apple

gripping... not really a fiction reader but chang-rae lee's native speaker opened me inside out so you know how it is. hata in this book reminds me a lot of park from the native speaker. they're both assimilators by nature, while not being able to sustain connection to anything. excellent at assimilation, horrible at connection, what makes the difference? thank you chang-rae lee for your thoughts on the matter...

i have many thoughts but so unorganized... it's just so thrilling, lee's writing. the haunting, reconciliation, childhood, doom, and belonging. there's a morality to everyone, in a different way than, like idk, the hunger games when you wonder who will survive to the end of the book, just that we're always aware of whose heart is beating, still beating. but i just realized that's in the title, yes? life. a gesture life...

i remain in awe of lee's narration, his use of narrative... this book literally feels like a sleepless night and at the same time being heavily sedated under a deep slumber all the time. im ILL im literally ILL like he should not he able to do any of that. ALSO hes really funny and it's not a funny book but like there are moments . there are moments. every time i talk about him i feel like im rachel bloom fuck me ray bradbury

Quote: I know you dream of one but it doesn’t exist. This time won’t end. It will end for you, but not for me.

well, it made me insane so it does get 5 stars. maybe better terminology would be it answers to things i feel insane about. i feel, with this being a letter to his son, a connection to coates as a paternal figure. i think a lot about what to do now that i have been racialized, to be made "of race." i guess in a similar way i used to think about gender and what we sometimes call coercively assigned sex... i guess sometimes i do wish i could say to an elder, "what do i do? there is cruelty in store for me, and there is subjugation, and there is oppression, and i am guaranteed a worse life, a worse life for me because of no reason, a worse and uglier life than the people doing cruelty to me, and what do i do? how do i live?" and i felt held by this work and the ideas and experiences coates shares with us. and a little more at ease, a little more figured out, or that it might be possible for me to figure it out.

i really related to the author but i didn't like the audiobook narration by jully lee. it was nice to see my experiences with self hate and low self esteem and obsessions with all sorts of stuff put into words... however im not sure if the words had much of an impact on me. i didn't feel moved, i lost the train of thought many times, i listened to the last chapter twice and still wasn't really sure what to make of it, what she was trying to say...

huuuuge "male professor" vibes from this guy

obsessed with his haters

also idk i think his suggestions are bad mostly, he's like "social media is so bad parents need to get their kids off of social media" yeah man ok good luck with that

cool topic for a book but quite honestly the best parts of the book are the quotes from other people lol

this book has taken me probably 5 years to finish because im already quite bad at conceptualizing fictional scenes and there is sooo much annoying flowery posh posturing from these two. it got easier when i realized how far removed the "storytelling" is from the "story." ie red and blue are mostly talking about irrelevant nonsense and that it doesnt have a lot to do with the advertised lesbian time traveling love story.

i do love love letters, and i do love a romance so romantic... i did cry when i read "I would rather break the world than lose you."

i also did not think it had to explicitly reference romeo and juilet the very next chapter, lol, but sure, cement it in there, this is a retelling of romeo and juliet. what if romeo and juliet fought over who would die for the other. what if juliet really did die without hope of coming back. what if romeo resurrected juliet by sheer power of will.

Quote: "I love you. I love you. I love you."

i mean, it was fun and fine. tender cozy sapphic novel. i like the central magical idea about magic and power quite a lot.

Quote: Power freely given isn't power halved, it's power doubled.

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.

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 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!!

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

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.

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

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

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?)

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.

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

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

not many take aways from this

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.

oh sabrina imbler, we're really in it now

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.