en-US Thu, 01 May 2025 10:38:01 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Review7534344363 Thu, 01 May 2025 10:38:01 -0700 /review/show/7534344363 Scott gave 5 stars to Stag Dance (Hardcover) by Torrey Peters
Torrey Peters's debut novel. Detransition, Baby, was probably my favorite of whatever that was. Stag Dance--three stories, one novella--isn't *quite* as riveting and funny and emotional, but it's still pretty fucking good, especially the titular tale, set in a winter lumberjack camp during an indeterminate time period (the language here is spectacular), and the final story Masker, which is creepy as hell, and The Chaser, which takes place at a boarding school. In addition to just being a smart, sharp, and entertaining read, the book as a whole once again offers a powerful portrait on what it feels like to be trans, both in your head and moving through the world. ]]> Review7461906292 Fri, 04 Apr 2025 08:44:32 -0700 /review/show/7461906292 Scott gave 4 stars to Care and Feeding: A Memoir (Hardcover) by Laurie Woolever
Really loved big chunks of Laurie Woolever's memoir, and laughed out loud a bunch, and certainly identified with her whole "I'm an alcoholic" deal. The basics: fled her semi-miserable small town life in Minnesota (?) and showed up in NYC without a plan, and was a bit of a disaster but kept plugging away, and, by circumstance and coincidence, worked as personal assistant to both Mario Battali and Anthony Bourdain, traveling the world with the latter. Her intelligence and talent as a writer also gave her a nice career in journalism. In addition to all the booze (she's now sober), she also smoked a ton of weed and had lots of depressing-sounding sex. And had a kid! A life can have many chapters. ]]> Review7453854046 Tue, 01 Apr 2025 10:05:06 -0700 /review/show/7453854046 Scott gave 2 stars to Chain-Gang All-Stars (Hardcover) by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Wow totally didn't get the critical accolades for this. It's all world-building, no narrative, and the scenes that do progress the story (such as it is), are borderline ludicrous. The farmers market scene in particular. Plus the ideas aren't that provocative or new. Oh well.    ]]> Review7397515333 Wed, 12 Mar 2025 09:55:45 -0700 /review/show/7397515333 Scott gave 5 stars to Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World (Hardcover) by John Vaillant
Smart, gripping, thorough, passionate portrait of the insane climate-change-driven Fort McMurray wildfire of 2016, a city in otherwise remote Alberta that only exists because oil companies are essentially strip mining the land to get at the bitumen embedded in the rock, an expensive and violent process that doesn't need to exist, resource-wise, except that it makes a very small amount of people a ton of money. So the climate-change accelerators get torched by their petard or something. Author John Vaillant does a superb job of tick-tocking the harrowing day or two when the world exploded up there, and explains precisely why it's all so crazy and the product of greed and greed alone, and gives a history of everyone ignoring the science for almost a century now which is why we are all truly fucked. Great book.    ]]> Review7342108534 Fri, 21 Feb 2025 08:06:38 -0800 /review/show/7342108534 Scott gave 5 stars to Beautyland (Hardcover) by Marie-Helene Bertino
Very sweet, smart, and, sometimes, laugh-out-loud funny novel about a literal alien, Adina, born to human single mom who grows up and lives a life and sends back observations about Earth and human behaviour to her home planet(ish). Charming and moving! Starts off a bit metaphorical seeming, but quickly becomes grounded. Bonus: a bunch of it is set in NYC. Really loved Adina, as anyone with heart will.        ]]> Review7296438838 Thu, 06 Feb 2025 10:07:00 -0800 /review/show/7296438838 Scott gave 5 stars to The Message (Hardcover) by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Ta-Nehisi Coates is so smart, and such a lucid writer, that I think everyone should always just read whatever he gives us. But The Message, basically three long essays with an intertwining theme (how the stories we are told and tell ourselves influence and distort how we view reality), is particularly relevant right this second because the final (and longest, and most compelling) section is about his trip to Palestine-Israel in 2023. Powerful, important stuff, all of it. ]]> Review7269787796 Wed, 29 Jan 2025 10:22:55 -0800 /review/show/7269787796 Scott gave 4 stars to The God of the Woods (Kindle Edition) by Liz Moore
Long, fun, cheesy thriller(ish) set in an Upstate NY summer camp owned by a Gilded-Age-style rich family whose children keep going missing. There are too many characters with bland American names for me to keep track of, and the timeline jumps around kind of randomly, but by the second half I had my bearings. If you're in the mood for a page-turner... ]]> Review7225781681 Fri, 17 Jan 2025 10:09:58 -0800 /review/show/7225781681 Scott gave 4 stars to You'll Never Believe Me: A Life of Lies, Second Tries, and Things I Should Only Tell My Therapist (Hardcover) by Kari Ferrell
This entertaining, fast-paced, and surprisingly (?) thoughtful memoir by the mid-aughts, NYC-based-blogs sensation "the Hipster Grifter" is actually very light on her Brooklyn scamming era (basically, she'd pick up guys at hipster hangs, go home with them, and steal random stuff like iPads or maybe a bit of cash), and heavy on, for example, her experience as an adopted Korean kid in Mormon Utah, and her early "criminal" career, also in Utah, during which her victims were mostly her friends (she did some fucked up things during this period, which she readily admits and regrets), and her six months or so in jail (this is maybe the best part of the book), and her subsquent attempt to live a normal, under-the-radar life afterward. So if you're looking for a salacious, reality-TV read, this isn't it! But Ferrell is clearly (self-)perceptive and charismatic, and you can't help but root for her.     ]]> Review7194907529 Thu, 09 Jan 2025 10:19:40 -0800 /review/show/7194907529 Scott gave 5 stars to The Animators (Hardcover) by Kayla Rae Whitaker
I can't remember who or what prompted me to pick up this 2017 first novel about two best friends/creative partners, Mel Vaught and Sharon Kisses, who meet at art school and... get up into a lot of stuff across many years and locations. But I'm glad I did! The Animators definitely has some debut jitters, with plot points and vibes occasionally overplayed, but for the most part Kayla Rae Whitaker does an excellent job, with both the narrative structure (every time I was worried it would fall into cliche, she veered into something new), the pacing (rapid!) and the emotional core. There's such a sweetness running through it, even when things and people suck, and you can't help but fall for/root for these two women. Eagerly await your next book, Kayla Rae!
]]> Review7159926621 Thu, 02 Jan 2025 10:46:13 -0800 /review/show/7159926621 Scott gave 5 stars to Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space (Hardcover) by Adam Higginbotham
Adam Higginbotham, previously seen in the brilliant Midnight in Chernobyl, is clearly great at taking massively populated, highly technical stories and making them both scientifically understandable and extremely human. The centerpiece of Challenger is, obviously, the space shuttle's explosion in 1986 that killed seven astronauts, including school teacher Christa McAuliffe, who has won the hearts of America in the months leading up to the fateful launch. I saw it live (not in school like millions of kids; I was 22) and it was shocking. Higginbotham does an incredible job of tick-tocking those few preceding days, and the actual explosion, and the immediate aftermath. But Challenger also functions as an history of the entire space shuttle program, and how and why it evolved from the Apollo program. AND, perhaps most important, he shows why years and DECADES of individual hubris and greed, within NASA and by the mfers getting rich at government-contracted manufacturers, are to blame for the whole thing. Really interesting read, with an appropriate amount of emotion at the end. ]]>