Customer Comments

I just got this book and I blasted through it. So fun! So Veronica! I really enjoyed the mystery. It was complicated enough to keep me guessing, but not so complicated things got messy or confusing. I also enjoyed the kind of quiet background thread of Veronica trying to settle into her new life and trying to sort of renegotiate her relationship with her father as an adult and work partner. I cannot wait for the next book in the series!

Brilliant! The Hyperbole and a Half is one of the shiniest gems of the internet and this book is every bit the treasure the blog is. There are a few old favorites from the blog reprinted here, but most of the book is new content. It's got zany childhood adventures, journeys of self-discovery, and dog stories. Oh yes, lots of dog stories! Allie's art may seem deceptively simple at first, but it actually has so much nuance and single frames can send you into gales of laughter all on their own, even independent of the story as a whole. Such a hilarious book!

This book is so disturbing! In a good way, though. It's tense, trippy and emotional. Beukes is an excellent writer who deftly weaves together strands of a story that could easily have been a muddled mess in the hands of a less skilled author.

What an adorable book! It grabs you from the first page and is a surprisingly fast read. This is a sweet, fun story about a brave, clever young boy and his spitfire little sister going on a quest through Faerie to retrieve a special stone that will allow them to prevent The Morrigan from unleashing misery on the world. A great mythological romp!

This is such a delightful book! Andromeda Klein is just your average high schooler obsessed with the tarot and ceremonial magic, when suddenly she begins having dreams and visions involving imagery from the tarot and a figure calling itself the King of Sacremento. Worse, her dead best friend is suddenly not quite as dead as she should be. This book is weird and quirky without even trying to be, which makes it absolutely charming. A fun, unique read!

A great collection of fun, reader-friendly articles from the first 10 years of Bitch magazine's existence. These authors cover a wide range of subjects and aspects of pop culture with wit and intelligence. A great, motivating read!

This is like a stand alone episode of the show. Most of the focus of this book is on original characters and they're well written and given enough depth that they really hold your attention. A great read for anyone who misses the show, like me!

A worthy sequel to 'The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making'! In this one, September finally makes her way back to Fairyland to find that people's shadows have gone missing! Figuring this is her fault on account of the way she gave away her own shadow the last time she was there, September vows to make things right and sets off for Fairyland Below. It's got the same charming kinds of characters, lovely use of language and wonderful fairytale quality that the first one has, so I was really, really pleased.

Another excellent collection of essays from Smart Pop! This collection of essays span a huge range of subjects from hilarious parody to deep philosophical ponderings. Some of these essays explored ideas that I'd had myself (though much more coherently!) and other essays I vehemently disagreed with. Either way, they made me think. And best of all, they reminded me just how much I love this 'verse!

This is a story about two independent pot growers in SoCal who are being targeted for incorporation by a Mexical cartel, so of course it's 11 kinds of messed up. But I enjoyed it. I loves me a good OT3 anyway, so the relationship between Ben, Chon, and O is interesting to me and I totally understood why the boys would do what they did when she was being threatened. The writing is very SoCal and full of slang and pop culture references, so it's got a sort of breezy feel to it, even when the events it's describing are kind of horrifying. It was a quick, exciting read full of twists and turns. I liked it!

This is an excellent biography. It explores not only Harvey Milk's life, but the social landscape that helped create him and that he, in turn, helped re-create. I like that the author doesn't make the mistake of idealizing Harvey. The author doesn't shy away from the silly or excessive aspects of Harvey's personality. But not only does that not detract from his accomplishments, it actually makes Harvey a more inspiring figure. He was a human being with real flaws, but he still managed to galvanize so many people to work together, proving his idealism wasn't unfounded and that a better world is possible.

THIS BOOK WAS AWESOME! I literally could not stop reading it. I started it at about 11 am and finished itat 2 am. I didn’t even stop for meals; I ate while I read. In Transylvania, there are five sisters raning in age from 16 to 5 years old. The book is told from the POV of the second oldest, Jena. For years, on every Full Moon, the girls have bolted their bedroom door and gone through a portal to the Other Kingdom where they’ve danced the night away with all the amazing creatures that live there. One winter, the girls’ father becomes very ill and has to go far south to a warmer climate because he wouldn’t be able to survive the winter there. He leaves Jena and Tati (the eldest) in charge of the house and his business, but their cousin Cezare has other plans. He wants their father’s business and land for himself. He also wants to destroy the Other Kingdom, which he blames for the death of his brother when they were children. It’s up to Jena to save everything she loves. This book was so, so good. Really charming. Jena was a great main character. She’s smart and independent, but not infallible. The author does a really great job of making it clear why Jena loves the Other Kingdom so much, even though she’s careful not to make them the happy shiny Victorian-style fairyland. This Kingdom has teeth. But you’re totally rooting for them to survive anyway, and not just because Cezare is so awful. I especially loved the relationship between Jena and her pet frog, Gogu. Who speaks to her. She’s the only one who can hear him and everyone thinks she’s a little strange because she carries him everywhere she goes and talks to him. But he really can talk to her and it’s a sweet little relationship they have. I’m a total sucker for stories that incorporate folktale tropes in interesting ways, and this book totally did. The companion novel, 'Cybele's Secret' is excellent as well.

This was an excellent book! She very clearly (and using plain language!) lays out the issues and problems faced by trans women in our society and shows how they may seem specific to trans women, but once you scratch the surface they really stem directly from traditional sexism and our societal devaluing of femininity in general. Also, I will love her forever for clearly articulating some of the problems I had with the hardcore pomo deconstructionists when I was in grad school. Back then I could never seem to put everything that was bothering me together and we were never taught any kind of critique of those pomo and/or gender performativity theories AT ALL because pretty much everyone there worships at the Altar Of Butler. Forget that, I’m with Julia!

Like the ’Chicks Dig Time Lords’ collection before it, this book collects essays from female fans of Whedon’s shows on all manner of topics. There are essays about the shows/episodes themselves discussing everything from individual characters (one essay was basically a love letter to Kaylee! It made me so happy) to the overarching themes of various shows (my favorite of those was by Catherynne Valente who discussed how the exploration of life and work as an adult on ’Angel’ spoke more to her than the high school as hell metaphor on ’Buffy’). There were essays on fandom itself, like the differences between Buffyverse fandom and Firefly Browncoats. My favorite of those essays was by Dae S. Low who talked about how the PDX Browncoats (who started the Can’t Stop The Serenity charity screenings which have raised over $66,000 for Equality Now!) and how fandom helped her create a chosen family much in the style of the characters on Whedon’s shows. The chosen family aspect of those shows has always been one of the things that resonated most strongly with me. It was cool to not only see how that works in the real world, but to see it come about as a direct result of fandom. Some essays explored the importance of writers and creators, not just in relation to fandom (which the Whedonverse fandoms pay far more attention to than most fandoms) but also in relation to the creation of Dr. Horrible and what makes it and its fandom different. There were also interviews with Jane Espenson and Juliet Landau. One particularly interesting essays was by Meredith McGrath. She’s a Lutheran minister and she wrote about how she could recognize themes of redemption, grace, and works that she was familiar with from her faith in the Buffyverse and how that actually helped her decide to pursue ordination as a minister when she was at a crossroads in her life. I found this fascinating for a few reasons. First, Joss Whedon has said numerous times he ”doesn’t believe in the Sky Bully,” so I just find it humerous that his works would actually end up helping to propel someone toward Christian ministry. Second, the themes she sees in the show and relates to her faith I do not read the same way AT ALL. I’m a Pagan, so while I do recognize the things she’s talking about as a coherent, intentional message about life and humanity, I interpret them very differently. Yet, her explanations still make sense. I can understand how someone with her background would make those interpretations. I think it’s interesting and cool how different people get so many different (and meaningful and inspirational) messages from the same texts. I did quite like this collection as a whole. Though the essays weren’t as laugh-out-loud funny as some of the ones in ’Chicks Dig Time Lords’ were, they covered a broader range of topics than that collection, simply because instead of only talking about one show, writers could discuss any one or combination of five different shows (Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Dr. Horrible, and Dollhouse). I’m a happy geek!

This is an engaging, intelligent, intense, and painfully honest look at one woman's experiences with an eating disorder. Marya Hornbacher's unflinching look at her own life and psyche manages to make the reader both understand the mind of someone with ED (while never condoning it) and also feel a great deal of empathy (without whining). This is a very powerful book. A word of warning: This book can also be very triggering. If you have any kind of issues with food/weight or any history of disordered eating, you should carefully consider whether or not you're able to handle this book. I wasn't far enough along in my recovery when I first read this and it triggered me 6 ways from Sunday!

I read this even though I dang well know better than to read triggering books like this when I’m really stressed out and having anxiety attacks like I was the other day. So be warned, if that's an issue for you. I think the fact that this book was so triggering is actually an indicator of how good it is. If Portia’s writing wasn’t so engaging and she wasn’t so unflinchingly honest, I wouldn’t have been able to connect with it and see so much of myself in it, which is what set me off. What I think this book does very well is plainly show the way an eating disordered person’s mind works. You can see how it’s not just about food and weight, it’s about the crushing feeling of not measuring up, failure, and disappointment in all areas of life. But at the same time, it’s not just ”one thing they can control” like a lot of people (even therapists) try to reduce eating disorders down to. Yes, it’s about all that other stuff, but it is also about weight and eating, really and truly. Our culture is monumentally messed up about weight and appearance. That has an effect. It means something very powerful in our culture when a woman is whittled down to nothing and it’s rewarded in a lot of ways. It’s not just some crazy coincidence that all this other anxiety and self-hatred just happens to manifest as an obsession with weight loss. I think Portia’s writing makes very clear both elements of this disease.

This book is supposed to be a lesbian classic, and I can see why, even though I didn't really enjoy it. The writing is fantastic. The characters and setting are all very vivid and striking. Unfortunately, the main character Nancy is such an incredibly self-centered moron it's hard to sympathize with her a lot of the time. In fact, by the end I was actively rooting against her.

Just like an episode of the show! This was a fun and engaging book. The author has a great handle on the character voices.

This was okay. It was a quick, light read and a good way to pass the afternoon. I liked the main character Maggie well enough, but I disliked a few of the secondary characters with enough intensity to almost overshadow that. And I was irritated that Maggie didn't even solve the mystery. She just kind of blundered around until the villain got overconfident (because of something the cops did, not Maggie!) and wound up getting accidentally incapacitated until someone else entirely figured out Maggie was in trouble and called the cops. Not the best book I've ever read, but not the worst either.

These novels are a lot of fun! They feel just like an episode of the show. Tod Goldberg really has the character voices down and he does a good job of coming up with situations that seem like they could happen on the show.

This book lays out who a lot of the major players in the virginity business are and the content and character of abstinence-only education in schools, then goes on to show how the purity myth and its associated ideas about proper girlhood (because, really, they’re all about perpetual girlhood for ALL women) manifest in larger cultural attitudes, the legal system and the legislature and how this is all connected to rape and violence against women and hatred of femininity in general. It finally wraps up with a call to reclaim the language of morality and provides suggestions and resources for fighting against the purity myth and its associated misogyny. And it’s very good that last chapter exists, because I was so furious by the time I got there, I was ready to start busting windows and setting things on fire because our culture is so irredemably messed up there’s nothing left to do but burn it to the ground and start over. Luckily the last chapter managed to dull that rage and return a bit of optimism. My rage is actually an endorsement, since I wouldn’t be so angry if Valenti hadn’t managed to state her case so clearly and impart the seriousness of the predicament so effectively. I’m glad I read this, but wow am I ever angry right now.

Great book! This continues the epic tale of the Mackenzies and the Bearkillers after the Change, with some new faces arriving on the scene. The world building in this book is very detailed, believable, and fascinating. The characters are well drawn, distinct, and interesting, and just the kind of people you'd want to have around after a techno-apocalypse! I cannot wait to read the next book in the series!

The Orphan's Tales is one story broken into two volumes ('In the Night Garden' and 'In the Cities of Coin and Spice') and it is absolutely brilliant! The language Valente uses is lush and vivid and the structure of this story is utterly unique. Stories are nestled inside stories like those Russian nesting dolls. Such a structure could easily become twisted and confusing, but in Valente's deft hand these intertwining stories stay clear and easy to follow. All of these storylines weave together to form a beautiful, complex tapestry that illuminates a whole new world.

This is the second half of the Orphan's Tales story and it's just as complex, beautiful, and engrossing as the first. Cat Valente weaves together multiple storylines better than any author I've ever read. When I finally finished this book, I wanted to cry because I was so happy. It was everything I'd been wanting in a story for a very long time.

I enjoyed this book very much. This is a peek into one chapter of Francie's life, narrated from her point of view. The issues she deals with are pretty serious, even bleak at times, but she tells them with such deadpan humor that it doesn't come off as dark at all. It's a fast read which pulls you in quickly.

This is a beautiful, imaginative, epic tale. Like she did in 'The Orphan's Tales,' Catherynne Valente weaves together overlapping narratives to create a rich tapestry that shows a wonderous, fantastic world unlike anything I've seen before. Now onto the second volume of this series! Also, for those who've never heard of the original Prester John story, Cat Valente has a hilarious video on YouTube called "Prester John: International Man of Mystery" that explains its origins in the 12th century.

At the dawn of the 20th century, a girl with the completely awesome name of Lilly Nelly Aphrodite is born in Berlin, Germany. Her mother is a cabaret singer and her father a Baron, both of whom die not long after her birth, leaving her to grow up in an orphanage. The book follows her through her childhood and years of struggling in life, until she is ultimately discovered by a movie director who turns her into one of the most famous silent movie actresses in Germany. All of this is set against the backdrop of both World Wars and involves several characters who disappear and reappear throughout Lilly’s life. It’s really well written, but DANG is it depressing! I mean, the poor girl grows up a destitute orphan, so you know it’s not going to be all sunshine and kittens, but this book really gets into the desperation and starvation of World War I and its aftermath in great detail. This book made me incredibly hungry just reading about that extreme deprivation. So, well done Ms. Collins, I guess. The one thing I didn’t really like was the lesbian character Eva, actually. Not because she was badly written, but she was such a pathetic figure that I felt kind of irritated about reading yet another Tragic Lesbian character. Such a horribly overused stereotype. I mean, yeah, it was much harder to be a lesbian back in the day, but every person Eva falls in love with or even gets involved with is just using her, even Lilly. No one loves her back, or even feels any sympathy or empathy at all, and they completely abandon her when they’ve taken all they can from her. And then eventually she gets hauled off by the Nazis. Although now that I think about it, it’s not like anyone else in the book had a happy ending or any significant periods of happiness at all, so maybe her problem wasn’t that she was a Tragic Lesbian character, but that she was just a character in a tragic book. It was definitely an interesting piece of historical fiction, though.

BRILLIANT! It’s supposedly a YA book, but it’s really for anyone who loves fairytales. Plus, Valente’s use of language is so lush (she’s also a poet, which is obvious) the prose feels a little more substantial than the usual YA fare (which I love, don’t get me wrong), so I really think adults would love it, even if they don’t usually go for YA. This book is about a girl named September living in Nebraska during WWII who gets whisked away to Fairy Land by the Green Wind and his Leopard. She goes on a quest (because isn’t that what girls in Fairy Land are supposed to do?) to retrieve a witch’s Spoon from the evil Marquess who is ruling Fairy Land with an iron fist. In the grand tradition of fairytales, she collects friends who help her on her quest, grows up along the way, and saves the world! I loved everything about this book. I had a huge smile on my face when I finished it. It definitely incorporates a lot of familiar fairytale tropes, but Valente manages to keep things feeling fresh and innovative at the same time. It’s a delicate balance, but I find a lot of her writing is really great at finding it. September herself is charming and clever and I loved her immediately. My favorite non-September character was A-Through-L, the half-Wyvern/half-library, who was forbidden to fly by the evil Marquess. I didn’t see the resolution coming and really enjoyed it. Also, the brilliant SJ Tucker created a song to go with this book. It’s called ”Septembers Rhyme” and you can listen to it at SJ's website.

This is a very dense, interesting book with a lot to say. I'm glad I read it. You can read this story on two levels (individually or both at the same time, it's up to you), so I'll talk about them seperately just for the purposes of this review. 1) The Plot/Story: If you're a fan of distopian stories, you should definitely read this. It's a fascinating look at our country after it suffers a political/religious upheaval and ecological disasters. The solutions to these problems sought by the protagonists don't follow either the glorification of technology or the rejection of it many distopian stories take. I find the rise of the theocracy based in Angel City super creepy and just way too believable for comfort. The pace drags in places and the story could have been tightened up a bit, my own cynicism made it pretty hard for me to find certain parts involving the extreme effectiveness of non-violent protests believable, but overall I found the book engaging and interesting. 2) The Message: If you're a Pagan of any kind, follower of an Earth-centered religion, follower of any kind of "spiritual but not religious" path, or are just interested in reading about any of those things, you should also read this book. I've read some of Starhawk's other non-fiction works and attended a talk she gave at my university, so I could definitely see this book as her trying to show what a society that functions with the kinds of spiritual and political beliefs she promotes might look like. I myself don't agree with her entirely on either subject, but it's not really necessary to wholely believe in it in order to get something out of the book. Reading parts that I found a bit unbelievable (the afore mentioned usefulness of complete non-violence against zelots with guns for instance) or parts that I didn't feel would be really useful in real life (banishing people to live outside the community instead of prisons, for instance) just got me to think and clarify what I believed and what I might do instead. That's useful. Overall, I think this is a worthwhile book.

This was a fun book! It's got a very intersting twist on the urban fantasy genre. Usually, you have a heroine who's tough and independent and almost always alone (or with a sidekick who is just as much an outcast as she is). But not here! She's got a huge network of family that is very much involved in her life and business. It's interesting to watch her navigate that network and try to carve out her own place in it and assert her own feelings and needs.

This was very good. A very solitary concierge in a building full of very rich people works hard to present an image of stupidity and to conform to the residents' stereotpyes of the lower class, all the while she is a voracious reader, lover of films, and a very intelligent, deep thinker (who also quotes Eminem songs on occasion, which made me laugh really, really hard). Among the rich families who live in her buildings is a very smart but sad 12-year-old girl who has decided to commit suicide on her 13th birthday because she just doesn't see any purpose in her life. An interesting, charming Japanese man moves into their building and befriends them both, changing all of their lives in the process. It's a very beautiful book which ponders a lot of subjects (mainly beauty, intelligence, and truth) which would usually have me rolling my eyes, but it manages to do it in a way that's interesting and entertaining. I also think the woman who translated it from the original French did an excellent job. Given the a lot of the subject matter, that couldn't have been easy.

This isn’t really an advice book for parents who want their kids to eat better. It’s a book about a family trying to follow advice for parents who want their kids to eat better. The author goes through a year-long odyssey trying to develop a healthy, organic, sustainably-grown way of eating for her family. This is a monumental task, not just because our food system is corrupt, confusing, and so beyond messed up, but also because this woman has two extremely resistant kids (seriously, if this woman said the sky was blue, those kids would start a fight with her about it and whine for hours) and a husband who is lazy and dismissive of her. He’s got that kind of banal sexism thing going on where he’ll say yes to the kids just so he can be the ”cool parent” and leaves the heavy lifting to her. AND he’s the most insanely picky eater I’ve EVER heard of and will in no way compromise with her on meals, even though he assumes she’ll be compromising her own tastes and preferences to fit his every time. It’s craziness! But in spite of all that, after a year she actually managed to get her family eating pretty well (and happily). This book is pretty honest about all the real world set backs you face and she admits up front that there are some things that in an ideal world they would be doing better, but here in the real world you make compromises and that’s okay. She’s also got lots of little tips and lists throughout the book to help people tackle obstacles and to get the kids involved in their own food and health. It was an interesting book.

What a lovely, lovely story! It's an amazing coming of age story with some fantastic twists on some old tales. Highly recommended!

This book makes a compelling case for changing the way we think about nature, value, and economics using undenyable real-world examples of the consequences of continuing on with our current treatment of the earth and other human beings. Sadly, this book is even more relevant and vital now than it was when it was originally written. Highly recommended!

This is the second book in the ”Legacy Series” which follows the series finale of the TV show. It basically picks up where the last one left off. We find out what horrible thing the Wraith have done to Rodney, get into some seriously complicated politics with the Genii and Todd, and Samantha Carter and her new warship from Earth join the party. I really, really like this series. There’s plenty of action and a complications, with the Atlantis crew having to deal with the logistics of living on the new planet as well as trying to rescue McKay and try to maintain a more or less civil working relationship with the Genii. But as many things as they have going on, the authors still make time for some really great character reflections and conversations between people we normally wouldn’t get to see talk too much. Teyla and Carson have a great discussion about human nature and how Teyla’s ”Gift” complicates that, and Sheppard and Carter have another great conversation about gate teams and responsibilities. Plus, there were also a lot of great conversations between Sheppard and Teyla, and even some full on flirting (which makes my shipper heart glad). Best of all, Ronon actually called Keller out on her arrogant dismissal of the knowledge of the peoples of the Pegasus galaxy as ”primitive superstition.” That utterly infuriated me in the show and it was just accepted as normal and then totally ignored (even though Ronon and Teyla were completely right!) and I’m so glad to see these authors actually address that. On top of this, my least favorite part of the last book (the IOA and Earth politics) was completely missing from this one. Yay! These books are a quick and fun read, so I’m looking forward to the rest of them being published

Although this was published long before the "Fool for Love" episode aired and has therefore been thoroughly Jossed, this story was a lot of fun. Spike and Dru are at their evil best and while we don't really discover anything about them we didn't already know, they were still entertaining and I found myself pulling for them in spite of their evilness. The Slayer, the Potentials and all of the various Watchers were very well drawn characters and I got attached to them very quickly. This book was a fun afternoon read!

I really enjoyed this book. It’s a really unique urban fantasy/mystery book. The main character, who goes by the name Bast, is a graphic designer in New York whose friend is found dead. Bast (and her now-dead friend) are witches. But unlike most urban fantasy books, these witches are just like real life witches! As in, Bast practices actual Wicca and spells and charms and things are the same in the book as they are in real life. It was a really interesting approach to take. Also, the author clearly has some insider knowledge of the Pagan community in the US, because the factions of Pagans (and associated in-fighting) and the groups and types of people that Bast meets as she tries to find out what happened to her friend are all spot on. Great mystery!

The Great God Om gets religion! Classic Discworld hilarity, with some sharp commentary on fundamentalism and compassion.

This was an excellent book. It very clearly lays out the double standard by which girls' sexuality is judged so much more harshly than boys'. More than that, it shows that the "slut" label isn't even dependent on a girl's actual sexual behavior, as it's really more of a weapon used against any girl who doesn't fit into some standard of femininity or other expected behavior. The author does a good job of showing how damaging this kind of treatment is to girls and how it can affect them negatively for the rest of their lives. She also shows how slut bashing can even be harmful to those girls who are lucky enough to escape being labled "sluts" themselves, as well as boys. She also lays out some good suggestions for combating this kind of harrassment of girls. I especially appreciated the way the author incorporated her interviews of girls and women who'd been labeled "sluts" into the book. She used anecdotes or quotes from them to illustrate points she was making and then would include long narratives told by the girls and women themselves. This way, they got to express their experiences in their own words and express their own feelings and interpretations for themselves without any framework being imposed on them by the author. It gives "sluts" their own voice, which is important since so much of this book emphasized how slut bashing serves to silence girls in all manner of ways.

Fun, fascinating peek into a colorful and eventful period of Chicago's past. Far from the dry kind of "this happened, then this happened, then this person got involved" history books many are used to, this is a vivid, engaging, and easy to read tale that pulls you right in. Great book!

How is he not dead? Seriously, how? I've always loved the Chili Peppers' music, but now I'm even more amazed by it. It's a miracle they lived long enough to make it, nevermind actually pulling themselves together enough to make it so *good*! I thought this was a very unflinching, honest account of a life hard lived. The writing style was engaging and relatable. I appreciated how he managed to quite clearly explain his thought processes at various points in his life, without glamorizing the drug use and chaos and without making excuses or blaming anyone other than himself. I've lost a cousin to drugs, so I feel like I can kind of understand his mindset better now than I could back when he was alive (he never had the way with words that Anthony does). Hopefully looking back over his life in the process of writing this book will have given Anthony some perspective and further motivation to stay clean.

What a delightful book! Loup, the daughter of an escaped genetic experiment, grows up in the small town of Santa Olivia in a militarized buffer zone between the US and Mexico. I really loved how this book focused on Loup building her own chosen family and how they bring hope, intentionally or not, to their oppressed community. The characters are vivid and endearing and the plot really pulls you in. Loved it!

Amazing book! I literally could not put it down and ended up reading it all in one sitting. That's all I've done today! With a premise like the one in this book, it would have been easy to get mired in the darkness and horror of everything they (Ma, especially) had to endure, but thankfully Donoghue doesn't go for the shock value. She doesn't shy away from the many difficulties they face even after escaping, but by having Jack be the narrator, his young age and innocence provides just enough distance from the major horrors that the story instead becomes much more focused on the ways humans manage to survive and create lives for themselves even in the worst of circumstances. Amazingly written, very powerful novel.

This is a hilariously snarky, but serious academic take down of reality TV and it’s regressive, offensive ideas about women, people of color, and the poor. It’s putting into words many of the things that have angered and irritated me for years. It also includes lots of ideas and resources for combatting the problems it talks about. Great book!

Great start to a great series! Miranda Grey is a musician in Austin, Texas who is literally being driven mad by her uncontrolled empathy and telepathy gifts. One night after a brutal attack she ends up crossing paths with David Solomon, the leader of the vampires of the southern part of the US. He takes her in and helps train her so she can control her gifts, but he’s got his own problems, what with a rival gang of vampires killing people left and right. I really like the Signet system that organizes the vampires’ shadow government. It’s a really original piece of world building. But most of all, I love the characters. David, aside from being a badass vampire, is a massive computer geek! Miranda is strong and capable, but in a way that real people are strong and capable, not the stereotypical genre hard-as-steel island-unto-herself urban fantasy heroine kind of way. David’s second in command, Faith, is awesome as well. Even the more minor characters, like Sophie and Deven and Jonathan, are interesting and show a lot of personality in their limited page time.

This is a beautiful, delicately written book. It's a really interesting, unique take on a subject thats kind of a scifi staple. The story is very un-scifi-like, in fact, so even if you don't usually care for the genre, you'll probably really enjoy this book.

This is a hard book. I don't mean "hard" as in "difficult to follow," because it's not at all, but "hard" as in "it deals with some harsh subject matter and does not flinch." This book deals with the messy and sometimes contradictory and/or disturbing emotions and reactions that come from childhood sexual abuse. Luckily, Heim is a very skilled writer and he handles things in such a way that the events of the story and the reactions of the characters don't come across as shocking for the sake of being shocking, but merely as the heartbreakingly matter-of-fact consequences of what happened. This is a very good book; it'll make you hurt.

Brilliant! One of Pratchett's best. I'm making my way through the Discworld books all willynilly, but out of the ones I've read so far I think this is my favorite. It was hilarious and somehow managed to be pessimistic with an optimistic end note. I liked that it didn't go for the simplistic sort of "war is bad, therefore people who make war are bad," "the world would be better if it were run by women," and "this amazing feat of daring/crazy revelation about the top brass change everything for women from now on" kind of storylines you usually see in these kinds of books. I appreciated the attention to the nuances of each of these situations. Pratchett is great at writing female characters, mostly because I think he doesn't write female characters, he just writes characters, some of whom happen to be women, if you know what I mean. My favorite few throw away bits were Maladict(a)'s Vietnam flashsideways and Vimes laughing at the Zlobenian soldiers when Polly told them to shove their offer up their jumpers. They just made me giggle! Also, I've been loudly denouncing various things as Abominations Unto Nuggan for the last few days. It's more fun than it ought to be.

Very funny! As any MST3K fan can tell you, Mike Nelson is a witty guy. This collection of essays covers a range of topics, from the vast array of moisturizers used by his wife to his hatred of prank phone calls made by obnoxious morning radio DJs. A really hilarious look at how absurd regular, every day life can be.

Nalo Hopkinson is a fantastic writer! I love that her books are great sci-fi/fantasy, but they're rooted in Caribbean culture. That's a perspective you don't find often in this genre, so it's a real breath of fresh air. In this book, Tan-Tan is taken with her to the wild New Half-Way Tree, her home world's alternate universe twin, when her father commits a murder. Growing up there, she's subjected to abuse from those closest to her and the book is about her coming to terms with that and finding her own strength and sense of self, while making the most of her new home. Very imaginative and engrossing.

Wow, great book! I knew looting was a huge problem and that during colonialism wholesale ransacking of antiquities was a major activity all over the world, but I had no idea the extent to which museums were, and still are to this day, such seething hotbeds of corruption. What a mess. This books examines the issue of repatriation from the points of view of the countries who are asking for items back and from the POVs of the museums who currently possess those items. Waxman interviews and investigates a lot of the people involved in the fights on both sides, as well as detailing the histories of four major museums involved in repatriation battles at the moment (the Getty, The Louvre, The Met, and The British Museum), as well as laying out the history of several items that are major battle grounds (the Elgin marbles, the zodiac ceiling from Egypt, etc). Wow. So messed up. The arguments of the museums are as self serving as they are insulting. There’s so much of the colonialist attitutdes and contempt for non-Western countries, it’s just unbelievable. But at the same time, there is the very real issue that many countries requesting items back don’t have the facilities to care for and protect these items. It seems to me, the only workable solution is for the countries of origin to be given ownership and control of the items, at which time they will arrange loans (short- or long-term) of exhibits or outside museums will rent the items on a long-term basis from their countries of origins. The countries of origin would also be updating their own museums and security practices, with the help of grants and donations (which is what Western museums do anyway), so they can display their own artifacts in their own countries whenever they want. Sadly, this would take way, way more cooperation than Western museums are clearly willing to give, since it would require them to 1. admit wrong doing on their parts in the past, 2. admit that they’re not the sole arbiters of culture and worth for the entire world, 3. relinquish their control of the antiquities markets and associated scholarship. Never gonna happen. What a mess!

A German student at the university in Reykjavik is gruesomely murdered and the family is convinced the police arrested the wrong person, so they send a family employee (who happens to be a former detective with the German police force) to work with local lawyer Thora Gudmundsdóttir to find out who did it. I liked this a lot! Iceland was more than where the story happened to be set, it was really a part of the story itself. The murdered man was a grad student in history who was fascinated with the witchburnings in Iceland’s past and it was his investigations into theis past, which intersected with a particular obsession of his, that caused his murder. It was really intersting to get into the history of the place, not just its current culture. Thora is a great character. She’s smart and capable, but in a real-person kind of way. Like, she’s trying to deal with being a divorced single mother of two juggling her family life with her work. It’s hard and she doesn’t always get it right, but she always tries! And a lot of the time, she does get it right. Also, Thora is a freaking awesome name. In fact, all the names in this book are awesome. I love Icelandic naming conventions.

Octavia Butler is one of the greatest sci-fi/fantasy writers of our time and this book is one of her best. Like all great sci-fi, this book can be read on two levels and both are equally engaging. The first is the surface, narrative level. The trials and tribulations of Dana, an African-American woman living in the mid-70s, who suddenly finds herself being transported back to the 1800s to a slave plantation are riveting from the first page. I found myself staying up into the wee hours of the morning reading this because I just had to know what happened to Dana and the other characters. The second level is that of metaphor; it's a response to the more militant attitudes in the African-American community at the time this book was written. It wasn't uncommon to hear people condemning those who didn't try to escape slavery as weak and "house slaves" or slaves who had sexual relations (voluntarily, or as close as one could get to it as a slave) as traitors. Butler uses Dana's journeys into the past as a way to explore how the oppressive social systems of the time work on people's minds. Even someone like Dana, who grew up in the comparatively more free and liberated 60s and 70s can feel changes in herself, in spite of her best efforts to fight against it. The result is a much more compassionate view of slaves as complicated people with sometimes conflicting feelings and impulses trying to get by the best they can within a horribly oppressive social structure. Such a message could seem heavy handed coming from a lesser writer, but Butler never lets the message overwhelm the characters and the story. I highly recommend this book!

This book follows a woman named Zarité, who was born a slave to the owner of a sugar plantation in Saint-Domingue (Haiti, back when it was still a French colony). The story doesn’t just focus on her, but on a whole cast of characters whose lives intertwine repeatedly from the time before the revolution, during the first few years of revolution in Haiti, and afterward when they start new lives in New Orleans. Because her own daughter (a product of her owner’s repeated rapes) was so young and because she loved her owner’s young son like her own, Zarité chose to go with him to New Orleans rather than joining the revolutionaries. Because of that, it was a long, hard road to freedom for her. I did like this book a lot, but it was pretty heartbreaking in places and the ending is bittersweet, though I suppose you can’t really expect anything else when the story is about slavery and the myriad ways it impacts all kinds of people in ways we don’t usually talk about in history class. Definitely well written and worth the time and effort to read.

If you're a fan of Dollhouse, this book should fascinate you. The essays in this book strike a good balance between "intellectual" and "fannish fun." They cover a range of themes in the show, from the meanings of individual characters' arcs to what the show says about what it means to be a person to examinations of themes that Dollhouse shares with Joss Whedon's other works. Very interesting stuff!

Wow! Ayaan is an amazing lady! Her courage and determination is incredible. Reading her life story makes me so grateful to have been born when and where I was. It would be nice to think that I could have done the same as her, faced with the challenges she was, but in all honesty I think I would have crumbled. She has a lot of important things to say about very complex issues facing society today. Highly recommended!

This is one of the best TV shoe tie-ins I've read! I got addicted to Stargate Atlantis because the premise had a lot of (sadly mostly unrealized) potential and because of what the actors managed to do with their characters almost in spite of what they’d been given by the scripts. Lots of stuff irritated me, though, such as the general opinion that the universe would be a lot better off if everyone just let the American military run everything and the complete dismissal of the knowledge, opinion, and even lives of native peoples of other planets (usually played by actors of color). Miraculously, this book goes a long way toward fixing a lot of that! After the infuriating series finale, the city of Atlantis was back on Earth, leaving the people of the Pegasus galaxy at the mercy of the Wraith. This book takes the city back to Pegasus, with every one of the main characters firmly of the opinion that that’s where it belongs and that they have a duty to do what they can to support the people of Pegasus. It delves into the history and home cultures of Teyla and Ronon far more than the series ever did. Ronon, instead of just being a one note tough guy like he was so often written on the show, is given a lot more depth. He was a student of poetry and literature before joining the army to fight the Wraith when they set out to destroy his world! It also gets more into Teyla’s conflicted feelings about wanting to be with her people, and wanting to be on Atlantis to represent them to the rest of the galaxy and to help protect them from the Wraith and also because she gets personal fulfillment out of exploration. All this, and they’re putting a new spin on the Wraith threat and setting up political intrigue with the Genii! Can't wait to read the rest of the series!

The ’Triumph of the Moon’ for the US! Clifton states right off that he wants to chronicle the establishment of Wicca (with a short look at other related Pagan religions) in America much like Hutton did in ’Triumph’ and I think he does a good job. It’s really interesting to see how things we take for granted as aspects of Wicca, such as characterizing it as a nature religion and women’s prominence, weren’t necessarily part of it to begin with but became so when it interacted with certain social trends and movements going on in particular times in America’s past. This book relies much more on written documents, unlike Hutton’s which focused much more on interviews and personal correspondences with people, just because Wicca was brought to America in writing and was disseminated far more often that way than it had been in Britain at the time. Another thing I liked about this book is that while it is a serious, objective academic study, the author is a Pagan himself and has been in the community for over 30 years. Although there are a few notable exceptions, I’ve just seen such unbelievable crap from academic outsiders that I frankly wouldn’t have bothered to read this if I didn’t know Clifton was One Of Us. Unfair perhaps, but I just have no patience for that random crap anymore. Clifton gets it, though.

This is a big ol’ collection of writings from zines written by and for girls and women in the ’90s. In my teens and early 20s I was really, really into the punk scene and zines were big deal to me. I frickin' loved 'Cometbus', but other than that all I read were zines by other girls. These zines were raw and uncensored thoughts of other girls and I loved them. In fact, I read a few of the zines that were featured in this book! I still have the issue of ROCKRGRL with Sleater-Kinney on the cover that’s pictured in the book. The book is divided up into loose categories of writings, like family, politics, idols, and so on. But a lot of themes run through all the writings. There’s a lot of queer girl stuff in here (I don’t know if that’s because the editors are lesbians or if we homogays were more motivated to make our own media since we sure as hell aren’t represented very well in the mainstream stuff). Race and class are also big thread running through a bunch of the stuff in here. Probably my favorite piece in the whole book is one young woman reflecting on the way growing up with a single mother on welfare impacted her sexuality and how it was perceived by outsiders. I also really liked the interview with Trinh T Minh-ha about the difference between making political films and making films politically. My area of specialization in grad school was in pop culture representation, so I read a lot of her work and it was fun to run into her in a different context, so to speak. This book actually makes me feel kind of old. As I was reading through it, I just kept thinking that the vast majority of this stuff is the kind of thing you’d see on blogs nowadays. I think it’s easier and faster to do this stuff online these days (Tristan Taormino’s blog is called ’Pucker Up,’ which is the name of the paper zine she was doing at the time she published this book!). I think the punk scene may be one of the last holdouts of zine culture, cuz Aaron Cometbus himself can tell you that even if you’re living in a squat with 10 other people and no electricity, you can still steal office supplies during your graveyard shift at Kinko’s and make a zine! But I wonder how much longer that will be the case. This book was only published in 1997 and it already felt like a peek into a bygone era. Dang, I miss Riotgrrrl.

So, so good! The structure of this book is that of a round table-type discussion of the history of punk in a more or less chronological fashion with each chapter focusing on one sort of subject (a particular band, or squat, or club, or zine, or whatever). The authors interviewed tons of people and they’ll take a couple sentences or paragraph from various interviews that pertain to whatever subject that chapter is covering, so the overall effect is that you’ve got a ton of people in one room reminiscing about all these crazy, amazing things that happened. The chapter on Green Day was surprisingly positive, which made me happy because they’re one of my favorite bands of all time. And while there were various debates about what/who is punk or who sold out or whatever, which I found unspeakably tedious and pointless even back when I was deeply invested in the punk scene, thankfully there are far, far more interesting discussions that take up the majority of the pages. This was fun! I'm so overwhelmed with nostalgia now!

This book traced historical attitudes toward menstruation, as well as the products and medical interventions developed to deal with it, mostly from an American perspective, but with occasional dips into ancient history as well. It also focused a lot on the role of advertising and its influence on our feelings toward menstruation. This could have been a depressing and frustrating book, but the authors wrote in such a friendly, chatty tone and really emphasized the ridiculous nature of a lot of what they were talking about, that it actually turned out pretty funny and entertaining, as well as informative. The funniest part was definitely the chapter covering advertisements of pads, tampons, douches and other associated products. There was a lot of mocking of the vague language used, like when they demanded to know what, specifically, all this generic ”protection” the ads were talking about meant. Like, protection from bullets and malaria? I also really liked the last chapter, which offered all kinds of alternatives. Like, alternative products for dealing with menstrual flow (like cloth pads and the Diva cup), as well as alternative ways of thinking about and treating our periods. This was an interesting book and a good starter for a conversation we kind of desperately need in our culture.

This is a collection of essays by lesbians covering all kinds of different aspects of lesbian life, from conceiving or adopting children to explorations of butch/femme gender coding to caretaking roles taken on by lesbians. I got my master’s degree in Women’s Studies, so I’ve read a LOT of stuff about lesbianism and whatnot. At this point, I’m actually pretty tired of ”coming out” narratives or academic analyses of coming out narratives. This is not to say that the ways we come to understand our sexualities and how others react to that isn’t important. It most certainly is. It’s just not the ONLY thing about our lives that’s worth exploring, and I often wished more writings would reflect that. This book does that! It was actually written in 1995, but the vast majority of the things the writers discussed are still very relevent today. I also really appreciated the diversity represented in the book. There were essays written by women of color, older women, and working class women. Sometimes these essays were explicitly about those subjects and sometimes they were essays about other topics that happened to be written by these women. For example, there was one essay specifically about the issue of aging as a lesbian and there was another essay written by an older lesbian that was about the ways we define our relationships and how much more complicated that is than we think. Most of the essays in general did a good job of incorporating the differences things like race and class make in lesbians’ experiences of whatever the essay subject is. For example, the essay on lesbians in recovery for addiction paid attention to the ways in which lesbians of color sometimes experience AA programs differently than white lesbians do. This was a great book! I wish they’d come out with some kind of companion volume. It would be interesting to see how they’d write about these same topics 17 years later and what new topics have come up since ’95.

This book was AWESOME! It's the first book in a series, but it's a self-contained story; it doesn't end on a cliffhanger or anything. One day out of the blue, there's a flash of white light and everything mechanical stops working all at once. Not only that, but guns and steam engines don't work anymore either. Gunpowder just barely fizzles and no matter what you do, the steam never builds up enough pressure to get the engine going. No one knows why and most people are too busy focused on their immediate survival to really investigate that. The book follows two groups of people. One group is started by a former Marine turned charter pilot who's flying a family called the Larssons to their ranch in Montana when the Change hits and their plane crashes into a river in northern Idaho. They pick up more people along the way and end up in this big nomadic wagon train heading west trying to make it to the Larssons' other property in Oregon. The other group is started by a Wiccan folk singer and her friends who head up to her land way out in the boonies (also in Oregon) and set up a homestead there, where they also end up taking in a bunch of stragglers. Eventually, these two storylines interweave. The book mostly focuses on people trying to adjust to this crazy situation they've all suddenly found themselves in and trying to carve out a little safety. The characters are unique and interesting and you really care about them, the breakdown of society (and the disparate attempts to rebuild some other kinds of local societies) are believable and detailed. It's fascinating and I can't wait to read the next book!

This is the sequel to ’Wildwood Dancing,' which I also loved. In this one, the second youngest sister, Paula, accompanies her merchant father on a business trip to Istanbul. Her father’s secretary falls ill and as a scholar, Paula is the best person to fill his shoes. They were hired by a collector of artifacts to buy something called Cybele’s Gift that would be going up for sale in secret. Paula, her bodyguard Stoyan, and a former pirate named Duarte get mixed up in a big mystery and end up going on a quest to return the artifact to a secret community of Cybele’s worshippers. This book was awesome! It didn’t have quite the breakneck pace that the first book had, but I still couldn’t stop reading it all the same. It’s more of a mystery than the first book, especially in the first half. But it’s got all the same fairytale quest goodness that I loved in the first one, so I’m happy. And it seemed to be open-ended enough for a sequel (maybe starring baby sister Stela?), which makes me hopeful. Cute book, loved it!

I loved this book. It reminded me of the only thing I liked about grad school: my friends. The women in my grad program were very tight knit. Every one of them were terrifyingly intelligent and radical thinkers. They were also snarky, irreverent, and had speech patterns very reminiscent of 'Buffy.' Reading this book was like talking to them. It's full of interesting, intelligent ideas (which is not to say that I agreed with everything, but it's all worth reading and thinking about), but the tone is about as far from academic as you can get. Which is a good thing, as far as I'm concerned. At its heart, this book tries to show women how to start developing an appreciation of their own bodies, minds, and other women; it's something that's desperately needed in this day and age.

This book totally deserves its Hugo Award! (Their acceptance speech included the following: "I have a Hugo now. Hugos are cool." WIN!) This book is a collection of essays on various aspects of Doctor Who and its fandom, all written by women. There were in-show issues like why some Companions/relationships work better than others, discussions of the ways in which fandoms in different countries dealt with the gender makeup of its fans, discussions of how and why the author came to be a part of the Whoniverse themselves (like by writing official tie-in books or running conventions), and there were interviews with a few women who were involved with the show (ACE! I love you!). Throughout all of them, though, you could just feel the love. I really like reading things by people who love something as much as I do. My hands down favorite essay in the whole thing, though, is Seanan McGuire’s. She tells the story of how a miscommunication on her mother’s part led her to believe FOR YEARS that Doctor Who was a documentary series. SO FUNNY! I don’t know whether to feel sorry for her (her grades in history suffered and she was horribly traumatized when she believed Adric, who she’d decided to marry, had been killed for real) or jealous because she got to truly believe for years that The Doctor was out there and maybe, just maybe, she could go with him one day. What a delightful book!

This is a fun series! The narration is chatty and friendly, and I really like having a heroine who isn't all super prickly and mopey, who acts so put upon and like she doesn't need anyone (yeah, I'm getting a bit burned out on the urban fantasy genre!). But this is a breath of fresh air! It's fun, fluffy, and a perfect quick read for a rainy afternoon. Calliope is growing up a bit; she's matured a bit (but just a bit!) from the last book, but she still keeps getting dragged into family drama against her will. I like how her strength comes not from being the most amazing/powerful/skillful person the world has ever known, but from her refusal to give up and her ability to make connections with other people and get them to work together when push comes to shove.

Fun! This was just like an episode. The author had a good handle on all the character voices, Michael especially. I could practically hear him with his deadpan sarcasm in my head as I read the narration in the book.

I really liked this volume. The art is great and the stories were really good. This one has the only story featuring Faith in the comics (until Season 8, that is), which was written by Jane Espenson, who I adore. There was also a really long story called ”Blood of Carthage” that was excellent. That felt like a TV episode. It was full of excellent quips and had a Spike/Dru flashback, which I’m always a sucker for. It also has a one-shot about Oz making his way to Tibet and how he learned to deal with his Wolf-side. This was a really good collection of stories!

I really enjoyed this book. Hopkinson's use of language is very vivid and creative. You don't see a lot of Caribbean-style magical realism in the speculative fiction genre, so this book is a unique and interesting addition. Exciting, fun story.

This book explains in plain English (i.e. no endless strings of academic jargon) the ways in which Hollywood movies both reflect and encourage the cultural attitudes and thought processes that cause eating disorders. The author is both a professor and a therapist who treats eating disordered patients and she includes anecdotes from her students and patients throughout the book to illustrate the points she is making. My MA is in Women's Studies and my specialization was in pop culture representation, so nothing in this book was really new to me, but I think it's great for anyone who hasn't done the kind of extensive research in this area that I have. It's really clear and straight forward in both its language and the points it tries to make. Plus, it was published this year, so the films it uses both as examples and case studies are very recent and familiar. I liked it. Also, if you are in recovery for eating disorders like I am, since this book focuses mostly on the movies and not so much on the behavior of eating disordered women, I didn't find it very triggering.

This book is excellent! It’s a collection of essays by people in several different fields all exploring categories of women and girls who have been dubbed ”bad” by society at large during various points in Japan’s history to determine what their ”badness” says about the society at that time, the changes taking place, and the ways in which women engaged with these things. The subjects they covered are some bad girls of Japanese folklore, Geisha, ”degenerate” school girls of the Meiji period, writer Yoshiya Nobuko, murderer Abe Sada, explicitly pornographic Ladies’ Comics, women obsessed with high-end luxury goods, girls using purikura to mock and defy gender expectations, ganguro, Filipinas in Japan, and performance artist Norico. It’s a range of seemingly unconnected subjects, but when the author of each essay pinpoint the elements of each of these subjects that make them ”bad,” you see patterns emerge. The introduction at the beginning written by the editors does a really good job of summing up those patterns, but even without the introduction you could pick out those patterns, since the authors do a good job of making their analyses clear. Even though it's written by academics, this book is really easy to read. Most of the authors steer clear of unnecessary academic jargon and deliberately over-complicated sentence structure. I especially enjoyed the essays on Geisha which emphasized the women as extremely devoted artists, while debunking a lot of misinformation (as well as detailing how such misunderstandings came about in the first place and what purposes such stereotypes served for the larger culture). The essay on Yoshiya Nobuko, who was a famous out lesbian living with a partner since the 1920s was also very good, and I’m disappointed that her books haven’t been translated into English. I also really appreciated how all of the authors (as well as the editors) emphasized women’s agency and subjectivity. They never took it so far as to glamorize or idealize the ”bad girls’” forms of resistance (Abe Sada killed a man, after all), but they always insisted on focusing on the women as active agents negotiating their own places within their social contexts. Highly recommended!

Born to a stage mother so horrid even Dina Lohan would say ”Wow, maybe you should back off a little?”, Gypsy Rose Lee managed to not only survive her mother (no small feat considering her mom murdered at least three people over the course of her life), but she went from a small support role in her younger sister’s vaudeville act to become the most famous burlesque dancer ever. You don’t make it through that kind of childhood without plenty of Issues,though, and this biography doesn’t shy away from them. It manages not to sensationalize the bad aspects of Gypsy’s personality or behavior and it doesn’t demonize her for them either. It’s all told with quite a bit of sympathy, even. She certainly had a fascinating, if rather sad, life. What I liked best about the book was that it situated Gypsy’s life in its historical context. There were entire chapters devoted to the workings of the vaudeville circuits, the rise of the Minsky Brothers and their hand in creating burlesque, and the political and cultural currents that led to the fall of vaudeville and the rise of different trends in public performance and burlesque. The author does a good job of clearly demonstrating how these things created the choices available to Gypsy (and/or her mother) and explained how and why Gypsy (or her mother) managed to play the system to her advantage.

Poetry is hit or miss with me, but when it hits it hits hard. And this one was a hit! A lot of Cat Valente’s work plays with elements and themes in folktales and myths, giving them a new spin and weaving new worlds out of them. In these poems, she addresses some of our most famous folktales (Rapunzel, Cinderella, etc) in their entirety and reinterprets the stories from the POV of the female characters. So, so good!

I finished reading this book yesterday and since then I've been trying to figure out why I found it so unsatisfying, in spite of the excellent writing. Now I think I have it: the characters never change. The writing is beautiful and it paints such a vivid picture of a fantastic city full of wonders, but none of these wonders impact the characters. They are the same people at the end of the story as they were at the beginning. While these wonders are taking place, the emotional effect they have (if any) on the characters is fleeting. It's really frustrating and it left me wondering what the point of the book was.

This is a fascinating autobiography. Mineko Iwasaki chose to leave her family’s home at 5 years old and be adopted into the Iwasaki family as the heir to their geisha house. She spent the next 25 years immersing herself in traditional art forms, eventually becoming the most famous and acclaimed geiko of her generation. When Arthur Golden was researching his ’Memoirs of a Geisha’ book, he interviewed her and used her story as his ”inspiration.” She was angry at the way he sensationalized and sexualized geishas and ignored their passion for and dedication to the arts. So she wrote this autobiography to help correct the misunderstandings about what a geiko does and how the system and its associated industries actually work. Their dedication to their arts is astounding. I read ’Memoirs of a Geisha’ years ago and it really bothered me, because it did feel like it sensationalized things and focused entirely on sex, but it was really well written and engaging (which somehow made it worse). I liked how this book laid out what a geiko actually does in a very clear way that even someone with no familiarity with Japanese culture and traditions can understand. She talked about not only the lessons, but also the relationships between the geisha houses and teahouses, what the parts of the geiko’s outfits mean and why they’re important, and the roles of all the people whose industries geiko depend on to enable them to perform their arts. She also explores some of the reasons there are so many misconceptions about what geishas actually do, such as similar use of terminology that leads to mixing up geiko traditions with those of courtesans. Overall, this was a really enjoyable book. It’s a fasinating look into a complicated, primarily female world. And I just admire the heck out of the dedication and determination it takes for these women to practice their arts.

This is a wonderful book! As anyone who's seen Mystery Science Theater 3000 or Rifftrax knows, Kevin Murphy is a funny, funny man. So it's no surprise that this book has a lot of laughs. But comedy isn't really the purpose of this book. Kevin Murphy is also someone with a deep love for movies and the entire experience involved in viewing films, and that is the real focus of this book. He writes about all sorts of aspects involved in seeing movies, from the different kinds of theaters in which they're shown to the food to the audiences and so forth, and the ways in which all of these elements come together to create an experience for good or ill. The writing is smart, descriptive, and engaging and most importantly it made me love moviegoing the way he loves movie going. Come for the LULZ, stay for the love!

Brilliant, lovely fairytale for readers of all ages! It's supposedly a YA book, but it's really for anyone who loves fairytales. Plus, Valente's use of language is so lush (she's also a poet, which is obvious) the prose feels a little more substantial than the usual YA fare (which I love, don't get me wrong), so I really think adults would love it, even if they don't usually go for YA. I loved everything about this book. I had a huge smile on my face when I finished it. It definitely incorporates a lot of familiar fairytale tropes, but Valente manages to keep things feeling fresh and innovative at the same time. It's a delicate balance, but I find a lot of her writing is really great at finding it. September herself is charming and clever and I loved her immediately. A-Through-L, the half-wyvern/half-library, is a great concept and a great character. Such a good book!