“North American Indians had experimented with ranked societies and all-powerful spiritual leaders and had found them deficient and dangerous. They had opted for more horizontal, participatory, and egalitarian ways of being in the world…” There is an old, deeply rooted story about America that goes like this: Columbus “discovers” a strange continent and brings back…
The Boy From Clearwater by Yu Pei-Yun and Zhou Jian-Xin
An incredible true story in graphic novel form that lays bare the tortured and triumphant history of Taiwan, an island claimed and fought over by many countries, through the life story of a man who lived through its most turbulent times. I already knew a little about Taiwan because I’ve read things like Hunter School…
The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw
“It is always interesting to see how often women are described as ravenous when it is the men who, without exception, take without thought of compensation.” You may think you know how the fairytale goes: a mermaid comes to shore and weds the prince. But what the fables forget is that mermaids have teeth. And…
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917-2017 by Rashid Khalidi
“The surest way to eradicate a people’s right to their land is to deny their historical connection to it.” In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would…
2024 Book Superlatives
It’s that time of the year again where I talk about how my overall reading year went and decide if it was a success. On paper it was a success, but as I looked at a lot of these categories it was really hard for me to pick out some of the books to highlight….
The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa
“A heart has no shape, no limits. That’s why you can put almost any kind of thing in it, why it can hold so much. It’s much like your memory, in that sense.” On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses—until things become much more serious….
The Brightness Between Us by Eliot Schrefer
“You had your bender. You had your wallow. Now you fix this thing that’s been done in your name.” Seventeen years have gone by since the Coordinated Endeavor crashed on a distant exoplanet. Ambrose Cusk and Kodiak Celius are now the devoted parents of two teenage children, Owl and Yarrow, in a hardscrabble frontier home….
Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands by Heather Fawcett
“The problem is not the packing, I admit; I simply dislike travelling. Why people wish to wander to and fro when they could simply remain at home is something I will never understand. Everything is the way I like it here.” Emily Wilde is a genius scholar of faerie folklore who just wrote the world’s…
The Nightmare Before Kissmas by Sara Raasch
“Every single one of those instances when I thought I was hypnotized by seeing joy on other people, I’d been searching, searching specifically for his joy. Because now that I’ve experienced it, it renders all past joy obsolete.” Nicholas “Coal” Claus used to love Christmas. Until his father, the reigning Santa, turned the holiday into…
The Magpie at Night: The Complete Poems of Li Qingzhao translated by Wendy Chen
“The pear blossoms are dipped in the moon’s first slanting light.” The Magpie at Night is a lyrical and searching portrait of the inner life of Li Qingzhao, one of the greatest poets in Chinese literary history. These spare and arresting poems evoke with rare immediacy the quiet and haunting beauty of country life during…
The Great Book Wyrm 