A mental health-related self-help book that I heard about because a friend posted this interview with the author connecting it to writing practice, and it was enough to intrigue me: http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/…/writing-brain-exercise-i…/. I have some significant misgivings, which I talk about below, but there are some core practices in this book that feel solid, useful to me, …
A book of essays – genre-bending ones – by someone who is “sometimes called a poet, sometimes an essayist, sometimes a lyric essayist, sometimes a prose poet” (101). Some are about writing, many are about life, and most feel like they follow closely the fluid movement of the author’s mind. Some cleverness and some lovely …
A fascinating book about how humanity went from being entirely comprised of peoples who were organized in relatively small, mobile groups who met their needs via a bunch of different practices generalized as “hunting and foraging,” through the beginnings of sedentary living, agriculture, and the eventual formation of states. To the extent that we think …
A sweet if somewhat insubstantial graphic novel. It is set on a space station orbiting a no-longer-habitable Earth. The first generation to grow up on the station have reached their early 20s, and under the mantra of “Honesty keeps us alive” in such confined and precarious circumstances they have developed a relational/sexual culture distinct from …
The author is primarily a poet, I think, but the back bills this book as “lyric essay/poetry,” which is an apt characterization. Along with the images sprinkled throughout there are some fragments that are clearly poetry, but most of the text is comprised of paragraphs written like they are from particularly lyrical personal essays. They …
A short sci-fi novel from the late, great Ursula LeGuin, originally published in 1972. I discovered once I was part of the way through reading it that it is the fifth in a cycle of books she set in the same universe, none of which I have read before, but that didn’t seem to matter. …
A short, accessible, measured, and methodical book that lays out what the author describes as a “reconstructed historical materialism” – that is, a way of understanding the world and of orienting our struggles to change it that fuses a critical marxist approach to class relations with the many other axes of oppression with which they …
Sequel to Son of a Trickster. Jared’s coming-of-age journey continues, now in Vancouver and with a focus on holding tight to his sobriety while doing his best to refuse the supernatural side of the world that he stumbled into at the end of the first book. As with book one, the writing was great and …
Last year or the year before, I stumbled across the fact that the rural southern Ontario township in which I lived until I was 18 had been the site of a major Black settlement in the mid-19th century. I had no idea, and I suspect the vast majority of people who live there have no …
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 …