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 …
A book with some useful and important ideas, but one I was not as able to like as I’d hoped. It sets out to demonstrate that everyday resistance has been historically pervasive and crucial to successful struggle, and to argue that movements in North America today need to do more to understand how everyday resistance …
Scholarly. Postcolonial, feminist, invested in dismantling our current oppressive formation of “the human.” In particular, its focus is “mastery,” which it understands as a sort of shared logic that links and informs many different scales of phenomena, contexts, practices, and experiences, including those that are easily legible as instances of oppression and domination but lots …
Did not at all intend this, but somehow this is my second LA-based, relationship-focused contemporary which draws heavily on the film industry of this year. Felt a little more substantive in some respects than a lot of the non-literary contemporaries I’ve read in the last few years. I liked the characters and the relationships and …
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 …