I have found 2016 somewhat dispiriting. Not that good things haven’t happened in 2016. My first-ever nephew is presently incubating, for instance. I got to go see Hamilton. I discovered this conceptual framework called mattering maps that blew my brains out through the back of my head.1 But also, like, it’s been a rough year. July has been a particularly rough month to be a liberal girl in Louisiana.2 THEREFORE. Believe me when I say that The War That Saved My Life is the balm for my soul that I needed. I saw it on the counter at my mum’s…
21 CommentsReading the End Posts
Alton Sterling was killed in Louisiana on Tuesday, July 5th. Roxane Gay talks about his life and his death. Rembert Browne on people who don’t want anyone not like them to exist at all. Ijeoma Olua on the tragedy in Dallas and how we should (and shouldn’t) respond to it. Ta-Nehisi Coates on the unbreakable link between violence by police officers and violence against them. In the wake of Black Lives Matter pulling out of the Pride parade in San Francisco due to increased police presence, some thoughts on the disconnect between the two major civil rights fights of our…
8 CommentsI 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…
30 CommentsHappy 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…
13 CommentsOkay, 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…
21 CommentsBy 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…
43 CommentsTwo 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…
28 CommentsOr, 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…
11 CommentsMy 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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