Lyric memoir. By a queer Cree poet, writer, scholar. Intense, compelling. Memory, poetry, theory, love, lust, rage, grief, joy, opacity, play. Keenly situated in the painful space between worlds violently unmade and worlds straining to grow. As is often true with this kind of book, I feel a pull to find a “right way” to …
Fantasy novella. A world reminiscent of imperial China. A cleric from a monastic order devoted to preserving history arrives, along with their talking bird-like companion with perfect recall, at what had been the late empress’ home while she was in internal exile many years before. They encounter an old woman who, as they catalogue the …
Literary fiction with fantastical elements. The author is from Argentina and the book was translated from Spanish. A girl in a poor neighbourhood of Buenos Aires responds to her mother’s death by compulsively eating dirt. As she gets older, it becomes clear that when she eats earth associated with someone who has been murdered or …
Scholarly. Anthropology, Indigenous studies. The book emerges from ethnographic research conducted among Mohawk people from Kahnawà:ke, and the author herself is Mohawk and from Kahnawà:ke. Unlike a lot of anthropological research, the book takes up questions of key concern to the community itself – things like membership, belonging, and borders – in the context of …
YA fantasy. Towards the “high fantasy” end of the genre. Set in Orisha, a nation based loosely on Nigeria. It is a kingdom in which magic had suddenly ceased to work and all adults who had been able to use it were killed by the king’s soldiers about a decade before the start of the …
Theory. Thinks about research from an Indigenous, and specifically Maori, perspective. A classic. I first read the book about 15 years ago and wrote an extensive review at that time. I re-read it now for work purposes, and I’ll keep this brief. The work is divided into two broad parts, one providing an overview of …
Literary fiction. Short stories. I don’t generally orient my reading via prizes, but the fact that this collection won the latest Giller Prize is probably why it was prominent enough in my awareness that, after my partner borrowed it from a colleague, I spontaneously picked it up and read it as well. Stories of everyday …
Science fantasy. In a post-apocalyptic Sudan, a child of a rape that happened as part of war-slash-genocide develops powerful magic as she grows up, and seeks to confront both the threat to her and the threat to her people. I’ve read a bunch of books by Okorafor – her Binti series and her Akata series …
YA fantasy. This author’s take on the secret British magic school and the ‘chosen one.’ Was pretty skeptical before I picked it up, but it drew me in fairly quickly. It manages a good balance of taking things seriously and poking a little bit of fun at, ahem, a certain similar series. The book enters …
Second edition from 2014 of a classic of US liberalism first released in the early George W. Bush years. The author is a cognitive scientist who has devoted much of his career to applying the findings of experimental neuroscience to politics. He has published a bunch of scholarly work along these lines too, but this …