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 CommentsCategory: 3 Stars
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 CommentsFor 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 CommentsSo 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 CommentsI 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 CommentsSo 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