4.16 average · 1166 reviews
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Adelmann interrogates and deconstructs the Campus Novel, turning it into a narrative about overworked, underpaid, adjuncts, the stratification and class divisions of academic work, the plight of the gig worker in general (no healthcare, no money, precarious housing, no savings and we're all just supposed to live like this??), and the false promise of college education. It's a lot of lifting for one book, and I don't think she hits every point with equal alacrity, but that would be asking a lot for a nonfiction book, let alone a fiction one. I especially enjoyed the many approaches to the campus novel that allowed us to look at it in different ways--which I elaborate on in this post🔗. One of the things I most enjoyed in this book was the thread of Sam's struggle to understand her own desires--or lack thereof--around sex/sexuality and relationships. This lack of interest and even occasional repulsion from sex has caused difficulties for here throughout her life (something I'm sure my fellow acespecs out there can relate to!) and she describes her relationship to sex as very formulaic and almost scripted. She also talks about her feelings around romance at once point, basically saying she finds it confusing and unrelatable, which I've never found more relatable. I absolutely drank up all of the sections where Sam is puzzling over her relationship to sex, desire etc because it felt so rare and special to have a book surprise me with interesting, thoughtful, fresh exploration of this without making it a book ABOUT being aspec. My one annoyance with this book is my bone to pick with all litfic which is that it will often devolve into paragraphs of being too pretentious, didactic, or navel-gazey for me to tolerate, and I'll roll my eyes. I alllmost DNF'd at around 30% because of one particularly navel-gazey bit about labels and terms, but I pressed on and I'm glad I did because it is a genuinely good piece of writing it's just...also litfic and unfortunately cannot escape the cardinal sin of the genre. This is the price I pay for continuing to find the premises of litfic books interesting and trying to read them despite knowing what will be inside!
I have a lot of feelings about this book.
It is both unapologetically political and unapologetically fantastical, telling you myths and realities in the same breath. This is modern-era second world fantasy so both nothing and everything is like our world. It is possible to achieve a level of enlightenment in a particular popular cult that allows you to walk on air; the cops can and will descend on immigrants and those they consider lesser and unworthy for no reason and with no warning. I almost felt as though I was following Fetter like a he was a kite and I was the string, through this complicated landscape of interpersonal relationships and state violence and also by the way, magic. This is a beautiful book. I will read everything Vajra Chandrasekera writes forever.
However, her marriage is childless. And no rich, ambitious man in this era can bear a childless marriage. Her husband has finally achieved a mark of status - his own estate in the country - and the book moves there after the first few chapters. The estate is a crumbling ruin, and one Lenore must renovate quickly to host guests. She is under so many pressures, and this estate and the moors of Sheffield are a perfect backdrop. The prose is luxurious and rich, truly giving so much weight and life to the setting. I could read Kat Dunn's descriptions of anything.
Technically, this is a vampire novel, in that it contains a vampire. But truly, this is a book about desire, and like the best novels with a vampire in them that is the focus not the vampire. In the acknowledgements Kat Dunn writes:
I am quite nervous to share this darker, less palatable story, to find out whether anyone else will recognize these feelings. I hope you do and I hope you don't. I hope you know your own hunger, and how to feed it well.
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë
A Wall Is Also a Road
Annalee Newitz
You don’t have to be smart or exceptional to earn a doctorate. You just have to want a doctorate. Which, if you know anything about the scholarly life, is actually a form of stupidity. Unfortunately Gardenpath had not yet discovered this undeniable fact.
Never has anyone written truer words about a graduate degree 💀
The Adjunct
Maria Adelmann
The romantic love portrayed in classic novels had always disappointed me. It seemed unearned, unexplained, leading me to believe it was so universally understandable that no one felt you had to describe anything other than its effects. I understood hunger, thirst, even sexual desire—they were essentially cravings born of over- or understimulation. I understood attraction, even, in a broad sense, that you were pulled to some people over others. I understood platonic and familial love, how a bond could form over time. But romantic love? If I didn’t know any better, I would think it was an authorial invention to get out of explaining why a relationship between two people—one of whom was often an asshole—was strong enough to be their downfall.
I read these two paragraphs and immediately copied them to go message my girlfriend (we're both aro) and go "omg look!!" because seeing a reflection of how her and I talk about romance and love is so rare! I've thought about romantic love this way for yeeaaarrs, especially the part about "no one [feels] you had to describe anything other than its effects" which is often my chief complaint with romance in stories! Allo people (of both kinds honestly) seem to lean very heavily on shared amatonormativity to fill in gaps in love stories or sexual chemistry between characters, but I can always see the gaps, because I don't have that shared culture of amatonormativity! I often say that reading romance requires the same kind of suspension of disbelief from me as reading SFF, and honestly it often requires more because while SFF writers are fully aware of the gap created for the reader, allo writers writing romance simply do not seem to be.
I think one of my favorite parts of this book so far are the places where Sam explores how she feels about sex, sexual orientation, attraction to other people, etc and what it all means for her. Especially because it seems that she's a deeply aspec protagonist represented in such a real way. It's so rare to get stories like this, where it's a part of the story, not The Story. I'm basking in it.
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
How many times will Mr Collins say her name 😭
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nostoat commented...
The OG name-dropper