A very thoughtful, very well-written book by an artist who lives in California’s Bay Area. A self-proclaimed “field guide to doing nothing as an act of political resistance to the attention economy” (xi) that is “not anti-technology” but that is “obviously anti-capiatlist” (xii). A book about why we might want to resist the latest generation …
It is early winter in an Ojibwe community in northern Ontario, and all of the external infrastructure – electricity, internet, phone – goes out, all at once. Though all of these systems are relatively recent and precarious this far north, it soon becomes clear that this was not some random, localized blip but something general …
Essays that use memoir in a mode the author describes as “fictionalized nonfiction” (20) to explore migration, (non)belonging, becoming, and the hypocrisies, indignities, and violence of white-supremacist, colonial, multi-cultural Canada. The author was born in Kowloon, Hong Kong, grew up in Edmonton, has lived in and travelled to many parts of Canada, and for many …
Third book in the series started by the charming gang-of-misfits-in-a-small-spaceship novel The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. As was true of #2, this is not exactly a sequel but rather another story set in the same universe. In this case, it is mainly set among the fleet of massive ships that set out …
[Patricia Hill Collins. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 2009.] A Black feminist classic, and deservedly so. An effort by one of the most prominent Black feminist sociologists in the US to create a sort of overview and synthesis of the rich and varied Black feminist tradition in …
Short stories. Literary. Weird. Focused on women, the body, transformation. At its best when evoking feeling and mood, particularly variations on the unsettling and the not really possible but the relentlessly true nonetheless. I’ve seen it compared to Carmen Maria Machado’s *Her Body and Other Parties*, which is apt though they explore somewhat different flavours …
Young adult contemporary. Read it because I read a middle-grade book by the same author earlier in the year and really liked it. Focused on a teen girl and her relationship with her traumatized, addicted, and likely mentally ill mother. It captures something real and overwhelming and painful about that experience, and captures it well. …
Third and final book in Nnedi Okorafor’s *Binti* series. (I believe in my review of #2 earlier in the year I said there were four books in the series – not sure where I got that idea.) I won’t say anything about the plot of this one, because spoilers, but the series features a young …
Sci-fi short stories. The author is a physics prof whose current work and activist focus is climate change, and whose way of seeing the world reflects a deep and compassionate humanism. Clever, thoughtful, well-written. Many of the stories have a melancholy vibe – some quite directly linked to humanity’s actual bleak future as understood by …
A company history published by a Scottish insurance firm on the occasion of its centenary in 1905 – so, most definitely not my usual fare! This Goodreads entry is for a contemporary reprint by one of those outfits that do print-on-demand for old books, but I actually read an original edition which had belonged to …