audaciaray's reviews
1618 reviews

The Partly Cloudy Patriot was a fun and engaging read - Sarah Vowell is very clever. I appreciate her nerdiness, but in a book of essays about patriotism and contemporary life, I could've gone for more nerdiness and less funny.

I'm a total sucker for anything about late nineteenth century New York, and I get pretty excited about historical fiction. I think I squeaked out loud when Anthony Comstock and JP Morgan made their appearances in The Alienist. It's a quick read (even at 600 pages long), and not a fine work of literature, but I really enjoyed this book and felt very much transported to the streets of NYC in 1896. Plus there's a spunky gun-wielding female wannabe detective, which warmed my feminist heart.

I felt compelled to read this book mostly because of the title and because I am interested in the ways that sex education is represented in pop culture. Sex nerdery and all that.

The book was very meh. What I expected to be a torrid affair was basically a lukewarm, confusing flirtation. The characters weren't that interesting, and though there was a plot, nothing particularly interesting happened.

I think I'm officially at the point where I'll read anything by Michael Chabon. Wonder Boys won't really stick with me the way "Kavalier and Clay" or "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" do, but the prose is enjoyable and funny, and the characters are delightfully fucked up.

I am very much not a reader of chick lit, but I can't resist when the book features sex workers and is written by a former sex worker who I have the utmost respect for.

When I read Tracy Quan's first book, Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl, I really didn't like it. I felt like the characters were all pretty unlikeable, and that she really played the characters up as stereotypes of high class call girls and activists.

Over the years, these characters have grown on me for exactly these reasons. My perception of these types has changed, and now I love this series of books entirely because the characters are unlikeable, steering with their own moral compasses, and totally hilarious.

I saw Adam Gopnik speak about Darwin and the Evolution of Human Goodness at the 92nd Street Y a few weeks ago, and I was impressed by his sense of humor and his affection for Darwin, so I picked up Angels and Ages.

His affection for both Darwin and Lincoln - not just as public figures and cornerstones of modernity, but as men - is at the core of this book. The book is basically a love letter to these two important men, but it's also thinky enough to be something more than a pure fanboy piece of prose.

I especially appreciation the work on Darwin and Lincoln as family men, and the stuff about both men's relationships with religion is really intriguing. Both men struggled with religion and its impact on their professional lives; both were non-believers who had family members who were avid believers - Gopnik does a great job of teasing this out.

Though the chapters bounce back and forth between Darwin and Lincoln, I felt like there was a bit more Darwin in the book, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Gopnik is a good and accessible writer - I keep laughing at the images he conjures of Darwin's kids assisting him with his worm experiments.

Beautiful, fast and loose writing.

For me, Drown was most fascinating as a meditation on masculinity (with heady doses of class, race, and immigration too). The men in the stories are pretty much all unsympathetic characters, except sometimes the boys. But only sometimes. But Diaz does this complicated thing, in which he lured me into disliking the characters, but also feeling sad on their behalf without exactly pitying them.

I'm not a dumb lady. But science hasn't really ever been my thing (which is why it's funny that I teach my human sexuality course in a biology department). I've been wanting to read more science stuff but also a little apprehensive about it, so a book about genetic mutations with a cover as awesome as this one was just what I needed. There were pieces of the book that lost me a little bit in their attention to scientific detail, but overall the writing was sharp and often funny, as well as thoroughly thought provoking. The line between mutation and evolution is a thin one indeed, and that's just a piece of what made this book so intriguing. If you want to just dip into this book, you can totally read a chapter here and there. There isn't really a big thread through the whole book, so no reason to feel obligated to read cover to cover. Except that you just might want to read all of it - I did.

My absolute favorite chapter was the one about skin ("A Fragile Bubble"). Leroi teases out fascinating threads about race, culture, and the meaning of hair through this chapter. Plenty of food for thought.

The reason I didn't give the book more than three stars is that the chapter about sex made me kind of furious. There is some really beautiful writing in the chapter about intersex conditions, plus some great historical illustrations. But the underpinings of the chapter are fucked up: Leroi keeps using the word "gender" to mean the biological manifestation of reproductive organs. No. No. NO. Ugh - I really don't understand how competent (though I guess that's questionable) writers/researchers mix up sex and gender, especially in the biological context. Though there has been some (inconclusive) research about the link between gender identity and biological sex (the latter is the combination of hormones, chromosomes, and genitals - so the identified sex at birth doesn't always correspond to biology), gender is an innate sense of being, NOT explicitly biological. Point being, Leroi keeps writing "gender" when he should be using the word "sex" - and it made me want to scream. It also seems like he couldn't really flex his head around issues of queer identities and orientations, which is a pity in an otherwise pretty awesome book.