Through her personal experiences and scholarly work, Katherine Angel explores desire, femininity, masculinity, power, choice, love, grief, and culture from a modern feminist perspective, with appropriate nods to Woolf, Sontag, Foucault, and others. Part memoir, part cultural criticism, it's written in snippets of lyrical prose that connect to create a moving, erotic, funny, critical, honest essay about that thing "most difficult to tell" (especially for women who are disproportionately condition...

AN EXCURSION1. Years ago when Hannah and I moved house, we decided to throw out all our porn. There was a remarkable quantity of it, considering how often we talked about how unsatisfactory it was. We piled it all in a big bin-bag and took it, with a whole carload of other rubbish, to the local dump. Hannah's parents came with us to help unload the bags. Luckily you couldn't see anything through the black bin-bags.2. At the dump, as we were unloading old furniture and other detritus, we realised...

A fascinating read of delicate language which gives a glimpse of the greatest desire of mankind. An amazing portrait of the struggle of feminist and masculinity- a match but also a symphony.A quick read but scent in every word is long-lasting.

Just to be clear, this is white, upper class and very heteronormative desire. Angel repeatedly invokes Sontag and Woolf, claiming for herself a branch on that intellectual family tree. No problem there; desire is personal, inextricable from the social context of the individual inflamed with it. You can take the urchin off the streets, but never the streets out of the urchin, that sort of thing.Therein the issue. This book, meditative, confessional, occasionally philosophical without ever losing

This was a kind of poetic essay on how sexuality doesn't always gel harmoniously and conveniently with ones ideals and beliefs. It's a book about desire in all its messy complexity. It won't be everyone's cup of tea.It was an interesting exploration of the clash between how the author feels versus how she/society thinks she should feel.I'll give it 3 stars because I wished it had gone a bit deeper, really peeled back the layers of desire, pushed the boundaries a bit more. Still, I would consider...

I just finished this book and immediately want to give it a re-read. Compelling, intense language that cracks open narrative, memoir, and confession. I don't agree on all of her points, but that doesn't matter -- I would be suspicious if we agreed unanimously about something as personal as sexual desire. A stunning example of (a very singular and critically aware) female subjectivity and an exploration of the personal interior, what's at stake, and why it's important.

reread, 17 January 2021:I was deciding what to donate from my bookshelves and this is absolutely leaving. I reread it, I went in thinking maybe it would mean more this time, I wanted to like it - but it's just not the book for me. I don't know who it is the book for, in all honesty. I don't feel like she actually really writes about desire properly at any point, anything more than vague platitudes or literary references. There must be better examples of women being horny and conflicted; thinking...

This essay was... exasperating.Part memoir, part poetry, it gestures towards art like it gestures towards argument, always promising and never quite doing. It's a tease.There were so many moments where I highlighted some phrase or paragraph and thought eagerly, 'Yes, this is so true, what a good insight' but then there was no follow-through, no thesis built upon the observations. When I look back and try to see what it was actually saying - it was nothing more than a series of interesting points...

A really interesting book on sexuality, feminism, femininity and masculinity. Lots to think about throughout. Provocative, sexy, strange, smart.

Highly evocative in some places, but too often crossed over into affectation. Sometimes I wondered if I was actually reading a book of NotTildaSwinton tweets.

Too many people are complaining about all the white space and how this book should really be only 100 pages, but nevermind all that. This fast, flighty, flashy dissection of love and lust is powerful and daring. Fans of Maggie Nelson would probably love Angel's academic rigor and semi-nostalgic tone.From pg 70: Sex, said Sontag--"unlike writing a book, making a career, raising a child"--is "not a project."Sex "consumes itself each day. There are no promises, no goals, nothing promised. It is not...

The structure and subject of and tone of Unmastered—prose in numbered sections, sex, the mix of the personal with semi-academic meditations—made me think of Maggie Nelson's Bluets, though I am not as in love with this book as I am with that one. Which isn't to say this book is bad, just that it didn't hit me quite like Nelson's did. Unmastered was a quick read for me (there's a lot of white space) and I read it twice over the course of a week, finding myself struck by different bits each time.Th...

Very impressed by good use of this prose poetry essay memoir - however you want to call it. I may change rating from 4 to 5 after rereading the end. I felt the book started out stronger than it ended, and final third or quarter seemed to run parallel to the rest (as opposed to coming after). But otherwise, a thought provoking read, with great use of terrific Sontag quotes.

A slender book with a firm heart, seeking to shift around easy categorisation or arguments. Desire, the politics of desire, the desire taken in a crisp sunny day -I loved the author's smart resistance while in lectures of one sort or another, her urge to question, dispute, to break the cosy bubble around certain discussions. As a note to other readers - the focus is on heterosexual love and desire (and without shame on the desiring of the self). Also provides a leaping off point for writings on

Early on I thought Angel had begun to explore some challenging ideas about female desire, but midway she left them (the ideas, questions) and began describing a past abortion, at which point I lost the thread of how that connected to her sexual desire - I mean, I did not follow/comprehend how this traumatic incident informed her thesis. The link was probably laid out in poetic metaphoric prose but I just missed it since I was impatient with this abortion section (though the entire book was perso...

3.5A good companion piece to Angel’s recent essay collection.

He was clad in a white bath robe and sitting in the mid-morning autumn sun at the wrought iron table where we had first made love, studying me as I bounded onto the terrace. I grinned at him and he smiled slightly, his long fingers brushing the glass top surface in tempo with Wagner’s Das Rheingold, his eyes teal flecked with dark amber, the pupils pits of non-light, and he continued to observe me as I stretched out my arms, wrists, legs. I bent from my hips to hang head down, palms flat on the

it's slippery. it's wet. a book on desire, most difficult to tell.

This is an interesting book. I started it not quite sure what it was - poetry, prose, short stories, non-fiction - and I suppose it is all of those things.Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell is just that - a book about desire. Told by Katherine Angel and informed by her own experiences and knowledge. I found myself folding over the bottom corners - something I do when there's something to go back to, there's plenty of that.The book is broken into sections with semi-cryptic names...

There is something that is hard to describe. Or to be exact, something that I can't describe yet. Something I'm not vulnerable enough to parse out in particular phrases. But this. This.book.I know friends who need to read this. If only to talk about it. To ponder the questions within their own life and within these pages. Sex and feminism. Control.Top or bottom or both... because. Just. Because. I am going to own my own copy of this. And write in the margins.