vampfang's Reviews (104)

i've always found it odd how, despite its title, this book isn't really about dracula, but rather the crew of light. all things considered, it's odd that THIS book is the quintessential vampire book, when its vampire is hardly an important character for much of it. it also goes without saying that the book is pretty dense considering it was written in the late nineteenth century. i read 370/400 pages in about a week this time around, then procrastinated it for several months before reading the last ten pages tonight, if that gives you any idea of how interesting the story is. however, the book still deserves merit for its classic status. it's a highly influential work, as it has inspired every male vampire to come, and that fact alone makes the book worth reading at least once, in my opinion. in addition, i'm a fan of the ways it plays with gender and sexuality, especially given the historical context.

ok so technically i didn't read the entire thing but i read it for school and he didn't assign all of it. either way i read most of it so it counts

read this when i was 6 and absorbed none of it, but i remember liking it. i've been thinking a lot about it recently and now i really wanna reread it!

honestly a solid book, very informative despite its density

i really enjoyed this!! it definitely took me a while to get into it though. as much as i love gothic horror i'm not a big fan of how the ann radcliffe-esque gothic novels often start off so slow and this book was no different. it took a while to get to the supernatural stuff and once it did i thought it was pretty out of left field. even with the mushroom foreshadowing, something about the tone of the book as pretty scientific and realistic clashed with the introduction of the supernatural explanation for the occurrences, even if it is fairly scientific (i don't really understand how it works. maybe it's not that unrealistic idk but to me it felt like it). outside of all that, though, i really enjoyed the book. once things picked up a bit i found them to be fast-paced enough to hold my attention and i really got into it. i liked how it wove aspects of race and class into the main story and used the "gloom" as a metaphor for the way rich white families maintain their power—i found myself getting really angry and frustrated on noemi's behalf at times. i thought noemi's character was also very interesting. in addition, i really liked moreno-garcia's writing style, she has this really visual way of describing things that i thought was beautiful and also made me want to see this as a movie. really enjoyable!

i read this over and over as a child. it made me who i am today i think

this was the first non-genre fiction book i'd read in...at least 6 months, so it was an interesting experiment for me. i really didn't think there'd be much for me, an american teenager, to relate to in a book about a college student in ireland having an affair with a 32-year-old married man, but i was pleasantly surprised. even though the experiences weren't relatable at all to me, i felt i could still relate to frances in many ways, her anxieties, her desires to not show how much she cares, her insecurities about her own identity, and of course her love of literature <3. i think it's really powerful that i could see myself in something so foreign to me, and i really liked that about the book. i know that sally rooney's writing style can be polarizing, but i have to say i kind of enjoyed the tone of the book. it did make things kind of confusing at times, with the way frances didn't always explain why she said/did things, but not to any concerning extent. the writing style was also kind of depressing to me, but i still thought it was very well-written. i really enjoyed the story of frances' pursuit of nick, so

Spoiler

it wasn't as interesting to me after they broke up and i found myself losing some interest at the 75% mark. i was still able to enjoy it though once i adjusted, though i found this part pretty depressing. in some ways i understand why she got back together with bobbi (whatever "together" means in the context of their relationship), but for much of the book i found myself really not liking bobbi and the way she treated frances.

in general, though, i thought bobbi was pretty smart and i liked a lot of the conversations she and frances had about class and politics, though i think they could have been integrated into the rest of the story a bit better. overall, i really enjoyed this book, it was pretty easy to read so a very good vacation book, and i thought the ending was satisfying :)

3.5. this book was really different from books i usually read, and i’m happy i was able to branch out. that being said, i didn’t love it. i don’t want to judge a book’s quality by its speed, but i personally found it a little slow. it certainly had an interesting way of telling its story with its not-exactly-linear flow, but since i wasn’t really used to it it was a bit difficult to follow the plot at times. it might just be my attention span issues, but i never quite felt immersed in the book because of the way it often jumped around without…a lot happening. it was also hard to get a sense of the characters at first—things mentioned in the book jacket don’t come in till later so in the beginning i was a little lost. i liked katharina’s voice, though, and the way the novel explored how gender impacts her situation. while the novel itself tells the story of injustice at the hands of both the justice system AND the court of public opinion, i've seen people interpreting it instead as "this is just like how people get mad on twitter these days," so perhaps galchen could have been a bit more specific. i think there is an issue with people refusing to think critically about things and writing people off too easily today just as in the time of this book, but i'm also wary of people painting the situation as just "people are too angry these days." for that reason, i'm not sure i agree with the "see no monsters" approach. i think if i had spent a bit more time on this book i would’ve enjoyed it more and gotten more out of it, but it didn’t speak to me.

4.5 stars. i really loved this book!!! machado's writing was so beautiful, complex, and thought-provoking. they're subtle, detached, yet still seem to say just the right thing to reach you. she really plays with the boundaries of realistic fiction and the supernatural, including a lot of fantasy and horror elements that i really loved. i also love the way she centers queerness and womanhood in her stories as well. she tends not to give away too much information in her stories so there were times where i was feeling a bit confused, but at the same time i always felt like her stories were saying something really powerful, and i enjoyed the challenge that i got from reading them. here are my individual thoughts:

"the husband stitch" 5/5
i loved this story when i first read it last august, but i think i loved it even more the second time around. the details all worked together so nicely to create the full picture of the story, without machado ever being heavy-handed. as someone who grew up with the green ribbon story, i appreciated the creativity of this retelling.

"inventory" 5/5
this wasn’t a story i could really relate to due to my age but i still liked it, maybe because i got a glimpse into a life other than my own. i loved the way it was told in small chunks i feel like that was really good for my attention span, and it was also nice getting little vignettes of each person. i was kind of curious what the virus was, but that's not really the point.

"mothers" 4/5
i didn’t quite get the ending, but i liked the way it was told, with the “not-memories.” i wanted a bit more from the story, though it’s still complete by the end. the description of the house was really well written and i felt the character’s yearning.

"especially heinous" 3.5/5
this honestly confused the fuck out of me. i had never seen svu so i was lost from the start, and even when it became clear that it wasn’t really about svu the story itself wasn’t super clear. it was here that i started getting used to machado’s dreamlike writing style that often leaves stories vague and without closure, but this was more like that than the others, and i wasn't really sure what it was trying to say. i liked how it was told in chunks like "inventory," and i enjoyed the writing.

"real women have bodies" 4/5
i first read this in late 2020 for a gender and sexuality in literature class, but i'm not sure my perspective has changed the second time around, since the metaphor is pretty cut-and-dry. it's a story about how the pressure placed on women suffocates them, causing them to make themselves small, and eventually "fade away," though i think the metaphor wasn't super developed. like why does petra fade before the narrator? i suppose the message is that it happens to all women, so there's no real reason for it, but i feel like there should have been more specificity. i really liked the narrator's relationship with petra, purely from an "i'm gay and i like reading about gay relationships" standpoint.

"eight bites" 4.5/5
i also read this in late 2020 for the same class, but i liked this one more the second time around. my only complaint is that i wish there was more, because i thought it was really well written and symbolic and all the details fit together really well, that there could've been more filling in the time between the surgery and the character's death.

"the resident" 4/5
i was left with a lot of questions after this one. what was the deal with the painter? how did she “meet herself?” was that thing in the woods her? as time went on, i began to connect with it more, and the thing i'm left with is the character's profound sense of isolation, her inability to fit in anywhere, be it girl scout camp or the residency. this was something i also related to as a young, queer, mentally ill person. i liked how she embraced her "craziness" by the end when she yelled at lydia.

"difficult at parties" 3/5
i honestly just didn't get this one, so it felt like kind of a weak note to end on. as always, i enjoyed machado's writing, so i wasn't bored or anything, but i just did not connect with it.