apple's Books by Status
26 Books
See all
apple's Reading Goals
apple's Pinned Prompts
Featured Prompt
4,663 booksWhat are your favorite books of all time?
When you think back on every book you've ever read, what are some of your favorites? These can be from any time of your life – books that resonated with you as a kid, ones that shaped your personal...
apple's Most Popular Reviews
Contains spoilers
first picked up nevada in 2022 and i still remember feeling terrorized by the first page and having to set it down. the intensity of that first sentence, even, made me so scared. weirdly, it gets a lot less intense from there, or maybe it's just me.
i never got past the first chapter back then, but now it's 2025 and i have. it's kind of a hard read when you're trans, because it's hard to distinguish between the fictional story being told and something that feels more like the clouds parted and the transgender bible dropped from the sky and these are the quotes from it. it's hard for me to think of maria as a character in a way. to me, it's like if all of the shame and doubt and misery and confusion and apathy and care and truth and pride* of being transgender could be pressed on a vinyl record, maria could be the record player.
reading nevada is crazy because at first you're like, oh ive been maria. and then it's like, i think i also shared my first kiss with maria. i think i had a one night stand with maria. i think maria was my first friend after i moved to the city. i think i went on a dozen dates with maria from dating apps. i think maria checked me out at the thrift store. and then every fucking character feels that way too. but of course maria is all the characters, too. she knows that she was james. she probably also knows how she feels about james maybe exactly the way steph feels about her, which makes her steph, too.
i have to say, i dont think it feels intense again until the last 3 chapters when you realize there is no room left for our protags to figure out what theyre doing. i mean the whole time it's like, oh man are they gonna kiss? fuck? something else? and then turning each page closer to the end is like, oh god, it just ends like this, huh? i thought the dread imogen binnie made me feel here is almost worse than when the book started with me thinking maria was going to die. more than anything, i love when an author displays full control of what theyre doing, and binnie has such a command of the intensity it just wows me.
*does maria feel proud of being transgender? i do not invoke pride as in Pride but invoke pride as in the thing that makes you go into a walmart and tell a guy without a college education all about feminist and anarchist theory because youre so knowing and youre doing the right thing by telling him that identifying as an autogynophile is a shaky identity that comes from a shaky sex science and maybe you should really just come out and realize what you are already. (and once again, haven't we all been there? [ml, if youre reading this, im sorry])
quote: "You and me against the rest of the queer community, she says back, only she’s not really kidding."
this is more of a 4 star in the beginning that becomes a 3 star over time. it gets really slow when he starts talking about the history of scrabble and its development and how its changed owners and all of that. but overall this book tells good story, genuinely. i love weird subculture anthropology. however the author is a little, idk, unlikable in a way. some misogyny, some fatphobia, and also something about the way he describes people is a little... weird? one of the guys featured in the book has said he hates the way the author depicted him because he make him out to seem like such a freak. it's definitely a good story telling trick, making these people out to be larger than life, myths, oddities, and he does it quite well which is his talent as a writer but hm.
