Rated Code 61 6/10
book
Finished reading Saevus Corax Gets Away with Murder
Wants to read Confessions of a Public Speaker
Rated Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite 8/10
A very brave and well-done piece of journalism; a Korean-American woman goes semi-undercover as an English teacher in an elite North Korean school. rare, compellingly-drawn glimpse into the deeply strange parallel universe of North Korea.
Rated Between the World and Me 8/10
Beautiful and important. A letter from the author to his teenage son about growing up black in America, and the very real risk of bodily harm that comes with it. A sharp, lyrical mixture of autobiography, history, and sociology, centered around the memory of a friend who died from police violence. Powerfully makes the case of America's racial divide not in abstract moral terms but viscerally, physically, in terms of injuries, rapes and death, in terms of exploited labor and stolen wealth and enforced poverty.
Rated Bird by Bird 8/10
This is lovely. Basically a writing class with a teacher with a free-floating mind. Anne Lamott just seems like a delight and she's tough, funny, practical, inspiring.
Rated D.C. Trip 6/10
Slight, endearing, often quite perceptive; a high school trip as seen through the eyes of both the sophomore students and the chaperoning teachers. Cutesy but funny, and a quick read.
Rated Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America 10/10
Really stunning - a well-researched story about crime and policing in Los Angeles, particularly the stubborn problem of a high risk of violent death for African American men. Manages to be interesting and compelling in a journalistic way, a theoretical way, and a novelistic way, with really empathetic and closely-observed portraits of real people affected by homicide. A tough read, but quick and informative.
Rated Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space 6/10
A layperson's guide to the physics and the human effort that went into the discovery of gravitational waves from massive, distant events like black hole collisions. I wanted to like this a little more than I did but it's still a nice clear story about a complicated subject and the complicated people who found a way to measure an elusive signal. Physics! It's weird!
Rated How to Be a Person in the World: Ask Polly's Guide Through the Paradoxes of Modern Life 8/10
I kind of want to buy a copy of this for everyone. I really love Havrilesky's generous, warm approach to life, and there's so many gems in this book. It's a *little* overwhelming to absorb what is, in essence, a collection of advice columns, but this one is thoughtful, engaging and a fast read, full of extremely well-put versions of truths I sort of know at 38 and wish I had understood better in my 20s. <br/><br/>"Every morning, you will wake up and see that life is all about fumbling and accepting that you're fumbling...life is about feeling your way through the dark."
Rated Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions 8/10
Bright, smart, no-nonsense: the author's letter to her sister upon becoming a mom, with advice for raising a feminist kid. It almost seems like cheating to count it as a book here, but there's a lot of insight and consideration packed into an hour or so's worth of reading.
Rated The Index Card: Why Personal Finance Doesn't Have to Be Complicated 8/10
a quick read that i highly recommend. compassionate, straightforward and realistic - simple tools to upgrade your financial practices offered without shaming or elaborate promises, and not premised on the idea that there are silver-bullet secrets.
Rated The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures 8/10
A thoughtful look at how DNA and heredity shape human lives. I enjoyed this but I feel like I have more critical things to say about it than good ones; it's a little messy and hard to explain what it's "about." Tonally, it reads like a book with an argument, but there isn't much of one; it's best approached as a series of essays about DNA, genealogy, and human history, rather than looking for a thesis or a through-line that isn't there. But it's full of insights and ideas that are challenging and eye-opening. <br/><br/>I had my guard up a little around this book because of the shoddy way these ideas are often used to justify inequity, but to the author's credit she doesn't either avoid or endorse those aspects of how we think about genetics and heredity. Instead, she does a really good job of swatting down that kind of thing, explicitly talking about the ways heredity has been used to oppress (including a chapter on the Nazis' obsession with ancestry), and also explaining how "race" is not a robust scientific concept. While the book doesn't explicitly address "Bell Curve"-style race-based genetic determinism, it's pretty good at showing implicitly that race-based genetic determinism is dumb. <br/><br/>I don't think she did a great job of explaining the science and mechanics of DNA - I found myself skimming past some stuff because I wasn't really getting it. There may be a ceiling for how technical she can get in a book for laypeople about the history and cultural ramifications of heredity rather than a science text. <br/><br/>Recommended, overall, but more as a set of angles and perspectives and case studies on its theme than as a single story. I've found myself thinking a lot about this book even when I'm not reading it.
Rated I'll Never Write My Memoirs 6/10
Fun, sharp, a really cool look at the worlds of music and fashion and life as a performer. She can get repetitive, self-contradictory, off on tangents and loose and vague about chronology, but it's still a pretty great read - Grace Jones is clever and charming, and very thoughtful and intentional about what she does.
Rated Right as Rain 6/10
a good, ever-so-slightly trashy DC-based mystery.
Rated An Untamed State 8/10
This is an incredible book - hard to read but also hard to put down. It's about a Haitian-American woman who gets kidnapped and held in horrific captivity in Haiti, and the effect it has on her. The writing is so good - powerful and emotional but very clear and controlled and and stark. I would love to be able to write anything like this.<br/><br/>Be forewarned: this book is pretty upsetting, one of the most intense and painful books I've read. For me it was worth it because it's so well-done, but go into it knowing what you're in for.
Really fantastic - highly recommend to anyone who works in politics, community outreach, etc etc. In-depth look at the nuts and bolts of the civil rights movement in the Delta region of Mississippi, particularly the local people who worked with SNCC. Thought-provoking and well-reported.
Rated The Free State of Jones: Mississippi's Longest Civil War 8/10
A new thing I learned: there was a small but real interracial anti-Confederate insurgency in southeastern Mississippi during the Civil War. The book is a little academic, with all that entails - it's quite narrow, somewhat dry, and takes for granted that you're well-read on the larger context. You have to read between the lines to get to the real meat of it, but when you do, there's a ton of fresh insight on the complicated relationship of race, gender and class in the South. The author's afterward, in which she explains her decision to let the book be the basis for a movie, is a great look at the role of the historian.
Rated Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City 8/10
Great book on DC's native-born party music; mixes sociology, personal essay, journalistic reporting to explain how go-go binds together Washington's black culture. Especially worth reading if, like me, you're a white person who moved to DC in the past decade - it's so easy to think of DC as just one thing when there's a whole other city happening.