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This was fine but it was not that exciting -- not very new! Read it for work, but I think there are more interesting novels I want to write about for the fiction part of my book

Read for work (3.5 really), but there was a lot I really really liked in there, and it's a rich text to analyse. This book might be the thing that takes me into talking about ecologies in my work (who would have thought)

yeah very nice way of putting everything together — and so many threads to pull! Also i couldn’t really make my mum read full surrogacy now but immediately recommended this one!

Owning up to the fact that this was my first time reading it entirely, as a book, not in pieces, not on a pdf with my eyes scanning for the bits that I knew I was looking for. It's for a piece of writing I'm working on, and it was actually a really rewarding read. I learned things in Robin Kelley's preface, and I really liked the Lautréamont passages (mainly bc of a long standing love for 19th century French lit and for the specific lice poem in Le Chant de Maldoror) - for some reason not one of the bits that was captured and transmitted to me in my peripheral/plundering/utilitarian relationship to the text until now. I also really liked the fun gothic imagery, and the surrealist engagement with the abject throughout (looking like a communion wafer dipped in shit/condemned to chewing on Hitler's vomit/the idea, an annoying fly)

I have been looking forward to Sophie Lewis's latest for years, ever since I first heard her speak about it at some talk or other online, under the lost title "the feminism of fools". It did not disappoint. It's rich, uncompromising, very well structured (which matters I think when writing such a sprawling history). It made me excited about the age of feminism we're currently in, gave me some tools, made me think about the importance of drawing and holding anti-fascist lines. Personal highlights were the Pornophobe, the Blackshirt, the Pro-Life Feminist (to my surprise) and the Adult Human Female. Obviously everybody should read this.

3.5. I liked this a lot — many of the ideas really appealed to me as someone who spends a lot of time in the kitchen (recipe cooking as translation, relationship between the self/the body and the food we make for others). I also learned a lot about the Odyssey lol. It’s definitely going to make me think differently about cooking!

3.5. Read this in one sitting this evening, Ruari picked it up for me at a second hand bookshop in London. The beginning is a super helpful introduction, and in a way really reassured me that I am not just making things up when I identify the intellectual tradition I most operate in as one of British cultural studies specifically. Towards the end of the book, by attempting to cover too much, it somewhat descended into chaos, but overall I like this funky format and it was a lovely evening read (my one has Mona Lisa with a bindi on the cover, for some reason)

4.5 really! read for the new sociology book club! It was very very good, gripping, incredibly harrowing at times. The bits on Hollywood and representation really hit, and I hope to think through them some more. I thought it was funny that the sympathizer had to remind us that he had a big penis at least two or three times, including when he was about to get horribly tortured.