hollyway's reviews
526 reviews

Imagine you're sitting with your cool ass grandma and she's telling you all her stranger-than-fiction anecdotes, all the history she's witnessed first-hand, all the wisdom she's accrued over a lifetime - and she's doing so with such grace and humility that you would never guess she was a literal living legend. Just a wonderful book, and it is such a delight to see an icon of women's lib who - as far as I can tell - is a true intersectional feminist, which is to say a true feminist full stop. Steinem is the real deal.

I love pondering questions with no answers hand in hand with one of the literary greats. 

Not giving a star rating because it's not really that kind of book, but this was very powerful. I randomly came across this in an op shop and although it is now 25 years out of date, it is incredibly informative and of course absolutely gut-wrenching. Sympathy is not a strong enough word for what I feel for the horrors women suffer under the Iranian regime, nor is admiration a strong enough word for the astounding bravery of the women who have spent decades fighting back.

These poems are well-constructed and I'm glad I read them, but ultimately just not really my cup of tea.

A very strong 4 stars, and I honestly think it would have been 5 had I read it at a different time. As it is, this just happened to be what I was reading as life stuff got in the way, which made for a strange mix of this book being so good and readable that I could still use it to distract myself (when I usually can't read during times of acute mental turmoil) but also not connecting fully because I was still somewhat distracted/dissociated. So maybe I will revisit this one day, but regardless I still really loved it. Sarah Waters is just so good at characters and pulling you into a specific setting. I am a bit sad I couldn't appreciate this fully but I am also glad I had it to keep me company the last few days. C'est la vie.

I love works that examine desire and obsession, and I think Acts of Desperation is a worthy addition to that conversation. Megan Nolan uses simple, easily-digestible language to convey some very bold and nuanced ideas, and overall it really resonated with me. 

This is both a great companion piece to Nanette and a fantastic memoir in its own right. Gadsby's personality shines through in every line. A lot of topics are covered but I found it to be an especially insightful portrait of their experience as an autistic person. Overall, a really solid memoir and engaging read.

Really beautiful. My brain is not totally gelling with poetry right now for some reason, but I still loved many of these poems and I'm looking forward to connecting with them more deeply in the future, as well as continuing to explore more Rilke in general.

Nothing hurts quite like giving three stars to a five star prediction. This is far from a bad book, but the blurb sells it as a ghostly love story which really sets the reader up with false expectations. Yes, Blanca falls in love with George, but that is not what the book is "about." I was anticipating a literary meditation on love and longing and wanting desperately what you cannot have. I was anticipating great atmosphere, tension, yearning. Basically I was anticipating and wanting something that this book simply is not. And it's fine that it's not that, I just wish the blurb did a better job of conveying the kind of novel this actually is, which is essentially a series of vignettes about various characters, with Blanca (the ghost) as our voyeuristic narrator. Unfortunately that's a style that is more miss than hit for me anyway, but I also think that Stevens failed to tie these vignettes together to create a cohesive theme or point. There were quite a few moments where her writing shone, but I never quite felt as though she'd really created a world for me to step into, nor was I given much of a reason to care about the characters whose lives we were catching glimpses of.

If you like books that hop around between characters and timelines, this is probably worth a read. It is well-written and at times insightful. But if you're interested in this because you're expecting a tense sapphic love story please save yourself the time and read a Sarah Waters book instead.

I wasn't intending for this to be my first Colette, but it's what happened to cross my path first so here we are. This didn't massively move me but I liked it. It was interesting to see a 1920s perspective on ageing from a female character and writer. There were some great lines throughout (including a rather painful final sentence) which makes me excited to get to more of her work.