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This book is pretty unique, I'll give it that. I did love the language, which is poetic and raw, queer in the best kind of way. Even though it is generally not my style, I also enjoyed being carried through this journey, sentence after sentence, without the need to fully understand every sentence, of knowing what happens at which point in the story, where a character comes from and how they end up.

Is Eileen incredibly pretentious when it comes to poetry? Hell yes. Is it yet another book by a writer enamored with the myth of their own creative bubble, and very proud of having hung out with the right crowds, doing drugs and having sex in New York? Also yes. Does Eileen, who strike me as a really sweet person, come across as a touch navel-gazing and emotionally unavailable (with one exception, Rosie the dog, that was adorable)? Absolutely. Do they seem to have a sense of humour about it? To be fair, yes they do.

The word matrescence makes me think of a growing appendage, a bulbous tentacle shooting off from someone’s side. It is however, a -scence as in adolescence, not excrescence: a phase of change in a person’s life. The book’s story is that becoming a mother is a tremendous change, physically, psychologically and socially, and not enough fuss is made about. Maybe this is because of a collective effort to undervalue women’s contributions, skills and sufferings, maybe because of a paternalistic sense that not talking about the most gruesome and taxing aspects of motherhoods will mean more women sign up for it. So far, so good.

The book waves together accounts of scientific research on the topic, some literature-informed reflections on the social structures of motherhood, bits of her personal experience as a mother of three, and sketches of motherhood in the animal kingdom. I enjoyed these different ingredients to different degrees. The author is a science journalist, meaning she’s pretty good at explaining biological research, but I did wish for more depth and details: just when things were becoming interesting, she would move on to a different topic. I may be a harsh critique on the social science front, but these pages felt too superficial, and maybe like she did her homework but didn’t have anything original to say about them. Her personal experience sections were…a roller coaster. Depending on the topic, I alternative thought that she was able to articulate my own fears, that she is a straight lady and god have mercy on them, or that she was genuinely in need of help and should be urgently talking to a counselor (a personal one, but also a marriage one!) rather than writing a book.

This sounds like a mean review, and I don’t mean it. Motherhood does sound tough and it is certainly good that someone writes about this. Plus, I’m sorry, Lucy Jones, that you had to go through all of this.

I read this book years ago and, if you had asked me, I would have said it's a book about Kay's experience growing up black in Scotland, and then embarking on a quest to trace her birth parents. I suppose this is more or less what the official blurb suggests. On this second read, I found that these two threads are kind of secondary, and the book could instead be described as an exploration of what it means to be a daughter. Kay loves her adoptive parents to bits, and that love really shapes her memory of the past (the way they stood up for her in every way they could), her experience of the present (her conflicting emotions meeting her birth parents and coming to terms with how insubstantial a relation based on genetics is), and her outlook on the future (as she sees herself taking on more and more of a caring role in relation to her aging mum and dad). In many ways, the book is not particular complex in its plot, language or insights, but it just gives one a warm feeling, and Kay seems so fucking lovely!

Four British women, each miserable in her own way, rent an Italian castle together. They don't know each other, don't particularly like each other, and are only motivated by the desire to leave behind the rain and their husbands / suitors. Ms Wilkins is a young housewife, married to a stingy man, who often loses the thread and cannot filter her thoughts. Ms Arbuthnot is a religious woman who feels abandoned by her husband, and seeks refuge in her pious work. Lady Caroline is a young aristocrat, so beautiful that men cannot help fall in love, to her great frustration. Mrs. Fisher is an elderly woman who lives stuck in her memories, preferring the company of dead intellectuals and politicians she met in the past to that of any living person. The Italian sun transforms all of them, but the undeniable cheesiness is only kept at bay by the author's light sarcasm and humor.

As I write this review, I'm once again finding myself on the goodreads page for this book (no idea why I do this, like I want to check my own taste against that of 'the people'?) and I'm very surprised to find that The ministry of time is an extremely polarising book. One star ('I'm thankful to this book for providing some needed perspective on what a bad book is'), or five star ('the author is a genius'), kind of thing. I would have thought it would be a solid 3-4 star crowd-pleaser. To me, it reads like one of those addictive Netflix series with a quirky plot, fun dialogues, and just enough nods to social issues to make it possible to watch without feeling completely gross afterwards.

The basic plot (very minor spoiler) revolves around a young, British-Cambodian public officer, whose job is to help / monitor a British explorer that has just been kidnapped from the 19th century, and ends up falling in love with him. The story touches upon some 'serious' issues: colonialism and its effects on the present, migration and experiences of outsiderness, individual agency and responsibilities within state apparatuses, climate change. It does so in a way that is both clever and relatively superficial. Intentionally, I think, because the author's main goal is to write a fun book, that blends time-travel novels, some elements of a spy thriller, and others of horny fan-fiction.

Female Masculinity has become a classic, the kind of book that gets reprinted for its 20th anniversary, with a new preface. And yet, somehow the notion of female masculinity still remains relatively marginal and provocative, certainly in the mainstream, but even within queer circles. At least, this is how it feels to me, even as a (somewhat) masculine woman. What does it mean for women to express masculinity in ways that are original rather than derivative? How does the category of 'masculine' reshuffles division between, on the one hand, dykes and straight (masculine) women and, on the other hand, dykes and trans men? What are the politics of performing masculinity, vs rejecting any stable gender position, vs becoming male? and are these even political practices, or expressions of some inner identity, or both?

Halberstam explores these questions by analysising different cultural artefacts: artistic photos of butches and trans people, the notes of 19th century doctors and therapists, the writings of John Radclyffe Hall, and his friends and lovers, Stone Butch Blues, the (mostly academic) clashes between dykes and female-to-male trans theorists, drag king performances, and films representing masculine women.

The main weakness of the book is, in my opinion, that Halberstam loves to pick fights with other scholars. In some cases, he clearly has no respect of his adversaries and their ideas, which he represents so sweepingly as to lose the reader's trust (example: 'white lesbian feminism', never defined, and at points seemingly encompassing - or 'brainwashing' even Audrey Lorde). In other cases, he is very sensitive and self-questioning (example: the mailinglist controversies around F2M) - which obviously is a better premise for thinking. In all cases, however, the meaningfulness of his reflections risks getting lost in the squabble.

Stylistically, I understand this is an academic product, but I do find it a bit of a shame that the book isn't written in a slightly more engaging way: Halberstam never abandons his rigorous scholarly register, though he cannot help soften a bit in his scholarly exegesis of Flaming Ears.

All in all, the book made me think of masculinity in a whole new way, but even I find myself thinking: wow, this is a bit navel-gazing, let's stop thinking about gender and burn down a bank instead.

Nada Elia sets out to accomplish something very necessary and ambitious: chart the connections between interrelated struggles across the globe, with a focus on the connections between Palestine and US indigenous struggles. In give-or-take 150 pages, she touches upon the problems with white feminism, pink washing, policing, land appropriation, health and reproductive rights, Apartheid, environmentalism and conservation, and food sovereignty, among others.

Necessarily, the book stays on the very surface: mentioning a given issue, sometimes providing an example, and then moving on. I get that the book is for a general, not particularly-informed audience, who may never had thought about these issues before, and that simply mentioning the connection can motivate them to do their own research. But if this is the idea, then I still lack a bit more rigorousness and precision in explaining concepts and phenomena around which entire literature exists. Some examples: when Elia discusses land restitution and the quest for indigenous sovereignty, at points she claims this means independence, at points she suggests indigenous activism aims to transcend a nation-state framework. These are two completely different things. If the situation in North America is somewhat similar to Latin America, then both positions exist and are a matter of debate and division within indigenous movements; but Elia never gets to this level of nuance, and indigenous movements are always united and right. This sort of imprecision / lack of interest for all that is grey, uncertain or worth debating also surfaces in a lot of throw-away comment, as when, in a fully-justified and righteous critique of the US settler-colonial mindset, she throws under the bus apple pie, on the ground that apples are not originally from the Americas (really? then no tomatoes for Italy, no chilli peppers for India, no sugar for the Caribbeans?), and the pie is 'more calorific than nutritious' (whose apple pie? what's wrong with calories? what does that even mean?). Nada, let the apples be.

Taking the time to explain in a simple but nuanced way how Palestine connects to other struggles would be an extraordinary accomplishment, and one that requires a lot of reading, time and dedication on the part of the author, because explaining things well always does. I don't feel Nada Elia quite manages.