Reading Wednesday

[sabotabby]

 Strap in for the next few weeks, lads: it's awards season.

Just finished: Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich. So good. I love all of these characters. I talk a lot, when I talk about writing, about specificity of character, and above all else, Erdrich is a master of this. She can give you three lines of description of a person and somehow they feel immediately real, no matter how minor they are.

Orwell's Roses by Rebecca Solnit: I loved this too—it's such a beautiful way of exploring the dimensions of a person, and a movement, and a relationship between ourselves and the more-than-human world. I can't help but compare it to The Gift of Strawberries again, in that it's a book that made me go out into my garden, and look at the rose hips and thorns on my rosebushes that are just starting to bud, and think about the ways that we keep ourselves going in the darkest of times.

The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed. Mohamed is getting nothing but raves lately and I can see why. This novella is gorgeous. It's a dark fairy tale about a woman, Veris, living in a village under the occupation of the Tyrant. The villagers know not to go into the forest, which contains another, secret forest within it, from which no one returns. The Tyrant's two children, however, don't know any better, and as the only person to have ever retrieved someone from the surreal other world, he forces Veris to search for them. It's suffused with magic both subtle and otherwise; I loved the uncanniness of the setting and the little details like the three tokens Veris uses to find her way. She's a fantastic character, a world-weary, done-with-your-shit middle aged woman who just wants to be left alone, internally rebelling against colonialism but compelled by her own empathy.

Currently reading: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad. What can I say about this one? I wish I could buy all the copies in the world and make every single person in the West read it. I wish I could curse our leaders to hear nothing but this book in their brains, 24 hours a day, until they stop the genocide. I would make a gift of it to everyone who's unfriended me or yelled at me or disowned me for my stance on Palestine. It's the most important thing you will read this year. Both about Gaza and El Akkad's own life as an immigrant and a journalist, every word is note-perfect.

Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons From Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Did you know that if we restored the population of whales to their pre-19th century levels, they'd be a massive carbon sink? This is a fact that lives rent-free in my brain now. Anyway, this is a poetic short book of meditations on Black liberation, trauma, and anti-colonialism. It's so good, you guys. I will always read a book about whale facts but also this is whale facts specifically geared at activism and I am here for it.

Comments

[greylock]

Did you know that if we restored the population of whales to their pre-19th century levels, they'd be a massive carbon sink?

I did not.
And now I am curious about how that would work, and how effective it would be now, when GHYNA is building two Beautiful Clean Coal plants per week.

*checks*
Whales (excluding sperm whales) would have sunk between 190,000 to 1.9 million tonnes of carbon pa

So, Sweet FA.

And our oceans could have been been FILLED with WHALES! And not edible factory farmed FUSH! Like awesome Tasmanian Salmon!

[sabotabby]

Our oceans can still have whales. We can make conditions that keep whales alive and then they will make additional whales and this will be great for everyone.

[greylock]

Not be be #NotallWhales, but I know some species, along some migration routes, are back to healthy population levels, if not pre-whaling levels.

I'm not sure how climate change is affecting krill and plankton levels, but I assume it's a negative.

I am all for saving the whales. But I fear soon enough we'll be back to hunting them for food and oil on an industrial scale. It feels like a thing. Think of all the vomit for perfumes!

(Your icon reminds me of the anti-Greenpeace 'Save The Gay Whales' sledge of the '80s).
I've not heard that in ages.

[frenzy]

I just put Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons From Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs on my list.

[sabotabby]

I think you'll love it.

*

[minoanmiss]

Not least being a Black girl who's been called a whale I think I need that last one.

Re: *

[sabotabby]

Oh, you definitely do.