M. Benesh > Recent Status Updates

It's not often someone reads at a speed fast enough to where I don't listen to the audiobook at 1.5x or 2x. Bonus points for the author recognizing gender and sex as separate but somewhat irrelevant when being perceived as female is othering regardless of both.

Ah, an actual gothic novel at last. I am horrified and I am thrilled. Thank the creatures that slither in dark, damp places. It's a touch late for halloween but truthfully, I love this sort of book all year round.

I think some historical context would help develop the author's argument, as otherwise the book becomes largely a record of personal accounts during the experience of evangelical women/girls during the 90s - 2000s.

So far this book because is less about "purity culture" and more about evangelical church culture (particularly, social reinforcement of gender expectations) and its influence on religious girls and women-- yet the author continually tries to point to the purity movement as a culprit rather than church leadership/teachings outside of that movement alone.

This book is funnier than I expected. So tongue in cheek!

I'm not sure the main character's college experience would sit well among readers living in the current #MeToo environment, but perhaps it's insightful into women's experiences in the scientific disciplines during the 70s-80s.

"Scottie had a will of her own, which is always dangerous in a woman." This is going to be a rough read, what with all the nervous machismo sweat smeared on every chapter.

The author seems to have just picked a more colorful/Sherlock-in-London time period in the US (at least, a time period perceived by the author as such) and plopped a modern story into that setting. While I enjoy the very rough criminal psychology used by the psychologist/alienist, it just seems extremely out of place in a time period when psychoanalysis had barely been born.

So far, very interesting. On a side note, it's amazing how author's from the 60's always seem write books that contain much more overt sexism than older books seemed to.

"Man has many saving graces, and not the least of them is his impuls to sober up between brawls."

Not even a page in and Mayer's writing is vivid and compelling. I'm incredibly excited this book finally became available at the library!

At this point, I'm really annoyed that the author has made a point to consistently call the women focused on in the book "girls". I know, at the time that was what you did. And the women mostly started working at the factories in their teens...but when the same sentence calls the women girls and then explains how each one is in their thirties with children or careers, it's just weird.

A third of the way in...and I think Sam was on the nose with her review of this book. It's such a poorly compiled account.

I didn't expect a successful combination of old classical scifi characters. I'm even impressed with the handling of Mr. Holmes.

Exposition is a sledgehammer one should wield carefully, my good author. Your story is interesting, but maybe you should have just written a prequel if you had so much background info to offer every 3 sentences.

"Making abortion hard to obtain will not return the United States to an imagined time of virginal brides and stable families; it will return us to the time of crowded septic abortion wards, avoidable deaths, and the routinization of punitive treatment of women by state authorities and their surrogates."
This has been a sobering but impactful book. I can't put it down.

If this character says "heavens to murgatroyd" again, I may just scream.

Addendum: also, the author seems to have an obsession with wallpaper?

Some not so subtle misogyny going on in this book...every time a woman is introduced, she is either literally or figuratively referred to as a "whore". Oh, and she's probably murderously insane.

I'm glad this book shows the reality of an admirable career in science as difficult, less dramatic, and spanning a much longer time in a person's life. The movie version was typical of hollywood, making lifelong struggles and institutionalized hardships into something that could be wiped away with one dramatic act. The truth of progress is much messier, and rarely has a "we've made it!" moment, as this story shows.

I've barely read a paragraph, so I can't pass any judgement on this book. But a sentence beginning with "The air was sultry..." just has me cracking up and muttering "Owen loves his mama!"