Michelle > Recent Status Updates

Not making it far in this one. I thought it would be nice in the audiobook rotation since I have been reading Fitch Riley’s biography and Beach’s own letters and memoir, but it was the opposite. The tone didn’t hit for me and it’s all just too fanciful and romanticized in a way that felt off. When I looked more into this I found a lot of credible critique of this portrayal of Beach, so I returned it.

For a cotton candy read inspired by Reddit snark around the most recent SATC franchise, this is very well observed prose and I am enjoying myself.

The first few chapters I found conceptually very interesting and well crafted, but also a bit of a bitter medicine. But chapter 4 is where I really started to love LeGuin’s writing of the mind and the human experience, which can reach very elegant and sublime heights.

The argument of this book is really useful & Brown as usual is great at modeling compassion. But she tends to be overly reliant on her personal experience, which at times leads to really shallow analysis and arguments. In the context of “loving corrections” this can risk being overly conciliatory to audiences eager to hand-waive the harm they do, and de-centering the people most harmed by things like ableism.

I really appreciated the framing and argument of this book from the pages I’ve gotten through so far, but the overwrought academic wordiness is making it extremely hard to be motivated to come back to.

Very plotty at this point. I confess I have forgotten a lot of the early world building and the writing is not doing much to remind me. The magic and gods in this book feel very literal, the earlier books had more a sense of mystery.

Morrison’s academic lecture style is soooooo dense, though the audiobook reading might not be helping much.

This is just completely brilliant and necessary, and the audiobook read by the author also gives the irony and humor of the writing a chance to shine. A favorite read this year for sure.

Picked this up because of the author’s incredible interview on Between the Covers podcast. Has been nothing short of brilliant so far. Incredible, incisive, powerful subjectivity.
(audiobook, read by author)

This audiobook reading was just absolutely stellar, and contained some unexpectedly affecting beats.
Having read this really makes the direction the show take make even less sense though.

This is so genius. No part of the frame goes unused. A kind of oral history of the last 30 years. A deep dialogue with the how out life decisions are inevitably in relationship with politics. And funny as hell.

I’m finding Glaude’s framing of the philosophical and political dialogue during the civil rights/black power movements to be incredibly useful and compelling, and his situation of Baldwin (and his evolution as a thinker) in this context even more so. He is very astutely making the case for the value of Baldwin’s specific lens(es) in our time and I find myself wanting to talk about it a lot.