books_ergo_sum's Reviews (933)

Oh fantasy romance. The ultimate ‘box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get’ genre. Basically, this (much beloved!!) book didn’t have what I’m personally looking for in a delicious chocolate (but if it had what you’re looking for, I see why you’d love it).

Let’s get into it—

The plot was magical Pokémon cards, a gotta catch ‘em all situation, with a hint of fake dating. Setting: cloaks and castles.

But, here’s how it didn’t bring what I was looking for… FOR ME 😅

👉 I want a fantasy romance to hurt my brain a little bit. I want lore, tons characters, and to have no clue what’s happening. But,
• we eased very slowly into the story
• not a ton of characters, not a ton of drama, and a heist-y plot that was fairly straightforward
• the one piece of lore we got was also the big reveal, so it came pre-spoiled

👉 I want to feel transported into another world. But,
• the name salad 😭 Names are my favourite fantasy culture and language vector (the book may be English, but I want to hear what their fantasy language sounds like). Sure, we had wood names (a bit on the nose, especially when “trees!” was a curse word and we got dialogue like “Trees, Elm Rowan!” 🥴). But everyone else’s name was a drunken Pin The Tail On The Donkey, Europe-edition. The names were Greek, Slavic, Germanic, Celtic, British… the Dutch name was misgendered, which felt weird as I live in 🇳🇱 It didn’t make the book feel European, it just made it feel American
• the scene setting was so flat and un-detailed that I kept forgetting what room we were even in

👉 I want the romance plot to squeeze my heart to bits—lots of on-page falling and the angst/drama that only a fantasy world can bring. But,
• instalust, no on-page falling, sudden compliments, and vague “aches” does not a romance plot make, for me
• minus 100 points for a spice scene so abrupt it was a jump scare

Not the wacky alien romance I expected—which just made it even cooler.

This sci-fi novella was a gothic romance novel meets Solaris (the 1972 Russian movie, not the 2002 American one). Haunted spaceship vibes, an eerie-yet-sexy alien man who may or may not try to lock you in a tower and/or drink your blood…

Was she losing her mind?
Were there ghosts?
Did the eerily hot alien have Hungry Eyes™️ because he wanted to eat her or because he wanted to eat (😉) her?
Would there be banging? 

It felt unputdownable because I needed answers.

It also had some really nerdy philosophy/epistemology questions. What is perception? What is ‘the real’? The spaceship was very ‘Myth of the Given’ in Sellars’ 1956 Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind text…

And our heroine was just a girl. Standing in front of a boy. Asking for some Kantian transcendental a priori Categories of the Understanding.

Girl, same.

This was a hot mess book. A More Is More book. The fantasy lore just kept coming and I had no idea where we were going. And I LOVED that.

Plus, our heroine was so dumb that she was basically an unreliable narrator. And I was entertained 😂 She was a golden retriever, her natural hair colour was pink, and she was Just Ken. Good natured, hot, and highly credulous.

The cutesy-ness of the story had me totally fooled. I was like, “this is really enjoyable but how intense (and therefore five stars territory) could it possibly get?”

And then it just went full teen drama Vampire Diaries; (silly) love triangles, (over the top) betrayals, (out of nowhere) problems… It was so stupid!

And I was living 😂

I really enjoyed this alien romance.

But I need to put SUCH a big *asterisk on that because—wacky alien romance, this was not. It was:
▪️ part the walking everywhere, trail rations, and boredom-meets-fighting random monsters of Lord Of The Rings
▪️ part the petty interpersonal drama of a Real Housewives of whatever city is cool these days—but like, Neanderthal edition
▪️ part enemies to lovers of an alien guy and a human lady who… frankly, needed therapy 😂

It was slow. But it was like, addictive slow.

A big theme in here was critiquing ableism, but I’d still put a TW for ableism on here because it wasn’t super cut-and-dry.

This was great!

Ngl, I read this because I’d just finished a neoliberal version of ‘green new deal’ policy in What If We Get It Right? edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson…

And I was having a neoliberalism-induced Menty B about it 😆 And Noam Chomsky is the best medicine for every neoliberalism-induced breakdown, even climate change themed ones.

A delightfully authentic New Deal-style Green New Deal policy proposal, focused on public ownership of green tech and infrastructure. It was easy to read (interview-style) and concise. Plus, I think they’re just… right. Especially for an American context (you guys are never going to be socialists and I’ve accepted that). And any other “solutions” have just ceded waayy too much ground to billionaires.

Could’ve been more sassy. Chomsky has mellowed out too much, for me. He is 96 years old, though.

This is Hannah Arendt’s response to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (his chapter also called On Violence and Sartre’s Preface, specifically) about decolonization and national liberation.

In the simplest terms, Fanon thinks violence is the answer. When a colony is violently oppressed, the oppressor, “is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence.” Because as Ghassan Kanafani so elegantly put it, ‘peaceful negotiations’ with your occupier are a “conversation between the sword and the neck.”

And Arendt disagrees. Kind of. The popular discourse around these two books is that they’re total opposites and you basically have to choose one (if that’s the case, I’m Team Fanon).

But I actually think Arendt and Fanon are more compatible than that. And Arendt improves on Fanon, rather than opposes him.

Arendt challenges the synonymousness of power and violence. The resistance movement seeks power (self-government and autonomy). Fanon wants to get there via violence. But Arendt stresses that:

“Violence can always destroy power… what can never grow out of it is power.”

This felt, to me, like Arendt was targeting Fanon’s interpretation of Hegel. Fanon says, “Violence can thus be understood to be the perfect mediation”—a reference to Hegel’s argument that violence is ‘an imperfect mediation’, one which leads from abstract freedom to “terror” instead of self-government.

Likewise, Arendt insists that:
“Nowhere is the self-defeating factor in the victory of violence over power more evident than in the use of terror to maintain domination… Terror is not the same as violence; it is, rather the form of government that comes into being when violence, having destroyed all power… remains in full control.”

I don’t think Arendt and Fanon are total opposites here. Ultimately, their goals are the same: powerful national liberation movements. And I think, on this little detail (that violence and power aren’t synonymous), Arendt (and Hegel) are right.

Which makes Arendt’s On Violence a great companion to Fanon’s book (which I also recommend).

This was like, six star book, all time favourite territory here. And I’m really struggling to put into words why I loved this book so much. This book squeezed my heart to bits. Teeny tiny, itty bitty bits.

The premise was angsty AF. The class difference, the midsummer night magic, their dreams for themselves… I knew there was going to be an HEA. I just didn’t know how. And I couldn’t put this down.

The characters were so well crafted. They were such opposites and they spent so much time exploring their super specific compatibility with each other. Ugh, my heart. My cup overfloweth with on-page falling in love.

This was like most “just one more chapter”-iest book I’ve read in a LONG time. There was the overall plot, but then there were so many mini-resolutions around every corner. Do not start this book before you go to bed. You will not sleep a wink. Ask me how I know.

How is there only four books in this series? I feel as attached to this world as I do series with double-digit books in them.

A comfort read. An ARC that landed in my inbox at the perfect moment. I gobbled it up. 

Our hero was an alien Daddy--I mean, Warden. And our heroine was working so hard, she just needed someone else to tell her how Good of a Girl--I mean, how good of a job she was doing. If you hate miscommunication then this book is for you. Our hero was DIRECT.

We got introduced to a bunch of new alien future husbands and I'm excited. I feel like my favourite show just got renewed for another season.

Loved it. I love a house party setting. I love a train setting. I love an accidental ruination. I love a sweet, puppy dog English guy who thinks he doesn’t deserve her because he’s “in trade.”

I didn’t know I love—but turns out I’m obsessed with—a smart Czech-Bohemian aristocrat from the crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire heroine who thinks British people are full of it.

She said that, “doesn’t know German philosophers well” was a defect in a marriage partner.

And I felt that.

I loved it! It was two things I hoped it would be:
- Butler’s tweak to their concept of gender (I love these little Gender OS™️ updates we get from them every few years)
- a ‘know thy enemy’ survey of all the anti-gender movements and ideologies that make up the International Reactionary Right (like TERFs and Christian Nationalists)

And one thing I didn’t dare hope for:
- BUTLER’S CRITIQUE OF NEOLIBERALISM!! Ahhh!!!

For Butler, anti-gender ideology is an inflammatory syntax (“a way of ordering the world that absorbs and reproduces anxieties and fears about permeability, precarity, displacement, and replacement”) created by the economic destruction of neoliberalism itself. Their solution? Socialism (or, as close as Butler will get to socialism. But I’ll take it—I thought they’d be a Lib forever).

I am desperate for this new era of gender and queer theory--more intersectional because we're also including theories of economics. Because Butler is right:

“It is, then, crucial that gender politics oppose neoliberalism and other forms of capitalist devastation… [by] “stand[ing] for a radical democracy informed by socialist ideals”