By page 2 of the introduction Hazard had already included trans people in her discussion and this is the book I was hoping to read. Good lord. It's not hard to include trans people! I'm still riled up about Hags. Anyway, this was an excellent book. It read like an investigative report but in a …
Continue reading "Womb: The Inside Story of Where We All Began – Leah Hazard"
My first DNF! I used to try and finish every book, but life is too short. I gave Smith 77 pages to lay out her argument, which as a middle-aged woman I was here for, but almost immediately she devolved into the kind of whining about cancel culture you can only expect from a TERF. …
Continue reading "Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women – Victoria Smith"
How do you resist a title like that. Have you ever had panic attacks? Have you ever sat and thought too deeply about how we're just electrically stimulated meat sacks and each of us will die through one of the many, many ways a human meat sack can die? Our narrator can't stop thinking like …
Continue reading "Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead – Emily Austin"
A family story that is all too relatable. We're in New Mexico where a teenager is pregnant, her dad (who had her when he was a teen) can't seem to get his life moving, and the grandmother who holds everyone and everything together chooses to face her own problems alone. You'll root for every character …
No, I have never seen the movie; no, westerns are not in my usual list of things to read; yes, this book was good. It was funny! Young Mattie is a very serious girl who has decided to avenge her father's death by hiring a U.S. Marshall to track down the killer and bring him …
A friend of mine hates when a book is a secret 9/11 book, so I'll tell you now that starting at page 115 and for about 5 pages we have to talk about 9/11. I mean, it makes sense, as this is a book about anomalies in flight and that was definitely something we hadn't …
Ames makes the case that workplace violence is the result of policies that dis-empower workers (like the union-busting, job exporting, shareholder takeovers that started under Reagan) but that the tendency to get used to any type of violence done to us by larger forces is a human one. People live with all sorts of awful …
Continue reading "Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion in America – Mark Ames"
560 pages which I finished in two days. I mean, it's Barbara Kingsolver, you can't go wrong. We're in deep Virginia here, down in the final county on the tiny tip of VA nearer to Tennessee than to me up here in Northern VA. Kingsolver uses the tale of own ward of the state, Damon, …
Another very weird book, this time with one chapter and a weird suburbia where everyone is developing defensive moats around their house and the ex-mayor is punished on the rack for stinger releasing missiles into the botanical garden. Antrim has a wild imagination and you never know where he's going next! It's a fun and …
Continue reading "Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World – Donald Antrim"
A very strange book by a fascinating author. I'd never heard of/read Ryman before, but I will again. This tale follows a young woman named Milena in an England that is far into the future. Here, there is no electricity, humans eat by photosynthesis (with purple skin), and everyone is "read" at age ten by …
Bookish & Inked