I listened to this as an audiobook because it is referenced so often in my very favorite podcast Secret Feminist Agenda. Host Hannah McGregor did a wonderful interview the author, Sara Ahmed, in the final episode of season 3. Ahmed grew up in Australia with a white mother and a Pakistani father as one of few POC students in her elementary schools. She is a lesbian, a PhD scholar, a professor, and long-time writer of the Feminist Killjoys blog. Her feminism is queer, intersectional and trans-inclusive. This is a scholarly book but it was a pretty easy listen as the writing itself leans more poetic and then dense. Much of it is about reactions to feminists speaking up in private or public spaces, and how words (such as "killjoy") are used against feminists and how they can be retaken. Ahmed references work she has done in previous books including the themes of willful subjects, sweaty concepts and walls. The middle portion of the book includes interviews with people doing diversity work at universities, followed by reflections on several films. The final portion includes Ahmed's Killjoy Survival Kit and Feminist Manifesto. This was a very thought-provoking text to listen to while I was drawing, but I am also aware than my comprehension is much higher when I read than when I listen, so hopefully I will have time to get a copy of this book in print to underline and highlight.

This book was published in 2012, so a few of the facts in it are now out of date. There's been a massive change in China's policy of importing American trash and recycling, and I think the numbers for waste and pollution production overall are now even higher than they were 7 years ago. However, this is a still very readable and informative book. Humes has won multiple Pulitzers for his writing- he's very good at focusing each chapter on a specific person and their relationship with/battle against trash. This includes a worker at Puente Hills, the largest landfill in the US, serving the LA area; the CEO of Waste Management, Inc; two different scientists studying ocean plastic; a Seattle resident helping out with an MIT based study tracking how far trash travels before it reaches a landfill (often hundreds or even thousands of miles); an archaeologist excavating trash to study it; several artists participating in the artist residency program at San Francisco's main trash hub; the founder of ChicoBag, an early reusable bag company; the founder of TerraCycle and more. It is hopeful to read about so many smart people who have been working on and studying trash, recycling and plastics for decades; but discouraging to learn how deeply messed up and unsustainable our systems for waste are. It's a problem beyond the scope of any one person- one that we must ALL begin to take personally before we are all buried under mountains of our own waste.

Nimona by Noelle Stevenson has won many awards and it deserves them. Originally serialized as a webcomic, this is an astonishingly moving story of a super villain and his side-kick, the shape-shifting title character, who must save a city from a villainy much worse than their own.

Jenny Odell makes a case for paying attention as an act of resistance, resilience, and a necessary step in being able to think critically and organize for activism. She worries that the "attention economy" (the persuasive design of social media and advertising) is leaving modern people, especially people who are already marginalized or in financially precarious positions, no room for quiet, introspective thought. New ideas often need time and space to grow, but who in this world has time and space to spare? Only the well-to-do, who should not have a monopoly on time to do nothing. Odell roots her book in the Bay Area, specifically in Oakland, drawing on anecdotes of native plants and birds as well as the histories of parks, unions, and labor in the Bay Area. She returns frequently to the story of the Useless Tree, a tree too twisted to be logged for timber, which was able to grow old and strong, sheltering a whole ecosystem under it's many branches. This is a refreshingly un-prescriptive book. Despite many critiques of facebook and twitter, Odell doesn't advocate for deleting one's accounts, but rather a kind of mindful resistance from within. The conclusion includes a call for Manifest Dismantling (a radical opposite of Manifest Destiny)- a hope that humans will begin to carefully unmake some of the things we have built, un-daming rivers, breaking up concrete shores and tearing up lawns to replant with native plants. I listened to this book as an audiobook, but I kind of wish I had read it on paper instead, because ironically I don't think I fully gave it the attention it deserved- I was working while listening to most of it, which felt pretty hypocritical.

Finally finished this. It took me about 6 weeks to read it, not because it's dense- it's actually quite conversational or even informal in tone- but it's packed with information. I learned a lot. The previous book I had read on this topic ended on a pro-waste-to-energy incineration note. This book rips up the concept of safe waste incineration. Even the most well monitored, carefully run incinerators are probably releasing nano-particles, ash and dioxins, destroying potentially re-usable resources and creating pollution. Paul Connett has been campaigning against waste incineration since 1985, and that fight lead him into the larger global struggle for sustainable waste management focused on composting, reducing, reusing, repairing and recycling to cut down the residual waste stream as much as possible. Another big take-away from this book is that Zero Waste is not a new trend. I would almost say that the more current use of zero waste by bloggers like Bea Johnson is co-opting a term that is a lot more powerful and effective went implemented on a community scale, rather than in a single house hold. It's good when individuals or families make a commitment to aim for zero waste; but as a movement that started in the late 80s/early 90s, Zero Waste has historically been about wider scale change. This book calls for limiting the extraction of virgin materials, the production of single use items, reducing the pollution caused by manufacturing and waste of resources caused by landfill and incineration. They present case studies of many communities, particularly in the US, Canada and Italy, that have made practical changes on the level of policy and infrastructure over the past few decades. I'd highly recommend this book to anyone interested in this issue, especially if your community is currently debating a new waste management system; the appendix includes a list of questions to bring up at city council meetings about planned incinerator projects.

As expected, this was delightful. It's a personal story of childhood struggles with anxiety which will be relatable to many. I especially appreciated the inclusion of therapy sessions, a subject I had no knowledge about as a child and am only learning about now, as an adult. I loved that Raina holds onto the fact that she attends therapy as a dark secret, but when she reveals it, all of her friends understand that in fact, it's no big deal.

This is a fun, fast-paced, sci-fi action, misfit-space-crew-being-molded-into-a-Team story that gets compared to Firefly in one of the back cover quotes. The cast includes a war veteran turned antique treasure hunter, a young hotshot race car driver, a butch battle-scarred bad-ass lesbian, a data wizard, a hippie chef, a hot doctor, a dead-eye markswoman and the Captain. I enjoyed the characters and their dynamics (as well as the side-plot queer romance) but wasn't as engaged with the constant chase scenes. This book feels like it was written with a film adaptation in mind, and I don't love what that does to the pacing. But it is cool to read a story in which magic and magic users are so well integrated into a spaceship/space battle setting.

This Newbery Award winning graphic novel follows Jordan, a kid from Washington Heights, for his entire seventh grade school year. Jordan loves drawing and carries a sketchbook everywhere. He dreams of going to art school, but his mother insists on sending him to a private, academically rigorous school a long subway ride away. He is one of very few kids of color in the whole school, as if being the new kid wasn't awkward enough. Luckily he finds friends in Liam, the rich white student assigned as his first week guide, and Drew, the only other black boy in his homeroom. Jordan survives joining a mandatory sports team, racial micro-aggressions from teachers, Secret Santas, unspoken cafeteria seating rules, salmon pink shorts and more. As he spends more time and begins to find his feet in the private school environment he finds it harder to make time for his neighborhood friends. But he has loving parents, and a grandpa full of wise advice on how to fit the two halves of his world together. This is a nuanced and warmhearted story, and I'm glad to know it will probably be available in every library in the country soon!