Category: Read This Book

Content warnings for discussion of graphic catcalling and sexual harassment, anti-fatness from microaggressions to outright active aggression, discussion of eating disorders and disordered eating, death related to anti-fatness, and use of the word obese (used sparingly and mostly in quotes).

Yes I’m going to use the word “fat” as a descriptor because “fat” is not a bad word. The main focus of this book is on fat justice for very fat people, that is, there are many people who don’t even get basic needs met because they are fat. This happens in so many ways, such as the pay gap between fat and straight size people, lack of public safety due to anti-fat violence, and denial to public spaces.

Anti-fatness is the last “socially acceptable” (sarcasm) way to hate people. Most people are frowned upon for being racist or homophobic but anti-fatness runs rampant and unchecked. This book is not about “wellness” aka repackaged diet culture. It is not about body positivity and loving the body we’re in. It is not even really about body neutrality or fat acceptance or body sovereignty. This book is about fat justice. About including the fattest among us in our social justice movements and about making sure fat people have access to basic things like clothing and equal pay and travel accommodations.

The citations alone are worth the price of admission. I love a well-resourced book, especially to hand over to people who automatically think that being fat is the same as being unhealthy. The author goes in-depth into things like how BMI is a garbage indicator of health (fun fact, it wasn’t even created as such in the first place!), and how there is no solid data illustrating that dieting achieves long-term weight loss. In fact, some conditions associated with being fat may actually be long-term effects of dieting.

If you’re not outraged before you read this book, then you may find flames shooting from your ears by the end of it. I love a book that changes how I see the world and this is absolutely one of those books.

So during lockdown I played a lot of Dragon Age: Inquisition. I mean a LOT. And if you’ve ever marathoned any kind of media, a book series, a show, a movie series, a video game – and I know most of you probably have – you know you get into a kind of headspace where all you crave is more of the same kind of content.

Then along came Hall of Smoke, which was everything I could possibly have asked for in a fantasy book at that exact moment. It hit me right in the DA:I sweet spot with it’s massive, mythic feel, it’s vivid landscapes, and it’s warrior heroine stuck right in the middle of a divine war. But what is divinity, really? Who gets to be considered divine? Are divine entities simply brought into being, as they might have us believe, and always divine – or are divine beings made? Do they rise to divinity? And is divinity bestowed upon them? Or is it a prize for a victor to seize?

These are the questions at the heart of Hall of Smoke as Hessa, an Eangi – a battle priestess of the Goddess of War – whose whole town and temple are slaughtered and whose Goddess has forsaken her, struggles to find justice for her people and redemption for herself in a world torn apart by war and fear. When the gods fight amongst themselves, mortals are inevitably trampled underfoot – and something far older, and long asleep, threatens to wake and throw all that Hessa thinks she knows about the gods, the nature of divinity, and herself, into chaos.

There is so much to love about this book, and since we still have something like 9 months until the sequel comes out next January I highly encourage you all to read Hall of Smoke and come join me in the book version of hiatus hell!

Content warning for suicide, which includes a graphic description, and drug use.

Dr. Vivek H. Murthy is the 19th & 21st Surgeon General of the United States. While he was serving as the 19th Surgeon General, he found that there was a common thread among the “major” public health issues like addiction, violence, anxiety, and depression. This common thread is loneliness.

This book is a deep dive into loneliness as something that everyone experiences at some point and also loneliness as a major public health issue. He also talks extensively about the shame that can happen around loneliness, how it’s something that people don’t talk much about, that we often feel like it’s our own fault if we experience it, or that we alone are the only ones who deal with loneliness. This book was written pre-pandemic and I imagine that some of this has shifted, but not necessarily enough.

Together isn’t entirely gloomy. It has some beautiful, uplifting stories about people who recognize loneliness for what it is and have organized to combat it in their own lives and their own communities, sometimes creating programs that reach further out to other parts of the county. There is also an exploration of loneliness in various cultures which is fascinating and it resonated deeply. Dr. Murthy also discusses isolation, childhood loneliness, and the effects of loneliness and isolation on children. Perhaps most importantly, Dr. Murthy offers ways to combat loneliness, which has been especially hard to do during this pandemic.

This book has altered the way I look at the world and at my relationships and community and for that alone, I highly recommend it.

S.T. Gibson had me sold on A Dowry of Blood from the moment that she announced she was working on a queer, polyamorous novel about Dracula’s brides. Dracula has been one of my favorite horror classics ever since I was a kid, so I’m always on board for adaptations, and Gibson has a style – Gothic lyricism embedded with religious imagery and abundant feeling – that proved a perfect foil for her subject. In Stoker’s original novel the Brides are but a footnote, seducing Jonathan in one chapter, foreshadowing the fate of poor Lucy Westenra, then eventually being beheaded by Van Helsing. With so little textual information to work with, Gibson has all the range in the world to tell a truly compelling novel of obsession, possession, fear, and love, and she really makes the most of it.

A Dowry of Blood is told from the perspective of Constanta, the first of three brides whom Dracula creates to be his companions over the course of the novel, and is written as a farewell letter to the man she loved and hated in equal measure. At its heart that is what the book is about, really: love, hate, and the ugly place in between where the two get blurred together. Dracula is in turns breathtakingly charming and painstakingly cruel. He collects lovers, his Brides, the way that others collect jewels, for their beauty, their fire, and sometimes even for their flaws. Through Constanta’s eyes we see both his cold emotional abuse and the tenderness he uses to reinforce it, we share in her fear and her devotion. And we cheer for her, Magdalena, and Alexi, when they finally decide that they have had enough.

I don’t know that I can do justice to the beauty of this novel in the short time I have to share it with you. All I can say is that if you love lush, poetic, gorgeous books, you don’t want to miss A Dowry of Blood.

Content warnings for racism, primarily anti-Asian racism, lychings, rape, violence against women including murder.

This book is phenomenal and some of the best creative nonfiction I have ever read. It is simultaneously the embrace of a shared experience, a kick in the face, and a punch in the heart. Cathy Park Hong explores her immediate, singular experiences as a daughter of Korean immigrants in some parts of the book, while interrogating the wide range of experiences of Asian Americans and Asians in America. We are not a monolith, yet so often treated as such. Our oppressions range from shared to pointedly personal. The author writes about the external oppressions, the hate, and the racism in both American history and American present as well as in academia and media. She also writes about the unique ways that we as Asians sometimes interact with other Asians who are not our same ethnicity.

The places Hong brings us as readers are unexpected but deeply relevant. She goes into detail about the United Airlines Express Flight 3411, when a Vietnamese American passenger, David Dao Duy Anh was violently removed from the plane when he did not give up his seat. Many of us saw the two-minute viral video, but Hong tells us so much about the story I hadn’t realized. It is absolutely heartbreaking. Another section is dedicated to the artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, who was brutally raped and murdered. The case had little coverage, and though her work has been shown in many places, Hong was curious as to why no one would talk about her death. The chapter about the ways that language is used to both racially oppress and racially glorify is alone worth the price of admission.

This book has fundamentally changed the way I think, especially the way I think about what I see in the media. It’s an absolutely fantastic read.

Surprising no one who is familiar with Jemisin’s talent and unmatched worldbuilding, The Fifth Season, book one of The Broken Earth series, was a Hugo Award winner in 2016. And I am the idiot who has let it languish in her TBR for three years, which I regret almost as much as the fact that I did not purchase the sequels and now no bookstore in a 20 mile radius has seen fit to stock them. Catastrophe!

Rather like the catastrophe that opens The Fifth Season, plunging the continent on which the novel is set into a fiery, ash-strewn apocalypse known to the locals as “The Season”. But while the devastation that follows the cataclysm underpins the present day portions of the plot, the novel is actually told over three separate but related timelines. There is Damaya, a young girl who has been exposed as an orogene – one who can control the seismic activity of the ground around her – and in an instant becomes both hated and feared. Syenite, a powerful orogene who has been sent on a mission that goes terribly wrong, exposing the dark underbelly of the world she thought she knew. And Essun, a women who has experienced more loss and grief than I have words to quantify, who sets out into a world torn asunder and set afire to find her daughter.

Content warnings for anti-Blackness, eating disorders, and domestic violence. There are definitely a number of heavy subjects in this book but that is part of the point: there are all kinds of difficult things we absolutely must talk about when we talk about feminism. Each chapter discusses the different ways in which “mainstream” feminism has failed and continues to fail so many women who are not white, cisgender, able bodied, affluent, and straight.

While some of the chapters focus on Black women and the author’s experience as a Black woman, they also expand to include a variety of the intersections of identity at which any one of us may exist. A few of the focuses include hunger & food insecurity, eating disorders in the Black community, education access, housing access, colorism, maternal mortality, gun violence, and more.

The chapter on gun violence is particularly powerful, as gun violence isn’t often immediately considered a feminist issue. According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV), 1 in 4 women have been victims of severe physical violence and The presence of a gun in a domestic violence situation increases the risk of homicide by 500%. Gun violence in certain areas is keeping girls from going to school. Not only are women victims of gun violence, but also the mothers, wives, and sisters of victims.

This book allows for such great opportunities for readers to step back and examine our own feminist views and learn where they can be expanded and where we each may have some work to do to better include all women. It is a must-read for anyone considering themself a feminist and/or an anti-racist.

To say that Karigan G’ladheon is having a bad day at the start of Green Rider is an understatement. Having been expelled from school after besting a bully with powerful parents, she’s doing the long walk of shame home to the coast and hoping she can beat the dean’s letter to her father’s house. Then she nearly gets run down in the lane by a rider in green, with arrows sticking out of his back. You know. Typical Tuesday.

The rider is one of the royal Green Riders, magically gifted legendary messengers to the king. The message the rider carries is life and death, and he makes Karigan swear that she will take his sword, his rider’s pin, and his horse and deliver the message to the King. What seems like a straightforward promise to a dying man throws Karigan’s whole world into chaos. Soon she’s riding hellbent for the capitol, pursued by assassins and an even deadlier man in grey whose purpose is far more sinister than she can guess and threatens the future of all of Sacoridia.

Like many fantasy series, Britain’s Green Rider series has been a long time in production. The titular novel originally came out in 1998, and the most recent novel, Winterlight, will be out this September. Each of the books clocks in at over 400 pages (the most recent installment was a whopping 800+ pages), so tackling the whole series can be a bit of a time commitment. But if you’ve been looking for a new fantasy series to tackle there are currently six books published, and if you are a fan of high fantasy series with detailed world building, an endearing cast of characters, plenty of action, and a splash of romance (so much pining – this series is defined by its romantic pining), there is no series I’d be happier to recommend!

Though the focus of this book is women of all types, I stand by my recommendation for all adults regardless of gender. Burnout, that is, prolonged physical, mental, and/or emotional stress is something with which many of us are all too familiar. Maybe even more so since the current pandemic began.

This book is not going to tell you that the cure for burnout is to have a gratitude journal or color in an adult coloring book or even to do something that is likely not possible, like work less, change jobs, leave your family, etc. Instead, the book is filled with an exploration of why we suffer from burnout and research-based suggestions for what to do about the stress when we can’t necessarily get rid of the stressors. Even if we do get rid of the stressor, we still have to find ways to get rid of the stress itself otherwise it builds up and voila! Burnout.

While exercise is definitely at the top of the list of ways to alleviate stress (thanks, I hate it), they offer other ways to complete the stress cycle as well. That being said, their argument for exercise includes details on how moving our bodies can help reduce the stress cycle and it is so darn compelling that I ended up buying an exercise bike after reading this book. Much to my chagrin, the authors are right.

I don’t know about you, but I’m hyper-critical of books in the self-improvement genre so I’m still surprised at how much I love this book. The wealth of citations and robust bibliography are enough to make me swoon. It’s conversational and has relatable anecdotes that help readers feel optimistic about managing stress. Bonus, it’s also excellent on audiobook!

At 26, Mia West has her entire future planned until Mia’s boyfriend Ethan breaks up with her after six years of dating. Although devastated, Mia is determined to find new meaning in her life. Guided by a recurring dream of honeybees, Mia decides to join her roommate and best friend Rosie on an around-the-world humanitarian trip.