en-US Fri, 07 Feb 2025 22:30:43 -0800 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Review29335599 Fri, 07 Feb 2025 22:30:43 -0800 /review/show/29335599 Lauryl gave 5 stars to Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Paperback) by Susan Bordo
]]> Review51334378 Fri, 07 Feb 2025 22:27:27 -0800 /review/show/51334378 Lauryl gave 1 star to Hannibal (Hannibal Lecter, #3) by Thomas Harris
bookshelves: fiction, mystery-crime, pulp
]]> Review63544612 Fri, 07 Feb 2025 22:25:11 -0800 /review/show/63544612 Lauryl gave 3 stars to Rosemary’s Baby (Rosemary's Baby, #1) by Ira Levin
bookshelves: fiction, horror
]]> Review63544394 Fri, 07 Feb 2025 22:24:53 -0800 /review/show/63544394 Lauryl gave 2 stars to Gone with the Wind (Mass Market Paperback) by Margaret Mitchell
bookshelves: fiction, disappointing, u-s-history
]]> ReadStatus9040728737 Fri, 07 Feb 2025 22:24:22 -0800 /review/show/63544394 Lauryl has read Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
]]> Review72805760 Fri, 07 Feb 2025 22:17:46 -0800 /review/show/72805760 Lauryl gave 3 stars to She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders (Paperback) by Jennifer Finney Boylan
bookshelves: gender-studies, memoir
I'm always interested in reading books that call into question the dominant binary gender paradigm and the idea that gender is a fixed quantity. And at the time I read this, I didn't know any transgender people at all, and I was (and still am) understandably curious about their experience of gender, the world, and their place in it. I feel that, especially in this polarized era of American politics and so-called "family values" voters ("A-hem", she scoffs.) people who take the very bold leap of actually endeavoring to change their given gender are a certain kind of heroic.

Jennifer Finney Boylan is a fine writer, and I thought the book was fascinating, although I agree with some of the other critiques here that she is not particularly politicized. Also, she leaves out some nuts-and-bolts things that those of us who are not transgender might like to know about. How does changing gender play into her sexuality? There seem to be moments in the book where she suggests that her new, female self is attracted to men, but her male self was not. Am I reading this part right? Is that something that happens a lot for trans people? I would have appreciated a frank discussion of her personal take on transgender and attraction.

Also, though I'm happy for Jennifer and her self-actualization, there is a huge cloud of sadness that hangs over the story. I felt terrible for her wife, who bore the brunt of the emotional trauma of the gender change. I cannot help but put myself in her shoes. Of course, Jennifer gives lip service to this sadness, but she's clearly too thrilled with her transition to really empathize fully. She attests that she's still the same person she always was, but to her wife, who was never privy to Jennifer's lifelong desire to be a woman, she obviously is not, and never will be again. I'm not blaming Jennifer for this entirely, but it's worth acknowledging, and would have made for a better, truer, more complex story. ]]> Review82799071 Fri, 07 Feb 2025 22:12:49 -0800 /review/show/82799071 Lauryl gave 3 stars to Histoire d'O | Story of O (Story of O, #1) by Pauline Réage
bookshelves: sex-sexuality, fiction
]]> Review7284390750 Fri, 07 Feb 2025 20:21:44 -0800 /review/show/7284390750 Lauryl gave 4 stars to Victorian Psycho (Hardcover) by Virginia Feito
bookshelves: fiction, horror
Victorian Psycho is a fast, wickedly funny, ugly satire of manners, class consciousness, bourgeois boorishness and misogyny. This book’s range of influences is satisfyingly broad. While reading it, I thought of Dickens, Austen, Shirley Jackson, Sylvia Plath, Flannery O� Connor, Patrick Suskind and Emerald Fennell.

It’s a sharp and funky amuse-bouche of a book, like popping an entire uni nigiri into your mouth, or swallowing an oyster so fresh that it’s still quivering.

Winifred Notty, the new governess of Ensor House, introduces herself to us like David Copperfield but with a sort of fourth-wall-breaking homicidal glee. Well, not exactly glee, but a matter-of-fact coldness. She has, she tells us, no ability to feel fear, and she thinks perhaps this sets her apart from other people, that it makes her monstrous.

The denizens of Ensor House, seen through the eyes of Winifred, are as harshly funny as old fashioned newspaper caricatures, with silly names like Miss Manners, Mrs. Fancey, Mr. Fishal, Mrs. Pounds. Winifred, herself, is funny. She’s clever. She’s terrifying. And she’s right that all of these people are really the worst, which complicates our task as witnesses to her thoughts and her history, which increasingly reveal themselves as unhinged and murderous. Despite its funniness, the book maintains a steadily growing sense of unease as it careens towards inevitable violence.

It would be wrong to say that I *like* Winifred. But I certainly don’t like her any less than the rich assholes she’s surrounded by, doomed by fate and social caste to a life of subservience in a mansion that is full of creepers, bullies, and fools. Winifred’s bloodlust may be impossible to understand, but her frustration with the limited life imposed upon her by sex and station are very easy to understand. Her sense of betrayal is palpable.


The obvious comparison for Victorian Psycho is to Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, a book that I mostly abhorred even while I thought it was a clever satire. I wrote a Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ review of it like 15 years ago or something and I dared to say that I hated reading it, and it’s funny to me because I still get weekly responses from Men Of The Internet that are mad that I wasn’t utterly charmed by their favorite little rapefest.

To be clear, I was a lot younger when I read that book and I don’t think I would have written the same review today. But I still never want to read it again, and I still think that, similar to Fight Club, most of the men who LoOooOoVeD it likely *utterly* missed the point and secretly think Patrick Bateman is a Real Cool Guy with his blood spattered rain slicker and his eggshell business cards, just like they find Tyler Durden aspirational, as they listen to Joe Rogan and shovel protein powder down their gullets.

Victorian Psycho is a perfect, sly literary antidote to American Psycho. A cup of tea laced with arsenic, reframing the Patrick Batemans of patriarchy into the commonplace cartoon chauvinists that they are, and driving fireplace pokers through their runty hearts.


]]> ReadStatus9040052849 Fri, 07 Feb 2025 18:41:04 -0800 /review/show/7300725881 Lauryl wants to read Mrs. March by Virginia Feito
]]> Review7284390750 Fri, 07 Feb 2025 18:38:22 -0800 /review/show/7284390750 Lauryl gave 4 stars to Victorian Psycho (Hardcover) by Virginia Feito
bookshelves: fiction, horror
Victorian Psycho is a fast, wickedly funny, ugly satire of manners, class consciousness, bourgeois boorishness and misogyny. This book’s range of influences is satisfyingly broad. While reading it, I thought of Dickens, Austen, Shirley Jackson, Sylvia Plath, Flannery O� Connor, Patrick Suskind and Emerald Fennell.

It’s a sharp and funky amuse-bouche of a book, like popping an entire uni nigiri into your mouth, or swallowing an oyster so fresh that it’s still quivering.

Winifred Notty, the new governess of Ensor House, introduces herself to us like David Copperfield but with a sort of fourth-wall-breaking homicidal glee. Well, not exactly glee, but a matter-of-fact coldness. She has, she tells us, no ability to feel fear, and she thinks perhaps this sets her apart from other people, that it makes her monstrous.

The denizens of Ensor House, seen through the eyes of Winifred, are as harshly funny as old fashioned newspaper caricatures, with silly names like Miss Manners, Mrs. Fancey, Mr. Fishal, Mrs. Pounds. Winifred, herself, is funny. She’s clever. She’s terrifying. And she’s right that all of these people are really the worst, which complicates our task as witnesses to her thoughts and her history, which increasingly reveal themselves as unhinged and murderous. Despite its funniness, the book maintains a steadily growing sense of unease as it careens towards inevitable violence.

It would be wrong to say that I *like* Winifred. But I certainly don’t like her any less than the rich assholes she’s surrounded by, doomed by fate and social caste to a life of subservience in a mansion that is full of creepers, bullies, and fools. Winifred’s bloodlust may be impossible to understand, but her frustration with the limited life imposed upon her by sex and station are very easy to understand. Her sense of betrayal is palpable.


The obvious comparison for Victorian Psycho is to Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, a book that I mostly abhorred even while I thought it was a clever satire. I wrote a Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ review of it like 15 years ago or something and I dared to say that I hated reading it, and it’s funny to me because I still get weekly responses from Men Of The Internet that are mad that I wasn’t utterly charmed by their favorite little rapefest.

To be clear, I was a lot younger when I read that book and I don’t think I would have written the same review today. But I still never want to read it again, and I still think that, similar to Fight Club, most of the men who LoOooOoVeD it likely *utterly* missed the point and secretly think Patrick Bateman is a Real Cool Guy with his blood spattered rain slicker and his eggshell business cards, just like they find Tyler Durden aspirational, as they listen to Joe Rogan and shovel protein powder down their gullets.

Victorian Psycho is a perfect, sly literary antidote to American Psycho. A cup of tea laced with arsenic, reframing the Patrick Batemans of patriarchy into the commonplace cartoon chauvinists that they are, and driving fireplace pokers through their runty hearts.


]]>