read harder challenge

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Fourteen Hundred Years of History; Still Uncovering the Women whose Achievements were Hidden.

The Dark Queens: The Bloody Rivalry that Forged the Medieval World by Shelley Puhak

March 12, 2022 by faintingviolet Leave a Comment

I work in Public History, but any good public historian (or historian of any stripe) will tell you that it is nearly impossible to know all eras and areas well. There are inevitable blind spots – you must choose where to apply your limited time. When this year’s Read Harder challenge asked us to read a history about a period you know little about, I was stoked, an excuse to go back further than I normally do and read about some women doing the leading. […]

“Profanity is an essential tool in disrupting patriarchy and its rules. It is the verbal equivalent of civil disobedience.”

The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls by Mona Eltahawy

March 1, 2022 by faintingviolet 2 Comments

Happy Women’s History Month in the US. Let’s talk about feminism and burning patriarchy to the ground, shall we? When I read ASKReview’s review of The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls in December 2021 I immediately threw it onto my to read list for 2022. A book described succinctly as “a call to action written by a queer woman of color” was absolutely something I want to read. There is much in the world that is fucking awful and the roots of that […]

Its Time for Me to Say Goodbye to Dahl

The Witches by Roald Dahl, Quentin Blake (Illustrator)

February 25, 2022 by faintingviolet Leave a Comment

Roald Dahl was one of the authors who dominated my childhood reading which makes sense as he is one of the most celebrated children’s authors of the 20th century. I spent a lot of time deep in a few of his books, seeing bits of myself in his protagonists. But this is my goodbye to him. Dahl was an unrepentant bigot. He was profoundly anti-Semitic, perpetuating harmful tropes and falsehoods for years in his public statements and books. Dahl is also easily read as a […]

“She was stuck sitting in a wingback chair, her phone as dead as a brick in her hand, and listening to Orchid pepper the townie with questions about how bad the storm had gotten.”

In the Hall with the Knife by Diana Peterfreund

February 23, 2022 by faintingviolet Leave a Comment

This book wound up on my to read thanks to a Read Harder Challenge from 2020 – read a mystery where the victim is not a woman – and the fact that I had loved the previous books I had read by Diana Peterfreund, For Darkness Shows the Stars and Across a Star-Swept Sea (as well as their accompanying prequel short stories Among the Nameless Stars and The First Star to Fall). It ended up in my hands thanks to my book exchange gifter, NTE. […]

“I am both ever evolving and ever decaying.” or another book in need of a CW

Charm and Strange by Stephanie Kuehn

February 19, 2022 by faintingviolet Leave a Comment

Something is going on with my reading this year, I seem to be swinging back and forth between 5-star books and 2-star ones, which means I should have anticipated trouble with Charm and Strange based purely on it falling in my reading order behind Boyfriend Material. This one didn’t make me angry as some of my other two star reads, Always, in December and Seduction, but it flirted with the line. This 2014 Winner of the William C. Morris Award is designed to be read […]

“I never stopped trying to save you, so don’t you fucking dare stop trying to save yourself.”

A Spindle Splintered (Fractured Fables #1) by Alix E. Harrow

February 12, 2022 by faintingviolet Leave a Comment

A Spindle Splintered is a queer retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairytale, playing on the variations that exist and adding one of its own. The basic story has been around for almost seven hundred years and has flown through the hands of Basile, Perrault, and Grimm, and that’s before we get into the hundreds of adaptations so what’s another? Harrow brings her own lens to this, and imbues her lead, Zinnia Grey, with a wonderfully clear voice. It is so realistic that I initially thought […]

esmemoria on What Else Would You Look With?I wonder if the audio brings out the best in the novel. The last part of the book was pretty great, but I had so...
narfna on What Else Would You Look With?Sad you didn't really like this one. I absolutely loved it. Not sure when I will be able to wrap my head around reviewing it....
narfna on And now, jump back hundreds and hundreds of years…#BlameMalin on this one for me, too, because she literally sent me a copy.
narfna on “And that very same evening—that very same evening—Lord Edgware dies. Good title that, by the way. Lord Edgware Dies. Look well on a book stall.”That's gotta be the new headcanon.
drmllz on “And that very same evening—that very same evening—Lord Edgware dies. Good title that, by the way. Lord Edgware Dies. Look well on a book stall.”I like to think the wife packs Hastings off to England to hang out with Poirot and enjoys having a whole ranch to herself...

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