gorgeousgirl's reviews
341 reviews

A Winter's Promise by Christelle Dabos

delicious! 

Jeff Buckley: His Own Voice: The Official Journals, Objects, and Ephemera by David Browne, Mary Guibert

what can you even say? rip jeff, so lucky to have stumbled across you

My Private Property by Mary Ruefle

took me a while to buy into it, but when it’s good it’s absolutely brilliant

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

woman sick of contemporary malaise women novels reads The post war malaise woman novel to mixed results

Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi
Did not finish book. Stopped at 16%.

idk i remembered reading the plot summary a few years ago & after reading a bit, i just don't want to continue. haven't gotten far enough to see if the reviews angry abt the gender treatment are accurate, but the outline of the story, plus the tone? i'm familiar w this game bcz ten years ago, i was reading original fiction on wattpad that was just a precious & laborious, but at least it was obviously a child behind it. this doesn't feel worth getting into, especially with how cartoonish it already is (& is gonna get)

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right by Angela Nagle

thought it might just be my copy, but this is really poorly written, organized & edited. affective, qualitative analysis written without sources. several times, authors are referenced & quoted without being introduced. many paragraphs are left with unresolved points, mostly because Nagle can't wrangle her too-long sentences, overloaded with prepositions & clauses, so that she often loses her trail. 

while it's useful as a journalistic overview of the alt-right, it lacks any academic substance or precision. Nagle is very critical of affective politics, though she fails to counter with material criticism. her both-sides approach to these affects causes her to equate a singular aspect of online left-ish activity, liberal Tumblr identitarianism, with all of alt-right "trangression." there's better academic writing on the manosphere, & it you want to track the ideas of the evolving right as lay-people, the Empire Never Ended podcast does so with actual engagement with the texts & ideas of those movements. overall, while Nagle hates the affective primacy of the online alt-right & little old Tumblr with equal passion, her work is just as vibes-based

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Much in the novel was written hurriedly, much is too diffuse and did not turn out well, but some of it did turn out well. I do not stand behind the novel, but I do stand behind the idea."

dostoevsky girl, ur right & so slay that u had the awareness. anyways, i have to avenge nastasya filippovna somehow, i'm so absolutely in despair. also, incredible audiobook on libby for this translation, highly recommend

There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura

really pleasant read. unfortunately it was not what i thought, coming to a sharp point about late-stage capitalism, more of a circular story about the nature of life, but great read still

I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki by Baek Se-hee

in a similar vein as How to Be Depressed by Scialabba, but i'd recommend Scialabba over this. it's got a basic level of insight into some benefits of a therapeutic process, if you're needing to hear that "you're not the only one who feels this way," this is for you. mainly for concerns about low social awareness, anxiety, insecurity, high neuroticism, i
 suppose. just listened to the audiobook while working, the writing isn't very interesting, the organization is linear for the most part. seems to have done numbers in the Go to Therapy fandom, overall doesn't say that much

Old School by Tobias Wolff

started off sooooo honest & raw, got progressively more & more novel-shaped, but a pleasant experience overall, happy with how it turned out