Katie

This was a fun read when I needed a distraction. I like that Jack takes charge of her situation and uses her skills and smarts instead of being a passive victim. Figuring out the baddie wasn't a challenge, but it was still fun to see it all unfold.

This book definitely felt like every issue, identity, orientation crammed into one story. The story was great and important. Sometimes the other stuff felt like too much. It captures well the claustrophobic feeling of the pandemic and the 2020 election, but it's even better at exploring relationships and grief.

I don't remember liking the first one in this series as much as I liked this sequel. A really enjoyable read and I did shed a little tear at the end. Looking forward to the next one.

This was insightful and humorous. It was also a little too lyrical for me and a little too in the weeds of literary theories.

I guess my expectations were off on this–I was expecting a straightforward story, and instead it jumped around from character to character, sometimes filling in details about a previous story, but sometimes not. It just wasn't cohesive enough for me to really enjoy it.

This was definitely engrossing. I loved her sentences and analogies and word choice. I think in the end it turned out to be a little bit different from what I expected–plus I could have done without some of the lists of DJs, but to someone in that world I'm sure that part is meaningful.

How did I not know about this book? It's so great–it reads like a thriller, but contains so much great, accessible science too. Plus memoir, history–what a book!

I 100% agree with her ideas and arguments. An important book.

This would be 4 stars but I'm not sure about how their recommendations mesh with what Stacy Sims recommends for older women. I found the science a little hard to follow, but I wasn't trying that hard. :) Definitely more information all around than I needed or will use but still interesting to read.

Maybe a 3.75 for me. I enjoyed the beginning, but it got increasingly poetic and maudlin as it went on. The characters were great, and I was satisfied with the way everything resolved, or didn't.

I was hoping for a dog book and got that, partly, but also a lot about the life of an internet influencer melting down, which I could have done without.

This was a super moving book that taught me a lot about how grief is different for fathers.

I loved this book! I loved the characters, the plot, the word choices, sentences, and all of the writing. A great debut, and I gained a deeper understanding of some history, as well.

Maybe a 3.5? This was entertaining, if a bit strange. The themes of race and adoption were lightly touched on in a way that seemed realistic, if not hugely enlightening.

This was maybe a 3.75 for me. Interesting story, fun to read in such detail about a search. And it definitely made me want to explore the Sierras!

This fell into the category of “books that make so many sweeping statements about the way things are that I can't fully believe they are correct.” I did read it 10 years south from its publication date, but still. There were some interesting insights, but overall it was just too wide-ranging for my taste.

This was another reporting book mixed with memoir, but I liked this one better than the last one I read. It was a little dramatic and gruesome–there were a few pages I had to skip. The topic of anexos is pretty fascinating and one that I knew nothing about.

Maybe a 2.5? I only picked this up because of the blurb by Rebecca Makkai and I wish I hadn't. It's portentous, with ominous foreshadowing so obvious even someone like me can pick it up.

I loved these stories. They were strange and funny and filled with great people I'd like to hang out with.

This was maybe a 3.5 or 3.75 for me. The framing felt a little forced–was it a memoir, was it a piece of reporting, was it writing about race or just about people's hard lives? I think if she had really wanted to write about the white bonus, she could have focused more directly on that and had a more effective book, but what do I know! It just felt like this one was trying to do too much and not really succeeding fully at any of it.

This was a fantastic and enlightening read. It's important for women and anyone who has sex with women.

This seemed a tiny bit like a rip off of To Paradise, but I liked the unconventional characters and the descriptions of what they did with their lives.

I think I liked this one more than the first. Again, funny, enjoyable, light. But more serious topics were covered.

This was entertaining, but not at all what I was expecting. I actually am not sure what I was expecting, except maybe a classic gay novel of San Francisco. Most of the characters are straight, and the way the gay characters are written about felt dated. The short (a page or two) “chapters” made it hard to keep track of everything and everyone, and there are a lot of main characters, which makes it a bit harder feel that they are more than just basic outlines of a character. There are definitely lots of funny parts (my favorite: Seedy guy at bar, “What's your sign?” Woman, “Do not disturb.”

This was probably 2.5. If you enjoy tortured/mixed metaphors, 2 adjectives for every noun, jumbled timelines and random pronouncements with cliches mixed in, this is the book for you. The information is good, but the book itself is painful to read.