like an inspirational story. The breathless tone is mostly to its detriment. If Marsha had any foibles or flaws, you would not be able to tell from this book. She is the Mother Teresa of the tristate area. It's interesting because in the other accounts of her that I have experienced, people have been very unanimous in that she was quite the storyteller and that is something that we don't really see reflected here. It's unfortunate that we need this person to be a hero so much that we can't tolerate their actual humanity. It's one thing to shoe-horn the past into 2020s language, but the way the author presents Johnson's mental health struggles feels patronizing.
I'm always interested to see how Stonewall is described in narratives about Johnson since what people like to believe seems to be quite different from what actually happened. To her credit, the author here hedges before reinforcing the myth. Presenting the myths but acknowledging that they may not be true, before ultimately doubling down. I was excited to see this had come out, but there's a lot of millennial excess going on here. It falls into the trap of presenting history as though it is shaped by individuals instead of groups. More the anything, the fever for casting the event as the setting for a one woman show deemphasizes the crucial role of butches that first night.
I gave this book 2 stars just for existing and having good intentions, but I really dislike it and feel that it would have benefited from having a cowriter more experienced in writing about history. There's just no sense that this author understands the historical context very well at all, which is bizarre because she isn't that young and she seems to have done a lot of research for this book.
I read this because I never read any of this author's books when I was young and it seemed like a funny coincidence that this book randomly came up in two different contexts in the same week. The prose isn't great. It reminds me of how books for teenagers used to be written. I could be wrong, but I think a lot of them are written better now, I don't know. It took a long time to get going, but ultimately it was pretty engaging. I've read a little bit about the sequels and I'm not sure I'll bother reading them since the first one seems to end on a note that suggests a relationship in the afterlife, and it didn't seem that this continues in the other two books. I'm intrigued by the books though since people complain that they're basically a presentation of a sort of cosmology which seems entertaining enough.
I have to say, it wasn't really expecting to like this for some reason. SomethingI had read about it on the internet left me skeptical but I found it fairly well written. the quality of the prose is pretty good. I felt connected to the characters. I appreciated the way the themes came together. There were perhaps a few too many coincidences, but and magic pulls things together the way it wants to.
I've read almost everything that is available to be read by Eve Babitz. I'm still reading her book about ballroom dance but I guess everything else. and I had already read this author's about Didion and Babitz. It feels kind of like I'm coming to the end of a romance cuz once I finish the book about dance, there's not really going to be anything left of this story, but maybe I'll go back and reread everything now that a lot of the mysteries have been unlocked by these two books by Lili Anolik. I had tried to read this one a few years back and didn't really get into it but then I really liked the one about Joan Didion so I went back and read this one after all. of course I wish I had succeeded in reading this one first because I think that would have made a little bit more sense at times but part of me wants to go back and reread that other one... One big mystery that remains though is what the fantasy series was that this author wrote under a pseudonym before writing all of this Eve Babitz stuff.
This is the book that the film PILLION is based on. It's very different from the movie. The plot goes in very different directions although some of the characters and situations are similar. I enjoyed this. The narrator has a very engaging voice. I don't know if I was completely satisfied, but I liked getting to know this character. there's a very melodramatic thing that happens in the movie and maybe it's even more melodramatic here. I'm not sure how I feel about either narrative choice.
I wasn't expecting this Liza book to basically be a camouflaged hit piece about Lady Gaga. I feel like she expresses more vitriol for Lady Gaga than she does for David Gest lol.
As far as AI audiobook narration goes, this might be the best one I've ever heard, but it's still obviously AI. It's cute that they made it sound like Liza Minnelli but sometimes it's so silly it becomes camp.
finally got around to reading this. I know people really like it, but for me it would just okay. It starts off very slow. I literally had to restart it like five times because I would get a quarterbof the way into it and I would be like what is this book even about and who are all these people. anyway it was fine and now I feel like I have to go back and read those Dark Tower books again.
This was engaging enough that I listened to the audiobook in one day, but didn't quite go where I was expecting it to go, which may be a good thing or maybe it's not. I don't know. I guess the last hour of the audiobook I wasn't really that into but in retrospect it's fine. in general, I liked the quality of the writing and I found the characters engaging enough, but I didn't always love every narrative choice. I had certain expectations because it seems to follow certain genre conventions, but some of those expectations were violated which was sometimes frustrating but ultimately maybe it's more interesting to do what it did than what I was expecting it to do.
This was a fun idea for a book and it's pretty engaging throughout. The ending felt kinda flat to me though. Somehow I guess I wanted them to find the carnival psychic again from the beginning. Not that that's why it's flat, that's just a thought I'm having. Really enjoyed the first half, but the more they figure out what's going on, the more The narrative started to feel flat to me.