gorgeousgirl's reviews
337 reviews

The Archaeology of Palestine by William Foxwell Albright
Did not finish book. Stopped at 30%.

maybe borrow from H again later, genuinely understand nothing, there's long lists of time periods & pottery styles & it's all ✈️ over my head

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Did not finish book. Stopped at 9%.

sorry being precious abt tech ppl is just not interesting to me & on top of that, this reads as YA, idk if it is or not. a bunch of reviews are calling the vocabulary choices pretentious? i think they're just very awkward, overall the sentences r not elegant. & mostly i blame whatever in the ether that sold this to me as something very experimental & novel, i don't feel that it is, can see the outlines already & it seems pretty standard

How to Be an Adult: A Handbook on Psychological and Spiritual Integration by David Richo

hopeful reflective fast-paced

pretty much no bullshit, unless ur very opposed to Jungian dream stuff, in which case just skip the dreams chapter. read it slowly, take in whatever u can. very gentle & loving approach, very good for me to have read. it’s the same good advice u can find in most places, i just very much this packaging of it

(didn’t mean to say it’s fast paced, it won’t let me unselect the button lol)

My Year Of Meats by Ruth Ozeki

medium-paced

wow! very shaken up, think i'm gonna phase meat out of my diet. v cathartic 4 me randomly? i'm v glad to have read this

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Domestic abuse, Rape, Sexual assault, and Sexual violence

Moderate: Miscarriage

MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus by Art Spiegelman

what can you say? v painful to read as genocides continue to happen in the world. spiegelman considers his work so beautifully and carefully, it's wonderful to learn from a master of their craft. sorry to say i skimmed through the transcripts at the end, i found it v difficult emotionally to read

The Iliad by Homer

took me sooo long, but i've triumphed finally! i appreciate the logic behind wilson's translation choices, i just don't think her execution fulfills her ideals. she chose to emulate the poetry of the original by using iambic pentameter, but i really couldn't keep up with the meter just reading on my own, it really bogged everything down. eventually, i just started reading it as sentences. the vocabulary chosen was pretty spare & dull, except in the rare places where she reproduces the multi-syllabic or "strange" words from the original greek. overall, it suffered for a lack of style or flourish. i think it could be a good entrypoint to get an understanding of the skeleton of the verse & story, i don't think it really manages to give the reader the riveting & lively experience of the ancient epic. take it w a grain of salt, i'm very far from being an expert of classics

How to Be Depressed by George Scialabba

took me low but ultimately was hopeful & comforting

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Did not finish book.

another time, i really can't deal w a european novel of manners rn

The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling

my library had it & i thought the blurb was interesting but nothing really called to me on a sentence level. was curious about the haunted house & the gaggle of magician-doctors, but each new development disappointed. didn't find it scary or creepy or gross & it felt like a lot of trudging through boredom just for it to end well, & then there were two more chapters that undid what i liked in chapter zero. left me w weird nitpicks (this world can have bombed out cities but no mathematical zero until just now? etc) 

Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield

reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character

idk maybe this could have been a novella. short story even. WAY oversold the horror aspect. feels v tumblr zeitgeist-y, like "ooooh what if your wife Came Back Wrong?👻" but leaves it right there, nothing further. much like yellowjackets imo

P.S. just realized OMG! it's a gay annihilation by jeff vandermeer bootleg!!!!!!