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Category: 3 Stars

We Love You, Charlie Freeman, Kaitlyn Greenidge

Note: I received a copy of We Love You Charlie Freeman from the publisher for review consideration. You know what there aren’t enough of, team? Books about chimp language research. I would read one a day on all the days if that were a possible thing, ever since I listened to the Lucy episode of RadioLab in 2010. And I lovety-love-loved a book that it’s a spoiler to tell you is about chimp language research even though that’s the only reason why I read it in the first place (don’t click the link if you are uptight about spoilers), and…

29 Comments

Bad News, Anjan Sundaram

“We have an oral culture,” he said. “People get nervous when you write. Writing also leaves proof. If you don’t write notes the world can be made different. People’s memories can always be questioned, molded.” Holy hell, this book. While I may have gripes with the author here and there, Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship captures the claustrophobic atmosphere of journalism in Rwanda. Sundaram opens the book with a story of traveling down a road in Kigali and hearing an explosion. When he goes to investigate, he witnesses a clean-up in progress, shards of glass being swept from…

16 Comments

Comics February Round-Up

Man. If this were any of the last three years, I would have failed at Comics February. But this year is Leap Year, and I am squeezing this post in just under the wire, because I want you to read Genius. And, I mean, I love Comics February as well. Just mainly I cannot understand why Genius hasn’t gotten more (and by “more” I mean “all the”) attention. Genius, Marc Bernardin, Adam Freeman, and Afua Richardson Shitdamn, this book was good. I’ve had a medium reading year thus far — nothing that I’ve hated (although see below re: puppy), but…

26 Comments

The City of Devi, Manil Suri

In some ways, The City of Devi is so perfectly on-trend you’ll roll your eyes. It’s the story of a dystopian future, and of a woman called Sarita who just wants to find her husband. There’s even a love triangle! And a superhero movie for everyone to be obsessed with! But in other ways, The City of Devi is like nothing I’ve read before. Pakistan (or some third party claiming to be as Pakistan) has vowed to drop a nuclear bomb on Mumbai / Bombay (the book’s agnostic as to which name it prefers) on a particular day, and the city is…

17 Comments

The Witches of Lychford, Paul Cornell

At first blush, you might turn up your nose at the premise of The Witches of Lychford, in which a group of slightly-misfit women in a quiet British town find themselves arrayed against the forces of darkness in the form of a proposed new superstore whose placement will (though most of the town does not realize it) open up the gates that separate our world from the world of the fairies. Like, you could see that premise and think it seemed heavy-handed. However, Paul Cornell — a veteran writer on Doctor Who, among other things, responsible for some of my…

13 Comments

The House of Shattered Wings, Aliette de Bodard

For the past few years, I’ve been working on making my reading less white. As Aarti keeps pointing out, this doesn’t require any shift in my book-reading habits, but only my book-finding habits. And one thing I have found is that if you follow more authors of color (on whatever social media platforms you wish), you’ll find more authors of color. I discovered Aliette de Bodard because I followed Zen Cho (author of Sorcerer to the Crown); since following Aliette de Bodard, I’ve added several more specfic books by authors of color to my TBR list. Because of signal-boosting. THAT…

25 Comments

Flood of Fire, Amitav Ghosh

Flood of Fire is the culmination of the least trilogy-like trilogy that ever trilogied, Amitav Ghosh’s The Ibis Trilogy, of which the first two were Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke (both excellent). In  the sense that it got the band back together (sort of) and shifted the reader into the early days of the Opium Wars (about which I really will learn more soon!), it was a superb conclusion to the trilogy. In the sense that it pinged some ick sensors of mine, it was my least favorite of the series. Do you remember that feeling when you…

25 Comments

A Wilderness of Error, Errol Morris

So okay. If you have read Janet Malcolm’s book The Journalist and the Murderer, which I have, or if you are interested in true crime, which I am not, you may have heard of this guy Jeffrey MacDonald, whose wife and two daughters were murdered and he said hippies did it. A Wilderness of Error is about this case and the many flaws and unreasonablenesses about the case the government (and popular culture) built against Jeffrey MacDonald. Morris has done an extraordinary amount of research into this case, conducting interviews with everyone who was involved in the case and survived to the…

23 Comments

A Darker Shade of Magic, V. E. Schwab

I am but human, friends. If you cut me, do I not bleed? If you design a supercool cover for a book about magical London, do I not eventually give in and get that book from the library? The protagonist of A Darker Shade of Magic, Kell, is a messenger between three separate Londons: In his own, Red London, where magic is common but his type of magic, Antari magic, is all too rare, he is something like a prince and something like a possession. In Grey London, he trades jokes with a mad king and meets a girl thief…

5 Comments

Not a dumb American: Liberia edition

So I knew that Liberia was colonized by free black Americans in the early 1800s, and I knew the name “American Colonization Society,” but I also thought these groups were one and the same. I thought the  American Colonization Society was a free black invention, like a sort of proto-Marcus-Garvey situation. What a silly, naive bunny I was to think that. The American Colonization Society was a bunch of white guys who came up with the great idea of sending all the free black people to Africa, which would serve the dual purpose of getting rid of black people the American government didn’t want, and maybe…

22 Comments