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Reading the End Posts

The Other Slavery, Andrés Reséndez

I was going to start this post about The Other Slavery by making a really grim joke about Ir*sh sl*very (asterisked out so Nazi bros don’t find my blog), but then I just got hugely sad about living in a world where that’s still a lie people perpetuate instead of talking about real actual slavery. So instead I’ll start by saying that Andrés Reséndez has produced what feels to me like a monumental work of American history, delving deep into archival records to uncover the hidden story of American enslavement of indigenous people. Reséndez argues that while disease certainly played…

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Alias, Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos

Happy Monday! It’s time for another installment of Angry Feminism by Gin Jenny, this time aimed at Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos’s Alias, the comic on which the Netflix Jessica Jones show is (loosely) based. Ready? Let’s get into it! This review will be broken up into two parts, one where I come not to bury Alias but to praise it, and then one where I have an enormous BUT and some further thoughts on Feminism. The bulk of Alias is a procedural story about Jessica Jones, Private Eye. I like this about Alias. If I had a complaint…

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Gabi, a Girl in Pieces, Isabel Quintero

Okay, before I include a picture of the cover of Gabi a Girl in Pieces, I want you to know that I know that this cover is terrible. It’s a terrible cover that will nevertheless make you cry when you encounter the reason for it in the course of the book itself. By contrast, Gabi a Girl in Pieces is so totally non-terrible that you must instantly dash out and read it, particularly if you liked Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging1 but wished that it had more there there. Gabi is a Mexican-American girl in her last year of high…

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Angry White People, Hsiao-Hung Pai

By total coincidence, my hold on Angry White People came in the same week that Jo Cox was assassinated in England, apparently for her support of Britain’s presence in the EU and other liberalish political agendas. I heard the name “Nigel Farage” for the first and second times in this book and the news (respectively? not respectively? I don’t remember). The real reason I put a hold on it in the first place was that I’m interested in what makes people choose one belief over another one. I try — I do try — to ground my own beliefs in…

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Marriage Material, Sathnam Sanghera

Two things to know about Sathnam Sanghera’s Marriage Material: I don’t like comic (by which I mean humorous) (by which I mean that “funny” is a primary selling point in marketing materials) (actually it is sort of hard to describe exactly what I mean so never mind) novels. I’ve been wanting to read this one for years. So the thing is that I don’t care about comic (humorous?) novels or book awards, with a primary exception that I care very much about the Costa Book Awards. This is not, as catty persons have suggested, down to my excessive fondness for…

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Black Widow, Nathan Edmondson and Phil Noto

Or, that time I was deceived into reading more of Black Widow than I cared about (two trade paperbacks of it) because the art was so beautiful. I really cannot say enough about Phil Noto’s art. It’s dreamy and watercolory, and if I had one takeaway from this book aside from “please stop perpetuating harmful myths about domestic violence” (about which more later), it would be that I need to find every comic Phil Noto has illustrated and put it straight into my brain pan. Further investigation on the Marvel website has revealed that Phil Noto draws like he’s running…

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A General Theory of Oblivion, José Eduardo Agualusa

My A+ year with African literature continues in José Eduardo Agualusa’s A General Theory of Oblivion, translated by Daniel Hahn. When I first heard about this book, I believed I squawked at Whiskey Jenny, “Look, ooh, oh, look at this! It’s about an Angolan woman who walls herself up in her house during the Angolan fight for independence! Sounds amazing!” and Whiskey Jenny was like, “….Does it?” I get her point. When you read a lot about nations fighting free of colonialism, there are patterns of violence and oppression that repeat themselves in exhausting, predictable ways. Police oppression, warring ideologies, journalists…

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Mount Pleasant, Patrice Nganang

Mount Pleasant was translated from French by Amy Baram Reid, but don’t let that put you off. If you are a fan of Salman Rushdie and the way he writes about Indian myth and history, Patrice Nganang’s novel of colonial Cameroon is going to be right up your alley. There are stories that must be told just for the story itself, just for the story. This was one of them. A historian called Bertha comes to Cameroon to speak to a 90-year-old woman, Sara, who was given to the sultan Njoya when she was only a small child, to be…

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The Lie Tree, Frances Hardinge

When Faith’s family moves suddenly to an out-of-the-way island to conduct an archaeological dig, they do so under threat of suspicion and fear, though fear of what Faith isn’t told. (She’s only fourteen, and nice young ladies in the year 1868 don’t ask questions.) But Faith herself hopes that this will be her opportunity to show her father, a prominent archaeologist, that she can be a scholarly companion to him, that she is worth taking seriously. Once they reach the island, though, it becomes clear that her worth remains what it has always been: She’s as valuable as the trouble…

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The Book of Memory, Petina Gappah

Remember before, when I was reading Anthony Schneider’s Repercussions and talking all about how I wished I read more books about good people who are trying their best? Guess what happened! I read The Book of Memory, which is about an albino woman in Zimbabwe who’s in jail for murdering the white man to whom her parents sold her when she was nine years old. Guess what it is about! Contrary to expectation, it’s totally about good people trying their best! I know, I know, I know what you are thinking. You’re thinking: But, murder? But, selling a child to…

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