Hotspur91

1544 points

0% overlap

My Taste

Reading...

56%

19%

Before and After the Book Deal: A Writer’s Guide to Finishing, Publishing, Promoting, and Surviving Your First Book

42%

Hotspur91 made progress on...

John of John

Douglas Stuart

56%

Hotspur91 made progress on...

Blue Lily, Lily Blue

Maggie Stiefvater

Hotspur91 TBR'd a book

Borealis

Aisha Sabatini Sloan

An intimate essay on the art of Alaskan glaciers, memory, loneliness, and blackness in wild spaces. In Borealis, Aisha Sabatini Sloan writes about a solitary summer visit to Alaska, observing glaciers, shorelines, mountains, bald eagles, and herself. As she studies her surroundings, the myth of Alaska—excitement, exploration, possibility—is complicated by boredom and isolation, and her attempts to set down place in writing are suffused with nostalgia and anxiety. The first title commissioned for the Spatial Species series, Borealis is a shapeshifting logbook of Sabatini Sloan’s experiences as a queer woman contemplating her Blackness in the wilderness and in the mysteries of art-making.

Hotspur91 TBR'd a book

Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian

A thrilling book about the abounding queerness of the natural world that challenges our expectations of what is normal, beautiful, and possible.Growing up, Patricia Kaishian felt most at home in the swamps and culverts near her house in the Hudson Valley. A child who frequently felt out of place, too much of one thing or not enough of another, she found acceptance in these settings, among other amphibious beings. In snakes, snails, and, above all, fungi, she saw her own developing identities as a queer, neurodivergent person reflected back at her—and in them, too, she found a personal path to a life of science.In Forest Euphoria, Kaishian shows us this making of a scientist and introduces readers to the queerness, literal and otherwise, of all the life around us. Fungi, we learn, commonly have more than two biological sexes—and some as many as twenty-three thousand. Some intersex slugs mutually fire calcium carbonate “love darts” at each other during courtship. Glass eels are sexually undetermined until their last year of life, which stumped scientists once dubbed “the eel question.” Nature, Kaishian shows us, is filled with the unusual, the overlooked, and the marginalized—and they have lessons for us all.Wide-ranging, richly observant, and full of surprise, Forest Euphoria will open your eyes and change how you look at the world around you.

Hotspur91 TBR'd a book

Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems

Mary Oliver

From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, her most personal book yet "What good company Mary Oliver is!" the Los Angeles Times has remarked. And never more so than in this extraordinary and engaging gathering of nine essays, accompanied by a brief selection of new prose poems and poems. (One of the essays has been chosen as among the best of the year by THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 1998, another by The Anchor Essay Annual.) With the grace and precision that have won her legions of admirers, Oliver talks here of turtle eggs and housebuilding, of her surprise at an unexpected whistling she hears, of the "thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else." She talks of her own poems and of some of her favorite poets: Poe, writing of "our inescapable destiny," Frost and his ability to convey at once that "everything is all right, and everything is not all right," the "unmistakably joyful" Hopkins, and Whitman, seeking through his poetry "the replication of a miracle." And Oliver offers us a glimpse as well of her "private and natural self—something that must in the future be taken into consideration by any who would claim to know me."

Hotspur91 TBR'd a book

The Book of (More) Delights: Essays

Ross Gay

The New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Delights and Inciting Joy is back with a new chronicle of small, daily wonders—and it is exactly the book we need in these unsettling times. Ross Gay’s essays have been called “exquisite” (Tracy K. Smith), “imperative” (the New York Times Book Review ), and “brilliant” (Ada Limón). Now, in this new collection of genre-defying pieces, again written over the course of a year, one of America’s most original voices continues his ongoing investigation of delight. For Gay, what delights us is what connects us, what gives us meaning, from the joy of hearing a nostalgic song blasting from a passing car to the pleasure of refusing the “ubiquitous, nefarious” scannable QR code menus, from the tiny dog he fell hard for to his mother baking a dozen kinds of cookies for her grandchildren. As always, Gay revels in the natural world—sweet potatoes being harvested, a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, a sunflower growing out of a wall around the cemetery, the shared bounty from a neighbor’s fig tree—and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us. For his many fans eagerly awaiting this new volume and for readers who have enjoyed the works of Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Zadie Smith, and Rebecca Solnit, Gay once again offers us “literature that feels as fluent and familiar as a chat with a close friend” (the New York Review of Books ). The Book of (More) Delights is a collection to savor and share.

Hotspur91 TBR'd a book

Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays

Mary Oliver

A perfect introduction to Mary Oliver’s poetry, this stunning collection features 26 nature poems and prose writings about the birds that played such an important role in the Pulitzer Prize winner’s life. Within these pages you will find hawks, hummingbirds, and herons; kingfishers, catbirds, and crows; swans, swallows and, of course, the snowy owl, among a dozen others-including ten poems that have never before been collected. She adds two beautifully crafted essays, “Owls,” selected for the Best American Essays series, and “Bird,” a new essay that will surely take its place among the classics of the genre. In the words of the poet Stanley Kunitz, “Mary Oliver's poetry is fine and deep; it reads like a blessing. Her special gift is to connect us with our sources in the natural world, its beauties and terrors and mysteries and consolations.” For anyone who values poetry and essays, for anyone who cares about birds, Owls and Other Fantasies will be a treasured gift; for those who love both, it will be essential reading.

Hotspur91 made progress on...

John of John

Douglas Stuart

52%

Hotspur91 wrote a review...

Hotspur91

Aug 28, 2026

Of Mice and Men

3.0

Enjoyment: 3.0Quality: 3.5Characters: 2.0Plot: 3.0

🐁

🐇

🧲

It can be difficult to review a classic from a time with such different attitudes towards marginalized people as we have today. However, I think it is fair to give Steinbeck the credit of accurately reflecting the views of his time, not outright endorsing them. The marginalized characters in this novella are sometimes described stereotypically but are nevertheless treated with compassion by the narration. It's complicated, basically. I think the sole female character comes off the least charitably.

The strange thing is that I could have sworn I never read this book in school, but I had some vague idea of the plot—and I don't think it was just Steinbeck's foreshadowing at work. Perhaps we watched a film adaptation in one of my classes, or maybe it's just cultural osmosis. Either way, it's not difficult to guess what is going to happen, but the inevitability is intrinsic to the tragedy.

In the spirit once again of wanting to give Steinbeck the benefit of the doubt, my understanding of his message is that it's close to impossible to care for someone who can't properly care for themself when you are already in precarious circumstances yourself. That doesn't make what George does at the ending right, but that's literature. You can't make a good decision when the options given to you are all bad; you just have to make the decision you can justify to yourself and live with.

It's a grim read, no getting around it. So while I admired the carefully paced plot and the stark descriptions of "bindle" life in the 30s, I can't see myself wanting to return to this book for a reread as I do with many other classics. I do, however, want to continue reading more from Steinbeck; I couldn't get into The Pearl, but I would like to read East of Eden ahead of the new adaptation. I've only read Grapes of Wrath otherwise.