Literary fiction. Follows a blue-skinned boy being raised as a god in an ashram run by his father outside a small village in Tamil Nadu, India. The promotional copy on the book jacket does not make this clear, but because it becomes evident to the reader pretty early on (though not to the protagonist) I …
A scholarly history of workers in media, publishing, design, advertising, and related professions in New York from the 1930s to the 1970s. Across the decades in which capitalism took on a mass consumerist shape, it traces changes in these industries that were so central in that process. And it examines the ways in which workers …
An anti-productivity book, of sorts. In most books that are either directly or indirectly about how we individually make use of our time, the goal is to enable the reader to do more. Now, I don’t actually often read that sort of book, at least in its most blatant neoliberal-cult-of-productivity manifestation. But I have been …
Fantasy. I picked this one up because the author makes bookish content online that I quite like – her taste in books isn’t the same as mine, but it’s related, and she’s smart and politically interesting so I enjoy her videos. The book is a vaguely-medieval-Europe, dragons-and-castles-and-magic sort of fantasy that I don’t read a …
YA contemporary fantasy. A young Black woman in Brooklyn whose touch, and sometimes mere presence, causes plants to grow, bloom, move. From a hitherto unknown relative, she inherits an old mansion outside a small town in upstate New York. Adventure ensues and she learns more about her powers and the heritage she has been born …
Fantasy novella. The premise is that when enslaved people who were pregnant were thrown or jumped overboard from slave ships and subsequently died, their foetuses did not die but came into the world transformed into beings of the sea. Over the years, some of these “wajinru” survived, found each other, and built a society. In …
Speculative short stories, mostly set in worlds close to but distinct from our own. Quietly weird, often unsettling or vaguely sad. The writing wraps around and immerses you, doesn’t spoonfeed, so there were some I didn’t understand, but the collection as a whole was definitely to my taste and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Originally posted by Scott on …
Essays. A lot of memoir – which I wasn’t expecting, for some reason, but certainly didn’t mind. The author is Cowlitz, a Coast Salish people from the northwest of what is currently the United States. She grew up in a coal-mining family in Appalachia, and then for much of the period covered in the book …
Fantasy. Set in Cairo in 1912. A bit steampunk, a bit noir mystery, and lots of magic drawn from folk traditions of Egyptian and other Islamic cultures. The premise is that in the late 19th century, djinn and other magical beings returned openly to the world in a way that was centred on Cairo. This …
An intellectual biography of radical English writer and art critic John Berger. Examines his key work from the end of the Second World War to his death in 2017, in the context of at least the major features of his life, if not really the nitty-gritty details, and of the broader political and intellectual culture. …