I think I would have enjoyed this more if I read it instead of listening to it. Sometimes I forgot to pay attention and got lost. I liked that the multiple narrators didn’t go back and forth but that we were with each for just one long portion. I loved the connections between food and family and food as a way of showing care.

So interesting! Creators really have much more control over the apps that they use than the actual companies do. I had no idea that Vine shuttered because the company refused to work with creators. This really makes me wonder what the internet landscape would look like in a non commodified, non capitalist society. It seems like the ultimate demise of most of these sites is due to either the failure to monetize or the over saturation of ads. I miss Tumblr!!!

The story didn’t really pull me in and I didn’t love the art :/ kind of a let down after how much I enjoyed Ram V’s Laila Starr

Aww this was sweet. Weird to read something illustrated by Tillie that she didn’t write. It definitely had clearer and easier to understand drawings than some of her other stuff. She used color in a really smart and cute way. Can’t wait for the next one!

This one took me foreeeeever and the library is charging me $30 to replace it, hopefully I can just return it and they will waive the fee, we’ll see…

Some really interesting stuff, just pretty dense. I would love to read something on this topic with a bit more of a narrative arc instead of straight academic. 

The last chapter, which talked about Tumblr, Twitter, and Google search results, was the only one I could relate to generationally. The earlier chapters had a lot of surprises for me both about the internet and the transgender community of the 80s and 90s. 

The archiving of social media and personal internet websites is so important and this author is doing such cool work!!

So wild that this was published two years before the pandemic. Obviously the fictional Shen Fever and Covid-19 don’t have a lot in common as diseases, but there were a lot of things she got right about the start of a worldwide pandemic. I found that going between two timelines to tell the story kept me engaged. I’m not a big apocalyptic story person, so I liked that a lot of the book was just about Candace’s normal life in early 2000s New York.

Re-reading this makes me like the film adaptation even less. This is much less clean cut.

I read this as a kid and wanted to pick it up again 1. after reading Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and realizing it was the same author and 2. when watching the scene in The Boy and the Heron where the Wara Wara float back to earth. 

There are so many beautiful renderings of the afterlife and this one has stuck with me until adulthood. The book is definitely written for a younger audience and I sometimes didn’t click with it, but I still ended up crying towards the end.

The reverse aging is a beautiful concept to me. Getting to meet your grandmother when she is 35 and you are 15 and all the other nonsensical relationships that occur at Elsewhere. The denial that Liz goes through when first arriving, the addiction she has to watching her old life… I would love to see a film adaptation of this.

<3 really great. Normalizes the struggle to complete care tasks, and has a huge focus on freeing the reader from any shame they might feel about this struggle. Then of course has some really great tips on how to get stuff done in the best way for you! Seriously can’t recommend this enough to my neurodivergent baddies

I’m really tired of this series, honestly. Listening to the audiobook meant I wasn’t always paying attention, but still, a lot of stuff just didn’t make sense. One thing I’ll say is that Emily Woo Zeller is THE GOAT of audiobooks. She can do so many different voices! This book has a lot of different characters and somehow they all have their own distinct voice, all of which are believable.