Tag: book review
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Axiom’s End by Lindsay Ellis
Rating: 2/5, bad WARNING: ALL OF THE SPOILERS!!! I love Lindsay Ellis’s channel and was super hyped for this book but I thought it was extremely boring, if intricately conceived. Here’s a basic summary: Axiom’s End is about a 21-year-old woman named Cora who is aimlessly drifting through life working temp jobs. Her dad, Nils,…
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Too Much and Never Enough by Mary L. Trump
Rating: 5/5, excellent It feels odd writing this after Trump’s been voted out of the presidency. I want to be done talking about him, but this book was fantastic and deserves the attention. Too Much and Never Enough is Mary L. Trump’s memoir/biography of the Trump family. Mary analyzes how Donald came to be the…
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Chthon by Piers Anthony
Rating: 3/5, average TW: rape This book is either brilliant or stupid and I’m not sure which one… possibly both. I saw this as #1 on a list of Weirdest Science Fiction some years ago and tried to read it, but only got about 30% in because there’s a pretty brutal rape scene that seemed…
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The Real Lolita by Sarah Weinman
Rating: 3/5, average CW: rape, pedophilia The Real Lolita posits that Vladimir Nabokov’s (in)famous masterpiece Lolita (which I reviewed in 2014) is based on the true story of Sally Horner. Sally Horner was kidnapped by a man named Frank La Salle from Camden, NJ, in 1948. He caught her stealing a notebook from a five-and-dime…
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Free Women, Free Men by Camille Paglia
Rating: 3/5, average Trigger Warning: pedophilia, transphobia, sexual assault I must have been in a rebellious mood or something when I bought this. I’d been following Reason magazine online for a little while because my dad was a libertarian and I thought I’d come to understand his politics more by reading it. He never mentioned…
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I Rise: The Transformation of Toni Newman
Rating: 4/5, good I picked up this book because I saw Toni Newman on a Zoom call with Charlie Jane Anders and a lot of other trans and nonbinary authors. There were so many cool authors and good books to pick from it was a little overwhelming (the call included Alok Vaid-Menon, Meredith Talusan, Vivek…
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The Light in Front of Me by Aria Howell
Rating: 4/5, good Full disclosure: This is my partner’s book and I edited it. The Light in Front of Me by Aria Howell is an LGBT high fantasy book. It’s about Valerie, the princess of a kingdom called Rayleth, who is engaged to marry Eliot, the prince of Va’cerio. Valerie and Eliot have been good…
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The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
Rating: 4/5, good Diverse Reading Challenge #4 This book was originally published in 1984 and it’s been a standard in classrooms. I’ve definitely seen it around, though I was never assigned it. We did read Sandra Cisneros’s story “Eleven” in class in 7th grade, and I loved that story. I think The House on Mango…
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The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
Rating: 5/5, excellent Diverse Reading Challenge #3 I don’t know why I slept on this book so long. It came out February 8th, 2017 and it was a huge hit, with a movie adaptation that came out in 2018. I’ve heard so many great things about it, and it 100% lives up to the hype!…
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12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson
Rating: 3/5, average I promised myself I wouldn’t read any male authors this year, but my dad said I should read this one shortly before he died so I made an exception (kind of, I found a loophole by listening to the audiobook instead of reading it with my eyes, haha). I think 12 Rules…