madgerdes's Reviews (970)

I didn’t let the sunk cost fallacy dupe me into finishing this book and I’m proud of myself! I’ve listened to about 40% of it and as I was about to head out on a walk I realized 1) I was not really looking forward to continuing and 2) if I stopped this book rn I wouldn’t be curious about how it ended because I’m really not invested. I think I may like this more in a written format, so I’ll possibly try again another time

This would be five stars if Imelda’s sections had punctuation

The romance plot was the least interesting part of this book but I was honestly intrigued/impressed by the world building and wish there was more of that 

It took me a while to get into this and I don’t feel remarkably changed by having read it, but it was fun enough! 

I feel pretty conflicted about and honestly disappointed by this book. I really wanted to like it! Some of the stories were really compelling, and I did enjoy how bizarre and unsettling most of them were. What took me out of it though was this author’s commitment to describing fatness as a character flaw. Again and again, characters that were meant to be morally ambiguous were described as fat. I didn’t notice it at first, but after a few stories the pattern became obvious and honestly distracting. The fatphobia degraded the quality of what could have been a great book and made so much of it utterly banal in my opinion. Oh you’re a man who resents his partner of many years because she is a fully realized person in an of herself? Oh she’s actually not 1 lb of lithe, lean muscle and you feel the need to mention that every two minutes to convey that resentment? Should we throw a party? Should we invite Oprah and Jenny Craig? He did diversify his unoriginal body politics and have a few stories that included weird and unlikeable men who were fat! Diversity win! 

Ultimately this book was a disappointment. It could have been great but all I could see was the author looking at the world with judgmental eyes and seeing fat people as having failed in some moralistic way. The author is actually a writer in residence/visiting professor at UM this semester - maybe I’ll go ask him what the fuck his problem is LOL 

This book was more history rather than cultural analysis, which is fine but it just wasn’t what I was looking for!  I’ve been reading things for a class I’m building in the spring

I felt like I was an arms length away from this book the whole time, I really wanted to have an emotional connection or reaction but I didn’t? Maybe I read it too quickly or it reminded me too much of other things I’ve read before so there wasn’t a new spark for me to connect to? I liked the writing style a lot though and I already put the woman in the purple skirt on hold at the library!