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krrksch@kirja.casa

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Jonathan M. Metzl: Dying of Whiteness (Hardcover, 2019, Basic Books) No rating

Whiteness is politics of calculated harm, not ignorance of negative consequences

No rating

A difficult book to read, since it mostly talks about how people are harmed, and how society fails to protect & support them. The three main topics covered are gun ownership leading to (especially) suicide, opposition to government-provided healthcare leading to worse healthcare outcomes, and school funding cuts leading to many negative outcomes. Whiteness is a political doctrine which contains many jagged bits and pieces of ideology which don't necessarily fit together neatly. One of the things this book did for me was articulate that at least in the policy areas of guns and healthcare, white people aligned with the white political project are not ignorantly voting for harmful policies. The people interviewed know that widespread easy access to guns leads to more gun deaths, and they accept and acknowledge that as a reasonable cost of maintaining their rights. Likewise healthcare: there is no confusion about the fact that moving …

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Sonia Sulaiman: Thyme Travellers (2024, Fernwood Publishing Co., Ltd.) 5 stars

Thyme Travellers collects fourteen of the Palestinian diaspora’s best voices in speculative fiction. Speculative fiction …

Beautiful anthology

5 stars

It's not just that the title of this anthology is genius, these are stories of ghosts, encounters, lost lands, resistance and connexion, and they are heartbreaking in a million ways.

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Gerardo Sámano Córdova: Monstrilio (2023, Zando) 5 stars

Monstrilio

5 stars

Monstrilio is a hard novel for me to pin down. If I had to attach some labels to it I'd say literary fiction with a dash of horror.

It's a story rooted in loss: Magos and Joseph's son Santiago dies suddenly; Magos is enthralled by a tale about regrowing a child from its heart and so cuts out a piece of Santiago's lung from his body to do the same. As she feeds it and grows this lung, it becomes a monster that she treats as her son, and names Monstrilio. The book is divided into four parts from different perspectives: Magos, longtime friend Lena, Joseph, and finally Monstrilio.

But it's not just about grief, it's a story about family and relationships with the monstrous. Magos lives in denial and tries to believe her lung monster Monstrilio is her child Santiago again. Joseph speedruns acceptance and tries to forcibly conform …

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Rozsika Parker: The subversive stitch (1984, Women's Press) 3 stars

A good book on how femininity was historically constructed but the stitches weren't very subversive

3 stars

3 stars: enjoyed this book, you might like it too

This is kind of a weird review because I feel like it was a different book than what I expected.

What it ended up being was a history of how femininity was socially constructed, in the context of social class, in Britain over the last few hundred years, and how the construction of modern femininity (as distinct from medieval femininity) was very closely intertwined with the construction of social classes as the middle class emerged. It did this largely through the lens of embroidery. It felt surprisingly modern in how it talked about gender as something changing and socially constructed and existing in the context of other socially constructed concepts, but it did feel very narrowly focused on Britain and Britain-adjacent areas.

Except for at the end in the more modern area, I don't think it really demonstrated embroidery being …

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William Landay: All That Is Mine I Carry with Me (EBook, 2023, Bantam) 4 stars

One afternoon in November 1975, ten-year-old Miranda Larkin comes home from school to find her …

I have absolutely loved Landay's three previous books. He does something interesting every time. Mind you, this is only his 4th book, and it's been a decade since his last. Landay puts care into his novels; there's no churning them out. Aware of the gap, the book starts out with this:

After I finished writing my last novel, I fell into a long silence. You might call it writer’s block, but most writers don’t use that term or even understand it. When a writer goes quiet, nothing is blocking and nothing is being blocked. He is just empty.

I had to look… is this a preface or an introduction? No. It's the story. Landay is already doing something to engage me.

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Bogi Takács: Power to Yield and Other Stories (2023, Broken Eye Books) 5 stars

Power to Yield is a collection of speculative tales exploring gender identity, neurodivergence, and religion …

Outstanding collection, full of imagination and perspectives I'm not used to

5 stars

Wow. For one thing, it's very rare that I am consistently impressed with every story in a collection, even single-author ones. And it's a wonderfully varied collection too, in subject matter, mood, and form: everything from a two-page story that's actually satisfying to the title one which could have been published as a novella on its own. There are common themes about outsider perspectives and unexpected viewpoints, but a huge range of what those things actually mean. Many of the stories are clearly informed by the author being an intersex Jewish immigrant, but again that shows up in very different ways from one story to the next - this is not an author who just has one thing to say.

Content note: some of the stories have disturbing imagery and themes around abuse, body horror, and/or being trapped. There's a list of specific content notes at the back of the …

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Stuart Turton: The Last Murder at the End of the World (Hardcover, 2024, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc) 4 stars

The Last Murder at the End of the World

4 stars

I enjoy a good mystery novel on its own, but when one brings in enough worldbuilding that can stand on its own, it makes the mystery so much sweeter. Tainted Cup is one book I read earlier this year that did this to great effect, and The Last Murder at the End of the World strikes a different blend that kept me engaged the whole way through. Unlike Stuart Turton's previous time loop-esque murder mystery, I found this one to be temporally more straightforward and the worldbuilding to be much stronger and more intriguing. There's still plenty of red herrings, questions, and multilayered deceptions.

The premise is delightful. The first quarter of the book is an intriguing worldbuilding and character introduction. The earth is covered in a deadly fog and a single Greek island is the only part free from the apocalypse. The villagers and elders who live on this …

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Premee Mohamed: Butcher of the Forest (EBook, 2024, Titan Books) 5 stars

A world-weary woman races against the clock to save two children from an enchanting but …

Butcher of the Forest

5 stars

For a moment only she allowed herself to be irritated that the woods could take as much of her blood as they liked, while she was not permitted to take even a drop of theirs; it wasn’t fair, nothing in here was fair. That was how it worked. No different without than within.

Forced into a second journey into a magic forest that nobody has ever gotten out (but her), Veris is tasked with going back and retrieving a tyrant's two children before the day is done and they are lost forever. It opens strong, with Veris being kidnapped from her home and forced into this very unwanted task. The forest is deeply creepy in a way that manages to feel fresh--there's dead sentinel deer corpses; a floating "cloth" manages to be one of the most terrifying monsters; there's also bargains, games, and tricks galore. I quite enjoyed this novella. …

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Hans Zinsser: Rats, Lice and History (Hardcover, 1996, Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, Distributed by Workman Pub. Co.) No rating

The classic chronicle of the impact disease and plagues have had on history and society …

I am over 160 pages into this book which is ostensibly a biography of typhus, and so far it has covered at length:

  • the nature of art,
  • whether or not he should write this book,
  • the origins and fundamentally parasitic nature of life,
  • the role of epidemic disease in various periods of history, each section of which he concludes that there's no reason to think typhus was present at that time.

It's the perfect book; it's like he wrote this book just for me.