aimiller's Reviews (689)

Just gorgeous--a deeply powerful exploration of the contradictions of Oscar Wilde. Eagleton's dialogue HITS, and I think the court scene in particular was powerful, and seeing it live would be wild (in a good, emotional way.) There's also SO MUCH to dig into here--I feel like I would benefit from reading it about 8 times over, in addition to seeing it live. Just a really powerful piece. 

This was a really marvelous little book--it really broke down Wittengenstein's arguments and made me excited to try to actually engage with Wittgenstein's writings on my own, especially the later stuff. I think the parts explaining Wittegenstein's earlier work was not as clear to me, which I'm gonna call a me thing and not a problem with Monk's writing or explanation. The later work though felt much more clear to me through Monk's explanations, and I found the chapter on language games to be particularly helpful and interesting! I definitely feel better equipped to try to go forth and read Wittgenstein's actual works after this, which means it did its job! 

This book started off with a pretty slow build and felt based on some like weird tropes (I wasn't like upset by skeevy Catholic official, but I was kind of eye-rolling at it,) but it just kept going and by the end things felt pretty wild--tropes were undermined and then twisted around and I don't know that I was necessarily surprised by how things worked out, but it did definitely feel like a real Journey.

It wasn't hugely my thing--sometimes the tone felt like it was Trying So Hard to be "noir," though as an Ohio ex-pat I did appreciate the details of the NE landscape, especially when the characters visited Hudson. But I think if the "noir" aesthetic appeals to you, complete with femme fatale, you might really enjoy this! 

Just stellar--kept me on the edge of my seat from minute one but really sped up about a third of the way in, going from "oh this is really interesting" to "can't put down." It then did sort of weave in and out from there between the two, but the tension was definitely kept up the whole time. Jade is a fascinating narrator--unreliable enough that I occasionally questioned her judgement but compelling enough that I had to see if and where she was right and what was actually happening. 

It's like deeply unpleasant in parts because of the gore but I never felt like I couldn't continue reading, and I'm a pretty huge scaredy cat. The tension was so good, and really intense. I'm excited to see where the next book goes, because the ending on this one felt like it closed up pretty neatly but I am NOT genre-savvy so I need Jade to write an essay for me about sequels! 

This book is a great collection of feminist writing but of course it's also much more than that; it's also an attempt to reclaim and to some extent rehabilitate second wave feminism from charges about how white and disconnected from working class women the "movement" was. (Movement in quote marks to delineate the idea of a single movement.) I would say it's a compelling argument, and definitely raises some questions about how we mark off movements of feminism, though I'm not sure it's necessarily always useful to take these different concerns and mark them all as "second wave." 

My primary Big Beef is the way the text draws a line between "academic feminism" and "regular" feminism, as if many of the pieces in the book--including the writings of Audre Lorde--were not produced for academic conferences. The lines between academic and non-academic are not as neatly drawn as this book might suggest, and I'm not sure who they were intending to exclude--Judith Butler? Joan Scott? (neither of whom I would say were second wave necessarily, and in fact responding to some of the claims that "regular" second wave feminists were making.) 

A smaller beef is with some of the explanatory text--which overall I did deeply appreciate, but occasionally important terms like "Third World Woman" were badly contextualized (in that case, stripping the term of any anti-colonial commitments.) 

Overall though, my personal nitpicking aside, I think this collection is actually very useful and does make a compelling argument for reexamining our assumptions about what constitutes the "second wave." I think especially for teaching, this collection is really really helpful, and I am glad I read it (and have already used it greatly for finding things for high school students and others to read!) 

Oh this was GREAT--Whitten has written this incredible blend of great worldbuilidng and compelling characters, which I think is a much harder balance to strike than folks know. There's so much incredible tension building that made me want to keep reading, and I think the motivations and conflicts between characters are so compelling without being like very frustrating, which--frustrating isn't bad in the storytelling, but here I think it makes the story all the more heart-rending, because there aren't really easy answers to solving the conflicts. 

Also can we just say: that SLOW BURN. The SEXUAL TENSION. We love that for us all. What a book, and ooo what a wait we now have for the sequel! 

I enjoyed this a lot, though I think it needs quite a bit of reorganization. Or at the very least: this is not as straightforward as <em>How to Read Literature</em> felt. I can see someone picking this up and putting it aside quickly because it takes several chapters, including a whole chapter on Russian Formalists, to get to the material “how” of reading a poem. As a person who has read Eagleton’s other literary studies books, I think it fit in nicely (sure wish the Formalism chapter existed in <em>Literary Theory: An Introduction</em>!) into that larger collection of work. 

All of that said, I did once again learn a lot, and I think the strongest chapters probably are the last two, where he stops kind of retreading previous ground (if you’ve read his others books—if you haven’t, it’s all new!) and gets into the meat of things. He suggests reading the chapters out of order, but I wonder why it was this specific order he went with. Still good, solid explanations, funny, just not my favorite of Eagleton’s. 

A pretty interesting collection of stories in and around Arthurian legends. It’s definitely interesting to see what the authors felt most compelled to use as their entry points—a lot of Merlin and Elaine/relationships to Lancelot, and I would say probably not as much on like the Sword in the Stone. I think I found the “present” stories to be the most compelling, though I did love Ausma Zehanat Khan’s “The Once and Future Qadi ” as an opener to the collection. The future ones I sort of struggled with more, though I did enjoy Alexander Chee’s story quite a bit. But overall I think I enjoyed the collection and would recommend it to others. 

I received a copy of this book through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program, and I am grateful to the publisher for the opportunity to read this book. 

It was good, it just didn’t catch my attention as fully as I might have wanted. I think honestly it’s more of a Me problem than the book, and there were definitely things I did like—the story of Hanlon and her husband’s swims I did find engaging, as they felt more and more connected to their surroundings and kept pushing to swim further and further into winter. But I think this book required a kind of visualization that isn’t a part of my reading practice and I ended up feeling geographically lost for a lot of it. 

The second half also felt like it grazed something but didn’t settle into it completely; I learned some things, but I dunno, I guess I just wanted more like “hey capitalism, woof,” as a part of grappling with ecosystem loss? I think Hanlon was trying to make a move to gesture at climate change without despair, and I don’t need her to be like High and Mighty about it all, but I think a little greater call to action might have been helpful? I’m not sure, but that part felt a little flat to me. 

Okay so as An Historian, I don’t think I need to be convinced hugely of the major interventions here about identifying these literary theory movements as being historically grounded and appearing at specific times with specific politics—and that they are in fact deeply imbued with politics. But I do think that Eagleton does so clearly and convincingly. It was also very useful to have these movements described to me, a person who is not at all familiar with most of them except maybe post-structuralism very loosely. The psychoanalysis chapter in particular I think takes Freud seriously in a way that almost no one seems to (for better or for worse.)

The one flaw I would really highlight is that Eagleton references the Russian Formalists a LOT and I don’t think ever explains Formalism? (I really only noticed this because he DOES spend an entire chapter doing so in How to Read a Poem, and I realized that I finally understood what he was talking about.) And again, maybe that’s something that you have a better understanding of if you’re like a student of Literature and not just an idiot off the street like me. 

The conclusion of the book really was what made me stand up and applaud, even if, of course, the afterword to the edition I read explains why perhaps some of the things he called for in that conclusion didn’t play out as he had maybe wanted or hoped. But I found the book on the whole to be really valuable if not as immediately delightful as his other works that I’ve read.