books_ergo_sum's reviews
746 reviews

A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

reflective

5.0

Is this nonfiction? If so, it’s a very genre-bending version of it. It read like a memoire, a political treatise on feminism and class consciousness, as well as a stream of consciousness story with a fictional narrator and a plot.

But, I wasn’t reading this for its feminism, which was radical for its time but is way too cis, het, white, and privileged to rock any boats these days.

I thought I would just enjoy this for the stream of consciousness (teenage, obsessed with Mrs. Dalloway, me saved this book for a rainy day), but what really drew me in was its interwar period setting. 

If feminism has evolved to the point that Woolf’s ideas about women are old hat, then our anti-war philosophy (what would we even call it?) has evolved so little that her ideas about the First World War still felt really fresh. And weirdly applicable to our current situation, I thought.

Take her raw thoughts on why she struggled to enjoy poetry and music at the time:

✨ “Shall we lay the blame on the war? When the guns fired in August 1914, did the faces of men and women show so plain in each other’s eyes that romance was killed? Certainly it was a shock (to women in particular with their illusions about education, and so on) to see the faces of our rulers in the light of the shell-fire. So ugly they looked—German, English, French—so stupid. But lay the blame where one will, on whom one will, the illusion which inspired Tennyson and Christina Rossetti to sing so passionately about the coming of their loves is far rarer now than then. One has only to read, to look, to listen, to remember. But why say ‘blame’? Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in its place?”

And quotes like this have really stuck with me.

Muscles & Monsters by Ashley Bennett

2.0

That two stars feels harsh because, really, this little book was fiiine. The MCs were cute, I was rooting for them.

But what really took me out of it was the whiplash it was giving me. We’d go directly from a scene that was soo cutesy, awkward, flirting, blushing, emojis—to a scene that was full-on dirty talk schmexy times, then back again. With absolutely nothing to mediate the two extremes. 

The Hegelian in me was like, dude where’s my concrete universal? Where’s the actualization of a rational self-consciousness in another self-consciousness? That mediation *is* the love story, which… wasn’t present in the book? It was strange.

The two extremes were fun on their own but flip flopping between them was too weird for me.

Through a Dark Mist by Marsha Canham

adventurous

1.0

Sooo. I didn’t have a good time with this one. My issues fell into a few categories…. Let’s get into it 😅

The romance plot:

▪️ There wasn’t much of one? These MCs hardly spent time in the same location, let alone in the same scene, let alone talking to each other, let alone falling in love on-page. I could’ve given it 1⭐️ for this alone.

This was NOT a Robin Hood retelling:

▪️ If ‘taking from the rich and giving to the (other) rich’ counts as a Robin Hood retelling then I quit.

There were some questionable writing techniques:

▪️ Holy head-hopping, Batman. We switched POVs every few paragraphs, with bizarre results. 

▪️ It leaned into the ‘ugly/deformed = evil’ trope. It was so ubiquitous that a, “Ooo, I bet you didn’t think this physically perfect person was going to be bad,” moment was supposed to… mean something? Yuck.

▪️ The girl-hate in here was getting to me.

▪️ I was intrigued by how low-key evil all the characters were at first, wondering how they’d do as MCs. With some, it was a ‘they’re secretly good’ thing; a classic. But with others, it just involved character breaking reversals. And with our heroine, it involved changing her from someone who didn’t care that her intended husband was philanderer (because she was hungry for that Grade A: D) to this innocent miss who was ashamed she felt any desire at all. Annd yeah, character breaking but also I think we were supposed to be disgusted with her at first? But I loved the first version of her character?

Then there was a ‘not this book’s fault—maybe Prisoner of My Desire has given me unrealistic expectations for how a 1991 book with SA as the main theme is going to pull it off’ … thing 😅, because:

▪️ I’m the idiot for thinking a ‘91 pub date book was going to do an okay job of SA themes, right? Well, it didn’t. It was also vague and contradictory about it, which made me reread huge chunks of the book multiple times (which didn’t contribute to my overall enjoyment, let’s just say that).

▪️ Didn’t appreciate the casual homophobia. But again, what was I expecting? 😅

This book is much-beloved. And it nailed the campy medieval old school histrom thing, so I’d recommend it for that.

To Ravish A Rogue by C.M. Nascosta

adventurous lighthearted fast-paced

4.0

This is my favourite kind of CM Nascosta. 

How can I explain? It’s like… so bonkers, so full-on, so wtf—without crossing a line into ‘oh no that went too far’ (for me)—that it bypasses hot and goes right into hilarious. You know what I mean?

Plus—monster romance mixed with historical romance on a pirate ship?? With some ‘she’s dressed as a boy’ thrown in? Delicious.

This was in the same universe as How to Marry a Marble Marquis (there’s a few shared side characters between the two books) but I enjoyed the historical setting of this one way more. The buccaneer thing was fun, the sea monster fantasy creatures fit right in, and our heroine was such a badass. Like, genuinely scary 😆

I just wish it had been longer!

A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid

adventurous emotional mysterious tense

5.0

I loved this book! It was everything I want:

✨ dark academia

✨ faeries

✨ atmospheric setting + lyrical writing

✨ perfectly imperfect MCs

✨ feeling unsettled 

✨ a cute rivals to lovers forced proximity romance 

✨ meta references—if my dark academia romance book doesn’t have excerpts from made up literature textbooks debating ‘what is a romance book?’ then I don’t want it

The vibe of this book feels hard to explain. I think it was:

-a more successfully unsettling and lyrical story than The Last Tale of the Flower Bride (which I hated)

-a more atmospheric mixture of academia and faerie lore than Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries (which I DNFed but probably should try again)

-plus The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath?? That’s honestly the je ne sais quoi magic of this book, I think.

It was published by Harper Teen but it was definitely on the mature side of YA Fantasy, in terms of themes and tone. So keep this in mind if you want to pick it up—cozy YA Fantasy, this was not.

I also highly recommend the audiobook.

Godkiller by Hannah Kaner

adventurous medium-paced

2.0

This has the dubious honour of being one of the only fantasy books to introduce a romance plot and have me say “Ew, no. Put it back.”

This book was so thoroughgoingly ‘just okay’ (on what I look for in a fantasy) that I ended up having a bad time?
▪️ it wasn’t particularly atmospheric (the cover had me thinking it could’ve had Emily Lloyd-Jones vibes?)
▪️ it was plot heavy without being anything more than a simple ‘walking from point A to point B’ quest 
▪️ the action didn’t feel high-stakes (I admit, I wanted our godkiller merc Kissen to feel more like Gideon the Ninth)
▪️ the lore was this uncanny valley between Greek/Roman mythology and completely invented fantasy (a goddess of the hearth named Hestra instead of Hestia or god of the sea named Osidisen instead of Poseidon, for example), which is so meh to me for some reason?
▪️ it fell into that classic trap of wanting the MCs to have lead armies in a big battle that changed the world… but also wanting them to be young. And I was rolling my eyes at their Aragorn-wannabe conversations around the campfire, instead of thinking they were actually cool.
▪️ there wasn’t enough emotion in here—by a long shot. The found family storyline between Kissen, Elo, and Inara didn’t have a ton of heart to me; the romance plot felt so shoehorned in; and was that supposed to be spice?

Honestly—that spice scene was my feelings about the whole book in microcosm. Basically: “why did you even go there if you were going to do it so half-heartedly?” It was neither spicy nor fade to black-y and that neither one/nor the other feeling was how I felt about everything 🤷🏻‍♀️

But I’ll give it a star for Skedi, Inara’s pet god. I appreciated how small-scale kinda evil he was.

Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam

informative reflective

5.0

We're so effed.

This book was about what Putnam calls social capital (which sounds like some sociology blah blah), but basically it’s:
✨ that list of people you’d call to help you move; the club/team you’re on; your friend who knows someone who knows someone who’s hiring or renting that apartment next month…. you get it.

And Putnam demonstrated two things:
⭐️ next to maybe air, social capital is THE MOST IMPORTANT thing ever
⭐️ social capital has declined in every generation since the Greatest Generation (people born between 1901-24)… RIP Gen Z

This book was so data-heavy and all-encompassing that it was, quite frankly, kinda overwhelming. Here’s just a taste: social capital is important for…
✨ health (joining a club has the same impact on life expectancy as quitting smoking)
✨ social programs (the number one factor in a child’s academic success is their amount of social capital. Not race, income, school district, etc)
✨ politics (social capital beats wealth when it comes to political power, which explains why the last bastion of social capital, the church, was the foundation of the Civil Rights movement and nowadays makes rightwing moral issues disproportionately powerful)

I read this book right after Freedom is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis and there was weirdly a ton of overlap? This book just had more, you know, graphs and shit.

Basically, decline in social capital is VERY VERY BAD. It lowers your happiness, makes it easier for big business to screw us over, increases intolerance, decreases social trust, and turns democracies into autocracies.

Which, considering this book was published in (august!) 2001 is…. yeahhh

Prince of Beasts by Lyonne Riley

adventurous

2.0

I’ve had so many excellent reads from this author. And two kingdoms, a marriage of convenience, a hint of fated mates, pining, plus a hero who was basically a Minotaur (complete with monster dong)—love all that.

But the thing holding this novella back: its single POV + our heroine being a too-boringly-perfect Mary Sue queen lady. Which shouldn’t necessarily = two stars, because the book was fiiine (and two stars is definitely more in the ‘bad’ zone)…

There was just a je ne sais quoi / this book took me four days to read even though it’s 82 pages?? thing. The book was putdownable in the extreme. For me, at least.

Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture, and Empire by Angela Y. Davis

reflective

4.0

A good introduction to Angela Davis—it gets 4 stars instead of 5 is because it was a transcribed interview and the interviewer didn’t always ask the best questions. But Angela Davis was awesome.

This was all about shifting your thinking about prisons: 
✨ Away from the idea that prisons are the place bad people get sent for their crimes—towards the idea that prisons are the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ place we put the people that government institutions are failing, if not actively undermining. 

And of course, who wants to use tax dollars for social programs that would decrease crime rates (by materially improving peoples lives)—when we could use those tax dollars to line the pockets of the private corporations that run prisons 🫠

Reading this, you can’t help but be struck with how… correct Angela Davis is. Just in the way she’s able to predict, in 2004, the problems we’d be dealing with in 2024.
✨ Like, the way she argued that homelessness gets targeted by police instead of dealing with housing. Meanwhile, in the past couple years all US states except two have introduced legislation criminalizing homelessness directly in the midst of a housing affordability crisis.
✨ Or, just last week—Baltimore announcing its most expensive state-funded project in history: a prison.
✨ Or, her worry that George W. Bush’s language was destroying political discourse, which seemed both quaint and poignant. Remember when our biggest problem was Bush talking about “evil doers” at the same time as “extraordinary rendition”?

But she’s right, prisoners are the canary in the coal mine. And you can’t do political activism without advocating for society’s first victims. Because,

“… the prison becomes a way of disappearing people in the false hope of disappearing the underlying social problems they represent.”

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé

informative reflective

5.0

It’s hard to put into words how shocking, chilling, and overwhelming this book was. And how amazing it was.

It was the zoomed-in account of events in Palestine in 1947-1948 (aka ethnic cleansing, aka the Nakba); as told by the meeting minutes, personal diaries, letters, and recorded speeches of the PERPETRATORS THEMSELVES. Oof.

The (openly stated) goal of the paramilitary activity of David Ben-Gurion (later the first Prime Minister of Israel) and his crew in the 1940s was solving the “population problem.” And Pappé demonstrated that they wanted the newly arrived European Jews to make up the majority of the population in the region. The debates weren’t about ‘if’ they should be the majority, it was about how much of a majority they should be, which is why Ben-Gurion said things like, “there can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60%,” in 1947 (he wanted it to be 80%). What’s WILD is that, in 1947 Jews were 30% of the population in Palestine (up from 8% in 1917).

And what’s EVEN WILDER is that… mission accomplished? In just a few months, Muslim and Christian Palestinians went from being 70% of the population to 17% (living on 2% of the land).

There are no words for how horrible those few months were. It was death and destruction on a massive scale. Plus the outright looting of the property, bank accounts, and businesses of every Muslim and Christian Palestinian in the region. To the point where it was the exhaustion of the Israeli soldiers (and a dwindling supply of bullets and dynamite) that became the limiting factor.

Pappé completely destroys the classic narrative about 1948 (if it’s acknowledged at all), that 'it was all in self-defense'. But really, these guys told on themselves. The ethnic cleansing was openly acknowledged, even encouraged, because us Eurocentric westerners were still in our Colonialism Era™️ and people didn’t think they were doing anything wrong.

Also, the parts about the national parks particularly wrecked me.