Category Archives: Personal Posts

Friday Fun Day

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I’m going to designate either Fridays or Sundays as days for semi-random thoughts that may or may not be book related. Sunday Funday sounds better, I suppose. We’ll see.

Just a couple of random things today.

I’m thinking about doing some kind of giveaway when I hit 100 followers – I’m at 96 right now. Maybe an Amazon Giftcard?

I’m also thinking about quitting linking to Amazon – they’ve had questionable business practices for a while now. I see a lot of people linking to the Goodreads profile for a book, and I know there’s another online seller that people are using but I can’t remember the name of it.

If I do random thoughts on Sundays instead of Fridays, I could join the Friday 56 – which is basically turn to page 56 of the book you’re currently reading and post a non-spoilery excerpt. Could be fun. Which would make my blog schedule the following:

Sunday Funday (random shit)
Monday Book Review
Top Ten Tuesday
Wednesday Library Loot
Thursday Book Review
Friday 56
Saturday Book Review

And then I’d be publishing every day. I’m not 100% sure I can keep that up long term. I will have to consider that.

Dominaria Pre-Release is tonight! I don’t play Magic outside casual games with my housemates, but my husband is playing tonight, and will be bringing home the box we pre-ordered. I do love opening packs and scanning them into our database. I have a collecting personality. Between books, Magic cards, and pets/mounts/achievement points in World of Warcraft…yeah. I like to collect things. XD

Tomorrow we’re playing D&D, and sometime this weekend we’ll be seeing Infinity War. I’m gonna cry if Cap or any of the Wakandans die. They won’t kill T’Challa, though – he’s too profitable!

A very good point was made on Twitter the other day about using “inclusive” instead of “diverse” so I will be making an effort to change my language going forward!

Edit: Realized today was another school walkout day for the anniversary of the Columbine shooting. There was a shooting the year before that at Thurston, a high school 10 miles from my own. I was a junior at the time. I remember being herded into classrooms and watching the news. Kip Kinkel shot his parents, then went to the school and proceeds to shoot almost everyone in the cafeteria. He killed two students and wounded 25 more before two of the wounded students tackled him and held him until authorities arrived. We had no idea at the time that this would become common. (Kinkel is currently serving a life sentence with no possibility of parole.) This is why I support the walkouts.

TTT – Top Ten Books by Autistic Authors

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So I’ve mentioned it on Twitter, but I have been remiss in mentioning it here – April is Autism Acceptance Month! This is another cause close to my heart, because my husband is on the spectrum. We didn’t actually realize this until a year ago, but having realized it, it has given us SO MANY tools to use to manage daily life. The improvement has been amazing. So in the last year I’ve been doing a lot of self-education about autism, and I recently learned that there is a publishing house specifically for autistic authors, because so many mainstream publishers were turning them away! It’s called Autonomous Press, and their slogan is Weird Books for Weird People. Goodreads also has a list of books by autistic authors; some are explicitly about autism, some are fiction with autistic characters, and some aren’t about autism at all. But reading books by autistic authors is a great way to support the community and neurodivergence. This list is more of a to-be-read list for me; these are books I want to read. My library only has a few of them, though, and a few of them are working their way through the system to me.

journalThe first book on my list is one I HAVE read – The Journal of Best Practices: A Memoir of Marriage, Aperger Syndrome, and One Man’s Quest to be a Better Husband. I really enjoyed this one, as a chronicle of a marriage almost torn apart but ultimately saved by their new understanding of how his brain works. So many of the author’s behaviors are things I also see in my husband – I often stopped to read passages to him, only to have him stare at me in surprised recognition. It was also surprising to me – I’d have to stop and say “wait, is that really the way you think about that subject?” To which he’d reply “what, that isn’t normal?” So it was a journey of discovery for us both.

queens of geekCurrently out from the library I have Queens of Geek, which I didn’t realize was by an autistic author and only makes me more eager to read it. (Also, look at that cover! Bright hair FTW!) Nerdy, Shy, and Socially Inappropriate – A User Guide to an Asperger Life is by a blogger whose blog I pored through, reading nerdy shy socially inappropriate asperger autismentries to my husband and following links to quizzes and other resources. (Taking the diagnostic quizzes together was also enlightening – I really did not fully realize how differently his brain worked from mine – and we’ve been together over twelve years!)

pretending to be normal aspergerMaking their way to me through my extended library system (they’ll ship books to my county from any system in the state, it’s amazing!) are Pretending to be Normal – Living with Asperger’s Syndrome and Loud Hands – Autistic People Speaking. I really prefer loud hands autistic people speakingreading about autistic experiences through the eyes of actually autistic people. I know there’s several books out there by family members or doctors, but really. Who knows them better than themselves? I’m trying to be aware of the #ownvoices movement when reading about marginalized groups, and this is part of that.

So those are the five books I have read or am going to read. The next five are ones I either don’t have requested yet, or my library doesn’t have them at all. But they look interesting.

ABCs_of_Aut_Acceptance_Ebook_Cover3_largeThe ABCs of Autism Acceptance is one I should DEFINITELY read. I might be making an order from Autonomous Press soon! This is a collection of 26 short essays about autistic culture, systemic barriers that face autistics, and some of the history of autism. I really want to pick this one up.

The_Real_Experts_Online_Cover_largeThe Real Experts: Readings for Parents of Autistic Children doesn’t apply to me specifically, but I still thought it should receive a place in this top ten list. It’s another collection of essays, this time by a variety nothing is rightof autistic adults.

The Shaping Clay series of novels looks interesting; they’re about the life of an autistic man named Clay Dillon. They begin with Nothing is Right, set in first grade. The books continue through Imaginary Friends to Defiant, taking place when Clay is 30. The books are written by Michael Scott Monje Jr, who is transgender as well as autistic.

Spoon_Knife_Cover_Final_JPEG_largeThe Spoon Knife Anthology: thoughts on Compliance, Defiance, and Resistance looks like a fascinating book, edited by Michael Scott Monje Jr. and N.I. Nicholson. This appears to be an annually published book, with Spoon Knife 2 being called “Test Chamber.” They’re published by NeuroQueer, an imprint from Autonomous books that focuses on gender, sexuality, and race, and they’re billed as an “annual open-call collection to find new talent.”

barking sycamoresAlso under the NeuroQueer imprint is the first anthology of Barking Sycamores, a quarterly magazine of neurodivergent literature and art. The magazine publishes “poetry, artwork, short fiction, creative nonfiction, and hybrid genre work by emerging and established neurodivergent writers as well as book reviews.” They’re only available online at the website, though past issues can be bought as ebooks. They publish one piece per day on their blog until the issue is complete. I’ll definitely be following this blog!

So those are my Top Ten books to read this month for Autism Acceptance Month. (Technically I suppose that’s thirteen books, but I grouped the series together.) I think an order from Autonomous Press is in my near future!

So I had finished this post and had it ready to publish when a friend of mine gave me a few more titles! The Autism Women’s Network has published a few books like All The Weight of Our Dreams, which is a collection of essays by autistic people of color, and What Every Autistic Girl Wishes Her Parents Knew, a collection of essays by autistic women. So those are also worth checking out!

As I continue to find and read books by autistic authors, I’m just going to list them at the bottom of this post so they’re all in one place to refer back to!

All Cats Have Asperger Syndrome

The Kiss Quotient

Look Me In The Eye

 

 

Author Diversity Results

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So I went through this blog’s posts and recorded the ethnicity of all the authors I have read. (I included scheduled posts that aren’t live yet.) And the results are both sad and encouraging. Sad in that they HEAVILY skew white, but encouraging in that I can see the point where I began to try to fix that. It really brought home that it’s very very easy to NOT read diversely. It takes a little more effort to find good books in my preferred genres by diverse authors. But the catch is that it’s not because they don’t exist – it’s that they’re not marketed as heavily! The books are totally out there, I just have to make an effort to go find them myself.

The actual numbers:

63 white women
31 white men
1 white non-binary person
4 Black women
2 Black men
3 Middle-eastern men
1 Hispanic man
1 Greek man
1 Indian woman
1 Asian woman
1 Native American woman
1 Native American man
4 unknown ethnicities

Just looking at the numbers is pretty bad. However, 14 of my last 30 books have been by non-white cisgender authors! So once I started making an effort, it was fairly easy to find diverse reads. (I’m also amused that I read twice as many women as men.) So I am encouraged by the progress I have made, but saddened by how bad the numbers were. I will be making an effort to continue this trend in the future, and I’ll check in at the end of the year with my results.

Women’s History Month

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enchantress of numbersMarch is Women’s History Month! Most of the books I’m reviewing this month are by women, and several of them are about women. My review of Jennifer Chiaverini’s historical fiction about Ada Lovelace will be published towards the end of the month, a book about a Muslim teen dealing with rape culture is coming later this week (Saints and Misfits), and a dystopia dealing with the end of fertility, centered on the experiences of a Native American woman, (Future Home of the Living God) is also on the list this month.

I’ve always been pretty female-focused on this blog – I like female and minority protagonists, and female authors are pretty common in my preferred genres. I am reading several books this month focused on feminism or prominent women, but I probably won’t get reviews of those up until early April. I have a biography of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a couple of books on non-white feminism, and another biography of the first black female millionaire in America.

saintsIn the meantime, a few interesting links for Women’s History Month!

The longlist for the 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction has been released.

A few lists of books to read for Women’s History Month.

Children’s books for Women’s History Month. 

Middle-grade reads.

Women’s History Facts and Timeline.

 

Author Diversity

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I’ve been trying to read more diverse books, and I think I’ve been succeeding, but I haven’t actually been keeping track of numbers. So in the next month I’m going to be going back through all of the entries on this blog and taking note of the authors’ ethnicities, to see how diverse I have actually been reading. I’m sure it will be skewed, since my efforts for diversity have only been in the last two years or so, and I’ve been posting book reviews for far longer than that. But hopefully soon I will have a pie chart up so I can see what I need to work on! Now to figure out the easiest way to make a pie chart of data….

The Canada Reads 2018 Longlist is out!

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I’ve been looking for more books to finish up my Read Canadian challenge, and conveniently, the Canada Reads 2018 Longlist came out today, January 8th! There are fifteen books on the list, one of which I’ve already read. (American War by Omar El Akkad)

I just put Saints and Misfits on hold at my local library. It’s about a Muslim teen struggling with being sexually assaulted. The Marrow Thieves is another dystopia, in which most of humanity has lost the ability to dream, but the bone marrow of North American Indigenous people can restore it. So it’s being taken. Forcibly. My library also stocks that one, so that’s on my list! Tomboy Survival Guide is a memoir written by someone outside the gender box – and I love reading books about minorities. My library doesn’t have it, but I did find it in the Marina state-wide network. So it should be getting shipped to my library eventually! I’d like to read Out Standing In The Field, the memoir of Canada’s first female infantry officer, but neither my library nor the Marina network has it. I’ll keep an eye on it. The Clothesline Swing is about a pair of gay Syrian refugees, and Marina has it. I’m also interested in Mark Sakamoto’s Forgiveness: A Gift From My Grandparents, about his grandparents’ lives. One was a prisoner of war in Japan in WWII, while the other was a Japanese-Canadian sent to an internment camp in Canada during the same period. It’s not available through my library, though. Who knows? By the time I finish the ones that are available through the state system, the others might be, too.

The rest of the Longlist:

Several of these sound interesting, too – Seven Fallen Feathers is about racism and First Nations peoples. Dance, Gladys, Dance is apparently a humorous book about a woman and a ghost. The Measure of a Man is about a tailor remaking his father’s suit to fit himself. Scarborough is about a poor neighborhood, Precious Cargo about a man’s experiences driving a school bus of special needs kids. Brother is another book about racism, masculinity, and inner city violence. Suzanne is a portrait of the author’s grandmother, and The Boat People is the story of a boat full of Sri Lankan refugees that lands in Canada.

I’m excited to knock out the rest of the Read Canadian Challenge. I wasn’t really sure what to read next, so the Longlist coming out was EXCELLENT timing!