Graphic memoir. I’ve read a couple of graphic novels by the author, but picked this up somewhat randomly not so much for fannish reasons but because I figured it would be a light and quick read. And it was. Drawing largely from material she has previously published online, it follows her life from 2011 to …
I don’t pay a lot of attention to literary awards for the most part, but the one exception that I regularly make is what used to be called the Tiptree Award and is now the Otherwise Award, the tagline for which is “an award encouraging the exploration & expansion of gender.” I picked this book …
A scholarly history of the social and cultural origins of sound reproduction. Very much not an effort to tell a straightforward, linear story about the history of telegraphy, telephony, broadcasting, and recording, but rather draws selectively and nonlinearly from the decades before such tech was introduced and the early decades after to push readers to …
Memoir. Place, desire, compulsion, shame, relationships ending and beginning, abuse, family history, faith. And especially place. The place that it is, especially, is Epping Forest, a 2400 hectare former royal forest in the UK that straddles the border between London and Essex. It is other places too, but particularly there. The author broods and reflects. …
Based on stories of the rogarou, a figure something like a werewolf that haunts Metis communities. Set in such a community on Georgian Bay in Ontario, following a woman whose husband suddenly disappeared almost a year ago. At the beginning of the book, she encounters someone who looks just like him but seems to be …
A scholarly examination of “told-to” narratives in the Canadian context, with some longer-ago history but mostly between the 1970s and 1990s. The told-to narrative is an old form that is of particular relevance to colonial contexts, in which white settler scholars and writers have produced written texts from oral stories told to them by Indigienous …
YA contemporary. Co-written by two fairly well known authors in the genre. A white Jewish boy and South Asian Muslim girl, both US American and both seventeen, fall for each other while volunteering on the campaign of a progressive candidate for state senate in a special election (which is what they call by-elections down there, …
Described on the jacket as “sociological science fiction.” Humanity lives in a network of cave cities deep beneath the ground, in a society organized into a rigid caste hierarchy. The ruler of the cave city in which this is set dies and a succession struggle ensues. Follows two brothers in a family of the caste …
An odd little book. My reason for reading it was not terribly well aligned with its own purpose, so my relative indifference to it should not be taken too seriously. The author is an experimental composer, seemingly fairly well known in her particular niche, who has spent a lifetime thinking about listening. I heard about …
Storytelling about a life spent at the heart of many of the major social movements in the US in the last 35 years combined with very practical lessons about how to organize. I had never heard of Lisa Fithian before, but as an organizer, a facilitator, a trainer, and an activist, she has done a …