dorking around with old books for work and reading new books for fun; you can find me anywhere as wykenhimself; she/her
This link opens in a pop-up window
'My favourite current crime series' Val McDermid Dr Ruth Galloway is flattered when she receives …
I think I reviewed the previous in the series by complaining how soap opera Ruth’s personal life has gotten and it’s no less true here but I still love her and the series and thank heavens for Cathbad
Miss Jane Fairfield has made a career of social disaster. She wears outrageous gowns and …
It’s just a fluffy fun feminist romance with two very strong people who refuse to bend. I mean, it’s Milan and she’s great.
The remarkable, little-known story of Belle da Costa Greene, J. P. Morgan's personal librarian--who became …
I hated this book. It’s a poorly written fictionalization of one of the most remarkable librarians, the woman who built the Morgan Library collections. All the book is interested in romanticizing her relationships with her father and JP Morgan and Berenson and justifying her mother’s decision to have the family pass as white. Meanwhile, Greene was mostly a self-taught expert in early printed books and manuscripts and art and there’s no focus on that. Her surviving letters make her sound witty and clever and these authors have just made her dull and flat. It’s an insult to Belle da Costa Greene. But one star for effort I guess
Detective Casey Duncan has noticed fewer and fewer residents coming in to the hidden town …
I really liked this series initially--a town hidden in the wilderness of Yukon, a new detective solving mysteries and learning to live in the woods. The characters were interesting and not obvious. And then. It's less of a series and more of a string of 6 books so far that follow a longggggg arc of who is responsible for the bogeymen in the woods and how evil actually is the corporation running the town. I might not be able to stop myself from reading until the series concludes, but I also might just try to dig up plot summaries as they come out.
Once, Lovelace had eyes and ears everywhere. She was a ship's artificial intelligence system - …
I found this much more emotional of a read than I expected. The questions about what makes a person a person, and a home a home, and a family a family, not to mention what is the relationship between ourselves and our physical bodies— it’s a lot to handle! And the book does is so gently even as it’s really fierce on valuing lives and loves. Anyway. She’s so good, Becky Chambers.
Sophie Roseingrave hates nothing more than a swindler. After her family lost their piano shop …
This was good! I’m into the setting of weavers and jacquard looms and a musician and piano building. But!! It’s really a heist story that has two main characters who pretty easily fall in love and into sex, not so much a romance. Still fun! Just not quite what I was looking for.
In Teaching to Transgress bell hooks—writer, teacher, and insurgent black intellectual—writes about a new kind …
I don’t know why I didn’t read this when it came out, smack in the middle of my grad student career and learning to teach. But now, almost three decades later, it’s both familiar and utterly destabilizing. hooks's ideas are so intertwined with how progressive teaching is today that a lot of this doesn’t feel groundbreaking the way it was. But she is so smart and eye-opening on how she talks about the intersections between gender, race, class, and the classroom and teachers and students—it’s inspiring.
As this urgent, genre-defying book opens, a woman who has recently been elevated to prominence …
I didn't want to read about Online because I am already too Online, so I almost quit it, but then wept through the second half of the book instead.
Urgent, propulsive, and sharp as a knife, The Other Black Girl is an electric debut …
I'm not sure the puff "Get Out meets Devil Wears Prada" quite does it justice, but it's not wrong. The book didn't go where I thought it would, and was probably better for that.
I had a lot of fun reading this (disclosure: I was a teen girl in the 1980s so that's part of it). It's easy to read with a ridiculous plot that is also about feminist and anti-racist issues.
A whipsmart debut about three women--transgender and cisgender--whose lives collide after an unexpected pregnancy forces …
I am still processing this book and probably will be thinking about it for a while still. I really enjoyed it—even reading late at night and in various states of lack of focus, it made me read slowly and thoughtfully. The complexities of gender and bodies and desire are more complex here than I’ve seen in other novels and it’s powerful for that. And the complexities of the main characters!! Their assumptions about cis straight women are laughably simplistic, which is the point. As a cis queer mother it was a bit weird to read with one foot in and one foot out of the assumed viewpoints of the book, in a way that is a lot different than reading the simplistic assumptions about women in cis men’s books (hi, trained as a Shakespeare scholar, have so much experience with handling that sort of disassociation). I should look around for …
I am still processing this book and probably will be thinking about it for a while still. I really enjoyed it—even reading late at night and in various states of lack of focus, it made me read slowly and thoughtfully. The complexities of gender and bodies and desire are more complex here than I’ve seen in other novels and it’s powerful for that. And the complexities of the main characters!! Their assumptions about cis straight women are laughably simplistic, which is the point. As a cis queer mother it was a bit weird to read with one foot in and one foot out of the assumed viewpoints of the book, in a way that is a lot different than reading the simplistic assumptions about women in cis men’s books (hi, trained as a Shakespeare scholar, have so much experience with handling that sort of disassociation). I should look around for trans women’s reviews of this. But I thought it was great.
Ambassador Mahit Dzmare arrives in the center of the multi-system Teixcalaanli Empire only to discover …
I loved this. All the questions about what’s a barbarian and what makes empires and invasions, not to mention a world built around poetry and allusions, not to mention the intrigues and friendships and romances—just a big yes to it all. (As a side note, ugh titling reviews is hard)
A quiet revolution in knowledge separated the early modern period in Japan from all previous …
I loved this book. The important caveat is that I know nothing about Japanese history or textual cultures. But I know more now and even without any familiarity with the subject, this book was fun to read. If you are looking for either a way of understanding how Japan shifted towards nationhood in the Edo period or how texts can shape a culture’s sense of itself, I highly recommend this.
An exhilarating and laugh-out-loud debut novel from a prize-winning new talent which chronicles the misadventures …
I wanted to love this, I really did. Words! Etymology! Dictionaries!!! Split timelines across centuries, mysterious phone calls, lovers, queer women! LONDON!!! And yet. And yet it was a bit too infatuated with the mysteries of words and dictionaries and slipperiness, nearly all of the characters in the 19c plot are annoying af, and many of the 21c ones are too. It did make me want to reread that Simon Winchester book about the OED, though, so I guess that's a point in its favor?
Meh. Assistant ends up dating boss, both of them very worried about the perception of sexual harassment, but both of them apparently the only queer women in all of LA.