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 …
This is an academic history of liberalism, in the form of what it calls a “conceptual history” – that is, it explores what its proponents (and to a certain extent opponents) have said over the years about the positions, ideas, and politics associated with “liberal” and its cognates. This is presented with some political history …
[Pankaj Mishra. Age of Anger: A History of the Present. New York: Picador, 2017.] A far-ranging and clever book that convinced me of its core thesis but left me with some questions and considerable ambivalence about some of the things surrounding that. The book sets out to understand some key elements of our current moment – …
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. …
A…political art intervention and act of cultural criticism, I guess? The author – a writer, artist, curator, and activist in the UK – has produced a manifesto and collection of documents from an imagined Shy Radical movement. This movement brings together people who are shy, introverted, socially anxious, on the autism spectrum, or otherwise oppressed …