graveyardpansy's reviews
556 reviews

definitely more interesting when you know the philosophical context - really enjoyed this on my second read!

2.5 stars? i guess I wish I’d read this earlier in life, bc reading it now all i see are the aspects i don’t love. it’s not bad, it’s just not for me. e.g. repeated use of the phrase “gender nonbinary,” harry potter refs, a few plot lines I felt were unresolved, etc. the bit on biology and gender seems outdated/misinformed at best and pathologizing at worst. also felt kinda weird about the lack of /reflection/ on some things — like how ey talked a lot about writing sexual/romantic/etc fanfic abt real people, which is kinda controversial, and the idea of autoandrophilia, which seems like it comes from Blanchard ???? anyways i liked a lot of the art, esp the single-panel pages, and I do think Kobabe is very talented! this just didn’t hit me now like I think it may have if I’d read it like 5 years ago, before it even came out. I’m glad this book is important to so many people, but I just feel pretty (shrug) about it.

edit: reread for class, noticed a few more bits I didn't love.

De Beauvoir and Camus were my favourites, but this reader generally has its ups an downs.

3.5 - very middle-of-the-road vamp horror imo. i think epistolary horror has a lot of potential but is hard to do well, which is one of this book’s weaknesses b/c the voices/tones of each POV just isn’t distinctive enough for me. one of the things i love abt vamp horror is its anticapitalist potential, which this book also doesn’t live up to. it blatantly does the tiniest bit of anticapitalist stuff but it’s not actually inherent to or rooted in the plot or characters. speaking of which, this is almost entirely plot-driven — there are a lot of characters but none of them are really interesting or have a meaningful arc. i had fun, but if i wasn’t interested in vampires i don’t think i really would’ve. also, this didn’t really hit the marks of a horror for me.

3.5 stars — enjoyable overall, but imo the plot moves too fast (which also means the characters were not developed enough for me to truly enjoy) bc the book was pretty short (i read it in about an hour.) i would’ve loved more environmental details but did really love the vibes. it was generally well-written and easy to follow. if you’re looking for a quick horror with eerie imagery and a little ickiness, this definitely isn’t bad!

this was pretty good!! i’m naturally skeptical about academic analysis of queercore, but Nault’s acknowledgement (and perhaps shared feeling) of that fear made this a lot more enjoyable for me. while i don’t think i really learned a /lot/ due to my previous knowledge and love of queercore, there were a few things new to me, and i really appreciated Nault’s explicit inclusion of fat, disability, and race politics, as well as discussion of transness as influential to even early queercore. my main critique is that this book doesn’t feel like it has a set purpose. at the end, Nault writes that he wants it to give readers what queercore artists gave to him. an academia-entrenched book doesn’t feel like the right medium for that to me. the book discusses history and places in a relatively accessible way, but also brings in Foucault, Freud, and complex ideas about sex and assimilation that don’t seem super accessible in the way that, imo, queercore should be. as someone already familiar with queer academia, i did feel like i was the right audience for this, but it didn’t do for me what queercore did for Nault — bc /queercore/ did for me what queercore did for him!

but also, because of the serious lack of scholarship around queercore, this was very much appreciated by me personally

3.5 — i like both her other memoirs better. but this is def still enjoyable !

i don’t think this would make sense if i hadn’t already read fun home, and the added context of having read both the collected DTWOF and also bechdel’s newest book also helped. unfortunately i am not a psychoanalysis fan.