starchy reviewed Hella Town by Mitchell Schwarzer
Hella Town
5 stars
Definitely check out the audiobook so you too can enjoy the stuffy narrator very precisely reciting Too $hort lyrics
Reviews and Comments
Techops @eff. Also dumb music, bad ideas, the yoozh, etc.
Reads: "literary" fiction, skiffy, general non-fiction, tech manuals, comix, your recs
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starchy rated Perfect Victims: 5 stars
starchy stopped reading Unmasking AI by Joy Buolamwini
Joy does important work on algorithmic bias, a field I'm very interested in, but this book, approached as memoir, didn't click for me.
starchy stopped reading Unmasking AI by Joy Buolamwini
Joy does important work on algorithmic bias, a field I'm very interested in, but this book, approached as memoir, didn't click for me.
starchy stopped reading Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man -- also named Jonathan Safran …
Content warning cw: child sexual abuse
As much as I loved the rest of it, I couldn't handle all the eroticized child sex in this book. WTF.
starchy started reading Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man -- also named Jonathan Safran …
Content warning cw: child sexual abuse
This is simultaneous one of the best and most unpleasant books I've read in some time.
I'd seen and loved the movie a long time ago, which adapts only one of three main narrative threads. Reading it now, I can appreciate much of how those chose to film it (especially the genius casting of Eugene Hütz as Sasha), much of what I was missing, and all the troubling echos of the ongoing contemporary war in Ukraine and the genocide in Palestine.
Another, maybe bigger thread shows us a fictionalized version of Jonathan Safran Foer's imagined version of his ancestor's lives on the Ukrainian/Polish shtetl that first thread revolves around. On the whole, it's heightened and whimsical, sometimes bordering on twee, but also profound, and I do enjoy it. It's also really fucking disturbing in a way it's not clear he intended.
I haven't finished the book yet, so maybe there's a payoff to this that I'm missing, but he explicitly sexualizes more than one of these imagined ancestors at ages as young as ten. I genuinely don't know what else to say about that.
starchy rated The Sapling Cage: 5 stars
The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy (Daughters of the Empty Throne, #1)
In the gripping first novel in the Daughters of the Empty Throne trilogy, author Margaret Killjoy spins a tale of …
starchy reviewed Pastoralia by George Saunders
Pastoralia
2 stars
I've really enjoyed his later stuff, but this was a DNF for me. Heavy on pointless slurs and a kind of elitist misanthropy.
starchy rated The Future Was Color: 5 stars
The Future Was Color by Patrick Nathan
A dazzling novel about the inextricable link between the personal and the political set against the decadence of Hollywood and …
starchy finished reading The Apocalypse Solution Uncanny XForce by Rick Remender
Ugh, the Orientalism is just over the top in this one
starchy reviewed Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri
A marvelous new novel from the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Lowland and Interpreter …
Whereabouts
3 stars
Pleasant meditations on urban isolation, but Lahiri comes across as oddly conservative in some really off-putting ways (fat-shaming, heteronormativity, etc).
starchy reviewed Morning and evening by Jon Fosse
A child who will be named Johannes is born. An old man named Johannes dies. …
Morning and Evening
3 stars
I found this sort of pleasantly sad, but ultimately not very interesting. I'm left wondering why they gave Fosse the Nobel, but at least it's still less perplexing than many of their peace prize choices.
starchy reviewed Death Strikes by Dave Maass
Death Strikes
5 stars
I'm so glad this opera, written during internment in a lesser known Nazi concentration camp, got a modern adaptation. The format suits it well and I loved the team's characterizations. Funny and haunting af.
starchy reviewed Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris
Palo Alto’s weather is temperate, its people are educated and enterprising, its corporations are spiritually …
Palo Alto
4 stars
It's long and it gets repetitive, but it's also insightful, incisive, and snarky. It leans on some connections a bit harder than I think makes sense, buys into Marxist historiography in a stricter way than I'm sold on, but sheds a lot of great light on the connections between capital, technology, militarism, and colonialism.
starchy reviewed The World We Make by N. K. Jemisin
The World We Make
4 stars
I continue to love the characterizations, and meeting some more global city avatars. The overall Marvel team-up style story doesn't do a ton for me, but it was still a lot of fun.