poisonenvy's reviews
844 reviews

Oh how I wish I was better at reviewing books I listened to entirely on audio, especially when said books are a billion hours long. But this was fun. The action was tight, the worldbuilding was Greta, the weird sexism was extra weird sexism (nothing takes me out quite as fast as Rand talking about how ten women got him drunk, then got him undressed and... Tickled him? Until he went to bed? You're fetishes are showing, Jordan).   

Anyway, I'm still enjoying the series, though am officially bummed out that there's no more Rosamund Pike audiobooks. 🥲 She truly is an excellent narrator. 

Is it wrong if I spent this entire play going "Wow, Prince Hal is giving me so many Nikolai-from-Grishaverse vibes? 

Given the way my professor spoke of Falstaff, he had not at all what I expected.  All the same, I had a lot of fun with this play. 

This book was wonderful, and absolutely beautifully written (I tabbed so many quotes).  It's suspenseful and a little creepy, but it's about hope and family and healing and grief.

There was one scene in particular that felt a little heavy handed, but it didn't diminish how much I truly enjoyed reading this book with my book club. 

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Second Read-through a couple months later for class. Just as enjoyable as the first time around.  

<u>Becoming Two-Spirit</u> is not a text without a wealth of issues, but it is also an enlightening look into Two Spirit life, particularly in Denver and Oklahoma, in the early 2000s (the book was published in 2006). I'm going to start off with the ways in which this text was weak: 

Brian Joseph Gilley opens the book, in the Preface and in the first few pages of the first chapter, letting us know that he is not Two-Spirit himself. While some people apparently seem to think this will make the book more academic or something because he'll somehow lack bias or whatever (no one lacks bias, fyi), Gilley straight up admits that he was excluded from a number of events and likely opinions because of the fact that he wasn't Two Spirit, and I am sure there were a number of men who wouldn't speak to him. I also wonder just how much he actually understood some aspects. For instance, one of the Two-Spirit individuals he spoke to lost often was someone named Shiela, a Two-Spirit person who was perceived to be a male at her birth, but lives life as a woman and uses feminine pronouns. Yet Gilley continuously referred to her as a Two-Spirit man, and referenced her as a man a number of times, and I spent nearly every time she came up wondering if she truly identified as a man or if that was only how Gilley understood things. 

Gilley also did not have access to any Two-Spirit women, as apparently the men and women kept quite a lot of space between them, and so it lacks entirely the perspective of more than half the community. 

Finally, and this is no fault of Gilley's at all, but the book is nearly twenty years old and so it's quite dated. This is only my first book in my research into Two-Spirit identities, but I am very positive that the acceptance levels in Indigenous communities has shifted radically in the last two decades, and I am excited to see how that shift has happened. 


Those criticisms aside, this was a very insightful book into the Two Spirit movement. It discusses the history of Two Spirit community members pre-colonization -- at least as much is known -- and how and why the identity started to form following the AIDS crisis. It speaks a lot about what it means to be Two Spirit -- how it's just as much about being Indigenous as it is about being queer, and you can be a "gay Indian" (as the book calls it), but if you do not embrace the culture of your Nativeness, you cannot be considered Two-Spirit. It talks a great deal of their role in communities, and their roles in ceremony, and I learned quite a bit in this very short book about identity and social acceptance.  

This is the second book in both the Emelan series and the Circle of Magic series, and takes place immediately following the events of Sandry's book. 

While that book seemed to lack in any real plot and seemed more like an intro to the characters and settings than anything, this one is plotted much tighter. It's still very much a children's novel, but it was very enjoyable even reading it for the the first time as an adult. The characters are strong, as is the world building, and I'm very excited to see where this goes. 

Also, I don't know when I'll be able to pick up Daja's book because life, but I'm hoping that it'll be in the next couple of weeks 🤞

My grandma has often talked to me about Richard the III, but this is my first time ever reading it.  It was far more interesting than I had expected, and I enjoyed it quite a lot.  The exchange between Richard and Elizabeth in Act 4, Scene 4 was really masterfully done, and the play really comes alive in the last couple of acts. 

I had no real sense of... time though? The pacing was strange, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out whether or not all these events truly happened on the heels of one another or if there was supposed to be more time between them.  I think I would also like to be a little more up in the know about the acutal history that happened rather than Shakespeare's propaganda haha. 

Warnings for ableism and whatnot.  

I just finished Pride and Prejudice last month, and after I finished, Libby recommended to me two very queer Pride and Prejudice related books: Pride and Prejudice and Pittsburgh which was very sapphic and not at all Pride and Prejudice minus the time period it half took place in, and Most Ardently.  

I knew that Most Ardently was a gay retelling when I started, but what I didn't realize was that in this queer retelling, Elizabeth Bennett is a trans boy named Oliver. This was really an excellent choice all things said. Oliver's story is compelling and sucked me right in. His struggle with juggling his two lives -- the fake life where he has to pretend to be a girl, and his real life where he can sneak out and be a boy -- was very real and very heartfelt.

There were a number of changes to the original text that just seem either inexplicable or annoying to me (moving Longbourn to London for some reason and making the Bennet children younger than they are in the book being the former, changing characters motivations to motivations that make more sense in a modern context but wouldn't make sense in the 1800s for the latter), but overall I enjoyed this quite a lot, and devoured the book in short order. 

Sandry's Book, and obviously the rest in the Circle of Magic series is very clearly a kids book. It was still enjoyable to read as someone in their mid-30s, but I'm clearly not the target audience. 

It also seemed to lack... Well, a plot? For the story? The story follows Briar, Sandry, Tris and Daja as they're taken from whatever circumstances they were in (none of them good) and brought to a magic school. There, they learned magic and learn to become friends despite their entity different lives and circumstances. 

There is very clearly going to be an overarching plot over the four books of the series, and it was sort of touched on in this one. But as far as having a beginning, a middle, and an end, this novel on its own did not. It is only a beginning. 

Anyway! It was fun! I'm excited to continue on with this series, and I am very sure that this series is going to be one of those ones that matured with its readers, so I'm excited about that! 

I read the ebook alongside the full-day audiobook. And the audiobook was... Fine? But Tamora Pierce did the narrator narration (whereas different actors did all the rest of the characters) and she is very clearly *not* an audiobook narrator and her reading was awkward. Not enough for me to not enjoy the series, but it wasn't great haha. 

I did it! I read this book in less than a year! One day short of a year, granted, but hey, a day counts. It wasn't that it was impossible to read or anything, but I read it solely during my free time at work and it went something like this: 
a) Read the Beowulf poem/translation through over the course of a couple weeks. 
b) Started reading the Beowulf poem again, this time in conjunction with Tolkien's commentary on it, which was more than twice as long. 
c) Didn't touch the book at all for like, several months while I filled my free time at work with other things 
d) Read the rest of the book and Tolkien's commentary in a couple of weeks when I realized I was coming up on the one year mark 
e) read Sellic Spell and The Lay of Beowulf in a single day before the year mark. 

I thought this was great. Beowulf is one of the first fantasy stories in history, and one of the only surviving stories that was written in Old English. It's a little dry, as is Tolkien's commentary, but hey, it's still worth reading. 

I had no idea what Sellic Spell was, but it turns out it was Tolkien's Fix-It Fanfiction (which he then translated into Old English what a fucking nerd) and it was *way* more engaging than Beowulf and I flew right through it. And The Lay of Beowulf is rhythmic and once again shows what a master post Tolkien was. 

Anyway, absolutely worth picking up for any fans of Tolkien or fans of mideveal literature/Beowulf. 

Audrey is in a rut: she's been waitlisted at the art school of her dreams and was recently broken up with by her boyfriend, and she cannot find the inspiration to do any art whatsoever. 

Two hundred years earlier, Lucy is resigned to the fact that she is going to have to marry a man more than twice as old as her and a dick to boot, because her father demands it. 

Can the two of them save one another? (Obviously the answer is yes, this is a romance novel after all). 

This wasn't what I expected, but I didn't really know what to expect in the first place. Libby recommended it to me after I finished Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, so I expected a sapphic retelling of that novel, but that wasn't what this was at all. 

But it was cute and sweet, and I enjoyed it quite a lot. I do have to wonder about why Lippincott, in a queer love story, chose to name one of her characters Matthew Shepard.  That was... A choice.