cghegan's reviews
438 reviews

Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution by Tania Branigan

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challenging dark informative reflective sad medium-paced

3.75

Sipping Dom Pérignon Through a Straw by Eddie Ndopu

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challenging informative reflective medium-paced

3.5

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Pageboy by Elliot Page

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challenging emotional reflective sad slow-paced

3.25

In this incredibly thoughtful and well-written memoir, Elliot Page deliberately meditates and threads together a narrative of pain and the most intense self-discovery. It was a good memoir, a beautifully crafted book, but extremely difficult to read. Page has rendered his agony and self-loathing so well that it’s difficult to sit with and parse with him as he cycles through nonchronological threads, looping over and over through small moments in time to piece together meaning. It is well crafted, a quilt in twenty nine shades of blues, but it is wave after wave of agony and sadness, and moments that linger on joy or relief or self discovery have less focus and the same breath of life that Page can write into his moments of darkness and loss. All this to say: I’m beyond grateful this narrative exists. It is going to save someone’s life. But I advise exercising care when reading.

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Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet's Memoir of China's Genocide by Tahir Hamut Izgil

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challenging dark informative reflective sad medium-paced

3.75

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Chef's Choice by TJ Alexander

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Did not finish book. Stopped at 18%.

I love a good fluffy queer romcom, but the writing is bad—really sharp transitions, awkward dialogue, and swaths of prose focused on unnecessary and frankly boring details? It was really clunky prose atop an unbelievable conceipt.

The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America by Monica Potts

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challenging emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

4.0

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After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made by Ben Rhodes

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Did not finish book. Stopped at 20%.

The narrative seemed especially self-serving, which could have grounded the narrative in a more human, individualized context, but it was a pretty big turnoff.

“You Just Need to Lose Weight”: And 19 Other Myths About Fat People by Aubrey Gordon

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challenging informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

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