Book Recs and Reviews

[cotton]

I'm always looking for book recommendations, so I wanted to create a thread for people to talk about what they're reading!

Personally, I recently enjoyed Kikuko Tsumura's There's No Such Thing As An Easy Job. It's a fun, surreal book about the increasingly bizarre jobs the protagonist's takes on and the unique ways each one tires her out.

I also just finished James Baldwin's If Beale Street Could Talk, and I had to lie down after. I'd mostly read his essays before, and now I'm trying to read more of his fiction. I don't think anyone's written more beautifully about love than him. (That last sentence could also be revised to read, "I don't think anyone's written more beautifully than him.")

 

[Tsushi]

I recently listened to Howl's Moving Castle! It was a lot of fun! I think the movie was a good adaptation but if you love the movie it's definitely worth getting some of the extra characters and characterization. Howl is even more whiny in the book, it's a hoot!

 

[The_Walking_Pie]

For detective/crime novels, I just finished reading Lavender House by Lev A.C. Rosen and it was a pretty good read (also the first book I've finished this year. XD) I'd also recommend The Human Flies by Hans Olav Lahlum. I finished it last summer and I'm buying the second book to read over my summer vacation this year.

As for just in general, A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving (it's hard to descripe, but it's my favorite book and it made me cry), A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman (a book about an old curmudgeon and how he eventually endears himself to the neighborhood after his wife's death, also made me cry but less so), Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao (fun fantasy with mechs but also randomly a bit that feels like the hunger games with propaganda and stuff), and On the Edge of Gone by Corinne Duyvis (a book about the apocalypse as its happening. Loads of fun, and it also has autism rep in it).

Also The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, a book about a man who sells his soul so that he stays beautiful. Good classical literature.

 

[cotton]

Last year, I read It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections On Horror (edited by Joe Vallese), which is a collection essays by queer writers about their relationships with horror movies and monsters, and I'm still thinking about it. A really neat collection of queer readings of horror, and working through the tension of seeing a part of yourself reflected in fiction and the uneasy relationship the horror genre has historically had with queerness. Man.

Currently, I'm reading Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, by James Scott, and it's so good. Scott writes very clearly about the mechanisms of state power that are easy to overlook. I'm reading about maps, taxes, scientific forestry, and modernist city planning like !

 

[Tsushi]

I finally got around to We Do This Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba about the ideology towards prison abolition and political struggle towards that goal. It was really good! If you have any interest in that subject, she has incredibly thoughtful insights.

I'm midway through Braiding Sweetgrass now, which is about plant science from an Indigenous perspective with some autobiographical aspects in terms of her relationship to motherhood etc. It's something that has positively impacted my thinking a lot in terms of relationships to plants and ecosystems. I assume it will continue to be a really impactful text for me so I have to read it slowly to really take it in.