elsieols's reviews
237 reviews

Travels in the Land of Serpents and Pearls by Marco Polo

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informative reflective medium-paced

1.75

another european man disrespecting other cultures for the sake of a travel memoir

Tar Baby by Toni Morrison

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dark reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

beautiful prose and amazingly crafted characters and settings as usual with toni morrison, but i cannot be for jadine and son together after son was so predatory.

he watched her as she slept and in their first actual conversation sexually assaulted her.

i can’t look past that honestly. also the foot thing was weirdly drawn out and uncomfortable.

the dynamic of two people in love who both can’t assimilate to each other’s natural environments is very interesting, though.

the reveal of

margaret’s abuse of michael and how it was dealt with and reacted to

was utterly haunting, and i think morrison is a true master author for how she handled and crafted this arc among others in this novel.

margaret’s complex characterization and how it becomes irredeemably monstrous

is so well-done. i feel like she can easily represent the way that white women are often allowed to get away with horrific abuse because no one thinks they’re capable.

“is that my job too, to stop you?” that line

perfectly encapsulates the dynamic the reveal opens up between margaret and ondine.

especially when followed by how margaret tries to infantilize herself compared to ondine just to realize she’s never known ondine’s correct age.

other than that, i feel uncomfortable with how trivialized child sexual assault is in these characters’ minds both with

son’s late’s wife’s 13 year old sexual “partner”

and with the child marriage between a 17 year old margaret and her older husband. but most importantly, i love ondine, and she is my hero (though flawed like every character).

Content Warnings

Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green

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hopeful informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

There There by Tommy Orange

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emotional mysterious reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison

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dark mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

1.75

would have rated this higher for the excellent descriptions and imagery except this is the most misogynistic depiction of a woman i’ve ever read. one may say “the character is just misogynistic, not the work” but the only female character in here exists only as an object of sex shaming for the protagonist. she’s literally no other use in the narrative. just someone for the narrator to fling sexual insults and accusations at, and it is a disgusting way to portray a woman that goes beyond simply a misogynistic narrator. this is a misogynistic text.

Content Warnings

Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer

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informative reflective medium-paced

3.25

my feelings towards this book are almost as complex as the feelings it addresses. i will say that i enjoyed the way this book highlighted that nothing about our media consumption will ever be perfect. also, we’ll all have different standards—this thing makes a work unreadable, while this thing we can think about while still continuing to read a work. the important thing that i feel dederer is getting at in this book, though, is that our moral feelings (guilt, love, a combination) are not rational and should not be rationalized into a solid generalization bc that’s just not how the world works. instead we need to reinstate our feelings as tools for media consumption on their own and say “i just can’t read this bc of xyz” and not demoralize another who CAN read a work and hold it in conversation with an author’s doings.

that being said, let me detail my issues with this book. first and foremost, it’s messy in format and could have been either more cohesive or split between dederer’s chapters on fandom and being an artist. dederer also seemed too preoccupied with circling back again and again to her own motherhood and her opinions on motherhood in general. those parts seemed mostly out of place, though some were relevant. at some points, i found myself thinking “this is called ‘a fan’s dilemma,’ so why are you spending so much time talking about what it’s like being a mom and a writer???”

next, it is painfully obvious that derderer is ignorant of many aspects of works she loves that are problematic, hence impeding her ability to adequately hold the actions in conversation with the work. most notably, she seems to think sylvia plath committing suicide is her greatest grievance, not, i don’t know, her praise of hitler and the racism running rampant in ‘the bell jar.’

also, dederer seems woefully inconsistent on a couple of points and how they fit into what she presents as her outlook on media. what stood out most to me of these was gender essentialism. she details her own thoughts about feelings and certain instincts as being “female” in their very nature instead of simply their societal status, but a few chapters later, she vaguely mentions that gender is a myth that we have arbitrarily created rules for. it was just really inconsistent, and that distracted me.

my other grievances with the work are fairly small (presenting nabokov as a universally-seen-as-a-predator figure when anyone who has ever studied lolita for two seconds knows it’s not the case, the briefly mentioned idea that art is inextricably linked to sexual activity which, as an asexual, celibate writer and painter i can assure you is demonstrably false). with all of my issues with it, i think this work was still fine, though it remains too muddled, vague, and in distinct for me to say i’d recommend it to anyone i know.

In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez

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dark emotional inspiring reflective sad medium-paced