Wants to read Golden Hill: A Novel of Old New York
book
Wants to read The War of the End of the World
Rated Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval 8/10
A remarkable and unusual social history, composed of novelistic vignettes drawn out from scanty archival material about the lives of Black women in the early 20th century. The project here is to center as history the lives of people who are on the margins and whose stories don’t get told in the traditional forms of history - Black, poor, queer, and otherwise in violation of the norms of a heavily policed and stratified era.
Inspirational reading..?
Edited 86d ago
Rated Persuasion 10/10
the ability to accurately narrate a character’s interior justification at face value and yet still convey the gap between it and the real world is a kind of magic trick, and to also make it funny, a little miracle
Rated Sleepless Nights 6/10
Not really my thing, I guess - a sort of flown lyrical amalgamation of remembrances that don’t really hang together.
Rated Velvet Was the Night 8/10
A clever and compelling thriller set against the backdrop of political repression in 1970s Mexico.
Finished reading Sing, Unburied, Sing
Rated The Island of Missing Trees 8/10
A very sweet, lyrical and sad story about an expatriate family from Cyprus living in London and the past that brought them there.
Wants to read The Lions of Al-Rassan
Finished reading Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror
Rated A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History 10/10
An important book; an excellent and scathing look at the fable version of US civil rights history and a reality check about the real version - a story of radical vision, long-ranging organizing, incomplete victories, brutal nationwide opposition, youth mobilization, true disruption, and, critically, hope. An extension of Theoharis’ terrific Rosa Parks biography. If I had one critique it’s that it can be a little rhetorically repetitive, but the point is so vital that it’s worth restating: the civil rights movement is not an inevitable and complete victory by a few noble heroes, it’s an unfinished mass movement. Would love to see an update someday that adds a chapter on the George Floyd protests and the “anti-woke” racist backlash.
Rated World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music 8/10
This is fun - breezy and modest, building on Tweedy’s skill as a storyteller and passionate fandom about music. Like a conversation with a friend in a bar when a good one comes on the radio.
Rated A Closed and Common Orbit 10/10
Brilliant plotting. I think I was three quarters of the way through it, maybe farther before the great big penny dropped. Not a surprise coming from Becky Chambers: this is a wonderful space opera about friendship, family and love.
Rated T. rex and the Crater of Doom 8/10
A brief and fun work of popular science that’s partly about its subject matter - the discovery of the impact that killed the dinosaurs - and partly about the process of science generally, showing the long, unsteady process of collaboration across countries and disciplines that led to the solution of one of the great mysteries. I very much remember “what happened to the dinosaurs?” as a live and possibly unsolvable problem when I was a kid and it’s remarkable that we learned the answer during my lifetime.
Reading Katabasis
Rated Automatic Noodle 8/10
Very SF SF, and fun. I had a problem keeping the cast of robots in my head (which one is the octopus and how does that work again?) but that might just be because my head is really old.
Wants to read Parable of the Talents