aimiller's Reviews (689)

This return back to the original team really satisfied everything I loved about this series in the first place, and also I think helped me better contextualize the previous book. Wells is just so good at making me invested in these characters--not just Murderbot, of course, but the rest of the team. It's one of the strengths I missed in the last book, but it's back even stronger in this one. 

The nuance with which Murderbot's dilemma is grappled with, narratively and by the other characters, is really beautifully done. I think it works way better here and I'm really looking forward to this story having the opportunity to really relish in a longer space in the next book! 

Just so excellent. Law lays out the truth about each myth, from those that are perhaps obvious to people familiar with arguments against prisons to ones that I still hear repeated frequently by abolitionists (myths about slave labor in prisons!) It's wildly accessible, and does a great job of combining short chapters with a great deal of citation and also extra reading. You could absolutely use this in a classroom with high schoolers, in college classrooms, and you should DEFINITELY read it in reading groups about PIC abolition. I've heard Law note that this book pairs very neatly with Prison By Any Other Name which she co-wrote with Maya Schenwar as she was writing this book, and I would strongly agree. Start with this, and then read that! 

This was fun and fine, but I think is the weakest of all the novellas I've read so far. I can see how the revelations made might make sense in the larger part of the ongoing story, but it didn't come across as particularly smooth or well-integrated to the larger narrative. Some of it was maybe the problem of novella, but Wells normally is so good at digging in so deeply to character relationships in the space of a novella that it was a little disappointing to have this feel so flat. I am definitely looking forward to getting my hands on the next book though! 

A very intense, powerful memoir of Assata Shakur's early life intermingled with her life after her arrest and the incredible amount of injustice she faced in numerous court systems, undergoing torturous isolation and other terrible treatment typical of prisons. It's TENSE but so, so powerful. I think you could teach this whole book as a real introduction to why the PIC should be abolished, or you could teach excerpts from her treatment. Her statement that she read in court in particular I think could be a great tool for kids to be introduced to the injustice of the American criminal court system and the US in general. 

Just so powerful, I definitely recommend folks read it. 

This book is so good and so important for folks to read in really industry but especially in those areas she covers in the book. Jaffe takes really an IMMENSE amount of research (it's deeply impressive actually,) and covers so many fields, especially those that are devalued gendered work. As a grad student, I deeply appreciate her covering adjunct and grad student labor and revealing how the (gendered!) labor of teaching is left up to them while tenured professors at many institutions get to drop their teaching responsibilities to pursue their own academic work. 

The other chapters are all also excellent--I think the tech labor chapter also was fascinating, especially looking at how some of the myths of the industry lead to the exploitation within the industry (recruiting people who dropped out of college so we don't have to pay them as much, for example) though I maybe was more interested because I didn't have as much knowledge as I did about the struggles of teacher unions and the work around care labor that is being organized. 

I do wish she had covered her own field, or at least freelance work generally, because I think there's so much going on there that is ultimately related to this (how are you asked to care about your OWN work as part of freelancing), and the problems of many of these are tied up in "bad bosses" but I think it's also worth looking into ways that freelancers have been organizing and what that might look like. But I think she already covered SO MUCH that I understand why she didn't, and she does it all--the history of these fields, the economic aspects, narratives of organizing, interviews with workers--so I'll just wait for another book maybe. 

But I do think everyone should read this and reconsider their relationship to work that asks you to be devoted to your job in some capacity, so please get it asap! (And then try and organize your workplace!)

Some really gorgeous poems; Choi does spoken word and it's pretty clear, so I'd strongly recommend reading these poems out loud. There's a whole flow of emotions within it that are all handled with such tenderness. Fave poems include "Notes on the Existence of Ghosts," "Pussy Monster," "Too Many Truths," and "Heaven is a Fairly Tale (& Vice Versa)." 

This was a solid and fairly interesting biography of an early abolitionist. It was also pretty short (primarily because of a lack of documentary evidence, I think) and while I think there are lots of areas that Rediker expands on that are interesting, the one that drew me to this book in the first place (disability) is left pretty uncommented on--which raises some questions about his claim that this is related to disability studies, especially given that the comments he DOES make are along the lines of "his disability never held him back!" which I guess could count more broadly but I do prefer more critical disability studies and am more interested in disability more generally during the period, including on ships (a dangerous workplace generally, so you see a lot of folks missing limbs etc.,) and things of that nature. 

It was still an interesting book, and can be useful for disrupting narratives around enslavement and abolition in the colonial period. It was just limited by the documentary record and the avenues that Rediker chose to focus on, and I think could have been expanded in a couple of ways that would have let us see the richness of Lay's world--which, on the other hand, the book is pretty short, less than 200 pages before notes. So, useful, just not my fave kind of history. 

A really solid collection. One of the real joys of this is that if you don't feel like you can commit to read the whole books from many of these authors, you can just read these essays and get a pretty good sense of at least some of the major points from their work, which is fun and easy if you're busy and on the go. It's also just good to return to these earlier community works and see just how different each one is, to draw out a larger picture of what gay history in the US has looked like over time. 

I think my favorite chapter, for personal reasons, is the Flint chapter, though of course many are very good and interesting. There's just a lot in here for folks to explore, so I definitely recommend it from that perspective! I think also it could be very, very good for use in a classroom, again if you don't want to assign the whole books from many of the contributors. 

Oh this was delightful. Lo really digs into the geography of 1950s San Francisco and manages to make the obvious research she did (and what she writes about doing at the end) a core part of the book without it really being an Obvious Infodump? This is just such a book rooted beautifully, beautifully in place and I love it for that. She just does a great job of constructing the world and guiding you through it. 

Lily feels so real and has such complex feelings and I love to see her get to develop a community and be mentored to some small extent even by older queer people. The tension also of being both Chinese American and gay is really explored in a way that doesn't feel like you're being hit over the head with like Belonging Only Partly in Two Different Worlds But Never Wholly By Either; the racism by white queer people in the book feels very matter of fact and although we (and Lily) cringe at it, and it's clear it's Wrong and tokenizing, it also feels... period appropriate (and obviously of course there is ongoing anti-Asian racism in white queer circles that has to be addressed, but its form has transformed somewhat.) 

The end feels like a balance of kind of predictable but also nice. I would like to see if we could do this balance that doesn't require a family coming out, just because that's My Shit (not having to draw on current narratives about coming out etc.)

 

Overall, a really lovely book that I enjoyed very much. It never felt slow or particularly contrived, and I really recommend it! 

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.

A compelling read based on real life letters between classical pianist Vladimir Horowitz and his student. Singer's frame story may confuse some readers or turn them off, but I found the beats between the content of the letters compelling and I think the ending pushed it from 3 stars to 4 for me; it just feels beautiful and a fascinating bringing together of art and politics, art and the personal, and the personal and the politics. It has that sort of old school melodramatic feeling of older gay fiction which I think can also be polarizing, but seems to work really well with the content of the letters.