And so it is that I give two romance books this week 4 and 5 stars, and yet a Pulitzer Prize winner with a concept I am quite interested in had me thinking that this was how I would die: Listening to the most sterile prose in existence, which even a seemingly decent narrator couldn’t make compelling.

Needless to say, after about two hours I decided life was too short. The premise is compelling and the history it begins with is sometimes fascinating. But the voice characterizes the subject matter with a high degree of banality. I have to imagine it reads better, but typically with somewhat dry subject matter the audiobook is the way to go for me, so I highly doubt it would change.

A shame, but no big deal. I’m bound to find books I don’t get on with to this degree with the level of books I consume these days. But was particularly sad about this one, as I was looking forward to it.

On the surface this book is a bit of a cliché. High strung, hyper organized, former Debutant from a well off family moves to cross country on a romantic gesture whim in hoes of wooing a long time crush. She expected to have him as a roommate… but when she lands, her crush proceeds to instead tell her that he’s leaving because his band has an opportunity. And he’s also subleased his room to a completely random guy on Craigslist. To further complicate things, he’s also a male ‘pornstar‘.

I had very low expectations for this book because most people I am friends with or follow on Goodreads seem to not dig this one. It was actually just a coincidental spur of the moment situation where the audiobook was available while I’m waiting for other holds. And I was pleasantly surprised!

Is it Literary? No. But it’s also a pretty refreshing take because it’s not enemies to lovers, insta-love (despite what other reviewers are labelling it), and it’s not the typical bad boy trope either. It’s great at sex positivity, attempting to broaden people’s knowledge of the porn industry and porn itself, to some degree. Most importantly though, for me, it readily demonstrates the difference between sexual attraction and romance. Without judgement and without sounding like an after school special.

The relationship itself feels no more contrived than any other contemporary romance. I liked that each had raised hackles around vulnerabilities that were very believable. It’s a lot more smutty than I expected, especially by what the cover suggests, and I think it has little to offer in terms of pure genre tropes that the marketing material telegraphs either. So, I can see why some people would put it down. I guess it’s lucky that I knew nothing about it going in except for the cover.

It definitely surpassed my expectations and I think underestimate how great it is for a male pleasure professional, or whatever terms you like, to be humanized yet flawed. I like that it flips the script on the gaze and I liked the opportunities it took to go into how workers are exploited and how toxic porn can be—but doesn’t have to be. The B plots were great and fit each character well. I liked how the relationship formed, the sexual dynamics, and how matter-of-fact it is with all the content.

All in all, it subverted my expectations pretty cleverly and feels like it actually had some substantive things to say. And when it didn’t, it had some pretty smutty, steamy chemistry happening. A lot of people clutch their pearls with this title and I can see why, but that’s also what makes it effective, imo.

Hannah is living a happy married life attempting to ingratiate herself to her new-ish husband’s teen daughter, Bailey, making decent money selling custom furniture, and spending what time she can with her husband, Owen; a man she thinks she knows pretty well, until he completely disappears. What follows is Hannah retracing what she does know about her husband, tugging on threads that unravel a past that flip flops between revealing Owen as “good” and “bad”.

This was alright. It’s popcorn commercial fiction that keeps the pages turning and has a somewhat interesting setup. I thought Hannah and Bailey were believable characters and against type. They’re competent and non-melodramatic. The story ends up being less contrived than I’d expected. Hannah, in particular, I found to be written as particularly observant and her thoughts were interesting.

But for much of it the hook barely kept me coming. If the pacing wasn’t as frenetic and the characterization of Hannah’s interactions weren’t in use via new characters constantly entering and exiting as the duo hop about in Owen’s past, I doubt I’d have kept going. I’m not sure exactly why, but the semi subversion of the genre conventions being Hannah choosing, ultimately, what is best for herself and Bailey, felt fairly toothless to me.

Maybe because emotion overall is something that felt lacking. And at a meta level, I liked that they weren’t characterized typically, but the narrative seemed unable provide something interesting in lieu of tropes.

Owen’s past, too, simply isn’t that interesting. The mystery itself continues to be the carrot, rather than the clues they eventually accrue.

As a result, as I said, this ended up being somewhat interesting, which bumped it up to 3 stars, because I liked it… But also something that didn’t make much of an impact on me.

Following the events of the first book, Murderbot goes on a sojourn to learn the circumstances in which they’d ostensibly murdered people in the past.

It’s a quick read, just like the first. And again, there’s a weird humour that works because it’s rooted in the straight forward endearing nature of Murderbot. But this actually is a through line. The people you can’t trust, of course, are the corporations/companies. For the most part—so far as we’ve seen—the subculture of workers in this world are similarly endearing.

It begs the question, at least to me, if Murderbot internalized some of their behaviour from the subculture. The characterization of the team in the first book versus the collective Murderbot encounters in this one, is such an interesting and good contrast.

It drops off on a cliffhanger, and not that much is found out around the central mystery, but I think that’s not much of a let down considering it’s a novella. It’s not as strong as the first book, imo, but still great. The only thing that bugged me a bit in this one is stylistic. It’s probably just that I’ve read hundreds of books since reading the first one, years ago. But I find the diction and paragraph construction to be unengaging because it’s quite simplistic. It’s thematic probably, because the PoV is from a robot. But I think it’s a lost opportunity to characterize Murderbot in a way that differs from what you’d typically think a character like them would “sound” like. Either way, the prose are just alright for me; occupying the same space as commercial fiction.

That said, I’ll definitely read all of these, as I still really enjoy them and I now own them all so don’t have to wait so long to consume them.

Similar problem with the prose being overly simplistic, creating a dissonance between events and characterization. But fast-paced and an interesting theme introduced with the new characters once again. The ending felt better than the previous two as well, but otherwise maybe a bit less strong.

Always happy reading this series. Endearing, accessible, surprisingly nuanced.

I liked this concept very much. We jump around with our narrator, whom slides into a few different points-of-view, using different artists as subjects. Sometimes information from interviews is used, sometimes the narrator them self talks about their own lived experience; there is no locked in framing.

This allows for a very fluid expression of various points to the views (ha!) utilized and injected in this to form a cohesive exploration of the concept of loneliness. It centres mostly marginalized folx I think, but does shift so frequently in its citations of various sources, I’m sure it’s more comprehensive.

It mostly works. The narration being audible does sometimes make it feel frenetic, even on lower speed. It’s way harder for me to retain information vocally, so I think I’d have to re read this physically to really digest it properly.

But I do recognize how interesting the structure, concept, and form are. That alone is worth the price of admission for me. I’ll be on the lookout for it in the future. There’s plenty of fantastic correlations in this thoughtful quest into a profoundly human, and therefor universal, experience.

This book was interesting to me, because initially, I actually found it quite annoying. The granularity of bland details from the onset creates a strange detachment to such an affecting thing as these Israeli soldiers almost casually inflict themselves on a Palestinian girl before killing her. It does seem to read like a first person accounting of a historical event.

This makes a lot more sense when the second part begins. The writing shifts into a much more lived experience detail as a woman 25 years later, at great personal risk, feels she needs to uncover more of this event after feeling something deeply affecting in the lines between a historical document.

In her sojourn to a zone she is not allowed due to her identity as a Palestinian, we end up seeing how much of an effect history has on current, lived experiences. Visual motifs are as much of a through line as the universality of the Palestinian experience, even across 25 years. And the reader experiences the contrast between the now and then with the structure and difference in voice.

It’s a book that is far more concerned with conveying some specific notions, rather than characterization, fully fleshed out plot; more traditional and conventional narratives, basically. That was a strength for me. I imagine this might be polarizing for some because of it, though.