uuuultraviolennnnt's reviews
103 reviews

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

adventurous reflective slow-paced

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

4.0

“‘Better is it’ she thought, ‘to be clothed with poverty and ignorance, which are the dark garments of the female sex; better to leave the rule and discipline of the world to others; better be wuit of martial ambition, the love of power, and all the other manly desires if so one can more fully enjoy the most exalted raptures known to the human spirit, which are contemplation, solitude, love,’

at times, an unfortunate impression of the gender binary, but so much more often an excellent sense of feminine and masculine energies in tow of one’s character 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Racism

Minor: Child abuse

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

adventurous challenging dark emotional funny informative reflective sad tense medium-paced

5.0

the relationship with the woman in the Dream House had to end. my relationship with Carmen, that’s a different story. When you read a person coming into the same somatic repulsion for a less-evil evil known as emotional abuse, you want to read that transition forever. The more time spent with her the more time spent with the girl I was before my own got it’s DNA translation, from unhurt to hurt. We less-victim victims have nostalgia for the same passages of time. This story can hold anyone who suffers from post-abusive nostalgia in the sweetest chokehold imaginable 

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Emotional abuse

Boulder by Eva Baltasar

emotional funny mysterious reflective fast-paced

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

5.0

raw emotions, hard cigarette smoke, sensual emotions towards the feminine, truly in awe of the divine feminine throughout.. 

a boulder doesn’t chose the red pill or the blue. a boulder is washed in and up by the wildest of seas, barely heated at the beach by sand or  a skeletal sun, only broken when it crumbles into something else. life as a boulder is infinitely less complicated than birth, love, and progress alike

Occupation by Julián Fuks

informative reflective sad tense fast-paced

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

3.75

a blend of sorrow and occupied bodies, occupied by past life, resistance and most of all loss

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

challenging dark mysterious sad slow-paced

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

4.0

‘my venus is damaged, or in exile, that’s what you say of a Planet that can’t be found in the sign where it should be.’

‘The psyche is our defense system - it makes sure we’ll never understand what’s going on around us. Its main task is to filter information, even though the capabilities of our brains are enormous. For it would be impossibleto carry the weight of this knowledge. Because every tiny particle of the world is made of suffering.’

After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz
Did not finish book. Stopped at 56%.

wonderful fragments of the lives sappho influenced throughout italy and her islands in the early 20th century 

DNF as a fault of my own, the history of lesbianism without intersectionality is hard for me to accept, such beauty falls lacklustre 

Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power by Byung-Chul Han

challenging informative reflective slow-paced

2.5

‘The capitalism of Like should come with a warning label: Protect me from what I want.’

‘Luxury as a freedom - like play that is truly free - can be thought only beyond the world of work and consumption. Viewed in this light, it stands close to asceticism.’

‘True happiness comes from what runs riot, lets go, is exuberant and loses meaning - the excessive and superfluous.’

unfortunately, outside of these fair declarations, the judgments that were pass from a place of superiority undermined the effectiveness of comparative philosophical discourse.

Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig

challenging relaxing slow-paced

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

3.25

Oh, the dramatics of it all… Beautiful prose, of course, with an interesting selection of adjectives at times that have that distinct 20th-century quality to them. Definitely reads more like a string of consciousness than anything more construed as far as cautionary tales go, which was pleasing, though, man, Toni Hofmiller is a complete puff(derogatory)((though in the reclamative tone of a lesbian woman)). The diagloues we’re engaging and so believable, no flowerly or suspended disbelief, which really drew me in. I’m happy to have learnt about Zweig’s friend and of my time spent uncovering the highly emotional Kekesfalva’s.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

adventurous challenging funny reflective sad fast-paced

5.0

A comic!! how fun, I thought; what a tragic concoction of passages, I realised... 

Bechdel’s hold on language is God-sent. As a queer person raised in a catholic albeit unconventional household, Bechdel’s familial dynamics in the Creek rang dangerously close to home… I found comfort in this Fun House— my own fascination with the aesthetics of masculinity led to a false identity of bisexuality. The use of grey was a beautiful stylistic choice for the comic, the interlinking of chapters so effortlessly well-done, and my biggest emotional takeaway right now is that I need to know how Bechdel would describe everything in the world, ever. Big up dykes.

‘And indeed, if our family was a sort of artists’ colony, could it not be even more accurately described as a mildly autistic colony?’

‘He did hurtle into the sea, of course. But in the tricky reverse narration that impels our entwined stories, he was there to catch me when I leapt.’

Erotic truth uncovered.

Before We Say Goodbye by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

inspiring lighthearted fast-paced

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

2.75