jac

Probably more of a 4 or a 4.5 for me personally, but bumped to a 5 for Woolf's grasp of gender and identity in 1928.

Orlando is hard to review without acknowledging Woolf wrote this about her lover. Above all, it's filled with love and affection and playful ribbing. But, also above all, it's filled with clever insights about what it means to experience gender and identity. I feel these are equally important to enjoying the novel. Orlando certainly meanders, but as a love letter to and about Sackville-West, I can hardly hold it against the text.

Really just a fascinating, unique book. I had to ease into reading Woolf's style, but found it easy and smooth to read after getting the hang of her writing.

The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity.

A novel that starts deeply fascinating but loses steam about halfway through. I agree with some other reviewers that the book seems to slow down significantly after Amlis frees the vodsels and they're recuperated.

Still, Faber touches on themes of class, capitalism, veganism, misogyny, environmentalism ... If nothing else, Under the Skin is interesting for the sheer scope of topics integrated into Isserley's life.

Extremely difficult book to rate because I found the concepts within very valuable but the writing was incredibly dense and repetitive. It's a book that's difficult to read but ultimately worth struggling through, I think, but it could be written in a more digestible way.

The real value in the book is not its readability but its spirit. Regardless of how I felt about Freire's perspective, I found it was a valuable perspective to read. The writing of Pedagogy of the Oppressed may not be digestible, but it is undoubtedly full of Freire's love for humanity and his resulting passion to better the world. Some of his concepts and writings didn't land for me, but Freire nonetheless gave me thoughts about how I can offset some of the abundant oppression in society as both an educator and a human.

In that sense, I feel Pedagogy of the Oppressed, whether intentional on Freire's part or not, managed to avoid being a book that deposited pedagogical concepts into me and instead stimulated my own interest in problem-solving. To me, this book is best read as Freire's interpretation and perspective of the struggles he faced as an educator rather than an instruction manual. His perspective is respectable and worthwhile, but I think it is ultimately one of many valuable perspectives to take into account.

I think it's a good, important book to read for a more wholesome grasp of how to approach oppression, especially as far as education is concerned. My only real gripe is, again, the writing quality.