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sara hendren was one of my professors so reading this is a little weird because i feel like im getting so personal with her.

this is a really rich place to start if you're interested in accessibility. more than just a list of successful projects, it challenges you to think a little bit more about the premise of what is a successful accessibility project? who defines success? who is allowed to? does it have to be legal? does it have to be normal?

it is also an extremely, heh, accessible read in that you don't have to be too educated on disability studies to get it. it's all in plain english, though she weilds it beautifully.

i read this one billion years ago when i was like 14 and i remember having to look up a lot of words lol. other than that i think i enjoyed the adventure but tbh it wasnt all that memorable!!

ok actually i never finished this book but everybody should go watch the weird racist orientalist short film he directed based on this book because its WILD. honestly i liked the beginning of the book but it slows down a bit and i lost interest

i can't remember if i finished this one but it did maje me less prone to googling where to eat when i could just walk down the street. pretty interesting if i recall

it felt a lot like reading fanfiction LOL. in a good way? she knows how to play with the reader. i love it when true love. i sometimes also love it when doomed true love. the writing is captivating.

crazy how this guy just does not care about vietnamese people

quite informative. this is a book that needed to exist. so many talking points nowadays about the nature of men and women and so called gender differences and everybody has something to fucking say about it "but what about socialization but what about evolution but what about science the brain the body the fat the muscles the bones" and this book fearlessly tackles all of it.

you know that pot that's like "you are gay and chinese" well this is the book that's like "you are gay and vietnamese"

gorgeous art, cute story, and it covers an emotional journey that's meaningful to me, like, when the main character is like "i dont even know the word for gay in vietnamese" like yeah man. yeah

ideas were good, but i dont think i liked the writing that much

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.

i love to believe women but i do feel like in a book whose premise is the SCIENCE of all this, i feel like sometimes the author didnt totally substantiate things and could have turned off the reader, especially the more skeptical ones. testosterone rex by cordelia fine does way more of this.

riveting and a little all over the place! cool tho. learned a lot about eels and i loved the tone of the book just kind of stringing me along through the mystery of everything.

useful frameworks and all. i think it teaches you A Method that can result in Your Desired Outcome but i kind of do feel like i ended up wondering if this is, like, a healthy way to be communicating all the time. the most famous example to come out of this guys work is the woman getting, like, robbed or something, and she ends up using the method to talk the attacker into leaving her alone. the method allowed her to manipulate the outcome to a desirable one for her but it didn't allow her to express her fear and pain. i think there's a lot to take away from this book but i think the method does kind of fail to be the one where people can fully express themselves and therefore fully feel understood. and i wish this were addressed in the book more. (maybe it was and i dont remember?)

not many take aways from this

i liked it because im a freak for computers, but the book does not give much indication that it's for freaks for computers, which could be annoying to the general reader. great histories, great story crafting, and i love being like "oh claude shannon. from my algorithms :)"

games, cultures, computing, so all my cup of tea

oh sabrina imbler, we're really in it now

truly the love story ever. hate to be the guy that mentions the movie in a book review but the movie is such a perfect adaptation of the book that you never need to read the book.

quote: This is true love — you think this happens every day?

hardcover disappeared my original review :((

definitely something here, but could use a couple of rounds of edits. a lot of the metaphors were just not executed elegantly. (vegas = destruction = rebuilding = trans girl) in all, there were some things that resonated with me and some things that seemed a little underbaked or underexplored.

i liked "sexting is roleplay about desire" a lot but truly i am just a sucker for that format. also, this book isnt as hot as people say it is. maybe im just being ace of sexual about it, but idk.

quote: I could not bear to be the mother and the fucker

booooo slow and annoying. some characters have charm and some things i thought were cool explorations, like a young girl stumbling into a kinky thing with her much older professor, but to be honest i never felt much for the characters even when they were hurting their very most. the story might have been saved by the two fucking and wanting to kill each other but we don't ever get anywhere close to that.

i do feel like we need more insane counting books in the world. i love the new age of early math education books that explore math as a thing beyond numbers and operations. for example "x people are incarcerated here, but only y<x people committed a crime" is immediately evokative. there's a big moment here about justice, incarceration, crime, and it's totally up to the reader to engage themselves with it. the book provides numbers, but it doesn't try to tell you what's fair. is it better to make a type I or a type II error when it comes to incarceration? is it fair at all that these 16 people are locked away from the vibrant world the rest of the characters live in? what is a crime, and what is the purpose of a punishment? without doing much at all, the book blurs the line between conversations about math and conversations about a bunch of other stuff. (there's literally the headstone of a dead child depicted. wanna talk to a kid about mortality during a math lesson?) rather than proclaiming "math can be relevant In Real Life!" which of course is true, it would rather redirect the conversation toward something weirder and more interesting. and that thesis, of course, is everybody counts.

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."