Reviews and Comments

This book is insane and amazing. I had not fully appreciated how deeply weird it is, and I love it.

I read it and I enjoyed it but I also judged it hard. Power play can be a fun dynamic but actually fucking your daughter’s best friend while they’re in your house and without telling your kid is just wrong. But you might feel differently if you don’t have young adult kids.

needed something light and hot; so far hitting the mark

I liked this. I might not play enough games to fully appreciate it? But I was very into the complicated friendship and the emphasis on the rarity of that connection.

So glad this is finally done. They’re crap! I couldn’t stop reading them!! Very settler fantasy of Yukon wilderness, too many convoluted murders, just don’t start is my advice

I’ve already hooted and hollered about the many ridiculous things the book gets wrong about libraries and academia and I won’t rehash (although ffs if you’re going to write a book revolving around these key details, why wouldn’t you think you need to actually learn about them?!). But even beyond that, this just doesn’t work. Like, the premise of why the murderer wants to do the murdering? Nonsensical. I stand by my appreciation of the romance plot. And I do like the idea of magical maps etc etc. But those are the only reasons this isn’t a one-star review.

Really enjoying this so far; a much more global perspective on what book history is than other anglophone pieces

Last night’s weirdness: apparently these PhD students convinced their department chair to accept their group project and provide funding and then they graduated before they had actually begun the project??!! I am trying to focus on the big-picture weirdnesses, not the typical misunderstanding of boring academic and library procedures, but what?&?&?!!! What are we supposed to imagine they got their PhDs for if not actual research?! (I am complaining but also I am having fun and I am into the romance anxieties actually)

also every time I see the description blurb for this on bookwyrm I think it says the main character is Neil Young, and now I’m also sad he isn’t the lead in this

last night’s jaw drop among other things: a private company was hired to scan everything in the map library with a snap of a finger (lollll) and they plan to attach “micro RFIDs” to EVERY SINGLE ITEM in the map collection!!!!! Can’t wait to see what tonight’s jaw drop will be 😱

Rereading this as teaching prep and rediscovering how much I love this book. It was just about the first thing I read as a budding book historian to help me think about what the field might be. And returning to those questions today from a position of much greater familiarity with book history, I’m struck by how nuanced and yet available to newcomers Howsam is (and now that I know Leslie, it’s no surprise—she and her work are like that!). Anyways, if you’re looking to get a sense of why and what book history might be, this will be tremendously helpful.

This was a delightful translation to listen to--Headley's sense of rhythm and storytelling turns into bro-slinging narrative of blood and kinship and loss (and hoo boy does Headley do a good job with keeping at the front all the misogyny that crops up in the poem). I might try reading Headley's translation at some point. For now, I'm really glad I listened to it.

I don’t know, feeling a bit meh about it after the start but maybe that’s just bad luck

Ok, this is it. I had to read Moby Dick for my grad school comps way back in 1992, and there were so many books on the list that I only had time to read a handful of key chapters from this. I loved it then and meant to pick up it and read it all the way through when I had time. And I guess it’s taken 30 years, and Hester Blum’s new edition, for me to do that. So far so good, excited to just read it slowly and enjoy all its capaciousness. Fingers crossed!

Back to the grungy drug addled Glasgow of her early books, but this time with sex workers and finding and making family. I love the way Mina’s characters make families for themselves, and I love the care she takes here in portraying sex workers as fully fledged people. I did not love the bits of having to see through the killer’s eyes—that misogyny was hard to be dunked into, even though it was the point. It’s a brutal world, like most Mina, but, as is also true with most Mina, the characters make their own escapes and communities.