reading

Reading for a 2-person book club

Really neat oral history of a community of squatters in the 90s.

Read this with someone to practice French together! I've heard that this book is great, and quite profound and dark for a children's book.

Feels very helpful for brainstorming structures for community management! I read most of this a year ago and finally finished the appendix over the last week.

Great food for thought, and also lots of really great stories of various gatherings.

The 11yo I live with enjoyed this and recommended it to me!

This series brings me both pessimism and optimism about human nature and societal governance.

It was so delightful to get more canon stories from the avatar universe! This story has much more violence than the tv series. I appreciated the exploration of when one decides to use violence vs try to work things out peacefully.

"It’s a book about family, breakups, queerness, childhood, sisters, and healing, but most of all, Stone Fruit is an act of playfulness." I really enjoyed this book and felt like the characters and relationship problems depicted were complex and human.

This felt like a really solid introduction to IFS -- it felt well organized, clearly written, and decently nuanced for an introductory book. I've recommended this book to several friends and been thinking about IFS a lot. It seems likely that IFS will make a huge difference for me in my mental health journey.

Read for book club

Stories where people may not be who they seem (and also where there is much death) kinda freak me out, but this book was definitely captivating. I like the idea of a magic built around the pursuasion of language. I still have many questions.

This kinda destroyed me emotionally.

Not totally sure if I'd recommend it, but I definitely enjoyed and learned from reading it as part of book club and having conversations around it.

Thinking about stability and happiness...

well that was depressing

Great duology.

I'm really glad I read this. Felt like a very real potential future. Feels like something that even exists now around us to some extent.

I liked the start, but it got repetitive and felt longer than it needed to be.

I really appreciated this read, the way it challenges the good/bad binary, and the way it explores the relationship between standing up for what you want and hurting the people you love. But most of all I loved the way it depicted what close relationships and family can look like <3

So wholesome!! Gives me nostalgia for the fun flirty feels.

Essays and interviews on anxious attachment, shame, masculinity, harm, transformative justice, and nurturance. Reading this brought up a lot of feelings for me. I especially liked this essay on gaslighting.

More depressing than I expected! I really appreciate her willingness to talk blatantly about her flaws.

Recommended by my doctor to deal with the pain that I've been assuming was nerve issues. After reading this book, I'm pretty sure most of the pain I've felt more recently was coming from my fear of nerve issues, and since starting this book the pain has already substantially decreased. I'd recommend this book to anyone -- it has tips to deal with physical discomfort and pain, but also has some really great advice about managing anxiety (which is related). It was really cool to see so many parallels between the way I've changed my relationship with anxiety and the way I want to change my relationship with pain.

Read for graphic novel book club. This was really beautiful! Great stories, drawn beautifully, connected cleverly. A work of art.

Recommended by my ex to better understand them :p Might read as part of our relationship retrospective work.

Started reading this for a local bookstore's book club, but eneded up making other plans that night. It was neat to read the essays, but wasn't quite what I wanted -- it would be cool to have a 201 version of this without explaining the fundamentals of gender and transition things, and getting into advanced gender fuckery. I might try to make a collection like that some time.

Read this for graphic novel book club (which I just joined!) and enjoyed it. Helps me understand the appeal of going on a long bike trip. I enjoyed the graphic journalling format.

The human world is this cute utopian-ish anarchist-ish place and I really enjoyed reading this book too!

Recommended by a friend who identified with neurodivergence after reading this, and saw symptoms in me as well. This book helped me understand more about myself and many of my friends -- one of my biggest realizations while reading was that investing in my hobbies brings me a lot of joy and shared interests are a lot of how I feel connected to people. I also now more easily notice when I'm feeling sensoriliy overwhelmed or desire more structure. I'd recommend this book to most people I know!

Cozy sci-fi about a nonbinary monk. Explores radical independence and also the journey of finding purpose or meaning. I really enjoyed this short read <3

I loved this! It's repetitive, but the ideas feel very aligned with the way I want to treat kids (and anyone), and it's a fairly quick read.

Pretty interesting! But also a little long-winded, and the book club I was reading it with went on break for a bit. We'll see if we pick it up again.

Quite engaging and easy to read. An interesting and somewhat depressing exploration of the pursuit of happiness. Definitely more like a collection of short stories than a novel. I liked the first half more.

Started this for book club at my house that inevitably died. I enjoyed the parts that I read, though!

Recommended by a housemate with the note 'Existential dread + imposter syndrome + gayness <3 hought you'd be interested'

Read for politics reading group. The author raises good questions about anarchy, but their answers weren't very satisfying. Read most of it but skipped several sections towards the end.

So many words I have to look up and so many sentences with way too many commas for me to be able to parse. But it's historically relevant and short, so still seems worth the read. Only got through it because it was for a reading club I'm in.

I don't agree with every single thing in the book, but damn this is such a good resource that brings up so many aspects of bottoming. I wish I'd read this years ago and I'm glad I did now.

(This book is the sequel to Six of Crows.) This duology is so great. Characters with interesting backstories, hiest plots that are clever and keep surprising me. There’s a bit of gay stuff, there’s a lot of fun banter, there are disabled characters, there’s some stuff around forced sex work, PTSD, racism, and poverty. I’d definitely recommend them!

I didn't realize it was a hiest book until I started reading it, but wow what a fun and interesting story!

Engaging, but I was not a fan of the sexism and inconsistent plot details.

A zine critiquing cancel culture in leftist communities. She writes about a lot of things I've been thinking about lately: trauma, identity, judgement, what it looks like to set boundaries, and how to take responsibility for harm.

beautiful and disturbing

I had these books as a child but never read them. They're very good. I feel inspired to finally listen to that recording my mom made of her parents' account of surviving the holocaust.

Read this in a group of four and we got through all twelve chapters. I think I'm glad I did it -- the rituals felt important, and there were some helpful thoughts I had from reading and especially from book club conversations. But overall, the book did not impress me -- too much emphasis on God and a view of spirituality that I don't vibe with, written from a lens of privilege, missing a lot of context of how tech affects people's lives now (it was written in the 90s), and surprisingly fixated on ways to deal with partners and friends who tear you down creatively. Some of the tasks were great, but a lot of them didn't feel relevant or helpful. I'd love to write a version of this some day that has the 10% I enjoyed and added commentary.

A very approachable read in terms of language and pacing. Emotionally it hit me like a ton of bricks. A woman has trauma from trans stuff and spending time on the leftist internet, spends all her time reading books and biking alone, and is checked out of her relationships and her life and her self. This book helped me feel more empathy for people who have trouble connecting with themselves and others, but it also felt very real and depressing.

Read for book club. Interesting to learn more about this discourse, but this book is so frustratingly focused on capitalism and on allowing 'low-skill workers' to benefit from moving to 'the wonderful USA' (and how that would also bring the USA more money). Couldn't bring myself to finish it.

recommended by a friend. my notes: 'fighting aliens, people die, also fighting misogyny'

recommended by a friend. my notes: 'assault and then murder'

recommended by a friend. my notes: 'novel and poem, but actually an even easier read than any of the other recs'

Approachable and interesting. Really glad I read it. Unfinished notes here. I didn't enjoy the last couple chapters as much as the first few.

A girl moves to NYC and falls in love with a punk lesbian who got stuck on the Q line in the 70s and can't get off. The characters are all fun, the story is wholesome and queer af and sometimes very hot. This book is totally written to appeal to a queer punk city-life nerdy kinky demographic, but hey I'm not complaining.

Educational and touching, and I think several people I know would enjoy reading it. It's not just about queering gender but also queering sexuality, and also queering queerness?

This book explores attachment theory in a more thoughtful and nuanced way than most other resources I've seen. It helped me better understand what I want from relationships, things that might be getting in the way (including a variety of types of trauma), and strategies to create those relationships. Definitely recommend.

an immigration story from china, recommended by someone who said they got lost in it

A collection of deliciously unnerving short stories with themes around the experience of living in a women's body. I particularly enjoyed the first two and last two stories. I often found myself confused about what happened in the stories, since it's not often I read something where the aesthetic of the story matters more than concrete details of the plot, and I enjoyed reading analyses of the stories online.

A short read, an accessible introduction to anarchist ideas, and decent advice for effective collaboration. It feels a bit like a political pamphlet making bold claims without much to back them up, but the ideas feel useful to think about regardless.

A sassy and informative read about how capitalism is hurting the environments we live in.

I thought it was interesting but kept not wanting to read it!! So I guess I'll consider it abandoned for now.

I love the concept of this book, and tried so hard to read it, and enjoyed the chapters i read, but I just can't find the attention span for this book these days.

A memoir detailing the story of an abusive queer relationship. Each chapter is short and captivatingly beautiful, combining into something indescribable. First book I've finished since April.

recommended by my therapist, a book about about flexible thinking (flexible thinking for yourself, persuading others stuck in rigid thinking, how to be flexible in systems we work in)

I love the way it portrays day-to-day life alongside mysterious and horrible events - it helps the heaviness feel more real and intimate.

I've noticed how good it feels to get off of my phone and just be mindful of things around me. I feel more creative, have more energy to think about things. This book talks more about this and I loved the anitcapitalist lense. I was finding it difficult to read chapters filled with historical anecdotes and abandoned in chapter 3. I was hoping the author would more quickly and clearly connect the anecdotes to the main ideas of the book.

A memoir about a humanities professor that studies technology and how it affects human communication, self-image, social dynamics. My friend couldn't put it down, and said she’s had a fascinating life and writes so honestly and vividly.

Recommended by a friend - historical ficiton about two musical, Chinese families. I had very slowly made my way through half of the book, but ran out of library renews after four months. I found it hard to get into - there were so many subplots it switches between and I never got that invested in any of them.

A short, fun, and easy to read novel (written for kids / young adults), which is exactly what I've been looking for recently. Sci-fi mystery, and some exploration of friendships, class, and race. I really enjoyed it.

I read this in one sitting while laying in a park where dogs and children were playing, would recommend! (both the book and the park reading experience)

Read this as part of research into what it would take to set up an urban community home. This book focuses a bit too much on specific rural/ecovillage details for my interests, and I'm skeptical of some of the author's opinions, but overall there was a wide variety of useful information here. I took some notes I might post here later :)

A really great introduction to thinking about the world more complexly and interconnectedly. Includes several tips for making systemic changes. This is one of the few non-fiction books I've read that didn't feel like it had a lot of filler.

Jazz music has intrigued me for years - I enjoy listening to jazz, but I'm especially interested in learning more about musical improvisation, especially in a collaborative setting. A friend recommended this book to help me think more about this. I read the chapter he recommended, put it down, and the library asked for it back :p I took some notes I may put up here later.

Fun queer coming of age graphic novel. I quite enjoyed it, and it felt surprisingly nuanced for the format? idk why I was surprised

I really liked the first essay (of three) that talks about how the author relates to anarchism without getting into any history or technical terms. The second essay was dense with references to things I didn't know, which got too effortful for me to read.

An autobiography recommended as an easy and funny read.

Historical fiction about first contact between first nations and settlers, set in great lakes area. This was recommended by a close friend as their favourite book ever.

I appreciate the nuance with which he talks about race, tying together seemingly contradictory concepts and experiences. He has a lot of interesting ideas, but I found some of his writing hard to follow (long winding sentences, references to media and culture I'm not familiar with). I enjoyed the autobiographical chapters a lot more than the more abstract academic chapters.

Picked this up at an anarchist bookstore - it's a short read with lots of pictures, which I appreciated. Learned a lot about the restaurant industry, but also class/labour politics in general. You can read the pdfs of the works in this book here.

This book was hard for me to read and uses a lot of jargon. It's not very long and has some pretty interesting ideas I think could be worth trying to understand, but abandoning it for now.

A set of writing tips, each tool described in only a few pages. I found a lot of useful advice in here! There were some aspects of this book I didn't like as much: the author used some confusing metaphors, some of the tools I disagreed with or felt weren't explored in enough depth/nuance, several of the writing examples felt tedious to read, and the tools were a bit more focused on journalism and fiction-writing than I wanted. There was still lots of great food for thought though, and I found enough of the advice useful that I made a summary of the tools that you can find here.

Every time I read a graphic novel I'm like wow I love graphic novels I want to read more of them. This particular one was EXTREMELY pretty and v cute and queer.

Taught me a lot about prisons (especially in the USA and California), history, politics, and race. Short and to the point - there were many references and terms I had to look up while reading, but this was also one of the few non-fiction books I've read that didn't feel like it had a lot of filler.

I liked the first book in this duology more, but still enjoyed this one!

This has been recommended by several friends. Seems like a great resource to learn more about systems of opression and progressive pedagogical ideas.

This book is advertised as sex science, but has a very self-help vibe to it. The tone frequently feels babying and the author uses some confusing metaphors, but also there are a lot of really interesting and useful concepts in it that have significantly helped me think through my feelings around sex (e.g. the accelerator/brake model) and I'd still recommend this book.

Started reading this as part of a book club at work. I don't usually like reading coding books, but it talks about some things I've been thinking about in developing my eng skills - making tradeoffs to help the code you write be less complex, such that people who work with your code in the future can understand it more easily and be less likely to create bugs and create unnecessary future complexity. We stopped reading when covid hit, but maybe I'll finish it some time!

A friend kept recommending this book to me, saying it was really helpful for them reframing their art away from the blocking feeling of needing to be 'good enough' (which is something I also struggle with). Also one of the author talks about their experience as a conductor, which is a skill I'm interested in and trained in, so seems like a cool book to check out.

After not reading much for a while, I devoured the first of this trilogy in a few days and it was awesome. I enjoyed the first > second > third book, but still really enjoyed the series overall. Loved how the story included polyamory in this super casual way that just was and wasn't even that important to the plot.

I love this book! A collection of short writing from folks of different backgrounds, each talking about their thoughts and experiences with relationships, surviving abuse, and consent. One of the pieces is just a long list of questions, many of which I found useful exercises for reflection (e.g. 'how do you give yourself or someone else space to figure out what you/they want?', 'how might you act out gender binary behaviours, even within queer relationships and friendships? how might this affect expectations and consent?')

A great introduction to queer theory, with lots of pictures. Reading this book changed the way I think about queerness, taught me some interesting queer history, and introduced me to the idea of queer as a verb ('to queer' something, challenge binaries) vs. an adjective (an identity that describes someone).

This book helped me think about how to approaching learning things and dedication to skill-building over a long period of time. I found some aspects of the book annoying, but have definitely come back to the ideas it discusses. You can check out some notes I took on it here.

Hank is one of my favourite 'humans from the internet' and I enjoyed his book for a lot of the reasons I enjoy his videos. This book was so casual in tone and easy to read, had a fun sci-fi story, and touched on a lot of interesting ideas around fame, power, and influence.