samarakroeger's reviews
585 reviews

kinda juvenile but still fun nonetheless 

happy to redeem my pride month romcom track record!  I haven’t been in the mood for romance much lately, but when the pms sets in… tears will be shed (warranted or not).  while parts of this were definitely pretty cringey (and ~quiRkY~), I’m really glad I finally got around to picking this up. and tbh seeing that it was published in 2020 makes the harry potter references moderately less concerning (p sure JK hadn’t fully gone off the deep end publicly at the time of writing — it would be a wild thing to include without caveats in a queer book now). 

wanted to like this book so much but I genuinely hated the writing style!  plus, baseball is an inherently boring sport (which I find kind of charming tbh), and allll the baseball talk did not hold my interest.  love the rep, though 

I think Isabel Wilkerson’s writing just isn’t for me.  there’s an ungodly amount of repetition in this book and it seems like it just wasn’t properly edited.  She did SO much research for this project and then presented it in a disjointed and fairly convoluted manner. It would have helped to either split up each of the three narratives into distinct sections OR for her to go through everything in chronological order, interspersing the wider context with the personal interviews. I disliked Caste for very similar reasons — except that book was even more repetitive. There’s only so many redundant topic sentences one casual reader can take, you know?  If you were worried we forgot the same basic biographical information we’ve been told several times already, maybe it would be prudent to edit it for length … then we’d read faster and have less time to forget it in the first place. 

I do think that the choice to follow three different people who represented larger trends was a good one, I just wished it was organized as a narrative with more of a natural flow and structure. I’ll stick to listening to Wilkerson’s podcast appearances in the future (which she is actually very good at). 

5 star information/research presented in a 2 star format = 3.5 I guess

horrifying. never got over how the unofficial miners were referred to as “artisanal miners” — what a euphemism!

anyways, this is a must-read and will stay with me, I’m sure. 

I really enjoyed this!  It was the perfect book to read in bed on a lazy morning.  Helen DeWitt is, indeed, quite witty. 

Absolutely obsessed with the font size of these New Directions hardbacks - I feel like a child. 

‘twas decent but I would prefer longer in-depth pop science essays instead of tidbits.  don’t think I really learned anything new here. 

this is essentially the ideal format for science nonfiction for me — it’s readable and engaging while it shows you a different way to sense the world around us. I think the Ed Yong hype is real.  Super excited to get to I Contain Multitudes soon. 

my nomination for most disappointing book of the year!!!

I’m kind of obsessed with Mark O’Connell. he’s quickly becoming my new favorite narrative nonfiction writer. 

would love to get an update to this book — there’s a lot to say about the pandemic and the rise of AI.