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michaelmarshall's Reviews (251)
This book looms large in modern science fiction (my copy is from the SF Masterworks series). It has a lot of fiercely interesting stuff, but I found it hard going. It doesn't have a plot so much as it has a premise that spins out into some vignettes, it leaps between narrators without necessarily letting you know who's talking, and in general it does everything possible to be Difficult. But on the plus side, it has some riotous observations on late 20th-century society, a fantastically imagined female-only utopian future, and a lot of sly humour.
Unfortunately some aspects have not aged well. There is one futuristic scenario in which men and women are waging open war on each other, so are living separately. The men still want to have sex with women, though, so they force some of their own to undergo surgery and hormone treatments to become ersatz women. No doubt it was intended as a satire on sexist men's simultaneous contempt for women and desperate need for them, but in 2020 it reads as transphobic.
I'm glad I read it, because I got a lot out of it and some of its imagery and ideas will linger with me. But I can't recommend it as a book to read for pleasure: this was very much work.
Unfortunately some aspects have not aged well. There is one futuristic scenario in which men and women are waging open war on each other, so are living separately. The men still want to have sex with women, though, so they force some of their own to undergo surgery and hormone treatments to become ersatz women. No doubt it was intended as a satire on sexist men's simultaneous contempt for women and desperate need for them, but in 2020 it reads as transphobic.
I'm glad I read it, because I got a lot out of it and some of its imagery and ideas will linger with me. But I can't recommend it as a book to read for pleasure: this was very much work.
This is a terrific, eye-opening and thoughtful book. The title is combative, and the book doesn't pull any punches, but it's also rich in historical detail and ideas and arguments. There's a lot here about the history of race in Britain that I didn't know and that was never even touched on when I was in school, despite much of it being quite literally close to home. Everything is expressed with great clarity and humanity. It's something that I'd recommend to anyone who is either confused by the arguments over race relations and issues like toppling slaver statues, or perhaps thinks that Britain's racial issues have been largely fixed. You might not end up agreeing with Eddo-Lodge on everything, but you'll come away better informed and more engaged.
It's a testimony to the quality of this book that I motored through it, despite its length, in about three days. I have to think about it some more, but right now I feel like it's a modern masterpiece of science fiction. It's also one of the most purely engaging stories I've come across in years, with a raft of richly-drawn and very human characters - and that includes the spiders, who are remarkably real and relatable. And the final action set piece is just .
This is by turns funny, insightful and heartbreaking. The main argument she's making is that middle-aged women find themselves taking on enormous and multifarious responsibilities, often with little or no thanks or reward, or even acknowledgment. Moran has always been funny, and her description of her and her husband waiting with bated breath for their kids to get on the school bus so they could have a hasty pre-work shag was everything you'd expect. But she also doesn't pull her punches when she talks about her child's eating disorder, or the ways in which gender role stereotyping harm men as well as women, or how stressed she feels when she's being pulled in 50 directions at once. It's a little episodic and disconnected in the way it's structured, but it's easy to read and gives you plenty to chew on.
This is a lot of fun and often wildly ingenious in its use of language. My main critique is that some of the drawings are hard to follow, either because there are so many elements included, or because there isn't a natural "pathway" through them. The one looking under the hood of a car was near-incomprehensible to me. In contrast, those that had clear eyelines, like the Saturn 5 and geological timescale, were great. I'm not sure how much sense it would make if you didn't know something about the subjects covered, or how much of it would be funny. But for someone like me who does know something about science and technology, it was mostly very entertaining.
A very solid follow-up to the first Secret Barrister book, with a wider range and an emphasis on the ways the media misrepresents the law. It's all very clearly explained and left me thoroughly angry.