A collection of essays by a white US American feminist. The collection begins from her own horrific experiences of gendered and sexual violence (about which she has previously published a memoir), and then moves into essays on what might be described as areas of complicity and of collectively experienced harm. Contains a number of quite …
A short book by an English academic that explores “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (2). In order to build movements that can once again threaten to transform capitalism, we must …
A trilogy of fantasy books republished under a single cover. My inclination is to describe it as “high-concept fantasy,” because it is based on asking a very thinky-yet-clear what-if and then seeing how it plays out, but I worry that label makes it sound obscure and inaccessible when in fact it is compulsively readable. The …
YA contemporary. Teen Sana Kiyohara’s family moves from the US midwest to California, where she has to deal with a new and very different school environment, a new love interest, and her sneaking suspicion that her dad is having an affair. I have mixed feelings about this one. I like that it visibly weaves the …
A wide-ranging, detailed, and highly critical examination of the history of liberalism. It both engages with the ideas of liberal thinkers across various eras and examines the material context in which those ideas and thinkers existed. It centres slavery and colonialism, as well as oppression/repression of poor and working people within the metropole, and not …
Silly, fluffy, escapist. A contemporary queer friends-to-lovers plot. At least a couple of key aspects of the premise that allow the story to unfold don’t actually make any sense, and there are noticeable continuity errors. Plus the writing is not great in other ways. Still, if you can suspend your judgement at those things, it …
I noticed during my year-end/new-year reflections this year that I had fallen into a common-to-me pattern: Most of my nonfiction reading in the previous six months had been things that I selected for their content not for their writing. I get why this happens, because I do often need to read a lot of things …
A collection of essays on disability justice by sometime-Toronto-based disabled femme of colour activist, writer, and performer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. A wide range of different kinds of pieces, to deliberately capture the broad spectrum of shared knowledge – from get-through-the-day life hacks to no-holds-barred critique to expansive dreaming – that a commitment to disability justice …
Coming of age novel with a late-revealed sprinkling of what would conventionally at least be understood as the fantastical. Set in northern British Columbia and centred on an Indigenous guy the same age as my own kid as he navigates messy family stuff, messy friendships, selling weed cookies, helping out the older couple next door, …
Fantasy set in what the cover copy describes as “the southern tip of an African continent that could have been.” A society in which nearly everyone is a twin, life opportunities are determined by the division of the seven vices and seven virtues between each pair, and proximity with your twin is necessary for survival. …