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whoischels's reviews
103 reviews
Hyperion by Dan Simmons
adventurous
challenging
dark
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
All That Is Sacred Is Profaned: A Pagan Guide to Marxism by Rhyd Wildermuth
challenging
informative
inspiring
fast-paced
5.0
The Vampyre; A Tale by John William Polidori
dark
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
Daisy Miller by Henry James
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
dark
mysterious
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.5
Dagon by H.P. Lovecraft
dark
mysterious
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.0
The Tower of Swallows by Andrzej Sapkowski
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
The Lottery and Other Stories: 75th Anniversary Edition by Shirley Jackson
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.5
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
challenging
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
Eugenides writes beautiful prose. His sentence and paragraph structures are incredible. I was initially surprised he hadn't been recommended to me by college professors. The immigrant experience portion of this story is very unique and well-written. You empathize with the characters in totally unexpected ways, and find yourself hungering to know more about what's going on inside of them, which Eugenides delivers on.
I wasn't entirely happy with how character development was balanced on the whole though. The portions of this book that cover the immigrant experience of the narrator's grandparents, and the 1940s teen courtship experience of the narrator's parents are detailed and imbued with a sort of a welling mythic feeling that I've also enjoyed in Chabon books and in Roth books. I really, really like that quality in a book, and this is why I like reading multi-generational stories (I don't necessarily like them in movies because the mythmaking feeling doesn't carry over well).
This mythmaking undercurrent sort of falls off when we get to the 3rd act of this book and learn about the narrator's life. Things become more concrete and less meaning-laden when we learn about how Cal comes to know about and think of his being an intersex person. My chief disappointment here is that the quality and care that went into the first portion of the book isn't really paid to the main character in the final 3rd of it. You could argue that the final generation of one of these stories necessarily can't have that mythmaking aesthetic in it, but specifically in this book, where the narrator lives early life as a girl and then remakes himself, it's a bit odd the aesthetic goes missing. I think this aesthetic literary quality could quite easily be applied to talking about gender dysphoria, but there isn't actually a lot of talk about gender dysphoria.
From what little research I did, I guess intersex people don't really like this book, and I get where they're coming from: Cal's decision to run away and live as a man is a bit hamfisted given there's not much indication that he's been experiencing gender dysphoria apart from being attracted to women, which is not the same thing. Cal's descriptions of his own genitalia are like, kind of literarily fetishy, which I personally (not being intersex) excuse on the grounds of the author being artful. It is, though, very unintentionally funny that Cal has described his own genitalia like this and then we are meant to view the descriptions written by the peep show runner at the end as bad and fetishistic, when they don't actually differ that much from what we've been reading already. I think Eugenides did a great job creating an intersex narrator that feels present and real. At the same time, he didn't seem to do the empathic work of writing at the level he did for the other generations whose story the book tells, and this shows.
I wasn't entirely happy with how character development was balanced on the whole though. The portions of this book that cover the immigrant experience of the narrator's grandparents, and the 1940s teen courtship experience of the narrator's parents are detailed and imbued with a sort of a welling mythic feeling that I've also enjoyed in Chabon books and in Roth books. I really, really like that quality in a book, and this is why I like reading multi-generational stories (I don't necessarily like them in movies because the mythmaking feeling doesn't carry over well).
This mythmaking undercurrent sort of falls off when we get to the 3rd act of this book and learn about the narrator's life. Things become more concrete and less meaning-laden when we learn about how Cal comes to know about and think of his being an intersex person. My chief disappointment here is that the quality and care that went into the first portion of the book isn't really paid to the main character in the final 3rd of it. You could argue that the final generation of one of these stories necessarily can't have that mythmaking aesthetic in it, but specifically in this book, where the narrator lives early life as a girl and then remakes himself, it's a bit odd the aesthetic goes missing. I think this aesthetic literary quality could quite easily be applied to talking about gender dysphoria, but there isn't actually a lot of talk about gender dysphoria.
From what little research I did, I guess intersex people don't really like this book, and I get where they're coming from: Cal's decision to run away and live as a man is a bit hamfisted given there's not much indication that he's been experiencing gender dysphoria apart from being attracted to women, which is not the same thing. Cal's descriptions of his own genitalia are like, kind of literarily fetishy, which I personally (not being intersex) excuse on the grounds of the author being artful. It is, though, very unintentionally funny that Cal has described his own genitalia like this and then we are meant to view the descriptions written by the peep show runner at the end as bad and fetishistic, when they don't actually differ that much from what we've been reading already. I think Eugenides did a great job creating an intersex narrator that feels present and real. At the same time, he didn't seem to do the empathic work of writing at the level he did for the other generations whose story the book tells, and this shows.