roach's reviews
269 reviews

 

What Traci Lords' autobiography might lack in writing style it makes up with Lords' undoubtedly shocking story and unique perspective on the porn industry. While the text might be a bit clunky or flat at points, Lords does have quite a lot of charm that makes her escape from trouble and abuse at a young age into a more and more flourishing adult very endearing to follow. Knowing that she grew into a happy and healthy woman also makes the awful early years of her life, which seemed to brandish her entire existence for a while, so much easier to bear.
Growing up as the poster child celebrity survivor of one of the ugliest crimes is a strange concept and I appreciate that she chose to share her point-of-view like this, with full confidence and self-reflection.

While this isn't the best-written (auto)biography I've read, it is definitely a very solid one, written by an interesting person with something to say. 

 

Aggression in Pornography is a very interesting research paper that aims to add empirical evidence to the divisive conversation about the harmfulness of pornography by analyzing a collection of freely available pornography on a popular website.
The authors claim that most previous research on the matter comes from a place of predisposition and also that many fail to acknowledge important factors like viewer reception and non-hetero pairings. Also, that previous research done in a somewhat similar fashion worked with a now outdated media landscape like analyzing rental tapes.

The authors combine quantitative information based on analyzed media with qualitative information from interviews with pornography consumers. Although the sample size of 409 videos (taken from Pornhub's "most popular" and "random" categories) and 122 interviewed people isn't very large, it still made for some interesting findings that often contradicted popular myths and beliefs about the subject.
For example, the quantitative results showcase a lack of evidence that popular pornography has gotten "harder" over time, data that same-sex pornography had relatively higher amounts of aggression than hetero pornography, and that pornography starring certain combinations of ethnic performers are coded with more aggression than others. (I also find it interesting to note here that this research was done before Pornhub started only allowing verified professionals to upload to their site. At the time of this research, Pornhub was probably the biggest intersection of popularity and a lack of moderation on the market, which probably made this a prime source of this.)
The qualitative information based on the interviews showed for example that women were statistically a lot more likely to enjoy aggressive pornography than men, that regular viewers are very much able to distinguish fantasy and their actual sex life so that for most one doesn't influence the other, and that most consumers value consent and pleasure a lot more than aggression, even in the context of BDSM acts.

While this research was not comprehensive enough to be able to confidently generalize the findings on a media-wide scale, it does give some very interesting insight and makes some good points or raises some good questions. It would be great to see similar research done on a larger scale.
 

  

On a very rainy day, I walked through the city to pick up this book with the intriguing subtitle of Novel in Ten Rainy Nights from the library. I didn't really know anything more about it and was ready to go into this literary fiction blind, expecting some nice atmosphere at the very least. But once I started it, I almost put it away before even finishing the first sentence.
The author's writing style favors endless, unfocused multi-cause sentences and so the very first line of this novel goes on and on across the entire first page. Not a great introduction in my eyes.
Unfortunately, this drew itself throughout the entire novel and made a lot of it quite tiring to read. I believe it the style was chosen on purpose to emulate the colloquial way of speaking when you talk to someone face-to-face, but it didn't translate well to written text for me and ended up very tedious instead. I joked before that reading this book very often had the same vibes as being stuck sitting together with your friend's boomer dad who goes on telling you all his mundane life stories while constantly losing his own focus and never getting to the point. Tangent after tangent.

The book is parted into ten chapters, each of which tells a mostly independent story. Most of them aren't very interesting though and there were only two or three of them, mostly in the latter half of the book, that I was actually engaged in, to some degree. Particularly one chapter where the protagonist spends time in the USA and ends up in the middle of a strange cult that thinks he's a person of meaning to them. But even that story pretty much leads to nothing in the end.
At the beginning, the book does allude to some sort of recurring theme about strange people dressed in black, which is most likely what the main title, Dark Company, is at least partially supposed to point at. But that whole thing only appears sporadically throughout the text until it is pretty much forgotten, never really leading up to anything.

The book as a whole felt rather aimless. Every now and then there is a good idea or a moment that captures the cold and dreary German landscapes that the protagonist occasionally finds himself in. But overall it's a very disconnected novel with little focus and a writing style that makes the mostly mundane stories even more tedious. 

Earth and Ashes is a short novel about a man trying to see his son to tell him about the death of their family set during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The author himself was born in Kabul and fled the country when the Soviets invaded, which gives his text some undeniable emotional authenticity.

The story moves rather slowly as most of the time is spent with the main character's inner turmoil trying to process the situation and holding the leftover strings together before confronting his son. It's written in the second person, which I love, narrating the story as if the reader is put in the character's shoes.
For being such a short and confined text, the few characters that appear are all very interesting and the text puts some interesting perspectives on how people deal with sorrow. It's effective and engaging. 

 

This book is a collection of photography from photographer Jaroslav Poncar who has been asked to capture the culture and history of the country in cooperation with local organization. It's very clear that he learned to appreciate and love the country's history and culture, and was willing to even step outside the safety barriers set up for him to document parts of the country that haven't been captured much if at all before.
The book has plenty of amazing pictures showcasing the cities and villages, formed by centuries of international conflict, but also the awesome landscapes of the country. It's broken up into chapters for the different locations that Poncar was able to visit, each with an introduction to the specific place.

I loved seeing the different spectrums of architecture, but also the mountains and valleys of the country. And all the candid pictures of the people inhabiting them.
This is a great visual insight into a country's cultural heritage that's unfortunately mostly known for and portrayed as a ravaged country of violence in a lot of (especially Western) media. 

I'm very grateful that I was able to get a glimpse of Afghan poetry despite not being able to read the language these texts were originally written in. I'm glad there exist translations despite the possibility of exact intentions and worldplay being changed or lost in the process of translating it.
But judging from a brief foreword of Afghan poet and scholar Khalilullah Khalili himself in this publication, I'm assuming he had a bit of an influence on that process which gives me some confidence that these English versions are fairly close to the original expression at least.

As the title makes clear, this is a collection of quatrains by one of the most famous writers in Afghan history. They all reflect on life, many of them being about the passing of time, about aging, death and love. Some of them are even funny, at least to me, like one mentioning the joy of breaking a law.
Some of them are very clever like the one comparing the moon from a sentimental ("everlasting light") and a scientific perspective ("dark planet"). 
My favorite phrase though might have come from a poem about the fact that we are all the same in death, where we become servants to the worms.

I didn't know anything about Anna Kavan before reading this and so I went into this mostly expecting something of an icy adventure with some apocalypse elements of an impending ice age. What I didn't know is how heavy it would be on the themes of abuse and trauma, which made sense the more I read about the author.

It ironically took a bit for me to get warm with Kavan's Ice. The dreamlike narration full of tangential interruptions took some getting used to but once I realized what it was trying to achieve, I was more able to follow the text like it was a dream itself that flows from one state into another without any questioning of itself. Fitting of a text with a protagonist whose delusions become clearer with time.
The plot also took a while for me to make much sense. What starts as the enigmatic search for a woman by the seemingly well-intentioned protagonist eventually becomes more questionable as time goes on and occasional flashes of hateful desires or imaginations pop up until the character eventually fully reveals himself in the end as despicable as the actual antagonist of the story. 
I'm very unsure if what I'm taking away from this book is what was intended by the author, but the story read to me as being about how the entitlement to be the savior of someone else can become abuse by taking away that person's own agency to live their own life. The more the protagonist felt like the nameless woman needed his help to survive and be safe, the less that woman thrived which in turn fed his blind rage. The victim becomes the victim by having that role pushed on her by people that are convinced she needs protection and don't realize their forceful imposition and pitying is actually what enables the misery.

It's an interesting perspective on abusive relationships and how they can be caught in a perpetual spiral. The text builds all of that up with quite a lot of fantastical atmosphere as well. The description of the freezing-over landscapes is amazing. Lots of great language about the ice and snow. The glaciers and frost. The cold comes across the page very, very well and matches the cold subject matter.

The Middle East has always been a gap in my education and I felt like finally fixing that a little bit by reading this very comprising book on the history of Afghanistan. Thomas Barfield covers a very long stretch of time and fills the book with very information-dense text chronicling the major happenings in the country throughout centuries.

It definitely helped me get a better perspective on the country, and presented more than enough interesting people and events for me to want to learn more about. Although it felt to me like the balance was a bit too much on the political history and didn't cover too much of the cultural aspect.
There is so much ground to be covered that I did wish at points that it would look a bit closer at certain events, but that would also make this already fairly thick book even heavier. As a first comprehensive overview of Afghanistan's long and complicated history, it's already very expansive with much to take away from.

Barfield seems genuinely personally invested in the history of the country but manages to tell the story from a rather objective perspective. 

I love the subject of insomnia, especially with a sleep physician as the protagonist. But the writing was rather dull and it couldn't keep my attention after a while.
Might give this a second chance in the future when I'm in the mood for seemingly lightweight contemporary writing.

Conceptually still interesting but I just never really got drawn into it. Might return to it someday.