brannonkirkhuang's reviews
514 reviews

Very engaging start but gets lost in the amount of POVs it presents. Karl Ove also does the classic thing of introducing a really terrible, shitty person of a character who feels like he might be Karl’s self-insert, like maybe he actually just thinks like this, and it’s completely reinforced by the character’s ability to be an asshole and still convince a pretty, young artist to have sex with him after chugging alcohol all night and after he trashed and dismissed her work publicly. That shit makes no sense. Fuck this.

Matthew McConaughey the type of dude to open up his memoir bragging about the child abuse he experienced as a child. How are people praising this book? These ideas about manhood, about parenthood, they are violently harmful antiques. He claims he comes from a long line of “outlaw libertarians” who vote red to “keep fewer outlaws from trespassin on their territory.” So what, you’re keeping yourself off your territory? Can anyone else see how awful this writing objectively is? He really means to claim that being an outlaw is good and bad in the same sentence?

Iris Murdoch’s writing remains iconic, but I am not crazy about this story. Especially the ending. I also don’t appreciate its perspective on gay people being only presented through the eyes of religious extremists. It prevents any acknowledgement, even within the gay characters themselves, that who they are is natural, normal, and not something to be ashamed of. 

It becomes anti-communist at a certain point, yet without offering anything more worthwhile than communism, which feels terribly lazy and simplistic. It essentially shrugs its shoulders and says, there’s no possibility of improvement in society, thus, this status quo of military industrial complexes, colonialism, imperialism, neocolonialism, greed, hoarding of wealth, hoarding of human rights like housing, food, water, and healthcare, increasing poverty, starvation, homelessness, the destruction of the environment, yes, all of this is far better than seeking to improve things. That’s lazy thinking. If you reject communism, please propose something better that will still aim to improve society, to free the working class from exploitation and wage slavery. If our society is uninterested in saving lives, improving living conditions, and feeding all of us, then of course our lives are meaningless, and this book doesn’t need to waste so much time explaining that to us. There has to be something better to strive for, because life is much bigger than us, and will go on beyond us.

Not Allende’s best book, but still effortlessly delightful, and for my first time listening to her in audiobook form - her writing is easy to listen to.

Jackson gets that capitalist politicians and capitalist policies are already waging a violent, merciless war against the working class. All he suggests here is that we actually fight back. Fascism isn’t coming. It’s here, and it has been here. Every death by traffic stop, every homeless person who starves to death, every person who dies because their health insurance won’t cover them, these are murders committed by the capitalist class against all of us.

Not nearly as good as Last Quarter of the Moon, with a few very questionable moments that made me go, “huh?” but it’s short and readable at least.

Read this because of Epic: The Musical. It’s a great book, but it drags at the end. Felt like Homer wanted to keep everyone in suspense so desperately that he overdid it and just made it a bit tedious.

Wish it had gone a bit more in depth but I understand it’s probably based on a fifteen minute speech. I do think this is a pretty decent book to expose people to a new take on feminism if they are anti-feminist or completely clueless. Maybe its size is beneficial in that it’s so short they’ll actually read the whole thing. I do think some of these feminist concepts would benefit from also looking at how capitalism impacts working class women. Like, we can talk about making more women CEOs, but that doesn’t save the majority of women (and men) from being exploited by corporations. There’s tons of intersectionality involved in this world, but if we just advocate for some more women to exploit the working class, we haven’t actually achieved much. 

It’s really good, but it drags a bit in the middle. It starts to seem like endless descriptions of war, where a lot of killing happens, and it’s all described similarly. It’s a great anti-war book though. It really highlights the stupidity and pettiness of war.