If at Faust You Don't Succeed by Roger Zelazny and Robert Sheckley

If at Faust You Don't Succeed by Roger Zelazny

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


A thief takes the place of the selected representative of humanity in a history-hopping contest between heaven and hell for the destiny of humankind.

Picked up because I wanted something light and fun. Finished because sometimes my hatred for a book is so strong I have to see it to the bitter, misogynist end to fully grasp its awfulness.

Truly terrible. Flabby and unfunny – unpunny? – and, um. Look, I expect a certain amount of misogyny from Zelazny. I mean, don't get me wrong, I dig a lot of his books, but with a few exceptions the dude was not good at conceiving of women as something other than vaginas with legs. But there's that and then there's whatever the hell this is, and what this is is the fuck not okay. At one point a woman character notices all the shit going down and is like, "you realize you're a raging asshole who treats women like objects to be stolen from other men, fucked and then traded for favors with other men, and discarded, right?" And then the book is like, "oh, huh, yeah, I guess. Let's get back to that, though!"

Ick. I need to scrub my brain out.




View all my reviews

The Disabled Woman's Guide to Pregnancy and Birth

The Disabled Woman's Guide to Pregnancy and Birth by Judith Rogers

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


A full-service book from pre-conception to post-partum, written based on extensive interviews with a cohort of women with disabilities.

I picked this up thinking there might be something for me here. It turns out none of the interviewees share either my major or minor disability issues, but I found this so interesting, I skimmed through it anyway. This book would be particularly useful for a woman with spinal issues, or any of the neuro-degenerative disorders, or amputations, or paralysis, or fibro. In fact, I bet this would be an invaluable resource, since the experiences of others are one of the very few reliable resources pregnant disabled women have. If nothing else, this book proved just how lacking the research is; it cited studies where it could, but it would usually be with a lot of caveats about how this was conducted in the sixties oh and the study population was ten people oops.

So I'm kind of rating this positively just for existing. It is good in its own right, though dated at this point. But it is thorough and well-intentioned, and it has that particular body frankness that a lot of disability writing does. There's something refreshing about a series of disabled women describing in hilarious, graphic detail all of the bodily substances that came out of them during labor. You don't see that in a lot of pregnancy books.

Still, dated. And quite heterocentric. And full of great advice about all sorts of practical issues like dealing with muscle spasms while pregnant, or transferring in and out of the wheelchair in the third trimester, or adjustments that may need to be made to prosthetics as pregnancy progresses, and on and on, but less good on, hm. On some of the trickier, more fraught stuff. Like, the book would throw out a series of anecdotes about the horrible way many of these women were treated by the medical profession – this one was forced to have a caesarian because her doctor did not believe paralyzed women can give birth vaginally (they can) and refused to do the relevant research, this one was threatened and not allowed to leave the hospital because she couldn't prove she could feed her baby with the inaccessible tools on offer even though she had perfectly functional accessible solutions, that one was abused by nurses when they discovered she was incontinent, this one was pressured repeatedly to have an abortion because her doctor did not believe she could care for a child, and on and on and on. And the book's response to that will be like, "so find a medical professional who is educated regarding your disability!" Um. . . . Wow. That's, like, step zero to the complex set of legal/interpersonal skills and emotional resilience a person needs to navigate these waters.




View all my reviews