B-Side

Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for the ARC of this title.

I liked this a lot, and enjoyed its dive into how social media is transforming and speeding up the way language changes in our current era. There's a few chapters that feel more focused on the social media side of the book's subtitle moreso than overall language stuff (and it borrows/builds on a lot of stuff I've already read in that space), but this manages to be informative while keeping a fairly breezy/enjoyable tone.

Thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the ARC of this title.

I've been a big fan of Chris' work for Stereogum for years and was delighted to see this title get announced. It's weird to read a history of a music scene you were aware of after it's happened, but this gets into exactly the level of how and why a lot of music from the mid-aughts to mid-10s became as big as it did, and covers a certain level of overall Pitchfork/Stereogum/blog culture as well in a way that's interesting. I love the playlists for each chapter and the way the book isn't strictly chronological, showing how all of these things were overlapping across genre and scenes.

Thanks to NetGalley and ECW Press for the ARC of this title.

This one got its claws into me right away by immediately evoking Chris Rice's “The Cartoon Song”, and as a survivor of the Weird Evangelical Christian Culture of the 90s/2000s, this was extremely helpful in confirming many of these pop culture things I remember from my childhood/tweendom actually happened and were kind of weird. The book also does a great job of unpacking all of the deconstruction/reflection members of my generation have been doing with these elements, and what they say about the larger culture around them as a whole.

Thanks to Del Rey and NetGalley for the ARC of this title.

I'm always interested for what Silvia Moreno-Garcia is doing next - she's hit so many different genres and really knocks all of them out of the park.

This neatly braids together 3 different timelines with one story, and while some of the beats of the plot feel easy to pick up on and predict, it's still a fantastic ride. As a New Englander, the 1998 section nails the vibe of small-town college campuses in the area.

Thanks to HarperVia and NetGalley for the ARC of this title.

I adored Women's Hotel last year for nailing the voice of a particular age of “women's fiction”, and though I'm generally not a fan of this recent trend of releasing the book equivalent of a Holiday EP in the same world as its corresponding novel's LP, I was equally delighted to get just a little more time with this cast of characters around Christmas.

I devoured this in a single sitting, and it's exactly as charming as that needs to be, sketching out just enough holiday hijinks in this world to satisfy.

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House for the ARC of this title.

“Love Island but the island exists somewhere after society has fallen” feels almost too easy to describe this - that's the driving force, but the book doesn't dwell too much on what's happened outside the titular compound and instead focuses on Lily, the contestant whose thoughts we're privy to. There's some interesting stuff here about consumerism and desire - what do we want? why do we want it? what are we willing to do for it?

Thanks to NetGalley and Doubleday for the ARC of this title.

3.5/5 stars

This really nails its setting of Edinburgh Fringe Fest and all the chaos that entails. I was initially confused by its choice of narrator, but putting that lens in the hands of someone outside the main drama really pays off as the plot goes along.

Thanks to NetGalley and Mariner Books for the ARC of this title.I read this pretty shortly after [b:Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves 216970860 Girl on Girl How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves Sophie Gilbert https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1737731201l/216970860.SY75.jpg 223433138], and I really liked how these felt like they were in conversation with one another, using different facets of media to hit some of the same points. The deep dive here on Playboy/The Girls Next Door alone is worth the price of admission, and I loved the way this braided its thoughts on cults, culture, and magazines together.

Thanks to NetGalley and FSG for the ARC of this title.

I adored Lacey's last book and was excited by the premise/structure of this one, but the fiction side didn't pop for me, and the non-fiction side was nice in how it echoed the fiction side, but also left me feeling at arm's length, for the most part. It might just be reading this as an e-book? There's something to the flippability of the physical copy of this one that may have been what I was missing here in a more linear e-book format.

short, sharp, savage

Thanks to NetGalley and ECW Press for the ARC of this title

I've enjoyed other entries in this series, but this one left me a little disappointed by the end - I love the author's enthusiasm for reading Clueless as a rich text, and they've clearly got a lot to say, but I wanted a little more synthesis of their additional sources rather than just giving us their text as quotes and asking us as readers to do all the connecting of dots.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC of this title.

As with most essay collections, there's always one that doesn't quite work for me, but the rest here did, and I really like Harron Walker's voice as a writer. The piece that manages to merge The Devil Wears Prada with The Intern and What It All Means is particularly brilliant.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC of this title.

The title of this is so perfectly “Apt Wordplay: The History of [Topic]” it's like a computer thought of the title. I wanted to like this - it's an interesting topic, and the author clearly has thoughts about What We Talk About When We Talk About Axe Murder, but the text for each chapter is a little too dry with attempts to make this a little lighter that generally didn't work for me as a reader.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC of this title.

Here's the thing about any anthology: there are going to be some hits, but also some misses. This had more hits for me as a reader, and the misses were pretty easy to skim/skip.

this feels slightly less than the other two in the series - I had a sense about mid-way through that this had likely been written to make a third series of the PBS show happen, and the author's notes confirm that yes, it had - but it's still fun, and still gets meta enough with its exchange between the main story and the story-within-a-story.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC of this title.

I've been a huge fan of Maris' coverage of books for Vulture, LitHub, and the myriad other venues she's freelanced for, and this was such a good collection of essays expanding beyond the world of books and into the world at large. I tore through this over the course of a day.

Thanks to NetGalley and The Unnamed Press for the ARC here.

Loved the focus on this collection - more story collections of this size, publishers! They're like a delicious EP to the full LP of a novel.

All five of these had great perspective and pacing.

Thanks to NetGalley and Pantheon for the ARC of this title.

This is a 3.5 rounded up to 4. When the essays in this book nail it, they nail. it. Moving, thoughtful, doing great work in thinking about what the current round of LLM can do and is useful for.

I'm fine with the overall bridging sections with a Chat GPT (or ChatGPT-alike) reviews the last few chapters as a framing mechanism, but so many of the essays feel like good conceptual ideas for essays set up in the chapter immediately preceding them that, once executed, are nowhere near as fun to engage with as a reader vs. as a thought experiment.

“I decided if I was going to use Amazon less, I'd need to write a review for any product I purchased.”
Cool.

[an essay consisting of the product reviews]
Meh.

An essay engaging with AI image generation's biases around women and people of color? Great!

A story that uses AI image generation to showcase this in the form of a fictional investor pitch that shows how those tools illustrate some claims vs. others when race/gender in included in the prompt?

interesting as a thought experiment as a potential illustration, deeply frustrating to read, especially thinking about the resources needed to generate (and possible re-generate) the images.

The essays that were the clear driver for this book shine, I just wish the rest wasn't so reliant on engaging with LLMs to do the work.

Thanks to NetGalley and FSG for the ARC of this title.

I've been a big fan of Andrea Long Chu's work for New York Magazine the last few years, and this is a wonderful collection of that along with her previous work for n+1, plus a few new pieces and updates/cutting room floor bits.

The thing I like about Chu's work (even when it doesn't work for me, as with the title essay here, which applies her approach to Critics and Criticism writ large) is that you can tell she's done the work. She has read every book in your ouevre, watched every episode of your TV show, processed it, thought about it, and put her thoughts together in the most devastating way. That said, while ALC's takedowns are fun, it's even better when her thoroughness is in pursuit of something she enjoys.

Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for the ARC of this title.

I had forgotten how good Karen Russell is at this. There's a wonderful sense that almost feels like found footage as we shift through the various perspectives here, augmented with photographs from the dust bowl, but there's enough of the fantastic in the mix here to elevate this beyond historical fiction.

this is on me for not getting a sample - I was hoping for something more in-depth rather than a book of lists. this was fun, but at a certain point I realized some of the lists had obvious jokes in them, and since nothing lists the actual phrases in their native languages, it immediately became hard to trust any of this as a result, fun as it was.

Thanks to NetGalley and Columbia University Press for the ARC of this title.

This book has a lot of important things to say, but as I worked my way through it, I kept feeling that it was getting in its own way of effectively saying those things. Is there a reproducibility crisis in biomed research? Yes! Is that crisis due to a lot of ways the research process is currently broken/set up to reward bad behavior? Yes!

While there's a lot of good info here, the text itself could have used one more editorial pass with an eye towards making this more readable/understandable by readers outside the sphere of academia - while there's a lot of great explaining of how the research sausage is made, it's written dryly enough that it's easy to let your eyes glaze over just as the author's getting to something worth your attention that could be missed. There's an attempt at what I assume is readability/humor with the inclusion of cartoons relevant to the various research processes, but these came off feeling like C+ versions of New Yorker cartoons from the grad student newsletter, and their presence feels like a tonal mismatch against the rest of the text.

I'd love to see something that uses this as a primary source to make this even more legibile to the audience that needs to read it.

Thanks to Celadon and NetGalley for the ARC.

I loved Elon Green's last book, Last Call, and this was a similarly fantastic piece of reporting, highlighting a case I wasn't aware of and how it touched so many pieces of 80s NYC culture that have stuck longer in the cultural memory. This was an excellent of reminder of how much the current moment we're living in still historically rhymes with what's already happened.

Thanks to NetGalley and Pantheon for the ARC.

This felt timely and thought-provoking. Lalami writes this in a way that feels real.

Thanks to Zombo and NetGalley for the ARC here

I've been a fan of Emily St. James' cultural criticism since her AV Club days, and it's such a delight to see how her perspective comes across as a fiction writer as well. This has a really snappy quality to it, and although the plot arc feels a little overly mapped at times, it's hard to get mad about seeing the dominoes falling when the plot's this fun to follow along. I basically devoured this over the course of a few commutes, and there's some really lovely use of different perspectives (1st vs. 2nd vs. 3rd) across the characters that makes some of the themes come across well.