I really enjoyed this book. I can’t decide if this is a drama with a lot of humor thrown in, or a comedy with a lot of drama. I feel like I should have read Judith Butler a long time ago to prepare for reading this. Many insights into the construction of gender & sexuality. Often made me ask “why are we doing gender at all?”

Another great collection of Spain’s work from the 60s to the 2010s. The biographical essay included was also interesting. (some very quotable & redactable quotes in there). I liked some of the cameos in the Big Bitch comics (I won’t spoil it). The Big Bitch comics were especially prophetic, anticipating may aspects of the war on terror, for instance. A lot of the material is pretty smutty, which makes sense considering that it often was for Screw magazine. It was kinda funny to see the stuff appearing in screw juxtaposed with the comic he made to raise awareness of women artists (which was pretty interesting in its own right).

Coming-of-age gender-ambivalence memoir. Maybe could be classed as YA, or maybe there’s too many “go fuck a tree”s to be classed as YA…. I’m not hip to the distinction. With luck Tomboy will be considered a good primary source on late twentieth century north American culture. I suppose it could have interrogated the idea of gender a bit more, but it’s a memoir focused more on the author’s own experience. Also an interesting window on what growing up in Santa Fe in the 90s was like.

I’ve read Left Hand of Darkness, sometime before 2007. I enjoyed Left Hand of Darkness more in the second reading, perhaps because I’ve read some other Hainish cycle books. Left Hand of Darkness is a pretty good adventure-n-intrigue novel, but it’s not my favorite LeGuin. I think LeGuin’s later books like Dispossessed, Always Coming Home, & Fisherman of the Inland Sea gave more complete visions of alternative family structures. I recently read that LeGuin regretted the pronouns she used, & I can see what she was talking about. It kind of made sense for Ai to think & write of everyone as a “he” at least in the beginning, because he was supposed to be from a gendered society, but the parts that were in the voices of Gethenian characters definitely should have used genderless pronouns. But despite the awkward male pronouns, Left Hand of Darkness is still a very interesting depiction of what a genderless society might look like. The implicit critique provided by that vision remains relevant.

The perhaps even zanier sequel to The Sympathizer. The Committed feels more of its time (now) than The Sympathizer; maybe that’s because I read The Sympathizer almost 4 years ago now, and a lot has changed (and had changed) since that book was published in 2015. It feels odd now to see the 1980s as a setting for books, movies, & TV which are really about our present time, much the same way that the Vietnam War was a common setting for works about the 80s present. The Committed may be more metafictional than the Sympathizer. These days it seems like any time a book has a sequel, it’s a sign there will be another sooner or later. I’m looking forward to it.

Graphic novelization of the story of Bertrand Russell’s & other logicians of his era’s attempts to ground mathematics in logic. As I understand from this book, this effort meant Russell was trying to replace unprovable axioms that had to be taken as givens with provable foundations for arithmetic. This is my second time reading this book, & I think I got more out of it this time because I've since been reading Existential Comics, which often features Russell, Wittgenstein, Godel, & the Vienna Circle as characters. I wish Logicomix had explored (even) more of Russell’s messy personal life. I also enjoyed how Logicomix is self-referential, & uses this as part of its explanation of “self-reference” in the field of logic. The notes at the end are worth reading.

Hilarious & Satirical workplace choose-your-own-adventure about a wolf in man's clothing who likes boring things. I am not a Wolf just might be the Candide of the 2020s. I read some parts multiple times.

I read this as a kid & decided to read it again to learn more about Opera (one of my worst categories when watching Jeopardy, along with sports, the Bible, & the Grand Ole Opry). When I read this as a kid, I only read about the operas that I'd heard, so I'd skipped everything except for Carmen, Love for 3 Oranges, L'Enfent et les Sortileges, Barber of Seville, & Porgy and Bess. So that meant that I experienced fresh the bizarreness of the plots of all of the other Operas. Not sure if the strangeness & bizarreness of the stories is true to the Operas they are from or not, since I've still never seen any of these operas in their entirety (& even if I had, I don't understand German, Italian, French, singing English, or Russian). The selection of operas in Sing me a Story represents a compromise between showing the kids the operas they may have heard, such as Barber of Seville(?) & operas that might interest the kids, such as Hansel & Gretel(??). Not sure what category the Tales of Hoffman, Love for 3 Oranges, or Daughter of the Regiment would fit into. The page of notes on all of the Operas is interesting because it highlights how recent most of what we think of as classic Opera is; only 2 of the Operas in Sing me a Story are from before 1840, & most of them are from between 1892 & 1951. Recommended reading for anyone who doesn't get the Pagliacci joke.

Great book about the evolution of American punk rock & underground weirdo music by one of my favorite artists of the genre/scene. This book is mostly an attempt to suggest a framework to understand the various ideas, features, and institutions of underground punk music of the 80s-early 2000s. McPheeters treats his own biography in the hardcore scene as kind of a case history, without getting in to too much detail about the stuff he did with Born Against & Men's Recovery Project. He depicts himself as more of a member of a scene or cultural movement than a member of a band. Mutations is does not provide a lot of gossip; you could probably get a lot of that from looking at zines or old Maximum RocknRoll issues from the era. I listened to the audio version, read by the author himself, so I couldn't easily flip back to parts that I thought of a question about in the middle of the night after I read them, and so some of my thoughts about this book are little underdeveloped. Maybe I need to learn how to listen to audiobooks, but I'm thinking I should pick the print version up for flipping through when I eat my dinner. Can't decide if this is the sort of book I should have read back when I was dipping my toe into weirdo underground's degenerate provincial offspring, or if it would have been as incomprehensible as any number of other 2020 artifacts.

Interesting memoir covering Nyamayaro’s upbringing in Zimbabwe, & her career in the UN & international humanitarian NGOs. I like I think I would have gotten more out of this book if I knew more about how international organizations such as the UN & WHO actually work. the parts about her youth in Zimbabwe are the most revealing about who Nyamayaro is as a person. The sections of the memoir that cover her international career feel much less personal. She doesn’t even mention being married, which would be an interesting topic to explore, even if only from the perspective of how she managed to find the time to have any sort of non-work relationship. I like the discussion of Ubuntu, & her depictions of the ways African communities attempt to provide for their own needs.