Graphic memoir. A self-identified tomboy looking back on the frictions, frustrations, and traumas of gender she experienced growing up. Thoughtful, readable, and interesting. Both an engaging story and a useful entry into thinking about gender – I can imagine, for instance, it being a useful teaching tool with students who had not really thought about …
History. Published 25 years ago, this is an early book by a prominent historian of US social movements. Examines everyday resistance and/or cultural politics and their interface with more formal social movements in a number of African American contexts across the 20th century, from everyday struggles on public transit in Birmingham under Jim Crow, to …
Memoir. Short. Focused on the body. Thoughtful and theoretical and nonlinear and lyrical, a la Maggie Nelson (who also happened to blurb it). Ran across it while I was investigating another book and justified picking it up with the idea that it might be vaguely relevant to some work that I’m doing. It’s not, sadly, …
Silkpunk. Short. A land of elemental magic, twin children born to a cruel empress and given to a monastery, and an uprising in which the intertwining of magic and new technologies is becoming ever more destructive. Really like the world building, and the writing is effective, but the story felt like it wasn’t enough. On …
A short, thoughtful, and somewhat meandering book about the politics of memory and legacy and, specifically, archives. The author was part of the New Left in the UK – he went by “Dr. John” in those years and was a central figure in the London Street Commune – and went on to become “a cultural …
Sci-fi. Two agents on opposing sides of a time war, skipping up and down different versions of history and covertly intervening, trying to ensure that their side wins the future. Except, this is not the sort of massive, ponderous tome that would result from trying (and inevitably failing) to capture that whole massive story in …
Literary fiction. The story of a young man buffeted by the winds of the social world into not-belonging of many different forms, and then navigating that towards a clearer sense of self. Woven together with a storyline drawn from Hindu mythology and with black/green/grey illustrations. Simple, lyrical, and emotionally compelling. Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.
Mediocre fantasy, but make it queer. Princess from one kingdom makes the long journey to marry her childhood betrothed in another, to form an alliance and to bring her people’s magic to this land that is increasingly plagued by dragons. He dies before she gets there, and in this non-heterosexist world it is perfectly normal …
A solid first book for white people to read to begin learning about racism. The hook and focus indicated by the title points towards how unprepared we generally are in multiple senses for conversations about race and racism. In particular, most of us never learn to handle “the smallest amount of racial stress” and so …
First fantasy novel by Ann Leckie, who made her name as an original voice in the sci-fi world with the excellent *Ancillary Justice* trilogy (of which I still haven’t read the final entry). As you might expect from Leckie, this is not typical fantasy. There are humans at a relatively early stage of state formation …