aka @kingrat@sfba.social. I'm following a lot of bookwyrm accounts, since that seems to be the only way to get reviews from larger servers to this small server. I make a lot of Bookwyrm lists. I will like & boost a lot of reviews that come across my feed. I will follow most bookwyrm accounts back if they review & comment. Social reading should be social.
"Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to …
interesting for the historical aspect I guess?
3 stars
You can see the way the DNA of this book shows up in other, later texts, particularly Matthew Desmond’s Evicted. Reading this in 2025 is interesting because so little has changed—except that things have perhaps gotten even more dire, with 25 additional years of increased costs and the minimum wage only having risen minimally since then. However, I just wasn’t particularly compelled by Ehrenreich’s time “slumming it” as a low-wage worker. I’ve been a low-wage worker, and in my opinion having an “outsider” tell this story and find ways to make it palatable and legible to the class of people who read the NYT makes it less incisive. The best parts of this book are the additional research and footnotes, and there’s not enough of that for me to recommend this book over something like Maid (which offers a better, more visceral personal narrative) or Evicted (which avoids the trap …
You can see the way the DNA of this book shows up in other, later texts, particularly Matthew Desmond’s Evicted. Reading this in 2025 is interesting because so little has changed—except that things have perhaps gotten even more dire, with 25 additional years of increased costs and the minimum wage only having risen minimally since then. However, I just wasn’t particularly compelled by Ehrenreich’s time “slumming it” as a low-wage worker. I’ve been a low-wage worker, and in my opinion having an “outsider” tell this story and find ways to make it palatable and legible to the class of people who read the NYT makes it less incisive. The best parts of this book are the additional research and footnotes, and there’s not enough of that for me to recommend this book over something like Maid (which offers a better, more visceral personal narrative) or Evicted (which avoids the trap Ehrenreich fell into by building the book’s narrative off of interviews rather than centering Desmond’s experience, and offers more background research).
I don’t regret reading it and it wasn’t a bad book, but it does surprise me how often this still gets recommended even now when it really doesn’t feel like it has much to say.
Also, the random fatphobic diatribe at the end of the book was so fucking annoying lmfao. Absolutely took me out of the book and made me roll my eyes, especially since I’m 99% sure we already had research indicating that poverty and fatness are deeply correlated in the US when this was written. Ehrenreich really shows her whole ass by denigrating the (likely similarly poor and overworked!) “wide-body” Wal-Mart customers in comparison to herself and her thin coworkers who are apparently more worthy of empathy. I didn’t put the book down after reading this bit because honestly it’s kind of to be expected from a middle-class white woman writing in 1999/2000, and also because it’s from a section where she emphasizes that the work seems to be making her more cruel and less empathetic. But that bit honestly just feels like punching down and also a missed opportunity to bring in some interesting research about how pursuing health, including a socially acceptable thin body, is not available to the working poor, and how being fat opens one up to additional discrimination and further poverty.
Basically: there are better books on this topic out there, by people with more complex lived experience. This book might be enlightening if you have never worked for minimum wage or cleaned toilets for a living, but if you have—skip it, you know more based on your own experience than Ehrenreich could have possibly put into this book.
I easily topped my reading goal, but with a little over a month to go I don't think I'm going to reach the number of books I read last year, 78. I'm only at 55 so far.
1940- As England prepares to fight the Nazis, three very different women answer the call …
Very engaging
5 stars
The story alternates between the war and 1947, just before Princess Elizabeth's marriage to Prince Philip. Three women work at Bletchley Park breaking Axis codes during the war, and hate each other bitterly by 1947. One of them is in an asylum by that point, and thinks she was put there by a Bletchley Park traitor. We see how they came together, how they fell apart, and wonder whether they'll come together by the end. While the plot isn't a masterpiece, it is good enough to not be in the way of what are extremely rich characters and amazing historical detail.
1940- As England prepares to fight the Nazis, three very different women answer the call …
The experience of listening to an audiobook is definitely not the same as reading. I'll happily count it as reading, but with a good narrator, the story is a bit more immersive.
I'm 3 chapters from the end. We're about to get to the big inflection point. And I had to pause this, because I don't know that I'm ready to handle it if the bad guy gets the upper hand and wins. This never happens to me with words on paper.
(And I know the good guys are gonna win here. This is not the kind of book that's going to build up all the characters and then end all of them on a sour note. But still, I have to pause.)
After Kit’s mother dies, her need for connection leads her to make friends with Bella, a young newcomer in town.
The writing is excellent, and Kit is written with great tenderness. She feels like a real little girl in a real world. As her story meanders back and forth, the blanks get filled in, and the reader gets sucker punched more than once. I’ll be reading more Verble.
Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn …
leave the cat alone
No rating
Content warning
harm to animals
In the story "Christmas", Yulia murders her cat because her wallet is stolen, and she needs to feed her boyfriend Oleg. This is noir, where some pretty fucked up stuff happens, but this is the sort of thing I just don't want to read. On the DNF pile, even though there's still a third of a book's worth of short stories left.
Daughter. Duhitár-. Dustr. Dukte. Listen to these English, Sanskrit, Armenian and Lithuanian words, all meaning …
well-told
4 stars
Tracing language's past through archaeology, genetics, and linguistics, reconstructing the unlikely-seeming breadth of similarities and ecological-driven differences and additions over millennia. A well-crafted and word-loving history.
They travelled into the unknown and left themselves behind . . .
Professor Arton Daghdev …
Maybe I'm just not a fan of the prison planet genre, but this one does get pretty good in the second half
No rating
For a while I thought I was accidentally rereading the author's other prison-on-another-planet book (Cage of Souls) which I just didn't get into and gave up halfway through, but maybe I should have stuck with it, because I also found this one slow-going and uninterestingly written for the first half but then it really got going and I thought the writing was almost poetry in the final chapters. My new theory is he's a different writer once the extraterrestrial biology gets going and the boring human-on-human preliminaries are out of the way.
