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 …
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 …
A short book by an English academic that explores “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (2). In order to build movements that can once again threaten to transform capitalism, we must …
A trilogy of fantasy books republished under a single cover. My inclination is to describe it as “high-concept fantasy,” because it is based on asking a very thinky-yet-clear what-if and then seeing how it plays out, but I worry that label makes it sound obscure and inaccessible when in fact it is compulsively readable. The …
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 …
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, …