Reading as healing
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This book was fantastic. It was rage-inducing and awe-inspiring. Anyone who wants to understand German migration politics needs to start with who is most affected: by listening to stories of the refugees and asylum seekers who deal with Germany's racism and institutional violence every day.
I met the Women* in Exile group at a digital safety training I hosted some months ago. They were selling this book of stories of migration as a fundraiser, and it’s amazing.
A nice long form essay, but it is more a review of Institutional Critique than a piece that really envisions a world of art that must—or gets to—exist without institutional influence.
This was… not great. It wasn’t awful. There were some gems inside if you can Butler’s needless wordiness. The book could have been much shorter. But the final chapter on nonviolence is a worthy read.
Picked this up at the Missread book fair a couple weekends ago in Berlin
Going through some books before donating them, this was below my reading level by the time I got to it but it was fun and I learned something from it nevertheless. I’ll donate it to my office library for the next learner.
Picked this book up at a photo exhibition in Amsterdam last year. It’s a nice little collection of photos and an interesting coffee table piece.
On to #68 on the Modern Library list. The opening chapter of this book is so vivid and beautiful, it’s prose is wonderful. I can’t wait to read it.
Butler wrote these essays between 2004 and 2008, and published this paperback before Chelsea Manning’s revelations. Yet, having read the introduction so far, it looks to still be a relevant text, and I’m excited to read it, even if it’s not Butler’s best known work.
Eine tolle, lustige und queere Geschichte, das lesbische, österreichische Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
Fresh off reading a very clumsy scifi novel about gender or something, I’m picking up this German maybe queerish scifi novel and it’s already an improvement.
Qven was created to be a Presger translator. The pride of their Clade, they always …
I really had some hopes for this, but it was… not great. Scifi’s not a subtle genre usually but this book beat you over the head while shouting in a bullhorn. The characters’ actions made no sense, key characters acted completely absurdly, and the shift between voices was irritating. But worst of all was its heavy-handed exercise in insisting on a boring, irritating, aspirationally woke take on pronouns that added nothing to the story. Essentially tumblr tenderqueer fanfic rep lit.
Qven was created to be a Presger translator. The pride of their Clade, they always …
Picking up some more sci-fi pleasure reading. Well, that was the intention except I forgot to bring it with me on the train
And… done with #78 on the ML Top 100 list. I did not like this book. Mostly because I had no idea what the hell was going on and didn’t feel like flipping back to an end note every three sentences.
