Brienne of Tarth, from Game of Thrones: tough, loyal, and completely un-girly. Jessica Jones, from Marvel comics: badass, superhuman strength, helps people while dealing with her own trauma. Hermione Granger: brilliant, intellectual, compassionate, and brave. Violet, Hannah, Dee, and Betty from Rat Queens: sex-positive, booze-guzzling, death-dealing battle maidens for hire, and also a family. Jo…
Category: Favorites
The Eye of the World, by Robert Jordan
Three and a half to four stars. Read for the first time in 2007, and again in February 2021. Some things Robert Jordan writes too much of: What songs are called in different places where the characters travel People using made-up swear words unbearably earnestly How Aes Sedai can’t be trusted (they never lie, but…
We Were Eight Years in Power, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Five stars, read in November 2017. This book covers the eight years of Barack Obama’s presidency. For each year, there is an article Coates wrote for The Atlantic, preceded by an essay (“a sort of extended blog post,” I think is how he describes it) in which he looks back on his own work and assesses…
ME, by Tomoyuki Hoshino
Five stars, read in January 2018. I’ve had this post in my drafts for a few months now, because there was so much for me to work through. I did not expect the direction this book ended up taking, on more than one level. It was brilliant, disturbing, astonishingly incisive commentary on human nature and identity—and…
Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . and Why, by Sady Doyle
Five stars, read in January 2018. This book was like an electric jolt to me. I was genuinely frustrated every minute that I couldn’t be listening to it on Overdrive, and I wish it could’ve been twice as long. I don’t follow much pop culture, so although I’d heard of most of these stories in…
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Americanah, read April 30 – May 1, 2014 I go back and forth between 4 and 5 stars, I think because the ending didn’t have as much of an impact as I was expecting. But then I remember how I basically devoured this book, loving every minute that I was reading, feeling completely absorbed and…
The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath
Four stars, read in January 2018. For most of the book I was going to give it five stars, but it seems to divide itself into two sections (before her suicide attempt and after), and I felt much more strongly about the first section. I loved it, I related closely to upsetting amounts of it, I…
Princeless: Raven the Pirate Princess, Vol. 2: Free Women, by Jeremy Whitley
Three and a half stars, read in December 2016. Oh, man. Volume one was so incredible. I still can’t wait to read volume three, and I hope there will be more forever and ever. I don’t know why everyone had to be such a dick in this one, though. Why did Des-whatever her name is…
New Volumes of My Favorite Comics
Saga, Vol. 8, by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples. Four stars. Excellent as always, less robot penis than usual, so plenty of good news. For the bad news, in chapter 47: oh my god, Brian K. Vaughan, no, absolutely fucking not. That is too far. Such excruciatingly graphic sexual violence against women is fetishistic, and…
We Need—I Needed—N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy Right Now
Five stars each and for the series as a whole; read mostly in December 2017. I read this series for the past two weeks of 2017, and it is so annoyingly perfect that The Stone Sky was the first book I finished in 2018. My stony, cynical heart doesn’t want to feel as hopeful as this…
Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, by Cathy O’Neil
Five stars, read in December 2017. I’ve read a lot of nonfiction this year that I consider to be important, even essential to the goal of social justice. There was Bertrand Russell, Christopher Hitchens, Susan Jacoby, and Sam Harris on the damaging nature of religion and anti-intellectualism; Angela Davis, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison,…
The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth about Food and Flavor, by Mark Schatzker
Five stars for the outstanding information and research, though I’m questioning now whether I should have deducted a star for the pervasive and very off-putting fat-shaming. Read in November 2017. I brought this book home after reading the blurb on the back and realizing that this must be, finally, the thing that would explain my…
The Bedlam Stacks, by Natasha Pulley
Five stars, read in September 2017. I’ve never read anyone who writes male characters the way Natasha Pulley does, and it’s irresistible to me. This book took longer to get going, but it’s also more polished than her first book; by the end, I’d fallen in love with Merrick and Raphael nearly as hard as…
The Bonesetter’s Daughter, by Amy Tan
Five stars, read in October/November 2017. It’s been several years since I last read Amy Tan and I was starting to wonder whether her books were a phase I’d grown out of. They are not. I deeply loved everything about this book, including (especially) the fact that in the audiobook, LuLing’s sections are beautifully narrated…
The Age of American Unreason, by Susan Jacoby
Four stars, read in July 2017. The most consistent theme of my experience reading this book was oh my god, if she said this ten years ago, what would she say now? I have minor differences with Jacoby, but her premise is clearly, demonstrably correct: in whatever our current age is called, almost nothing in…
That Old Ace in the Hole, by Annie Proulx
Five stars, read in October 2017. I started with this at four stars, planning to bump it up to five if it stuck with me after a couple weeks. Annie Proulx is just . . . a master. How did I just read a book about all the things I find least interesting in the…
The Bookshelf Test
You know how you can get to know someone just by looking at their bookshelves? It’s my favorite part of meeting someone new. So here’s my shelf—these are some of my favorite books (in no particular order), the ones I love and own, or plan to own, and feel like I should say hi when…
Tonoharu, by Lars Martinson
Four stars, read in March 2017, then again in August. I didn’t write what I thought about each book as I finished it, so I can only think of the trilogy as a whole—but you really have to read all three, so it’s just as well. The story is written a bit confusingly; the two…
Notes on a Harry Potter Reread
These are small posts that come from my old blog, but which I hadn’t previously reposted here, from the last time I reread the Harry Potter series (in 2014). Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone I wish I could remember exactly how many times I’ve read the earlier books in the series; obviously it’s more…
An Autobiography, by Angela Davis
Five stars, read in April 2017. Yes, once again a post has taken me this long to write. For years I have been meaning to find out more about Angela Davis, and as so often happens, now that I’ve finally met her books I cannot believe it took me so long—or that in all my reading, she’s…
God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, by Christopher Hitchens
Four stars, read in July 2017. In my quest to start reading the famous atheists, I discovered several Christopher Hitchens quotes that earned him the next place on the list. As with Richard Dawkins, I’m letting myself try out his books in a sort of vacuum, wanting to engage with their ideas before I have…
The Fire Next Time, by James Baldwin
Five stars, read in June 2017. First lesson learned from listening to James Baldwin on audio: I cannot listen to James Baldwin on audio. Jesse Martin’s narration is excellent (I knew I recognized his voice but had to look him up to learn that what I know him from is Rent), but James Baldwin is…
Invisibles: The Power of Anonymous Work in an Age of Relentless Self-Promotion, by David Zweig
Four stars, read in August 2017. Really enjoyed this exploration of the people who work in jobs we never know about until something goes wrong, like data analysts for intelligence agencies (9/11), the people who design election ballots (the 2000 election in Florida), or fact-checkers (weapons of mass destruction in Iraq). I learned about several…
Human Acts, by Han Kang
Five stars, read in April 2017. I kept not returning this book to the library because I wanted to go back through and get quotes for this post, but when I tried to do it, I felt like it was too late. This book is much too intense an experience to just dip back in…
Milk and Honey, by Rupi Kaur
Five stars, read in May 2017. Man, I have not been keeping up with things lately. I’ve started a new job and no longer have all the blogging time I used to, but the only computer we have at home is a shitty laptop that is so shitty I never want to use it. So…
In the Miso Soup, by Ryu Murakami
Five stars, read on the last day of September 2016. I should have written about this back then, because now I won’t be able to remember details. But this book was so notable that I still feel I need to post something about it. For several years Ryu has just been the other Murakami, the one who gets in…
Why We Can’t Wait, by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Five stars, read in January 2017. If you want a perfect example of why this book is (STILL) necessary, consider this: It’s a book about the same time period, the same issues, as To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee—the book nearly every person in the United States had to read in school. While I…
Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, by Jane Mayer
Five stars, read from November 2016 to January 2017. Well. If you want to know why the United States looks the way it does in 2017, this is your book. (All emphasis in quotes is mine, and all the sources are named in the book.) Charles and David Koch. Richard Mellon Scaife. John Olin. Richard…
Jessica Jones: Alias, by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos (+ The Pulse)
Five stars, read throughout 2016. Jessica Jones is one of my absolute favorite characters from Marvel comics. She is superhumanly strong, angry, and utterly unapologetic. She has relationships, and they are in no way the focus of her story. She is dealing with trauma, which makes her vulnerable, but never delicate. She wears heavy boots,…
Why I Am Not a Christian, by Bertrand Russell
Seven hundred stars. Read in January 2016. Just kidding: It’s only five. I’ve just never read a book that I agreed with so closely. This is what my book looks like now that I’ve finished: And probably half of those blades of grass represent two or more sections on the same page spread. I think I’ve…
Meanwhile the World Goes On 