mars2k's Reviews (226)

Zami: A New Spelling of my Name

5.0

adventurous emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name is truly incredible. It’s beautifully written; raw, evocative, heartachingly sincere. Reading it, I felt like there was always something almost said – secrets just barely hidden behind a veil of metaphor, accessible only to those who know what to look for.
At times, the major themes of relationships, the self, and truth are explicitly highlighted, while at others they permeate the text almost – but not quite – unnoticed.

My only complaint (and even then it isn’t really a complaint) is that the book ends somewhat abruptly. I found myself yearning for a few more chapters. Still, I don’t think that’s enough to bring my rating down from its well-deserved five stars. If anything, it just goes to show how enthralling Lorde’s writing is.

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Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life

Karen E. Fields, Barbara J. Fields

4.0

challenging dark informative tense medium-paced

Racecraft is not without its flaws, though it’s certainly not without its merits. Perhaps I ought to start this review with those positive aspects.

The thesis is solid. The book explores the relationship between race and racism (proposing that racism creates race rather than the other way around) and coins the term “racecraft” to describe this process of manifesting race. The authors provide many examples of racecraft in action, both historical and contemporary. They go so far as to suggest that slavery preceded racism as we understand it today, arguing that black people were dehumanised and treated as property first, and then that inferior status was attributed to their race.

The witchcraft analogy works well – the “illusion of race,” a framework of “truth” based on assumption and confirmation bias rather than biology. I was pleasantly surprised that witchcraft wasn’t just dismissed as nonsense – “a middle ground between science and superstition” is a good way of explaining it.

Beyond the core premise of the book, however, things start to get a little muddled. The authors make it clear that they don’t like race being described as a social construct, which seems odd to me. After all, they use phrases like “an invisible realm of collective understandings” to describe racecraft, and repeatedly point out that race has no biological basis and is constructed? socially? I’m left with this feeling that I must be missing something, because otherwise this is a glaring contradiction.

There’s also opposition to the idea of reclaiming race as an identity, ie: celebrating blackness. The authors almost seem to call for a so-called “colourblind” approach, a complete rejection of race as a concept... but then they also reject that idea, so I’m not sure what they’re trying to say.

In the end the book didn’t feel like it was really saying anything. There was an excellent breakdown of race, racism, and racecraft, and a ton of examples presented and explored, but then...? It felt like it was building to something, some kind of call to action that never came. The conclusion felt rushed and lacking.

At one point I thought I’d give this book five stars, but I’ve since lowered that rating to four. Despite a very strong start, the book lost steam in the latter half. Overall Racecraft is good and worth reading, but the contradictions and overly academic writing made it a bit confusing at times.

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The BBC: Myth of a Public Service

Tom Mills

3.5

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The BBC: Myth of a Public Service manages to strike a healthy balance of being academic and being accessible. It is thoroughly researched (footnotes galore!) but, at the same time, approachably written and well explained. Mills provided some good insights (on the BBC’s reliance on the state/government, apoliticism and conservatism, capitalism and creativity, etc.) and he concludes the book with a call for decentralisation, democratisation, and diversity.

Despite my praise, it must be said that the book was quite dry at times. There really is no way around that. This isn’t really the author’s fault – rather, the subject matter just didn’t intrigue me as much as I thought it would.

In the end, The BBC: Myth of a Public Service was paradoxically interesting yet also failing to hold my interest. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this book, but I’m sure others will enjoy it more than I did.

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The Madman's Library: The Strangest Books, Manuscripts, and Other Literary Curiosities from History

Edward Brooke-Hitching

3.5

dark funny informative mysterious fast-paced

The Madman’s Library delivers exactly what it promises – a compendium of unusual manuscripts and literary curiosities. Beyond that I don’t have a whole lot to say about it. The text and the images are well formatted and work to elevate each other. The writing is evocative and entertaining. The subject matter can get pretty gruesome at times but if it sounds like something that might interest you, I recommend reading it. I wasn’t completely enthralled but it’s a nice enough coffee table book.

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We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan

Lou Sullivan

4.5

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“They told me at the gender clinic that I could not live as a gay man, but it looks like I will die as one.”

I’m not sure how to review a book of diary entries – it feels so wrong rating somebody’s life. I know it would be cliché to call this book inspiring, but it really is. I don’t mean that in a cis “wow, you’re so brave” way. Lou Sullivan himself is inspiring, not only as a gay trans man or even as a queer activist, but as a human being.

It’s also really interesting to see how trans terminology and, more than that, our very understanding of what it means to be trans has changed over the decades. Sullivan describes transness as “a sexual minority (TV/TS) within a sexual minority (homosexual)” and as a disability (due to him being born without a penis), and though this isn’t how I or most other trans people would think of transness today, it’s an honest expression of how Sullivan felt about his own identity.

Another passage I want to highlight is this:

“I can never be a man until my body is whole and I can use it freely and without shame. I may appear in all outward ways to be a man and I may feel in my heart all that a man feels, yet my spirit is hampered and my dreams of being a whole man will always be just dreams... I will always have to back down...my shortcomings will always be a factor. I do not mean that I am not a man, that my living as a man is a lie. I mean that I cannot even fool myself when I stand face-to-face with another man and he is full of pride + privilege + confidence that has been his birthright.”

Again the phrasing is a little clumsy, but his attempt to express abstract thoughts and feelings of otherness comes from the heart.

This book reminded me to be tolerant (though I dislike that word) and to engage with curiosity instead of the impulse to police and to “correct.” Honestly, it’s foolish to think the way we view transness today is somehow the “right” way, to think the vocabulary we use now is the vocabulary that will be used ten, twenty, fifty years from now. It’s all fluid and socially constructed.

We Both Laughed In Pleasure is an emotional rollercoaster from start to finish. Tragedy is punctuated with humour, and vice versa. There’s a lot of sex. A lot of death. And it has a great deal of value as a piece of queer history. An important read.

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Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color

Christopher Soto

5.0

challenging dark emotional inspiring reflective fast-paced

Every poem in this anthology is moving and powerful in its own way. Some are harrowing gut punches, while others are more gentle and contemplative. The variety is certainly a boon.

I can’t rate each poem individually because there are so many of them, but some of my favourites were The [Black]Outs: Listen by Steffan Triplett, Actually, Yes, Everything is About Race by Madison Johnson, Untitled (Destroying Flesh) by Juliana Huxtable, and Boy in a Stolen Evening Gown by Saeed Jones.

I’m speechless. I wish I had something profound to say, some astute insight. I suppose the poems speak for themselves, so all I can do is give a recommendation. Five stars.

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Welcome to Night Vale

Jeffrey Cranor, Joseph Fink

4.5

emotional funny lighthearted mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

I was a big fan of WTNV as a teen, and though I no longer keep up-to-date with new episodes I do remember it fondly and it has a special place in my heart as the first podcast I ever listened to. I think this put me in a pretty good position as I read the novel – familiar with the world of Night Vale, but not so invested that my expectations would be unrealistically high.

I’ve seen people interpret WTNV as a satire of modern neoliberal society. While that interpretation is valid, I think a simpler (and perhaps more applicable) way of looking at things is this: Night Vale makes feelings fact.

I’ll use time as an example. “Time doesn’t work in Night Vale” is a notion that comes up frequently in the book. The thing is, time works however it intuitively makes sense for it to work. Feels like ages ago? Feels like only yesterday? Voilà.

Jackie, one of the main characters in the novel, is literally and figuratively stuck at age nineteen. She laments and slightly resents her high school friends who have moved on with their lives while she’s unable to “grow up” and do all the things adults are expected to do. She has worked the same dead-end job for decades, possibly centuries. She’s going through the motions, literalised as actual rituals performed with each transaction. Again there’s this lack of distinction between the literal and the figurative.

Characterisation is where the novel truly excels. It just feels so honest in its portrayal of the characters’ emotional states and rationales. It feels so human, even with the paranormal elements. If I had to choose one word to sum up the feel of Welcome to Night Vale, it would be “weird.” But if I had to choose another word, it would be “candid.”

The story does progress quite slowly in the first half. I think the switching back and forth between Jackie and Diane is what kept it from feeling like it dragged. But I don’t think the pacing is poor – it works well. My only complaint is that the ending felt a little insubstantial in comparison to the build up.

I know there are some WTNV fans disappointed that there wasn’t more Cecil and Carlos content, but this story isn’t about them. In fact, I think we see too much of them. Their inclusion felt a bit shoehorned at times. And, more generally, I think there were a few too many references and in-jokes. That said, I can forgive the book for that because they needed to tie it in to the podcast somehow. A little fanservice is harmless, really.

I prefer the book over the podcast, which is not something I’d expected going in. I feel like the podcast has excellently strange vibes but the novel takes that material and uses it to actually tell a story and explore a handful of characters in depth.

Welcome to Night Vale is beautifully odd and oddly beautiful, and I’m glad I finally read it.

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Bitten By Witch Fever: Wallpaper & Arsenic in the Victorian Home

Lucinda Hawksley

4.0

informative medium-paced

Bitten by Witch Fever is a solid book. It promises to explore the history of arsenic and its use in wallpaper pigments, and it delivers. I only wish it was a little more in depth.

Wallpaper designs dominate, with the written sections confined to what are essentially smaller booklets sewn inside the larger book. I appreciate the effort not to let the text get in the way of the visual elements. Each design was not only credited and dated but also had its toxicity ranked (“possible,” “probable,” or “highly likely”), which was neat. I’ve seen other reviewers complaining about the typeface but honestly it doesn’t bother me that much.

As for the content of the text, it’s a fairly brief overview. Hawksley raised some really interesting points like the correlation between the rapid increase in poisonings in the 1830s and 1840s with the growth of the life insurance industry, and the interpretation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper as a tale about gradual arsenic poisoning. William Morris is a fascinating figure – Hawksley does note the contradiction between his socialist views and his capitalist business practices. Still, I found the book a little lacking, as it couldn’t quite commit to being a biography of Morris and his contemporaries, but it couldn’t commit to being a complete history of arsenic either.

I would give Bitten by Witch Fever three and a half stars, but since I bought it for the pictures and not the text I feel it’s harsh to fault it for the writing.

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Figuring

Maria Popova

3.5

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Figuring is a book which is difficult to appraise, but I think I’m happy with the three and a half star rating I eventually settled on. I have a lot to say about it and I’ll start with its flaws. I don’t want to give the impression that this is a terrible book – it isn’t – but I do think it’s important that I address these issues frankly.

Figuring has no patience for religion or spirituality. When the topic comes up, the reader is bombarded with cringe-inducing lines like “she could no longer accept the dogma that crumbled in the face of her experience and critical thinking.” The relentless yet pointless dunking on faith reminds me of my teenage antitheist phase. It’s especially odd here, though, considering the book’s reverence for love and beauty and art, which are surely just as “unscientific” as religion, and just as human. Why is poetry celebrated while piety is mocked?

Whiteness is centred throughout, with people of colour like abolitionist Frederick Douglass being mentioned but ultimately sidelined. The problem is deeper than a lack of representation, however. Sentiments like “here was a successful and self-sufficient queer white woman celebrating the dignity and growing cultural power of black men” exemplify the tendency to applaud white people for doing the absolute bare minimum, and to treat racism as an abstract issue rather than actually engaging with those who experience it firsthand.

Unfortunately, the questionable exclusion of minorities doesn’t end there. In a passage about Emily Dickinson, Popova notes that the poet would use masculine pronouns and terms like “boy,” and in one poem expressed the following:

Amputate my freckled Bosom!

Make me bearded like a Man!

I don’t know Dickinson’s gender and I never will, but the way they’re very pointedly interpreted as a cis woman made me uncomfortable. Popova refers to Dickinson’s desire for a flat chest as “a violent transfiguration” and their use of masculine pronouns as an attempt to “fit the heteronormative mold,” echoing two major TERF talking points weaponised against trans people and transmascs in particular – the framing of surgery as mutilation, and the notion that trans men are actually lesbians who wish to escape lesbophobia.

I’m aware that both myself and Popova are projecting our own identities and experiences onto this historical figure. Perhaps Dickinson was a woman after all. Even so, the subject ought to be handled with more care so as to avoid regurgitating transphobic rhetoric and granting it legitimacy.

Am I calling Popova an irredeemable racist and transphobe? No. I think these issues are more likely to be oversights than deliberate acts of hostility. But the book does have its fair share of problematic elements, which should be acknowledged even if they’re genuine mistakes. Impact is just as important as intention, if not more so.

Now, the writing style.

Figuring is verbose, not in an academic way but, rather, in a poetic way. Sentences are long and meandering, laden with metaphor and evocative imagery. The purple prose can begin to feel a little saturated at times – I found myself having to take a break after each chapter. But when I was in the right mindset, I was able to appreciate the beauty of the writing which I would otherwise dismiss as pretentious and dense.

Here are three quotes which stuck with me:

“Lives are lived in parallel and perpendicular, fathomed nonlinearly, figured not in the straight graphs of “biography” but in many-sided, many-splendored diagrams.”
“The ecstasy of having personally chipped a small fragment of knowledge from the immense monolith of the unknown.”
(on the topic of labels like “queer” and “Uranian”) “The human heart is an ancient beast that roars and purrs with the same passions, whatever labels we may give them. We are so anxious to classify and categorize, both nature and human nature. It is a beautiful impulse—to contain the infinite in the finite, to wrest order from the chaos, to construct a foothold so we may climb toward higher truth. It is also a limiting one, for in naming things we often come to mistake the names for the things themselves.”

I’m glad I’m able to finish this review on a positive note because, though I must acknowledge its shortcomings, I do cherish this book. It’s undeniably fascinating and I certainly learnt a lot, and I feel enriched having read it. I doubt I’ll reread the whole thing cover-to-cover but I’ll likely revisit the odd chapter here and there.

Content Warnings

Ways of Seeing

John Berger

4.0

challenging informative reflective relaxing medium-paced

Ways of Seeing is an accessible yet insightful introduction to art criticism, with musings on the nature of art, subjectivity, capitalism, hierarchy, ownership, sexism, glamour, advertising, and more. I always enjoy being introduced to new perspectives on topics familiar to me. I liked, for example, the section about Holbein’s 1533 painting The Ambassadors. I was familiar with the memento mori aspect of the weird skull, but I hadn’t considered that if it had been painted the same way as the other objects in the picture it would have been reduced to just another belonging instead of a symbol of death.

I appreciated the essay about sexist portrayals of women in art, including that iconic and influential quote “You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity.” Yet I’m curious that Berger uses generic “he” throughout the book (with two exceptions I picked up on; a “he or she” towards the end of the book, and generic “she” used when referring to shoppers). I feel like this is something he should have been more mindful of – he had some really astute insights regarding sexist assumptions but he neglected to examine his own biases, it seems. There was also one point where he referred to male and female sex categories as “unquestionable reality” and I know this wasn’t intentionally exclusionary but I’m trans and it did kind of sting.

I did really enjoy Ways of Seeing overall though, and I almost gave it a rating of four and a half stars but in the end I had to knock it down to a (high) four. The main let-down isn’t the writing, it’s that the images are grainy and greyscale – in my copy, at least – which makes them difficult to make sense of. This is especially frustrating in those “purely pictorial essays” where the images are supposed to speak for themselves without the need for accompanying text. How can I analyse an image if I can’t see what it is?

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