maramergens's reviews
275 reviews

Taste: My Life Through Food by Stanley Tucci

3.5

I’m curious to hear the reasoning for ending the book with his journey with cancer when it seemed to be the inspiration for the book, and I think would have introduced the overall theme very well. I suppose it wraps it all together, but I think it would have been a powerful introduction.

He used way too many puns and corny jokes for my liking. Another major qualm is that he mentions Big Night on every other page but only name drops Tony Shalhoub once. What’s with that?

Losing Earth by Nathaniel Rich

Full honesty, if you quizzed me about the content of the book I would fail. I’m not good at listening to non-fiction

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

4.25

Kind of a surprisingly boring ending? But I don’t think that ruins the whole thing for me. I’ve heard complaints that it’s just Klara observing things a lot but honestly I could have read a whole book of just that. I liked that the dystopian elements were subtle and didn’t drag down the vibe. Really interesting to think about this through a religious lens. I’m rambling a bit but yeah this was cool

Little Weirds by Jenny Slate

3.75

Definitely recommend listening to this one! Cute and wholesome. Sometimes the essays felt a tad repetitive.

Family Meal by Bryan Washington

I think I would have enjoyed this more if I read it instead of listening to it. Sometimes I forgot to pay attention and got lost. I liked that the multiple narrators didn’t go back and forth but that we were with each for just one long portion. I loved the connections between food and family and food as a way of showing care.

Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet by Taylor Lorenz

4.0

So interesting! Creators really have much more control over the apps that they use than the actual companies do. I had no idea that Vine shuttered because the company refused to work with creators. This really makes me wonder what the internet landscape would look like in a non commodified, non capitalist society. It seems like the ultimate demise of most of these sites is due to either the failure to monetize or the over saturation of ads. I miss Tumblr!!!

Grafity's Wall by Ram V.

2.75

The story didn’t really pull me in and I didn’t love the art :/ kind of a let down after how much I enjoyed Ram V’s Laila Starr

Tegan and Sara: Junior High by Tegan Quin, Sara Quin

4.0

Aww this was sweet. Weird to read something illustrated by Tillie that she didn’t write. It definitely had clearer and easier to understand drawings than some of her other stuff. She used color in a really smart and cute way. Can’t wait for the next one!

The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet by Avery Dame-Griff

This one took me foreeeeever and the library is charging me $30 to replace it, hopefully I can just return it and they will waive the fee, we’ll see…

Some really interesting stuff, just pretty dense. I would love to read something on this topic with a bit more of a narrative arc instead of straight academic. 

The last chapter, which talked about Tumblr, Twitter, and Google search results, was the only one I could relate to generationally. The earlier chapters had a lot of surprises for me both about the internet and the transgender community of the 80s and 90s. 

The archiving of social media and personal internet websites is so important and this author is doing such cool work!!

Severance by Ling Ma

medium-paced

3.5

So wild that this was published two years before the pandemic. Obviously the fictional Shen Fever and Covid-19 don’t have a lot in common as diseases, but there were a lot of things she got right about the start of a worldwide pandemic. I found that going between two timelines to tell the story kept me engaged. I’m not a big apocalyptic story person, so I liked that a lot of the book was just about Candace’s normal life in early 2000s New York.