March was a productive month, and not just because I read a good number of books. I also started writing again after a bit of a slump, and I managed to unhaul 37 books from my home library, though some of them have not actually left the house yet. The used bookstore I went to didn't take everything so I have to decide which one I'm hitting next. Or if I'm dumping the bulk on a thrift store because let's be honest, most used bookstores aren't going to want what's left either.
Can you tell I got rid of that many? Only if you saw the state of things before. My shelves are neat and tidy with no books wedged on top of other books to make things fit.
And I was so, so close to ending the month without buying more books! I really thought I was going to manage it! And then, well, I mentioned the used bookstore, right? I've been meaning to read Delaney but few bookstores stock him, and Lincoln's Dreams is one of the only Connie Willis novels I don't own. (That shop also had stickers, and a cute bookmark I can't show you because whiting out the identifying features would ruin the effect.) Under the Smokestrewn Sky was a rescue, of sorts. Why return it to the publisher when you could just buy it, right?
Anyway, in terms of books read, there were some really good ones! And only one that was not so great. I think I'm done reading and collecting Rat Queens and might need to include those in the next unhaul. And don't get me wrong about the Evie Dunmore. It is a Good Historical Romance Novel. There's just something about it that didn't work for me.
Click through to see everything I read this month, in the rough order of how glad I was to have read them.
I Love Russia - Elena Kostyuchenko, translated by Bela Shayevich and Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse
Portraits and memories of the unsung Russia—the poor, the broken, the marginalized.
10/10
🏳️🌈 author
warnings: so many, including but not limited to misogyny, homophobia, genocide, violence, sexual violence, drugs and alcohol, abuse, child death, suicide
reading copy
True North - Andrew J. Graff
The Brechts move to Michigan to restart a rafting business. They hope it’ll save their family, but it might do the opposite.
7.5/10
Menominee secondary character
library book
Sociopath - Patric Gagne
As a child, Patric knew something about her was off and kept countering a lack of feeling with dark acts. As a young woman, she learns the definition of “sociopath” and it changes everything. Out in April.
8/10
neurodivergent author
To a Darker Shore - Leanne Schwartz
When the invention that should have guaranteed Alesta's future fails, her best friend takes the fall and is sacrificed to the demon besieging their kingdom. To rescue him, Alesta must descend into hell, where she learns truths about her society—and her gods. Out in April.
8/10
fat protagonist, autistic main character, major autistic secondary character, 🏳️🌈 secondary characters, autistic author
warning: classism, strict religion, autism-related ableism
reading copy
The Temple of Fortuna - Elodie Harper
Amara’s living as a courtesan in Rome but misses her lover and daughter in Pompeii. When she returns to the city, her needs and desires are sent into turmoil—and Vesuvius has started to rumble.
8/10
🏳️🌈 secondary characters (sapphic), Ethiopian secondary characters
warning: misogynist society, sexual violence, slave society
Funny Story - Emily Henry
What do you do when your partners dump you for each other? Move in together, of course! Out in April.
7.5/10
Iranian-American secondary character, Black secondary character, 🏳️🌈 secondary characters (sapphic)
warning: toxic relationships, mainly in backstory
reading copy
Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop - Hwang Bo-reum, translated by Shanna Tan
Tired of fulling expectations, Yeongju opens a bookshop. She’s not the only one to find happiness there.
7.5/10
Korean cast, Korean author
library ebook
Aftermarket Afterlife - Seanan McGuire
The Covenant has started actively pursuing the Prices and their allies, and all Mary wants to do is protect her family.
7/10
🏳️🌈 secondary characters (lesbian, gay, bi man), Korean-American secondary character, 🏳️🌈 author
warning: canon-typical violence, bigots
library ebook
Knife Skills for Beginners - Orlando Murrin
Paul Delamare is filling in for a friend at a cooking school when a body is found on the premises.
6.5/10
🏳️🌈 protagonist (gay), Black British secondary character, 🏳️🌈 secondary character (sapphic)
reading copy
Let Them Tremble - Wolf Epley
The revolution is brewing and both the workers and the government refuse bend. Throw in a destroyed print shop, ghosts, and malfunctioning Shroud devices, and you know things won’t end well.
7/10
major disabled character (partial blindness, limp, hand disfigurement), cast largely of non-racialized colour
won/digital reading copy
The Gentleman’s Gambit - Evie Dunmore
Catriona needs to avoid distractions to write her book but is pressed to help her father’s new colleague around Oxford. Elias needs her help if he ever hopes to smuggle antiquities out of the Ashmolean.
7/10
🏳️🌈 protagonist (bi woman), Lebanese love interest, Lebanese secondary character
warning: colonial/orientalist characters
library book
Rat Queens, Vol. 5 - Kurtis J. Wiebe with Owen Gieni (illustrator)
Palisade’s problems continue, including hallucinations, a hipster bar, and a sinister wizard.
6/10
major Black character, major 🏳️🌈 character (lesbian), 🇨🇦
off my TBR shelves
Children’s Books
Penelope Rex and the Problem with Pets - Ryan Higgins
Mittens hogs the bed, eats from the trash, and causes all kinds of trouble—and Penelope didn’t even want them!
Currently reading
I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons - Peter S. Beagle
Robert doesn’t want to be the country’s dragon exterminator on the best of days, but then Princess Cerise meets Prince Reginald. Out in May.
reading copy
Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century - Richard Taruskin
A history of early written European music, in its social and political contexts.
The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Victorian detective stories
disabled POV character (limb injury), occasional Indian secondary characters
warning: racism, colonialism
Monthly total: 12
Yearly total: 32
Queer books: 4
Authors of colour: 1
Books by women: 8
Authors outside the binary: 0
Canadian authors: 1
Classics: 0
Off the TBR shelves: 1
Books hauled: 3
ARCs acquired: 5
ARCs unhauled: 7
DNFs: 0
January February
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Footnotes 101 - 188
[101] Toby Rollo, “Feral Children: Settler Colonialism, Progress, and the Figure of the Child,” Settler Colonial Studies (June 2016), 1–20.
[102] Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (1992), 3–7.
[103] Institute for Precarious Consciousness, “We Are All Very Anxious,” WeArePlanC.org, April 4, 2014, http://www.weareplanc.org/blog/we-are-all-very-anxious/.
[104] Sitrin, Everyday Revolutions, 37.
[105] Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 12.
[106] Our readings and understandings of Illich’s work, and our understanding of conviviality in particular, is indebted to conversations with friends who either knew Illich personally or worked closely with his ideas, including Gustavo Esteva, Madhu Suri Prakash, Dan Grego, Dana L. Stuchul and Matt Hern.
[107] Quoted in The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 232–3.
[108] Marina Sitrin, ed., Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina (Oakland: AK Press, 2006); Sitrin, Everyday Revolutions.
[109] Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 2.
[110] Idem, 7.
[111] Leanne Simpson, “Dancing the World into Being: A Conversation with Idle No More’s Leanne Simpson,” Yes! Magazine, March 5, 2013, http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/dancing-the-world-into-being-a-conversation-with-idle-no-more-leanne-simpson.
[112] Quoted in Tony Manno, “Unsurrendered,” Yes! Magazine, 2015, http://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=b24e304ce1944493879cba028607dfc7.
[113] INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, “INCITE! Critical Resistance Statement,” 2001, http://www.incite-national.org/page/incite-critical-resistance-statement.
[114] Rachel Zellars and Naava Smolash, “If Black Women Were Free: Part 1,” Briarpatch, August 16, 2016, http://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/if-black-women-were-free.
[115] Victoria Law, “Against Carceral Feminism,” Jacobin, October 17, 2014, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/10/against-carceral-feminism/.
[116] Creative Interventions, “Toolkit,” CreativeInterventions.org, http://www.creative-interventions.org/tools/toolkit/ (accessed December 1, 2016).
[117] Quoted in carla bergman and Corine Brown, Common Notions: Handbook Not Required, 2015.
[118] Gustavo Esteva, interview by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery, video, 2012.
[119] Kelsey Cham C., Nick Montgomery, and carla bergman, interview by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery, October 26, 2013.
[120] Marina Sitrin, “Occupy Trust: The Role of Emotion in the New Movements,” Cultural Anthropology (February 2013), https://culanth.org/fieldsights/75-occupy-trust-the-role-of-emotion-in-the-new-movements.
[121] Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash, Grassroots Postmodernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures (London: Zed Books, 1998), 91.
[122] Day, Gramsci Is Dead, 200.
[123] Zainab Amadahy, Wielding the Force: The Science of Social Justice, Smashwords edition (Zainab Amadahy, 2013), 36.
[124] Esteva and Prakash, Grassroots Postmodernism, 89.
[125] Amadahy, Wielding the Force, 149.
[126] Emma Goldman, “The Hypocrisy of Puritanism,” in Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader, ed. Alix Kates Shulman (Amherst: Humanity Books, 1998), 157.
[127] Chris Dixon, “For the Long Haul,” Briarpatch Magazine, June 21, 2016, http://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/for-the-long-haul.
[128] We first encountered the concept of “public secret” as a way of getting at the affect of anxiety today, described by the Institute for Precarious Consciousness. Earlier uses can be traced to the work of Ken Knabb (which credits the concept to Marx) and his curation of Situationist writing, as well as Jean-Pierre Voyer’s reading of Reich. See Institute for Precarious Consciousness, “Movement Internationalism(s),” Interface 6/2; Jean-Pierre Voyer, “Wilhelm Reich: How To Use,” in Public Secrets, trans. Ken Knabb (Bureau of Public Secrets, 1997), http://www.bopsecrets.org/PS/reich.htm; Jean-Pierre Voyer to Ken Knabb, “Discretion Is the Better Part of Value,” April 20, 1973, http://www.bopsecrets.org/PS/Reich.add.htm.
[129] This was suggested to us by Richard Day.
[130] brown, interview by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery.
[131] Amador Fernández-Savater, “Reopening the Revolutionary Question,” ROAR Magazine 0 (December 2015).
[132] Federici, interview by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery.
[133] Touza, interview by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery.
[134] Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), 32.
[135] Foucault, “Preface.”
[136] Cited in Ashanti Alston, “An Interview with Ashanti Alston,” interview by Team Colours, June 6, 2008, https://inthemiddleofthewhirlwind.wordpress.com/an-interview-with-ashanti-alston/.
[137] Thoburn develops his conception of a “militant diagram” through a reading of Deleuze and Guattari, and we have found it useful in thinking about rigid radicalism as an affective tendency that is irreducible to the gestures, habits, practices, and statements that are simultaneously its fuel and its discharge. See Nicholas Thoburn, “Weatherman, the Militant Diagram, and the Problem of Political Passion,” New Formations 68/1 (2010), 125–42.
[138] Colectivo Situaciones, “Something More on Research Militancy: Footnotes and Procedures and (In)Decisions,” 5.
[139] Thoburn, “Weatherman, the Militant Diagram, and the Problem of Political Passion,” 129; Cathy Wilkerson, Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007), 265–300.
[140] Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, and Jeff Jones, eds., Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements, and Communiques of the Weather Underground 1970–1974 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006), 18.
[141] Bill Ayers, Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009), 154.
[142] Esteva, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.
[143] Thoburn, “Weatherman, the Militant Diagram, and the Problem of Political Passion,” 134.
[144] Esteva, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.
[145] Sitrin, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.
[146] Emma Goldman, Living My Life (New York: Dover Publications, 1970), 54.
[147] amory starr, “Grumpywarriorcool: What Makes Our Movements White?,” in Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth (Oakland: AK Press, 2006), 379.
[148] Idem, 383.
[149] crow, Black Flags and Windmills, 81.
[150] Alston, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.
[151] Richard J. F. Day, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman, phone, March 18, 2014.
[152] Alston, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.
[153] CrimethInc., “Against Ideology?,” CrimethInc.com, 2010, http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/atoz/ideology.php.
[154] Erich Fromm, Man for Himself: An Inquiry Into the Psychology of Ethics (Oxon: Routledge, 1947), 235.
[155] See Raoul Vaneigem, The Movement of the Free Spirit, trans. Randall Cherry and Ian Patterson, revised edition (New York, Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 1998); Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 21–60.
[156] Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, 33.
[157] Idem, 36.
[158] Quoted by Maya Angelou in Malcolm X, Malcolm X: An Historical Reader, ed. James L. Conyers and Andrew P. Smallwood (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2008), 181.
[159] Kelsey Cham C., “Radical Language in the Mainstream,” Perspectives on Anarchist Theory 29 (2016), 122–3.
[160] Asam Ahmad, “A Note on Call-Out Culture,” Briarpatch, March 2, 2015, http://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/a-note-on-call-out-culture.
[161] Ngọc Loan Trần, “Calling IN: A Less Disposable Way of Holding Each Other Accountable,” Black Girl Dangerous, December 18, 2013, http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/2013/12/calling-less-disposable-way-holding-accountable/.
[162] Ibid.
[163] Chris Crass, “White Supremacy Cannot Have Our People: For a Working Class Orientation at the Heart of White Anti-Racist Organizing,” Medium, July 28, 2016, https://medium.com/@chriscrass/white-supremacy-cannot-have-our-people-21e87d2b268a.
[164] Ibid.
[165] Ursula Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven (New York: Scribner, 1999), 137.
[166] This section title is borrowed from Eve Sedgwick, from whom we’ve also taken the concept of paranoid reading. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re so Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Duke University Press, 2003), 124–51.
[167] Killjoy, Interview with Margaret Killjoy.
[168] Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re so Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You.”
[169] Day, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.
[170] Mik Turje, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman, March 4, 2014.
[171] Walidah Imarisha, Angels with Dirty Faces: Three Stories of Crime, Prison, and Redemption (Oakland: AK Press, 2016), 113–15.
[172] Walidah Imarisha, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman, email, December 22, 2015.
[173] Federici, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.
[174] John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today, 2nd Revised Edition (London: Pluto Press, 2005), 215.
[175] Coulthard, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.
[176] This turn of phrase comes to us from Stevphen Shukaitis’s wonderful book Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Life (New York: Autonomedia, 2009), 141–2, http://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/ImaginalMachines-web.pdf.
[177] This idea is paraphrased from Lauren Berlant and her conception of “cruel optimism,” a relation in which our attachments become obstacles to our flourishing. See Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
[178] Federici, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.
[179] Zainab Amadahy, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman, January 15, 2016.
[180] Jo Freeman, “Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood,” JoFreeman.com, n.d., http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/trashing.htm.
[181] Marge Piercy, “The Grand Coolie Dam,” (Boston: New England Free Press, 1969).
[182] See Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” Ms. Magazine, July 1973.
[183] Silvia Federici, “Putting Feminism Back on Its Feet,” Social Text 9/10 (1984), 338–46.
[184] See Raúl Zibechi, Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces, trans. Ramor Ryan (Oakland: AK Press, 2010); Zibechi, Territories in Resistance.
[185] Silvia Federici, “Losing the sense that we can do something is the worst thing that can happen,” interview by Candida Hadley, Halifax Media Co-op, November 5, 2013, http://halifax.mediacoop.ca/audio/losing-sense-we-can-do-something-worst-thing-can-h/19601.
{1} BIPOC is an acronym for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. We understand these not as ethnic categories or essentialist identities, but complex political categories forged in struggles against white supremacy and settler colonialism. For instance, the creation of BIPOC-specific spaces or “caucuses” within various struggles has created opportunities for understanding how racism or whiteness is playing out, and how it can be confronted effectively.
{2} ISIL stands for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, often used interchangeably with Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
{3} Note: when we interviewed Silvia Federici, we were still using the phrase “sad militancy” in place of “rigid radicalism.” The original terminology is retained throughout.
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Full Name: Samantha Lauren Puckett
Nicknames: Sam (by everyone), Mama (by herself, Rex, Gibby, and Carly), Puckett, Princess Puckett That, Lady, Blonde-headed Demon, Sammy, Dude Sam-jerk, Horrible, lazy blonde, Cuteness, My little fibber, Little Samanther, Genius, babe, baby (by Freddie), Sammy (by herself, her mother, Cousin Chaz, and Billy Boots), That gutter girl, That no good Puckett (by Mrs. Benson)
Gender: Female
Birthday: April 17, 1994
Age: 29
Occupation: Host of iCarly (currently), Student at Ridgeway Junior High School (formerly), Employee at Chili My Bowl (formerly), Employee at the Pear Store (formerly)
Education: Ridgeway Junior High School (graduated)
Residence: Seattle (currently), Los Angeles (formerly)
Hair Color: Blonde
Eye Color: Blue
Family: Pam Puckett (mother), Melanie Puckett (twin sister), Unnamed father, Unnamed grandfather, Unnamed great-grandfather, J'Maw-maw (grandmother), Frank (uncle), Buzz (uncle), Morris (uncle), Billy (uncle), Carmine (uncle), Chaz (uncle), Maggie (aunt), Judy (aunt), Greg Patillo (cousin), Garth (cousin), Tanya (cousin), Annie (cousin), Dominic (cousin), Julia Puckett (niece), Frankini Valentine (brother in law)
Friends: Carly Shay (best friend), Freddie Benson (best friend, ex-boyfriend), Gibby Gibson, Cat Valentine (best friend), Brad, Caleb, Harper, Robyn, Shelby Marx, Spencer Shay, T-Bo, Wendy, Cort, Claire, Jade West
Romances: Freddie Benson (ex-boyfriend, still in love with), Frankie Murkin (ex-boyfriend), Jonah (ex-boyfriend), Reuben (one date), Shane (former crush), Eric Mosby (ex-boyfriend), Carter Ford (former crush), Pete (former crush), Gary Wolf (former crush), Zayn Malik (celebrity crush)
Pets: Frothy (3-legged cat), Fluffles (former pet rabbit), Shelly (former baby chick), Huevo (former baby chick), Omelet (former baby chick), Benedict (former baby chick), Yoko (former baby chick), Poachy (former baby chick), Gaga (mother's pet horse)
Enemies: The Petographers, Melanie Puckett (sometimes), Pam Puckett (formerly), Freddie Benson (formerly), Valerie, Jonah, Mrs.Benson, Lervin's bully, Chip Chambers, Dana Bukowski, LeAnn Carter, Nora Dershlit, Steven Carson, Penny Tee Employees, Tasha, Ms. Briggs, Nevel Papperman, Kyoko and Yuki, Wade Collins, Jocelyn, Missy Robinson, Mr. Howard, Ms. Ackerman
First Appearance: iPilot (OG), iStart Over (Revival)
Last Appearance: iGoodbye (OG), TBD
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