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hostile's reviews
29 reviews
X by Davey Davis
Did not finish book. Stopped at 35%.
Did not finish book. Stopped at 35%.
1 star!
Lee is abusive, but it's alright because they've found an outlet for their abuse. They're a sadist, they're enmeshed in kink. They abuse people consensually!! Except they routinely violate people's consent and manipulate people to get what they want, which is to hurt them, rape them, etc. They're no Humbert Humbert, though, so all of their "manipulation" is blithely described, their desire to rape people maliciously is just a fact of the book. There isn't even an attempt to couch this in the language of negotiated desire, to make it CNC. So blandly presented I am made to go "man, this guy is a boring rapist" which is an equally bland response. There's nothing postmodern about this. The only consent manufacturing (get it) the author does is painting Lee's victims as masochists who ask for it by being masochists, which I do not buy into. Oh, but their manipulation and neglect of their friends and community is all so they can find X who will redeem them by making them bottom. God, I just don't care. Maybe if this is your fantasy the erotic parts will be good for you.
Maybe just read Mishima, Genet, Guibert, Nabokov, Kathy Acker, Despentes, Heather Lewis, I could go on, instead?
Lee is abusive, but it's alright because they've found an outlet for their abuse. They're a sadist, they're enmeshed in kink. They abuse people consensually!! Except they routinely violate people's consent and manipulate people to get what they want, which is to hurt them, rape them, etc. They're no Humbert Humbert, though, so all of their "manipulation" is blithely described, their desire to rape people maliciously is just a fact of the book. There isn't even an attempt to couch this in the language of negotiated desire, to make it CNC. So blandly presented I am made to go "man, this guy is a boring rapist" which is an equally bland response. There's nothing postmodern about this. The only consent manufacturing (get it) the author does is painting Lee's victims as masochists who ask for it by being masochists, which I do not buy into. Oh, but their manipulation and neglect of their friends and community is all so they can find X who will redeem them by making them bottom. God, I just don't care. Maybe if this is your fantasy the erotic parts will be good for you.
Maybe just read Mishima, Genet, Guibert, Nabokov, Kathy Acker, Despentes, Heather Lewis, I could go on, instead?
The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan
Did not finish book. Stopped at 34%.
Did not finish book. Stopped at 34%.
lost access to digital arc
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
2.0
i am not the target (and i say target because i believe this is a work attempting to force a specific audience into feeling empathy for refugees) of this book. i don't mind that.
for me this is less of a feared future and more of a known past and understood reality. it already happened for my family. it is currently happening for many families, but we'll get to that.
what i do mind is that the proverbial shoes have been borrowed with no consideration given to the intellectual work that people who have lived through imperialist war, fascism, totalitarian regimes have done. i see nothing of the novels and the theoretical writings about these forces (of course in prophet song these forces remain vague lest the target is scared away!).
so, there is no interest in how this comes to happen. it's a suburban fantasy, fine, but when you use the image of refugees fleeing out to sea as the final punchy image of your book without demonstrating an understanding of the mechanisms that drive people out to sea, i'm going to be suspicious.
why use refugees as a rhetorical tool? is this humanization, because it feels othering. are the imagined white suburban racists going to read this book, or is it written for well meaning liberals who already pity refugees who will read it and extract some catharsis from a narrow understanding of losing your home and who will feel good about themselves for having done it because /they/ are not racist, /they/ have put themselves in the shoes of the other and felt horror, maybe shed some tears.
specific gripe: eilish does not understand what is happening to her, other than when she knows exactly what is happening to her (as in the mechanisms of intergenerational trauma, which was coined to talk about holocaust survivors for gods sake).
2 stars because i actually did not hate the prose and it was very readable. but conceptualization is way more important to me.
a good summary would be "wouldnt it be fucked up if it happened to us? damn, it must be hard being a refugee"
anyway, it was a condescending objective at the outset.
for me this is less of a feared future and more of a known past and understood reality. it already happened for my family. it is currently happening for many families, but we'll get to that.
what i do mind is that the proverbial shoes have been borrowed with no consideration given to the intellectual work that people who have lived through imperialist war, fascism, totalitarian regimes have done. i see nothing of the novels and the theoretical writings about these forces (of course in prophet song these forces remain vague lest the target is scared away!).
so, there is no interest in how this comes to happen. it's a suburban fantasy, fine, but when you use the image of refugees fleeing out to sea as the final punchy image of your book without demonstrating an understanding of the mechanisms that drive people out to sea, i'm going to be suspicious.
why use refugees as a rhetorical tool? is this humanization, because it feels othering. are the imagined white suburban racists going to read this book, or is it written for well meaning liberals who already pity refugees who will read it and extract some catharsis from a narrow understanding of losing your home and who will feel good about themselves for having done it because /they/ are not racist, /they/ have put themselves in the shoes of the other and felt horror, maybe shed some tears.
specific gripe: eilish does not understand what is happening to her, other than when she knows exactly what is happening to her (as in the mechanisms of intergenerational trauma, which was coined to talk about holocaust survivors for gods sake).
2 stars because i actually did not hate the prose and it was very readable. but conceptualization is way more important to me.
a good summary would be "wouldnt it be fucked up if it happened to us? damn, it must be hard being a refugee"
anyway, it was a condescending objective at the outset.
Who's Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler
5.0
this is exceptionally humane across the board. if the construction of Butler's argument is challenging it may because it is new to you and i hope that any difficulty will not be conflated with obfuscation or dismissed as "ideology" (and Butler, if you read on, will personally deconstruct this bastardization of the Marxist term that has somehow entered the language of the Right for you) on their part, because it is not. be patient, explore their extensive sources. this is a rare learning opportunity!! and it is a call to reaffirm our use of creative and social powers to imagine a future that is more compelling and life affirming than the real obfuscation: the scapegoating of vulnerable people as the source of our very real collective fears of catastrophe and economic collapse so that its true perpetrators remain powerful. thanks FSG for the ARC!!!!!