Kate
There were things I liked about this book. I liked how the aliens were interacting with earth and how I always felt like they weren't giving us all the information that they had. The science was fun, but the main character's kids all grated on me and there was a black character introduced who made me think that Nancy Kress had never met a black person before.
I got on a jag of reading memoirs by people who have suffered brain injuries. It's such an interesting topic - it's also nice because you know they recovered well enough to at least write a book.
It's so interesting to compare how Lauren thought and felt about her brain injury at the time and after, versus how other people were perceiving it.
Cute! I'm not normally a romance reader so I feel like there are probably some romance tropes or norms that I don't understand - I'm not a huge fan of the two people in love with each other since forever but just haven't said anything and push each other away for only their own reasons thing...I was hoping they'd just be able to sit down and talk a bit earlier than they actually did, but then again I do get how their relationship could have built that way. The characters are all extremely good-looking and that's not a complaint.
I liked this book much more than I thought I would! The magic world in this book is really creepy and dangerous and intense. This is a world in which for many people it would be way better to not have magic, because if you do you have to go to this magic school and the odds of actually graduating (read: surviving) are like 1/10. I don't know that I'd be able to make it through the crucible! I also like how this is a send-up of Harry Potter and other teen fantasy novels with a Mary Sue/Gary Stu protagonist who can do no wrong and is always at the center of things.
I feel like this is a really really important book. Everyone really needs to read this. There are so many kinds of biases in the world and they're all basically bullshit, and anti-fat bias is an easy one to hold because it's almost always couched in “concern for your health”. Once you look even a little bit closer though, the health excuse falls away. There are so many incredibly unhealthy and dangerous ways to lose weight, that are much worse for your health than living at a certain weight, that could potentially kill you or certainly shorten your life, and fat people are recommended these things BY DOCTORS. How could it be more healthy to live at a certain weight deemed “unhealthy” than to take medication that fucks up your liver? Or your kidneys? Or living on fewer calories than your body needs to maintain proper functioning? Or messing up your metabolism? Honestly, if the “it's for your own health” people went after behaviours instead of bodies I probably still wouldn't love it but at least it would make sense. Wanna tell people who eat pizza every day or never exercise that they're going to die earlier? I mean, rude, and shaming people isn't a helpful tactic, but at least you're going after a behaviour. Being fat in and of itself is not indicative of a person's health or activity level or diet. Assuming that all fat people must eat junk food and never exercise IS BIAS. Not believing fat people who tell you that they're eating well and exercising and just aren't losing weight IS BIAS. Weight is much more complicated than “calories in, calories out” and even if it wasn't, fat people are people and just want to live their damn lives without total strangers busting in to be concerned about their health.
I read this because I've really liked Liz Jensen's stuff in the past, and I still really like her writing style. It's a very interesting story as well, with everyone seeing different things in this one girl. The only thing that sort of bugged me was one plot point that felt very “high-school” to me because the main character assumed she was unlovable because she's in a wheelchair and then didn't actually talk to anyone about the truth of it.
This book was a little tough to get through because of the academic language, but I think this is an important book and a good contribution to the history of slavery, racism, and gynecology in the United States. There were a lot of tough stories to hear but Owens does her best to humanize all the women she calls the “mothers of gynecology” even when there is very little information about their lives. I liked her afterword where she talks about how some historians or critics of historians say that if you identify with the people you're studying then you can't be objective, but I think if you can't identify with the people you're studying then a lot of nuance will be missed. Owens is very deliberate about being empathetic and I believe that makes for a more accurate history.
Man I'm just zipping through this trilogy...now I have to wait until March to read the next one!
I like getting to hear Spinner's perspective in this one - it's helping me to understand Koli a bit better too. He truly is an oblivious do-gooder. I'm glad Spinner's getting fleshed out more too, in the last book she did just seem like a personality-less prize that Koli and his friend were sort of competing over.
I'm also interested in the idea of being crossed - trans in our terminology. It seems like humans gon human, because there are some groups/villages who will say you're not normal and will try to convert you back to being “normal”, and some who are cool with it and feel like it's just another way that people can be.
As the author warns, this book is pretty gnarly. This isn't surprising to me though, as most fairy/folk tales are quite scary or gory, in order to prevent people (usually children) from doing something dangerous or wrong. This one is probably an admonition against wandering off on your own and going into random caves.
I love how creepy Inuit monsters are (especially the Qallupilluq), and I image they're so scary to me because a) I'm more used to western/European monsters and b) the things that the Inuit people need to warn their children of are just more terrifying to me. Being trapped under the ice sounds really really horrible.
This book definitely puts you in the creepy mood right from the start though - the endpapers are covered with the variously decomposing heads of children who have been kidnapped and decapitated by the Mangittatuarjuk:
I like the details about Mangittatuarjuk's viscera being so strong, and the way she is finally dispatched is pretty great/gory. Good for folks who are into body horror and folk tales!
It's so fascinating how our brains work! Our bitty baby brains are equipped with learning software built in. We're constantly taking in information and testing our assumptions about the world. Like Dehaene keeps saying, we're all budding scientists!
This book contains good looks at the research underpinning our knowledge of learning. What's important? Attention, engagement, error feedback, consolidation. Basically you need to pay attention to what you want to learn, actually engage with it (don't just let it wash over you - wrestle with it!), understand what your mistakes are and why you made them, and then REST to let it all linger in your brain.
Rest is actually such an important part of learning, and not understanding that is why I thought procrastinating on studying would be fine. Actually all the sleeps you have in between studying help your brain keep knowledge inside and use it for problem solving later.
This wasn't a difficult read. I like Winterson's writing style, though I also get people scoffing at it being very ~literary~ with the lack of quotation marks and whatnot.
I really enjoyed the stuff from Mary Shelley's point of view. Her talking about what it means to be a woman and what it means to be alive while living the horror of continually losing her children in infancy - she lost three before her fourth child survived.
The modern stuff I wanted to like, I'm interested in the idea of living past our lifetimes, life extension and brain uploads etc., but the characters were weirdly one dimensional. The sexbot seller, the southern black woman leveraging sexbots for God, they didn't really do anything for me at all. Ry, the protagonist, is an interesting character. I like how they talk about gender, and they feel to me like a representation of some of the more fluid gender presentations and genderqueer identities. Unfortunately everyone else in the story treats them like a freak and doesn't respect their name and there's an awful sexual assault scene later on so whatever Ry is supposed to represent, the future of gender or the success of body modification technology or how we'll all be able to feel more comfortable with a more fluid idea of what a body can be (or the idea of not having a body at all!), the world is not at all ready for this. Ry is not allowed to be. Ry, whose last name is Shelley, is the future counterpart of Mary Shelley, who is also not allowed to be because of her gender. It's the other counterparts that don't track for me. Ron Lord, the sexbot seller and presumably the Lord Byron counterpart, kind of just feels like a juvenile dig at Byron to me? And Victor Stein, for all his talk of brain scanning and moving past our bodies, is adamant that Ry's genitals make him NOT GAY despite Ry's presentation and identity. He thinks that freeing us of our bodies will free our minds but he can't even conceive of a sexual orientation outside of STRAIGHT and GAY.
I'm not sure how much of my critiques are of the characters and how much are of the author. I can't tell what is supposed to be satire and what we're supposed to agree with. It's making me think I guess, but I don't love this kind of ambiguity when it comes to transphobia. I hope it was meant to make me uncomfortable.
