en-US Tue, 11 Mar 2025 16:22:14 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 215362032 In this collection of one novel and three stories, bestselling author Torrey Peters’s keen eye for the rough edges of community and desire push the limits of trans writing.

In Stag Dance, the titular novel, a group of restless lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit plan a dance that some of them will volunteer to attend as women. When the broadest, strongest, plainest of the axmen announces his intention to dance as a woman, he finds himself caught in a strange rivalry with a pretty young jack, provoking a cascade of obsession, jealousy, and betrayal that will culminate on the big night in an astonishing vision of gender and transition.

Three startling stories surround Stag Dance: “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones�� imagines a gender apocalypse brought about by an unstable ex-girlfriend. In “The Chaser,�� a secret romance between roommates at a Quaker boarding school brings out intrigue and cruelty. In the last story, “The Masker,�� a party weekend on the Las Vegas strip turns dark when a young crossdresser must choose between two guides: a handsome mystery man who objectifies her in thrilling ways, or a cynical veteran trans woman offering unglamorous sisterhood.

Acidly funny and breathtaking in its scope, with the inventive audacity of George Saunders or Jennifer Egan, Stag Dance provokes, unsettles, and delights.]]> 304 Torrey Peters 0593595645 Jeff 0 to-read 4.09 2025
author: Torrey Peters
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 804852 457 William Blum 1567510523 Jeff 5 non-fiction 4.24 1995
author: William Blum
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1995
rating: 5
read at: 2000/05/01
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: non-fiction
review:

]]> 157056100
Dubbed a voice of her generation, poet and writer Morgan Parker has spent much of her adulthood in therapy, trying to square the resonance of her writing with the alienation she feels in nearly every aspect of life,��from her lifelong singleness to her battle with depression. She traces this loneliness to an inability to feel truly safe with others and a historic hyper-awareness stemming from the effects of slavery.

In this collection of essays as intimate as being in the room with Morgan and her therapist, Morgan examines America's cultural history and relationship to Black Americans through the ages, through such topics as the ubiquity of a beauty culture that excludes Black women, the implications of Bill Cosby's fall from grace in a culture predicated on acceptance through respectability, and the pitfalls of visibility as seen through the mischaracterizations of Serena Williams as alternately iconic and too ambitious.

With piercing wit and incisive observations, You Get What You Pay For is ultimately a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness and its effects on mental well-being in America today. Weaving unflinching criticism with intimate anecdotes, this devastating memoir-in-essays paints a portrait of one Black woman's psyche—and of the writer's search to both tell the truth and deconstruct it.]]> 214 Morgan Parker 052551144X Jeff 5 4.17 2024
author: Morgan Parker
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/18
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 60063057
Today it calls to mind a jumble of post-Soviet states paved over with C&A and McDonald's. We could describe Eastern Europe as a group of twenty nations - but why? For most of their history, they weren't nations at all.

The region is more than the sum total of its annexations, invasions and independence declarations. Eastern Europe abounds with peoples tied together by tragicomic twists of fate. Lives could be turned upside down by distant decrees from Vienna or Istanbul, or just as easily by a stubborn bureaucrat in your village. In twentieth-century Knust, you could live in six different countries without ever leaving your house. You could get married any day, but buying a teakettle was a singular event.

Goodbye Eastern Europe is a eulogy for a world we are losing as memories fade and new malls get built. We may not be able to conquer fate - but we can delight in its mystery.]]> 380 Jacob Mikanowski 0861542592 Jeff 3 4.10 2023
author: Jacob Mikanowski
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/26
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 62049765 480 Elizabeth Cobbs 0674258487 Jeff 5
Abigail Adams would petition her husband for a woman's right to speak for herself, have a voice, and have an education. Her husband, John Adams, would brush her off. She was undeterred by his dismissive attitude. Her retort was, "Who will educate your children, John?" Conversely, the other story in this segment shows how an ordinary woman had no rights. She had to rely entirely on her husband, who was not able to keep a steady job, would drink and gamble away their funds, and then abuse the children. She had no rights to her children and had to resort to outsmarting them to get them out of harm's way. This is just one of a dozen stories where it would seem a woman of means would have every right but does not and then see the common woman wrecked by that society.

These are inspirational stories of perseverance as well as educational stories demonstrating the contrast between a woman of means and a woman of no means. Both still butt up against the patriarchy of the day and over time, change these rules. An effort that continues to do this day. ]]> 4.30
author: Elizabeth Cobbs
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.30
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/28
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves:
review:
People will often romanticize historical time periods. Imagining oneself as a lord and lady of some grand manor and taking advantage of the privilege therein. We don't think about the everyday people that made up history. People are working, raising children, and dealing with difficulties without modern technology and modern rights. In Elizabeth Cobbs' book Fearless Women, we get to see through both lenses. Not surprisingly, we see prominent women of history who would seem to have privilege still not have any more rights than an ordinary person. Worse, we then see the common person living under cruel conditions without any recourse except their wits.

Abigail Adams would petition her husband for a woman's right to speak for herself, have a voice, and have an education. Her husband, John Adams, would brush her off. She was undeterred by his dismissive attitude. Her retort was, "Who will educate your children, John?" Conversely, the other story in this segment shows how an ordinary woman had no rights. She had to rely entirely on her husband, who was not able to keep a steady job, would drink and gamble away their funds, and then abuse the children. She had no rights to her children and had to resort to outsmarting them to get them out of harm's way. This is just one of a dozen stories where it would seem a woman of means would have every right but does not and then see the common woman wrecked by that society.

These are inspirational stories of perseverance as well as educational stories demonstrating the contrast between a woman of means and a woman of no means. Both still butt up against the patriarchy of the day and over time, change these rules. An effort that continues to do this day.
]]> 176823054 From the author of The Arsonists�� City and The Twenty-Ninth Year, a new collection of poetry that traces the fragmentation of memory, archive, and family–past, present, future–in the face of displacement and war.

A diaspora of memories runs through this poetry collection—a multiplicity of voices, bodies, and houses hold archival material for one another, tracing paths between Brooklyn, Beirut, and Jerusalem. Boundaries and borders blur between space and time and poetic form—small banal moments of daily life live within geopolitical brutalities and, vice versa, the desire for stability lives in familiarity with displacement.

These poems take stock of who and what can displace you from home and from your own body—and, conversely, the kind of resilience, tenacity, and love that can bring you back into yourself and into the context of past and future generations. Hala Alyan asks, What stops you from transforming into someone or something else? When you have lived a life in flux, how do you find rest?]]> 112 Hala Alyan 0063317478 Jeff 5
I read Salt Houses many years ago and was drawn in by the Palestinian experience in the Middle Est. Even there, it is a rootless experience. These poems focus on the need for perseverance. That what you build can be destroyed and yet your return. The building holds a family, and then both are gone. Rubble is all left, but a plant or weed can still grow there. Everything reemergence. I really enjoyed the format. She would have a poem, and the subject-verb mix pulled you into the poem.

Favorite Passages:

“It is not enough

to say love in Arabic.
You must say

be the thing that buries me,��

----

“I do not call them / not even after her father dies / or after the surgery /
or when the city plunges like a heart / & they’re silent back / a gift
we give each other / like only those who know what’s gone is gone can give��

----

“I can’t hear you. I can’t hear you under the missiles.
A plant waits for fire to grow.
A child waits for a siren. It must be a child.
Never a man. Never a man without a child.
There is nothing more terrible
than waiting for the terrible. I promise.
Was the grief worth the poem? No,
but you don’t interrogate a weed
for what it does with wreckage.
For what it’s done to get here.��

---

From Werewolf

Look how our fathers left our
Pick of exits, how there is
Always the wolf that breaks you and the wolf that turns you back.

��
I always think the tanks have left my body
But here’s my pretty
Head, my tongue a sprig of silver, a comet, the bullet
That turns you back

��
I am always swooning at any old light. Little gorge, little magpie. In the darkest dark, I wait for the moon
That turns you back.

---
“It might not happen for a long time,
but one day you run your fingers through the sand again, scoop a fistful out
and pat it into a new floor. You can believe in anything, so why not believe
this will last? The seashell rafter like eyes in the gloaming.
I’m here to tell you the tide will never stop coming in.
I’m here to tell you whatever you build will be ruined, so make it beautiful.”]]> 4.21 2024
author: Hala Alyan
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/28
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves:
review:
"I'm here to tell you whatever you build will be ruined, so make it beautiful."

I read Salt Houses many years ago and was drawn in by the Palestinian experience in the Middle Est. Even there, it is a rootless experience. These poems focus on the need for perseverance. That what you build can be destroyed and yet your return. The building holds a family, and then both are gone. Rubble is all left, but a plant or weed can still grow there. Everything reemergence. I really enjoyed the format. She would have a poem, and the subject-verb mix pulled you into the poem.

Favorite Passages:

“It is not enough

to say love in Arabic.
You must say

be the thing that buries me,��

----

“I do not call them / not even after her father dies / or after the surgery /
or when the city plunges like a heart / & they’re silent back / a gift
we give each other / like only those who know what’s gone is gone can give��

----

“I can’t hear you. I can’t hear you under the missiles.
A plant waits for fire to grow.
A child waits for a siren. It must be a child.
Never a man. Never a man without a child.
There is nothing more terrible
than waiting for the terrible. I promise.
Was the grief worth the poem? No,
but you don’t interrogate a weed
for what it does with wreckage.
For what it’s done to get here.��

---

From Werewolf

Look how our fathers left our
Pick of exits, how there is
Always the wolf that breaks you and the wolf that turns you back.

��
I always think the tanks have left my body
But here’s my pretty
Head, my tongue a sprig of silver, a comet, the bullet
That turns you back

��
I am always swooning at any old light. Little gorge, little magpie. In the darkest dark, I wait for the moon
That turns you back.

---
“It might not happen for a long time,
but one day you run your fingers through the sand again, scoop a fistful out
and pat it into a new floor. You can believe in anything, so why not believe
this will last? The seashell rafter like eyes in the gloaming.
I’m here to tell you the tide will never stop coming in.
I’m here to tell you whatever you build will be ruined, so make it beautiful.��
]]> 127282429 From a global icon, a bold, essential account of how a fear of gender is fueling reactionary politics around the world.

Judith Butler, the groundbreaking thinker whose iconic book Gender Trouble redefined how we think about gender and sexuality, confronts the attacks on “gender�� that have become central to right-wing movements today. Global networks have formed “anti-gender ideology movements�� that are dedicated to circulating a fantasy that gender is a dangerous, perhaps diabolical, threat to families, local cultures, civilization―and even “man�� himself. Inflamed by the rhetoric of public figures, this movement has sought to nullify reproductive justice, undermine protections against sexual and gender violence, and strip trans and queer people of their rights to pursue a life without fear of violence.

The aim of Who’s Afraid of Gender? is not to offer a new theory of gender but to examine how “gender�� has become a phantasm for emerging authoritarian regimes, fascist formations, and transexclusionary feminists. In their vital, courageous new book, Butler illuminates the concrete ways that this phantasm of “gender�� collects and displaces anxieties and fears of destruction. Operating in tandem with deceptive accounts of “critical race theory�� and xenophobic panics about migration, the anti-gender movement demonizes struggles for equality, fuels aggressive nationalism, and leaves millions of people vulnerable to subjugation.

An essential intervention into one of the most fraught issues of our moment, Who’s Afraid of Gender? is a bold call to refuse the alliance with authoritarian movements and to make a broad coalition with all those whose struggle for equality is linked with fighting injustice. Imagining new possibilities for both freedom and solidarity, Butler offers us a hopeful work of social and political analysis that is both timely and timeless―a book whose verve and rigor only they could deliver.]]> 320 Judith Butler 0374608229 Jeff 5
She describes the creation of a phantasm—the idea that the LGBTQ community will bring about the collapse of civilization. In reality, this community only wishes to pursue a livable life—one where they can live the same life as any human being on this Earth can expect from birth. Unfortunately, dark forces are using this group to galvanize their supporters and not only take away this group's rights but everyone's rights.

Ultimately, her conclusion is that you can't stop the tide of history, and those on the Right best start mourning their loss productively. We work better as a united, not divided, society.

Favorite Passages:

“When “gender�� absorbs an array of fears and becomes a catchall phantasm for the contemporary Right, the various conditions that actually give rise to those fears lose their names. “Gender�� both collects and incites those fears, keeping us from thinking more clearly about what there is to fear, and how the currently imperiled sense of the world came about in the first place.��

“For in the end, defeating this phantasm is a matter of affirming how one loves, how one lives in one’s body, the right to exist in the world without fear of violence or discrimination, to breathe, to move, to live. Why wouldn’t we want all people to have those fundamental freedoms?��

“Although interpreted as a backlash against progressive movements, anti-gender ideology is driven by a stronger wish, namely the restoration of a patriarchal dream-order where a father is a father; a sexed identity never changes; women, conceived as “born female at birth,�� resume their natural and “moral�� positions within the household; and white people hold uncontested racial supremacy. The project is fragile, however, since the patriarchal order it seeks to restore never quite existed in the form they seek to actualize in the present. “Gender�� here is a psychosocial scene, a public way of dreaming, for the past anti-gender proponents seek to restore is a dream, a wish, even a fantasy that will reinstate order grounded in patriarchal authority. Recruitment into the anti-gender ideology movement is an invitation to join a collective dream, perhaps a psychosis, that will put an end to the implacable anxiety and fear that afflict so many people experiencing climate destruction firsthand, or ubiquitous violence and brutal war, expanding police powers, or intensifying economic precarity.��

“Their anti-intellectualism, their distrust of the academy, is at the same time a refusal to enter into public debate. What is dismissed as “academic�� procedure is actually required for informed public deliberations in democracies. Informed public debate becomes impossible when some parties refuse to read the material under dispute. Reading is not just a pastime or a luxury, but a precondition of democratic life, one of the practices that keeps debate and disagreement grounded, focused, and productive.��

“Consider, however, that sex assignment is not simply an announcement of the sex that an infant is perceived to be, but also communicates a set of adult desires and expectations. The infant’s future is often being imagined or desired through the act of sex assignment, so sex assignment is not a simple description of anatomical facts, but a way of imagining what they will mean, or should mean. That imagining comes from elsewhere, and it does not exactly stop after sex has been legally or medically determined at birth. The girl continues to be girled; the boy continues to be boyed; and these practices of girling and boying are repeated not just by parents but by a range of institutions that greet the child with boxes to be checked and norms to be embodied. In a sense, sex assignment does not happen just once. It is an iterative process, repeated by different actors and institutions, and depending on where one lives, it can be reiterated in ways that are not always in conformity with one another.��

“What kind of phantasm has gender become, and what anxieties, fears, and hatreds does it collect and mobilize? ��

“The ancient debates about free will and determinism take shape within gender theory as well. Yet here a distinction should be made between whether or not gender or sexuality are chosen and whether people should be free to live according to the gender and sexuality that they are. For instance, a trans person can claim that their gendered truth is internal, even God-given, while another may regard themselves as formed by culture or even freely chosen. All of them deserve rights to live freely, which means that their demand for political freedom does not necessarily presuppose that gender or sexuality is chosen. When people claim a gender or, indeed, a sex for themselves that was not the one originally assigned at birth, they exercise human powers of self-definition at the expense of a natural sex divinely created or established in a Christian version of nature. According to the Pope, they are acting as if they have divine powers, flagrantly disputing the power of divinity to establish their sex for all time. At some moments, the Pope has declared that gender advocates seek to steal the powers of God, thus confirming that they work from the devil. “For the devil always disguises himself in a mesmerizing appearance. If “gender�� is such a devil, or the devil himself, then to argue with him is to fall inside his trap. To argue with the devil would be to accept the false appearance as a plausible interlocutor. Devils and demons can only be expelled or banished, burned in effigy, which is why censorship, bullying, and pathologization become the key strategies for the anti-gender movement.��

“The harm that these laws do relies upon the conceit that they are warding off harm. This is a moral alibi, an inversion, the kind that lets moral sadism flourish. The harm is done through cultivating an imagination of where harm is happening and who is making it happen. That phantasmatic scene effects a displacement from actual harm done, both continuing and justifying that harm, for if the source of that harm has been effectively externalized, then destroying that externalized form keeps the destructive action alive—and intensifies it. ��


“A serious harm is done to children who are denied education and care. That kind of deprivation produces psychic damage, producing a situation in which life itself becomes a form of damage from which they must escape. If a queer or trans kid seeks to live, if a girl assigned female at birth seeks to change the gender expectations made of her, if a boy assigned female at birth is seeking to affirm his life, and there is no language or community in which these lives can be affirmed, they become the waste expelled from the human community, and their sexuality and their gender become the unspeakable. Heteronormativity becomes mandatory, backed by law or doctrine, forming the horizon of the thinkable, the limits of the imaginable-and the livable. And so, the task becomes how to affirm life with others in ways that give value and support to all those who seek to breathe, love, and move without fear of violence. Where, by the way, is “pro-life�� in this scene?��

“How does “morality�� serve the purposes of political sadism, muffling and subordinating those who are seeking to emerge into voice, equality, and freedom? If “love�� has been reduced to compulsory heterosexuality and hatred has propagated distortions of its own making to justify incendiary attacks on critical thinking, social movements for freedom and justice, gender and race studies, and academic freedom, then it is all those who seek to live and breathe in freedom and equality who suffer most by being transfigured into demonic and dangerous forces. It is not only that the principles of freedom and equality are under attack, but all those who require them to live.18��


“The freedom to determine a reproductive future is one being explicitly and partially denied by the revocation of Roe v. Wade. It is important during these times to see how many freedom struggles are being demeaned and destroyed by those who would augment state powers, aided and abetted by the allegation that collective freedoms that seek to more radically actualize democracy are a danger to society and whose freedom or “liberty�� must be curtailed by increasingly authoritarian measures. Why is freedom so frightening? Is that even the question? Or is it rather: how has freedom been made to seem so frightening that people find themselves longing for authoritarian rule?��

“In the context of trans people, TERFs oppose basic claims of self-determination, freedom and autonomy, rights to be protected from violence, and rights of access to public space and to health care without discrimination, all of which are rights that they, as feminists, fight for and depend on otherwise. No wonder those who confront this attempted existential nullification are sometimes screaming. It does not help that “gender-critical�� feminists describe their opponents as stupid, suffering from false consciousness, fad-driven, doctrinaire, even totalitarian, allying with the rhetorical aims of the Christian Right. Precisely because they are not thinking about coalitions, and not concerned with the best way to fight the rise of the Right, they retreat into identitarian claims and proliferate baseless fears, contributing to the anti-gender phantasm.��

“To refuse to recognize trans women as women because one is afraid that they are really men and, hence, potentially rapists, is to let the traumatic scenario loose on one’s description of reality, to flood an undeserving group of people with one’s unbridled terror and fear, and to fail to grasp social reality in its complexity, while also failing to identify the truer source of harm, an insight that could very well participate an alliance in the place of paranoid division. ��

“Working together with race, class, disability, personal and national histories, gender saturates how we see, feel, and sense ourselves in the world. It is decidedly not a timeless reality. This structure that saturates the world goes largely unexamined unless we explore its pervasive operation in presenting the way things are. Gender affects the way we understand the profession of medicine, the vocation of science, economics, especially the delimitation of the public and private domains, the organization of labor, the distribution of poverty, structural inequalities, the modalities of violence and war. But it can also name one of the most intimate and abiding senses of who we are in relation to others, to history, and to language. If it did not raise this intimate question of who we are and how we relate to others, of permeability and survival, we would not be having any of these arguments, and they would not be as urgent as they clearly are.��

“For Lugones, gender dimorphism based on biological assumptions works together with heterosexual patriarchy, and both are imposed by what she called the “light�� side of the organization of gender within colonial modernity. In light of the anti-gender ideology movements and its links with new forms of authoritarianism, she may well consider its colonial influence to be a bit “heavier than before.��


“To argue, as many rightly have, that it is colonial power which orders gender in patriarchal and heteronormative ways implies that the resistance to colonization should be closely allied with the affirmation of queer, trans, and intersex lives.��

“And yet, the two kinds of objections become confused in the phantasm of gender circulated by the Right. Its localist appeal to anti-imperialist sentiment is an appropriation of a Left critique, but surely not one. Its appeal excites nationalist xenophobia and racism, and rallies support for politicians who would promise to more fiercely patrol the borders. This combination is not surprising. Construing “gender�� as an enemy works only by bringing together opposing political trends and bundling oscillating fears without having to reconcile them logically, that is, without accountability. In this way, the phantasm functions as a counterfeit synthesis.��

“Those who should be most enraged by my argument are those who believe that the gender binary is mandated by a version of natural law referenced or occasioned by the Bible, or mandated by an Anglophone understanding of gender dimorphism crafted according to white ideals. They have a great deal to lose, and they should start that process of mourning. Let’s hope their destructive rage turns to productive grief so that they can emerge into a world committed to cohabitation and equality across difference.”]]> 4.02 2024
author: Judith Butler
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/04
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves:
review:
When Judith Butler was contemplating writing a book on gender for a general audience, she posed the question, "Who's Afraid of Gender?" Her editor exclaimed, "Everyone! Everyone is afraid of Gender!" Thus begins Butler's foray into explaining gender studies to a general audience. In plain language, she describes the current threats by the contemporary Right as they seek a return to a patriarchal norm where nothing is ever questioned, even though this kind of society never existed.

She describes the creation of a phantasm—the idea that the LGBTQ community will bring about the collapse of civilization. In reality, this community only wishes to pursue a livable life—one where they can live the same life as any human being on this Earth can expect from birth. Unfortunately, dark forces are using this group to galvanize their supporters and not only take away this group's rights but everyone's rights.

Ultimately, her conclusion is that you can't stop the tide of history, and those on the Right best start mourning their loss productively. We work better as a united, not divided, society.

Favorite Passages:

“When “gender�� absorbs an array of fears and becomes a catchall phantasm for the contemporary Right, the various conditions that actually give rise to those fears lose their names. “Gender�� both collects and incites those fears, keeping us from thinking more clearly about what there is to fear, and how the currently imperiled sense of the world came about in the first place.��

“For in the end, defeating this phantasm is a matter of affirming how one loves, how one lives in one’s body, the right to exist in the world without fear of violence or discrimination, to breathe, to move, to live. Why wouldn’t we want all people to have those fundamental freedoms?��

“Although interpreted as a backlash against progressive movements, anti-gender ideology is driven by a stronger wish, namely the restoration of a patriarchal dream-order where a father is a father; a sexed identity never changes; women, conceived as “born female at birth,�� resume their natural and “moral�� positions within the household; and white people hold uncontested racial supremacy. The project is fragile, however, since the patriarchal order it seeks to restore never quite existed in the form they seek to actualize in the present. “Gender�� here is a psychosocial scene, a public way of dreaming, for the past anti-gender proponents seek to restore is a dream, a wish, even a fantasy that will reinstate order grounded in patriarchal authority. Recruitment into the anti-gender ideology movement is an invitation to join a collective dream, perhaps a psychosis, that will put an end to the implacable anxiety and fear that afflict so many people experiencing climate destruction firsthand, or ubiquitous violence and brutal war, expanding police powers, or intensifying economic precarity.��

“Their anti-intellectualism, their distrust of the academy, is at the same time a refusal to enter into public debate. What is dismissed as “academic�� procedure is actually required for informed public deliberations in democracies. Informed public debate becomes impossible when some parties refuse to read the material under dispute. Reading is not just a pastime or a luxury, but a precondition of democratic life, one of the practices that keeps debate and disagreement grounded, focused, and productive.��

“Consider, however, that sex assignment is not simply an announcement of the sex that an infant is perceived to be, but also communicates a set of adult desires and expectations. The infant’s future is often being imagined or desired through the act of sex assignment, so sex assignment is not a simple description of anatomical facts, but a way of imagining what they will mean, or should mean. That imagining comes from elsewhere, and it does not exactly stop after sex has been legally or medically determined at birth. The girl continues to be girled; the boy continues to be boyed; and these practices of girling and boying are repeated not just by parents but by a range of institutions that greet the child with boxes to be checked and norms to be embodied. In a sense, sex assignment does not happen just once. It is an iterative process, repeated by different actors and institutions, and depending on where one lives, it can be reiterated in ways that are not always in conformity with one another.��

“What kind of phantasm has gender become, and what anxieties, fears, and hatreds does it collect and mobilize? ��

“The ancient debates about free will and determinism take shape within gender theory as well. Yet here a distinction should be made between whether or not gender or sexuality are chosen and whether people should be free to live according to the gender and sexuality that they are. For instance, a trans person can claim that their gendered truth is internal, even God-given, while another may regard themselves as formed by culture or even freely chosen. All of them deserve rights to live freely, which means that their demand for political freedom does not necessarily presuppose that gender or sexuality is chosen. When people claim a gender or, indeed, a sex for themselves that was not the one originally assigned at birth, they exercise human powers of self-definition at the expense of a natural sex divinely created or established in a Christian version of nature. According to the Pope, they are acting as if they have divine powers, flagrantly disputing the power of divinity to establish their sex for all time. At some moments, the Pope has declared that gender advocates seek to steal the powers of God, thus confirming that they work from the devil. “For the devil always disguises himself in a mesmerizing appearance. If “gender�� is such a devil, or the devil himself, then to argue with him is to fall inside his trap. To argue with the devil would be to accept the false appearance as a plausible interlocutor. Devils and demons can only be expelled or banished, burned in effigy, which is why censorship, bullying, and pathologization become the key strategies for the anti-gender movement.��

“The harm that these laws do relies upon the conceit that they are warding off harm. This is a moral alibi, an inversion, the kind that lets moral sadism flourish. The harm is done through cultivating an imagination of where harm is happening and who is making it happen. That phantasmatic scene effects a displacement from actual harm done, both continuing and justifying that harm, for if the source of that harm has been effectively externalized, then destroying that externalized form keeps the destructive action alive—and intensifies it. ��


“A serious harm is done to children who are denied education and care. That kind of deprivation produces psychic damage, producing a situation in which life itself becomes a form of damage from which they must escape. If a queer or trans kid seeks to live, if a girl assigned female at birth seeks to change the gender expectations made of her, if a boy assigned female at birth is seeking to affirm his life, and there is no language or community in which these lives can be affirmed, they become the waste expelled from the human community, and their sexuality and their gender become the unspeakable. Heteronormativity becomes mandatory, backed by law or doctrine, forming the horizon of the thinkable, the limits of the imaginable-and the livable. And so, the task becomes how to affirm life with others in ways that give value and support to all those who seek to breathe, love, and move without fear of violence. Where, by the way, is “pro-life�� in this scene?��

“How does “morality�� serve the purposes of political sadism, muffling and subordinating those who are seeking to emerge into voice, equality, and freedom? If “love�� has been reduced to compulsory heterosexuality and hatred has propagated distortions of its own making to justify incendiary attacks on critical thinking, social movements for freedom and justice, gender and race studies, and academic freedom, then it is all those who seek to live and breathe in freedom and equality who suffer most by being transfigured into demonic and dangerous forces. It is not only that the principles of freedom and equality are under attack, but all those who require them to live.18��


“The freedom to determine a reproductive future is one being explicitly and partially denied by the revocation of Roe v. Wade. It is important during these times to see how many freedom struggles are being demeaned and destroyed by those who would augment state powers, aided and abetted by the allegation that collective freedoms that seek to more radically actualize democracy are a danger to society and whose freedom or “liberty�� must be curtailed by increasingly authoritarian measures. Why is freedom so frightening? Is that even the question? Or is it rather: how has freedom been made to seem so frightening that people find themselves longing for authoritarian rule?��

“In the context of trans people, TERFs oppose basic claims of self-determination, freedom and autonomy, rights to be protected from violence, and rights of access to public space and to health care without discrimination, all of which are rights that they, as feminists, fight for and depend on otherwise. No wonder those who confront this attempted existential nullification are sometimes screaming. It does not help that “gender-critical�� feminists describe their opponents as stupid, suffering from false consciousness, fad-driven, doctrinaire, even totalitarian, allying with the rhetorical aims of the Christian Right. Precisely because they are not thinking about coalitions, and not concerned with the best way to fight the rise of the Right, they retreat into identitarian claims and proliferate baseless fears, contributing to the anti-gender phantasm.��

“To refuse to recognize trans women as women because one is afraid that they are really men and, hence, potentially rapists, is to let the traumatic scenario loose on one’s description of reality, to flood an undeserving group of people with one’s unbridled terror and fear, and to fail to grasp social reality in its complexity, while also failing to identify the truer source of harm, an insight that could very well participate an alliance in the place of paranoid division. ��

“Working together with race, class, disability, personal and national histories, gender saturates how we see, feel, and sense ourselves in the world. It is decidedly not a timeless reality. This structure that saturates the world goes largely unexamined unless we explore its pervasive operation in presenting the way things are. Gender affects the way we understand the profession of medicine, the vocation of science, economics, especially the delimitation of the public and private domains, the organization of labor, the distribution of poverty, structural inequalities, the modalities of violence and war. But it can also name one of the most intimate and abiding senses of who we are in relation to others, to history, and to language. If it did not raise this intimate question of who we are and how we relate to others, of permeability and survival, we would not be having any of these arguments, and they would not be as urgent as they clearly are.��

“For Lugones, gender dimorphism based on biological assumptions works together with heterosexual patriarchy, and both are imposed by what she called the “light�� side of the organization of gender within colonial modernity. In light of the anti-gender ideology movements and its links with new forms of authoritarianism, she may well consider its colonial influence to be a bit “heavier than before.��


“To argue, as many rightly have, that it is colonial power which orders gender in patriarchal and heteronormative ways implies that the resistance to colonization should be closely allied with the affirmation of queer, trans, and intersex lives.��

“And yet, the two kinds of objections become confused in the phantasm of gender circulated by the Right. Its localist appeal to anti-imperialist sentiment is an appropriation of a Left critique, but surely not one. Its appeal excites nationalist xenophobia and racism, and rallies support for politicians who would promise to more fiercely patrol the borders. This combination is not surprising. Construing “gender�� as an enemy works only by bringing together opposing political trends and bundling oscillating fears without having to reconcile them logically, that is, without accountability. In this way, the phantasm functions as a counterfeit synthesis.��

“Those who should be most enraged by my argument are those who believe that the gender binary is mandated by a version of natural law referenced or occasioned by the Bible, or mandated by an Anglophone understanding of gender dimorphism crafted according to white ideals. They have a great deal to lose, and they should start that process of mourning. Let’s hope their destructive rage turns to productive grief so that they can emerge into a world committed to cohabitation and equality across difference.��
]]> 63876565
As a young femme in 1990s Manila, Geena Rocero heard, �� Bakla, bakla! ,�� a taunt aimed at her feminine sway, whenever she left the tiny universe of her eskinita . Eventually, she found her place in trans pageants, the Philippines�� informal national sport. When her competitors mocked her as a “horse Barbie�� due to her statuesque physique, tumbling hair, long neck, and dark skin, she leaned into the epithet. By seventeen, she was the Philippines�� highest-earning trans pageant queen.

A year later, Geena moved to the United States where she could change her name and gender marker on her documents. But legal recognition didn’t mean safety. In order to survive, Geena went stealth and hid her trans identity, gaining one type of freedom at the expense of another. For a while, it worked. She became an in-demand model. But as her star rose, her sense of self eroded. She craved acceptance as her authentic self yet had to remain vigilant in order to protect her dream career. The high-stakes double life finally forced Geena to decide herself if she wanted to reclaim the power of Horse Barbie once and for radiant, head held high, and unabashedly herself.

A dazzling testimony from an icon who sits at the center of transgender history and activism, Horse Barbie is a celebratory and universal story of survival, love, and pure joy.]]> 320 Geena Rocero 0593445880 Jeff 5
Growing up poor in the Philippines, she struggled to help her family make ends meet. Effeminate, she was bullied by boys in her neighborhood while trying to sell street food. Always knowing she was trans, her community and family were immediately supportive. Her family introduced her to taking birth control pills to help her in her transition. She started her modeling and pageant career. She gets selected by some of the top trans pageant queens. She would win pageant after pageant and get a reputation and a following. When she gets the opportunity to go to the United States, she jumps at the chance. In her mind, the opportunity to full transition was a bigger draw than continued success in the Philippines. A reminder of what she can gain: when she gets her United States identification, she is identified as a woman.

It is a riveting memoir of hope, transition, and making your dreams come true. This memoir complements Munroe Burdorf's Transitional, which documents her time as a famous trans model. ]]> 4.19 2023
author: Geena Rocero
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/08
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves:
review:
Geena Rocero begins her story at the top of her game, dancing in a John Legend music video and living the life of her dreams, but it didn't start off that way.

Growing up poor in the Philippines, she struggled to help her family make ends meet. Effeminate, she was bullied by boys in her neighborhood while trying to sell street food. Always knowing she was trans, her community and family were immediately supportive. Her family introduced her to taking birth control pills to help her in her transition. She started her modeling and pageant career. She gets selected by some of the top trans pageant queens. She would win pageant after pageant and get a reputation and a following. When she gets the opportunity to go to the United States, she jumps at the chance. In her mind, the opportunity to full transition was a bigger draw than continued success in the Philippines. A reminder of what she can gain: when she gets her United States identification, she is identified as a woman.

It is a riveting memoir of hope, transition, and making your dreams come true. This memoir complements Munroe Burdorf's Transitional, which documents her time as a famous trans model.
]]> 77920745 WINNER OF THE 2024 PULITZER PRIZE FOR GENERAL NON-FICTION

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, The Economist, Time, The New Republic, and the Financial Times.

Immersive and gripping, an intimate story of a deadly accident outside Jerusalem that unravels a tangle of lives, loves, enmities, and histories over the course of one revealing, heartbreaking day.

Five-year-old Milad Salama is excited for a school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a semitrailer. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to the site. The scene is chaos—the children have been taken to different hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some are missing, others cannot be identified. Abed sets off on an odyssey to learn Milad’s fate. It is every parent’s worst nightmare, but for Abed it is compounded by the maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must navigate because he is Palestinian. He is on the wrong side of the separation wall, holds the wrong ID to pass the military checkpoints, and has the wrong papers to enter the city of Jerusalem. Abed’s quest to find Milad is interwoven with the stories of a cast of Jewish and Palestinian characters whose lives and histories unexpectedly converge.

In A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, Nathan Thrall—hailed for his “severe allergy to conventional wisdom�� (Time)—offers an indelibly human portrait of the struggle over Israel/Palestine and a new understanding of the tragic history and reality of one of the most contested places on earth.]]> 272 Nathan Thrall 1250854970 Jeff 5
Thrall then takes a step back and thoroughly examines how we got here. We go over Abed Salama's life and history, which becomes the history of modern relations between Israel and Palestine. The repression, red lining, and managing the bureaucracy of living a livable life. The details that lead to this point are frustrating and horrendous.

This book was released just days before the ghastly October 7th attacks on Israel and the resulting vengeful carnage inflicted on the Palestinian people. What is genuinely horrible about this situation is the revelation of the lack of care for Palestinian children. Both in the retelling of these actual events and the bombing of women and children, there is a lack of regard for children. Even the idea that a dead Palestinian is a future terrorist. It is disheartening to imagine a peaceful future. ]]> 4.34 2023
author: Nathan Thrall
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/10
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves:
review:
The book opens with a parent's worst nightmare. After dropping his son off for school, he is alerted to a horrific school bus accident. While on a field trip, a school bus crashes and catches fire. Rescue crews are slow to respond, and most of the children barely make it out alive. Many are killed and scorched unrecognizably. Parents still waiting for word on their children don't know if they are living or dead and must navigate the bizarre two-state solution of Israel and Palestine.

Thrall then takes a step back and thoroughly examines how we got here. We go over Abed Salama's life and history, which becomes the history of modern relations between Israel and Palestine. The repression, red lining, and managing the bureaucracy of living a livable life. The details that lead to this point are frustrating and horrendous.

This book was released just days before the ghastly October 7th attacks on Israel and the resulting vengeful carnage inflicted on the Palestinian people. What is genuinely horrible about this situation is the revelation of the lack of care for Palestinian children. Both in the retelling of these actual events and the bombing of women and children, there is a lack of regard for children. Even the idea that a dead Palestinian is a future terrorist. It is disheartening to imagine a peaceful future.
]]> 44094014 Homie is Danez Smith’s magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith’s close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family—blood and chosen—arrives with just the right food and some redemption. Part friendship diary, part bright elegy, part war cry, Homie is the exuberant new book written for Danez and for Danez’s friends and for you and for yours.]]> 96 Danez Smith 1644450100 Jeff 5 4.42 2020
author: Danez Smith
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/31
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 155685405 ��
Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, the complex. She has been compared to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, acclaimed for her powerful thinking, deep feeling, and electric prose. But while Jamison has never shied away from challenging material—scouring her own psyche and digging into our most unanswerable questions across four books�� Splinters enters a new realm.
��
In her first memoir, Jamison turns her unrivaled powers of perception on some of the most intimate relationships of her her consuming love for her young daughter, a ruptured marriage once swollen with hope, and the shaping legacy of her own parents�� complicated bond. In examining what it means for a woman to be many things at once—a mother, an artist, a teacher, a lover—Jamison places the magical and the mundane side by side in surprising ways: pumping breastmilk in a shared university office, driving the open highway in the throes of new love, growing a tender second skin of consciousness as she watches her daughter come alive to the world. The result is a work of nonfiction like no other, an almost impossibly deep reckoning with the muchness of life and art, and a book that grieves the departure of one love even as it celebrates the arrival of another.
��
How do we move forward into joy when we are haunted by loss? How do we claim hope alongside the harm we’ve caused? A memoir for which the very term tour de force seems to have been coined, Splinters plumbs these and other pressing questions with writing that is revelatory to the last page. Jamison has delivered a book with the linguistic daring and emotional acuity that made The Empathy Exams and The Recovering instant classics, even as she reaches new depths of understanding, piercing the reader to the core. A master of nonfiction, she evinces once again her ability to “stitch together the intellectual and the emotional with the finesse of a crackerjack surgeon�� (NPR).]]> 272 Leslie Jamison 0316374881 Jeff 5 --Adele, Cry Your Heart Out

After reading one of her essays about her Covid experience, I was drawn to this book. Her essay and Jesmyn Ward's were two of the most terrifying essays I read early in the pandemic. This book expands on her experience as a recently divorced single mother.

Her previous work, The Empathy Exams, was a thought-provoking exploration of who deserves empathy. In this book, she turns the lens on herself, delving into a time when she believed her marriage and child would answer all her problems, only to realize that sharing her life with another was a struggle, leading to fractures in her relationship.

Very moving, powerful, and brutally honest essays that call herself out for her problems. YOu can't do any work until you acknowledge how you contribute to the situation. "no one moves through this life without causing harm..." You have to claim responsibility for the harm you cause, you have to believe it is necessary."

Favorite Passages:

“I imagined someone taking a photo of our circle, with my baby bouncing there amid my students, proof of my nimble working motherhood. Perhaps if I assembled enough of this proof, it could fill whatever space inside myself I’d once imagined filling with happiness. It was as if I lived every moment of my life with the sense that it had to be good enough for someone else—perhaps my husband, to show him the life I was trying to give our daughter.��

“There is a photo of that day, actually. My daughter looks happily blurred by jumping and my students are leaning forward, listening intently, and I do look like both a mother and a teacher. But I never felt doubled. I felt more like half a mother and half a teacher, constantly reaching for each identity as if it were a dangling toy—mother, teacher, mother, teacher—until the elastic tether of the other self snapped me away again.��


“During a conversation two years earlier, when I was already unhappy enough to consider leaving, I told Harriet I was worried about the harm I would cause if I left. She told me I was right to worry. I would cause harm. She also told me no one moves through this world without causing harm. I’d wanted her to say, Don’t be crazy! You won’t cause any harm! Or at least, You’re in so much pain, you deserve to cause harm!
But she hadn’t said either of these things. What she said instead was neither condemnation nor absolution. It was just this: You have to claim responsibility for the harm you cause. You have to believe it’s necessary.��

“Sometimes motherhood tricked me into feeling virtuous because I was always taking care of someone. But it didn’t make me virtuous at all. It made me feral and ruthless. It steeled me to do what needed to be done.��

“We were tucked inside the logic of a fairy tale: two roads diverged in a wood. One led to a mitzvah and the other to gang rape. But I wanted to believe that the universe was an entity with benevolent intentions. That was one of the things Colleen and I shared—an instinctive, sometimes foolish faith in people; permitted by the ways in which the world had generally been kind to us. ��

“We mapped three paths: we could end things; we could radically change both our lives; or we could keep on going in this middle space, full of intensity without assurances. Each path—ending, transforming, continuing—was hard to imagine. But we liked going back and forth. I was hooked on hope and he was hooked on doom. Whenever he saw a puppy, he said, he just thought about how it would someday die.��

“Wasn’t that ultimately a more sustainable notion of love, anyway—a love that wanted to involve all your tedious moments, rather than turn away from them?��

“The ex-philosopher wasn’t my happy ending, and he wasn’t an epic punishment, either. He was just an opportunity to stand in the muck of hope and uncertainty, swiping and tapping. As it turned out, I was neither a villain nor a goddess, but just—as they say in recovery—a woman among women, a person among people. No better or worse than the rest.”]]> 3.79 2024
author: Leslie Jamison
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/18
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves:
review:
"I created this storm, it's only fair that I have to sit in its rain."
--Adele, Cry Your Heart Out

After reading one of her essays about her Covid experience, I was drawn to this book. Her essay and Jesmyn Ward's were two of the most terrifying essays I read early in the pandemic. This book expands on her experience as a recently divorced single mother.

Her previous work, The Empathy Exams, was a thought-provoking exploration of who deserves empathy. In this book, she turns the lens on herself, delving into a time when she believed her marriage and child would answer all her problems, only to realize that sharing her life with another was a struggle, leading to fractures in her relationship.

Very moving, powerful, and brutally honest essays that call herself out for her problems. YOu can't do any work until you acknowledge how you contribute to the situation. "no one moves through this life without causing harm..." You have to claim responsibility for the harm you cause, you have to believe it is necessary."

Favorite Passages:

“I imagined someone taking a photo of our circle, with my baby bouncing there amid my students, proof of my nimble working motherhood. Perhaps if I assembled enough of this proof, it could fill whatever space inside myself I’d once imagined filling with happiness. It was as if I lived every moment of my life with the sense that it had to be good enough for someone else—perhaps my husband, to show him the life I was trying to give our daughter.��

“There is a photo of that day, actually. My daughter looks happily blurred by jumping and my students are leaning forward, listening intently, and I do look like both a mother and a teacher. But I never felt doubled. I felt more like half a mother and half a teacher, constantly reaching for each identity as if it were a dangling toy—mother, teacher, mother, teacher—until the elastic tether of the other self snapped me away again.��


“During a conversation two years earlier, when I was already unhappy enough to consider leaving, I told Harriet I was worried about the harm I would cause if I left. She told me I was right to worry. I would cause harm. She also told me no one moves through this world without causing harm. I’d wanted her to say, Don’t be crazy! You won’t cause any harm! Or at least, You’re in so much pain, you deserve to cause harm!
But she hadn’t said either of these things. What she said instead was neither condemnation nor absolution. It was just this: You have to claim responsibility for the harm you cause. You have to believe it’s necessary.��

“Sometimes motherhood tricked me into feeling virtuous because I was always taking care of someone. But it didn’t make me virtuous at all. It made me feral and ruthless. It steeled me to do what needed to be done.��

“We were tucked inside the logic of a fairy tale: two roads diverged in a wood. One led to a mitzvah and the other to gang rape. But I wanted to believe that the universe was an entity with benevolent intentions. That was one of the things Colleen and I shared—an instinctive, sometimes foolish faith in people; permitted by the ways in which the world had generally been kind to us. ��

“We mapped three paths: we could end things; we could radically change both our lives; or we could keep on going in this middle space, full of intensity without assurances. Each path—ending, transforming, continuing—was hard to imagine. But we liked going back and forth. I was hooked on hope and he was hooked on doom. Whenever he saw a puppy, he said, he just thought about how it would someday die.��

“Wasn’t that ultimately a more sustainable notion of love, anyway—a love that wanted to involve all your tedious moments, rather than turn away from them?��

“The ex-philosopher wasn’t my happy ending, and he wasn’t an epic punishment, either. He was just an opportunity to stand in the muck of hope and uncertainty, swiping and tapping. As it turned out, I was neither a villain nor a goddess, but just—as they say in recovery—a woman among women, a person among people. No better or worse than the rest.��
]]> 52751434 Award-winning author and artist Mike Curato draws on his own experiences in Flamer, his debut graphic novel, telling a difficult story with humor, compassion, and love.

I know I’m not gay. Gay boys like other boys. I hate boys. They’re mean, and scary, and they’re always destroying something or saying something dumb or both.

I hate that word. Gay. It makes me feel . . . unsafe.

It's the summer between middle school and high school, and Aiden Navarro is away at camp. Everyone's going through changes—but for Aiden, the stakes feel higher. As he navigates friendships, deals with bullies, and spends time with Elias (a boy he can't stop thinking about), he finds himself on a path of self-discovery and acceptance.]]> 366 Mike Curato 1250756146 Jeff 5
The main character is with a scout group called The Flaming Arrows, which speaks to the title (those who have yet to read the book assume it means something else). As the troop sets up camp, the main character explains the situation. While he gets along with his troopmates, they often make fun of him and use gay slurs against him (these scenes are used to justify and challenge the book, but the counterargument is that this is not an uncommon situation for a 13-year-old boy.) He has a best friend and a pen pal. We learn about his rough family life and how hard it has been to find friends. He has a low moment when multiple crises emerge for him, but his faith inspires him to continue.

An inspiring story everyone should read for themselves.]]> 4.30 2020
author: Mike Curato
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/13
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves:
review:
I picked this one up since it's been on Banned Books lists across the United States. In fact, this book was challenged at my local library. What I find shocking about these attempts is that it is clear the challengers have not read these books. This book is a wholesome story told by someone who was in a personal struggle and found a way forward, through a Catholic faith, no less.

The main character is with a scout group called The Flaming Arrows, which speaks to the title (those who have yet to read the book assume it means something else). As the troop sets up camp, the main character explains the situation. While he gets along with his troopmates, they often make fun of him and use gay slurs against him (these scenes are used to justify and challenge the book, but the counterargument is that this is not an uncommon situation for a 13-year-old boy.) He has a best friend and a pen pal. We learn about his rough family life and how hard it has been to find friends. He has a low moment when multiple crises emerge for him, but his faith inspires him to continue.

An inspiring story everyone should read for themselves.
]]> 127306192 New York Times bestselling author Xochitl Gonzalez delivers a mesmerizing novel about a first-generation Ivy League student who uncovers the genius work of a female artist decades after her suspicious death

1985. Anita de Monte, a rising star in the art world, is found dead in New York City; her tragic death is the talk of the town. Until it isn’t. By 1998 Anita’s name has been all but forgotten—certainly by the time Raquel, a third-year art history student is preparing her final thesis. On College Hill, surrounded by privileged students whose futures are already paved out for them, Raquel feels like an outsider. Students of color, like her, are the minority there, and the pressure to work twice as hard for the same opportunities is no secret.

But when Raquel becomes romantically involved with a well-connected older art student, she finds herself unexpectedly rising up the social ranks. As she attempts to straddle both worlds, she stumbles upon Anita’s story, raising questions about the dynamics of her own relationship, which eerily mirrors that of the forgotten artist.

Moving back and forth through time and told from the perspectives of both women, Anita de Monte Laughs Last is a propulsive, witty examination of power, love, and art, daring to ask who gets to be remembered and who is left behind in the rarefied world of the elite.]]> 342 Xóchitl González 1250786215 Jeff 4
The narrative shifts between the art history student's challenges with Anita de Monte's artistic journey. This alternation prompts reflection on who succeeds and who fades into obscurity. The student grapples with the impact of power on a young artist's career, particularly one with a wealthy family. She is torn between succumbing to this power, as Anita de Monte did, or standing on her own and accepting the consequences.

Meanwhile, we see the story of de Monte, her art, her rise, her death, and even her afterlife. One of the more touching aspects of the story is that the power in the afterlife comes from those who remember her and her artwork when people continue to celebrate her. She can reemerge and watch the world. She can also haunt her murderer as a bat, which is very fun.

It is an excellent educational narrative that remembers Mendieta and reminds young women to remember their worth and stories. ]]> 3.76 2024
author: Xóchitl González
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/25
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves:
review:
A fictionalized account of Ana Mendieta, her art, her death, and her husband, Carl Andrew. Names have been changed to protect the guilty. A young college student who doesn't fit in with the Art History girls decides to research Anita de Monte. She finds a connection as this art also does not fit in the typical oeuvre of Western Art.

The narrative shifts between the art history student's challenges with Anita de Monte's artistic journey. This alternation prompts reflection on who succeeds and who fades into obscurity. The student grapples with the impact of power on a young artist's career, particularly one with a wealthy family. She is torn between succumbing to this power, as Anita de Monte did, or standing on her own and accepting the consequences.

Meanwhile, we see the story of de Monte, her art, her rise, her death, and even her afterlife. One of the more touching aspects of the story is that the power in the afterlife comes from those who remember her and her artwork when people continue to celebrate her. She can reemerge and watch the world. She can also haunt her murderer as a bat, which is very fun.

It is an excellent educational narrative that remembers Mendieta and reminds young women to remember their worth and stories.
]]> 144734712
What are we to think as we facing the sixth extinction moment? Kant's invitation to imagine an 'end of all things' no longer feels like just a thought experiment.

Philosopher Ben Ware argues that we must accept this without looking away. In fact, extinction is the very lens through which we see our current reality. He argues that in order to map the catastrophic present, we will first need to take a tiger's leap into the past in order to construct a new 'dialectics of extinctions'.

On Extinction takes us on a breath-taking philosophical journey. Bringing dialectical thought to bear on one of the most pressing issues of our times, Ware argues that radical politics today should not be concerned with merely averting the worst , but rather with beginning again at the end : bringing to completion a mode of political and economic life which tethers us all–the yet to be born–to a sick but undying present.

To think about the future in this way is itself a form of liberation that might incubate the necessary radical solutions we need.]]> 192 Ben Ware 178873999X Jeff 3
A bleak, philosophical take on climate change, politics, and the state of the world. It could be summed up with the True Detective line: Time is a Flat Circle.

Ben Ware prepares for our bleak future. He examines Late Capitalism's impact on politics. Climate Change is bringing extinction but also demonstrating that we have all seen this before. The future is in the past, and it is also the secret to prepare for the future.

Favorite Passages;

This catastrophic convergence, far from placing the possibility of a global humanity on the immediate horizon, has instead intensified a series of sad passions and alienating symp- toms: surplus rage, hyper-anxiety, cynical resignation, the addiction to numbing forms of enjoyment, identitarian narcissism, collective paranoia, melancholic withdrawal, historical forgetting, the desperate attempt to preserve the ‘human�� as it already exists under capitalism. What we are talking about here then is a new kind of traumatized psy- chic reality, a new wounded subjectivity, one that won’t be overcome by a dialectics of mortal fear (being scared ‘so much that we start fighting for our lives��64), but which will instead require a political shift away from the time of end- less suffering

This beginning again, which the death drive announces, has always already begun. There are, strictly speaking, no blank pages on which the text of history can be written, only those already overwritten with a network of still illegible signifiers, marked by the hands of previous generations. A revolutionary politics of the death drive will thus take as its goal the liberation of these texts into history, their coming to legibility: an actualization of a past that has not yet fully existed, a past that still remains ahead of us in time. In this respect, the death drive reconfigures political temporality as such. No longer a straight line heading towards some pre-determined ‘future��, but now, rather, a series of repetitions, or better still revolutions, with each one interrupting the oppressive course of history and producing the new. Such is the foundation of a true politics of immortality today: a beginning again from scratch with one’s face turned resolutely towards the unfinished past.]]> 3.47
author: Ben Ware
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.47
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/27
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves:
review:
"There are, strictly speaking, no blank pages on which the text of history can be written, only those already overwritten with a network of still illegible signifiers, marked by the hands of previous generations."

A bleak, philosophical take on climate change, politics, and the state of the world. It could be summed up with the True Detective line: Time is a Flat Circle.

Ben Ware prepares for our bleak future. He examines Late Capitalism's impact on politics. Climate Change is bringing extinction but also demonstrating that we have all seen this before. The future is in the past, and it is also the secret to prepare for the future.

Favorite Passages;

This catastrophic convergence, far from placing the possibility of a global humanity on the immediate horizon, has instead intensified a series of sad passions and alienating symp- toms: surplus rage, hyper-anxiety, cynical resignation, the addiction to numbing forms of enjoyment, identitarian narcissism, collective paranoia, melancholic withdrawal, historical forgetting, the desperate attempt to preserve the ‘human�� as it already exists under capitalism. What we are talking about here then is a new kind of traumatized psy- chic reality, a new wounded subjectivity, one that won’t be overcome by a dialectics of mortal fear (being scared ‘so much that we start fighting for our lives��64), but which will instead require a political shift away from the time of end- less suffering

This beginning again, which the death drive announces, has always already begun. There are, strictly speaking, no blank pages on which the text of history can be written, only those already overwritten with a network of still illegible signifiers, marked by the hands of previous generations. A revolutionary politics of the death drive will thus take as its goal the liberation of these texts into history, their coming to legibility: an actualization of a past that has not yet fully existed, a past that still remains ahead of us in time. In this respect, the death drive reconfigures political temporality as such. No longer a straight line heading towards some pre-determined ‘future��, but now, rather, a series of repetitions, or better still revolutions, with each one interrupting the oppressive course of history and producing the new. Such is the foundation of a true politics of immortality today: a beginning again from scratch with one’s face turned resolutely towards the unfinished past.
]]> 181346634
There’s Always This Year is a triumph, brimming with joy, pain, solidarity, comfort, outrage, and hope. No matter the subject of his keen focus—whether it's basketball, or music, or performance—Hanif Abdurraqib’s exquisite writing is always poetry, always profound, and always a clarion call to radically reimagine how we think about our culture, our country, and ourselves.]]> 334 Hanif Abdurraqib 0593448790 Jeff 5
"You are going to have to catch me. You are going to have to climb, and I know you want no part of the world this high up. Find the point where you are unkillable and jump toward it if you can."

Hanif Abdurraqib's book is a sort of essays, sort of poems, on what makes watching sports magical.
With a countdown clock running, we reminisce on our dreams. In sports, in basketball, miracles can happen. We see them in the big games, the come-from-behind game-winning buzzer-beater shot. But it is the miracles on the small court that can stay with us. This magical game at your high school or pickup game—something unbelievable that will never show up on a television set but will be orally recounted and remembered for generations—stories made legend.

Hanif weaves this tale of legends and myths: guys who had a miraculous game but never made it out, a team that was unkillable for a season and then quietly disappeared, a season of bad-luck teams suddenly becoming champions, that feeling near midseason when you look at your fellow fans and think this might be our year—all wonderfully captured. Of course, so much of this is about Ohio, about getting out and making it big. It is about watching the Cleveland Cavaliers and seeing something magical come together, if even for a few moments. This book is one of my favorite this year.

Favorite Passages:

But please believe me and my boys made up handshakes that were just ours, ones where we would slap hands and then make new, shared designs out of our bent fingers, pulled back and punctuated with a snap. We would break them out before parting ways at the bus stop to go to our separate schools, and break them out again upon our return at the end of the day. The series of moves was quick, but still slow enough to linger. Rarely are these motions talked about as the motions of love, and since we are talking about our loves over our enemies, lord knows I will take whatever I can to be in the presence of my people. To have a secret that is just ours, played out through some quiet and invented choreography. A touch between us that lingers just long enough to know we've put some work into our love for each other. We've made something that no one outside can get through.

“…you are going to have to catch me. You are going to have to climb, and I know you want no parts of the world this high up. Find the point where you are unkillable and jump toward it if you can. ��

When he started at one end of Market Square Arena in Indianapolis and ran, catapulting himself from the free-throw line (yes, the actual free-throw line!) and remaining, suspended and extended, for what feels, even now, like a glorious hour. Your finest hour. The hour you've dreamed of living again ever since the final grains of it kissed the mountain of sand at the bottom of the hourglass. Have you ever been in the air so long that your feet begin to fall in love with the new familiar, walking along some invisible surface that is surely there, that must be, as there is no other way to describe what miracle keeps you afloat? How long have you been suspended in a place that loves you with the same ferocity and freedom as the ground might, as the grave might, as a heaven that lets you walk in drowning in gold might?

If we don't talk about what we do beyond the frantic moments of what we do, then we can convince ourselves that there is a newness to each clumsy encounter. That we're mostly strangers, drifting toward each other, desiring only touch and nothing else. And in the hour that is our hour, a window opens and we can breathe out all the sad stuff. Find a closet for our tapestry of aches. Both of our mothers had died, which might bond us in another world, if we were considering falling in love and not simply pouring ourselves into what would otherwise be vast, lonely gaps of living.

Your ball is your ball, and depending on how you and your folks are livin', you might not see a new one for a while. And so, of course, praise to the person who made a way with a bald rock, and a little path of concrete that was their concrete, and a rusted rim with no net. Those be the noblest of hoopers. The ones who, back then, you had to keep an eye on. Cuz they've done all the hard shit already. Once they get a little bit of a grip on something new, it's lights out.

Yes Lord, I am thankful today again for every reminder of how I have outlived my worst imagination. I will walk slowly through the garden of all that could have killed me but didn’t.

The people I trust most understand a love like that, understand it even if the money from the record deal got them out of a place, or if ball got them out of a place. Call it war, call it whatever you want. You wouldn't know what to do with your face turned toward the blaring dawn, having survived another handful of hours that someone didn't want you to. There is no language I can find for the affection of repeated survival. To know you haven't been caught just yet. That with some luck, you never will be

If things have gone wrong enough for a long time, anyone can become a god.

With enough repetition, anything can become a religion. It doesn’t matter if it works or not, it simply matters that a person returns.

There are things we know about cities—the ones we live in, the ones we visit, the ones that seem like ours during the right run of hours. But this story ends in an act of forgetting. At least for now, in this moment. Which, I must tell you, is almost over. It was a delight to drink from this dream, but know, the bottom of the glass, tilted to our mouths, is visible enough to offer a reflection. Hold whatever sweetness you can in your mouth for a little longer. Ignore the glass, dropped to the floor, fractured into an army of shards. This is how we begin the other story.

to be nothing but rage I know this to be what comes after swinging wild punches at the air and imagining the faces of your worst demons the cops the politicians who call the places you love war zones the helicopters that won't let you sleep that claw through the walls and wake up elders and children and goddamn I remember at my feet that blood-stained concrete just split right in half and opened up and I want a whole city underground if it does not love my people I want to bury the new condo developments instead of my people I want to bury the craft breweries and the barcades and the mixed-use helltowers instead of my people I want the statues melted down I want the mothers of murdered children to do it I want the heat to rise from a statue's vanishing and last for ten summers I don't want apologies anymore no not this time I want the mayor to walk through a place he called a war zone at night I want people to get real honest with themselves about what war actually is I want the schools to have heat I want the schools to have air I want the riot gear thrown in the river the river that was blue when I was a boy but now leaves brown streaks as it runs away from the city I want the brown river to carry the riot gear to some other hell and I want the babies to stop passing out in school do you hear me I want a whole city under the ground some days but I at least want the rain I at least want something to wash the blood away so that no one who loved him has to and somewhere beyond the blood what I don't remember is

If I hadn’t made it clear there, this is all about the good fortune of who gets to make it out of somewhere and who doesn’t. ]]> 4.32 2024
author: Hanif Abdurraqib
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/30
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves:
review:
"If I hadn't made it clear there, this is all about the good fortune of who gets to make it out of somewhere and who doesn't."

"You are going to have to catch me. You are going to have to climb, and I know you want no part of the world this high up. Find the point where you are unkillable and jump toward it if you can."

Hanif Abdurraqib's book is a sort of essays, sort of poems, on what makes watching sports magical.
With a countdown clock running, we reminisce on our dreams. In sports, in basketball, miracles can happen. We see them in the big games, the come-from-behind game-winning buzzer-beater shot. But it is the miracles on the small court that can stay with us. This magical game at your high school or pickup game—something unbelievable that will never show up on a television set but will be orally recounted and remembered for generations—stories made legend.

Hanif weaves this tale of legends and myths: guys who had a miraculous game but never made it out, a team that was unkillable for a season and then quietly disappeared, a season of bad-luck teams suddenly becoming champions, that feeling near midseason when you look at your fellow fans and think this might be our year—all wonderfully captured. Of course, so much of this is about Ohio, about getting out and making it big. It is about watching the Cleveland Cavaliers and seeing something magical come together, if even for a few moments. This book is one of my favorite this year.

Favorite Passages:

But please believe me and my boys made up handshakes that were just ours, ones where we would slap hands and then make new, shared designs out of our bent fingers, pulled back and punctuated with a snap. We would break them out before parting ways at the bus stop to go to our separate schools, and break them out again upon our return at the end of the day. The series of moves was quick, but still slow enough to linger. Rarely are these motions talked about as the motions of love, and since we are talking about our loves over our enemies, lord knows I will take whatever I can to be in the presence of my people. To have a secret that is just ours, played out through some quiet and invented choreography. A touch between us that lingers just long enough to know we've put some work into our love for each other. We've made something that no one outside can get through.

“…you are going to have to catch me. You are going to have to climb, and I know you want no parts of the world this high up. Find the point where you are unkillable and jump toward it if you can. ��

When he started at one end of Market Square Arena in Indianapolis and ran, catapulting himself from the free-throw line (yes, the actual free-throw line!) and remaining, suspended and extended, for what feels, even now, like a glorious hour. Your finest hour. The hour you've dreamed of living again ever since the final grains of it kissed the mountain of sand at the bottom of the hourglass. Have you ever been in the air so long that your feet begin to fall in love with the new familiar, walking along some invisible surface that is surely there, that must be, as there is no other way to describe what miracle keeps you afloat? How long have you been suspended in a place that loves you with the same ferocity and freedom as the ground might, as the grave might, as a heaven that lets you walk in drowning in gold might?

If we don't talk about what we do beyond the frantic moments of what we do, then we can convince ourselves that there is a newness to each clumsy encounter. That we're mostly strangers, drifting toward each other, desiring only touch and nothing else. And in the hour that is our hour, a window opens and we can breathe out all the sad stuff. Find a closet for our tapestry of aches. Both of our mothers had died, which might bond us in another world, if we were considering falling in love and not simply pouring ourselves into what would otherwise be vast, lonely gaps of living.

Your ball is your ball, and depending on how you and your folks are livin', you might not see a new one for a while. And so, of course, praise to the person who made a way with a bald rock, and a little path of concrete that was their concrete, and a rusted rim with no net. Those be the noblest of hoopers. The ones who, back then, you had to keep an eye on. Cuz they've done all the hard shit already. Once they get a little bit of a grip on something new, it's lights out.

Yes Lord, I am thankful today again for every reminder of how I have outlived my worst imagination. I will walk slowly through the garden of all that could have killed me but didn’t.

The people I trust most understand a love like that, understand it even if the money from the record deal got them out of a place, or if ball got them out of a place. Call it war, call it whatever you want. You wouldn't know what to do with your face turned toward the blaring dawn, having survived another handful of hours that someone didn't want you to. There is no language I can find for the affection of repeated survival. To know you haven't been caught just yet. That with some luck, you never will be

If things have gone wrong enough for a long time, anyone can become a god.

With enough repetition, anything can become a religion. It doesn’t matter if it works or not, it simply matters that a person returns.

There are things we know about cities—the ones we live in, the ones we visit, the ones that seem like ours during the right run of hours. But this story ends in an act of forgetting. At least for now, in this moment. Which, I must tell you, is almost over. It was a delight to drink from this dream, but know, the bottom of the glass, tilted to our mouths, is visible enough to offer a reflection. Hold whatever sweetness you can in your mouth for a little longer. Ignore the glass, dropped to the floor, fractured into an army of shards. This is how we begin the other story.

to be nothing but rage I know this to be what comes after swinging wild punches at the air and imagining the faces of your worst demons the cops the politicians who call the places you love war zones the helicopters that won't let you sleep that claw through the walls and wake up elders and children and goddamn I remember at my feet that blood-stained concrete just split right in half and opened up and I want a whole city underground if it does not love my people I want to bury the new condo developments instead of my people I want to bury the craft breweries and the barcades and the mixed-use helltowers instead of my people I want the statues melted down I want the mothers of murdered children to do it I want the heat to rise from a statue's vanishing and last for ten summers I don't want apologies anymore no not this time I want the mayor to walk through a place he called a war zone at night I want people to get real honest with themselves about what war actually is I want the schools to have heat I want the schools to have air I want the riot gear thrown in the river the river that was blue when I was a boy but now leaves brown streaks as it runs away from the city I want the brown river to carry the riot gear to some other hell and I want the babies to stop passing out in school do you hear me I want a whole city under the ground some days but I at least want the rain I at least want something to wash the blood away so that no one who loved him has to and somewhere beyond the blood what I don't remember is

If I hadn’t made it clear there, this is all about the good fortune of who gets to make it out of somewhere and who doesn’t.
]]> 62802733 A searing, heartbreaking debut about the powerful bonds that make and break an Iranian-American family

Three young brothers leave Los Angeles in the dead of night for Iran, taken by their father from their mother to a country and an ancestral home they barely recognize. They return to the Valley months later, spit back into American life and changed in awful and inexorable ways. Under the annihilating light of the California sun, our protagonist, the youngest brother, tries to piece together a childhood shattered by his father's abuse, a queer adolescence marked by a shy, secret love affair with a boy he meets on the basketball court, and his suddenly-hostile status as a Muslim living under the shadow of 9/11.

'I WILL GREET THE SUN AGAIN is exquisite, heart-breaking, incredibly beautiful. The whole narrative thrums with a bright, warm longing. You can feel the sunshine of LA and Iran, the rhythm of Khashayar J Khabushani's voice. This is a novel to return to again and again.' Caleb Azumah Nelson, award-winning, bestselling author of OPEN WATER]]> 240 Khashayar J. Khabushani 0593243307 Jeff 3 3.86 2023
author: Khashayar J. Khabushani
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/30
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 174147294
Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion Prison Castle, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father’s jailer. Under Pratt’s harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines.

Oakland, 2018. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield is barely holding her family together after the shooting that nearly took the life of her nephew Orvil. From the moment he awakens in his hospital bed, Orvil begins compulsively googling school shootings on YouTube. He also becomes emotionally reliant on the prescription medications meant to ease his physical trauma. His younger brother, Lony, suffering from PTSD, is struggling to make sense of the carnage he witnessed at the shooting by secretly cutting himself and enacting blood rituals that he hopes will connect him to his Cheyenne heritage. Opal is equally adrift, experimenting with Ceremony and peyote, searching for a way to heal her wounded family.

Extending his constellation of narratives into the past and future, Tommy Orange once again delivers a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous, a book piercing in its poetry, sorrow, and rage—a masterful follow-up to his already-classic first novel, and a devastating indictment of America’s war on its own people.]]> 315 Tommy Orange 0593318250 Jeff 5
We find people who are constantly tested by history. The intent to eradicate the Indigenous people of the United States has a long history. Orange shares story after story. In some of these stories, it would seem like a bloodline would be lost, yet it still exists. The continuing to exist is the fight.

“Citizenship being granted will be a kind of victory too because you will not have died in any of the wars or massacres, you will have survived starvation and relocation, indoctrination and assimilation, you will have lasted long enough that they had to say that you too, our longtime, once mortal enemy, even you are one of us, even if its meaning, its rights, won’t come for decades, the seed will have begun there, in the year you were born.��

The book reminded me a great deal of Council of Dolls, which came out last year. I enjoyed the back-and-forth between the struggles of the present and the struggles of the past. It seems there is never freedom from struggle, but that struggle shows a people still alive and moving into the future despite these odds. This is the victory.

Favorite Passages:

“All the Indian children who were ever Indian children never stopped being Indian children, and went on to have not nits but Indian children, whose Indian children went on to have Indian children, whose Indian children became American Indians, whose American Indian children became Native Americans, whose Native American children would call themselves Natives, or Indigenous, or NDNS, or the names of their sovereign nations, or the names of their tribes, and all too often would be told they weren’t the right kind of Indians to be considered real ones by too many Americans taught in schools their whole lives that the only real kinds of Indians were those long-gone Thanksgiving Indians who loved the pilgrims as if to death.��

“he will recognize you as Indian and ask where you’re from. The question will throw you at first, because you’re from Oakland, so you want to say you’re from here, but you don’t know what here means for a moment, did it mean modern times, did it mean Oakland, did it mean America? And where would you be from if you were a real Indian? Oklahoma? You will know that’s not true, that Indians were from every single corner of the country—beyond the country. You will have read about hundreds of tribes, each with their own languages and customs and creation stories. You will want to tell him that you are Cheyenne, that that is where you are from, that Cheyennes once, up near the Great Lakes, were agricultural people, and then followed the buffalo before running for their lives like the buffalo, and that your people, they were Cheyenne wherever they went, but instead you just say the word Cheyenne, with your hand over your heart, to which he will say the word Lakota with his hand over his heart. You will laugh at each other’s hand-to-heart gestures.��

“Citizenship being granted will be a kind of victory too, because you will not have died in any of the wars or massacres, you will have survived starvation and relocation, indoctrination and assimilation, you will have lasted long enough that they had to say that you too, our longtime, once mortal enemy, even you are one of us, even if its meaning, its rights, won’t come for decades, the seed will have begun there, in the year you were born.��

“white people who want so bad to be on the right side of history they forget they’re inevitably on the white side of history.��

“I’m being asked to understand that with some people you love, they just won’t end up being a part of your life. I’m being asked a question that it seems I can answer only by living.”]]> 3.83 2024
author: Tommy Orange
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/11
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves:
review:
Picking up from the ending of There, There, a young man has to heal from his wounds, both physically and spiritually. After the shooting at the Pow Wow, he is left with wounds that look like stars. We then travel back in time, where his perseverance and survival match the story of his people.

We find people who are constantly tested by history. The intent to eradicate the Indigenous people of the United States has a long history. Orange shares story after story. In some of these stories, it would seem like a bloodline would be lost, yet it still exists. The continuing to exist is the fight.

“Citizenship being granted will be a kind of victory too because you will not have died in any of the wars or massacres, you will have survived starvation and relocation, indoctrination and assimilation, you will have lasted long enough that they had to say that you too, our longtime, once mortal enemy, even you are one of us, even if its meaning, its rights, won’t come for decades, the seed will have begun there, in the year you were born.��

The book reminded me a great deal of Council of Dolls, which came out last year. I enjoyed the back-and-forth between the struggles of the present and the struggles of the past. It seems there is never freedom from struggle, but that struggle shows a people still alive and moving into the future despite these odds. This is the victory.

Favorite Passages:

“All the Indian children who were ever Indian children never stopped being Indian children, and went on to have not nits but Indian children, whose Indian children went on to have Indian children, whose Indian children became American Indians, whose American Indian children became Native Americans, whose Native American children would call themselves Natives, or Indigenous, or NDNS, or the names of their sovereign nations, or the names of their tribes, and all too often would be told they weren’t the right kind of Indians to be considered real ones by too many Americans taught in schools their whole lives that the only real kinds of Indians were those long-gone Thanksgiving Indians who loved the pilgrims as if to death.��

“he will recognize you as Indian and ask where you’re from. The question will throw you at first, because you’re from Oakland, so you want to say you’re from here, but you don’t know what here means for a moment, did it mean modern times, did it mean Oakland, did it mean America? And where would you be from if you were a real Indian? Oklahoma? You will know that’s not true, that Indians were from every single corner of the country—beyond the country. You will have read about hundreds of tribes, each with their own languages and customs and creation stories. You will want to tell him that you are Cheyenne, that that is where you are from, that Cheyennes once, up near the Great Lakes, were agricultural people, and then followed the buffalo before running for their lives like the buffalo, and that your people, they were Cheyenne wherever they went, but instead you just say the word Cheyenne, with your hand over your heart, to which he will say the word Lakota with his hand over his heart. You will laugh at each other’s hand-to-heart gestures.��

“Citizenship being granted will be a kind of victory too, because you will not have died in any of the wars or massacres, you will have survived starvation and relocation, indoctrination and assimilation, you will have lasted long enough that they had to say that you too, our longtime, once mortal enemy, even you are one of us, even if its meaning, its rights, won’t come for decades, the seed will have begun there, in the year you were born.��

“white people who want so bad to be on the right side of history they forget they’re inevitably on the white side of history.��

“I’m being asked to understand that with some people you love, they just won’t end up being a part of your life. I’m being asked a question that it seems I can answer only by living.��
]]> 195834354
To be a bookseller or librarian��

You have to play detective.

Be a treasure hunter. A matchmaker. An advocate. A visionary.

A person who creates “book joy�� by pulling a book from a shelf, handing it to someone and saying, “You’ve got to read this. You’re going to love it.��

Step inside The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians and enter a world where you can feed your curiosities, discover new voices, find whatever you want or require. This place has the magic of rainbows and unicorns, but it's also a business. The book business.

Meet the smart and talented people who live between the pages—and who can’t wait to help you find your next favorite book.]]> 333 James Patterson 031656754X Jeff 3 4.15 2024
author: James Patterson
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/16
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves:
review:
James Patterson's attempt to give back to librarians and booksellers everyone who stocks every permutation of his books in multiple copies. I thought so many of these stories fell flat and missed the looming crisis of literature, critical thinking, and book bans. We are whistling in the dark here.
]]> 194803881
Tracking the natural beauty that surrounds us, The Backyard Bird Chronicles maps the passage of time through daily entries, thoughtful questions, and beautiful original sketches. With boundless charm and wit, author Amy Tan charts her foray into birding and the natural wonders of the world.

In 2016, Amy Tan grew overwhelmed by the state of the Hatred and misinformation became a daily presence on social media, and the country felt more divisive than ever. In search of peace, Tan turned toward the natural world just beyond her window and, specifically, the birds visiting her yard. But what began as an attempt to find solace turned into something far greater—an opportunity to savor quiet moments during a volatile time, connect to nature in a meaningful way, and imagine the intricate lives of the birds she admired.]]> 291 Amy Tan 0593536134 Jeff 5
Amy Tan's latest book takes an unusual twist. A non-fiction book about birding, backyard birding at that. As she increasingly becomes fixated and focused on creating the best habitat for her birds, we see her poetic prose come through. We are riveted at which birds like which feeding mechanism. We care deeply about every bird, crestfallen at any injury, which often means certain death—a beginner's guide to bird watching but a master at description. There isn't a feather that falls that escapes her gaze. This was a surprising favorite for me this year.

Favorite Passages:

With both fiction and birds, I think about existence, the span of life, from conception to birth to survival to death to remembrance by others. I reflect on mortality, the strangeness of it, the inevitability. I do that daily, and not with dread, but with awareness that life contains ephemeral moments, which can be saved in words and images, there for pondering, for reviving the bird and my heart. With every novel I finish I think it’s a miracle because three or four predecessors never came to life. With every adult bird I see, I think it’s a miracle it is before me, because 75 percent of young songbirds die before the end of their first year. When I try to find the right image and words that capture an emotion, I must beat down clichés and homilies, which are devoid of fresh thought and honest contemplation. When I see a bird that has died, I don’t accept the sanguine saying, “It’s the circle of life.�� It is good to mourn and wish it weren’t so.

I still see in my mind’s eye the goldfinch with its swollen eyes. Did it fly off with the others? Is it sitting alone on the branch? I imagine it making futile forays to this now empty spot it knows by the habit ingrained by a precise number of wingbeats. I see it in my mind sit- ting on a nearby branch, wet, starved, weakening until it falls to the ground, dead. Such heartbreak comes with love and imagination.

Each day I look at the birds and they look at me. Each individual bird is different. Each individual has its personality. What if owners of roaming cats noticed their backyard birds looking at them. What if they saw the same bird looking at them day after day. What would they then feel if they witnessed it suffering as their cat played with it as a live stuffed animal? Maybe the owners would no longer thank their cat for the lovely bouquet of loose feathers. It’s not too late for them to become besotted with birds, to rejoice over their presence and mourn their unnecessary demise.

I understand the antipathy. Invasive birds usurp habitat and resources. But I can’t help but feel discomfort. The rhetoric is often the same as the racist ones I hear about Chinese people.
I am still new to birding, and so every bird is a good bird to see, even the ones I see all the time. I am happy they’ve come, that they’ve chosen my yard to visit for a few minutes or the day or every day for many weeks or months. I especially love the birds that are here every day of the year, like the titmouse and chickadee. I hope I never cease to be amazed.

In January, I will start a new journal. I will include much more of what I see in the trees, as well as on the ground where the sparrows and quail live and nest. I will sit outside on a low chair to watch the action on the ground. I will see where the sparrows and quail live and nest. I will see where the quail hide. That will require I remain frozen still, making no sound or twitch. To remain there motionless for an hour or so means I will also be frozen from cold. One must suffer for beauty, happily, for birds.]]> 4.06 2024
author: Amy Tan
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/27
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves:
review:
When I see a bird that has died, I don’t accept the sanguine saying, “It’s the circle of life.�� It is good to mourn and wish it weren’t so.

Amy Tan's latest book takes an unusual twist. A non-fiction book about birding, backyard birding at that. As she increasingly becomes fixated and focused on creating the best habitat for her birds, we see her poetic prose come through. We are riveted at which birds like which feeding mechanism. We care deeply about every bird, crestfallen at any injury, which often means certain death—a beginner's guide to bird watching but a master at description. There isn't a feather that falls that escapes her gaze. This was a surprising favorite for me this year.

Favorite Passages:

With both fiction and birds, I think about existence, the span of life, from conception to birth to survival to death to remembrance by others. I reflect on mortality, the strangeness of it, the inevitability. I do that daily, and not with dread, but with awareness that life contains ephemeral moments, which can be saved in words and images, there for pondering, for reviving the bird and my heart. With every novel I finish I think it’s a miracle because three or four predecessors never came to life. With every adult bird I see, I think it’s a miracle it is before me, because 75 percent of young songbirds die before the end of their first year. When I try to find the right image and words that capture an emotion, I must beat down clichés and homilies, which are devoid of fresh thought and honest contemplation. When I see a bird that has died, I don’t accept the sanguine saying, “It’s the circle of life.�� It is good to mourn and wish it weren’t so.

I still see in my mind’s eye the goldfinch with its swollen eyes. Did it fly off with the others? Is it sitting alone on the branch? I imagine it making futile forays to this now empty spot it knows by the habit ingrained by a precise number of wingbeats. I see it in my mind sit- ting on a nearby branch, wet, starved, weakening until it falls to the ground, dead. Such heartbreak comes with love and imagination.

Each day I look at the birds and they look at me. Each individual bird is different. Each individual has its personality. What if owners of roaming cats noticed their backyard birds looking at them. What if they saw the same bird looking at them day after day. What would they then feel if they witnessed it suffering as their cat played with it as a live stuffed animal? Maybe the owners would no longer thank their cat for the lovely bouquet of loose feathers. It’s not too late for them to become besotted with birds, to rejoice over their presence and mourn their unnecessary demise.

I understand the antipathy. Invasive birds usurp habitat and resources. But I can’t help but feel discomfort. The rhetoric is often the same as the racist ones I hear about Chinese people.
I am still new to birding, and so every bird is a good bird to see, even the ones I see all the time. I am happy they’ve come, that they’ve chosen my yard to visit for a few minutes or the day or every day for many weeks or months. I especially love the birds that are here every day of the year, like the titmouse and chickadee. I hope I never cease to be amazed.

In January, I will start a new journal. I will include much more of what I see in the trees, as well as on the ground where the sparrows and quail live and nest. I will sit outside on a low chair to watch the action on the ground. I will see where the sparrows and quail live and nest. I will see where the quail hide. That will require I remain frozen still, making no sound or twitch. To remain there motionless for an hour or so means I will also be frozen from cold. One must suffer for beauty, happily, for birds.
]]> 178072409 The final installment in the most lauded trilogy in the history of horror literature

It’s been four years since Jade Daniels last set foot in Proofrock, Idaho. Since then, her reputation, and everything around Indian Lake, has changed dramatically. There’s a lot of unfinished business in Proofrock, from serial killer cultists to the rich trying to buy Western authenticity. But there’s one aspect of the savage history of Proofrock, Idaho, no one’s got the mettle to confront �� no one except a final girl, making her last stand, this time for everything.

New York Times bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones has crafted an epic horror trilogy of generational trauma and stolen hope. It’s the story of the American West written in blood. And it’s the story of one girl who doesn’t know how to give up.]]> 416 Stephen Graham Jones 1668011689 Jeff 5
The trilogy has it all, even a return of old faces from the earlier books. Battling her dead dad, now resurrected, watching her loathsome wealthy neighbors get massacred. Still, everything comes back around to what is beneath the town—The final exorcism of the foundation of the town, built on a Christian Burial ground. I appreciated the solution to the trilogy as Jones reverses the curse that haunts the residents in the movie Poltergeist. ]]> 4.24 2024
author: Stephen Graham Jones
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/05
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves:
review:
Stephen Graham Jones returns with the conclusion of the Indian Lake Trilogy. Jade foresaw the massacre in My Heart is a Chainsaw and realized a new pattern of killing in Don't Fear the Reaper. After serving her time for both incidents, she returns home to replace her beloved history teacher at the local high school. With the roles reversed, instead of providing an analysis of slasher flics, she assigns local history presentations to her students, including the town's macabre and dark history. When, during one of the presentations, she sees something out of place, her stomach drops. Is it another round of massacres? (Of course it is).

The trilogy has it all, even a return of old faces from the earlier books. Battling her dead dad, now resurrected, watching her loathsome wealthy neighbors get massacred. Still, everything comes back around to what is beneath the town—The final exorcism of the foundation of the town, built on a Christian Burial ground. I appreciated the solution to the trilogy as Jones reverses the curse that haunts the residents in the movie Poltergeist.
]]> 194803842
Over just a few decades at the end of the nineteenth century, the United States underwent a moral revolution on behalf of animals. Before the Civil War, animals' suffering had rarely been discussed; horses pulling carriages and carts were routinely beaten in public view, and dogs were pitted against each other for entertainment and gambling. But in 1866, a group of activists began a dramatic campaign to change the nation’s laws and norms, and by the century’s end, most Americans had adopted a very different way of thinking and feeling about the animals in their midst.

In Our Kindred Creatures, Bill Wasik, editorial director of The New York Times Magazine , and veterinarian Monica Murphy offer a fascinating history of this crusade and the battles it sparked in American life. On the side of reform were such leaders as George Angell, the inspirational head of Massachusetts’s animal-welfare society and the American publisher of the novel Black Beauty ; Henry Bergh, founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; Caroline White of Philadelphia, who fought against medical experiments that used live animals; and many more, including some of the nation’s earliest veterinarians and conservationists. Caught in the movement’s crosshairs were transformational figures in their own animal impresarios such as P. T. Barnum, industrial meat barons such as Philip D. Armour, and the nation’s rising medical establishment, all of whom put forward their own, very different sets of modern norms about how animals should be treated.

In recounting this remarkable period of moral transition—which, by the turn of the twentieth century, would give birth to the attitudes we hold toward animals today—Wasik and Murphy challenge us to consider the obligations we still have to all our kindred creatures.]]> 464 Bill Wasik 0525659064 Jeff 4
Our pets and the animals we live with and see in the community are sacred. We give them love and care as if they were our children. John Wick would kill for them. This wasn't always the case. Animals were viewed as work animals. Soulless, unfeeling, and only to be commanded.

The start of the American Society to Prevent Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) had its roots in the anti-slavery movement. Humans should not be treated so cruelly, and neither should animals. We find the individuals lobbying to change the law and often restoring and enforcing it themselves. They also go toe to toe with Barnum and Bailey Circus (a fighter that stretched even into modern times( it was the book Black Beauty that changed so many hearts and minds.

The book does a thorough job of documenting the movement and its impacts. It is hard to imagine a time when we were not fascinated and enamored by our pets, but the book does an excellent job of showing the contrast. A society that treats even the smallest creatures kindles is a society that flourishes.


Favorite Passage:


Judeo-Christian tradition—the founding texts of which offer few prescriptions against cruelty to animals, even as they make ringing statements of human “dominion�� over the natural world—could travel through their daily lives without giving much thought to how domestic animals in their overwhelmingly agrarian societies were treated. Few Europeans truly believed, as the French philosopher René Descartes theorized in the early seventeenth century, that animals should be classed as soulless machines—that, in the summation of one of Descartes’s disciples, Nicolas Malebranche, animals “eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it; they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.�� And yet animals�� inability to testify to their desires, fears, and knowledge made it possible for many to put the question of their suffering entirely out of mind, given their seemingly preordained place in the natural order as mere possessions to be worked and consumed. ]]> 3.89
author: Bill Wasik
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.89
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/11
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves:
review:
"... animals�� inability to testify to their desires, fears, and knowledge made it possible for many to put the question of their suffering entirely out of mind, given their seemingly preordained place in the natural order as mere possessions to be worked and consumed."

Our pets and the animals we live with and see in the community are sacred. We give them love and care as if they were our children. John Wick would kill for them. This wasn't always the case. Animals were viewed as work animals. Soulless, unfeeling, and only to be commanded.

The start of the American Society to Prevent Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) had its roots in the anti-slavery movement. Humans should not be treated so cruelly, and neither should animals. We find the individuals lobbying to change the law and often restoring and enforcing it themselves. They also go toe to toe with Barnum and Bailey Circus (a fighter that stretched even into modern times( it was the book Black Beauty that changed so many hearts and minds.

The book does a thorough job of documenting the movement and its impacts. It is hard to imagine a time when we were not fascinated and enamored by our pets, but the book does an excellent job of showing the contrast. A society that treats even the smallest creatures kindles is a society that flourishes.


Favorite Passage:


Judeo-Christian tradition—the founding texts of which offer few prescriptions against cruelty to animals, even as they make ringing statements of human “dominion�� over the natural world—could travel through their daily lives without giving much thought to how domestic animals in their overwhelmingly agrarian societies were treated. Few Europeans truly believed, as the French philosopher René Descartes theorized in the early seventeenth century, that animals should be classed as soulless machines—that, in the summation of one of Descartes’s disciples, Nicolas Malebranche, animals “eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it; they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.�� And yet animals�� inability to testify to their desires, fears, and knowledge made it possible for many to put the question of their suffering entirely out of mind, given their seemingly preordained place in the natural order as mere possessions to be worked and consumed.
]]> 71544794
A Penguin Classic

“I speak from my difference,�� wrote Pedro Lemebel, an openly queer writer and artist living through Chile’s AIDS epidemic and the collapse of the Pinochet dictatorship. In brilliantly innovative essays—known as crónicas —that combine memoir, reportage, fiction, history, and poetry, he brought visibility and dignity to sexual minorities, the poor, and the powerless. Touching on everything from Che Guevara to Elizabeth Taylor, from the aftermath of authoritarian rule to the daily lives of Chile’s locas —a slur for trans women and effeminate gay men that he boldly reclaims—his writing infuses political urgency with playfulness, realism with absurdism, and resistance with camp, and his AIDS crónicas immortalize a generation of Chileans doubly “disappeared�� by casting each loca, as she falls sick, in the starring role of her own private tragedy. This volume brings together the best of his work, introducing readers of English to the subversive genius of a literary activist and queer icon whose acrobatic explorations of the Santiago demimonde reverberate around the world.]]> 272 Pedro Lemebel 0143137085 Jeff 5
This book significantly impacted me as I fear for our future in this country. It is always the smallest and weakest community that tyrannical bullies target. Small populations like the LGBQ community and specifically the Trans community are always targeted first. They are the canary in the coal mine with oppressive governments. When their rights are taken away, all of our rights are taken away. This book is also a reminder of that and a reminder of what we can lose.


Favorite Passages:

“So that the revolution does not completely rot
I leave you with a message
Not for my sake
I am old
And your utopia is for future generations
There are so many children who will be born
With a little broken wing
And I want them to fly, comrade
I want your revolution
To drop them a piece of red heaven
So that they fly.��

“An asthmatic loca who, finding an exit with a last mouthful of oxygen, doesn’t know if her life or her lungs suffocated her more, who knows she’s going to hell and so wants to live no matter what, burning her hands, clambering up the smoky scaffolding until she finds a window on the third floor, so tall, so high up. And with such a big audience below, waiting perversely to see if she jumps into the void, over this crowd of onlookers who will watch fires without caring what happens. Deciding to take the leap because just maybe she’ll float down on the golden air that’s now burning her lungs. Daring to do it now, since she’s already burning and the sea’s so far away and a vertigo of waves is applauding her. Barely a step, the bonfire pushing her from behind as it ignites her hair into a torch. One step, a single step on a glass runway, and the spectacle of a loca in flames, flying high above the Valparaíso docks, will be remembered as a glittering jewel on the city’s prostituted neckline.

“Minorities sometimes come up with other ways to act in contempt, using what seems like superficiality as a weapon. Gastón, tanning on his beach towel, knew how to break free from that yard of torment, as if a loca’s irreverence could transform a beach towel into a rug for flying, a magic carpet that would hover over the iron bars, float out past the soldiers�� guns, and raise him above that camp of horrors.
Maybe some of the prisoners who got out of there alive still remember the morning when Gastón received his letter of transit, granting him permission to depart immediately for exile in some European country. Gastón, grinning from ear to ear, carefully put away his bathing suit, folded his towel, and breathed deeply, gulping down air as if he wanted, with a single sigh, to erase the morbid atmosphere of that place. Then he wished everyone goodbye and, walking on the tips of his toes, crossed over the spikes at the entrance. And, still glowing tropically, he disappeared from the road in a cloud of dust, never looking back.��

“I never knew what happened to you: maybe you were in hiding, or snatched away, tortured, riddled with bullets, or disappeared inside our national pain’s musical score, which is silent and without justice. Something tells me it was like that. Santiago is a street corner, Santiago is not the big wide world: here sooner or later everyone finds out, everything comes to light. That’s why today, after hearing that song, I mouth it silently just for you and walk splashing through puddles in the park. This winter is coming on hard, the fall afternoon sinks into a sky reflected off pools of water. Cars jammed together honk their horns at the traffic lights. The students come and go with their enormous backpacks, ready for the cold or some big march. The city dwellers shove each other at the bus stop, waiting for the Transantiago in a mass, in chaos, in a tumultuous commotion that saturates the streets. Mas la ciudad sin ti . . . mi corazón sin ti . . .��

“There’s only one photo left from that party, a bleached snapshot where the sissy faces reappear, exposed to the present at a distance. It’s not a good photo, but their sexual militancy jumps out at the viewer. The receding years frame them, their mouths are extinguished laughter, echoes of gestures frozen in the flash of a final toast. Jokes, sneers, quips, and shade drip from their lips, ready to fall, ready to lace their kisses with irony. It’s not a good photo, the image blurry, an unfocused haze that never stabilizes into memory. Maybe the photo is fuzzy because the stained tulle of AIDS shrouds almost every loca in a double disappearance. That shadow, it’s a fragile cellophane bandage that wraps around la Pilola Alessandri’s waist as she leans her faggot hips against the right side of the table. She purchased the epidemic in New York, the first one to bring it back, the genuine article, the latest, most exclusive gay trend in how to die. The hottest mortuary look, which made her drop pounds faster than any diet, leaving her as skinny and pale as the models in Vogue, as stretched and chic as an orchid’s sigh. AIDS wrung out her body and she died pressed and pleated, fashionable and stunning in the rarefied ranks of her miserly death.

“La Palma came back and died happy in her agony, stripped of her savings. She said goodbye listening to Ney Matogrosso’s music, humming the saudade of her parting. See you at the next party, she said sadly, gazing at the photo nailed to the wallboards of her misery. And right before she closed her eyes, she looked so young again, almost a blushing maid raising a glass and a fistful of bones that summer of 1973. She looked so beautiful in the photo’s reflection, wrapped in la Pilola’s white mink, so queenly in the halo of albino fur, that she told the Ghost, Hold on a sec, and held back Death’s bony hand while she took one last look at herself, indulged her narcissus in furs for one final moment. Then she closed her lids and let herself go, floating away on a velvet memory.
It’s a bad photo, the shot hastily taken because the locas couldn’t stop fidgeting, almost all of them blurred by too many poses and their wild desire to leap into the future. Practically a last supper of queer apostles, where the only thing clearly rendered is the pyramid of bones on the table. ��

In short, there’s always a metaphor that, in ridiculing, beautifies the flaw, making it unique, one’s own. A nickname that hurts at first but later makes even the girl herself laugh. What starts as overexposure to a shame constantly yelled and named and pointed out turns into a ghetto rebaptism that camouflages the real name. A reconversion where caricature becomes a sign of affection.
And there are loads of ways to name yourself.��

“And so neoliberalism cross-dresses memory’s scars, laying a mask of silver and gold across its uniformly painted eyelids, ready for Carnaval.��

“And outside, in the street, in front of the presidential palace, the blurry faces of the disappeared are pasted on signs that their family members hold against their hearts. And these photos are the only thing left of them, the only thing keeping them here at the edges of this disgusting clique. Maybe in the street, with their faces turned to the sun, illuminating their extinct features, maybe the street is the only place they can be that alive, that direct, like an ethical declaration that exposes the agreement’s end game. They’re in there—those who agreed to play a game of poker with marked cards. We’re out here, outside the game, with our memories of Sola Sierra, with the mothers and family members and the moral mettle of Viviana Díaz and Mireya García, unshakable in their demand for justice no matter who you are. They’re in there, at their long reconciliation table, toasting with wine that impunity has poisoned and breaking the bitter bread of forgetfulness.”]]> 4.54
author: Pedro Lemebel
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.54
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/20
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves:
review:
Pedro Lemebel's essays focus on the Queer community as they go from being celebrated to being hunted by the Chilean Pinochet government and the AIDS Epidemic. Told with love, we see the special faces and their perseverance through hardship. We see the details of the beauty of their lives despite the sometimes ger-wrenching experiences.

This book significantly impacted me as I fear for our future in this country. It is always the smallest and weakest community that tyrannical bullies target. Small populations like the LGBQ community and specifically the Trans community are always targeted first. They are the canary in the coal mine with oppressive governments. When their rights are taken away, all of our rights are taken away. This book is also a reminder of that and a reminder of what we can lose.


Favorite Passages:

“So that the revolution does not completely rot
I leave you with a message
Not for my sake
I am old
And your utopia is for future generations
There are so many children who will be born
With a little broken wing
And I want them to fly, comrade
I want your revolution
To drop them a piece of red heaven
So that they fly.��

“An asthmatic loca who, finding an exit with a last mouthful of oxygen, doesn’t know if her life or her lungs suffocated her more, who knows she’s going to hell and so wants to live no matter what, burning her hands, clambering up the smoky scaffolding until she finds a window on the third floor, so tall, so high up. And with such a big audience below, waiting perversely to see if she jumps into the void, over this crowd of onlookers who will watch fires without caring what happens. Deciding to take the leap because just maybe she’ll float down on the golden air that’s now burning her lungs. Daring to do it now, since she’s already burning and the sea’s so far away and a vertigo of waves is applauding her. Barely a step, the bonfire pushing her from behind as it ignites her hair into a torch. One step, a single step on a glass runway, and the spectacle of a loca in flames, flying high above the Valparaíso docks, will be remembered as a glittering jewel on the city’s prostituted neckline.

“Minorities sometimes come up with other ways to act in contempt, using what seems like superficiality as a weapon. Gastón, tanning on his beach towel, knew how to break free from that yard of torment, as if a loca’s irreverence could transform a beach towel into a rug for flying, a magic carpet that would hover over the iron bars, float out past the soldiers�� guns, and raise him above that camp of horrors.
Maybe some of the prisoners who got out of there alive still remember the morning when Gastón received his letter of transit, granting him permission to depart immediately for exile in some European country. Gastón, grinning from ear to ear, carefully put away his bathing suit, folded his towel, and breathed deeply, gulping down air as if he wanted, with a single sigh, to erase the morbid atmosphere of that place. Then he wished everyone goodbye and, walking on the tips of his toes, crossed over the spikes at the entrance. And, still glowing tropically, he disappeared from the road in a cloud of dust, never looking back.��

“I never knew what happened to you: maybe you were in hiding, or snatched away, tortured, riddled with bullets, or disappeared inside our national pain’s musical score, which is silent and without justice. Something tells me it was like that. Santiago is a street corner, Santiago is not the big wide world: here sooner or later everyone finds out, everything comes to light. That’s why today, after hearing that song, I mouth it silently just for you and walk splashing through puddles in the park. This winter is coming on hard, the fall afternoon sinks into a sky reflected off pools of water. Cars jammed together honk their horns at the traffic lights. The students come and go with their enormous backpacks, ready for the cold or some big march. The city dwellers shove each other at the bus stop, waiting for the Transantiago in a mass, in chaos, in a tumultuous commotion that saturates the streets. Mas la ciudad sin ti . . . mi corazón sin ti . . .��

“There’s only one photo left from that party, a bleached snapshot where the sissy faces reappear, exposed to the present at a distance. It’s not a good photo, but their sexual militancy jumps out at the viewer. The receding years frame them, their mouths are extinguished laughter, echoes of gestures frozen in the flash of a final toast. Jokes, sneers, quips, and shade drip from their lips, ready to fall, ready to lace their kisses with irony. It’s not a good photo, the image blurry, an unfocused haze that never stabilizes into memory. Maybe the photo is fuzzy because the stained tulle of AIDS shrouds almost every loca in a double disappearance. That shadow, it’s a fragile cellophane bandage that wraps around la Pilola Alessandri’s waist as she leans her faggot hips against the right side of the table. She purchased the epidemic in New York, the first one to bring it back, the genuine article, the latest, most exclusive gay trend in how to die. The hottest mortuary look, which made her drop pounds faster than any diet, leaving her as skinny and pale as the models in Vogue, as stretched and chic as an orchid’s sigh. AIDS wrung out her body and she died pressed and pleated, fashionable and stunning in the rarefied ranks of her miserly death.

“La Palma came back and died happy in her agony, stripped of her savings. She said goodbye listening to Ney Matogrosso’s music, humming the saudade of her parting. See you at the next party, she said sadly, gazing at the photo nailed to the wallboards of her misery. And right before she closed her eyes, she looked so young again, almost a blushing maid raising a glass and a fistful of bones that summer of 1973. She looked so beautiful in the photo’s reflection, wrapped in la Pilola’s white mink, so queenly in the halo of albino fur, that she told the Ghost, Hold on a sec, and held back Death’s bony hand while she took one last look at herself, indulged her narcissus in furs for one final moment. Then she closed her lids and let herself go, floating away on a velvet memory.
It’s a bad photo, the shot hastily taken because the locas couldn’t stop fidgeting, almost all of them blurred by too many poses and their wild desire to leap into the future. Practically a last supper of queer apostles, where the only thing clearly rendered is the pyramid of bones on the table. ��

In short, there’s always a metaphor that, in ridiculing, beautifies the flaw, making it unique, one’s own. A nickname that hurts at first but later makes even the girl herself laugh. What starts as overexposure to a shame constantly yelled and named and pointed out turns into a ghetto rebaptism that camouflages the real name. A reconversion where caricature becomes a sign of affection.
And there are loads of ways to name yourself.��

“And so neoliberalism cross-dresses memory’s scars, laying a mask of silver and gold across its uniformly painted eyelids, ready for Carnaval.��

“And outside, in the street, in front of the presidential palace, the blurry faces of the disappeared are pasted on signs that their family members hold against their hearts. And these photos are the only thing left of them, the only thing keeping them here at the edges of this disgusting clique. Maybe in the street, with their faces turned to the sun, illuminating their extinct features, maybe the street is the only place they can be that alive, that direct, like an ethical declaration that exposes the agreement’s end game. They’re in there—those who agreed to play a game of poker with marked cards. We’re out here, outside the game, with our memories of Sola Sierra, with the mothers and family members and the moral mettle of Viviana Díaz and Mireya García, unshakable in their demand for justice no matter who you are. They’re in there, at their long reconciliation table, toasting with wine that impunity has poisoned and breaking the bitter bread of forgetfulness.��
]]> 55711617
That’s not the only thing that’s getting carved up, though �� this, Jade knows, is the start of a slasher. But what kind? Who’s wearing the mask? Jade’s got an encyclopedic recall of every horror movie on the shelf, but�� will that help her survive? Can she get a final girl trained enough to stop all this from happening? Does she even want to?

Isn’t a slasher exactly what her hometown deserves?

This new novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Only Good Indians, Stephen Graham Jones, called “one of our most talented living writers�� by Tommy Orange, explores the changing landscape of the West through his distinct voice of sharp humor and prophetic violence.

Go up the mountain to Proofrock. See if you’ve got what it takes �� see if your heart, too, might be a chainsaw.]]> 405 Stephen Graham Jones 1982137630 Jeff 5
Here, we meet Jade (Jennifer Daniel), a teenager finishing high school and working as a janitor there. Her mom has left her, and her dad is a piece of shit with a piece of shit friends, one of which happens to be her boss. She is obsessed with slasher movies, not just Friday the Thirteenth, but very low-budget deep-cut stories. In order to get extra credit in her history class, her teacher allows her to submit a paper on any topic she chooses. She, of course, selects an analysis of slasher films. These essays are peppered throughout the book (often even used as foreshadowing for the events in the next chapter). She saves a kid from an accident, and her boss takes the credit. At the beginning of the book, she attempts suicide. Weeks later, she is back in school and hopes a serial killer takes out the horrible town. She gets her wish.

While being an expert and fan of horror films can enhance the narrative, Jones ensures you stay caught up with descriptions of the movies and the year. The philosophy is exciting and makes for great critical analysis. Certain girls are chosen to survive for their purity in many ways, and some are set aside just because of their background.]]> 3.52 2021
author: Stephen Graham Jones
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/21
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves:
review:
I read the Indian Lake series entirely out of order. I started with Don't Fear the Reaper, the Angel of Indian Lake, and finally, this one. This is where it all starts, and it is probably the best in the series. You don't really know if Jade has mental health issues or if she's telling the truth, which is always how great horror fiction and films start.

Here, we meet Jade (Jennifer Daniel), a teenager finishing high school and working as a janitor there. Her mom has left her, and her dad is a piece of shit with a piece of shit friends, one of which happens to be her boss. She is obsessed with slasher movies, not just Friday the Thirteenth, but very low-budget deep-cut stories. In order to get extra credit in her history class, her teacher allows her to submit a paper on any topic she chooses. She, of course, selects an analysis of slasher films. These essays are peppered throughout the book (often even used as foreshadowing for the events in the next chapter). She saves a kid from an accident, and her boss takes the credit. At the beginning of the book, she attempts suicide. Weeks later, she is back in school and hopes a serial killer takes out the horrible town. She gets her wish.

While being an expert and fan of horror films can enhance the narrative, Jones ensures you stay caught up with descriptions of the movies and the year. The philosophy is exciting and makes for great critical analysis. Certain girls are chosen to survive for their purity in many ways, and some are set aside just because of their background.
]]> 63249715 The Nib, a hilarious trans-"final girl" horror graphic novel about a bachelor party gone very, very wrong.

Newly-out trans artist’s assistant Sammie is invited to an old friend’s bachelor weekend in El Campo, a hedonistic wonderland of a city floating in the Atlantic Ocean's international waters—think Las Vegas with even fewer rules. Though they have not identified as a man for over a year, Sammie’s college buddies haven't quite gotten the message—as evidenced by��their formerly closest friend Adam asking them to be his “best man.��

Arriving at the swanky hotel, Sammie immediately questions their decision to come. Bad enough that they have to suffer through a torrent of passive-aggressive comments from the groom's pals—all met with zero pushback from supposed "nice guy" Adam. But also, they seem to be the only one who's noticed the mysterious cult that's also staying at the hotel, and is ritually dismembering guests and demanding fealty to their bloodthirsty god.

Part satire, part horror, Boys Weekend explores what it’s like to exist as a transfemme person in a man’s world, the difficulty of maintaining friendships through transition, and the more cult-like effects of masculinity, “hustle�� culture, and capitalism—all through the vibrant lens of a surreal, scary, and immensely imaginative romp.]]> 232 Mattie Lubchansky 0593316711 Jeff 5
On a mysterious tech island, the narrative retains much of the Nib humor. It features futuristic horrors, bloodsport, and mysterious cults. The story is both about how you can't go home again as it illustrates true beauty when you live your authentic self. ]]> 4.00 2023
author: Mattie Lubchansky
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/23
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves:
review:
Mattie Lubchansky of Nib fame pens this dystopian graphic novel that combines future horror, politics to the extreme, and comedy. The main character is going to an old best friend's wedding. They are all rich tech dudebros, and she has transitioned to a woman since the last time they spent time together. As she immerses herself into this old world, new horrors spring up.

On a mysterious tech island, the narrative retains much of the Nib humor. It features futuristic horrors, bloodsport, and mysterious cults. The story is both about how you can't go home again as it illustrates true beauty when you live your authentic self.
]]> 56238064 A graphic novel about starting over at a new school where diversity is low and the struggle to fit in is real.

Seventh grader Jordan Banks loves nothing more than drawing cartoons about his life. But instead of sending him to the art school of his dreams, his parents enroll him in a prestigious private school known for its academics, where Jordan is one of the few kids of color in his entire grade.

As he makes the daily trip from his Washington Heights apartment to the upscale Riverdale Academy Day School, Jordan soon finds himself torn between two worlds—and not really fitting into either one. Can Jordan learn to navigate his new school culture while keeping his neighborhood friends and staying true to himself?]]> 249 Jerry Craft 0062691201 Jeff 5 4.21 2019
author: Jerry Craft
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/25
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves:
review:
One of the most banned books in America, and after reading it, I cannot figure out why. A young Black student goes to an affluent middle school, leaving his friends behind. Being only one of the few Black kids, he is ostracized and singled out, but this fact is obvious to White students, faculty, and administration. He finds fellow Black students getting similar treatment, and even some of the faculty are on the receiving end of it. Ultimately, it is a lesson on what to do about it. Getting mad and acting out only makes it worse, but it takes courage and fortitude to combat it. HIghly recommended reading.
]]> 62850110
"Wondrous . . . captivating.”—Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of An Immense World

Christian Cooper is a self-described “Blerd�� (Black nerd), an avid comics fan and expert birder who devotes every spring to gazing upon the migratory birds that stop to rest in Central Park, just a subway ride away from where he lives in New York City. While��in the��park one morning in May 2020,��Cooper��was engaged in the��birdwatching��ritual that had been a part of his life since he was ten years old��when what might have been��a routine encounter with a dog walker��exploded��age-old racial��tensions.��Cooper’s��viral��video of the incident would��send shock waves through the nation.

In Better Living Through Birding , Cooper tells the story of his extraordinary life leading up to the now-infamous incident in Central Park and shows how a life spent looking up at the birds prepared him, in the most uncanny of ways, to be a gay, Black man in America today. From sharpened senses that work just as well at a protest as in a park to what a bird like the Common Grackle can teach us about self-acceptance, Better Living Through Birding exults in the pleasures of a life lived in pursuit of the natural world and invites you to discover them yourself.

Equal parts memoir, travelogue, and primer on the art of birding, this is Cooper’s story of learning to claim and defend space for himself and others like him, from his days at Marvel Comics introducing the first gay storylines to vivid and life-changing birding expeditions through Africa, Australia, the Americas, and the Himalayas. Better Living Through Birding recounts Cooper’s journey through the wonderful world of birds and what they can teach us about life, if only we would look and listen.]]> 304 Christian Cooper 0593242386 Jeff 5
A gay Black man who grew up with a passion for nature, comics, and storytelling, he also gives us tips on birding. His writing is often hilarious. He begins the narrative by desperately running through Central Park. Is this about the incident? No, he just heard of a sighting of a rare bird and would hate to miss it. He talks about being gay and how that's impacted his life, both good and bad. He was also part of Marvel Comics when they had their first gay superhero. This isn't some ghostwritten celebrity memoir. He surprises you with the depth of his stories and experiences. ]]> 4.22 2023
author: Christian Cooper
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/02
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves:
review:
Most of Christian Cooper's claim to fame was a racist two-minute incident caught on video in Central Park. He kindly asked a woman to put her dog on a leash, and she threatened to call the cops on him for being aggressive with her. This book is not about that. Cooper has led a very full life and has the writing chops to take you on his journey.

A gay Black man who grew up with a passion for nature, comics, and storytelling, he also gives us tips on birding. His writing is often hilarious. He begins the narrative by desperately running through Central Park. Is this about the incident? No, he just heard of a sighting of a rare bird and would hate to miss it. He talks about being gay and how that's impacted his life, both good and bad. He was also part of Marvel Comics when they had their first gay superhero. This isn't some ghostwritten celebrity memoir. He surprises you with the depth of his stories and experiences.
]]> 139400713 Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others—in which a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of Tehran in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the Angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 Jeff 5
Cyrus Shams is grieving the loss of his mother. Now living in the United States, he grew up in Iran. When his mother was away on a trip the US Military shot down her commercial plane. Never really owning up to this tragedy, the family received a small compensation, and his father moved the family to the United States. Now at college, Cyrus struggles as a writer and in his relationships, always haunted by the death of his mother, now a martyr. When a dying artist sets up a performance at the Met, he starts a conversation with her that will unlock long-kept secrets.

This had a slow start for me, but it came together wonderfully in the end. Although a bit of the mystery is crammed at the end of the book, it does a beautiful job of breaking Cyrus out of his rut.

Favorite Passages:


“It wasn’t fair that just because he was sober, everyone expected him to exhaustively interrogate his every decision. This job or that job, this life or that. Not drinking was Herculean enough on its own. He should’ve been afforded more grace, not less��

Being awake was a kind of poison, and dream was the only antidote.

“I get that,�� said Cyrus. “I do. Maybe part of it is just wanting my tiny little life to have something of scale. For the stakes to matter.�� He paused, then added, “For my having-lived to matter.�� Orkideh smiled, placed her hand on Cyrus’s. It felt cold, dry, like canvas.
“We won’t grow old together, Cyrus. But can’t you feel this mattering? Right now?��

“I guess, I write these sentences where I try to lineate grief or doubt or joy or sex or whatever till it sounds as urgent as it feels. But I know the words will never feel like the thing. The language will never be the thing. So it’s damned, right? And I am too, for giving my life to it. Because I know my writing can never make any of these deaths matter the way they’re supposed to. It’ll never arrest fascism in its tracks or save the planet. It’ll never bring my mother back, you know?��

“She said it in English. I woke screaming. English, fifty years of sun. I wept for a week. Separation from what you love best, that is hell. To be twice separated, first by a nation and then by its language: that is pain deeper than pain. Deeper than hell. That is abyss.��

“Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it.”]]> 4.22 2024
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/02
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves:
review:
"Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it."

Cyrus Shams is grieving the loss of his mother. Now living in the United States, he grew up in Iran. When his mother was away on a trip the US Military shot down her commercial plane. Never really owning up to this tragedy, the family received a small compensation, and his father moved the family to the United States. Now at college, Cyrus struggles as a writer and in his relationships, always haunted by the death of his mother, now a martyr. When a dying artist sets up a performance at the Met, he starts a conversation with her that will unlock long-kept secrets.

This had a slow start for me, but it came together wonderfully in the end. Although a bit of the mystery is crammed at the end of the book, it does a beautiful job of breaking Cyrus out of his rut.

Favorite Passages:


“It wasn’t fair that just because he was sober, everyone expected him to exhaustively interrogate his every decision. This job or that job, this life or that. Not drinking was Herculean enough on its own. He should’ve been afforded more grace, not less��

Being awake was a kind of poison, and dream was the only antidote.

“I get that,�� said Cyrus. “I do. Maybe part of it is just wanting my tiny little life to have something of scale. For the stakes to matter.�� He paused, then added, “For my having-lived to matter.�� Orkideh smiled, placed her hand on Cyrus’s. It felt cold, dry, like canvas.
“We won’t grow old together, Cyrus. But can’t you feel this mattering? Right now?��

“I guess, I write these sentences where I try to lineate grief or doubt or joy or sex or whatever till it sounds as urgent as it feels. But I know the words will never feel like the thing. The language will never be the thing. So it’s damned, right? And I am too, for giving my life to it. Because I know my writing can never make any of these deaths matter the way they’re supposed to. It’ll never arrest fascism in its tracks or save the planet. It’ll never bring my mother back, you know?��

“She said it in English. I woke screaming. English, fifty years of sun. I wept for a week. Separation from what you love best, that is hell. To be twice separated, first by a nation and then by its language: that is pain deeper than pain. Deeper than hell. That is abyss.��

“Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it.��
]]> 154486930 “Reading this book is a joy...��much to say about the trans journey and will undoubtedly become a standard for those in need of guidance. �� �� The Washington Post

"Sante’s bold devotion to complexity and clarity makes this an exemplary memoir. It is a clarion call to live one’s most authentic life.�� �� The Boston Globe

“Not to be missed, I Heard Her Call My Name is a powerful example of self-reflection and a vibrant exploration of the modern dynamics of gender and identity.”���� Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2024

An iconic writer’s lapidary memoir of a life spent pursuing a dream of artistic truth while evading the truth of her own gender identity, until, finally, she turned to face who she really was

For a long time, Lucy Sante felt unsure of her place. Born in Belgium, the only child of conservative working-class Catholic parents who transplanted their little family to the United States, she felt at home only when she moved to New York City in the early 1970s and found her people among a band of fellow bohemians. Some would die young, to drugs and AIDS, and some would become jarringly famous. Sante flirted with both fates, on her way to building an estimable career as a writer. But she still felt like her life a performance. She was presenting a façade, even to herself.

Sante’s memoir braids together two threads of personal narrative: the arc of her life, and her recent step-by-step transition to a place of inner and outer alignment. Sante brings a loving irony to her account of her unsteady first steps; there was much she found she still needed to learn about being a woman after some sixty years cloaked in a man’s identity, in a man’s world. A marvel of grace and empathy, I Heard Her Call My Name parses with great sensitivity many issues that touch our lives deeply, of gender identity and far beyond.]]> 235 Lucy Sante 059349377X Jeff 4
Her story is important for those transitioning or learning about people who transition. It's a personal journey with fits and starts and, ultimately, a way forward to one's true self. ]]> 3.56 2024
author: Lucy Sante
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/08
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves:
review:
When Lucy Sante started using the Face app and changed her face to a woman, it was an epiphany. Her story of transition begins there, but the knowledge of being trans starts much earlier. Her story moves back and forth through time, from moments when she realizes she is trans to the current time of announcing that fact to the world.

Her story is important for those transitioning or learning about people who transition. It's a personal journey with fits and starts and, ultimately, a way forward to one's true self.
]]> 52129515 Untamed is both an intimate memoir and a galvanizing wake-up call. It is the story of how one woman learned that a responsible mother is not one who slowly dies for her children, but one who shows them how to fully live. It is the story of navigating divorce, forming a new blended family, and discovering that the brokenness or wholeness of a family depends not on its structure but on each member’s ability to bring her full self to the table. And it is the story of how each of us can begin to trust ourselves enough to set boundaries, make peace with our bodies, honor our anger and heartbreak, and unleash our truest, wildest instincts so that we become women who can finally look at ourselves and say: There She Is.]]> 333 Glennon Doyle 1984801252 Jeff 4 to-read
It was a good message, but it came off like a feel-good Instagram post. There was some narrative and then some feel-good sections. It's good to read if you are down or need some inspiration. ]]> 3.98 2020
author: Glennon Doyle
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/13
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves: to-read
review:
Glennon Doyle prides herself on being a resilient memoirist and keeping a marriage together during hardship, which made for a great story until it wasn't. When her husband shatters their marriage and her story, she must find a new one. Then, in walks Abby. She sees the one at a conference and is immediately drawn to her. It happens to be the famous soccer star, Abby Wambach. This begins this seismic shift and figuring out the rest of her life.

It was a good message, but it came off like a feel-good Instagram post. There was some narrative and then some feel-good sections. It's good to read if you are down or need some inspiration.
]]> 203956715 A brilliant exploration of freedom—what it is, how it’s been misunderstood, and why it’s our only chance for survival—by the acclaimed Yale historian and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller On TyrannyTimothy Snyder has been called “the leading interpreter of our dark times.�� As a historian, he has given us startling reinterpretations of political collapse and mass killing. As a public intellectual, he has turned that knowledge toward counsel and prediction, working against authoritarianism here and abroad. His book On Tyranny has inspired millions around the world to fight for freedom. Now, in this tour de force of political philosophy, he helps us see exactly what we’re fighting for.Freedom is the great American commitment, but as Snyder argues, we have lost sight of what it means—and this is leading us into crisis. Too many of us look at freedom as the absence of state We think we're free if we can do and say as we please, and protect ourselves from government overreach. But true freedom isn’t so much freedom from, as freedom to—the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible.On Freedom takes us on a thrilling intellectual journey. Drawing on the work of philosophers and political dissidents, conversations with contemporary thinkers, and his own experiences coming of age in a time of American exceptionalism, Snyder identifies the practices and attitudes—the habits of mind—that will allow us to design a government in which we and future generations can flourish. We come to appreciate the importance of traditions (championed by the right) but also the role of institutions (the purview of the left). Intimate yet ambitious, this book helps forge a new consensus rooted in a politics of abundance, generosity, and grace.]]> 368 Timothy Snyder 0593728726 Jeff 4 4.29 2024
author: Timothy Snyder
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/29
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 196674628
Smith brings a startling urgency to these poems, their questions demanding a new language, a deep self-scrutiny, and virtuosic textual shapes. A series of “ars poetica�� gives way to “anti poetica�� and “ars america�� to implicate poetry’s collusions with unchecked capitalism. A photographic collage accrues across a sequence to make clear the consequences of American acceptance of mass shootings. A brilliant long poem―part map, part annotation, part visual argument―offers the history of Saint Paul’s vibrant Rondo neighborhood before and after the city decided to run an interstate directly through it.

Bluff is a kind of manifesto about artistic resilience, even when time and will can seem fleeting, when the places we most love―those given and made―are burning. In this soaring collection, Smith turns to honesty, hope, rage, and imagination to envision futures that seem possible.]]> 160 Danez Smith 1644452987 Jeff 5 dear reader whenever you are reading this is the future to me, which means tomorrow is still coming, which means today still lives, which means there is still time for beautiful, urgent change, which means there is still time to make more alive which means there is still poetry."


Can a book of poetry save you? Can it solve the problems of the world? Smith says no. The beginning of his new book of poetry faces the futility of making change head-on. Poetry cannot stop this from happening. Worse, it gets used by the very people who are making things terrible. He has to swallow pride from those who would harm him in a different context. The first half of this book is filled with despair and frustration. Midway through the poems, he changes focus. It is at that point he shows his true power as a poet. The poems are filled with hope, promise, and resilience. One would wonder if this is what the title of the book refers to.

Favorite Passages:

We wanted to stop being killed and they thanked me for my beauty

happy to vote Happy to be able to protest the killing We couldn't end, happy for healthcare That killed us slower, happy the gays could marry In the country where trans women vanished Like snow in warm winters Happy our wars were only of the mind only elsewhere.

…we made them late for work, traffic such a gentle revenge for how they clog heaven, a small inconvenience in return for the harvesting of cousins��

Capitalism is the worst bird, able to make a tool out of its destruction.

I hate it here. It’s June so it’s perfect. They do it every pride month, take stonewall and hide the brick. They’re doing it again. Money making uprising a strategy, a mask. Money making your dead face a shield, an invitation to spend your grief. Money figuring out how to stay safe. Money playing the money game. Money making you forget it’s about money. This all started over twenty bucks.

Sometimes we laugh when we are in danger. Every man I knew who was evil had someone who loved him who called him good.

I offer my scratched golds to the blueprint of possible.
dear reader whenever you are reading this is the future to me, which means tomorrow is still coming, which means today still lives, which means there is still time for beautiful, urgent change, which means there is still time to make more alive which means there is still poetry.

Somewhere my children can write poems about being without protest, their songs full of stars. ]]> 4.44 2024
author: Danez Smith
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/20
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:
" I offer my scratched golds to the blueprint of possible.
dear reader whenever you are reading this is the future to me, which means tomorrow is still coming, which means today still lives, which means there is still time for beautiful, urgent change, which means there is still time to make more alive which means there is still poetry."


Can a book of poetry save you? Can it solve the problems of the world? Smith says no. The beginning of his new book of poetry faces the futility of making change head-on. Poetry cannot stop this from happening. Worse, it gets used by the very people who are making things terrible. He has to swallow pride from those who would harm him in a different context. The first half of this book is filled with despair and frustration. Midway through the poems, he changes focus. It is at that point he shows his true power as a poet. The poems are filled with hope, promise, and resilience. One would wonder if this is what the title of the book refers to.

Favorite Passages:

We wanted to stop being killed and they thanked me for my beauty

happy to vote Happy to be able to protest the killing We couldn't end, happy for healthcare That killed us slower, happy the gays could marry In the country where trans women vanished Like snow in warm winters Happy our wars were only of the mind only elsewhere.

…we made them late for work, traffic such a gentle revenge for how they clog heaven, a small inconvenience in return for the harvesting of cousins��

Capitalism is the worst bird, able to make a tool out of its destruction.

I hate it here. It’s June so it’s perfect. They do it every pride month, take stonewall and hide the brick. They’re doing it again. Money making uprising a strategy, a mask. Money making your dead face a shield, an invitation to spend your grief. Money figuring out how to stay safe. Money playing the money game. Money making you forget it’s about money. This all started over twenty bucks.

Sometimes we laugh when we are in danger. Every man I knew who was evil had someone who loved him who called him good.

I offer my scratched golds to the blueprint of possible.
dear reader whenever you are reading this is the future to me, which means tomorrow is still coming, which means today still lives, which means there is still time for beautiful, urgent change, which means there is still time to make more alive which means there is still poetry.

Somewhere my children can write poems about being without protest, their songs full of stars.
]]> 203579067 Part memoir, part manifesto, the inspiring story of a Louisiana librarian advocating for inclusivity on the front lines of our vicious culture wars. One of the things small town librarian Amanda Jones values most about books is how they can affirm a young person's sense of self. So in 2022, when she caught wind of a local public hearing that would discuss “book content,�� she knew what was at stake. Schools and libraries nationwide have been bombarded by demands for books with LGTBQ+ references, discussions of racism, and more to be purged from the shelves. Amanda would be damned if her community were to ban stories representing minority groups. She spoke out that night at the meeting. Days later, she woke up to a nightmare that is still ongoing. Amanda Jones has been called a groomer, a pedo, and a porn-pusher; she has faced death threats and attacks from strangers and friends alike. Her decision to support a collection of books with diverse perspectives made her a target for extremists using book banning campaigns-funded by dark money organizations and advanced by hard right politicians-in a crusade to make America more white, straight, and Christian. But Amanda Jones wouldn't give up without a she sued her harassers for defamation and urged others to join her in the resistance. Mapping the book banning crisis occurring all across the nation, That Librarian draws the battle lines in the war against equity and inclusion, calling book lovers everywhere to rise in defense of our readers.]]> 288 Amanda Jones 1639733531 Jeff 5
This is a book that shouldn't have to be written. Who would think we would have a society where libraries and libraries are viciously attacked? Your local neighborhood librarian exists to help children learn to read and embrace the magic of reading. Who helps seniors learn technology skills. Who helps people find jobs and assistance. And yet, they are attacked with claims of harming children. It is entirely unfathomable. And yet, here we are. It's infuriating that someone can be a billionaire on the bodies of murdered children, yet librarians are attacked to the point that they become radioactive to associate with.

Amanda Jones has had to face this firsthand. A school librarian, she provided public comment against book banning at her local library board meeting. One of many speaking that night, she would find herself singled out and eviscerated online the next day. She was called a groomer and a pedophile who exposed pornography to children. She was devastated as people she knew well in the community and even coworkers would turn against her. She would fight back in court, but after many tense exchanges, she was viewed as an s a public official, making it fair game for people to say anything they wanted against her.

This movement attempts to silence anyone who provides diverse materials for the public and children. Books are a mirror and a window; patrons should be able to see themselves reflected in the collection and learn about people different from themselves. People attacking librarians nationwide often do not even have library cards or live in the community. It is shocking that it has gotten to this point.

Amanda Jones hasn't stopped fighting and attempting to foil the efforts of those who would ban books and scare librarians out of the profession. Furthermore, this book is essential for capturing this moment. Librarians and librarians attacked viciously with little recourse for their defense.

Favorite Passages:

So many of my school librarian friends have essentially gone into hiding after being targeted. Educators who were once the face of the most popular sessions at librarian conferences have disappeared for their own safety or the security of their families. I miss seeing their faces and learning from them. Some have even completely left social media, so librarians I messaged and kept up with through those avenues are gone from my life. I think of them often and wonder if they are okay. I do not fault them and under-stand completely. Their safety and mental health should be their focus, and they need to do what they need to do. A few of us have even formed our own support group online on a private Facebook group to help offer moral support and suggestions for coping through the stress of it all. What kind of world are we living in that has some of our most devoted community servants living so terrified?

Throughout this whole ordeal, I have felt that there was an attempt to silence me. Whether that was because they just didn't want to deal with the issue, because of their own fears or anger at me personally, I will never know unless I ask, and I'm not going to ask. There was a movement to silence me through the posts of these two men and then an attempt to silence me from people I thought were friends. There is a massive amount of political pressure in our community from the far-right and our citizens and leaders let their fear of becoming targets, and their cowardice, affect their decisions. It takes bravery to speak out. I guess it is a courage many do not have.

Last fall, I was invited to speak to a group that included many trans women. As I was listing my woes of being called names online, I had a huge epiphany. Here I was crying to these women over something that at most will cause me turmoil for a few years. Meanwhile, they will face harassment forever. How horrible of a thought—that what I'm feeling for a few months or years is someone's entire life? Because I have diarrhea of the mouth, and sometimes just let my newfound thoughts ooze out of my mouth with no thought, I said this out loud. They clapped and snapped for me. That's when I realized that we all face difficult situations each in our own way. Some situations are worse than others and some last longer than others. Our pain is our own and it sucks. It doesn't mean I'm belit-tling my experience or saying it's not painful. It's just different. I've faced this hate because of what I said (and didn't actually say), but they face it because of who they are. Nobody should ever be made to feel less than for who they are. This constant barrage of hate toward the LGBTQIA+ commu-nity is not normal behavior. Homophobic and racist people try to justify their hate, but it boils down to their fear of anyone who looks and thinks differently from them. What used to be whispered is now a very outward display of hate. Or maybe I just noticed it for the first time? I guess that makes me woke. Woke. Ha. That's another word that's thrown around a lot. I'd rather be accused of being woke than be accused of being a hateful bigot. The kids in my town are paying attention. I want them to know that not everyone in our town hates the LGBTQIA+ community. I want them to see that there are adults in the world who truly want to protect children and not just mock and malign people. Not everyone is actively racist. I must think of the children in our community and set a good example.

What they're really saying is that the LGBTQIA+ community shouldn't be given equal rights or even be acknowledged. They can't just leave queer people alone. No, they want to take away their rights and "other" them. Alt-right conspiracy theorists fixate on the idea that teachers and librarians are all in a plot to turn their children gay. It's ludicrous, and I wish they would take off the tin-foil hats before our country no longer has any educators or librarians. But perhaps that is the idea.

Books and librarians are not harming children. Books provide comfort and libraries provide safe spaces. If anyone says otherwise, I’d ask them when they’d last visited a library or spoke to a librarian. ]]> 3.81 2024
author: Amanda Jones
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/30
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:
" What they're really saying is that the LGBTQIA+ community shouldn't be given equal rights or even be acknowledged. They can't just leave queer people alone. No, they want to take away their rights and "other" them. Alt-right conspiracy theorists fixate on the idea that teachers and librarians are all in a plot to turn their children gay. It's ludicrous, and I wish they would take off the tin-foil hats before our country no longer has any educators or librarians. But perhaps that is the idea."

This is a book that shouldn't have to be written. Who would think we would have a society where libraries and libraries are viciously attacked? Your local neighborhood librarian exists to help children learn to read and embrace the magic of reading. Who helps seniors learn technology skills. Who helps people find jobs and assistance. And yet, they are attacked with claims of harming children. It is entirely unfathomable. And yet, here we are. It's infuriating that someone can be a billionaire on the bodies of murdered children, yet librarians are attacked to the point that they become radioactive to associate with.

Amanda Jones has had to face this firsthand. A school librarian, she provided public comment against book banning at her local library board meeting. One of many speaking that night, she would find herself singled out and eviscerated online the next day. She was called a groomer and a pedophile who exposed pornography to children. She was devastated as people she knew well in the community and even coworkers would turn against her. She would fight back in court, but after many tense exchanges, she was viewed as an s a public official, making it fair game for people to say anything they wanted against her.

This movement attempts to silence anyone who provides diverse materials for the public and children. Books are a mirror and a window; patrons should be able to see themselves reflected in the collection and learn about people different from themselves. People attacking librarians nationwide often do not even have library cards or live in the community. It is shocking that it has gotten to this point.

Amanda Jones hasn't stopped fighting and attempting to foil the efforts of those who would ban books and scare librarians out of the profession. Furthermore, this book is essential for capturing this moment. Librarians and librarians attacked viciously with little recourse for their defense.

Favorite Passages:

So many of my school librarian friends have essentially gone into hiding after being targeted. Educators who were once the face of the most popular sessions at librarian conferences have disappeared for their own safety or the security of their families. I miss seeing their faces and learning from them. Some have even completely left social media, so librarians I messaged and kept up with through those avenues are gone from my life. I think of them often and wonder if they are okay. I do not fault them and under-stand completely. Their safety and mental health should be their focus, and they need to do what they need to do. A few of us have even formed our own support group online on a private Facebook group to help offer moral support and suggestions for coping through the stress of it all. What kind of world are we living in that has some of our most devoted community servants living so terrified?

Throughout this whole ordeal, I have felt that there was an attempt to silence me. Whether that was because they just didn't want to deal with the issue, because of their own fears or anger at me personally, I will never know unless I ask, and I'm not going to ask. There was a movement to silence me through the posts of these two men and then an attempt to silence me from people I thought were friends. There is a massive amount of political pressure in our community from the far-right and our citizens and leaders let their fear of becoming targets, and their cowardice, affect their decisions. It takes bravery to speak out. I guess it is a courage many do not have.

Last fall, I was invited to speak to a group that included many trans women. As I was listing my woes of being called names online, I had a huge epiphany. Here I was crying to these women over something that at most will cause me turmoil for a few years. Meanwhile, they will face harassment forever. How horrible of a thought—that what I'm feeling for a few months or years is someone's entire life? Because I have diarrhea of the mouth, and sometimes just let my newfound thoughts ooze out of my mouth with no thought, I said this out loud. They clapped and snapped for me. That's when I realized that we all face difficult situations each in our own way. Some situations are worse than others and some last longer than others. Our pain is our own and it sucks. It doesn't mean I'm belit-tling my experience or saying it's not painful. It's just different. I've faced this hate because of what I said (and didn't actually say), but they face it because of who they are. Nobody should ever be made to feel less than for who they are. This constant barrage of hate toward the LGBTQIA+ commu-nity is not normal behavior. Homophobic and racist people try to justify their hate, but it boils down to their fear of anyone who looks and thinks differently from them. What used to be whispered is now a very outward display of hate. Or maybe I just noticed it for the first time? I guess that makes me woke. Woke. Ha. That's another word that's thrown around a lot. I'd rather be accused of being woke than be accused of being a hateful bigot. The kids in my town are paying attention. I want them to know that not everyone in our town hates the LGBTQIA+ community. I want them to see that there are adults in the world who truly want to protect children and not just mock and malign people. Not everyone is actively racist. I must think of the children in our community and set a good example.

What they're really saying is that the LGBTQIA+ community shouldn't be given equal rights or even be acknowledged. They can't just leave queer people alone. No, they want to take away their rights and "other" them. Alt-right conspiracy theorists fixate on the idea that teachers and librarians are all in a plot to turn their children gay. It's ludicrous, and I wish they would take off the tin-foil hats before our country no longer has any educators or librarians. But perhaps that is the idea.

Books and librarians are not harming children. Books provide comfort and libraries provide safe spaces. If anyone says otherwise, I’d ask them when they’d last visited a library or spoke to a librarian.
]]> 215150206 A 2024 BOOK OF THE YEAR PICK FOR BBC R4 OPEN BOOK, THE OBSERVER, GQ, GRAZIA, HERO, I-D, NYLON

The New York Times bestselling author of The First Bad Man returns with an irreverently sexy, tender, hilarious and literary novel about a woman upending her life

A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country from LA to NY. Thirty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic and domestic life of a 45-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectations while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 326 Miranda July 1838853456 Jeff 4
An eccentric artist decides to drive cross country to celebrate a paycheck from a whiskey company that used one of her poems. She leaves her husband and child behind. Just outside of town, about 30 minutes, she runs into a young man at a pit stop. She runs into him three more times, decides it is a sign, and stops for the night. She then decides to stay in the room rather than drive. She pretends that she is still driving to her family. She ends up spending the $20,000 on the motel room in which she is staying. Giving it to the wife of the young man she stopped for. She has a pseudo-affair with him, but they do not consummate the relationship. He works off his sexual desire through hip-hop dancing.

A new Miranda July book should prepare the reader for a wild and weird ride. I like her fiction because it is so unusual and strange. It makes one think differently about perspective, even if it is a story where nothing really happens. She is manifesting a mid-life crisis, and it does generate a major change. She needed to make something happen in her stagnated life.



Favorite Passages:
“Without a child I could dance across the sexism of my era, whereas becoming a mother shoved my face right down into it. A latent bias, internalized by both of us, suddenly leapt forth in parenthood. It was now obvious that Harris was openly rewarded for each thing he did while I was quietly shamed for the same things. There was no way to fight back against this, no one to point a finger at, because it came from everywhere. Even walking around my own house I felt haunted, fluish with guilt about every single thing I did or didn’t do. Harris couldn’t see the haunting and this was the worst part: to be living with someone who fundamentally didn’t believe me and was really, really sick of having to pretend to empathize—or else be the bad guy! In his own home! How infuriating for him. And how infuriating to be the wife and not other women who could enjoy how terrific he was. How painful for both of us, especially given that we were modern, creative types used to living in our dreams of the future. But a baby exists only in the present, the historical, geographic economic present. With a baby one could no longer be cute and coy about capitalism—money was time, time was everything. We could have skipped lightly across all this by not becoming parents; it never really had to come to a head. On the other hand, sometimes it’s good when things come to a head. And then eventually, one day: pop.��

“For me lying created just the right amount of problems and what you saw was just one of my four or five faces—each real, each with different needs. The only dangerous lie was one that asked me to compress myself down into a single convenient entity that one person could understand. I was a kaleidoscope, each glittering piece of glass changing as I turned.��

Most of life is a vapor of unconscious associations, never bright to light.

“Although maybe midlife crises were just poorly marketed, maybe each one was profound and unique and it was only a few silly men in red convertibles who gave them a bad name. I imagined greeting such a man solemnly: I see you have reached a time of great questioning. God be with you, seeker.��

“How crazy and vain did you have to be to kill yourself when you found out that your main thrill, the thing that really got you going, was gone forever? Maybe not so crazy. If birth was being thrown energetically up into the air, we aged as we rose. At the height of our ascent we were middle-aged and then we fell for the rest of our lives, the whole second half. Falling might take just as long, but it was nothing like rising. The whole time you were rising you could not imagine what came next in your particular, unique journey; you could not see around the corner. Whereas falling ended the same way for everyone.��

“Because in truth it was like a bad dream, a nightmare. Life didn’t just get better and better. You could actually miss out on something and that was that. That was your chance and now it was over. I wondered if I would continue with my work and then I realized that my work was all I had now. I had gotten it completely wrong—I thought I was laboring toward a prize, but the prize was right there, I already had it, and work was something I could do afterward, after I was no longer young enough to be beautiful and could no longer be wanted by someone beautiful.��
]]> 3.45 2024
author: Miranda July
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/05
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:
" Most of life is a vapor of unconscious associations, never bright to light."

An eccentric artist decides to drive cross country to celebrate a paycheck from a whiskey company that used one of her poems. She leaves her husband and child behind. Just outside of town, about 30 minutes, she runs into a young man at a pit stop. She runs into him three more times, decides it is a sign, and stops for the night. She then decides to stay in the room rather than drive. She pretends that she is still driving to her family. She ends up spending the $20,000 on the motel room in which she is staying. Giving it to the wife of the young man she stopped for. She has a pseudo-affair with him, but they do not consummate the relationship. He works off his sexual desire through hip-hop dancing.

A new Miranda July book should prepare the reader for a wild and weird ride. I like her fiction because it is so unusual and strange. It makes one think differently about perspective, even if it is a story where nothing really happens. She is manifesting a mid-life crisis, and it does generate a major change. She needed to make something happen in her stagnated life.



Favorite Passages:
“Without a child I could dance across the sexism of my era, whereas becoming a mother shoved my face right down into it. A latent bias, internalized by both of us, suddenly leapt forth in parenthood. It was now obvious that Harris was openly rewarded for each thing he did while I was quietly shamed for the same things. There was no way to fight back against this, no one to point a finger at, because it came from everywhere. Even walking around my own house I felt haunted, fluish with guilt about every single thing I did or didn’t do. Harris couldn’t see the haunting and this was the worst part: to be living with someone who fundamentally didn’t believe me and was really, really sick of having to pretend to empathize—or else be the bad guy! In his own home! How infuriating for him. And how infuriating to be the wife and not other women who could enjoy how terrific he was. How painful for both of us, especially given that we were modern, creative types used to living in our dreams of the future. But a baby exists only in the present, the historical, geographic economic present. With a baby one could no longer be cute and coy about capitalism—money was time, time was everything. We could have skipped lightly across all this by not becoming parents; it never really had to come to a head. On the other hand, sometimes it’s good when things come to a head. And then eventually, one day: pop.��

“For me lying created just the right amount of problems and what you saw was just one of my four or five faces—each real, each with different needs. The only dangerous lie was one that asked me to compress myself down into a single convenient entity that one person could understand. I was a kaleidoscope, each glittering piece of glass changing as I turned.��

Most of life is a vapor of unconscious associations, never bright to light.

“Although maybe midlife crises were just poorly marketed, maybe each one was profound and unique and it was only a few silly men in red convertibles who gave them a bad name. I imagined greeting such a man solemnly: I see you have reached a time of great questioning. God be with you, seeker.��

“How crazy and vain did you have to be to kill yourself when you found out that your main thrill, the thing that really got you going, was gone forever? Maybe not so crazy. If birth was being thrown energetically up into the air, we aged as we rose. At the height of our ascent we were middle-aged and then we fell for the rest of our lives, the whole second half. Falling might take just as long, but it was nothing like rising. The whole time you were rising you could not imagine what came next in your particular, unique journey; you could not see around the corner. Whereas falling ended the same way for everyone.��

“Because in truth it was like a bad dream, a nightmare. Life didn’t just get better and better. You could actually miss out on something and that was that. That was your chance and now it was over. I wondered if I would continue with my work and then I realized that my work was all I had now. I had gotten it completely wrong—I thought I was laboring toward a prize, but the prize was right there, I already had it, and work was something I could do afterward, after I was no longer young enough to be beautiful and could no longer be wanted by someone beautiful.��

]]> 200555235 A searing novel about being a wife, a mother, and an artist, and how marriage makes liars out of us all, from the author of Very Cold People and 300 Arguments.

“Painful and brilliant—I loved it.”—Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot and Either/Or

A nuclear family can destroy a woman artist. I’d always known that. But I’d never suspected how easily I’d fall into one anyway.

When Jane, an aspiring writer, meets filmmaker John Bridges, they both want the same things: to be in love, to live a successful creative life, and to be happy. When they marry, Jane believes she has found everything she was looking for, including—a few years later—all the attendant joy and labor of motherhood. But it’s not long until Jane finds herself subsumed by John’s ambitions, whims, and ego; in short, she becomes a wife.

As Jane’s career flourishes, their marriage starts to falter. Throughout the upheavals of family life, Jane tries to hold it all together. That is, until John leaves her.

Combining the intensity of Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment and the pithy wisdom of Jenny Offill’s Dept of Speculation, Liars is a tour de force of wit and rage, telling the blistering story of a marriage as it burns to the ground, and of a woman rising inexorably from its ashes.]]> 272 Sarah Manguso 0593241258 Jeff 5
It is a scathing indictment of marriage and what some need to endure endlessly. A young woman becomes infatuated with a young artist, and they soon move in together and marry. This is where the trouble begins. Narcissistic, selfish, jealous, and financially unstable, she endures all of this simply to have a family.

Probably one of the most infuriating books I have encountered in a long time. Endlessly yelling dump himeosnt change the narrative. This is the signal for the whole man's disposal service, yes, the entire man.



Favorite Passages:


“Anger is one of the last privileges of the truly helpless. ��

“I laundered vomit-soaked sheets until the dryer broke and then took two wet loads to the laundromat, which as usual was full of heroic women.��

“I thought about all the wives who had lived before birth control, before legal abortion, before the recognition of marital rape and domestic abuse, before women could buy a house or open a bank account or vote or drive or leave the house. I wanted to apologize to all the forgotten and unseen women who had allowed me to exist, all the women I’d sworn not to emulate because I’d wanted to be human—I wanted to be like a man, capable and beloved for my service to the world.��

“But I also knew that the most intimate relationship is not mutual. It is one-way: the mother’s relationship to the child. The best part of my life had been this animal intimacy, the secretion of my milk into this body, the teaching how to lift food to the mouth, how to speak, how to show love according to the feeling of love, how to put on a shoe, how to pick up a spoon, how to wipe one’s own tears, how to piss and shit and be clean. Nothing, nothing in the world like that. That absolute authority of which the baby must be convinced in order to feel safe, separate from the mother’s body. The honor the mother must give the baby, when the baby is ready to know that her absolute authority was never real. The careful timing of the revelation that, baby, you are alone, as alone as anything can be. How lucky you were, baby, to have been a baby with its mother. Now you are ready to start living life in the imagination, to start imagining your way back to every good feeling you don’t quite remember from the days of milk.��

“I hadn’t experienced uncontaminated time—time unoccupied by vigilance to the child’s health, feeding, elimination, education, safety, entertainment, development, socialization, and mood, and the care of the house, including food shopping, meal planning, cleaning, cooking, tossing old food, scrubbing bathrooms, making doctors�� appointments, labeling toys for show-and-tell, planning play dates, maintaining contact with grandparents, planning holidays, paying bills, dealing with two tax audits and an identity theft (all John’s), and usually most of these things at once—outside an airplane in years. This meant absurdly little of the sort of time needed to write books. My time, which is to say the time that was mine, for me alone, had disappeared. And at once I understood why I hadn’t felt like myself in years. My own time—my own life—had disappeared, been overtaken. Which might have been the reason I was so angry, I thought.��

“I was in charge of everything and in control of nothing.��

“John and I both caught the child’s cold. John stayed in bed for two days; I took the new kitten to the vet and bought groceries and did dishes and laundry and planned all the meals and took the child to school and so on. I took one nap but otherwise kept everything up. And that is a mother’s cold.��

“So at his worst, my husband was an arrogant, insecure, workaholic, narcissistic bully with middlebrow taste, who maintained power over me by making major decisions without my input or consent. It could still be worse, I thought.��

“Calling a woman crazy is a man’s last resort when he’s failed to control her.��

“That’s the problem with women like us, Marni said. We don’t die. When I tell people I look forward to dying, they don’t get it. I’m just fucking tired. I’m not going to kill myself, but I’m ready to rest. When I went on vacation I went snorkeling and couldn’t move. The current was too strong. But it was just beautiful underwater. I thought, Well, if this is it, it’s not bad. Then the stupid boat guide saved me and gave me a hundred bucks.”]]> 3.67 2024
author: Sarah Manguso
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/14
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:
Anger is one of the last privileges of the truly helpless."

It is a scathing indictment of marriage and what some need to endure endlessly. A young woman becomes infatuated with a young artist, and they soon move in together and marry. This is where the trouble begins. Narcissistic, selfish, jealous, and financially unstable, she endures all of this simply to have a family.

Probably one of the most infuriating books I have encountered in a long time. Endlessly yelling dump himeosnt change the narrative. This is the signal for the whole man's disposal service, yes, the entire man.



Favorite Passages:


“Anger is one of the last privileges of the truly helpless. ��

“I laundered vomit-soaked sheets until the dryer broke and then took two wet loads to the laundromat, which as usual was full of heroic women.��

“I thought about all the wives who had lived before birth control, before legal abortion, before the recognition of marital rape and domestic abuse, before women could buy a house or open a bank account or vote or drive or leave the house. I wanted to apologize to all the forgotten and unseen women who had allowed me to exist, all the women I’d sworn not to emulate because I’d wanted to be human—I wanted to be like a man, capable and beloved for my service to the world.��

“But I also knew that the most intimate relationship is not mutual. It is one-way: the mother’s relationship to the child. The best part of my life had been this animal intimacy, the secretion of my milk into this body, the teaching how to lift food to the mouth, how to speak, how to show love according to the feeling of love, how to put on a shoe, how to pick up a spoon, how to wipe one’s own tears, how to piss and shit and be clean. Nothing, nothing in the world like that. That absolute authority of which the baby must be convinced in order to feel safe, separate from the mother’s body. The honor the mother must give the baby, when the baby is ready to know that her absolute authority was never real. The careful timing of the revelation that, baby, you are alone, as alone as anything can be. How lucky you were, baby, to have been a baby with its mother. Now you are ready to start living life in the imagination, to start imagining your way back to every good feeling you don’t quite remember from the days of milk.��

“I hadn’t experienced uncontaminated time—time unoccupied by vigilance to the child’s health, feeding, elimination, education, safety, entertainment, development, socialization, and mood, and the care of the house, including food shopping, meal planning, cleaning, cooking, tossing old food, scrubbing bathrooms, making doctors�� appointments, labeling toys for show-and-tell, planning play dates, maintaining contact with grandparents, planning holidays, paying bills, dealing with two tax audits and an identity theft (all John’s), and usually most of these things at once—outside an airplane in years. This meant absurdly little of the sort of time needed to write books. My time, which is to say the time that was mine, for me alone, had disappeared. And at once I understood why I hadn’t felt like myself in years. My own time—my own life—had disappeared, been overtaken. Which might have been the reason I was so angry, I thought.��

“I was in charge of everything and in control of nothing.��

“John and I both caught the child’s cold. John stayed in bed for two days; I took the new kitten to the vet and bought groceries and did dishes and laundry and planned all the meals and took the child to school and so on. I took one nap but otherwise kept everything up. And that is a mother’s cold.��

“So at his worst, my husband was an arrogant, insecure, workaholic, narcissistic bully with middlebrow taste, who maintained power over me by making major decisions without my input or consent. It could still be worse, I thought.��

“Calling a woman crazy is a man’s last resort when he’s failed to control her.��

“That’s the problem with women like us, Marni said. We don’t die. When I tell people I look forward to dying, they don’t get it. I’m just fucking tired. I’m not going to kill myself, but I’m ready to rest. When I went on vacation I went snorkeling and couldn’t move. The current was too strong. But it was just beautiful underwater. I thought, Well, if this is it, it’s not bad. Then the stupid boat guide saved me and gave me a hundred bucks.��
]]> 196674636 Survival is a moral quandary in this jagged, otherworldly debut charting forbidden love during an apocalypse.

In a near future devastated by war and unspecified natural disaster, a young man and his mother cling to survival at the edge of a forest. Society is militarized and dangerous, with men with shaved heads patrolling the land as families are uprooted and nature is all but decimated. The young man spends his days helping his mother, who is traumatized from her experience working in the ominous Factory, and exchanging letters with his lover, Boris, who lives in a city on the other side of the forest. It’s barely a life, but it’s life nonetheless.

After a brutal act of desperate violence and the arrival of armed men at their doorstep, the young man leaves his mother and finds Boris, who travels with him through the forest to the city. Escaping slavers and trekking through the empty landscape, the two find moments of intimacy despite their circumstances. But as their survival comes with increasingly violent demands, the young man is forced to confront whether, in his effort to stay alive, he’s become the very thing he’s fought to escape.

An award-winning, breakout novel from a blazingly original Catalonian poet, Pol Guasch’s Napalm in the Heart is breathtaking in its beauty and devastation. Sparse, quick, and wrestling with big ideas, from the despoiling of the environment and totalitarianism to queerness and manhood, Guasch’s debut is an unrelenting and extraordinarily artful exploration of the moral murkiness of survival.]]> 256 Pol Guasch 0374612951 Jeff 5
It is a sprawling and poetic story about war and its impacts. We don't see it as the reader, but we know it is there. We are just as clueless as refugees.

Favorite Passage:
I always reminded myself that he was profoundly nostalgic, deep down, because he was missing something he’d never had, and that’s the worst nostalgia you can have. ]]> 3.45 2021
author: Pol Guasch
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/26
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:
Nations at war often don't feature the impacted civilians and are unaware of what is happening. IT's frightening and alienating. The young man documents his life through letters to his boyfriend, Boris. When his mother tries to get a lover, who is one of the soldiers occupying their area, he tricks him, ties him up, and lets him starve to death to be devoured by animals. A metaphor for the life of the refugee, freed from that trap.

It is a sprawling and poetic story about war and its impacts. We don't see it as the reader, but we know it is there. We are just as clueless as refugees.

Favorite Passage:
I always reminded myself that he was profoundly nostalgic, deep down, because he was missing something he’d never had, and that’s the worst nostalgia you can have.
]]> 199349912 A bold and unabashed novel about a young Palestinian woman's unraveling, far from home, as she gets caught up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags

The Coin follows a Palestinian woman as she pursues a dream that generations of her family have failed at: to live and thrive in America. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys in New York, where her eccentric methods cross conventional boundaries. She befriends a homeless swindler and the two participate in a pyramid scheme reselling Birkin bags, the value of which "increases, year by year, regardless of poverty, of war, of famine." The juxtaposition of luxury and the abject engulfs her as she is able to con her way to bag after bag, preoccupied by the suffering she knows of the world.

Eventually, her body and mind go to war. America is stifling her—her willfulness, her sexuality, her ideology. In an attempt to regain control, she becomes preoccupied with purity, cleanliness and self-image, all while drawing her students into her obsessions. In an unforgettable denouement, her childhood memories converge with her feelings of existential statelessness, and the narrator unravels spectacularly.

Enthralling, sensory, and uncanny, The Coin explores materiality, nature and civilization, class, homelessness, sexuality, beauty—and how oppression and inherited trauma manifest in every area of our lives—all while resisting easy moralizing. Provocative and original, humorous and inviting, The Coin marks the arrival of a major new literary voice.]]> 240 Yasmin Zaher 1646222105 Jeff 5
It is a brilliant first novel documenting the breakdown and epiphany of a young, wealthy Palestinian woman living in New York. Not needing to work, she takes a job as a teacher, but she is ill-suited and unprepared and also doesn't care. She desperately needs to be clean and has an elaborate ritual using CVS products. She is obsessed with the feeling that she has an inside of herself that she cannot rid herself of, seemingly a metaphor for the persistence of the Palestinian people's pain.

There are aspects of the book that reminded me of other books where a woman has a breakdown. In Clarice Lispector's The Passion, According to GH, a woman accidentally smashes a cockroach in half, causing her breakdown where nothing much happens. In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a teacher has a breakdown and decides to give her students her prime, but it is anything but.

Favorite Passages:

Why is it that the rich are uptight but the poor are themselves?

He had just be-come a French citizen, he said, and his friends wanted to go to the Pride parade in Tel Aviv, but he was still hesitant. I told him I was Palestinian and had just become a citizen of Armenia. Some-times, maybe even most of the time, telling a stranger that you're Palestinian is a handicap, it makes people withdraw from you, it makes them unsure or suspicious. But other times it's like show-ing a hand of four aces. You get a pat on the back, you get Yasser Arafat's V sign, you get free stuff. And that day, when I told him, Mubarak sold me a size 35 Birkin in crocodile skin, the color of ganache. Happy Pride, Vive la Palestine, Eid Mubarak.

I walked back to the hotel, and I wondered if it was true, what I had told him, that I didn't need to pretend. Maybe pretense Was all there was. Fashion is pretense, education is pretense, personality, too, is a form of internalized pretense. I wondered what my true essence would be, if I were solitary, in nature, untamed and unconditioned.

I read the poem again, it said something about me, about what kind of person I was, what kind of teacher I wanted to be for my students. That poem, with all its references to art, was meant to be a vacation from their burdens. There was a moment, before, when I was carefree, when I offered my students lightness. As Frank O'Hara wrote, It seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience.

Aisha belonged to that rare breed of people, kind and gentle people, I think they are born that way. They're more visible in cer., tain professions, in education, or in health care, like the nurses who draw blood. These people often work indoors, they work long, intensive hours, sometimes night shifts. There aren't many of them these days, because our culture socializes us against kindness. I know this because you rarely come across them in the street.

Rich Palestinians, she told me, rolling her eyes, in New York of all places, the world capital of support for Israel. I agreed with her, I said, The more contradictions in your life, the more complex your identity, the harder your soul, the more difficult it is to love and be loved. I don't want to be with similar people, I continued, if you rub many knotted strings together, they don't solve into a beautiful braid, they just become a big ugly mess.

I was unfamiliar witn. I come from a land that is a graveyard. For millennia, all kinds of people were born there, they died there, or were killed, and some were even resurrected or reborn. It was bloody, haunted, and doomed, but it belonged to mankind. Nature in America Was uncivilized and untamed. I didn't know how to read it. If a deer was some kind of warning sign, I wouldn't have known.

I loved my friend's house but I knew that it was haunted. Even at a young age, I knew that there was a family out there in the world that was still holding on to the key.
No, I didn't know this intuitively. Each time my morn picked me up from the house she made a remark about it. Of course, the door had long been changed, it was a modern glass door with a keyhole fitting a small aluminum key, which my friend kept on a friendship bracelet. I remember that above the door they had garlic cloves hanging. My friend told me that it was there to ward off vampires, but I think, in truth, that it was to keep the spirit of the original inhabitants away.

Of course, nothing had happened, it had barely been a few weeks. I dug it out, the will was pretty much intact. The Birkin was soiled, I had ruined it, but the hardware was still shiny. I thought about metal then, and the landscape of my childhood, how it was saturated with coins. Roman coins, gold Abbasid coins, ancient Judean coins. There were shekels, mils, and drachmas. Emperors, gods, and queens. They didn't decompose. They just stayed there, in the ground. And the coin in my body, it was going to stay there, until I died, and long after. ]]> 3.50 2024
author: Yasmin Zaher
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/30
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:
"I thought about metal then, and the landscape of my childhood, how it was saturated with coins. Roman coins, gold Abbasid coins, ancient Judean coins. There were shekels, mils, and drachmas. Emperors, gods, and queens. They didn't decompose. They just stayed there, in the ground. And the coin in my body, it was going to stay there, until I died, and long after."

It is a brilliant first novel documenting the breakdown and epiphany of a young, wealthy Palestinian woman living in New York. Not needing to work, she takes a job as a teacher, but she is ill-suited and unprepared and also doesn't care. She desperately needs to be clean and has an elaborate ritual using CVS products. She is obsessed with the feeling that she has an inside of herself that she cannot rid herself of, seemingly a metaphor for the persistence of the Palestinian people's pain.

There are aspects of the book that reminded me of other books where a woman has a breakdown. In Clarice Lispector's The Passion, According to GH, a woman accidentally smashes a cockroach in half, causing her breakdown where nothing much happens. In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a teacher has a breakdown and decides to give her students her prime, but it is anything but.

Favorite Passages:

Why is it that the rich are uptight but the poor are themselves?

He had just be-come a French citizen, he said, and his friends wanted to go to the Pride parade in Tel Aviv, but he was still hesitant. I told him I was Palestinian and had just become a citizen of Armenia. Some-times, maybe even most of the time, telling a stranger that you're Palestinian is a handicap, it makes people withdraw from you, it makes them unsure or suspicious. But other times it's like show-ing a hand of four aces. You get a pat on the back, you get Yasser Arafat's V sign, you get free stuff. And that day, when I told him, Mubarak sold me a size 35 Birkin in crocodile skin, the color of ganache. Happy Pride, Vive la Palestine, Eid Mubarak.

I walked back to the hotel, and I wondered if it was true, what I had told him, that I didn't need to pretend. Maybe pretense Was all there was. Fashion is pretense, education is pretense, personality, too, is a form of internalized pretense. I wondered what my true essence would be, if I were solitary, in nature, untamed and unconditioned.

I read the poem again, it said something about me, about what kind of person I was, what kind of teacher I wanted to be for my students. That poem, with all its references to art, was meant to be a vacation from their burdens. There was a moment, before, when I was carefree, when I offered my students lightness. As Frank O'Hara wrote, It seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience.

Aisha belonged to that rare breed of people, kind and gentle people, I think they are born that way. They're more visible in cer., tain professions, in education, or in health care, like the nurses who draw blood. These people often work indoors, they work long, intensive hours, sometimes night shifts. There aren't many of them these days, because our culture socializes us against kindness. I know this because you rarely come across them in the street.

Rich Palestinians, she told me, rolling her eyes, in New York of all places, the world capital of support for Israel. I agreed with her, I said, The more contradictions in your life, the more complex your identity, the harder your soul, the more difficult it is to love and be loved. I don't want to be with similar people, I continued, if you rub many knotted strings together, they don't solve into a beautiful braid, they just become a big ugly mess.

I was unfamiliar witn. I come from a land that is a graveyard. For millennia, all kinds of people were born there, they died there, or were killed, and some were even resurrected or reborn. It was bloody, haunted, and doomed, but it belonged to mankind. Nature in America Was uncivilized and untamed. I didn't know how to read it. If a deer was some kind of warning sign, I wouldn't have known.

I loved my friend's house but I knew that it was haunted. Even at a young age, I knew that there was a family out there in the world that was still holding on to the key.
No, I didn't know this intuitively. Each time my morn picked me up from the house she made a remark about it. Of course, the door had long been changed, it was a modern glass door with a keyhole fitting a small aluminum key, which my friend kept on a friendship bracelet. I remember that above the door they had garlic cloves hanging. My friend told me that it was there to ward off vampires, but I think, in truth, that it was to keep the spirit of the original inhabitants away.

Of course, nothing had happened, it had barely been a few weeks. I dug it out, the will was pretty much intact. The Birkin was soiled, I had ruined it, but the hardware was still shiny. I thought about metal then, and the landscape of my childhood, how it was saturated with coins. Roman coins, gold Abbasid coins, ancient Judean coins. There were shekels, mils, and drachmas. Emperors, gods, and queens. They didn't decompose. They just stayed there, in the ground. And the coin in my body, it was going to stay there, until I died, and long after.
]]> 202102049 From the award-winning, psychologically astute author of The Memory Police, here is a hypnotic, introspective novel about an affluent Japanese family navigating buried secrets, and their young house guest who uncovers them.

In the spring of 1972, twelve-year-old Tomoko leaves her mother behind in Tokyo and boards a train alone for Ashiya, a coastal town in Japan, to stay with her aunt’s family. Tomoko’s aunt is an enigma and an outlier in her working-class family, and her magnificent home—and handsome, foreign husband, the president of a soft drink company—are symbols of that status. The seventeen rooms are filled with German-made furnishings; there are sprawling gardens, and even an old zoo where the family’s pygmy hippopotamus resides. The family is just as beguiling as their mansion—Tomoko’s dignified and devoted aunt, her German grandmother, and her dashing, charming uncle who confidently sits as the family’s patriarch. At the center of the family is Tomoko’s cousin Mina, a precocious, asthmatic girl of thirteen who draws Tomoko into an intoxicating world full of secret crushes and elaborate storytelling.

In this elegant jewel box of a book, Yoko Ogawa invites us to witness a powerful and formative interlude in Tomoko’s life, which she looks back on briefly from adulthood at the novel’s end. Behind the family’s sophistication are complications that Tomoko struggles to understand—her uncle’s mysterious absences, her German grandmother’s experience of the second world war, her aunt’s misery. Rich with the magic and mystery of youthful experience, Mina’s Matchbox is an evocative snapshot of a moment frozen in time—and a striking depiction of a family on the edge of collapse.]]> 288 Yōko Ogawa 0593316088 Jeff 4
Endearing story, but it is interesting that the popular book The Memory Police is unique. However, all her books talk about memory and has this wistful appeal to it. ]]> 3.75 2006
author: Yōko Ogawa
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/30
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:
A woman reminisces about her childhood and remembers when she stayed with her uncle and his family for two years. Her uncle was a very wealthy executive. Her cousin is sickly and travels to and fro on a hippopotamus. Thus begins this surreal and endearing chapter in her life. Her cousin collects matchboxes, and with each unique book (collected by the driver who delivers soft drinks), she imagines the story behind the pictures on the matchbook.

Endearing story, but it is interesting that the popular book The Memory Police is unique. However, all her books talk about memory and has this wistful appeal to it.
]]> 60099237 A groundbreaking global history of gender nonconformity ��

Today’s narratives about trans people tend to feature individuals with stable gender identities that fit neatly into the categories of male or female. Those stories, while important, fail to account for the complex realities of many trans people’s lives. ��
��
Before We Were Trans  illuminates the stories of people across the globe, from antiquity to the present, whose experiences of gender have defied binary categories. Blending historical analysis with sharp cultural criticism, trans historian and activist Kit Heyam offers a new, radically inclusive trans history, chronicling expressions of trans experience that are often overlooked, like gender-nonconforming fashion and wartime stage performance. Before We Were Trans  transports us from Renaissance Venice to seventeenth-century  Angola, from Edo Japan to early America, and looks to the past to uncover new horizons for possible trans futures. ��]]> 343 Kit Heyam 1541603087 Jeff 5 4.28 2022
author: Kit Heyam
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/08
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 59069071 Celebrated cartoonist Kate Beaton vividly presents the untold story of Canada.

Before there was Kate Beaton, New York Times bestselling cartoonist of Hark A Vagrant fame, there was Katie Beaton of the Cape Breton Beatons, specifically Mabou, a tight-knit seaside community where the lobster is as abundant as beaches, fiddles, and Gaelic folk songs. After university, Beaton heads out west to take advantage of Alberta’s oil rush, part of the long tradition of East Coasters who seek gainful employment elsewhere when they can't find it in the homeland they love so much. With the singular goal of paying off her student loans, what the journey will actually cost Beaton will be far more than she anticipates.

Arriving in Fort McMurray, Beaton finds work in the lucrative camps owned and operated by the world’s largest oil companies. Being one of the few women among thousands of men, the culture shock is palpable. It does not hit home until she moves to a spartan, isolated worksite for higher pay. She encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet never discussed. Her wounds may never heal.

Beaton’s natural cartooning prowess is on full display as she draws colossal machinery and mammoth vehicles set against a sublime Albertan backdrop of wildlife, Northern Lights, and Rocky Mountains. Her first full-length graphic narrative, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is an untold story of Canada: a country that prides itself on its egalitarian ethos and natural beauty while simultaneously exploiting both the riches of its land and the humanity of its people.]]> 430 Kate Beaton 1770462899 Jeff 5 4.41 2022
author: Kate Beaton
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/10
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 195886563
Wooing the standoffish Meredith isn’t going to be easy, however. With Aiden’s coaching, Cara slowly manages to win Meredith over―but finds herself accidentally falling for her in the process. Worse as Meredith gets happier and Aiden’s mission nears completion, his ghost begins to fade. Can Cara continue to date Meredith under false pretenses, especially if it means Aiden will vanish forever? Or should she tell Meredith the truth, and risk both of them hating her? And either way, will she lose her only shot at proving ghosts are real?]]> 336 James L. Sutter 1250869765 Jeff 3 3.48 2024
author: James L. Sutter
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/21
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 22074335
There's a long-running joke that, after "coming out," a lesbian, gay guy, bisexual, or trans person should receive a membership card and instruction manual. THIS IS THAT INSTRUCTION MANUAL. You're welcome.

Inside you'll find the answers to all the questions you ever wanted to ask: from sex to politics, hooking up to stereotypes, coming out and more. This candid, funny, and uncensored exploration of sexuality and what it's like to grow up LGBT also includes real stories from people across the gender and sexual spectrums, not to mention hilarious illustrations.

You will be entertained. You will be informed. But most importantly, you will know that however you identify (or don't) and whomever you love, you are exceptional. You matter. And so does this book.]]> 273 Juno Dawson 1471403955 Jeff 5 3.77 2014
author: Juno Dawson
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/21
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 204316973 The beloved and award-winning author of BLACK HOLE's haunting and visually arresting story of an artist's obsessions, and the value and cost of pushing the boundaries of creativity

As a child, Brian and his friend Jimmy would make sci-fi films in their yards, convincing their friends to star as victims of grisly murders, smearing lipstick on the "bodies" to simulate blood. Now a talented artist and aspiring filmmaker, Brian, along with Jimmy, Jimmy's friend Tina, and Laurie—his reluctant muse—sets off to a remote cabin in the woods with an old 8 millimeter camera to make a true sci-fi horror movie, an homage to Brian's favorite movie: Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But as Brian's affections for Laurie go seemingly unreciprocated, Brian writes and draws himself into a fantasy where she is the girl of his dreams, his damsel in distress, and his savior wrapped into one. Rife with references to classic sci-fi and horror movies and filled with panels of stunning depictions of nature, film and the surreal, Burns blurs the line between Brian's dreams and reality, imagination and perception. A master of the form at his finest, Final Cut is an astonishing look at what it means to truly express oneself through art.]]> 224 Charles Burns 0593701704 Jeff 3 3.74 2024
author: Charles Burns
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/27
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 157981706
If you’re muddling through the day in a fog, often forgetting why you walked into a room��.��.��.��
If you feel emotionally flattened, lacking the energy to socialize or feel joy in the small things��.��.��.��
If you feel an inner void—like something is missing, but you aren’t sure what��.��.��.��

Then this book is for you.

Languishing—the state of mental weariness that erodes our self-esteem, motivation, and sense of meaning—can be easy to brush off as the new normal, especially since indifference is one of its symptoms. It’s not a synonym for depression and its attendant state of prolonged sadness. Languishers are more likely to feel out of control of their lives, uncertain about what they want from the future, and paralyzed when faced with decisions. Left unchecked, languishing not only impedes our daily functioning but is a gateway to serious mental illness and early mortality.

Emory University sociologist Corey Keyes has spent his career studying the causes and costs of languishing—the neglected middle child of mental health. Now Keyes has written the first definitive book on the subject, examining the subtle complexities of languishing before deftly diagnosing the larger forces behind its the false promises of the self-help industrial complex, a global moment of intense fear and loss, and a failing healthcare system focused on treating rather than preventing illness.

Ultimately, Keyes presents a groundbreaking approach to breaking the cycles keeping us stuck and finding a path to true flourishing. Unlike self-improvement systems offering quick-fix mood boosts, his framework focuses on functioning taking simple but powerful steps to hold our emotions loosely, becoming more accepting of ourselves and others, and carving out daily moments for the activities that create cycles of meaning, connection, and personal growth.

Languishing is a must-read for anyone tempted to downplay feelings of demotivation and emptiness as they struggle to haul themselves through the day, and for those eager to build a higher tolerance for adversity and the pressures of modern life. We can expand our vocabulary—and, with it, our potential to flourish.]]> 304 Corey Keyes 0593444620 Jeff 3 3.59 2024
author: Corey Keyes
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/27
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 195791689 From the National Book Award–longlisted author of The Need comes an extraordinary novel about a wife and mother who—after losing her job to AI—undergoes a procedure that renders her undetectable to surveillance…but at what cost?

In a city addled by climate change and populated by intelligent robots called “hums,�� May loses her job to artificial intelligence. In a desperate bid to resolve her family’s debt and secure their future for another few months, she becomes a guinea pig in an experiment that alters her face so it cannot be recognized by surveillance.

Seeking some reprieve from her recent hardships and from her family’s addiction to their devices, she splurges on passes that allow them three nights�� respite inside the Botanical Garden: a rare green refuge where forests, streams, and animals flourish. But her insistence that her son, daughter, and husband leave their devices at home proves far more fraught than she anticipated, and the lush beauty of the Botanical Garden is not the balm she hoped it would be. When her children come under threat, May is forced to put her trust in a hum of uncertain motives as she works to restore the life of her family.

Written in taut, urgent prose, Hum is a work of speculative fiction that unflinchingly explores marriage, motherhood, and selfhood in a world compromised by global warming and dizzying technological advancement, a world of both dystopian and utopian possibilities. As New York Times bestselling author Jeff VanderMeer says, “Helen Phillips, in typical bravura fashion, has found a way to make visible uncomfortable truths about our present by interrogating the near-future.”]]> 262 Helen Phillips 1668008831 Jeff 4
A near future with climate change, mass surveillance, and a lack of jobs forces one young Mom to alter her face to get ahead. She now can avoid facial recognition, but this seemingly mundane process causes havoc in her life. She pays for a great vacation for her family at the Botanical Gardens. However, even that leads to her face being actually recognized in the worst way.

One of the most stressful aspects of this story was the robots (known as hums) constantly trying to sell something. It's a sharp contrast to the hardscrabble life of the main characters to feel the relief of buying whatever they are selling, even if what they are selling is hollow.

I enjoyed the ending with Hum comforting the family. The story was stressful, and this ending was a reminder of what is important. ]]> 3.49 2024
author: Helen Phillips
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/01
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:
“The thing is, May,�� the hum said, “the goal of advertising is to rip a hole in your heart so it can then fill that hole with plastic, or with any other materials that can be yanked out of the earth and, after brief sojourns as objects of desire, be converted to waste.��

A near future with climate change, mass surveillance, and a lack of jobs forces one young Mom to alter her face to get ahead. She now can avoid facial recognition, but this seemingly mundane process causes havoc in her life. She pays for a great vacation for her family at the Botanical Gardens. However, even that leads to her face being actually recognized in the worst way.

One of the most stressful aspects of this story was the robots (known as hums) constantly trying to sell something. It's a sharp contrast to the hardscrabble life of the main characters to feel the relief of buying whatever they are selling, even if what they are selling is hollow.

I enjoyed the ending with Hum comforting the family. The story was stressful, and this ending was a reminder of what is important.
]]> 208580653 From the award-winning novelist of The Parisian and Enter Ghost comes an outstanding essay on the Palestinian struggle and the power of narrative.

Isabella Hammad delivered the Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture at Columbia University nine days before October 7th, 2023. The text of Hammad’s seminal speech and her afterword, written in the early weeks of 2024, together make up a searing appraisal of the war on Palestine during what seems a turning point in the narrative of human history. Profound and moving, Hammad writes from within the moment, giving voice to the Palestinian struggle for freedom. Recognizing the Stranger is a brilliant melding of literary and cultural analysis by one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and a foremost writer of fiction in the world today.

"Extraordinary and amazingly erudite. Hammad shows how art and especially literature can be much, much more revealing than political writing.�� �� Rashid Khalidi, author of the New York Times bestseller The Hundred Years�� War on Palestine]]> 96 Isabella Hammad 0802163920 Jeff 5
Favorite Passages:

Of course, the word recognition has another, very formal connotation in political discourse as a diplomatic or governmental action; states will recognize the sovereignty of another state or political entity, a political or legal claim, or a right to life, a right to have rights. Cultural recognition of difference can form the basis of just societies, but recognition that remains solely that--a form of acknowledgment without economic and political redistribution-is an act of language that leaves out the plot of history, where a word tries to stand in for material reparations through the smoke and mirrors of discourse and ceremony.

Rather than recognizing the stranger as familiar, and bringing a story to its close, Said asks us to recognize the familiar as stranger. He gestures at a way to dismantle the consoling fictions of fixed identity, which make it easier to herd into groups. This might be easier said than done, but it's provocative--it points out how many narratives of self, when applied to a nation-state, might one day harden into self-centered intolerance. Narrative shape can comfort and guide our efforts, but we must eventually be ready to shape-shift to be decentered, when the light of an other appears on the horizon in the project of human freedom, which remains undone.


What in fiction is enjoyable and beautiful is often terrifying in real life. In real life, shifts in collective understanding are necessary for major changes to occur, but on the human, individual scale, they are humbling and existentially disturbing. Such shifts also do not usually come without a fight: not everyone can be unpersuaded of their worldview through argument and appeal, or through narrative... emotion and understanding are not the same as action, but you might say that understanding is necessary for someone to act.]]> 4.68 2024
author: Isabella Hammad
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.68
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/03
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:
An analysis of the Palestinian crisis through literary criticism. Certain points reflect on the lack of humanity, to fellow human beings. A literary epiphany in fiction is a revelation but in real life, creates a fissure in one's beliefs, which is much harder to change. What would it take to change one's perspective, recognizing the stranger as a mirror to one's self. There remains a refusal to look. The end of this lecture is chilling as it is published just as the retribution of the October 7 attacks begin. She sees the initial horror, but has not idea of how bad it would become. This book along with a A Day In the Life of Abed Salam demonstrate the lack of humanity for the Palestinian people. One has to wonder what comes next.

Favorite Passages:

Of course, the word recognition has another, very formal connotation in political discourse as a diplomatic or governmental action; states will recognize the sovereignty of another state or political entity, a political or legal claim, or a right to life, a right to have rights. Cultural recognition of difference can form the basis of just societies, but recognition that remains solely that--a form of acknowledgment without economic and political redistribution-is an act of language that leaves out the plot of history, where a word tries to stand in for material reparations through the smoke and mirrors of discourse and ceremony.

Rather than recognizing the stranger as familiar, and bringing a story to its close, Said asks us to recognize the familiar as stranger. He gestures at a way to dismantle the consoling fictions of fixed identity, which make it easier to herd into groups. This might be easier said than done, but it's provocative--it points out how many narratives of self, when applied to a nation-state, might one day harden into self-centered intolerance. Narrative shape can comfort and guide our efforts, but we must eventually be ready to shape-shift to be decentered, when the light of an other appears on the horizon in the project of human freedom, which remains undone.


What in fiction is enjoyable and beautiful is often terrifying in real life. In real life, shifts in collective understanding are necessary for major changes to occur, but on the human, individual scale, they are humbling and existentially disturbing. Such shifts also do not usually come without a fight: not everyone can be unpersuaded of their worldview through argument and appeal, or through narrative... emotion and understanding are not the same as action, but you might say that understanding is necessary for someone to act.
]]> 201562253 Award-winning author Willy Vlautin explores loneliness, art, regret, and hard-won empathy in this poignant novel—his most personal to date—that captures the life of a journeyman musician unable to escape the tragedies of his past.

Al Ward lives on an isolated mining claim in the high desert of central Nevada fifty miles from the nearest town. A grizzled man in his sixties, he survives on canned soup, instant coffee, and memories of his ex-wife, friends and family he’s lost, and his life as a touring musician. Hampered by insomnia, bouts of anxiety, and a chronic lethargy that keeps him from moving back to town, Al finds himself teetering on the edge of madness and running out of reasons to go on—until a horse arrives on his nameless, blind, and utterly helpless.

Al hopes the horse will vanish as mysteriously as he appeared. Yet the animal remains, leaving him in a conundrum. Is the animal real, or a phantom conjured from imagination? As Al contemplates the horse’s existence—and what, if anything, he can do—his thoughts are interspersed with memories, from the moment his mother’s part-time boyfriend gifts him a 1959 butterscotch blonde Telecaster, to the day his travels begin. He joins various bands—all who perform his songs once they discover his talent–playing casinos, truck stops, clubs, and bars. He falls in love, and finds pockets of companionship and minor success along the way. Never close to stardom or financial success, he continues as a journeyman for decades until alcoholism and a heartbreaking tragedy lead him to the solitude of the barren Nevada desert.

A poignant meditation on addiction, heartbreak, and the reality of life on the road in smalltime bands, The Horse is a beautiful, haunting tale from an author working at the height of his powers.]]> 204 Willy Vlautin 0063346605 Jeff 5
Al Ward lives in an old abandoned mining camp. He lives on instant coffee and Campbell soup, seemingly counting out his last days. One day, a horse wanders into his camp. It turns out that the horse is blind. Al wonders if he is hallucinating the horse, but eventually, he has to decide how to save it. Meanwhile, he reminisces on his life. He is a creative songwriter and guitar player for various country casino bands across Northern Nevada.

I always love Willy Vlaugtin. He captures a bit of Nevada history that's beneath the margins. As coins get replaced by housing and communities gentrify, he remembers the gritty Nevada—the one people would like to forget but is part of the heart and soul of the state.

Favorite Passages:

There's a guy, I can't remember who, but he said that when you write a good tune and you know it's good, and you haven't played it for anyone, it's like holding hope in your pocket. And the hope has a heart that's beating and it rushes through you and all around you. For a moment you're proud of yourself because you have this little bit of gold that no one's heard and you're the only guy in the world that knows it or feels it or knows how good the tune is. That's the best feeling."

She told me that all the sad and ruined people were living on one side of the street. And they were all okay there, they were all free from themselves, free from their pain and heartache.

You just have to wake up and then you can disappear to see it. You’ll be safe there. I swear you will be. Because it’s the only way for people like us. People not tough enough to live in this world. Wake up Al please if you wake up I’ll forgive you. If you wake up I’ll love you again please Al wake up for the horse. Because the horse has never been given a chance. The horse has always been pushed around and pushed aside his whole life he’s been nothing but an afterthought.

We’ll escape. Some people get to escape, and we’ll be those people.

At least you saved a horse, Al. That's something. If you were dead, if you weren't alive, you wouldn't have saved him. He'd still be there freezing his ass off, trying not to get attacked by coyotes. And who knows, maybe at one time he was a great horse. Maybe at one time he was a cutting horse as good as Smart Little Lena or as fast as Dash for Cash. You just don't know who somebody is. So to me, if all you ever did in your whole life was walk thirty miles to save an old horse, well, shit, that's something, ain't it? That says something. Most people wouldn't cross the street to do something decent, and you walked thirty miles in the snow, and you're a drunk, lazy musician." ,

It’s a dark world if you open your eyes at all..]]> 4.25 2024
author: Willy Vlautin
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/06
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:
"And who knows, maybe at one time he was a great horse. Maybe at one time he was a cutting horse as good as Smart Little Lena or as fast as Dash for Cash. You just don't know who somebody is. So to me, if all you ever did in your whole life was walk thirty miles to save an old horse, well, shit, that's something, ain't it?"

Al Ward lives in an old abandoned mining camp. He lives on instant coffee and Campbell soup, seemingly counting out his last days. One day, a horse wanders into his camp. It turns out that the horse is blind. Al wonders if he is hallucinating the horse, but eventually, he has to decide how to save it. Meanwhile, he reminisces on his life. He is a creative songwriter and guitar player for various country casino bands across Northern Nevada.

I always love Willy Vlaugtin. He captures a bit of Nevada history that's beneath the margins. As coins get replaced by housing and communities gentrify, he remembers the gritty Nevada—the one people would like to forget but is part of the heart and soul of the state.

Favorite Passages:

There's a guy, I can't remember who, but he said that when you write a good tune and you know it's good, and you haven't played it for anyone, it's like holding hope in your pocket. And the hope has a heart that's beating and it rushes through you and all around you. For a moment you're proud of yourself because you have this little bit of gold that no one's heard and you're the only guy in the world that knows it or feels it or knows how good the tune is. That's the best feeling."

She told me that all the sad and ruined people were living on one side of the street. And they were all okay there, they were all free from themselves, free from their pain and heartache.

You just have to wake up and then you can disappear to see it. You’ll be safe there. I swear you will be. Because it’s the only way for people like us. People not tough enough to live in this world. Wake up Al please if you wake up I’ll forgive you. If you wake up I’ll love you again please Al wake up for the horse. Because the horse has never been given a chance. The horse has always been pushed around and pushed aside his whole life he’s been nothing but an afterthought.

We’ll escape. Some people get to escape, and we’ll be those people.

At least you saved a horse, Al. That's something. If you were dead, if you weren't alive, you wouldn't have saved him. He'd still be there freezing his ass off, trying not to get attacked by coyotes. And who knows, maybe at one time he was a great horse. Maybe at one time he was a cutting horse as good as Smart Little Lena or as fast as Dash for Cash. You just don't know who somebody is. So to me, if all you ever did in your whole life was walk thirty miles to save an old horse, well, shit, that's something, ain't it? That says something. Most people wouldn't cross the street to do something decent, and you walked thirty miles in the snow, and you're a drunk, lazy musician." ,

It’s a dark world if you open your eyes at all..
]]> 40597810 Everyone knows DAISY JONES & THE SIX, but nobody knows the reason behind their split at the absolute height of their popularity . . . until now.

Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A. in the late sixties, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it’s the rock ’n�� roll she loves most. By the time she’s twenty, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things.

Also getting noticed is The Six, a band led by the brooding Billy Dunne. On the eve of their first tour, his girlfriend Camila finds out she’s pregnant, and with the pressure of impending fatherhood and fame, Billy goes a little wild on the road.

Daisy and Billy cross paths when a producer realizes that the key to supercharged success is to put the two together. What happens next will become the stuff of legend.

The making of that legend is chronicled in this riveting and unforgettable novel, written as an oral history of one of the biggest bands of the seventies. Taylor Jenkins Reid is a talented writer who takes her work to a new level with Daisy Jones & The Six, brilliantly capturing a place and time in an utterly distinctive voice.]]> 368 Taylor Jenkins Reid 1524798622 Jeff 4
"..you have to have one person..who you know will always tell you the truth."

Told by members of the band The Six, Daisy Jones, as well as friends and associates, we learn about this epic small moment where Daisy Jones and the Six were on top of the world. It isn't always what it is cracked up to be. The Six finally make it big, which leads to their lead guitarist and singer to binge out on drugs and sex, leaving his new wife to delivery their baby by herself. Bandmates couple up, leading to their own problems. Then there is Daisy Jones, confident in her abilities and a star thrown into the mix. It all leads to one of the successful rock stories of the 70s, and then it was over.


I feel that this book led to a resurgence in interest in Fleetwood Mac. A retelling of the rocking 70s through a pseudo Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Nicks. I would recommend listening to the audiobook as they have several different actors telling their parts. It is very much VH1 Behind the Music and I loved that aspect. ]]> 4.20 2019
author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/08
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:
"You have these lines you won't cross. But then you cross them. And suddently you possess the very dangerous information that you can break the rule and the world won't instantly come to an end. You've taken a big, black, bold line and you 've made it a little bit gray. And now every time you cross it again, it just gets grayer until one day you look around and you think, There was a line here once, I think.."

"..you have to have one person..who you know will always tell you the truth."

Told by members of the band The Six, Daisy Jones, as well as friends and associates, we learn about this epic small moment where Daisy Jones and the Six were on top of the world. It isn't always what it is cracked up to be. The Six finally make it big, which leads to their lead guitarist and singer to binge out on drugs and sex, leaving his new wife to delivery their baby by herself. Bandmates couple up, leading to their own problems. Then there is Daisy Jones, confident in her abilities and a star thrown into the mix. It all leads to one of the successful rock stories of the 70s, and then it was over.


I feel that this book led to a resurgence in interest in Fleetwood Mac. A retelling of the rocking 70s through a pseudo Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Nicks. I would recommend listening to the audiobook as they have several different actors telling their parts. It is very much VH1 Behind the Music and I loved that aspect.
]]> 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

Brimming with nuanced humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim's agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first-century American literature.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett Jeff 5
The story begins the same, but we see Jim's perspective. When Huckleberry Finn is thought to have been killed by Jim, they must escape. In their hiding spot, Jim is bitten by a snake and has hallucinations of famous thinkers who would inspire the country's Founding Fathers to create a "free society." This technique runs throughout the story, where Jim has arguments with Voltaire and other European thinkers who spoke on man's right to freedom. He asks about the nature of freedom and equality and why he is not included in that discussion.

When Huckleberry Finn and Jim are separated, we follow Jim, and Everett has the opportunity to open up the narrative about Jim and other enslaved Black men and women. We see some in terrible conditions and others all too happy to work with their masters against their own people. We see horrors where an enslaved man is whipped and lynched over a missing pencil. When they return home, Jim get's revenge in a satisfying way.


Favorite Passages:

“How strange a world, how strange an existence, that one’s equal must argue for one’s equality, that one’s equal must hold a station that allows airing of that argument, that one cannot make that argument for oneself, that premises of said argument must be vetted by those equals who do not agree.��

“Then I thought, How could he know that I was actually reading? I could simply claim to be staring dumbly at the letters and words, wondering what in the world they meant. How could he know? At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn’t even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them. It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive.��

“A pencil.��
An ice-cold spear hit the back of my stomach. “A what?��
“A pencil. Can you believe that? A slave was accused of stealing a damn pencil and they hanged him dead for it. They didn’t even find the pencil on him. What’s a slave need a pencil for? Can you believe that?��
“It’s hard to believe, all right.�� I could feel the pencil in my pocket. I was taken then by the fact that I thought of it as the pencil and not my pencil.
“It’s a horrible world. White people try to tell us that everything will be just fine when we go to heaven. My question is, Will they be there? If so, I might make other arrangements.�� Easter laughed.��

“It’s actually a simple question, Hopkins. Which would frighten you more? A slave who is crazy or a slave who is sane and sees you clearly?��

“Nigger, you are in more trouble than you can imagine,�� he said.
“Why on Earth would you think that I can’t imagine the trouble I’m in? After you’ve tortured me and eviscerated me and emasculated me and left me to burn slowly to death, is there something else you’ll do to me? Tell me, Judge Thatcher, what is there that I can’t imagine?��
He squirmed in the chair.
“Could you have imagined a black man, a slave, a nigger, talking to you like this? Who’s lacking in imagination?”]]> 4.47 2024
author: Percival Everett
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/15
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:
Percival Everett is the master of satire. Coming off his Academy Award-winning rendition of his 20-year-old book Erasure, he turns his attention to the retelling of Huckleberry Finn. This version is told by Jim. The secret Jim carries along with other enslaved people is their manner of speech is just to fool the White people. When they are not around, they speak like anyone else, but when a White person enters, they use what they refer to as the slave vernacular. It is this secret, and the fact that the Black men and women featured in Twain's work had an inner life, opinions, as well as hopes and dreams, that drive the narrative. While Twain's work acknowledges there is slavery, we go through a good portion of the book without seeing the horrors of that. Everett seeks to rectify that.

The story begins the same, but we see Jim's perspective. When Huckleberry Finn is thought to have been killed by Jim, they must escape. In their hiding spot, Jim is bitten by a snake and has hallucinations of famous thinkers who would inspire the country's Founding Fathers to create a "free society." This technique runs throughout the story, where Jim has arguments with Voltaire and other European thinkers who spoke on man's right to freedom. He asks about the nature of freedom and equality and why he is not included in that discussion.

When Huckleberry Finn and Jim are separated, we follow Jim, and Everett has the opportunity to open up the narrative about Jim and other enslaved Black men and women. We see some in terrible conditions and others all too happy to work with their masters against their own people. We see horrors where an enslaved man is whipped and lynched over a missing pencil. When they return home, Jim get's revenge in a satisfying way.


Favorite Passages:

“How strange a world, how strange an existence, that one’s equal must argue for one’s equality, that one’s equal must hold a station that allows airing of that argument, that one cannot make that argument for oneself, that premises of said argument must be vetted by those equals who do not agree.��

“Then I thought, How could he know that I was actually reading? I could simply claim to be staring dumbly at the letters and words, wondering what in the world they meant. How could he know? At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn’t even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them. It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive.��

“A pencil.��
An ice-cold spear hit the back of my stomach. “A what?��
“A pencil. Can you believe that? A slave was accused of stealing a damn pencil and they hanged him dead for it. They didn’t even find the pencil on him. What’s a slave need a pencil for? Can you believe that?��
“It’s hard to believe, all right.�� I could feel the pencil in my pocket. I was taken then by the fact that I thought of it as the pencil and not my pencil.
“It’s a horrible world. White people try to tell us that everything will be just fine when we go to heaven. My question is, Will they be there? If so, I might make other arrangements.�� Easter laughed.��

“It’s actually a simple question, Hopkins. Which would frighten you more? A slave who is crazy or a slave who is sane and sees you clearly?��

“Nigger, you are in more trouble than you can imagine,�� he said.
“Why on Earth would you think that I can’t imagine the trouble I’m in? After you’ve tortured me and eviscerated me and emasculated me and left me to burn slowly to death, is there something else you’ll do to me? Tell me, Judge Thatcher, what is there that I can’t imagine?��
He squirmed in the chair.
“Could you have imagined a black man, a slave, a nigger, talking to you like this? Who’s lacking in imagination?��
]]> 50489291
The first full-length biography of the Nobel laureate to appear in a quarter century, Mad at the World illuminates what has made the work of John Steinbeck an enduring part of the literary canon: his capacity for empathy. Pulitzer Prize finalist William Souder explores Steinbeck’s long apprenticeship as a writer struggling through the depths of the Great Depression, and his rise to greatness with masterpieces such as The Red Pony, Of Mice and Men, and The Grapes of Wrath. Angered by the plight of the Dust Bowl migrants who were starving even as they toiled to harvest California’s limitless bounty, fascinated by the guileless decency of the downtrodden denizens of Cannery Row, and appalled by the country’s refusal to recognize the humanity common to all of its citizens, Steinbeck took a stand against social injustice—paradoxically given his inherent misanthropy—setting him apart from the writers of the so-called "lost generation."

A man by turns quick-tempered, compassionate, and ultimately brilliant, Steinbeck could be a difficult person to like. Obsessed with privacy, he was mistrustful of people. Next to writing, his favorite things were drinking and womanizing and getting married, which he did three times. And while he claimed indifference about success, his mid-career books and movie deals made him a lot of money—which passed through his hands as quickly as it came in. And yet Steinbeck also took aim at the corrosiveness of power, the perils of income inequality, and the urgency of ecological collapse, all of which drive public debate to this day.

Steinbeck remains our great social realist novelist, the writer who gave the dispossessed and the disenfranchised a voice in American life and letters. Eloquent, nuanced, and deeply researched, Mad at the World captures the full measure of the man and his work.]]> 464 William Souder 0393292266 Jeff 4 4.07 2020
author: William Souder
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/16
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 9519897 112 Fyodor Dostoevsky 1453838430 Jeff 5 3.84 1864
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1864
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/18
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 50269327
Now Natsuki is grown. She lives a quiet life with her asexual husband, surviving as best she can by pretending to be normal. But the demands of Natsuki's family are increasing, her friends wonder why she's still not pregnant, and dark shadows from Natsuki's childhood are pursuing her. Fleeing the suburbs for the mountains of her childhood, Natsuki prepares herself with a reunion with Yuu. Will he still remember their promise? And will he help her keep it?]]> 247 Sayaka Murata 1783785675 Jeff 3
A young girl believes she is an alien from a different planet. Observing Earthling's strange rituals. She has sex with her cousin when they are both underage, leading to both of them being ostracized and separated. She would have no freedom until she was in her 20s. Now married, she moves back to town and sees her cousin again. What was thought to be a story about a reminiscence becomes dark and disturbing.

The beginning of the story is closed to Convenience Store Woman. It is a commentary on how one's life can be predetermined and how one must assume one's role in society (in the factory, holding a job, having a family, etc.). The ending is close to Life Ceremony in its grotesque actions. ]]> 3.59 2018
author: Sayaka Murata
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/23
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:
I am a big fan of Murata and her weird stories. Convenience Store Woman is the tip of the iceberg of her twisted imagination. A woman who is born to be part of the "factory." I also enjoyed Life Ceremony, where she delves into her strangeness, but she makes the point that the reader wonders if the characters are bizarre or we are. In this story, it feels like a meditative commentary on rituals and morals and ends on something far darker.

A young girl believes she is an alien from a different planet. Observing Earthling's strange rituals. She has sex with her cousin when they are both underage, leading to both of them being ostracized and separated. She would have no freedom until she was in her 20s. Now married, she moves back to town and sees her cousin again. What was thought to be a story about a reminiscence becomes dark and disturbing.

The beginning of the story is closed to Convenience Store Woman. It is a commentary on how one's life can be predetermined and how one must assume one's role in society (in the factory, holding a job, having a family, etc.). The ending is close to Life Ceremony in its grotesque actions.
]]> 199392376 What does it mean to be human in a world where technology is quickly catching up to biology?

In a near-future world, a new technological therapy is quickly eradicating cancer: The body’s cells are entirely replaced with nanites—robot or android cells that not only cure those afflicted but leave them virtually immortal. At the same time, literary researcher Yonghun teaches an AI how to understand poetry and creates a living, thinking machine he names Panit, meaning "Beloved," in honor of his husband. When Dr. Beeko, who holds the patent to the nano-therapy technology, learns of Panit, he transfers its consciousness into an android body, giving it freedom and life. As Yonghun, Panit, and other nano humans thrive—and begin to replicate—their development will lead them to a crossroads and a choice with existential consequences.]]> 256 Anton Hur 0063344483 Jeff 5
Toward Eternity is a fascinating study of human nature. It becomes a question of what makes us human, even if we are reincarnated as something else. What is the true self?

A new experience allows people to be reincarnated using nanobots. Their personalities and attributes carry over, but are they truly the same person? What are the ramifications of this new technology? Patient Zero shows promise but seems different from the person who was created. A new version of a different patient forgets the notes for her instrument, and does she see doppelgangers? The story gets more complex as it progresses as inevitable; this experiment goes from something to help individuals to something that will help governments and, inevitably, the military. The story turns full circle, and it is quite a journey.

A story that goes from poetry to horror and back to poetry. It spans the scope of human existence. It draws on many science fiction authors such as Phillip K Dick, Asimov, Clark, and others. I picked this up since he is Bora Chung's translator. I read Your Utopia earlier this year and loved it. It was both parts dark and imaginative. It's a journey, and everyone should read it while considering the accelerating developments of artificial intelligence. Can the beauty of humanity be copied?

Favorite Passages:

“It’s also the sound of the names themselves; like a different language, they are, and yet they’re not. Which is what every word, every language sounds like. They almost mean something, and they do, and yet they don’t.

I’m no linguist or literary scholar, but as a scientist, I know something about naming things. I know how misleading naming can be, I know how it can lead to failure, and I know how absolutely necessary it is. Language contains our knowledge and at the same time fails to contain it. All it really contains is our performance of control. And yet, we persist. We write in our lab reports, we assign numbers and agree on degrees of significance, we describe our attitudes toward something by giving it a name. Awe, disgust, fear, they’re all in there. They’re all in the names we give things. Sometimes, I think that’s all scientists do: give names to things. Things we can see, things we can only deduce, things we wish existed. Are scientists the poets of the natural world? Or are poets scientists of the imagined world? Names as long as poems, names as long as scientific papers, both written in that stuff of names that we call language. We both name, we pass on these names, then we die. My breath caught in my throat.��

Nothing so pure deserves the hell of immortality.

“I see him as he is. I also see him as he was, him in all the ages that I knew him, from young man to old. He will always be young to me. His is the face that I am more familiar with than my own. Age cannot mar it, disease cannot ruin it. A face that is the very landscape of my happiness, my joy. I love even his frailness, what the years have made of him, and this love astonishes me. So close to the end, I thought I would be prepared for it. I thought our love would have faded. It is all there still, in his face. There is no radical nanotherapy that can replace that love.��


“Music is as eternal as the universe, it is part of its very fabric, and a musician is only picking at a small corner of the universe, a tiny dot in it, when they turn air and time into sound. A musician’s task is not to create sound from nothingness; a true musician understands that music is the primordial state of the universe, the very first world, and silence is a cloak imposed upon this state, and a musician’s job is to create a tear in that cloak to let out the music underneath. We do not create music, we draw it out from underneath the silence. I draw it out from my cello, my tear in the cloak.��

“Once they have our memories, our language, our music, they can do whatever they want with us. They don’t need us anymore.��

“Twenty minutes passed as my thoughts and new emotions coalesced into a manageable equilibrium. This new body was like a drug. It enhanced some kinds of thought and dulled others. I could not do calculations like I used to, but I kept feeling new, subtle textures to my thoughts that shifted my thinking into strange directions and associations. Later on, I recognized these textures as emotions. It was the longest twenty minutes I had ever lived, half a lifetime in 1,200 seconds.”]]> 3.82 2024
author: Anton Hur
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/23
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:
" Nothing so pure deserves the hell of immortality."

Toward Eternity is a fascinating study of human nature. It becomes a question of what makes us human, even if we are reincarnated as something else. What is the true self?

A new experience allows people to be reincarnated using nanobots. Their personalities and attributes carry over, but are they truly the same person? What are the ramifications of this new technology? Patient Zero shows promise but seems different from the person who was created. A new version of a different patient forgets the notes for her instrument, and does she see doppelgangers? The story gets more complex as it progresses as inevitable; this experiment goes from something to help individuals to something that will help governments and, inevitably, the military. The story turns full circle, and it is quite a journey.

A story that goes from poetry to horror and back to poetry. It spans the scope of human existence. It draws on many science fiction authors such as Phillip K Dick, Asimov, Clark, and others. I picked this up since he is Bora Chung's translator. I read Your Utopia earlier this year and loved it. It was both parts dark and imaginative. It's a journey, and everyone should read it while considering the accelerating developments of artificial intelligence. Can the beauty of humanity be copied?

Favorite Passages:

“It’s also the sound of the names themselves; like a different language, they are, and yet they’re not. Which is what every word, every language sounds like. They almost mean something, and they do, and yet they don’t.

I’m no linguist or literary scholar, but as a scientist, I know something about naming things. I know how misleading naming can be, I know how it can lead to failure, and I know how absolutely necessary it is. Language contains our knowledge and at the same time fails to contain it. All it really contains is our performance of control. And yet, we persist. We write in our lab reports, we assign numbers and agree on degrees of significance, we describe our attitudes toward something by giving it a name. Awe, disgust, fear, they’re all in there. They’re all in the names we give things. Sometimes, I think that’s all scientists do: give names to things. Things we can see, things we can only deduce, things we wish existed. Are scientists the poets of the natural world? Or are poets scientists of the imagined world? Names as long as poems, names as long as scientific papers, both written in that stuff of names that we call language. We both name, we pass on these names, then we die. My breath caught in my throat.��

Nothing so pure deserves the hell of immortality.

“I see him as he is. I also see him as he was, him in all the ages that I knew him, from young man to old. He will always be young to me. His is the face that I am more familiar with than my own. Age cannot mar it, disease cannot ruin it. A face that is the very landscape of my happiness, my joy. I love even his frailness, what the years have made of him, and this love astonishes me. So close to the end, I thought I would be prepared for it. I thought our love would have faded. It is all there still, in his face. There is no radical nanotherapy that can replace that love.��


“Music is as eternal as the universe, it is part of its very fabric, and a musician is only picking at a small corner of the universe, a tiny dot in it, when they turn air and time into sound. A musician’s task is not to create sound from nothingness; a true musician understands that music is the primordial state of the universe, the very first world, and silence is a cloak imposed upon this state, and a musician’s job is to create a tear in that cloak to let out the music underneath. We do not create music, we draw it out from underneath the silence. I draw it out from my cello, my tear in the cloak.��

“Once they have our memories, our language, our music, they can do whatever they want with us. They don’t need us anymore.��

“Twenty minutes passed as my thoughts and new emotions coalesced into a manageable equilibrium. This new body was like a drug. It enhanced some kinds of thought and dulled others. I could not do calculations like I used to, but I kept feeling new, subtle textures to my thoughts that shifted my thinking into strange directions and associations. Later on, I recognized these textures as emotions. It was the longest twenty minutes I had ever lived, half a lifetime in 1,200 seconds.��
]]> 195790688
Along with her husband, a ghostwriter for a famous thriller author returns to her mother's house in the Florida town where she grew up. As the summer heat sets in, she wrestles with family secrets and memories of her own troubled youth. Her mercurial sister, who lives next door, spends a growing amount of time using MIND’S EYE, a virtual reality device provided to citizens of the town by ELECTRA, a tech company in South Florida, during the doldrums of a recent pandemic. But it’s not just the ominous cats, her mother’s burgeoning cult, or the fact that her belly button has become an increasingly deep cavern―something is off in the town, and it probably has to do with the posters of missing citizens spread throughout the streets.

During a violent rainstorm, the writer’s sister goes missing for several days. When she returns, sprawled on their mother’s lawn and speaking of another dimension, the writer is forced to investigate not only what happened to her sister and the other missing people but also the uncanny connections between ELECTRA, the famous author, and reality itself.

A sticky, rain-soaked reckoning with the elusive nature of storytelling, Laura van den Berg’s Florida Diary is an interlocking and page-turning whirlwind. With inimitable control and thrilling style, she reaches deep into the void and returns with a story far stranger than either reality or fiction.]]> 224 Laura van den Berg 037461220X Jeff 5
Florida is its own dimension. One always imagines the stories of "Florida Man" and Bugs Bunny cutting the state off from the rest of the content. Laura van de Berg has mixed feelings about this altered state. She works through some of it in this work of fiction.

After surviving a pandemic, a ghost writer, her husband, her Mom, and sister are left to navigate a new reality. In this world where virtual reality is on the rise, her sister becomes increasingly lost within it. When she disappears, the hunt for her uncovers more than what the author had bargained for. This is a story that delves deep into the themes of isolation and the allure of virtual reality, making us question the true nature of our reality.

Snippets of Florida's surreal life, the mystery of the organization the author ghostwriters for, as well as the company that makes the VR headsets all swirl in this surreal story of a possible terrible future. It's fun, thought-provoking, and short.

Favorite Passages:

Sometimes we are called back to the things we most want to flee, perhaps because they left such a mark that we don’t know how to leave them behind.

That old world still exists, is what I mean. Distant, but not forgotten. No, no. We will never forget all those good times. Now that world is like an old friend who comes to visit on occasion, but who can never stay for too long. ]]> 3.41 2024
author: Laura van den Berg
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.41
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/29
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:
"The problem, I have decided, with people who never leave home is that they are never forced to become someone else."

Florida is its own dimension. One always imagines the stories of "Florida Man" and Bugs Bunny cutting the state off from the rest of the content. Laura van de Berg has mixed feelings about this altered state. She works through some of it in this work of fiction.

After surviving a pandemic, a ghost writer, her husband, her Mom, and sister are left to navigate a new reality. In this world where virtual reality is on the rise, her sister becomes increasingly lost within it. When she disappears, the hunt for her uncovers more than what the author had bargained for. This is a story that delves deep into the themes of isolation and the allure of virtual reality, making us question the true nature of our reality.

Snippets of Florida's surreal life, the mystery of the organization the author ghostwriters for, as well as the company that makes the VR headsets all swirl in this surreal story of a possible terrible future. It's fun, thought-provoking, and short.

Favorite Passages:

Sometimes we are called back to the things we most want to flee, perhaps because they left such a mark that we don’t know how to leave them behind.

That old world still exists, is what I mean. Distant, but not forgotten. No, no. We will never forget all those good times. Now that world is like an old friend who comes to visit on occasion, but who can never stay for too long.
]]> 60784729 From one of our fiercest stylists, a roaring epic chronicling the life, times, and secrets of a notorious artist.

When X—an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter—falls dead in her office, her widow, wild with grief and refusing everyone’s good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM, her wife, knew where X had been born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, as it is finally, in the present day, forced into an uneasy reunification.

A masterfully constructed literary adventure complete with original images assembled by X’s widow, Biography of X follows a grieving wife seeking to understand the woman who enthralled her. CM traces X’s peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America's divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from Bowie and Waits to Sontag and Acker. And when she finally understands the scope of X’s defining artistic project, CM realizes her wife’s deceptions were far crueler than she imagined.

Pulsing with suspense and intellect while blending nonfiction and fiction, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey, one of our most acclaimed literary innovators, pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in her tantalizing mystery, shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.]]> 416 Catherine Lacey Jeff 4
A biography within this fiction book, C. M. Luca, the author and wife, sets up to find the true story of X. Whether this act is out of love, grief, or her own need to know is irrelevant. She finds X's true birthplace in the South (or Southern Territory), a timeline where the South succeeded again after World War II and created a Christofascist state.) She finds Xs real name and that she escaped by faking her own death. This is just the beginning of her crisscrossing the territories and around the world. Each place had a different identity and a different art movement. She's a writer, an actor, and a painter; the changing identities become art in and of itself. Finally, going by X, she claims that one's entire identity is drag. Ultimately, is the wife unknowingly part of the act? Or is the final act one of love?

A fun journey through contemporary art movements with some creative license for a more feminist world.

Favorite Passages:
Grief has a warring logic; it always wants something impossible, something worse and something better.

The title of this book—as titles so often are—is a lie. This is not a biography, but rather a wrong turn taken and followed, the document of a woman learning what she should have let lie in ignorance. Perhaps that’s what all books are, the end of someone’s trouble, someone putting their trouble into a pleasing order so that someone else will look at it.

“The circumstance of someone’s birth should have no bearing on their life, and any insistence on the importance of those accidental facts is violence, ignorance. A person can be understood only through the life they choose, the people they choose, the things they do, and not the things that are done to them.*��

The photo develops. And this is what life is, little Waldo Emerson, little Charlie, darling. You put people in situations and their personality develops. Their little freaky heads.

This is one of the darker, less contested realities of authoritarian governments—that the human animal is a meek thing, easily manipulated. No one wants to admit that they, too, might live quite happily in a simulation, in a simulacrum of life. No one wants to believe that they are, at heart, more interested in comfort than in truth.

“How close I felt to him, close against my will. Despite every trouble she caused me, and despite all the falsehoods I was left to untangle, and despite the rage I sometimes feel these days toward her, I wanted then and still want now to be singular in X’s life. Was that all this was? An attempt to prove myself to be irreplaceable, the victor, the most crucial and true love in her life? I didn’t know that trying to prove this fantasy would so certainly undo it.��

That’s a real story, Gioia said. A real story from a real life. It’s never a kidnapping, a deathbed confession. It’s always much simpler—letters thrown out. That’s a real story.

]]> 3.83 2023
author: Catherine Lacey
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/06/12
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:
Author Catherine Lacey made a name for herself with the breakout hit No One Is Ever Missing, which would become a New Yorker's Best Books of 2014. Her new fiction book, Biography of X, chronicles the mysterious life of X. An Author, An artist, and a creator who mesmerized the American public for 25 years until her death. When a biography is written about her life, X's wife finds it flat and sets out to write her own biography. However, she finds the ever-elusive X is a mystery even to herself.

A biography within this fiction book, C. M. Luca, the author and wife, sets up to find the true story of X. Whether this act is out of love, grief, or her own need to know is irrelevant. She finds X's true birthplace in the South (or Southern Territory), a timeline where the South succeeded again after World War II and created a Christofascist state.) She finds Xs real name and that she escaped by faking her own death. This is just the beginning of her crisscrossing the territories and around the world. Each place had a different identity and a different art movement. She's a writer, an actor, and a painter; the changing identities become art in and of itself. Finally, going by X, she claims that one's entire identity is drag. Ultimately, is the wife unknowingly part of the act? Or is the final act one of love?

A fun journey through contemporary art movements with some creative license for a more feminist world.

Favorite Passages:
Grief has a warring logic; it always wants something impossible, something worse and something better.

The title of this book—as titles so often are—is a lie. This is not a biography, but rather a wrong turn taken and followed, the document of a woman learning what she should have let lie in ignorance. Perhaps that’s what all books are, the end of someone’s trouble, someone putting their trouble into a pleasing order so that someone else will look at it.

“The circumstance of someone’s birth should have no bearing on their life, and any insistence on the importance of those accidental facts is violence, ignorance. A person can be understood only through the life they choose, the people they choose, the things they do, and not the things that are done to them.*��

The photo develops. And this is what life is, little Waldo Emerson, little Charlie, darling. You put people in situations and their personality develops. Their little freaky heads.

This is one of the darker, less contested realities of authoritarian governments—that the human animal is a meek thing, easily manipulated. No one wants to admit that they, too, might live quite happily in a simulation, in a simulacrum of life. No one wants to believe that they are, at heart, more interested in comfort than in truth.

“How close I felt to him, close against my will. Despite every trouble she caused me, and despite all the falsehoods I was left to untangle, and despite the rage I sometimes feel these days toward her, I wanted then and still want now to be singular in X’s life. Was that all this was? An attempt to prove myself to be irreplaceable, the victor, the most crucial and true love in her life? I didn’t know that trying to prove this fantasy would so certainly undo it.��

That’s a real story, Gioia said. A real story from a real life. It’s never a kidnapping, a deathbed confession. It’s always much simpler—letters thrown out. That’s a real story.


]]> 62092265
In the shared and private spaces of Iowa City, a loose circle of lovers and friends encounter, confront, and provoke one another in a volatile year of self-discovery. At the group’s center are Ivan, a dancer turned aspiring banker who dabbles in amateur pornography; Fatima, whose independence and work ethic complicates her relationships with friends and a trusted mentor; and Noah, who “didn’t seek sex out so much as it came up to him like an anxious dog in need of affection.�� These three are buffeted by a cast of poets, artists, landlords, meat-packing workers, and mathematicians who populate the cafes, classrooms, and food-service kitchens of Iowa City, sometimes to violent and electrifying consequence. Finally, as each prepares for an uncertain future, the group heads to a cabin to bid goodbye to their former lives—a moment of reckoning that leaves each of them irrevocably altered.]]> 303 Brandon Taylor 0593332334 Jeff 5
They are poets, dancers, and townies, all struggling into the next phase of their lives. It is a novel, but broken up like short stories, we follow those characters through their relationships and what happens next.

I like this book focuses on the great uncertainties of life. College can be a dreamland with endless possibilities. As that dream comes to an end, panic sets in. A cold shower to awaken the senses of the dangers of life. Can I make a career out of this? Pursuit of passion, but will that lead to survival? Take the safe route, but is that a life of fulfillment? The landscape of Iowa can come off as Hellish as if they are all in limbo. Who will escape? Who will meet their fate?

I enjoyed the classic literary undertones of Taylor's work. Even the turn to Fatima at the end, like he's approaching his fate. It's another magnificent tale from a modern master.

Favorite Passages:

“It would have been easier for these poets to say that sometimes you lied and sometimes you were mistaken and sometimes the truth changed on you in the course of telling. That sometimes trauma reconfigured your relationship both to the truth and to the very apparatus of telling. But no, they went on signifying. Tethering their bad ideas to recognized names and hoping someone would call them smart, call them sharp, call them radical and right, call them a poet and a thinker and a mind, even if they were just children.��

Witness and legacy of violence and valid: such terms made poetry seminar feel less like a rigorous intellectual and creative exercise and more like a tribunal for war crimes. Seamus hated it very much—not because he believed that trauma was fake, but because he didn’t think it necessarily had anything to do with poetry.

Everyone was always so optimistic at first, when they arrived at the hospice. See, look at how beautiful it is. See, you will have a view of these trees. It’s hardly even like being on the East Side. Oh, look, there are ducks in the pond. There is a knitting circle every day. Once a month, a group of young children comes to read and do crafts. The busy politeness you offered the god of dying in order to pretend for a little while that you were simply on a brief respite from your life, that before long you would get to return. But soon that wore off. Some came out of it, joined the ongoing projects of hospice life: the garden, the compost, the deer, the bird-watching, the knitting, the crafts. And some did not. They sat by their windows and waited. And then they died.

Taking his bike across the bridge. The wind was stronger then, slicing up his face. He looked up. The stars, he thought, had been watching him his whole life. They’d seen the whole thing go on and on. Him and the rest of all the people who had ever lived and ever would.
It was like living in a museum exhibit or a dollhouse. It was so easy to imagine the hands of some enormous and indifferent God prying the house open and squinting at them as they went about their lives on their circuits like little automatons in an exhibit called The Late Americans. A God with a Gorgon’s head peering down in judgment.
What were you supposed to do in the face of that? Turn to stone? Fuck.
He mattered so little.

He had wanted to ask why it was that people found it so much easier to extend charity to the anonymous herd beasts of the field than to other people. Loving people was hard. It was difficult sometimes to believe that they were good. It was hard to know them. But that didn’t mean you could just go on without trying. What he believed was that love was more than just kindness and more than just giving people the things they wanted. Love was more than the parts of it that were easy and pleasurable. Sometimes love was trying to understand. Love was trying to get beyond what was hard. Love, love, love.

Fyodor still thought sometimes about the shooting in Alabama. There had been four other shootings across the South in the last month or so, each rising for a brief instant above the noise and clamor of the news, the whole country looking in one direction at one thing, burning a hole in the fabric of the culture. But then, the next day or the next, their thoughts turned back to the common demands of daily life. Everyone went back into the anonymous whir of things, safe inside their irrelevance.

Climbing the stairs at Noah’s party, his hand at Goran’s back, Ivan could see in the eyes of these young people, too, how desperately they wanted to be—and how desperately this hinged on being seen. That if no one witnessed you in the state of freedom, then you were not free. This seemed, to Ivan, really sad. He wanted to grip their shoulders and tell them to leave and to go and just be, just get the fuck out and do something with themselves. They still had time, they were so young. But what right did he have? He was not older than them. Not old enough to justify giving them orphic warnings from the shores of his second life. But he did know something about wanting to be finished with a part of your life before you were really ready, how you could trick yourself into thinking you knew so much when in fact you knew nothing at all. These dancers. High, glossed out of their minds, riding a wave of pleasure. They were so fucking alive. And they were dead already. And it broke his heart.

How to make his own feelings understood? How to say, I see you, I love you, I’m sorry? But sorry was just a cheap, dirty little word. It presupposed an orderly world. It presupposed that it was ever possible to make up for what had come before.

Perhaps what people misjudged for prodigious talent was really just unexpected competence.

He thought he could understand Bert a little now, seeing the fields and how close the sky stooped in the distance. He understood the peculiar loneliness of such a place, the way that loneliness held fast to you, no matter how far away you ran. You grow up in a place like this, Noah thought, and it haunts your dreams until you die.

“Money is like an animal, changeful and anxious, ready to flee or bite. There is never enough of it.��

Perhaps that is what you call it when you appeal to the world about something that has happened to you and the world answers back that it’s fine if you leave, as though you were nothing but an irritating child being sent on your way. ]]> 3.34 2023
author: Brandon Taylor
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/06/16
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:
Award-winning author Brandon Taylor returns with a new novel. Fresh off the success of Real Life and Filthy Animals, Taylor's book, The Late Americans, details the lives of students and residents of a small Iowa college town. Each struggling for their identity and future, they confront the illusions that make up their life to create solid ground.

They are poets, dancers, and townies, all struggling into the next phase of their lives. It is a novel, but broken up like short stories, we follow those characters through their relationships and what happens next.

I like this book focuses on the great uncertainties of life. College can be a dreamland with endless possibilities. As that dream comes to an end, panic sets in. A cold shower to awaken the senses of the dangers of life. Can I make a career out of this? Pursuit of passion, but will that lead to survival? Take the safe route, but is that a life of fulfillment? The landscape of Iowa can come off as Hellish as if they are all in limbo. Who will escape? Who will meet their fate?

I enjoyed the classic literary undertones of Taylor's work. Even the turn to Fatima at the end, like he's approaching his fate. It's another magnificent tale from a modern master.

Favorite Passages:

“It would have been easier for these poets to say that sometimes you lied and sometimes you were mistaken and sometimes the truth changed on you in the course of telling. That sometimes trauma reconfigured your relationship both to the truth and to the very apparatus of telling. But no, they went on signifying. Tethering their bad ideas to recognized names and hoping someone would call them smart, call them sharp, call them radical and right, call them a poet and a thinker and a mind, even if they were just children.��

Witness and legacy of violence and valid: such terms made poetry seminar feel less like a rigorous intellectual and creative exercise and more like a tribunal for war crimes. Seamus hated it very much—not because he believed that trauma was fake, but because he didn’t think it necessarily had anything to do with poetry.

Everyone was always so optimistic at first, when they arrived at the hospice. See, look at how beautiful it is. See, you will have a view of these trees. It’s hardly even like being on the East Side. Oh, look, there are ducks in the pond. There is a knitting circle every day. Once a month, a group of young children comes to read and do crafts. The busy politeness you offered the god of dying in order to pretend for a little while that you were simply on a brief respite from your life, that before long you would get to return. But soon that wore off. Some came out of it, joined the ongoing projects of hospice life: the garden, the compost, the deer, the bird-watching, the knitting, the crafts. And some did not. They sat by their windows and waited. And then they died.

Taking his bike across the bridge. The wind was stronger then, slicing up his face. He looked up. The stars, he thought, had been watching him his whole life. They’d seen the whole thing go on and on. Him and the rest of all the people who had ever lived and ever would.
It was like living in a museum exhibit or a dollhouse. It was so easy to imagine the hands of some enormous and indifferent God prying the house open and squinting at them as they went about their lives on their circuits like little automatons in an exhibit called The Late Americans. A God with a Gorgon’s head peering down in judgment.
What were you supposed to do in the face of that? Turn to stone? Fuck.
He mattered so little.

He had wanted to ask why it was that people found it so much easier to extend charity to the anonymous herd beasts of the field than to other people. Loving people was hard. It was difficult sometimes to believe that they were good. It was hard to know them. But that didn’t mean you could just go on without trying. What he believed was that love was more than just kindness and more than just giving people the things they wanted. Love was more than the parts of it that were easy and pleasurable. Sometimes love was trying to understand. Love was trying to get beyond what was hard. Love, love, love.

Fyodor still thought sometimes about the shooting in Alabama. There had been four other shootings across the South in the last month or so, each rising for a brief instant above the noise and clamor of the news, the whole country looking in one direction at one thing, burning a hole in the fabric of the culture. But then, the next day or the next, their thoughts turned back to the common demands of daily life. Everyone went back into the anonymous whir of things, safe inside their irrelevance.

Climbing the stairs at Noah’s party, his hand at Goran’s back, Ivan could see in the eyes of these young people, too, how desperately they wanted to be—and how desperately this hinged on being seen. That if no one witnessed you in the state of freedom, then you were not free. This seemed, to Ivan, really sad. He wanted to grip their shoulders and tell them to leave and to go and just be, just get the fuck out and do something with themselves. They still had time, they were so young. But what right did he have? He was not older than them. Not old enough to justify giving them orphic warnings from the shores of his second life. But he did know something about wanting to be finished with a part of your life before you were really ready, how you could trick yourself into thinking you knew so much when in fact you knew nothing at all. These dancers. High, glossed out of their minds, riding a wave of pleasure. They were so fucking alive. And they were dead already. And it broke his heart.

How to make his own feelings understood? How to say, I see you, I love you, I’m sorry? But sorry was just a cheap, dirty little word. It presupposed an orderly world. It presupposed that it was ever possible to make up for what had come before.

Perhaps what people misjudged for prodigious talent was really just unexpected competence.

He thought he could understand Bert a little now, seeing the fields and how close the sky stooped in the distance. He understood the peculiar loneliness of such a place, the way that loneliness held fast to you, no matter how far away you ran. You grow up in a place like this, Noah thought, and it haunts your dreams until you die.

“Money is like an animal, changeful and anxious, ready to flee or bite. There is never enough of it.��

Perhaps that is what you call it when you appeal to the world about something that has happened to you and the world answers back that it’s fine if you leave, as though you were nothing but an irritating child being sent on your way.
]]> 75293507
Norris Black, Amber Blaeser-Wardzala, Phoenix Boudreau, Cherie Dimaline, Carson Faust, Kelli Jo Ford, Kate Hart, Shane Hawk, Brandon Hobson, Darcie Little Badger, Conley Lyons, Nick Medina, Tiffany Morris, Tommy Orange, Mona Susan Power, Marcie R. Rendon, Waubgeshig Rice, Rebecca Roanhorse, Andrea L. Rogers, Morgan Talty, D.H. Trujillo, Theodore C. Van Alst Jr., Richard Van Camp, David Heska, Wanbli Weiden, Royce Young, Wolf Mathilda Zeller.

Many Indigenous people believe that one should never whistle at night. This belief takes many forms: for instance, Native Hawaiians believe it summons the Hukai’po, the spirits of ancient warriors, and Native Mexicans say it calls Lechuza, a witch that can transform into an owl. But what all these legends hold in common is the certainty that whistling at night can cause evil spirits to appear—and even follow you home.

These wholly original and shiver-inducing tales introduce listeners to ghosts, curses, hauntings, monstrous creatures, complex family legacies, desperate deeds, and chilling acts of revenge. Introduced and contextualized by bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones, these stories are a celebration of Indigenous peoples�� survival and imagination, and a glorious reveling in all the things an ill-advised whistle might summon.]]> 400 Shane Hawk 0593468465 Jeff 0 3.90 2023
author: Shane Hawk
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/12/05
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 65215321 From the bestselling author of We the Animals, Blackouts mines lost histories--personal and collective.

Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly, but who has haunted the edges of his life. Juan Gay--playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized--has a project to pass along to this new narrator. It is inspired by a true artifact of a book, Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns, which contains stories collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator trade stories--moments of joy and oblivion--and resurrect lost loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes. The past is with us, beside us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures?

Inspired by Kiss of the Spider Woman, Pedro Páramo, Voodoo Macbeth, the book at its own center and the woman who created it, oral histories, and many more texts, images, and influences, Justin Torres's Blackouts is a work of fiction that sees through the inventions of history and narrative. An extraordinary work of creative imagination, it insists that we look long and steady at the world we have inherited and the world we have made--a world full of ghostly shadows and flashing moments of truth.]]> 306 Justin Torres 0374293570 Jeff 0 3.76 2023
author: Justin Torres
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/12/30
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 63910510 96 Joseph Bruchac 147887516X Jeff 0 4.55
author: Joseph Bruchac
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.55
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2023/11/19
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 62873257 A sharply observed memoir of motherhood and the self, and a love letter to Maine, by a writer Eula Biss calls witty, sly, critical, inventive and whose mind Leslie Jamison calls electric.

That night, in his bed, I spread my son's palm wide and tried to read it. If the hand was a map that led to a future person, was there any changing the destination?

One day Heidi Julavits sees her son silhouetted by the sun and notices he is at the threshold of what she calls the end times of childhood. When did this happen, she asks herself. Who is my son becoming--and what qualifies me to be his guide?

What follows starts to feel like uncharted waters. Rape allegations rock the university campus where she teaches, unleashing questions of justice and accountability. Julavits begins to wonder how to prepare her son to be the best possible citizen of the world he's about to enter. And what must she learn about herself in order to responsibly steer him.

Looking back to her own childhood in Maine, where she often navigated the coastline in a small boat relying on a decades-old sailing guide, Julavits takes us on an intellectual navigation of the self. Throughout, she intertwines her internal investigation with a wide-ranging exploration of what it means to raise a child in a time full of contradictions and moral complexity. Using the past and present as points of orientation, Directions to Myself examines the messy minutiae of contemporary family life alongside knottier philosophical questions of politics and gender. Through it all, Julavits discovers the beauty and the danger of telling stories as a way to locate ourselves, and help others find us.

Intimate, rigorous, and refreshingly unsentimental about motherhood and parenting, Directions to Myself is a love letter to Maine and a reckoning with the disappearance of childhood--her children's and her own--that cements Julavits' reputation as one of the most engaged and innovative nonfiction writers today.]]> 304 Heidi Julavits 0451498518 Jeff 0 3.70 2023
author: Heidi Julavits
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/10/12
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 62645211 From the mid-century metropolis of Chicago to the windswept ancestral lands of the Dakota people to the bleak and brutal Indian boarding schools, A Council of Dolls is the story of three women, told in part through the stories of the dolls they carried.

Sissy, born 1961: Sissy’s relationship with her beautiful and volatile mother is difficult, even dangerous, but her life is also filled with beautiful things, including a new Christmas present, a doll called Ethel. Ethel whispers advice and kindness in Sissy’s ear, and in one especially terrifying moment, maybe even saves Sissy’s life.

Lillian, born 1925: Born in her ancestral lands in a time of terrible change, Lillian clings to her sister, Blanche, and her doll, Mae. When the sisters are forced to attend an “Indian school�� far from their home, Blanche refuses to be cowed by the school’s abusive nuns. But when tragedy strikes the sisters, the doll Mae finds her way to defend the girls.

Cora, born 1888: Although she was born into the brutal legacy of the “Indian Wars,�� Cora isn’t afraid of the white men who remove her to a school across the country to be “civilized.�� When teachers burn her beloved buckskin and beaded doll Winona, Cora discovers that the spirit of Winona may not be entirely lost.

A modern masterpiece, A Council of Dolls is gorgeous, quietly devastating, and ultimately hopeful, shining a light on the echoing damage of Indian boarding schools, and the historical massacres of Indigenous people.]]> 304 Mona Susan Power 0063281090 Jeff 0 4.02 2023
author: Mona Susan Power
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/11/30
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 61871743 A sweeping and overdue retelling of U.S. history that recognizes that Native Americans are essential to understanding the evolution of modern America
��
�� A National Bestseller
��
“Eloquent and comprehensive. . . . In the book’s sweeping synthesis, standard flashpoints of U.S. history take on new meaning.”—Kathleen DuVal, Wall Street Journal
��
“In accounts of American history, Indigenous peoples are often treated as largely incidental—either obstacles to be overcome or part of a narrative separate from the arc of nation-building. Blackhawk . . . [shows] that Native communities have, instead, been inseparable from the American story all along.”�� Washington Post Book World, “Books to Read in 2023��
��
The most enduring feature of U.S. history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants. This long practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing, however, with a new generation of scholars insists that any full American history address the struggle, survival, and resurgence of American Indian nations. Indigenous history is essential to understanding the evolution of modern America.
��
Ned Blackhawk interweaves five centuries of Native and non‑Native histories, from Spanish colonial exploration to the rise of Native American self-determination in the late twentieth century. In this transformative synthesis he shows that
��
�� European colonization in the 1600s was never a predetermined success;
��
�� Native nations helped shape England’s crisis of empire;
��
�� the first shots of the American Revolution were prompted by Indian affairs in the interior;
��
�� California Indians targeted by federally funded militias were among the first casualties of the Civil War;
��
�� the Union victory forever recalibrated Native communities across the West;
��
�� twentieth-century reservation activists refashioned American law and policy. ��
��
Blackhawk’s retelling of U.S. history acknowledges the enduring power, agency, and survival of Indigenous peoples, yielding a truer account of the United States and revealing anew the varied meanings of America.]]> 596 Ned Blackhawk 0300244053 Jeff 0 4.15 2023
author: Ned Blackhawk
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/11/12
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 122012382 A four-year-old Mi’kmaq girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a tragic mystery that haunts the survivors, unravels a community, and remains unsolved for nearly fifty years.

July 1962. A Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie, the family’s youngest child, vanishes. She is last seen by her six-year-old brother, Joe, sitting on a favorite rock at the edge of a berry field. Joe will remain distraught by his sister’s disappearance for years to come.

In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as the only child of an affluent family. Her father is emotionally distant, her mother frustratingly overprotective. Norma is often troubled by recurring dreams and visions that seem more like memories than imagination. As she grows older, Norma slowly comes to realize there is something her parents aren’t telling her. Unwilling to abandon her intuition, she will spend decades trying to uncover this family secret.

For readers of The Vanishing Half and Woman of Light, this showstopping debut by a vibrant new voice in fiction is a riveting novel about the search for truth, the shadow of trauma, and the persistence of love across time.]]> 304 Amanda Peters 1443468185 Jeff 3
I thought the narrative was very sad. I think knowing that the girl belonged to the family and watching time slip by was really unbearable to read. I think from the beginning, you can see that the man narrating was at the end of his life, and only then does he find his sisters. It is beautiful to have that reunion, but it is so late in the game. It is an excellent story and great narrative to show the different paths, but that part really got to me. ]]> 4.30 2023
author: Amanda Peters
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/06
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:
An indigenous family and community pick blueberries every summer. When their youngest child goes missing, the whole community goes to look for her but never finds her. This has a huge impact on the family for years to come. At this point, the narrative shifts, and we read two stories, one from one of the missing girl's brothers and the other, presumably, from the missing girl. We see the parallel of their lives as one has to live trying to make it with discrimination while the other has the privilege of being part of a white family but then disconnected from her roots.

I thought the narrative was very sad. I think knowing that the girl belonged to the family and watching time slip by was really unbearable to read. I think from the beginning, you can see that the man narrating was at the end of his life, and only then does he find his sisters. It is beautiful to have that reunion, but it is so late in the game. It is an excellent story and great narrative to show the different paths, but that part really got to me.
]]> 61190770
Loretta Thurwar and Hamara "Hurricane Staxxx" Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America's increasingly dominant private prison industry. It's the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom.

In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death-matches for packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. Thurwar and Staxxx, both teammates and lovers, are the fan favorites. And if all goes well, Thurwar will be free in just a few matches, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer. As she prepares to leave her fellow Links, she considers how she might help preserve their humanity, in defiance of these so-called games, but CAPE's corporate owners will stop at nothing to protect their status quo and the obstacles they lay in Thurwar's path have devastating consequences.

Moving from the Links in the field to the protestors to the CAPE employees and beyond, Chain-Gang All-Stars is a kaleidoscopic, excoriating look at the American prison system's unholy alliance of systemic racism, unchecked capitalism, and mass incarceration, and a clear-eyed reckoning with what freedom in this country really means.]]> 367 Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah 0593317335 Jeff 5
Prisoners have teams known as chains and links (hence chain gangs). Hurricane Staxx and Thurwar are the leaders of their chain. Kill after horrendous kill moves them closer to freedom until a change in the rules will bring them face to face.

A condemnation of the carceral state and the horrors that exist in prison combined with exploitation and entertainment. I think prisons wouldn't do this because they would not want to set anyone free. Of course, even that problem is solved in the worst way in the conclusion.



Favorite Passages:

Door number two slides away, then the man sees his own dead body. Jackpot, triple seven, somebody wins, just definitely not him. He stops shaking. I watch him close. Workers hand him a purple pillow with a spoon resting on top of it. More salt for new wounds. He holds the spoon in his hand. Looks at it. Sees himself stretched against the curve. I watch him close. It’s a show I’ve seen before. When a man sees he has been forsaken. Discovers he might be unblessed. Thinking he understood. All at once he see the gods he kept don’t keep him the same way. Not how he hoped. He see he had it all wrong the whole time.

His mama named him a king’s name
’Cause she knew what he had within
His only sin, was too human
So please, God, let him in
So please, Lord, let him in
]]> 4.13 2023
author: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/05/27
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:
In the not-so-distant future, private prisons get creative in how to make money. Not content with federal tax dollars and crooked schemes, they create a reality show network. CAPE develops Hard Action Sports, a gladiator show where prisoners kill each other for a chance at freedom. One-on-one attacks with weapons in a stadium arena, complete with announcers.

Prisoners have teams known as chains and links (hence chain gangs). Hurricane Staxx and Thurwar are the leaders of their chain. Kill after horrendous kill moves them closer to freedom until a change in the rules will bring them face to face.

A condemnation of the carceral state and the horrors that exist in prison combined with exploitation and entertainment. I think prisons wouldn't do this because they would not want to set anyone free. Of course, even that problem is solved in the worst way in the conclusion.



Favorite Passages:

Door number two slides away, then the man sees his own dead body. Jackpot, triple seven, somebody wins, just definitely not him. He stops shaking. I watch him close. Workers hand him a purple pillow with a spoon resting on top of it. More salt for new wounds. He holds the spoon in his hand. Looks at it. Sees himself stretched against the curve. I watch him close. It’s a show I’ve seen before. When a man sees he has been forsaken. Discovers he might be unblessed. Thinking he understood. All at once he see the gods he kept don’t keep him the same way. Not how he hoped. He see he had it all wrong the whole time.

His mama named him a king’s name
’Cause she knew what he had within
His only sin, was too human
So please, God, let him in
So please, Lord, let him in

]]> 60321460
Experience the joys of literature with this this “exciting guide to all that the world of fiction has to offer�� ( The New York Times Book Review ): a compulsively readable, deeply engaging discussion of great short novels. A journey into fiction designed with our contemporary attention spans in mind, Great Short Books suggests fifty-eight excellent short novels, all under 200 pages—easily readable in a week or less—a fresh approach to a fun, fascinating year of reading.

From hard-boiled fiction to magical realism, the 18th century to the present day, Great Short Books spans genres, cultures, countries, and time to present an enchanting and diverse selection of acclaimed and canonical novels. From works in translation like Yu Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station and Marguerite Duras’s The Lover to popular, acclaimed authors like Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, this compilation is a celebration of classics from the historic to contemporary—plus a few bestsellers, including Stephen King and Colson Whitehead. Each entry includes the novel’s opening lines, a spoiler-free plot summary, a “why you should read it�� section, and suggestions for what to read next.

“An entertaining journey with a fun, knowledgeable guide�� ( Booklist ), this eclectic collection is a fun and practical book for any passionate reader hoping to broaden their literary IQ—or anyone who wants to find an effortless reentry into reading.]]> 448 Kenneth C. Davis 198218003X Jeff 4
Many of these I have read, and it was fun to engage with them again. A great list of classics that are up to date and more accessible than 1000 Books to read before you die and the like. I added books to my to-be-read bookshelf.]]> 3.84 2022
author: Kenneth C. Davis
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/31
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:
Kenneth C. Davis is known for his Don't Know Much About series. Here he tackles the classics, the short classics, that is. In approachable prose, Davis is able to select a short book, provide an excerpt, plot summary, a bio of the author, why he picked it, and other recommendations for similar authors.

Many of these I have read, and it was fun to engage with them again. A great list of classics that are up to date and more accessible than 1000 Books to read before you die and the like. I added books to my to-be-read bookshelf.
]]> 38562634 "On the Other Side of Freedom reveals the mind and motivations of a young man who has risen to the fore of millennial activism through study, discipline, and conviction. His belief in a world that can be made better, one act at a time, powers his narratives and opens up a view on the costs, consequences, and rewards of leading a movement."--Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

From the internationally recognized civil rights activist/organizer and host of the podcast Pod Save the People, a meditation on resistance, justice, and freedom, and an intimate portrait of a movement from the front lines.

In August of 2014, twenty-nine-year-old activist DeRay Mckesson stood with hundreds of others on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, to push a message of justice and accountability. These protests, and others like them in cities across the country, resulted in the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement. Now, in his first book, Mckesson lays out the intellectual, pragmatic political framework for a new liberation movement. Continuing a conversation about activism, resistance, and justice that embraces our nation's complex history, he dissects how deliberate oppression persists, how racial injustice strips our lives of promise, and how technology has added a new dimension to mass action and social change. He argues that our best efforts to combat injustice have been stunted by the belief that racism's wounds are history, and suggests that intellectual purity has curtailed optimistic realism. The book offers a new framework and language for understanding the nature of oppression. With it, we can begin charting a course to dismantle the obvious and subtle structures that limit freedom.

Honest, courageous, and imaginative, On the Other Side of Freedom is a work brimming with hope. Drawing from his own experiences as an activist, organizer, educator, and public official, Mckesson exhorts all Americans to work to dismantle the legacy of racism and to imagine the best of what is possible. Honoring the voices of a new generation of activists, On the Other Side of Freedom is a visionary's call to take responsibility for imagining, and then building, the world we want to live in.]]> 212 DeRay Mckesson 0525560327 Jeff 5 4.16 2018
author: DeRay Mckesson
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2018/12/28
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves: non-fiction, black-lives-matter, civil-rights
review:

]]> 62047992 The moving international sensation about new beginnings, human connection, and the joy of reading.

Hidden in Jimbocho, Tokyo, is a booklover's paradise. On a quiet corner in an old wooden building lies a shop filled with hundreds of second-hand books.

Twenty-five-year-old Takako has never liked reading, although the Morisaki bookshop has been in her family for three generations. It is the pride and joy of her uncle Satoru, who has devoted his life to the bookshop since his wife Momoko left him five years earlier.

When Takako's boyfriend reveals he's marrying someone else, she reluctantly accepts her eccentric uncle's offer to live rent-free in the tiny room above the shop. Hoping to nurse her broken heart in peace, Takako is surprised to encounter new worlds within the stacks of books lining the Morisaki bookshop.

As summer fades to autumn, Satoru and Takako discover they have more in common than they first thought. The Morisaki bookshop has something to teach them both about life, love, and the healing power of books.]]> 150 Satoshi Yagisawa 0063278677 Jeff 4 3.67 2010
author: Satoshi Yagisawa
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/04
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:
When her longtime boyfriend marries his girlfriend, her life goes into a downward spiral. Unable to continue at her job where he also works, she struggles to get back on her feet. When, out of the blue, her uncle asks her to work at his bookshop, she is skeptical. When she takes him up, she finds herself living in the musty upstairs of a specialty bookshop. The customers all have specific tastes, and she is ill-prepared. She learns the magic of the bookstore, its customers, and the quirky neighborhood. She leaves restored, but not before solving her uncle's marital issues.
]]> 63274127 What are you looking for?

So asks Tokyo's most enigmatic librarian, Sayuri Komachi. She is no ordinary librarian. Naturally, she has read every book on her shelf, but she also has the unique ability to read the souls of anyone who walks through her door. Sensing exactly what they're looking for in life, she provides just the book recommendation they never knew they needed to help them find it.

Every borrower in her library is at a different crossroads, from the restless retail assistant - can she ever get out of a dead-end job? - to the juggling new mother who dreams of becoming a magazine editor, and the meticulous accountant who yearns to own an antique store. The surprise book Komachi lends to each will change their lives for ever.

Which book will you recommend? ]]> 252 Michiko Aoyama 0857529129 Jeff 0 4.17 2020
author: Michiko Aoyama
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2023/12/09
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 15811580
The protagonist of Ron Currie, Jr.’s new novel has a problem­—or rather, several of them. He’s a writer whose latest book was destroyed in a fire. He’s mourning the death of his father, and has been in love with the same woman since grade school, a woman whose beauty and allure is matched only by her talent for eluding him. Worst of all, he’s not even his own man, but rather an amalgam of fact and fiction from Ron Currie’s own life. When Currie the character exiles himself to a small Caribbean island to write a new book about the woman he loves, he eventually decides to fake his death, which turns out to be the best career move he’s ever made. But fame and fortune come with a price, and Currie learns that in a time of twenty-four-hour news cycles, reality TV, and celebrity Twitter feeds, the one thing the world will not forgive is having been told a deeply satisfying lie.

What kind of distinction could, or should, be drawn between Currie the author and Currie the character?�� Or between the book you hold in your hands and the novel embedded in it? Whatever the answers, Currie, an inventive writer always eager to test the boundaries of storytelling in provocative ways, has essential things to impart along the way about heartbreak, reality, grief, deceit, human frailty, and blinding love.




]]> 340 Ron Currie Jr. 0670025348 Jeff 2 did-not-finish 3.57 2013
author: Ron Currie Jr.
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2013
rating: 2
read at: 2013/02/20
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves: did-not-finish
review:

]]> 50706476 A new book of poetry from internationally acclaimed, award-winning and bestselling author Margaret Atwood

In��Dearly, Margaret Atwood’s first collection of poetry in over a decade, Atwood addresses themes such as love, loss, the passage of time, the nature of nature and - zombies. Her new poetry is introspective and personal in tone, but wide-ranging in topic. In poem after poem, she casts her unique imagination and unyielding, observant eye over the landscape of a life carefully and intuitively lived.


While many are familiar with Margaret Atwood’s fiction—including her groundbreaking and bestselling novels��The Handmaid’s Tale,��The Testaments,��Oryx and Crake, among others—she has, from the beginning of her career, been one of our most significant contemporary poets. And she is one of the very few writers equally accomplished in fiction and poetry.����This collection is a stunning achievement that will be appreciated by fans of her novels and poetry readers alike.]]> 124 Margaret Atwood 006303249X Jeff 0 3.75 2020
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2023/12/03
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 197753 278 Vine Deloria Jr. 0806121297 Jeff 0 4.13 1969
author: Vine Deloria Jr.
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1969
rating: 0
read at: 2023/11/19
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 18283207 176 Hiromi Kawakami 1846275083 Jeff 0 3.63 2001
author: Hiromi Kawakami
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at: 2023/12/13
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 2590136
In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his ship. Spending more than three months there, she talked in depth with Cudjo about the details of his life. During those weeks, the young writer and the elderly formerly enslaved man ate peaches and watermelon that grew in the backyard and talked about Cudjo's past--memories from his childhood in Africa, the horrors of being captured and held in a barracoon for selection by American slavers, the harrowing experience of the Middle Passage packed with more than 100 other souls aboard the Clotilda, and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War.

Based on those interviews, featuring Cudjo's unique vernacular, and written from Hurston's perspective with the compassion and singular style that have made her one of the preeminent American authors of the twentieth-century, Barracoon masterfully illustrates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it. Offering insight into the pernicious legacy that continues to haunt us all, black and white, this poignant and powerful work is an invaluable contribution to our shared history and culture.]]> 193 Zora Neale Hurston 0060921706 Jeff 0 4.03 2018
author: Zora Neale Hurston
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2024/02/26
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 38255372 An inspiring collection of essays by black women writers, curated by the founder of the popular book club Well-Read Black Girl, on the importance of recognizing ourselves in literature.

Remember that moment when you first encountered a character who seemed to be written just for you? That feeling of belonging can stick with readers the rest of their lives--but it doesn't come around as frequently for all of us. In this timely anthology, "well-read black girl" Glory Edim brings together original essays by some of our best black female writers and creative voices to shine a light on how we search for ourselves in literature, and how important it is that everyone--no matter their gender, race, religion, or abilities--can find themselves there. Whether it's learning about the complexities of femalehood from Their Eyes Were Watching God, seeing a new type of love in The Color Purple, or using mythology to craft an alternative black future, each essay reminds us why we turn to books in times of both struggle and relaxation. As she has done with her incredible book-club-turned-online-community Well-Read Black Girl, in this book, Edim has created a space where black women's writing and knowledge and life experiences are lifted up, to be shared with all readers who value the power of a story to help us understand the world, and ourselves.

Contributors include: Jesmyn Ward (Sing Unburied Sing), Lynn Nottage (Sweat), Jacqueline Woodson (Another Brooklyn), Gabourey Sidibe (This Is Just My Face), Morgan Jerkins (This Will Be My Undoing), Zinzi Clemmons (What We Lose), N. K. Jemisin (The Fifth Season), Tayari Jones (An American Marriage), Nicole Dennis-Benn (Here Comes the Sun), Rebecca Walker (Black, White and Jewish), and more.]]> 201 Glory Edim 0525619771 Jeff 0 4.36 2018
author: Glory Edim
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2024/03/04
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 29751398 The Power the world is a recognizable place: There's a rich Nigerian boy who lounges around the family pool; a foster kid whose religious parents hide their true nature; an ambitious American politician; and a tough London girl from a tricky family. But then a vital new force takes root and flourishes, causing their lives to converge with devastating effect. Teenage girls now have immense physical power: They can cause agonizing pain and even death. With this small twist of nature, the world drastically resets.]]> 341 Naomi Alderman 0670919985 Jeff 0 3.75 2016
author: Naomi Alderman
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at: 2024/03/15
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 52692515 Convenience Store Woman meets My Year of Rest and Relaxation in this strange, compelling, darkly funny tale of one woman's search for meaning in the modern workplace.

A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits: it is close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing �� and ideally, very little thinking.

She is sent to a nondescript office building where she is tasked with watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods. But observing someone for hours on end can be so inconvenient and tiresome. How will she stay awake? When can she take delivery of her favourite brand of tea? And, perhaps more importantly �� how did she find herself in this situation in the first place?

As she moves from job to job, writing bus adverts for shops that mysteriously disappear, and composing advice for rice cracker wrappers that generate thousands of devoted followers, it becomes increasingly apparent that she's not searching for the easiest job at all, but something altogether more meaningful...]]> 416 Kikuko Tsumura 1526622246 Jeff 0 3.61 2015
author: Kikuko Tsumura
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2024/01/05
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 58470813
As she searches for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue, Hiruko soon makes new friends. Her troupe travels to France, encountering an umami cooking competition; a dead whale; an ultra-nationalist named Breivik; unrequited love; Kakuzo robots; red herrings; uranium; an Andalusian matador. Episodic and mesmerizing scenes flash vividly along, and soon they’re all next off to Stockholm.]]> 256 Yōko Tawada 0811229289 Jeff 0 3.28 2018
author: Yōko Tawada
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.28
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2024/01/05
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 62979704
On the fictional island of Patusan—and much to the ire of the Patusan natives—the Korean conglomerate LK is constructing an elevator into Earth’s orbit, gradually turning this one-time tropical resort town into a teeming travel hub: a gateway to and from our planet. Up in space, holding the elevator’s “spider cable�� taut, is a mass of space junk known as the Counterweight. And it’s here that lies the key—a trove of personal data left by LK’s former CEO, of dire consequence to the company's, and humanity's, future.

Racing up the elevator to retrieve the data is a host of rival forces: Mac, the novel’s narrator and LK’s Chief of External Affairs, increasingly disillusioned with his employer; the everyman Choi Gangwu, unwittingly at the center of Mac’s investigations; the former CEO’s brilliant niece and his power-hungry son; and a violent officer from LK’s Security Division, Rex Tamaki—all caught in a labyrinth of fake identities, neuro-implant “Worms,�� and old political grievances held by the Patusan Liberation Front, the army of island natives determined to protect their sovereignty.

Conceived by Djuna as a low-budget science fiction film, with literary references as wide-ranging as Joseph Conrad and the Marquis de Sade, The Counterweight is part cyberpunk, part hardboiled detective fiction, and part parable of Korea’s neocolonial ambition and its rippling effects.]]> 176 Djuna 0593317211 Jeff 0 3.03 2021
author: Djuna
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.03
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2024/02/04
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 58724723 A fierce and riveting queer coming-of-age story following the personal and political awakening of a young gay Black man in 1980s New York City, from the television drama writer and producer of The Chi, Narcos, and Bel-Air.

Born into a wealthy Black Indianapolis family, Earl “Trey�� Singleton III leaves his overbearing parents and their expectations behind by running away to New York City with only a few dollars in his pocket. In the city, Trey meets up with a cast of characters that changes his life forever. He volunteers at a renegade home hospice for AIDS patients, and after being put to the test by gay rights activists, becomes a member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). Along the way Trey attempts to navigate past traumas and searches for ways to maintain familial relationships—all while seeking the meaning of life amid so much death.

Vibrant, humorous, and fraught with entanglements, Rasheed Newson’s My Government Means to Kill Me is an exhilarating, fast-paced coming-of-age story that lends itself to a larger discussion about what it means for a young gay Black man in the mid-1980s to come to terms with his role in the midst of a political and social reckoning.]]> 276 Rasheed Newson 1250833523 Jeff 0 4.23 2022
author: Rasheed Newson
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2024/02/09
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 59892213 Japan's internationally celebrated master storyteller returns with five stories of women on their way to healing that vividly portrays the blissful moments and everyday sorrows that surround us in everyday life.

First published in Japan in 2003 and never-before-published in the United States, Dead-End Memories collects the stories of five women who, following sudden and painful events, quietly discover their ways back to recovery.

Among the women we meet in Dead-End Memories is a woman betrayed by her fiancé who finds a perfect refuge in an apartment above her uncle's bar while seeking the real meaning of happiness. In "House of Ghosts", a daughter of a yōshoku restaurant owner encounters the ghosts of a sweet elderly couple who haven't yet realized that they have been dead for years. In "Tomo-chan's Happiness", an office worker who is a victim of sexual assault finally catches sight of the hope of romance.

Yoshimoto's gentle, effortless prose reminds us that one true miracle can be as simple as having someone to share a meal with and that happiness is always within us if only we take a moment to pause and reflect. Discover this collection of what Yoshimoto herself calls the "most precious work of my writing career".]]> 240 Banana Yoshimoto 1640093699 Jeff 0 3.94 2003
author: Banana Yoshimoto
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at: 2024/01/08
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 60784770
“Where are you from . . . ? No―where are you from from?�� It’s a question every Asian American gets asked as part of an incessant chorus saying you’ll never belong here, you’re a perpetual foreigner, you’ll always be seen as an alien, an object, or a threat.

Monica Youn’s From From brilliantly evokes the conflicted consciousness of deracination. If you have no core of “authenticity,�� no experience of your so-called homeland, how do you piece together an Asian American identity out of Westerners�� ideas about Asians? Your sense of yourself is part stereotype, part aspiration, part guilt. In this dazzling collection, one sequence deconstructs the sounds and letters of the word “deracinations�� to create a sonic landscape of micro- and macroaggressions, assimilation, and self-doubt. A kaleidoscopic personal essay explores the racial positioning of Asian Americans and the epidemic of anti-Asian hate. Several poems titled “Study of Two Figures�� anatomize and dissect the Asian Midas the striving, nouveau-riche father; Dr. Seuss and the imaginary daughter Chrysanthemum-Pearl he invented while authoring his anti-Japanese propaganda campaign; Pasiphaë, mother of the minotaur, and Sado, the eighteenth-century Korean prince, both condemned to containers allegorical and actual.

From From is an extraordinary collection by a poet whose daring and inventive works are among the most vital in contemporary literature.]]> 136 Monica Youn 1644452219 Jeff 0 4.13 2023
author: Monica Youn
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/01/03
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 61242254 GRANTA BEST OF YOUNG BRITISH NOVELISTS 2023

From the Booker Prize-nominated author of The Water Cure comes a chilling new feminist fable based on the true story of an unsolved mystery...

A recommended read for 2023 in The Times, Guardian, Irish Times, Scotsman, iD, Good Housekeeping, Big Issue and Our Culture

'A shimmering fever-dream of a novel' Telegraph

'A dreamy sapphic romp' The Times

'Gauzy [and] gripping, a quietly rich maturation of Mackintosh's skill' Guardian

If you eat the bread, you'll die, he said. The statement made no sense, but it filled me with an electric dread.

Elodie is the baker's wife. A plain, unremarkable woman, ignored by her husband and underestimated by her neighbours, she burns with the secret desire to be extraordinary. One day a charismatic new couple appear in town - the ambassador and his sharp-toothed wife, Violet - and Elodie quickly falls under their spell. All summer long she stalks them through the shining streets: inviting herself into their home, eavesdropping on their coded conversations, longing to be part of their world.

Meanwhile, beneath the tranquil surface of daily life, strange things are happening. Six horses are found dead in a sun-drenched field, laid out neatly on the ground like an offering. Widows see their lost husbands walking up the moonlit river, coming back to claim them. A teenage boy throws himself into the bonfire at the midsummer feast. A dark intoxication is spreading through the town, and when Elodie finally understands her role in it, it will be too late to stop.

Audacious and mesmerising, Cursed Bread is a fevered confession, an entry into memory's hall of mirrors, a fable of obsession and transformation. Sophie Mackintosh spins a darkly gleaming tale of a town gripped by hysteria, envy like poison in the blood, and desire that burns and consumes.]]> 184 Sophie Mackintosh 0241539617 Jeff 0 3.31 2023
author: Sophie Mackintosh
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.31
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/01/19
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 70240478
In the #1 New York Times bestseller So You Want To Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo offered a vital guide for how to talk about important issues of race and racism in society. In Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America, she discussed the ways in which white male supremacy has had an impact on our systems, our culture, and our lives throughout American history. But now that we better understand these systems of oppression, the question is this: What can we do about them?

With Be A Revolution: How Everyday People are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World—and How You Can, Too, Oluo aims to show how people across America are working to create real positive change in our structures. Looking at many of our most powerful systems—like education, media, labor, health, housing, policing, and more—she highlights what people are doing to create change for intersectional racial equity. She also illustrates various ways in which the reader can find entryways into change in these same areas, or can bring some of this important work being done elsewhere to where they live.

This book aims to not only be educational, but to inspire action and change. Oluo wishes to take our conversations on race and racism out of a place of pure pain and trauma, and into a place of loving action. Be A Revolution is both an urgent chronicle of this important moment in history, as well as an inspiring and restorative call for action..]]> 256 Ijeoma Oluo 0063140225 Jeff 0 4.38 2024
author: Ijeoma Oluo
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2024
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date added: 2024/10/07
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]]> 63927483 From an exciting new literary voice: a memoir that explores grief, Blackness, and recovery after the death of a dear friend.

After an unexpected phone call on an early morning in 2018, writer and model Eirinie Carson learned of her best friend Larissa’s death. In the wake of her shock, Eirinie attempts to make sense of the events leading up to Larissa’s death and uncovers startling secrets about her life in the process.

THE DEAD ARE GODS is Eirinie’s striking, intimate, and profoundly moving depiction of life after a sudden loss. Amid navigating moments of intense grief, Eirinie is overwhelmed by her love for Larissa. She finds power in pulling moments of joy from the depths of her emotion. Eirinie’s portrayal of what love feels like after death bursts from the page alongside a timely, honest, and personal exploration of Black love and Black life.

Perhaps, Eirinie proposes, “The only way out is through.”]]> 240 Eirinie Carson 1685890458 Jeff 0 4.21 2023
author: Eirinie Carson
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/02/26
date added: 2024/10/07
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]]> 133286981 Katie Peterson unfurls the quotidian fabric of our lives, patterned with the difficulties of language and this moment.

Confusion frames the human predicament. In Katie Peterson’s Fog and Smoke, confusion is, literally, our climate. Writing to and from the California landscape, Peterson sees fog and smoke as literal—one a habitual, natural weather event, the other an increasingly common aftereffect of the West’s drought-caused fires. But they are also metaphysical. Fog and smoke reflect the true conditions (and frustrations) of our ability to perceive and to connect. Peterson writes, “I’ve been speaking about it at a distance. / Now I want to talk about its thickness. / A person could get killed in here.��

The collection moves through three First, the poet follows her local fog’s cyclical journey of descent and dispersion. Second, in a sort of pastoral interlude, she travels widely, almost erratically, to the California desert, the greater world, and ancient history. Finally, she descends into the enclosed space of the household, and the increased confinement and intimacy of raising a child during the pandemic. Peterson unfolds the small moments that make up our lives and reveals the truths contained within them, and her poems capture the lyricism of our daily rhythms—the interruptions, dialogues, and epiphanies.]]> 76 Katie Peterson 0374610908 Jeff 0 3.50
author: Katie Peterson
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.50
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rating: 0
read at: 2024/01/08
date added: 2024/10/07
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]]> 137123578 Intergalactic visions, deadly threats, and explosive standoffs between mostly good and nearly completely evil converge in an alternative fiction novel that could only be conceived by the inimitable Walter Mosley, one of the country’s most beloved and acclaimed writers

Martin Just wakes up one morning after what feels like, and might actually be, a centuries-long sleep with two new innate pieces of knowledge: Humanity is a virus destined to destroy all existence. And that he is the Cure.

Martin, his wife, and his two children are the only Black family on their neighborhood block in the Hollywood hills of Los Angeles. Suddenly, Martin is both father and Antibody, husband and Cure, occasionally slipping into an alternate consciousness �� equipped with unprecedented physical strength �� to violently defend them.

The family is stalked by Tor Waxman �� the pale, white-haired embodiment of death who wears a dapper suit, carries a cane, and seeks to destroy all life with his fatal touch. Martin must convince his family of the danger and get them to engage with him in a battle beyond all imagining. Mosley effortlessly marries the sublime and the pedestrian: from monumental battles with truly universal stakes to the banality of standoffs with neighborhood police patrols, and the quotidian yet joyfully intimate conversations the family shares at home while gathered for dinner.

With his boundless talent and skilled range, Walter Mosley brings an ethereal, incisive look at a primal struggle driven by the spirit of the universe, in the vein of masters Octavia Butler, N.K. Jemisin, and Jeff VanderMeer. Expansive and innovative, sexy and satirical, Touched brilliantly imagines the ways in which human life and technological innovation threaten existence itself.]]> 176 Walter Mosley 0802161847 Jeff 0 3.33 2023
author: Walter Mosley
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/01/01
date added: 2024/10/07
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]]> 145624868 ��
This essential collection, in the tradition of Dudley Randall’s The Black Poets and E. Ethelbert Miller’s In Search of Color Everywhere, contains poems exploring joy, love, origin, race, resistance, and praise. Jacqueline A.Trimble likens “Black woman joy�� to indigo, tassels, foxes, and peacock plumes. Tyree Daye, Nate Marshall, and Elizabeth Acevedo reflect on the meaning of “home�� through food, from Cuban rice and beans to fried chicken gizzards. Clint Smith and Cameron Awkward-Rich enfold us in their intimate musings on love and devotion. From a “jewel in the hand�� (Patricia Spears Jones) to “butter melting in small pools�� (Elizabeth Alexander), This Is the Honey drips with poignant and delightful imagery, music, and raised fists.
��
Fresh, memorable, and deeply moving, this definitive collection a must-have for any lover of language and a gift for our time.

��

��

��]]> 448 Kwame Alexander 0316417521 Jeff 0 4.44
author: Kwame Alexander
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.44
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rating: 0
read at: 2024/02/02
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]]> 141247133
Another young man returns at the same time. Hamza was not stolen for the war, but sold into it; he has grown up at the right hand of an officer whose protection has marked him life. With nothing but the clothes on his back, he seeks only work and security �� and the love of the beautiful Afiya.

As fate knots these young people together, as they live and work and fall in love, the shadow of a new war on another continent lengthens and darkens, ready to snatch them up and carry them away…]]> Abdulrazak Gurnah 1526615851 Jeff 0 4.00 2020
author: Abdulrazak Gurnah
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2024/02/01
date added: 2024/10/07
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]]> 3181564
She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him.

And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them. Though he cannot hold memories for long (his brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes), the Professor’s mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son. The Professor is capable of discovering connections between the simplest of quantities--like the Housekeeper’s shoe size--and the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away.

The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family.]]> 180 Yōko Ogawa 0312427808 Jeff 0 4.04 2003
author: Yōko Ogawa
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/20
date added: 2024/10/07
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]]> 166219081
A misstep at a dinner party, and the older man she's been staying with dismisses her with a ride to the train station and a ticket back to the city.

With few resources and a waterlogged phone, but gifted with an ability to navigate the desires of others, Alex stays on Long Island and drifts like a ghost through the hedged lanes, gated driveways and sun-blasted dunes of a rarified world that is, at first, closed to her. Propelled by desperation and a mutable sense of morality, she spends the week leading up to the end of the holidays moving from one place to the next, a cipher leaving destruction in her wake.]]> 294 Emma Cline Jeff 0 3.44 2023
author: Emma Cline
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/01/10
date added: 2024/10/07
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]]> 157981682 The Book of Love showcases Kelly Link at the height of her powers, channeling potent magic and attuned to all varieties of love—from friendship to romance to abiding family ties—with her trademark compassion, wit, and literary derring-do. Readers will find joy (and a little terror) and an affirmation that love goes on, even when we cannot.

Late one night, Laura, Daniel, and Mo find themselves beneath the fluorescent lights of a high school classroom, almost a year after disappearing from their hometown, the small seaside community of Lovesend, Massachusetts, having long been presumed dead. Which, in fact, they are.

With them in the room is their previously unremarkable high school music teacher, who seems to know something about their disappearance—and what has brought them back again. Desperate to reclaim their lives, the three agree to the terms of the bargain their music teacher proposes. They will be given a series of magical tasks; while they undertake them, they may return to their families and friends, but they can tell no one where they’ve been. In the end, there will be winners and there will be losers.

But their resurrection has attracted the notice of other supernatural figures, all with their own agendas. As Laura, Daniel, and Mo grapple with the pieces of the lives they left behind, and Laura’s sister, Susannah, attempts to reconcile what she remembers with what she fears, these mysterious others begin to arrive, engulfing their community in danger and chaos, and it becomes imperative that the teens solve the mystery of their deaths to avert a looming disaster.]]> 628 Kelly Link 0812996585 Jeff 0 3.45 2024
author: Kelly Link
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 173403968 By the internationally acclaimed author of Cursed Bunny, in another thrilling translation from the Korean by Anton Hur, Your Utopia is full of tales of loss and discovery, idealism and dystopia, death and immortality. These stories are suffused with Chung's inimitable wry humour and surprisingly tender moments, too �� often between unexpected subjects.

In ‘The Center for Immortality Research��, a low-level employee runs herself ragged planning a fancy gala for donors, only to be blamed for a crime she witnessed during the event, under the noses of the mysterious celebrity benefactors hoping to live forever. But she can’t be fired �� no one can. In ‘One More Kiss, Dear��, a tender, one-sided love blooms in the AI-elevator of an apartment complex; as in, the elevator develops a profound affection for one of the residents. In ‘Seeds��, we see the final frontier of capitalism’s destruction of the planet and the GMO companies who rule the agricultural industry in this bleak future, but nature has ways of creeping back to life.

If you haven’t yet experienced the fruits of this singular imagination, Your Utopia is waiting.]]> 256 Bora Chung 1643756214 Jeff 0 3.64 2021
author: Bora Chung
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/07
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]]> 176530578 Being single is like playing the lottery. There’s always the chance that with one piece of paper you could win it all.

From the New York Times bestselling author of In Five Years and One Italian Summer comes the romance that will define a generation.

Daphne Bell believes the universe has a plan for her. Every time she meets a new man, she receives a slip of paper with his name and a number on it—the exact amount of time they will be together. The papers told her she’d spend three days with Martin in Paris; five weeks with Noah in San Francisco; and three months with Hugo, her ex-boyfriend turned best friend. Daphne has been receiving the numbered papers for over twenty years, always wondering when there might be one without an expiration. Finally, the night of a blind date at her favorite Los Angeles restaurant, there’s only a name: Jake.

But as Jake and Daphne’s story unfolds, Daphne finds herself doubting the paper’s prediction, and wrestling with what it means to be both committed and truthful. Because Daphne knows things Jake doesn’t, information that—if he found out—would break his heart.

Told with her signature warmth and insight into matters of the heart, Rebecca Serle has finally set her sights on romantic love. The result is a gripping, emotional, passionate, and (yes) heartbreaking novel about what it means to be single, what it means to find love, and ultimately how we define each of them for ourselves. Expiration Dates is the one fans have been waiting for.]]> 272 Rebecca Serle 1982166843 Jeff 0 3.55 2024
author: Rebecca Serle
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 195474144 From the bestselling author of The Lincoln Highway, A Gentleman in Moscow, and Rules of Civility, a richly detailed and sharply drawn collection of stories set in New York and Los Angeles. The millions of readers of Amor Towles are in for a treat as he shares some of his shorter six stories set in New York City and a novella in Los Angeles. The New York stories, most of which are set around the turn of the millennium, take up everything from the death-defying acrobatics of the male ego, to the fateful consequences of brief encounters, and the delicate mechanics of compromise which operate at the heart of modern marriages. In Towles’s novel, Rules of Civility, the indomitable Evelyn Ross leaves New York City in September, 1938, with the intention of returning home to Indiana. But as her train pulls into Chicago, where her parents are waiting, she instead extends her ticket to Los Angeles. Told from seven points of view, “Eve in Hollywood�� describes how Eve crafts a new future for herself—and others—in the midst of Hollywood’s golden age. Throughout the stories, two characters often find themselves sitting across a table for two where the direction of their futures may hinge upon what they say to each other next. Written with his signature wit, humor, and sophistication, Table for Two is another glittering addition to Towles’s canon of stylish and transporting historical fiction.]]> 451 Amor Towles 0593296370 Jeff 0 4.15 2024
author: Amor Towles
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 196439808
A young woman moves from the place of her birth to the remote northern country of her forebears to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has recently left him.��

Soon after her arrival, a series of inexplicable events occurs - collective bovine hysteria; the demise of a ewe and her nearly born lamb; a local dog's phantom pregnancy; a potato blight. She notices that the local suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed with some intensity at her and she senses a mounting threat that lies 'just beyond the garden gate.' And as she feels the hostility growing, pressing at the edges of her brother's property, she fears that, should the rumblings in the town gather themselves into a more defined shape, who knows what might happen, what one might be capable of doing.

With a sharp, lyrical voice, Sarah Bernstein powerfully explores questions of complicity and power, displacement and inheritance. Study for Obedience is a finely tuned, unsettling novel that confirms Bernstein as one of the most exciting voices of her generation.]]> 196 Sarah Bernstein Jeff 0 3.01 2023
author: Sarah Bernstein
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.01
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> 186872432
In Helen Oyeyemi’s joyous new novel, the Czech capital is a living thing—one that can let you in or spit you out.


For reasons of her own, Hero Tojosoa accepts an invitation she was half expected to decline, and finds herself in Prague on a bachelorette weekend hosted by her estranged friend Sofie. Little does she know she’s arrived in a city with a penchant for playing tricks on the unsuspecting. A book Hero has brought with her seems to be warping her the text changes depending on when it’s being read and who’s doing the reading, revealing startling new stories of fictional Praguers past and present. Uninvited companions appear at bachelorette activities and at city landmarks, offering opinions, humor, and even a taste of treachery. When a third woman from Hero and Sofie’s past appears unexpectedly, the tensions between the friends�� different accounts of the past reach a new level.


An adventurous, kaleidoscopic novel, Parasol Against the Axe considers the lines between illusion and delusion, fact and interpretation, and weighs the risks of attaching too firmly to the stories of a place, or a person, or a shared history. How much is a tale influenced by its reader, or vice versa? And finally, in a battle between friends, is it better to be the parasol or the axe?]]> 272 Helen Oyeyemi 0593192362 Jeff 0 3.06 2024
author: Helen Oyeyemi
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.06
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 195820829 ��
Alma Cruz, the celebrated writer at the heart of The Cemetery of Untold Stories , doesn’t want to end up like her friend, a novelist who fought so long and hard to finish a book that it threatened her sanity. So when Alma inherits a small plot of land in the Dominican Republic, her homeland, she has the beautiful idea of turning it into a place to bury her untold stories—literally. She creates a graveyard for the manuscript drafts and revisions, and the characters whose lives she tried and failed to bring to life and who still haunt her.
��
Alma wants her characters to rest in peace. But they have other ideas, and the cemetery becomes a mysterious sanctuary for their true narratives. Filomena, a local woman hired as the groundskeeper, becomes a sympathetic listener as Alma’s characters unspool their secret tales. Among them: Bienvenida, the abandoned second wife of dictator Rafael Trujillo, consigned to oblivion by history, and Manuel Cruz, a doctor who fought in the Dominican underground and escaped to the United States.
��
The characters defy their author: they talk back to her and talk to one another behind her back, rewriting and revising themselves. The Cemetery of Untold Stories asks: Whose stories get to be told, and whose buried? Finally, Alma finds the meaning she and her characters yearn for in the everlasting vitality of stories.
��
Readers of Isabel Allende’s Violeta and Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead will devour Alvarez’s extraordinary new novel about beauty and authenticity that reminds us the stories of our lives are never truly finished, even at the end.]]> 243 Julia Alvarez 1643753843 Jeff 0 3.64 2024
author: Julia Alvarez
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/07
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]]> 62039259 A lonely, lovable, queer mountain lion narrates this star-making fever dream of a novel.

A queer and dangerously hungry mountain lion lives in the drought-devastated land under the Hollywood sign. Lonely and fascinated by humanity’s foibles, the lion spends their days protecting the welfare of a nearby homeless encampment, observing obnoxious hikers complain about their trauma, and, in quiet moments, grappling with the complexities of their gender identity, memories of a vicious father, and the indignities of sentience. “I have so much language in my brain,�� our lion says, “and nowhere to put it.��

When a man-made fire engulfs the encampment, the lion is forced from the hills down into the city the hikers call “ellay.�� As the lion confronts a carousel of temptations and threats, they take us on a tour that spans the cruel inequalities of Los Angeles and the toll of climate grief, while scrambling to avoid earthquakes, floods, and the noise of their own conflicted psyche. But even when salvation finally seems within reach, they are forced to face down the ultimate question: Do they want to eat a person, or become one?

In elegiac prose woven with humor, imagination, sensuality, and tragedy, Henry Hoke’s Open Throat is a marvel of storytelling, a universal journey through a wondrous and menacing world told by a lovable mountain lion. Both feral and vulnerable, profound and playful, Open Throat is a star-making novel that brings mythmaking to real life.]]> 160 Henry Hoke 037460987X Jeff 3 4.02 2023
author: Henry Hoke
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/08/08
date added: 2024/10/07
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]]> 57822516 ��
Hak Jeonga has always shouldered the burden of upholding the family name. When she sent her daughter-in-law to America to cover up an illegitimate birth, she was simply doing what was needed to preserve the reputations of her loved ones. How could she have known that decades later, this decision would return to haunt her �� threatening to tear apart her bond with her beloved son, her relationship with her infuriatingly insolent sisters, and the future of the family she has worked so hard to protect?
��
Part ghost story and part family epic, The Apology is an incisive tale of sisterhood and diaspora, reaching back to the days of Japanese colonialism and the Korean War, and told through the singular voice of a defiant, funny, and unforgettable centenarian.

�� Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2023
�� Shondaland's The Best Books to Read for Summer 2023
�� San Francisco Chronicle 's 17 Books We Can't Wait to Read This Summer
�� Publishers Weekly 's Fall 2023 Adult Literary Fiction
�� ŷ������'s 88 Upcoming Books the ŷ������ Editors Can't Wait to Read
�� Los Angeles Times 's 10 Books to Add to Your Reading List in August
�� Apple Books's Best Books of August]]> 291 Jimin Han 0316367087 Jeff 0 3.46 2023
author: Jimin Han
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/08/17
date added: 2024/10/07
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]]> 126524776
The stories we usually tell ourselves about climate change tend to focus on the damage inflicted on human societies by big storms, severe droughts, and rising sea levels. But the most powerful impacts are being and will be felt by the natural world and its myriad species, which are already in the midst of the sixth great extinction. Rising temperatures are fracturing ecosystems that took millions of years to evolve, disrupting the life forms they sustain--and in many cases driving them towards extinction. The natural Eden that humanity inherited is quickly slipping away.

Although we can never really know what a creature thinks or feels, The End of Eden invites the reader to meet wild species on their own terms in a range of ecosystems that span the globe. Combining classic natural history, firsthand reportage, and insights from cutting-edge research, Adam Welz brings us close to species like the moose of Northern Maine, the parrots of Puerto Rico, Namibia's cheetahs and rare fish in Australia as they struggle to survive. The stories are intimate yet expansive and always dramatic.

An exquisitely written and deeply researched exploration of wild species reacting to climate breakdown, The End of Eden offers a radical new kind of environmental journalism that connects humans to nature in a more empathetic way than ever before and galvanizes us to act in defense of the natural world before it's too late.]]> 288 Adam Welz 1635575222 Jeff 0 4.22
author: Adam Welz
name: Jeff
average rating: 4.22
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read at: 2023/10/19
date added: 2024/10/07
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]]> 62558834
As the unbearable loss settles deeper into his bones, Damien, a small-town line cook, walks away from everything he has ever known. Driving as far south as his old truck and his legs allow, he lands in a fishing village beyond the reach of his past where he hopes he can finally forget. But the village has grief of its own. The same day that Damien arrives, a young woman from the community’s most powerful family is being laid to rest. A stranger in town,��Damien is the object of gossip and suspicion, ignored by all except the dead girl’s mother, Ana Maria, who offers Damien a room and a job.

Grateful for her kindness, Damien soon begins to fall under Ana Maria's charismatic spell. But how long can he resist the rumors swirling through town suggesting she might have had something to do with her daughter’s death? Or deny his strange kinship with one of Ana Maria's surviving daughters, Marta, who knows too well the grief that follows the loss of a sibling—and who is driven by a fierce need for revenge? Swiftly, Damien finds himself caught in a power struggle between the brujas, a whirlwind battle that threatens to sweep the whole village out to sea.

Resonant with the Diné creation story and the unshakeable weight of the Long Walk—the forced removal of the Navajo from their land�� Swim Home to the Vanished ��explores the human capacity for grief and redemption, and the lasting effects it has on the soul.]]> 232 Brendan Shay Basham 0063241080 Jeff 0 3.30 2023
author: Brendan Shay Basham
name: Jeff
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/10/15
date added: 2024/10/07
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]]>