Thankfully not about shark tank. The most upbeat and well-adjusted Daniel Clowes book I've read. It's kind of an awkward shape to read in hardcover. Part of me wondered if the Tim character was based on the author.

non-fiction dystopia literature. I like this book for the perspectives it has on life in North Korea, and what it's like to live in a country that has gone from relative prosperity to almost a pre-industrial economy. It was also interesting to see how even people who were engaged in the black market could still be true believers. This book also shows how border restrictions can actually enable human trafficking.

Great comic! Uses superhero genre to comment on whitewashing, the immigrant experience, and Chinese and American history. However, what struck me most about this book was the ending, claiming that it was based upon a real, short-lived, 1940s wartime propaganda superhero comic set in China, that was created by a Chinese American artist, who was forbidden to portray his superhero as Chinese, and so mostly avoided showing the main character's masked face! When I first read the ending section detailing this history of the Green Turtle, I wondered if it was fictional; a story within a story of Asian American agency and portrayal in white-dominated media. It was crazy enough to be true, and true-sounding enough to be fictional. I'll let YOU be the judge *dah-duh-duh*!

Makes me want to re-read the novel!

The New Jim Crow is a book length explanation of how the legal system and the War on Drugs is used to enforce racial hierarchy. It also goes into the history and evolution of Mass Incarceration. Even to those who are already familiar with the history of Mass Incarceration, and with the fight against it, this book is a good aid for those who need to explain to others why Mass Incarceration must be stopped.

A book with many strengths and many weaknesses. Walkaway is jam-packed with big ideas about technology, capitalism, communism, communalism, politics, anti-politics, sex, gender, life, death, work, wealth, etc. The use of computer technology to run a non-capitalistic economy reminded me of the Soviet economists in Red Plenty, who hoped to create an economy run by computers, independent of the political leaders . The hypercapitalistic dystopian elements and the internet elements also reminded me of Snow Crash. The social experimentation and artificial intelligence (and life extension) elements reminded me of the Rama Sequels (Arthur C Clarke & Gentry Lee) and Red Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson). Similar to Clarke and Robinson, I felt the dialogue and characters are a little weak. Without the emotional investment that strong characters give me, I found it hard to get to into their world, and I started finding fault with his premises (e.g. the idea of wilderness-like wastelands both lacking in state/capitalist control and containing resources for walkaways to build their own independent communities; the question of where they are getting the energy for all their computing power). I was, however, intrigued enough by where Doctorow's ideas were leading to be riveted to the very end.

This is a great book! While the record breaking dory run down the Grand Canyon takes center stage, this book is very much also about the circumstances that allowed it to take place, foremost of which was the massive El Nino storms of 1983 that came close to overwhelming the Glen Canyon Dam. The language is a little overflowing, but Emerald Mile is a great source of info about the modern history of the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon.

Big Freedia's memoir also gave interesting perspectives on growing up gay and black in NOLA, NOLA's sissy bounce scene, hurricane Katrina, and getting big and famous in the 2010s.

While I really liked this book, I felt that some of its storylines felt a little incomplete in that they ended as if there was another chapter to come, without it really feeling like an end of the book cliff-hanger ending. Maybe that's just how I expect it to go with George R.R., and he was deliberately upsetting my expectations, or maybe this late in the series, once he gets to 1100 pages a bell goes off at the publisher's and they start blowing up his phone. Dance w/ Dragons still had all my favorite elements of a song of ice and fire (food descriptions, feudal local politics, fictional histories and mythologies, and Big Dumb Objects).

Illustrated memoir by a formerly undocumented UC Berkeley professor about the importance and difficulty of telling stories of the undocumented immigrant experience. I want to read more from Ledesma!