Week 37
Well, we are fully into September now. Somehow I managed to read some books this week despite also hosting my partner’s parents, which — y’know what, we don’t have time, let’s just get to some books.
#57) COME AS YOU ARE by Emily Nagoski
This is not a fiction book. I’m going rogue.
In seriousness, though, I think this book is great. I really enjoyed Emily Nagoski’s BURNOUT, and this was not a disappointment as a second book from her. It goes so deep into the science of pleasure and sex, and I found the information really amazing and insightful.
If you’re like me (and the majority of people in the world, let’s be honest) and have absorbed the messaging from the media and from peers/family about sex and pleasure, and what that’s meant to look like, I recommend reading this book. Hell, even if you think you’ve left some of those messages behind, take a look at this, I think you might still learn something new.
This book focuses on cis women, acknowledging as it does so that there just aren’t enough studies about this kind of thing with trans women and non-women with vaginas. However, even if you aren’t a cis woman, I think there’s valuable information in how our bodies process pleasure and how to think about desire.
Also, I just really like Nagoski’s writing and approach to these things. Her number one message is that everyone is normal, that there is a wide spectrum of normal, and that however your body works is okay. She even acknowledges that ace people exist! Hell yeah!
#58) THE TAKING OF JAKE LIVINGSTON by Ryan Douglass
Jake Livingston is a teenage medium, able to see and sometimes interact with ghosts and the spirit world. Therefore, it falls to him to solve the mystery when a ghost apparently starts killing locals.
Let’s start with the things I liked about this book: the world-building. The way that Jake’s powers work and the development that is done around how the spirit world works is really interesting. There’s some fun bits of horror, and body horror specifically, that come in here too, and I really enjoyed that. Also, Jake is a pretty interesting character in how he relates to this, as well as being one of the only Black kids in a white school, and the romance was pretty cute.
Onto the things I didn’t care for: …kind of everything else? A major element of this book revolves around the antagonist being a school shooter, and to be honest that just kind of doesn’t work for me. I’m not an expert on the phenomenon, but something about the way in which the character is depicted as mentally ill, sympathetic but also not, sat really strangely with me.
There’s also some weird pacing, and I felt a little like plot threads got picked up and dropped unevenly, but that was honestly less of an issue than trying to figure out what kind of tone or message we were trying to hit with said school shooter character. I’m not even necessarily against the idea of what (I think?) this book was trying to do, it just didn’t hit the mark for me, alas.