I always look at the 1-2 star eviews of a book to see what people didn't like in it. I'm talking constructive reviews, not review bombing BS.

I was entranced by The Poet X, so I was shocked by the negative reviews and the amount of them.

This was a book to be listened to and that's how I consumed it. I listen to audiobooks while I do design jobs and I found myself sitting and listening to this even when I had no work left.

Perhaps the poems on the page don't hit the same but this is performed so well on audio, I cannot imagine processing the words any other way.

Spoilers

Overall, this is a 4.5 star review for me because of one thing. This book shows parental abuse happening, describes in vivid detail how awful it is for the recipient, and has the perpetrator face no consequences. I get that it happens every day, I really do. However, I would hate for a teenager to read that, identify with it because it resembled their life, and sit with it as normal because that's ultimately what Xiomara did. There should have been repercussions. Something. There were only repercussions for Xiomara. I kept waiting for Father Sean or Mrs. Galiendo to help her, and I mean really help her. Not just help her get to her poetry slam. This is a pretty perfunctory complaint and definitely gets into the territory of what beyond the story itself is the responsibility of YA fiction.

Anyway, it's a great book, listen to it!

This has a really good premise. It’s excellent at making you care about characters quickly. However, it needed better editing. It’s overly descriptive for my taste and I felt like there was no reason it needed to be as long as it was. I did like it though, I’m just a curmudgeon.

3.5

It’s pretty pulpy and bad. I contemplated giving up on this book but I didn’t want to be poltroon.

That is a fun word I learnt from the adventures of Zorro.

I found this to be tedious. The titular story is decent.

This is a biography of taxonomist David Starr Jordan, but it’s far more than that. At times it reads like a mystery novel. Miller is so good at unfolding his life, his eccentricities slowly, cagily, that you come to like the man as she did. Until you don’t.

I typically do not like non fiction works that interweave the author’s life, but this worked extremely well. It has a bit of a Fun Home vibe to me.

If you like science / nature non fiction at all I highly recommend this. It’s beautifully written. Moreover, it has one of the best endings to a non fiction book I’ve ever read. It’s extremely satisfying.

Listened to the audio of this. It's fantastically narrated by Chiwetel Ejiofor.

First book I've read by Susanna Clarke, I'll surely read others. It's an incredibly thought provoking novel about exploring what identity truly is and what makes it real.

Side: It was a pure delight to read as an art history major.

I think in terms of social commentary novels, this reminded me a lot of MT Anderson’s Feed. Another book I felt was very well done but didn’t necessarily “enjoy.”

I think if you have any sort of moral compass, you will find this book deeply, deeply upsetting not because of how outlandish it seems, but how facets of it could ostensibly creep into our world and we’d just accept it because it would entertain us.

I thought about the NFL about a thousand times while reading this book.

Delightful little book where each hour is devoted to a different class and or profession of a person who lived/worked in Rome. Their stories loosely intersect and there are facts and real life anecdotes interspersed. Very enjoyable!

This was a good not great read about an incredible discovery of a pirate ship. The story is deliberately unfolded in a very repetitive way that I didn’t really appreciate. I loved the historical and archival work that was acknowledged in the book though.

This is pretty dark. Quick read though, I’m not sure how much a modern YA reader is going to get out of this though.