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roxymaybe's review against another edition
2.0
Reading this felt like being beaten with a thesaurus while the author shouts "I AM REALLY SMART, PLEASE TAKE ME SERIOUSLY." The content was fine but the writing really dragged me down. I've seen all these points made with more wit and less pretension on Tumblr over the last 10 years.
savaging's review against another edition
5.0
My favorite Nelson book yet. I was a little jolted at first by the idiosyncrasies of academics -- everything's couched in what this person said about what that person wrote about what that artist created.... -- but once I caught my stride I remembered also how delicious all this close reading can be.
I can fall prey to the kinds of thinking Eve Sedgwick classifies as 'paranoid' -- totalizing and immovable interpretations which homogenize and flatten the world into a classifying system. I mean the world is chaotic -- it's comforting to diagram it out into a clear meaning, whether that's a religion or a political stance or any other big theory.
But it's also an ever-tightening net. I left social media (except for this barely-functional website) because I was feeling that urge to weigh and adjudicate each artifact of our time, to label it with a Correct Opinion, to bite my nails over the fear I didn't get it 'right'. What an exhausting way to live.
And so it's a real joy to consider drugs and sex and art and biospheres and all the things that trouble the neat lines of our diagrams. Even if Nelson has no clear answers, reading this book actually makes me feel more free.
I can fall prey to the kinds of thinking Eve Sedgwick classifies as 'paranoid' -- totalizing and immovable interpretations which homogenize and flatten the world into a classifying system. I mean the world is chaotic -- it's comforting to diagram it out into a clear meaning, whether that's a religion or a political stance or any other big theory.
But it's also an ever-tightening net. I left social media (except for this barely-functional website) because I was feeling that urge to weigh and adjudicate each artifact of our time, to label it with a Correct Opinion, to bite my nails over the fear I didn't get it 'right'. What an exhausting way to live.
And so it's a real joy to consider drugs and sex and art and biospheres and all the things that trouble the neat lines of our diagrams. Even if Nelson has no clear answers, reading this book actually makes me feel more free.
acabraham's review against another edition
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
I’m a simple man. I read a Maggie Nelson book, I think about some things slightly differently in a manner that will change my life forever, I look up the books she references, and the cycle repeats.
alissa417's review against another edition
5.0
Oh my word, just the last lines - until then I want to be in, all in - all heart, no escape (ie living, committed to life, not living merely until the death march ends). Ah, what beauty. Everything here is timely, and yet has so much universality - meditations on care, what makes a good life, what true freedom even is. I haven't seen a work of this intellectual magnitude hit in a while that I had high hopes for commercially. I have high hopes for this one.
tweepunx's review against another edition
5.0
what a book. quite thoughtful and nuanced. read on freedom!!