Tag: Books

Weekly media report – 2025 07 16

Books
Stone and Sky, by Ben Aaronovitch. Most recent of the Rivers of London books, in which the gang goes to Aberdeen to find out what’s up with a mysterious sheep-eating cat, and ends up involved with merfolk, selkies, North Sea oil, and Scottish independence. I’ve actually been to Aberdeen once and it felt right to me. I really enjoyed the Abigail/foxes subplot more than usual, and I was fascinated by Beverly and the babies. Also, kudos to Ben for getting around Brexit.
Last Call at the Nightingale and The Last Drop of Hemlock. First two books in a 1920s set mystery series centering on a jazz bar in New York. Our heroine is an Irish orphan who stumbles into two mysteries. The supporting cast is diverse and the mysteries are interesting: the first one involves a body found outside the club and gets into whiskey runners and gangsters; the second involves the demise of our heroine’s (Black) best friend’s uncle and has some great twists. There are 2 or 3 more in the series and I’m definitely down for the lot of them.
Picks & Shovels by Cory Doctorow. I’m glad he writes from the perspective of a (sometimes really dumb even though he’s really smart) man, because the story he’s telling in this one would be unbearable if he were trying to write from a woman’s POV. Third in the Martin Hench series, this one tells a story about Marty’s arrival in San Francisco in the 1980s and his involvement in the quarrel between a religious computer company and the women who left them and tried to take them down. I like these books a lot; I just don’t like the protagonist very much even when he’s theoretically doing the right thing. Also, the overall ending was strong, even the parts I didn’t like.
Death by Misadventure, by Tasha Alexander. 18th in the Lady Emily series. Lady Emily and her husband do a locked room mystery in the Bavarian Alps. I correctly predicted the killer but not the reasoning, which was well-done. This series has the annoying past-history interspersions but this time I figured out the significance about halfway through the book and thought it was much more interesting than the previous books: it explained a lot more about the current mystery than the interspersed stories have in the past.
The Lily of Ludgate Hill and The Muse of Maiden Lane by Mimi Matthews. Third and fourth in the four-hander Regency romances in the Belles of London series, in which four horse-riding friends get paired off. Book three involves one of the girls calling in a favor from an old flame. Timewise this is interspersed with events from the previous books in a very clever way. Book four involves the aftermath of those events and ties in with them the same way. This time the clergyman’s sister has to forsake her home to get her independence and her man, who’s a disabled artist (he can’t walk after a bout of scarlet fever). The way the series ties the books together is really clever.
Miss Caroline Bingley: Private Detective, by Sharmini Kumar & Kelly Gardiner. Inspired by the side characters in Pride & Prejudice, this one uses a Regency mystery as a jumping-off point to get into the history of the East India Company and subcontinental Indians in Regency London. By the end of the book we have Caroline set up with an Anglo-Indian lady friend, a possible romance/foil in the Company, friends and allies and enemies, so I expect there to be another one.
A Daughter’s Guide to Mothers and Murders, by Dianne Freeman. 8th in the Countess of Harleigh series. This time Frances and her husband are in 1900-ish Paris, at Longchamps and dealing with a mystery in which the Divine Sarah (Bernhardt) is a suspect. I like the expansion of the family in the B-plot and the resolutions with Frances’ mother and personal friends, and while I did see one of the twists coming, there was one that surprised me, so that was good.

Movies & TV
Murderbot, Episode 10. I’ve really enjoyed this series even if most of the finale was predictable (they weren’t going to destroy the protagonist!) I liked the ending and look forward to S2.

Music
Apple Essentials: Wet Leg and Wet Leg, Moisturizer. None of the other stuff is as droll as Chaise Longue but I do like me a little female fronted rock music. Of the new stuff I think I like CPR (the new single) best.

Weekly media report – 2025 07 09

Books
Organizing Solutions for People with ADHD (3rd edition), by Susan C. Pinsky. I don’t have ADHD but chronic illness has given me some of the same management issues, and I’m pretty sure spouse has his share as well. This is the third edition; I’d previously read the second edition, and there’s some additional useful information in it. Specifically there’s more up-to-date suggestions for keeping your online life organized. I think I’m feeling the desire for what this book calls a Brutal Purge, because I’m thinking about rereading another, similar book next.

Short Stories
Death and Liquidity Under the New Moon, by Vajra Chandrasekera. Post-mortem military service by the author of The Saint of the Bright Doors. Nuff said.

Movies & TV
Murderbot, episodes 7-9. We get to the climax and find out what’s going on, finally, and everything blows up in everyone’s faces. Next week: the payoff. Then I’m going to read the books. I continue to enjoy this series and especially Alexander Skarsgard’s deadpan as he deals with his clients/cow orkers.

Music
Neave Trio, La mer: French Piano Trios & A Room of Her Own. Two albums of chamber music that I’m mostly not familiar with but definitely enjoyed. I picked this album because the trio has two women, putting them squarely in my “listen to more women in 2025” project, and because their newest album (the first) got a nice review in the Guardian.
Apple Essentials: Tangerine Dream. Pretty sure the answer here is still I really like the late Virgin era and am not so crazy about anything else.

Weekly media report – 2025 07 02

I’m going to start putting my mini-reviews here as well as longer reviews for books that I think merit it.

Books
The Starving Saints, by Caitlin Starling. Medieval fantastic horror in which three women (a knight, a heretical nun, and the daughter of an executed noble) are locked in a besieged castle with supernatural forces that come as the face of their goddess and her saints. Really good with vibes and twists. I only picked this up because of the medieval connection; I don’t normally read horror.
The Case of the Missing Maid, by Rob Osler. Series starter with a novice woman private detective in Progressive era Chicago; she has to find a missing woman in the Polish community in a case that hinges on, among other things, exploration of her lesbianism. The second book isn’t out yet but I’ll be interested in seeing where this series goes.

Short Stories
Why We Sing, by C.C. Finlay. Paywalled. The story of how mermaids came to be, with a twist.
Welcome 2 the Freedom Galaxy, by Maurice Broaddus. Paywalled. Interstellar funk wars. I love the Prince-inflected musician our protagonist follows.
Banded Iron, by T. K. Rex. Paywalled. What happens when it’s your turn to go back to Earth to fight the interstellar kaiju?
The Green Glass Paperweight, by Sarah Monette. (Reprint from 2004) Hard to talk about this one without breaking the twist but it’s worth it. What does the hated godson select as his bequest?
All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt, by Marissa Lingen. The gift shop manager convention on a space station takes an unlikely turn.

Music
MARINA, Princess of Power. We listened to this in the car and my husband thinks it’s a post-divorce album. It’s retro disco-pop in a fun way, really girl power, and I’m going to be listening to it again and again. I never really got into her last two albums as much as the first three, but this one hit the sweet spot again.

Book Review: In Open Contempt, by Irvin Weathersby Jr.

In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space, by Irvin Weathersby Jr. Part travel memoir, part political and historical art criticism, and part soul-baring about white supremacy, this debut book by a Black author trying to grasp how to deal with public art and racial trauma. He starts with the easy-to-grasp: Confederate monuments in New Orleans coming down in the wake of the George Floyd protests. But he moves from there through his own life and Black American history to the presentation of history in plantations to the different presentations of Black history and stories in modern Black art.

The sections of the book about the Confederacy were deeply personal to me, a white woman with Confederate slaveholder ancestors who attended a school with a Johnny Reb mascot. Weathersby’s unpacking of the effects of white-centered Confederate and slavery-related public history on Black Americans recontextualized discussions around the mascot change at my school. But the discussion of Wounded Knee, Mount Rushmore, and New York also led me to stories I lacked context for and needed the foundation Weathersby offered.

Weathersby also discussed white myth-making in public art and history with various interested parties of all backgrounds in places he visited. Black, white, and Native Americans all offer insights on white supremacist myths around their sites of interest. Weathersby’s questions elicit thoughtful answers from them that in turn elicit reconsideration of the old civil history of the United States. At the same time, Weathersby’s interviews and commentary demonstrate that there’s no single answer to how to approach America’s racist history. What some minoritized Americans find helpful will harm others.

As with other books I’ve read since January, I find it hard not to reconsider the effect of the second Trump administration on the subjects of interest to Weathersby. Confederate naming is back for military bases; DEI is out and restoring so-called truth to American history is in; white supremacy is federal policy. The lessons of In Open Contempt will show the thoughtful reader the ways art and popular history could support both the Trumpist view of America and the alternatives offered by politicians and commentators with other goals and viewpoints. We don’t need to have suffered racist trauma to understand the messages conveyed in art and public space.

Book Review: Stolen Pride, by Arlie Russell Hochschild

Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right, by Arlie Russell Hochschild. This is a follow-up to Strangers in Their Own Land, about Lousiana; the new book covers the rise of the right in rural Appalachia. Hochschild’s focus is on how rural men hold pride in rural ways and providing without government assistance, and how that pride is “stolen” when changing economic times destroy their jobs and way of life, bringing shame on them in their own eyes.

One of Hochschild’s focal points is a white nationalist march in Pikesville in the runup to 2017’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. She interviewed local officials, a member of the group putting on the march, and men who might be drawn into the orbit of white nationalism. Part of the appeal of white nationalist politics is that it gives rural men something to be proud of in the face of lost jobs, drug addiction (the opiate crisis), and the strongly felt contempt of urban liberals.

I came away with a stronger understanding of why conservative men place such a high value on “owning the libs”. They generally share this pride versus shame orientation and project their shame onto their supposed opponents. Passing shame onward doesn’t work in online slapfights, but it does explain part of the “conservative” MAGA delight in undermining institutions perceived as liberal, such as universities and law firms. Even when it hurts MAGA supporters to burn down part of the government, as much of Project 2025 will, stealing the pride of liberals who “destroy” and deride their rural-based way of life is satisfying to men whose own pride has been stolen.

The story Hochschild elicits from her interviews and research wouldn’t work if she didn’t give all of her subjects a full three dimensions, even the man who led the white nationalist march in Pikesville and the imprisoned KKK devotee. But what was most intriguing for future research and practical politics was the concept of the empathy bridge, which Hochschild discusses in an appendix. The bridge connects the experiences of rural whites with Black Americans, either by an upper deck that educated, wealthy whites travel or a lower deck travelled by whites in precarious circumstances. In a time when unity across class and ethnic lines is vital to opposing American authoritarianism, Hochschild’s research points to a way forward that can include former MAGA men.

School District Saturday – 2025 04 04

This week we have some news from the Legislature about bad bills. You know what to do.

Book Review: Secrets of the Sprakkar by Eliza Reid.

Secrets of the Sprakkar: Iceland’s Extraordinary Women and How They Are Changing the World, by Eliza Reid. This book was a relatively light and easy read, in large part because it was hopeful about gender equality. Written in 2020 and released in 2022, the book covers a wide variety of topics around gender equality in Iceland, where the author was First Lady from 2016 to 2024.

Reid structures the book around “sprakkar” or extraordinary Icelandic women: mythical, historical, and women Reid knows from her time in Iceland. As an immigrant, she covers both good and bad points about Iceland’s small population (e.g., it turns like a speedboat, but everyone is related to everyone, which can lead to cronyism and nepotism and limited opportunities for immigrants and outsiders). It struck me that the modern women she interviewed were often ordinary but interesting: almost any woman in public life can be a sprakkar if you focus on her good works.

While the book is encouraging about Icelandic and European gender equality, it’s depressing to consider it in light of gender disparity in the US. Icelanders consider gender equity a moral right, where here we’re fighting a rearguard action against people who consider patriarchal hierarchy desirable and correct. Gestures and actions that seem simple in the Icelandic context would be highly controversial here. Certainly no recent American First Lady could write a book on extraordinary American women. While she might have connections to powerful businesswomen, celebrities, and sports heroines, the approach she would take to interviewing them would necessarily be different.

At the same time, Reid is aware of her own privilege and the downsides of Iceland for immigrant women, particularly women of color. Reid’s interviews with fellow immigrants bring these problems into focus, including spousal abuse in her own circles. And her chapter discussing Iceland’s work toward supporting women refugees was distressing to read.

The book answers questions I didn’t know I had and raises questions I couldn’t expect it to answer. The differences in size and culture between the US and Iceland mean their answers can’t transfer here, but they suggest how American institutions could support women and gender equity if they wanted. It would be inspiring if we hadn’t seen in recent weeks that so many American institutions neither care about nor want diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Book Review: We Are Not Like Them by Christine Pride and Jo Piazza

We Are Not Like Them: A Novel, by Christine Pride and Jo Piazza. I usually avoid women’s book club fiction, but this book’s structure and topic interested me. The two authors, a Black woman and a white woman, wrote alternating first-person chapters about the friendship between an up-and-coming Black journalist and the wife of a white Philadelphia policeman who shoots and kills an unarmed Black teenager. The story is ripped from the headlines, but the approach is from an unusual angle.

The details of the friendship feel real as written but the backstory from which it emerged feel contorted (did the white girl’s mom have to be a drug addict?) to touch all the social issues the writers seemed to want. As events involving money, lawyers, journalistic ethics, deaths, births, etc., spiral, the two women circle each other, bound by history and affection but separated by the pain of racism as it affects their experiences and expectations.

I’m not in the socioeconomic class of the white woman in this story and while I come closer to the experience of the Black woman (good schools, good career, etc.) I don’t think I could tell her story. The writing was solid and portrayed the interior of each of the women well, along with their relationships with their families and supporting cast. But I felt that stuffing so many topical issues into the single story decreased the realism and credibility of the story overall.

I took particular issue with the ending, which I can’t describe as happy so much as less sad and more hopeful than I expected. I felt that some of the relationships that survived should have broken, and that at least one of the relationships that broke should have remained intact. It was obvious to me what the authors intended but one crucial decision a character made seemed out of character: not wrong for their heart but surprising given who they were and everything we knew about them.

My discomfort with the ending might have more do to with my unfamiliarity with women’s book club fiction, or with the need to tie up all the threads that I felt were awkwardly woven into the story. I’d read another similar book by these two authors again, but I’d go in with slightly lower expectations.

Book Review: The Anti-Ableist Manifesto by Tiffany Yu

The Anti-Ableist Manifesto: Smashing Stereotypes, Forging Change, and Building a Disability-Inclusive World by Tiffany Yu. This was a solid read, but I felt old and sad while reading. Old because I’d never have dreamt of showing Yu’s boldness around my disabilities; sad because considering disability activism and accommodations during Trump II is depressing.

The structure of the book is solid: short chapters with bullet points and questions for reflection. I’ll need to reread it slowly to answer the chapter questions. Yu communicated her values and goals and the steps to achieve them clearly. At the same time, the book has a millennial vibe about disability accommodation: proactive, identity-based, and assuming good faith in dealing with employers, businesses, and government, an assumption I don’t share. Some of this comes up explicitly in her chapters on working with disabilities. Yu’s optimism about improving workplaces doesn’t jibe with my experience. Her experience with government in California is also different to what I’d expect in Texas.

Part of our difference is generational, but also I’m reading the book in 2025. It was published before the election, which not only changed federal government but also confirmed a cultural change hostile to DEIA. President Trump is openly eugenicist and HHS Secretary Kennedy plans to solve chronic illness and other health problems by “reparenting” patients in organic work farms. Within the context of the manifesto, it makes sense that Yu barely mentioned the eugenic discrimination in triage of COVID patients. Yet the widespread acceptance of discrimination against the disabled during COVID both parallels and foreshadows the open bigotry of the current Republican administration.

A book that addressed those issues wouldn’t be Yu’s manifesto, though I’d read a book by Yu that addresses continued advocacy and community with other marginalized groups in a 2025 context. All of her advice is good and similar to that I’ve read for and by other marginalized groups. It’s just going to be harder to follow now than it would have been when Yu wrote it.

Part of the discomfort I felt while reading Yu’s book was internalized ableism and the feeling that I don’t do enough advocacy for myself or around disability in general. I’m glad Yu got over those feelings. Her book points the way to a world where disability doesn’t evoke shame and anger because the conditions that lead to them have changed for the better or been eliminated completely.