en-US Fri, 18 Sep 2026 08:26:20 -0700 60 144 41 https://www.goodreads.com/images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg ReadStatus11401698311 Fri, 18 Sep 2026 08:26:20 -0700 https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8955699688 Tracy wants to read The Passengers by John Marrs
]]> ReadStatus11401690343 Fri, 18 Sep 2026 08:23:23 -0700 https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8955693968 Tracy wants to read Bay Country by Tom Horton
]]> ReadStatus11359973086 Mon, 07 Sep 2026 08:05:29 -0700 https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8926364774 Tracy is currently reading The Mother Who Couldn't Describe a Thing If She Could by Shareen K. Murayama
]]> Review8876081907 Mon, 07 Sep 2026 07:57:42 -0700 https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8876081907 Tracy gave 5 stars to Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage (Hardcover) by Belle Burden
bookshelves: audiobooks
Another "I must read to have an opinion on the discourse" read. As I read, I did enjoy her writing style (literary, emotional truth above all).

I am trying to not make this next assessment sound mean, I am trying to be frank - it's a good book for middle class and above heterosexual women to read & think about how they can protect themselves financially. In socioeconomic classes that prize obedience, Burden chronicles how she nearly lost everything in her divorce. Caregivers should be protected across class! It was horrifying to see how someone with so much power and class privilege nearly lost it all because of how she invested in her marriage.

BASIC AUDIOBOOK NOTES:
-the case against obedience
-how emotionally destabilizing covid was
-Wedding dress designed by Calvin Klein at her mother’s request (I want to see it!)
-Wealth is intoxicating (Belle constantly saying she was moving far from who she was)
-The horror of a man willing to destroy his wife whose work was raising their children (like all the "good" men in Promising Young Woman)
-It’s ok for a man to leave his wife, it’s not ok for her to talk about it: responses to her Modern Love piece and then her memoir
-The importance of speaking up!!!!!!!!!!! ]]> Review8856608837 Mon, 07 Sep 2026 07:50:23 -0700 https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8856608837 Tracy gave 5 stars to Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk (Hardcover) by Kathleen Hanna
I downloaded Rebel Girl on Libby to read offline while traveling. So interesting to learn about Hanna's life from her perspective in chronological order. As someone born in the late 80s, I first learned of her through Le Tigre, then looped back through Bikini Kill.

Big picture takeaway: Hanna put all this pressure on herself to be everything for everyone - supporting strangers through her own trauma - in reading Rebel Girl, you learn with her in real time how she learns to be there for herself.

I also found it astute to understand oneself as an artist adjacent to activism. The work is different and that is ok.

I generally like a memoir written in a more literary style, but I'm still content to have read Rebel Girl. It's probably best as an audiobook, which my library has yet to buy. ]]> Review8602999272 Mon, 24 Aug 2026 11:21:43 -0700 https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8602999272 Tracy gave 5 stars to Frontier: A Memoir and a Ghost Story (Paperback) by Erica Stern
Small presses continue to knock it out of the park. Hooray for Barrelhouse being open to genre benders 😊

Very few women I know have had a smooth birth experience. Stern experiences a terrifying near-death experience for herself and her son, and this memoir pulls you in with her experience and the fictionalized account of a frontier ghost woman – storytelling to move through trauma. Which honestly, the creative route made it easier to understand the depths someone may have to dig themselves out of after a traumatic birth.

The book is beautifully written, blending the transformative nature of motherhood through personal account, fiction, medical history, and ancient ritual (from Judaism) to tell her story.

I want to give you a longer excerpt of Stern’s voice:
“HELLP syndrome, along with its cousin, preeclampsia, is understood more like a vibe, a gestalt, than an exact mechanism defined by cause and effect. It’s got something to do with circulation through the placenta gone awry, but it’s hard to say exactly what is happening or why it occurs, and therefore it’s basically impossible to treat with more than the equivalent of bandages. This kind of vague gesturing might be at home in art criticism but is less welcome in science. The exception is the field of women’s health, which in spite of its name understands shockingly little about the female body.” (50)

Expanding past the birth experience, there are so many conditions that the medical establishment treat by “vibes” that primarily affect folks assigned female at birth. I have to say that WE have not been shy about sharing their stories, medical professionals refuse to hear us. FRONTIER reminded me how much women have in common. ]]> Review8724689961 Mon, 24 Aug 2026 11:07:23 -0700 https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8724689961 Tracy gave 5 stars to Bottom Feeders (Paperback) by Arielle Hebert
bookshelves: 2026-poetry
What a beautiful debut collection! Beautiful and heartbreaking, in BOTTOM FEEDERS Arielle Hebert gives the people in her life, and eventually herself, grace for the circumstances they came of age in: early 2000s Florida. The opioid epidemic. Deeply Christian homes when you are queer.

These are cinematic, narrative poems that pull you, the reader, through the gamut of emotions. If you were moved by the movie THIRTEEN, get this book asap.

“Everything we do is
self-preservation or
self-destruction.

Every day I find a flimsy promise
to drag myself out of bed,
to stroke the wild animal I was
until she remembers
what a kind touch is,
to tell her that I’m sorry,
that she is safe now
here with me.” – 62, from “Apology to My Past Self”
]]> ReadStatus11305434669 Mon, 24 Aug 2026 11:00:57 -0700 https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8887826239 Tracy is currently reading Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke
]]> ReadStatus11288729710 Thu, 20 Aug 2026 06:20:43 -0700 https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8876081907 Tracy is currently reading Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden
]]> Review8856620240 Fri, 14 Aug 2026 06:25:19 -0700 https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8856620240 Tracy gave 5 stars to Travesties (Paperback) by Tom Stoppard
A+ art fight play, fictionalizing some key Zürich figures of the 1910s. We are still having many of the same discussions. Literally fighting words!

Some favorite quotes:

Tzara: Cleverness has been exploded, along with so much else, by the war. (37)

Gwen: Whenever people talk to me about the weather I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. (55)

Carr: “I learned three things in Zurich during the war. I wrote them down. Firstly, you’re either a revolutionary or you’re not, and if you’re not you might as well be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can’t be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary...I forget the third thing. (98-99)
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