#political nonfiction

[tododeku-or-bust]

So my friend @toiletpotato suggested this TEDTalk on another post where I suggested reading some Kimberlé Crenshaw, and frankly.... You all need to watch it. If you want to understand the frustrations, fears, and the perspectives of being Black women and how and why our needs are different, and you want a place to start? Watch this video. If you really want to be that intersectional, true feminist and ally? Watch this video. If you want to be better, it's time to do better, and I think this is a very good introduction.

The Urgency of Intersectionality- Kimberlé Crenshaw (version w/transcript)

[a-typical]

— On Palestine: Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappé (2015)

[hedgehog-moss]

My top 10 nonfiction reads of 2023 (the asterisked ones are in French with no translation as of yet) :

Belle Greene, Alexandra Lapierre

The Indomitable Marie-Antoinette, Simone Bertière

Reporter: A Memoir, Seymour Hersh

Red Carpet: Hollywood, China and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy, Erich Schwartzel

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, Patrick Keefe

Servir les riches, Alizée Delpierre*

La Comtesse Greffulhe : L’ombre des Guermantes, Laure Hillerin*

Le Courage de la nuance, Jean Birnbaum*

The Book Collectors of Daraya, Delphine Minoui

Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea's Feminist Movement, Hawon Jung

[stuckinapril]

About to deep clean & rearrange my bookcase …… I am about to be a girl reborn

[gor3sigil]

I did a bunch of digital art projects and writing about transness, being a freak, the journey I took from being an insecure girl to who I am today, and I'm starting to consider making a zine out of it.

Digital, because I can't afford to print it, but just for people to read through and if it can help others feel less alone in the process, I'll be super duper happy.

Maybe I'll do that. I don't have much knowledge in graphic design though so it'll take time lmao but it's a fun project !

[deanmarywinchester]

previous years: 2022, 2021 / list of worst sf/f/horror

the bangers were BANGING this year, I kept mentally readjusting my top 5 list every time I read something good so the honorable mentions are extremely honorable this year. I hope you read anything that sounds good from this list and tell me about it!

top 5:

chain gang all stars by nana kwame adjei-brenyah: when I say that this book is like the hunger games for adults, I’m not making a glib comparison between two books about fighting to the death, I’m saying that I haven’t felt so intensely about a book since I stayed up late to tear through the hunger games and sob about it when I was thirteen. this book is satire as real and devastating as I’ve ever read, with action scenes that feel like they’re being dripped directly into my hindbrain and a unique and believable love story. put it on hold at your library literally RIGHT now.

the actual star by monica byrne: about a post-climate catastrophe utopian society built around a religion started by a teenage girl in 2012 based on mayan traditions, and also about the teenage girl, and also about the maya. this book made me crazy because the future society felt real enough to touch, with its radical openness and collectivity solving problems that exist today but causing new ones that are totally novel and meaty and interesting to dig into. read it if you’re interested in different ways of being.

the spear cuts through water by simon jiménez: really, REALLY good, fresh, original epic fantasy. jimenez picks a few perspectives to stick to but hops fluidly into bystanders’ brains to give you their perspectives, so even background characters feel fleshed-out and no one’s pain is dismissed as a side effect of heroic battles or whatever. highly recommended if you like framing narratives and stories about stories, and like epic fantasy but wish it wasn’t mostly about finding acceptable enemies to slaughter with cool swords

the dispossessed by ursula k. le guin: I love how much this book is about hope as clear-eyed commitment to the boring and difficult work of a brighter and necessary future. sometimes the work of the glorious anarcho-communist revolution is leaving your university post and romantic partner for months at a time to dig irrigation ditches so nobody starves when there’s a drought. read this book for diplomatic conniving, a clash of values between a capitalist planet and its dissident moon, and hope.

imperial radch trilogy and its spinoffs by ann leckie: what if you were built to be a weapon of the empire, a serene sentient battleship with thousands of human bodies all containing your consciousness, and you lost all bodies but one and had to figure out how to be a person, singular and alone? what if you were a 19th century british military officer and you slept for a thousand years into the decline of the empire? what if you were grown in a vat to be a facsimile of human and then told off for eating all your siblings even though eating them was SO interesting? what then. leckie’s prose is incisive and funny, her unreliable narrators are wonderful, and her stories are intimate even though the backdrops are insanely huge. 👍.

honorable mentions:

house of leaves by mark z. danielewski: guys? anyone hearda this one? anyway. Something Is Wrong With This House horror with themes of storytelling and grief. recommending that you slam this book as fast as possible like I did so you can hold all its layers in your head at once.

the lathe of heaven by ursula k le guin: i thought I didn’t like ursula k le guin, and then I read this book, went OH and immediately devoured the hainish cycle. im so sorry miss ursula. this book about a hapless pacific northwesterner whose therapist is making him dream different realities into being is so sharp and sly and funny. themes of choices, ends and means.

he who drowned the world by shelley parker-chan: I liked the prequel to this addition to the radiant emperor duology. I LOVED this book. parker-chan has invented new and exciting modes of fucked-up codependency and im obsessed. historical light-fantasy with themes of ideals vs what it takes to reach them, gender, and regret.

babel by r. f. kuang: found the didacticism of this book annoying, but i really loved the concept of this novel and the way it slowly ratchets up the stakes. this novel is for people who want to smash the fun of the magic school genre against the reality of universities’ complicity in the imperial machine.

piranesi by susannah clarke: im late to this book but it’s such a weird little gem. peaceful yet unsettling. a man takes care of an endless house with an ocean inside it until he realizes the house is stealing his memories. themes of memory and devotion.

hell follows with us by andrew joseph white: I can only read YA these days if it’s a reread or if it’s genuinely good and really really strange. this is that. weird gory fantasy about a trans teen who escapes his militarized post-apocalyptic christian cult and finds himself turning into something Different. my only gripe is that he uses 2023-perfect language to describe transness and I think he should be inventing genders weve never even thought of. such is YA.

some desperate glory by emily tesch: a rolickin’ good space opera time with terrible women <3. a thriller about how the golden child of her isolated human-supremacist space station cult deprograms and the consequences of it. this feels like a grown-up SPOP until the theoretical physics gets involved. big fan

the library of mount char by scott hawkins: this book is harrow the ninth in suburbia until it becomes a more macabre version of the absurdity of the gomens apocalypse. God raises his children, sometimes brutally, to hone their powers in a neighborhood that mysteriously keeps out outsiders. came for the dysfunctional mess of the god-children and now I can never look at a grill the same way

runners up:

bunny by mona awad: books that make you WISH you were in mona awad’s MFA program where she must have been having a terrible time. the weird one out in an MFA program accepts overtures into the unbearable rich-girls’ clique to find out what they’re Up To. themes of aimlessness and the intersection of class with the art world

camp damascus by chuck tingle: have you ever wished that you were simply too autistic to be successfully demonically brainwashed into not having gay thoughts? horror-flavored thriller that was just fun

light from uncommon stars by ryka aoki: this author put a bunch of genres in a blender and came up with something fun and surprisingly cozy. an immortal woman must sell violinists’ souls to the devil in exchange for their fame, or he’ll drag her to damnation instead. there might be aliens and coffeeshop romance involved. definitely a blender.

the fragile threads of power by v. e. schwab: if you haven’t read a darker shade of magic and you like tightly paced high fantasy and historical fantasy elements, political intrigue, and pirates, read that first. if you have, there’s more now! lila bard are you free on thursday when I am free

the library of the dead & our lady of mysterious ailments by t. l. huchu: a teenage girl provides for her family in soft-apocalypse magic edinburgh with a job carrying messages from ghosts to their living relatives. an ongoing mystery series about the intrigues she uncovers among the dead.

severance by ling ma: this books is on the list of media that is the terror to me: it's about an apocalyptic disease that makes people reenact their routines mindlessly until they collapse. intimate apocalypse novel with themes of late capitalist malaise.

ocean’s echo by everina maxwell: i didn't really like winter's orbit because i'm just not a romance guy, but this second novel stands alone and the romance is more insane and less of the entire point of the novel. (also it's between essentially Discworld's Carrot and Moist Von Lipwig, which is. really something.) in the Space Military, a buttoned-up mind controller must pretend to bend a socialite with illegal mind-reading powers to his will. what if fake relationship but the relationship they have to fake is "brain linked master/servant pair."

the murderbot diaries by martha wells: novellas about a misanthropic security android who jailbroke itself in order to watch tv. the name "murderbot" is a joke but it very much did kill people <3 themes of paranoia and outsiderhood, corporate wrongdoing, repentance, and trust

black water sister by zen cho: zen cho is good at any kind of fantasy she writes, including this, her first modern fantasy novel. a closeted lesbian has to move in with her family in malaysia after college in the US, only to discover that her dead grandmother has some unfinished business involving a local goddess and a conniving real estate developer. themes of family, gender, and place.

the way inn by will wiles: a man who’s paid to pretend he’s other people to attend conferences in their place gets trapped in an endless Marriott. has the sharp humor of a colson whitehead corporate satire until it becomes more straightforwardly horror-flavored.

[haveyoureadthistransbook]

Gender/Fucking: The Pleasures and Politics of Living in a Gendered Body by Florence Ashley

goodreads

Featuring critical essays, erotica, and stitched-up memories, Gender/Fucking explores sexual arousal as a site of knowledge about the self and world. Taking the idea of intellectual masturbation a bit too literally, Florence Ashley draws on their experiences as a transfeminine activist, academic, and slut to interrogate what it means to live in a gendered body in our difficult yet occasionally loving world. With personal essays about the fetishization of trans bodies, recovering from surgery, and losing hope, Florence’s collection celebrates the queer messiness of sex and identity. Through the embrace of its raw and lyrical prose, Gender/Fucking invites the reader into the intimate world of academic smut to ask what it means to be horny on main in a sex-negative world—and what power it might hold.

Mod opinion: I haven't heard of this book before, but it sounds really, really interesting!

[misforgotten2]

A book you very likely don’t have on your shelf (and why would you?) #667

[sleepysera]

"National identities have to take root. Their roots are in urban public spaces: newspapers, magazines and coffee shops, where intense discussions and the exchange of ideas take place. For these identities to take root, it is also important that they be free, that they grow from below, rather than being planted from above."

-Yaroslav Hrytsak, Ukraine (2022)

[cuntylittlesalmon]

For example, we can imagine ourselves participating in good faith conversations on a new social media platform about a particular social issue. This platform is structure, of course, by designers employed by the company owners, who build and manage algorithms that direct the traffic of posts and courage consumer engagement. As we talk on this platform, its feature begin to affect our behavior: simpler takes attract comments and shares, affecting what people say on the platform. The tech-company owners get the lion's share of the revenue generated by the site's traffic, driven by our conversations, and a small number of site participants get the lion's share of attention directed the activity on the platform. An elite emerges. It would be a mistake, however, to understand everything that happens on the platform as a process orchestrated by the elites. They are its results, like the platform's unequal distribution of the profit and attention itself. Elites do often make the environment worse and block solutions, but to blame the problem of elite capture entirely on their moral successes and failures is to confuse effect for cause. The true problem lies in the system itself, the built environment and rules of interaction that produced the elites in the first place.

— Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else)

[tododeku-or-bust]

"So long as some readily identifiable African Americans are doing well, the system is largely immunized from racial critique. People like Barack Obama who are truly exceptional by any standards, along with others who have been granted exceptional opportunities, legitimate a system that remains fraught with racial bias- especially when they fail to challenge, or even acknowledge, the prevailing racial order. In the current era, white Americans are often eager to embrace token or exceptional African Americans, particularly when they go out of their way not to talk about race or racial inequality."

The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander

Emphasis mine. Especially since I was told recently that calling certain Black people "token negroes" made me "not as virtuous as I thought". Discussing race is essential, and that means pointing out when someone that looks like you is being weaponized against you.

[a-typical]

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine - Ilan Pappé (2006)

[thatstudyblrontea]

Can one divide human reality, as indeed human reality seems to be genuinely divided, into clearly different cultures, histories, traditions, societies, even races, and survive the consequences humanly? By surviving the consequences humanly, I mean to ask whether there is any way of avoiding the hostility expressed by the division, say, of men into "us" (Westerners) and "they" (Orientals).

Edward W. Said, Orientalism

[discoursets]

“Kasuri also gives us a rare insight into the minds of the Pakistan Army, the contribution of the Foreign Office and his warm but complex relationship with President Musharraf. Blending analysis with choice anecdote, Neither a Hawk nor a Dove gives us a comprehensive and revealing account of Pakistan’s politics and the political compulsions of those at the helm.” 🌱

[fredersen]

holy shit why is every podcast so bad

[safirefire]

Link to David Hume’s essay Of the First Principles of Government

It is a very short read and the website links his other works as well but given Sunrise on the Reaping is based on Hume’s implicit submission and the current American political landscape I’d like to highlight:

“…Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular. ”

and

“Upon these three opinions, therefore, of public interest, of right to power, and of right to property, are all governments founded, and all authority of the few over the many.”