books_ergo_sum's Reviews (933)

I should have loved this 😭

I've been enjoying this author. And I love all of this:
✨ A marriage of convenience that turned into inconvenient feelings
✨ A fictional medieval setting
✨ A "I want you for myself" selfishly passionate guy who was possessive, unhinged, angry, and prone to intense staring
✨ A Rapunzel-esque, sheltered but stronger than she looks, heroine

But I kinda hated it?

So I went down a bit of a rabbit hole with reviews and here's my conclusion: Assuming we all like this kind of deranged hero, the jury is still out on whether he has a character arc or not.

And I'm on Team Not. Yes, there was a grand gesture. And he definitely tortured himself.

But... I wanted way more grovel. I wanted a moment when he (self-awarely) did something unselfish, for her. Also, a moment when he showed he could successfully check his violent behaviour (kinda scared for her, ngl).

And the plot structure wasn't helping. Most of the book had nothing going on (except some of the most mediocre sex scenes of all time—she was 💦-ing through shere book-magic alone because this man had no game). And then there was a third act plot thing we saw coming a mile away that annoyed me because the scenes had a literal elephant in the room (a person responsible for all the drama was literally in the room but we never addressed it for some reason?)

So it all ended up being a slog. And yet, I can see why some people love this book (because this hero was a nut 😆)

This book was amazing-it's going to end up being my favourite book of the year.

It felt so real. And it kinda defies explanation. Because of how nuanced it was? I keep erasing everything | write in this review because like, I could say:
✨ it's about a Palestinian woman—welll, it's more complicated than that. She's from Haifa and her family is multigenerationally diasporic. Some of her family members had Israeli passports, some West Bank passports, some European passports, etc.
✨ it's about Palestinian resistance-welll, this meant something different to literally every single character. Disagreements about what resistance is was the subtext to almost every conversation. Our heroine especially didn't have a clear relationship to it.
✨ it's about actors rehearsing for a Hamlet play in the West Bank-welll, nothing was ever that simple in here.

Nothing about this book was direct. And that was kind of the point? I think it says something about living under occupation.

Plus, all the details in this book! There was a moment where I was almost overwhelmed by them. This new character, that conversation, this flashback, that Shakespeare quote, this history fact... and then. All the little details started coming back around, getting resolved, being combined with something else to create a reveal, to create a twist, to create a moment so impactful that it hit me in the gut.

And it was... Moving? Thrilling? Cathartic? It was the kind of (audio) book that stops you in your tracks and you just stand there in the middle of the sidewalk as people walk around you (yup, that happened).

And I highly recommend the audiobook. It was communicating stuff I think I would have missed if l'd read it with my eyeballs. You know how people can say "bless your heart" but mean something completely different? There was a lot of that going on with the conversations between these Palestinian characters.

What made this philosophy book so great was something I didn't expect at all-how much of it was about Israel.

The main theme of this book was: pick your looming crisis-the climate crisis, increasingly nutty political discourse in the West, everyday people struggling while billionaires get richer-and how can we avoid it?

The simple answer: act *as if* the crisis has already happened, in order to stop it from happening.

The methodology was Hegelian, which I loved. And of course, Zizek is an icon of socialist political analysis. But the wildest part of this book (written in late 2022/early 2023, published in autumn 2023) was how immediately it was proven right.

Because his analogy for Russia's invasion of Ukraine (which had already happened)? What he foresaw as an immanent attack on Palestine by Israel (which hadn't happened yet). The JUMP SCARE that was sections explaining Itamar Ben-Gvir (who I now know way too much about, unfortunately). Or, sections on Russian officials who said:

"Imagine [that the war in Ukraine] was happening in Africa, or the Middle East. Imagine that Ukraine is Palestine. Imagine Russia is the United States."

Ummm, yeah. I can imagine that 🥴

And this scarily accurate point spilled over into the other themes of the book: the barbarism of New Right populism and the totalitarianism of Leftist political discourse; Safari subjectivity (how people intervene on the world as if they're not a part of it); how the hypocrisy of Western liberal values is a good thing; and what collective liberation even means.

Highly recommend, a very approachable philosophy book.

A great, radical reading of Hegel.

This book was made up of three essays.
✨ Frank Ruda looked at Hegel's Philosophy of Nature using a method I like to call "insisting on the crazy" to challenge interpretations of Hegel that attempt to naturalize him.
✨ Agon Hamza pulled an Uno Reverse Card to argue that we need a Hegelian critique of Marx for a truly radical Marxism.

Those two essays were decent and where the four star rating is coming from.

✨ Slavoj Zizek's essay was perfection, though. On the surface, it was a critique of a prominent American "Hegel scholar" (I can't not scare quotes that 😆) Robert Brandom. But really, it was an excellent demonstration of a radical interpretation of Hegel in action, explaining Hegelian terms like
'determinate negation' and 'concrete universality' without falling into the usual teleological/ conservative traps in the context of current day identity politics. And it made me realize that this Hegelian method is behind a lot of Zizek's movies, lectures, and pop culture analysis books.

I wish this book had been more 'for a pop audience' than it was. I have a very Elle Woods, "what like it's hard?" attitude towards Hegel-unfortunately considered by most to be the most difficult philosopher to read. But I don't think Hegel scholarship needs to be obtuse.

Zizek was pretty clear, though! And if you're thinking about reading some Hegel, I'd highly recommend his essay in this book. It felt both beginner friendly and 100% correct-which is too unique.

This book was about a cartoonishly insensitive teenager who can see ghosts (but we weren't supposed to think she was insensitive?) going on some wacky adventures with her highschool "enemy". Who had just become a ghost.

But themes of death and grief? Nahh. The theme was more: 'I don't care that you just DIED. If my mom finds out about this, she's going to KILL me' 🥴

It was giving Nickelodeon teen show circa early 2000s (particularly the canned laugh track).
And then I just disliked everything else about it:
• The world building was thin AF. Normally, I critique a fantasy setting by calling it "liminal" —but this book literally called its fantasy world the "liminal realm." And I hated it with every fibre of my being.
• Holy villainous monologues, Batman. There was an episodic structure to this plot that had our MCs battling bad guys every few chapters. But not before each and every bad guy pontificated about their evil plans for a few paragraphs.
• I don't think I've ever read a book with this many too-convenient and nonsensical "twists"?
• That romance plot was a jump scare.

And this book couldn't decide if ending a ghost's existence was a good thing (an almost gratuitous number of ghosts were unalived in here) or a bad thing (the whole point was to help our ghost high school "enemy" guy)? The cognitive dissonance of all the characters was getting to me.

Oh well, can't win them all. This cover is really pretty tho.

Sometimes I just need a little 100 page friends-to-lovers historical romance novella.

This was adorable. Our landlocked lady-pirate kidnapped our Starchy McStarchison and we all caught some feelings (guided along by some only one bed).

It was all really touching-if a story can make my heart pitter-patter about hand holding and longing glances, then I'm sold.

The premise of this book was deliciously moronic.
Whatever the opposite of secret identity trope is, this was that 😆

The premise: These two dumb-dumbs were wed by proxy, had never seen each other. She travelled to him, he thought it must be some elaborate plot when she said "I'm your wife," they fell in love but he was
panicking because he still thought she wasn't his wife? But she was his wife? It was a whole thing.

I love these fictional Medieval settings. Bonkers plots and all the brocade a girl could ask for, without any of that pesky 'my brain getting picky about real Medieval history. Bonus points for witches, cloistered maidens, knights, and peace treaties between kingdoms.

Our heroine's innocence did make me cringe somewhat. And there was a side plot that meandered a bit. But still, a really fun book that got me out of a big reading slump.

Is this nonfiction? If so, it’s a very genre-bending version of it. It read like a memoire, a political treatise on feminism and class consciousness, as well as a stream of consciousness story with a fictional narrator and a plot.

But, I wasn’t reading this for its feminism, which was radical for its time but is way too cis, het, white, and privileged to rock any boats these days.

I thought I would just enjoy this for the stream of consciousness (teenage, obsessed with Mrs. Dalloway, me saved this book for a rainy day), but what really drew me in was its interwar period setting. 

If feminism has evolved to the point that Woolf’s ideas about women are old hat, then our anti-war philosophy (what would we even call it?) has evolved so little that her ideas about the First World War still felt really fresh. And weirdly applicable to our current situation, I thought.

Take her raw thoughts on why she struggled to enjoy poetry and music at the time:

✨ “Shall we lay the blame on the war? When the guns fired in August 1914, did the faces of men and women show so plain in each other’s eyes that romance was killed? Certainly it was a shock (to women in particular with their illusions about education, and so on) to see the faces of our rulers in the light of the shell-fire. So ugly they looked—German, English, French—so stupid. But lay the blame where one will, on whom one will, the illusion which inspired Tennyson and Christina Rossetti to sing so passionately about the coming of their loves is far rarer now than then. One has only to read, to look, to listen, to remember. But why say ‘blame’? Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in its place?”

And quotes like this have really stuck with me.

That two stars feels harsh because, really, this little book was fiiine. The MCs were cute, I was rooting for them.

But what really took me out of it was the whiplash it was giving me. We’d go directly from a scene that was soo cutesy, awkward, flirting, blushing, emojis—to a scene that was full-on dirty talk schmexy times, then back again. With absolutely nothing to mediate the two extremes. 

The Hegelian in me was like, dude where’s my concrete universal? Where’s the actualization of a rational self-consciousness in another self-consciousness? That mediation *is* the love story, which… wasn’t present in the book? It was strange.

The two extremes were fun on their own but flip flopping between them was too weird for me.

Sooo. I didn’t have a good time with this one. My issues fell into a few categories…. Let’s get into it 😅

The romance plot:

▪️ There wasn’t much of one? These MCs hardly spent time in the same location, let alone in the same scene, let alone talking to each other, let alone falling in love on-page. I could’ve given it 1⭐️ for this alone.

This was NOT a Robin Hood retelling:

▪️ If ‘taking from the rich and giving to the (other) rich’ counts as a Robin Hood retelling then I quit.

There were some questionable writing techniques:

▪️ Holy head-hopping, Batman. We switched POVs every few paragraphs, with bizarre results. 

▪️ It leaned into the ‘ugly/deformed = evil’ trope. It was so ubiquitous that a, “Ooo, I bet you didn’t think this physically perfect person was going to be bad,” moment was supposed to… mean something? Yuck.

▪️ The girl-hate in here was getting to me.

▪️ I was intrigued by how low-key evil all the characters were at first, wondering how they’d do as MCs. With some, it was a ‘they’re secretly good’ thing; a classic. But with others, it just involved character breaking reversals. And with our heroine, it involved changing her from someone who didn’t care that her intended husband was philanderer (because she was hungry for that Grade A: D) to this innocent miss who was ashamed she felt any desire at all. Annd yeah, character breaking but also I think we were supposed to be disgusted with her at first? But I loved the first version of her character?

Then there was a ‘not this book’s fault—maybe Prisoner of My Desire has given me unrealistic expectations for how a 1991 book with SA as the main theme is going to pull it off’ … thing 😅, because:

▪️ I’m the idiot for thinking a ‘91 pub date book was going to do an okay job of SA themes, right? Well, it didn’t. It was also vague and contradictory about it, which made me reread huge chunks of the book multiple times (which didn’t contribute to my overall enjoyment, let’s just say that).

▪️ Didn’t appreciate the casual homophobia. But again, what was I expecting? 😅

This book is much-beloved. And it nailed the campy medieval old school histrom thing, so I’d recommend it for that.