Idea > Recent Status Updates

The first chapter alone didn’t tell me anything that I didn’t already know. Shrayana Bhattacharya wrote an entire book on gender politics in the Indian labour force. But it is nice to have a buffet of ideas to pick from, especially contextualised to India and as much as I hated it, by a man in a position of authority. I hope men will read this book and listen.

I started an ARC of this book and was thrown off by the description of sexual assault at the start. It seemed so incongruous with the blurb and cover. But the AppleTV series just came out so I decided to give it another try.

The book is so much, so much better than the show! This has to be the mother of all STEMinist fiction.

How ugly are we as writers that we are drawn to the most morbid aspects of the living to feast on it to great acclaim? I am really disliking the characters of this story but it all rings so true, I can’t look away.

How many women have been raped but are unable to acknowledge it? And worse, live with their rapists and have children with them?

“Athena’s original text is almost embarrassingly biased.”

“We switch one of the white bullies to a Chinese character and one of the more vocal Chinese labourers to a sympathetic white farmer.”

Chapter 1 made me want to spit on the protagonist for her disgusting jealousy. This one just wants to make me scream at the causalness with which white people shrug off discomfort after centuries of oppression of others.

Jealous people punish others for the universe’s indifference to them. Everybody deserves good things but nobody is owed good things. Jealousy is such an ugly, murderous thing to nurture.

This book is such a head trip right on the heels of CIRCE (Madeline Miller) and ELEKTRA (Jennifer Saint). I encountered Helen & Clytemnestra in both and now there's a more head-on collision with their stories from within their perspectives. It's a crazy high.

What a gorgeous collection so far!

It's never in doubt that this is a satire, a critique of Big Tobacco & its lobbyists. This is great craftsmanship considering the story is through the POV of the cigarette lobby's chief spokesperson.

This book intrigued me because motherhood tends to be a fount of inspiration for writers & poets but fatherhood runs strangely dry. Loving the sentimental male vulnerability in each poem.

I thought sonnets were all love poems. What a pleasant surprise to discover they're not. The archaic English takes me some getting used to (especially since I'm also reading translations of varied Asian poetry which prefers a simpler style). I'm dipping into a collection of different books from this series, so these differences make for a tasty poetic meal.

I read two poems at a time. No more. They're lovely.

Re-reading this. I last read it in March 2009 on a vacation, after having loved the Walsh sisters books. This one was....very heavy, even compared to the themes of addiction, cheating & grief that were covered in those other books.

I had a personally traumatic experience similar to the book's central focus so I didn't dare pick this one up again (though I've read all the others multiple times over the years).

I'm giving up this book. The early part, introducing the cooking teacher was spectacular. But once the class actually started, it was hard to stay interested in the boring characters and the amateurish writing. And the food? Haven't gotten to it yet, other than murdering a few crabs, which is apparently the most important cooking lesson to start with.

I did not like the chapter 'State of Emergency' because it told me nothing new and felt like it was sensationalising extreme cases. But I understand that there's a place for this in a discourse about DV. It's entirely about how the Australian system is inadequate to deal with DV. We know and it's no different, even worse in some other places.

Just finished the hardest chapter but also the one with biggest revelations to date - the one on Female Violence. My big takeaway is that most violent women are not just hitting, they're hitting back. Also in 'violent resistance' (useful term), women usually take responsibility and violent men usually don't.

Much respect for the clarity & empathy shown by the writer.

Barely a couple of pages into the chapter on women's violence and I'm already battling my own biases (I use this word in a statistical sense of being inclined in one direction rather than truly objective). It's really hard to, when the narrative has been of a tormented, abused woman victim only and even that has been gaslit for decades. Let's hope the book keeps its objective focus.

The chapter on children was hard to read. Coming right after two objective chapters that were more about intellectual concepts, this one dropped us right into brutal cases from the most devastating point of view - of children bystanders & victims. It also brought out how kids maybe be double victims because they're forced to intervene or made into shields. So hard.