My interest was piqued after a conversation with coworkers concerning this book and the pineapple-like qualities of the (supposedly) ideal breast, so how could I resist reading the whole thing? The approach is more humorous than scholarly, with lots of uncredited and out-of-context images that serve as punchlines, but the author also cites some genuinely off-the-wall quotes from various bit of Victorian health and beauty advice that serve the thesis of "men sure had a lot of medically dangerous opinions without any knowledge to back them up." I learned quite a bit about what wombs are apparently supposed to do, and enjoyed many a horrified laugh reading bits aloud to my girlfriend re: face enameling and burning off one's freckles.

I've always loved a good advice column, and reading this book felt like a much more personally relevant version of all the drama that child Britt sucked up from Dear Abby and Ann Landers. While the advice isn't always groundbreaking--stop feeling bad about your exes being friends on Instagram by making yourself stop stalking them on Instagram? you don't say!--it was almost always validating. It's always comforting that your problems are not yours alone, and that plenty of other queer women are overthinking their ways through the same old stuff.

Sweet, Sapphic, selkies. Pretty much exactly what I expected, and I'm not mad about it.

I see what Burton is trying to do. She pits three different factions of belief--religious tradition, progressive reform, and commodification of the self that necessitates a chameleon belief in anything and everything by turns--against one another, with a wide-eyed pilgrim torn between them, all set against a boarding school backdrop and seasoned with the angst of Sapphic coming-of-age. But it doesn't work. This is a book that needed to slow down, get wordier, spend time building its characters and setting.

The thing about books that publishers claim to be The Secret History? No one writes like Donna Tartt but Donna Tartt. They write like they're working production in a factory, because capitalism turns culture into an assembly line. And The Secret History isn't going to roll off an assembly line.

I've been keeping an eye out for fiction and graphic novels about polyamory that aren't either MMF erotica or dour literary fiction that will only make me feel cynical. Sugar Town came up in one of my searches, and it's mostly what I was looking for. It's very brief and there's not a ton of conflict, but it gave me one window onto what a polyamorous relationship can look like. And it's a window that I didn't want to immediately slam shut and draw the curtains on.

I used to have a recurring thought, when lying in bed face-to-face with a lover, that there was no fathoming their separate consciousness, and that they might choose to do anything; they might choose at any moment, for instance, to use their freedom from my control and their teeth to chew off my face. When I told my girlfriend of this fear, she encouraged me to get on with reading Nausea, already.

I'm finding that Nausea is a book that is difficult to recommend to people. I start to explain that it's about a dejected historian who's hung up on his ex, and that he becomes increasingly alienated from the world around him and overwhelmed by the inherent meaninglessness of life, and my interlocutor's eyes start to glaze over. They begin to suspect that I'm the kind of person who casually uses words like interlocutor, and they decide that they would rather be talking to anyone else.

Perhaps I will not recommend Nausea to people, then. But I did enjoy it very much, and persist in my affection for Sartre.

Okay, so looking back on this review after a couple of years have passed and I've come out as a lesbian is in fact as funny as I thought it might be. Wow, I wonder why I didn't find Jamie attractive at all and didn't really get why this book is supposed to be sexy?

People have been telling me to read Outlander for years, but I always resisted because long series of 1000-page books tend to hold little appeal for me. But it's 2020, and the world is upside-down, so I decided that it was time to change my reading habits and try Outlander.

There are some great things about this book that I personally have seen overshadowed by the sexy reputation of the series. When a library patron where I worked in 2013 told me that I had to read Outlander, she said that I had to read it because Jamie is hot. "Jamie is hot" tends to be the prevailing selling point for the series.

Here's the thing. I don't find Jamie overwhelmingly hot, large and muscular men not being my thing, and I don't find this book all that sexy. While there are some genuinely tender sex scenes between Claire and Jamie that do what I think all good sex scenes need to do--reveal something about characters and progress their relationship in ways that other situations wouldn't, and also to not sound gross--they're kind of outliers in the broader sexual landscape of the books, in which rape occupies a larger space than I expected.

And I'm pretty conflicted in my feelings about that.

But while Outlander is not the romp that you might mistakenly believe it to be based on the "Jamie is hot" marketing, it boasts characters who are interesting and easy to care about, which is important if you're going to stick around for thousands of pages. The people in these books are complicated and live difficult and dangerous lives. You're invested in finding out what happens to them, even the ones you don't like.

Claire stands out for me as a heroine equally removed from the one-dimensional Strong Female Character trope and the empty placeholder heroine that allows the reader to insert their own identity. She's smart and capable, and watching her use her knowledge of medicine and botany to heal people are some of my favorite scenes. But she's also hotheaded and sometimes makes dumb decisions, which I also love. Because that's being human.

Jamie similarly gets to inhabit more emotional ground than being hot. I've read him described as a barbarian, but that's a pretty bad take regarding a character who is educated, skilled at politics, and dealing with multiple sources of trauma in a time in history when that's not really even a vague concept. His relationship with Claire is devoted but not without its challenges (especially moving into book 2, but that's another review).

Overall, my first foray into this series has been one of surprise and some confusion. Surprise that it's not the bodice-ripper it gets billed as, and confusion about why it has that reputation. My educated guess is because it's narrated from a woman's perspective, because a romantic relationship plays a significant role in the two protagonists' development, and because it's written by a woman.

But also because of how some fans talk about it! Why isn't there more discussion of how cool it is that Claire was a combat nurse and can set compound fractures? Why aren't we impressed with the amount of research that went into the writing? Why aren't we shaking our heads and cursing English imperialism?

Anyway. Glad that I've finally given this a go, and interested to see how the saga unfolds over subsequent books.

Recently someone asked me which book I think everyone should read. I referenced Ranganathan's Five Laws of Library Science and said that while every reader has their book and every book their reader, I don't think that there is one book for every reader.

But that's before I read The Grapes of Wrath. Now I have a real answer: Everyone should read The Grapes of Wrath.

Recently I swore off romance novels indefinitely, but alas it seems that I am unable to stay away from queer historicals. In fact, after watching Bridgerton and deciding that I needed something like it but queer, I stumbled upon the first ever lesbian Regency romance... at least, according to Michelle Martin, and I haven't found anything to contradict her.

I planned to read Pembroke Park mostly for historical value, but I ended up enjoying the story on its own merits. It's not perfect, but it's pretty damn fun, with crossdressing and riding astride and plots to foil the scheming of meddling relatives. While there are plenty of frivolity and laughs, there's also consideration of loss and the risks of living and loving in ways that society proscribes, and a lot of leaning on found family that adds emotional weight and a kind of timeless relatability. The good made up for the bad, which in this case is a tendency for problems to resolve too quickly and the least believably-written child I've ever read.

I will definitely suggest this to readers who have exhausted the well-known queer historical writers working today and need a deeper cut.