It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?

The meme that we use to share what we read this past week and what our plans are for the upcoming week. Now hosted by The Book Date.

Last Week

I’ve managed to finish some books finally, I feel like I’m always working through 6 books at a time, and it takes me ages to get anything read. Time to rethink that strategy, but I’m always saying that. I did finish two  good ones though:

Opal Charm: The Path To Dawn by Miri Castor is the first book in a fantasy series about reluctant heroine Opal Charm, who struggles with life and family as it is, but then her new friend Hope Adaire let’s slip that Opal is the only one to save Hope’s world from destruction. Poor Opal! A very readable fantasy novel and I’ll be reading the sequel when it comes out. 

Unhallowed Graves by Nuzo Onoh is a Nigerian horror collection and I did my best to read it in daylight but it’s much more fun to read at night by candle light. Fantastic settings and use of mythology, do read if you’re into the creepy stuff! 

Since it’s also finally fall, my favorite season, I went to the pumpkin market. Most of these will make excellent dinners as well as pumpkin bread and cookies!

Currently

Reading some more excellent books at the moment. I have too many on the go, but here’s what I’m mostly focusing on:

Daybreak Rising by Kiran Oliver. A YA/NA fantasy book about a failed hero with the chance at redemption. So far I’m really into the anti-normativity of the characters and the story’s politics. And finally someone who knows what demiromantic is and yeah that got my attention, so here I am reading a book with lots of romance elements. 

Hen & Chick by Tristan J. Tarwater, another YA fantasy. Kinda proud of myself for exploring more YA! Also, this one has pirates AND magic! How could I resist? Add to that brown girls kicking ass and a focus on mother-daughter relationships. 

Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge by Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, a wonderful collection of poetry. I’m working my way through it at the moment, since it’s LatinX Heritage Month and check out all the amazing LatinX things going on at Naz’s Read Diverse Books!

Soon

It’ll be October soon and I’m very excited for the Diverse Detective Fiction Month hosted by Silicon and myself. More info here, including sign-ups. The only requirement is to read 1 #DiverseDetectives book and write about it on your blog/goodreads/bookstagram. Won’t you join us?

What have you all been up to? Have a great week!

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Mailbox Monday

Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came in their mailbox during the last week.

Warning: Mailbox Monday can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and humongous wish lists

It’s been ages since I’ve participated in this meme, but it’s lovely to see that it’s still around. You’ve probably noticed it’s been a bit more quiet around here and many know I’m one step away from graduating, but I need to concentrate on studying and so I thought I’ll leave you with bookish envy until I return August 4th.

Usually, I don’t get that many books in my mailbox but this week has been lovely and added three exciting works to my shelves:

The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability (Kristen Hogan)

From the 1970s through the 1990s more than one hundred feminist bookstores built a transnational network that helped shape some of feminism’s most complex conversations. Kristen Hogan traces the feminist bookstore movement’s rise and eventual fall, restoring its radical work to public feminist memory. The bookwomen at the heart of this story mostly lesbians and including women of color measured their success not by profit, but by developing theories and practices of lesbian antiracism and feminist accountability. (Amazon)

On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Sara Ahmed)

What does diversity do? What are we doing when we use the language of diversity? Sara Ahmed offers an account of the diversity world based on interviews with diversity practitioners in higher education, as well as her own experience of doing diversity work. Diversity is an ordinary even unremarkable feature of institutional life. And yet, diversity practitioners often experience institutions as resistant to their work, as captured through their use of the metaphor of the “brick wall.” On Being Included offers an explanation of this apparent paradox. It explores the gap between symbolic commitments to diversity and the experience of those who embody diversity. (Goodreads)

The Underground Railroad (Colson Whitehead)

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hellish for all slaves, but Cora is an outcast even among her fellow Africans, and she is coming into womanhood; even greater pain awaits. Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her of the Underground Railroad and they plot their escape. (Goodreads)

The first two books I splurged on when Duke UP had a 50% sale and I’ve been wanting them for quite some time. Sara Ahmed is one of my favorite activist academics even if she is intimidatingly smart and I love the intro. Hogan’s books sounds amazing and it’s a topic I wish I knew more about. It’s written by a white woman but I’ll be interested to see how she works the antiracism angle. And finally @BlackBrainFood (must follow for amazing tweets on Black culture) over on twitter send me their copy of Whitehead’s new book, I’m so excited to read this!

Which books are new on your shelves? Bought or otherwise acquired.

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?

The meme that we use to share what we read this past week and what our plans are for the upcoming week. Now hosted by The Book Date.

Last week

There was all the excitement about #DiverseBookBloggers and our directory. Make sure to add your blog and grab a blogger/ally badge!

I also really started on my exam prep and so most of my reading is secondary literature at the moment and excerpts from academic books about Chicana feminism. But I also read a fantastic novel:

Isn’t that the most amazing cover? Go read it now! Especially if you’re a brown girl, lesbian or interested in racism in feminism.

Currently

Still slowly making my way through Borderlands, and might be for a while yet. It’s still amazing!

And then during the weekend I also got back into A Stranger in Olondria, and I’m finally really into this world and loving the slow, detailed way in which the story unfolds.

Soon

I got so many fantastic recommendations for audiobooks from you all, but Scribd didn’t have that many of them, but I put them on my audible wishlist! Since I had to redeem a credit, I chose to go with this one, which comes recommended by Naz from Read Diverse Books.

What are you all up to? And what are you reading?

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?

The meme that we use to share what we read this past week and what our plans are for the upcoming week. Now hosted by The Book Date.

Last Week

Exciting things were happening last weekend! Perhaps, if you’re on twitter, you noticed w had some great conversations going on under the #DiverseBookBloggers hashtag. It was wonderful to meet so many non-white, queer, non-Western and differently-abled bloggers and talk about what we want out of diversity in blogging and publishing! Check out the complete storify here.

“A conversation between @demelzagriff95 and @_diversebooks resulted in the creation of the #DiverseBookBloggers hashtag. Since May 17, the hashtag has exploded, resulting in more than 1,000 tweets from a wide variety of bloggers and Twitter users. This is just the beginning of the hashtag’s impact.”

I also finished two reads I’d been making my way through quite slowly, I don’t have a long commute at the moment and in my case that means audiobooks take ages.

We Need New Names was such a great read though I would have preferred to read it instead of listening to it, to follow the story better. I read this one for my reading more African lit challenge, though this is my second Zimbabwean novels, I need to branch out.

Obesity.The Biography is my second book from the autobiography of illness series, which is wonderful so far. Gilman’s work is usually amazing, but I would have liked a more in-depth discussion. Might try Gilman’s Fat.A Cultural History though.

My favorite read last week was Anne Chebu’s Anleitung zum Schwarz sein /Instrutions for Being Black, an introduction about racism experienced by Afro-Germans for Afro-Germans and it should be a good learning experience for white Germans. I fall somewhere in the middle and could relate so much, it was wonderful to find such a book for the German context. Sadly there seems to exist no translation, but if you speak German, definitely read this book!

I also got some blogging done, posting a reading list for International Day Against homophobia and posted another instalment of my 5 On a Theme series, this time on Chicana and Latino/a Speculative Fiction.

Currently

I’m still trying so hard not to get distracted by shiny new books because I’m starting exam prep and will be reading Chicana literature and secondary lit in June. Don’t distract me with awesome blog posts about amazing books! ;D But you’re all welcome to join me in my reading!

What are you all reading? Let me know in the comments!

Non-Fiction Friday: Critical Food Studies and Intersectionality

Here’s the next round of non-fiction reads and I have to confess there are lots of academic texts in this post. Funny thing is, for all that my city’s library is so badly stocked, I have access to a university library and cheap ILL. That means it’s often easier for me to get my hands on academic books than the latest fiction and so I like to indulge. Of course it takes me ages to actually read them cover to cover, but don’t worry, I’ll soon bore you with a review. But never fear, it will involve dinosaurs! (yes I never grew out of that phase)

After focusing on the body in my last post, I want to list some intriguing titles from critical food studies. I almost went into that direction with my thesis, but it’s a pretty new field over here and I would have had no guidance. Didn’t keep me from ogling food studies publications though. Critical food studies is an interdisciplinary field of study in the social sciences and humanities, examining food-related issues from cooking and eating to production and foodways. Important work also pays close attention to how gender, race and class amongst other axes of oppression are implicated in these issues. Thus, necessary systemic critique comes from feminist and anti-racist directions in critical food studies and subsets further connect with animal studies. My own interest comes in at these intersections of intersectional feminism and critical food studies. This is not an introductory reading list but just 3 works from different directions that have caught my interest:

Sugar. A Bittersweet History by Elizabeth Abbott is a social history of one of our most important food products today. I have a soft spot for these microhistories that take one product/aspect as a critical entry point to demonstrate that these can never be taken outside of the social context. Like chocolate, sugar is an important aspect of the world’s history of racism and slavery. This is a Penguin publication but I’ve heard people saying the writing is somewhat dry. I can’t really say that I agree, but maybe I have a high threshold or the history of racism is never dry to me. Perhaps readers should know that this is a history of the slave trade, examined through sugar. Consider yourselves warned I guess.

Racial Indigestion by Kyla Wazana Tompkins, too, focuses on the food-related racial history of the 19th century. However, Tompkins takes a literary and media studies approach to this. As the title reveals, she focuses on consumption and calls for a turn to “critical eating studies.” Can you hear the echo of bell hooks’ “Eating the Other” in this!? Tompkins analyses case studies where Black Americans and especially Black women become posited as consumable in the eyes of white supremacy. I’ve only read excerpts of this text but I’m looking forward to having the time to finish this one. You’ll like this one if you enjoyed Building Houses Made of Chicken Legs.

Cultivating Food Justice is a collection about food production and distribution, focusing on how low-income and communities of color are disproportionately hit by current policies of the industry. Thus, the food system reproduces hierarchies of race and class and these effects can be see in access to food, health and environmental issues. By and large the face of the food movement had been presented as white  and this collection seeks to challenge this image and bring a social justice perspective to food studies. I especially like that this book gathers work from activists who work in the food justice movement and not just academics!

What are your favorite food-related non-fiction reads? Let me know in the comments!

Note: I wanted to make non-fiction post something regular and while googling about non-fiction in the book blogosphere, I stumbled on the wonderful Non-Fiction Friday series by DoingDewey. It seemed perfect and so here I am joining in on the non-fiction love.

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?

The meme that we use to share what we read this past week and what our plans are for the upcoming week. Now hosted by The Book Date.

Last Week

Readathon! I had a blast following everyone’s progress on instagram, I guess I do have a preferred social media app. Pretty happy with the books I managed to read, even if I slept a solid 7 hours and spent 3 more cooking and cleaning the kitchen. Maybe I’ll lock myself in next time, but the quiche was definitely worth it and this time I managed to get a picture:

Here’s my readathon wrap-up picture.

My faves in order:

Nimona – so much love for this perfect comic

Ghost Summer – I read the novella and it was wonderfully creepy and atmospheric

Bitch Planet – such an amazing feminist comic! Bit violent for my taste, but fits the subject

Every Heart a Doorway – such wonderful imagination, loved the imagery and asexual mc

Uglies – super readable and love the discussion of beauty and norms, not sure I’ll read the sequel though

Currently

I’m making my way through the rest of the short stories in Due’s collection. She’s made me a fan of the Southern gothic.

I’m also read Paper Girls Vol.1, whoa the colors are amazing!

And then i need to get through all my non-fiction reads, so this week I want to concentrate on this one, cause dinosaurs 🙂

Soon

Deepika’s readalong of RK Narayan starts next Sunday, so there’s still time to join in on the fun!

And then I’ll also start making my reading list for my oral exam, so be prepared for Chican@ lit!

What are you all reading? Let me know in the comments!

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?

The meme that we use to share what we read this past week and what our plans are for the upcoming week. Now hosted by The Book Date.

 

Last Week

It’s been a busy week, I had lots of paperwork stuff on my list and I’m starting to prepare for my defense and oral exam. So you might soon find my reading following some themes not part of a challenge 🙂

I got some baking done and found the perfect mix of glutenfree flour. So yay bread is back on for breakfast (I’m German so bread is life! 🙂 ) and nope I’m not gluten intolerant just have to watch what I eat. It doesn’t look as pretty as normal bread loaves, but it tastes pretty awesome:

On the reading front, I managed to finish two books and that means my book juggling is slowly getting more manageable:

Gut was a quick and easy read, despite it being non-fiction. Enders presents a quick informative overview of the gut and its importance to our health in general but also with regard to bacteria influencing mental health. Who knew! It’s written in an accessible style and accompanied by charming illustrations made by the author’s sister.

Brown Girl Dreaming was a tougher read with regard to the subject matter but I absolutely love it. It’s written in verse but I dare say it will appeal to non-poetry people as well. I listend to the audiobook narrated by the author and it was such a cool ‘reading’ experience. Highly recommended!

I also got some blogging done though I dropped the ball on my schedule. Oh well, so many of you were nice enough to drop in anyways! I posted a list of books that make for perfect uninterrupted weekend reading, so if you have a free weekend soon take a look at my post. And then I also recommended lots of novellas for Saturday’s readathon or in case you want to get some quick reading in.

Currently

So this morning I realized my only fiction read was the Issa Rae memoir as audiobook but I only listen to it before bed. That means I can finally get to my Once Upon a Time book list and it’s about time as I’ve only read 1 out of 5! I started with Somatar’s book and so far I’m really enjoying it.

Soon

So soon, in fact next Saturday: It’s readathon time, yay!

Hope lots of you are joining in, it’s such a fun event! You can still sign up here.

Also, I will soon (probably in May) start with my uni reading and one of my topics is Chicana lit. So anyone wanting to drop some recommendations or join me in my prep reading, let me know in the comments. I fear I’ll have to stick to the classics but we’ll see.

Hope you’re all having a great start to the week! We actually had a nice sunny but not too warm day over here and I spent some time reading in the garden. What are you all reading?