shane_the_reading_rat's reviews
1004 reviews

stellar memoir, zoomed through it and could hardly put it down :D ended a tad abruptly but thats okay
[the rest of this review is more personal, so feel free to just read the above and skip the rest if you’re not interested in me yapping lmao.]
while i grew up in a different-but-slightly-similar environment to Abby Stein (conservative  christianity for me), a lot of what she said felt like it heavily paralleled my own journey as a trans man. as a kid i vaguely knew that i was called and treated as a girl, but figured eventually people would just realize they had gotten it wrong and i was actually a boy. obviously didnt work that way, which upon my realization of that in middle school sent me down a spiral of depression and anger at everything and everyone (partially exacerbated by getting to play the beast in a beauty and the beast play in 6th grade and realizing “oh. that was incredible. i want to be called he and him all the time. ive never been happier.” and then having to go back to Normal Girl Life). im just glad i had internet access and was able to 1: fucking deconstruct the homophobia and transphobia that had been drilled into me 2:figure out i was trans and didn’t have to just be confused and angry for longer than i did.
thank you abby stein for writing this memoir, it hit me hard

i really did not like this :/
i was much more interested in analysis of the manosphere than the other topics in this book, and the description makes it seem like it will be substantially about the manosphere and modern masculinity, but it’s really not. the three large topics here (Brodeur’s life, history of gyms/weightlifting, and manosphere) are not blended well to say the least.
this also had a writing style i deeply disliked. lots of overusage of the term “beefcake” and i dont know if i have ever seen butts mentioned more in one book.
.5 star because there were a few spots where Brodeur had some good insight. but not many.

gonna be honest, i genuinely have almost no clue what happened in this story. despite that being almost never my vibe, i already want to reread this but physically?? so honestly my rating of this might rise in the future.
interesting to have read this book about murdering a ceo at a time when there was Much Discussion about,,, yknow,,, a man who did That who shares a name with a very popular nintendo character. if you know what i mean 

this book was very much a fever dream and again i still barely know what to make of it. also vico ortiz’s narration is overall fine, but i might just have to avoid books narrated by them because of how often they mispronounce words (mispronunciations take me out of the story so badly). this has been consistent in both audiobooks ive listened to narrated by them :/
anyway, overall liked this but it was hard to get back into every time i started listening again and the writing is very blurry, if that makes sense. but as someone who has recently begun watching Arcane i really really can see the comparisons of Metal From Heaven to Arcane

picked this up on a whim from my library recently, i knew almost nothing about the Blue Beetle character but got this because it was made by the same duo who made one of my favorite graphic novels ever, Frontera
i really loved this!! my favorite superhero stories are ones that can balance real-world issues with superhero antics, and this did that splendidly. this also had some of my favorite ever commentary on the right-wing pipeline (in a way that wasn't cringy to read).
would definitely recommend this even if you're overall not much of a superhero fan, because discussion of the right wing pipeline and immigration seemed to me like the main topic and the superhero stuff secondary, and i thought it was done extremely well

still just as incredible as the first time i read it <3

genuinely scarier than any horror book ive ever read. jesus christ
fair warning this book is incredibly america-centric, there is nearly zero discussion of how any other country would fare. thought that was disappointing. i also had a massive side-eye when this book used an interview of Yeonmi Park done by Joe Rogan for a quote :/
overall though i think this is a really fascinating (and also haunting) book

look it might just be because i went through a breakup recently but THIS BOOK HITTTTT i cried at that fucking ending

this was pretty alright. i loved XOXO dearly, so mentally i did compare this a lot. this imo was just not as good as XOXO, i love the world of this series but admittedly Sori and Nathaniel were just not characters i was massively into in XOXO.
getting into spoiler territory here,

i just didn’t like how jealous Sori was of Hyemi and Nathaniel hanging out. that was weird and ick. jealousy and possessiveness in a romance gross me out. it was kinda a weird love triangle plot that was resolved by Hyemi saying she will love Nathaniel from afar “like a fan”, which. is just kinda icky.

some of the writing was just not for me (mainly things Nathaniel would say that were meant to be romantic but just made me cringe, i swear to you i read some of this in public and made a full 😖 face at some of what he said cause jesus christ)
anyway this was overall pretty sweet and the writing flowed well, just didn’t have the giggling-kicking-my-feet energy like XOXO

my final book of 2024!
i thought this was lovely, my only thing is that i could stand for it to be a little longer. but that didn’t hinder my enjoyment :D

i was writing a very long review and sadly it did not save. so the gist of what i was writing is: i hate the main character, she is so apathetic that i think if straight up nuclear war happened she wouldnt blink an eye, and the treatment of the disabled child she nannies for is horrific (including her referring to him as “the syndrome” an uncountable number of times, comparing him to an “amphibian monster”,  describing his looks as “his eyes long slits in his shapeless face”, and abandoning him at her apartment for several hours at a time). the book ends with him (his name is Mauro) being sent back to the countryside with his mother, to the place where it seems implied earlier in the book that he is being abused and neglected, while he cries and desperately tries to stay with the narrator. im incredibly mad at this book. the only reason it is 1.25 stars and not just 1 is because i thought the pandemic narrative was mildly interesting.