Despite loving podcasts, I have never listened to Sarah Costello and Kayla Kaszyca’s podcast of the same name. Nevertheless, I was drawn to Sounds Fake But Okay: An Asexual and Aromantic Perspective on Love, Relationships, Sex, and Pretty Much Anything Else because, hey, asexual and aromantic over here! It feels very fitting that I’m writing this review at the end of Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week. Thanks to Jessica Kingsley Publishers and NetGalley for the eARC.

This book explores asexuality and aromanticism (which Costello and Kaszyca often refer to under the united umbrella of aspec, not to be confused with the asexual- or aromantic-specific terms ace-spec and aro-spec) by discussing how these identities relate to specific topics in our society. This is a slightly different and perhaps refreshing approach, finding a middle ground between books that take an “Asexuality 101” stance and more academic work like the fantastic Refusing Compulsory Sexuality. It’s definitely accessible, humorous, and empathetic.

The chapters are divided very logically: “Society,” “Yourself,” “Friendship,” etc. Costello and Kaszyca share a lot of their own personal journey with their sexual and romantic identities. Costello is aroace, while Kaszyca is demisexual, so they each bring slightly different perspectives to being aspec, which I think is valuable. As the book progresses, they start to bring in quotations from a survey of other aspec people. This adds other voices as we hear from genderqueer aspec people, alloromantic asexuals, aromantic allosexuals, etc. The goal is very obviously to showcase the incredible diversity of the asexual and aromantic umbrellas within the wider tent that is being queer, and I love that.

On that note: this is a masterclass in how to write in an inclusive, expansive way. Many writers, both queer writers themselves and those who write about us, often lament how “difficult” it is not to “offend” or inadvertently exclude people with their language. They point to artificially constructed examples of tortuous, often circuitous sentences supposedly designed to avoid such offence and exclusion. Kaszyca and Costello bypass such malarkey. They acknowledge that labels can be challenging, that terms change, that the split-attraction model isn’t for everyone, etc. Then they thread the needle to get to the point, which is that aro and ace identities are united by the fact that all of us on those spectra, to one extent or another, experience romantic or sexual attraction in a qualitatively different way from other people. That is the basic truth to which they speak in this book. The additional voices included throughout allow them to refine the message to speak to more specific experiences as needed.

What I loved most about Sounds Fake But Okay is how it simultaneously resonated with so many of my own experiences while also showing me many different ones. I’m an aromantic, asexual woman—but I am also trans, and having transitioned in my thirties, I spent most of my formative youth under the impression I was a man. So while I heavily identify with Costello and the other female aroaces quoted herein, I didn’t quite share some of their experiences of compulsory sexuality and how that is linked to the madonna/whore paradox of our society. Likewise, in their chapter on gender, they discuss how the proportion of aspec people who are trans is higher than aspec people who are cis. Then we hear from a trans person who identified as ace when they responded to the survey but has since settled on the label of bisexual—because her experience of transition has changed how she experiences and understands attraction. Many people have asked me, as I have transitioned, whether I might not identify as ace anymore—so much so that I actually wrote a whole blog post about this for Ace Awareness Week—and while my answer was in the negative, I totally understand how it’s different for some people.

Consequently, Kaszyca and Costello have managed to collate commentary that does a very good job of helping us understand the remarkable diversity of aspec experiences. I love it. I love how sensitively they unpack and critique the amatonormative nature of our society; while a lot of what they discussed in these parts of the book was not new to me, it is an essential part of this wider conversation. Similarly, I was pleasantly surprised to see other topics included, like a section near the end about kink and asexuality. In short, Sounds Fake But Okay is a careful, thoughtful work that seeks to go beyond its authors’ own experiences and ideas of being aspec.

Though this book will be, I think, most fulfilling for aspec readers, I would recommend this to people who are not aspec as well. This book is probably the most concise exploration of the greatest number of topics related to being asexual or aromantic in our society. For any allosexual and alloromantic folx out there, reading this book would be a great way to educate yourself about some of the challenges that we aspec people have navigating a society that privileges romance above other relationships and pressures us to talk about and even engage in sex that we might not want. As its tongue-in-cheek title implies, Sounds Fake But Okay is about challenging our biases so that we can build a society that is more tolerant, affirming, and compassionate, regardless of the extent or ways in which one feels attracted to others.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

You know, I don’t really think I ever asked myself this question after the one sleepless Sunday night I spent wrestling with it. I jest, of course. Kind of. I think for me my understanding of my transness was sneaky. It kind of grew in my subconscious for years until it burst forth, fully formed, and once I accepted it, everything else happened all at once. Nevertheless, Am I Trans Enough: How to Overcome Your Doubts and Find Your Authentic Self still had some cool insights for me, and I suspect the research, ideas, and questions Alo Johnston has brought together in this book will be helpful for many a trans or questioning person. Thanks to Jessica Kingsley Publishers and NetGalley for the eARC.

This is a surprisingly comprehensive book! I say surprisingly because I wasn’t sure it was possible to pull off a feat like this until Johnston did it. Am I Trans Enough? comprises four parts: “The Personal and Philosophy,” “Context and History,” “Mental Health,” and “Interpersonal.” You know how much I love good organization, and this book has that down: each one of these parts is necessary and thoughtful in the exploration of this topic. Johnston begins by asking the reader, who presumably might be questioning their gender identity, to consider how we think of gender in relation to ourselves. From there, he branches into the wider idea of gender as a social construct. Next, a crucial discussion of how gender nonconformity and transition can affect one’s mental health, especially given the transphobic state of our society. Finally, a part that discusses what transition and coming out means for your relationships with others.

One of the things I love most about this book is how it doesn’t focus much on medical transition. Of course Johnstone mentions both hormone therapy and gender-affirming surgery throughout the book. However, these are always in service of a wider discussion of transition that firmly grounds it in a social context. This is valuable, in my opinion, for three reasons. First, it discourages what’s known as transmedicalization, this idea that you are only “trans enough” if you pursue a certain level of medical transition. Second, it pushes back against the cisnormative narrative that always focuses on medical transition when we talk about trans people. Third, it reminds us that gender-affirming medical care is only one piece of the puzzle. Yes, it is essential for many trans people—including me!—but when we look to hormones or the like as a panacea for all of our mental health issues or questions about gender, we’re setting ourselves up for disappointment.

Along these lines, probably my favourite chapter is “The Paradox of Transition.” In it, Johnston reflects on how most trans people would love to say that we are only transitioning for ourselves, but the reality is much more complicated. I feel this, oof. I’m approaching my third anniversary of coming out as trans and pondering what I want to write about to mark the occasion. Though I don’t question whether I am trans enough, I still struggle to explain sometimes why I went from (as an external observer might see it) being comfortable calling myself cis for thirty years to deciding to transition overnight. It is, of course, more complicated than that, and this is what Johnston gets at in this chapter. I love how he discusses how the pandemic belied the popular desire among many transitioning people to go off and transition on a desert island—I have blogged about that as well.

In particular, this paragraph stands out for me:

 

Louder for the people at the back, please!

 This is what I have tried to articulate time and again, on my personal blog and in discussions with others about my transition. The piece of the puzzle that burst the dam I had subconsciously built around my gender identity was the realization that I didn’t want to be “one of the girls” in an honourary sense; I wanted to be one of the girls. This flip of a switch from metaphorical to literal was all it took for my resistance to being trans to crumble—seemingly overnight, as I said earlier—because, as Johnston puts it so well in that quote, it’s all about relations. It’s why I needed to socially transition rather than just start wearing cute dresses while still calling myself a man; it’s why the cute dresses make me feel good about myself even though I am a woman regardless of what I wear.

In terms of knowledge levels, this book eschews quite a bit of the standard “trans 101” that you might find in similar texts. However, it remains accessible to someone who hasn’t read a lot of books about being transgender. Some later chapters discuss, respectively, the experience of being nonbinary, a trans woman, or a trans man, and I think a lot of people who are much newer to the language and concepts around transness will benefit from those chapters especially.

Of course, even though this framing includes nonbinary people loudly and on the same footing as transfeminine and transmasculine people, it’s still somewhat problematic in the way it kind of creates what I call the “bumpy gender binary,” where nonbinary becomes an “other” category outside of a trans experience that otherwise replicates and reinforces the binary. Johnston acknowledges early in the book that his perspective is a limited, Western one. So it’s important to seek out voices that write about nonbinary experiences outside of that sphere—this publisher has such an anthology, and there are others out there. This is not a critique of Am I Trans Enough? so much as an observation of a limitation it has already acknowledged.

What about readers who are pretty certain they are cis? Am I Trans Enough? might still be a beneficial read. You are not Johnston’s intended audience, but you would still learn a lot about how to look at and explore gender. Even if you are confident you are cisgender, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t spend time examining what that means for you. However, there are probably other books out there that will do a better job of guiding you on that journey, just as there are probably better books to learn about trans experiences, ones that are speaking to an audience that includes cis people.

This is a book firmly written for trans people, by a trans author who is also a therapist, grounded firmly in theory and praxis. It gets you thinking. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to anyone who comes to me expressing questions about their gender.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Even though I don’t have TikTok, some of the best content always escapes that platform to find its way to me. Such is the case with Cody Daigle-Orians, purveyor of Ace Dad Advice. I remember watching some of his videos and thinking exactly some of the sentiments he shares later in I Am Ace: Advice on Living Your Best Asexual Life, such as “it’s so nice to see an elder ace!” Lol, we’re so predictable. But it’s also true. Ace people aren’t visible enough. That’s changing, slowly, and it’s good to see someone like Daigle-Orians helping to make that happen. My thanks to Jessica Kingsley Publishers and NetGalley for the eARC.

Although there’s a fair amount of “asexual 101” in this book—and that’s fine—what I value most about this book is exactly what the subtitle promises: the advice. This is a book grounded in Daigle-Orians’ lived experience: that of someone who came out as gay, then came out again as ace after discovering what that was, then started talking about it online and realized he could contribute to the conversation. As he shares his story, he offers advice, yes, but also reassurance.

Some of the advice is very quotable, such as when Daigle-Orians reminds us that “labels are tools not tests.” This is such an important idea to internalize, regardless of how one describes one’s identity. Daigle-Orians returns to this touchstone time and again, from an exploration of microlabels to a primer on the history and theory behind the label queer.

Much of their journey is very relatable. They discovered the asexuality label on Tumblr. Some people dismiss asexuality as being “Tumblr real,” so I suppose this makes Daigle-Orians somewhat of a stereotype, but there’s a reason it’s a stereotype. Though Tumblr, like TikTok, has largely remained outside my purview, I love how it creates these spaces where queer people can talk, lurk, and just exist, often outside of a cishet gaze. The emotions that Daigle-Orians describes as they navigate the discovery of their aceness—relief, trepidation, excitement, etc.—are going to be familiar to aces even if they came to their sexuality in a very different way. While I came to mine younger than Daigle-Orians and single, I feel like we still have a lot in common. It was really cool to hear them talk about how they had never been to a pride event until recently, for that was true of me as well (and in many ways still is).

Similarly, it’s so lovely to hear about his experiences as part of a polycule. I love seeing alternatives to our stereotypical ideas of what a family should be. The way that Daigle-Orians discusses his family, his challenges with dating while ace, the closeness he feels even to those members of his polycule with whom he isn’t in a sexual or romantic relationship—that’s neat. It’s wholesome, even.

Some of the advice and perspective here might be hard to read the first time round. At one point, Daigle-Orians levels with us: being ace is not always easy. Boy is that ever true. I really appreciate that he doesn’t sugarcoat his experiences. Sometimes I swing between these two extremes of thinking “oh man, I’m so glad I’m asexual,” versus, “sometimes it feels like it would be easier if I were ace.” Daigle-Orians addresses the sentiment that some people don’t want to be ace empathetically but sincerely: you are who you are. You can deny that experience, compounding your unhappiness, or embrace going on a journey to discover what that experience means for you. Being ace isn’t the best thing ever, nor does it doom you to unhappiness. It’s just an identity like any other.

Highly recommend for anyone who wants to spend some time listening to that elder ace’s perspective while you meditate on what being ace might mean for you. For allosexual readers: while this book cannot obviously capture everything about being ace, Daigle-Orians does their best to articulate one version of asexuality, acknowledging the limitations of this perspective by dint of being an older, white, male-presenting person. You’ll still get an interesting window into what it’s like being ace in a world that vacillates between denying we exist and telling us we’re broken.

The overarching theme of I Am Ace is that your asexuality does not need to define you, but it can inform you. If you let it, your asexuality can help you feel more comfortable in who you are—whether you’re cis or trans, younger or older, etc. When we realize that our behaviour is not the same as our attraction, that neither of these are destiny, that we can question and change how we identify throughout our life and build, as a result, a happier life—that’s powerful.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Money is kind of a big deal. I don’t particularly like this fact, but I would be a fool not to acknowledge it. For the majority of my life, money has been more digital than paper-based, even though a fully qualified digital currency in Canadian or US dollars still has yet to materialize. I have never owned a paper chequebook in my name, and almost all of my payments are online or through a chip-and-pin debit card. So I was very curious to learn more about the potential security issues around e-commerce and digital transactions in The Unhackable Internet. Thomas P. Vartanian brings decades of experience in the finance world and the law to chart out some of the biggest dangers along with possible solutions. NetGalley and publisher Rowan and Littlefield provided me with an eARC in exchange for a review.

Vartanian’s thesis is simple: the internet as it is currently configured is ferociously insecure to the point where it would be extremely easy for a bad actor to compromise vital infrastructure or threaten the integrity of the global economy. He offers up numerous historical examples of cybersecurity incidents. The same week I was reading this, Indigo—Canada’s largest retail bookseller—was hacked, forcing it to pull its website offline and suspend non-cash transactions at its stores. I bet that cost them billions. What happens when it’s a bank, a hospital, the electrical grid? Vartanian’s solution is elegant: scrapping the internet and starting from scratch is not feasible, but we should be able to graft more secure, isolated networks to the existing internet. Safe bubbles, if you will, where access from the overall internet is tightly controlled, and identity and authorization within the bubble is paramount.

I don’t actually disagree with Vartanian’s analysis. As I noted above, this has become commonplace. Vartanian criticizes the average consumer’s apathy towards security breaches, which might rankle some readers, but he’s just trying to make a point that our apathy engenders complacency among these corporations. It’s clear that Vartanian is a much firmer believer in, say, capitalism and the free market, than I am, yet even he’s advocating for the government to step in and regulate and centralize some of this decision-making.

Vartanian is quite hawkish towards China. Pretty much every warning he delivers in this book is framed in terms of China doing something awful, either towards its own people or towards democratic countries like the US. Don’t get me wrong—China is not a paragon of a place, especially considering its treatment of minority groups like the Uyghurs. I’m not here to defend China. However, I’m also not a fan of sinophobic rhetoric that positions China as an economic, military, or political bogeyman simply to justify enhanced security. Moreover, although Vartanian is highly critical of the United States’ inaction on cybersecurity, he hasn’t quite extended that critical analysis to this idea that the US is a democracy or that it is “the greatest nation on Earth” (at least aspirationally, if not in practice). That is to say, I disagree with Vartanian’s implicit goal to preserve the US as the supreme superpower of the world. Still, I don’t think this hegemonic perspective is all that surprising given his background or even just the description of the book, so I think most readers who choose to pick up this title will either be more sympathetic to these views than me or will at least understand what to expect.

Beyond these differences in ideology, my criticism of the book is more about the structure and depth than style or substance. The middle part of the book is a lengthy history of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries through the lens of networking, finance, and cybersecurity. It’s useful, yes—I learned stuff I definitely didn’t know—but it’s also very drawn out and dry. I wonder if a more robust approach, with this timeline condensed into another appendix, might have made things more interesting.

On a similar note, Vartanian’s explanations for the internet’s physical infrastructure and cybersecurity in general tend to meander between levels of audience. Some of the explanations are so basic I think he’s talking to people with rudimentary understanding of what a computer is at best; other explanations are so high level that I struggle to understand them. My guess would be that the book wants to cater to a variety of audience levels of knowledge about networking. That’s fine in theory, but in practice it made the book feel very uneven for me.

So do I recommend the book? Sure. If you are interested in finances, cybersecurity, networking, etc., this is a thoughtful and very knowledgeable analysis. Vartanian knows what he’s talking about, is a confident writer, and delivers interesting arguments. Even when you disagree, you’re going to come away having learned a lot. Just don’t expect something revolutionary.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

This is one of those books where I don’t remember how it got on my to-read list. Love Is the Drug is just shy of ten years old now, although thanks to its pandemic storyline it feels perhaps even more topical than it did when Alayna Dawn Johnson wrote it. A YA thriller that mixes Washington, DC, privilege with misogynoir, this novel has a lot of individual elements to recommend it, yet for me it never quite came together as an enjoyable whole.

Emily Bird has it all. She’s with the in crowd at her private school, has the perfect boyfriend, seems to be going places. But something goes down at a party one night—she gets drugged, or something, hits her head, memory absent—and shortly thereafter, a flu sweeps the world and Washington, DC, goes into lockdown. Emily—or Bird, as she increasingly starts to think of herself thanks to the influence of some rebellious spirits like Coffee—is determined to understand more about that fateful night, even if it means antagonizing a private-security spook with CIA connections. Bird isn’t sure who she is anymore—but she is done being a good girl.

Shortly after starting this book, I was beginning to wonder if it would be my first “bad” book of 2023. My reading so far this year has been off to a fantastic start! Love Is the Drug just didn’t grab me. It took me a while, however, to really wrap my head around why that was the case. It’s a less recent book, sure, but there are plenty of 2014 YA releases that still feel relevant to me today. Eventually, I settled on the intersection of setting and character. To be more specific: Bird’s high school experience just feels entirely too bland and familiar. The opening scene at the party felt like the same kind of teenage party scene I had read so many times. Sure, it was a little different because Bird and her peers are mostly rich kids going to one of the most elite schools in the country. Aside from that, however, the setting and the various minor characters who populate it just didn’t feel fresh to me. Paul, Bird’s overbearing sleazeball of a boyfriend, felt like every cluelessly opportunistic young boyfriend I’ve read before. I was having so much trouble finding something about the book to cling on to and enjoy.

This feeling continued for most of the first half of the book. Maybe I should have given up on it. I think mainly what kept me going was the pandemic: I was so interested to see how that worked out given its eerie prescience here in our post-COVID world. So I kept reading.

And damn it if Johnson didn’t mostly change my mind!

Somehow the second half of this book nearly completely turned my opinion around. I think when Bird drops the baggage of her old self, commits to being friends with Marella, decides she’s going to do whatever it takes to bring Roosevelt down—I was like, finally. Let’s do it! The book kicks into a higher gear, and the result is a much more satisfying read.

I’m happy about this because there is plenty to like about this book. Johnson is making some very salient commentary on life as a Black girl in the upper echelons. Bird’s parents, particularly her mother, have a very clear idea of who she is supposed to be: relaxed hair, always polite, going to make a name for herself. We see how Bird’s mother has really bought hard into things like respectability politics, and when Bird dares to express a desire to rebel even a little bit, her mother loses all perspective. Yet her mother isn’t a villain, isn’t a bad person per se—she genuinely believes that her very conservative ideas, that blending in, is necessary for Bird’s survival. Her mother understands the harm of misogynoir in America, and her reaction is to try to fit in more rather than stand out and stand up against it. In this way, Johnson chronicles how different generations of Black families deal with the intergenerational trauma of anti-Black racism differently, and it’s fascinating.

The pandemic content is also, of course, deeply interesting in our current context. Johnson in many ways anticipates how the country would respond to a pandemic respiratory virus: masks, lockdowns and quarantines, the rush for a vaccine. I can only imagine how readers prior to 2020 might have panned the portrayal as unrealistic, but I don’t think anyone who reads the book now can do anything except shake their head at how optimistic, if anything, Johnson was regarding the swiftness and absoluteness of the US government’s public health procedures.

You might notice, if you have read the book, that I’ve said relatively little about the romance between Bird and Coffee. I don’t know that I have much to say, for it’s yet another one of those aspects that just didn’t feel original. I feel terrible saying that because I’m really trying hard not to slate this author. The intensity of feeling that develops is, at times, a very rewarding experience for the reader. But the overall subplot just never feels like it goes anywhere interesting or gets all that exciting.

Love Is the Drug is a book with great intentions that just never quite settles into itself. It has all the ingredients for a great thriller, yet it doesn’t turn into a filling meal. While I don’t want to give the impression it’s awful, I also don’t recommend it, not even for the experience of reading about a pandemic set in such temporal proximity to our own. When I return to this review ten years from now, this is not a book that I will remember.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

If my reading lately has a theme, it seems to be stories about storytelling. Or in the case of Babel: An Arcane History, stories about language. The power of words. Writers are so meta sometimes, eh. In this alternative history, R.F. Kuang confronts the very real-life history of British colonialism and imperialism and asks us to consider how our relationship with language affects our willingness to participate in—and perhaps even incite—systemic change.

Newly orphaned Robin is plucked from Canton, China, by Professor Lovell of the Royal Institute of Translation, also known as Babel. For years, Robin studies under Lovell, first privately as his ward and then as a student at Babel. He is one of four translators in his year cohort—two others, Ramy and Victoire, are similarly racialized, imported for their facility with language or languages, while the other, Lettie, is a white woman determined to buck the trend that says women neither need nor desire an education. But all is not right at Babel. Robin quickly finds himself in the middle of, shall we say, shenanigans most dark. His loyalties divided, Robin must decide what role he wants to play in this system. Does he want to be a collaborator? A dissident? A rebel leader? A fugitive? A martyr? Or something else entirely?

So I’m reading this book, and quite honestly by about page twelve I realized that Kuang is both smarter and better read than me, and I’m here for it. Like we’re talking some Umberto Eco–level shit. Kuang’s writing here will run circles around most readers, which some will find intimidating, but if instead you’re willing to set aside your ego and soak up the majesty of the moment, you will not only learn but be entertained. For Babel is a book perched on a pinhead: sprawling and epic in some ways; powerfully precise in others.

Let’s ease into the discussion by talking about the magic, for it’s probably the least interesting or important part of the story, and that’s saying something. In Babel, you can engrave words from different languages that are connected in some way into silver bars. When you speak these “language pairs” out loud, the bar activates some kind of magical effect—for example, some pairs can create invisibility; others might help make a garden more serene. One can only activate a bar if one understands the languages used on it, for the actual magic needs human understanding to close the circuit. Hence Robin’s utility as a Mandarin speaker. The British are preeminent in the field of translation and silver-working, but they are running out of pairs to mine from European languages, so they have cast themselves further afield but need minds that understand these increasingly foreign (to them) tongues.

The magic system is neat, a nice twist on the eternal quest to seek a balance between rigidly systematic spellwork schemes versus visualize-it-and-it’s-done willpower schemes. This system requires both the rigorous academic knowledge acquired only through years of study, as we see Robin and his peers embark on, along with the kind of understanding and mental awareness that goes deeper than mere scholarship. Its exclusivity, lack so many magical systems, creates a power dynamic that Kuang slots neatly into the existing class system of nineteenth-century Britain.

Which brings us to the politics of Babel. Holy shit. I was expecting the trenchant analysis of colonialism but I wasn’t quite prepared for the intense focus on labour (more fool me)—that hit me harder than I anticipated given the current political situation in Ontario and my own involvement in unionism. (It is, of course, all connected, as Kuang seeks to demonstrate.)

There’s more to be analyzed here than I can manage in a simple review (I hereby summon the literature undergrads to pick apart this book in a thousand essays). Suffice it to say, Babel is a hot mess—intentionally so. The main theme is simple: revolution is messy, and dismantling the intersecting structures of colonialism, white supremacy, capitalism, etc., are not without compromise. We see this most acutely in how each character wrestles with the consequences, both real and potential, of decolonization. How, even for oppressed people in the system, there are conveniences and perks that maybe we aren’t willing to give up. This felt so real to me, because it’s something I see in a lot of my white colleagues when I start talking about antiracism work—and if I am being honest, it is of course something I feel within myself, as a white woman. Changing this system—truly dismantling it and building something better—will be uncomfortable because it does mean giving up some of the things we currently enjoy, either because they are part of the package of privilege bound up in our whiteness or the end result of unsustainable, extractive processes that are both dehumanizing and degrading.

So Babel is a masterclass in depicting how colonial structures persist only because of compliance of the masses. Sometimes this compliance is forced or coerced, as in the case of enslavement; other times it is cajoled. For people whose marginalization exists outside of racial and ethnic axes, our compliance is usually purchased through irresistible convenience. There is a climactic moment in the story—resolved, actually, in a footnote, because that is how Kuang rolls—where Robin’s actions indirectly lead to a dramatic incident that kills people and destroys an important London landmark. And … no one cares. Or rather, people implicitly decide that maintaining the structure of society as it exists requires the sacrifice of some people’s humanity and dignity. Kuang pointedly comments on this through several characters, and it resonates given what’s happening right now in Ontario, as municipalities like Toronto simply refuse to open warming centers for unhoused people, or in the US, as various state legislatures compete to see who can most creatively precipitate trans genocide.

We keep underestimating the depths of cognitive dissonance we are willing to practise, as a society, to uphold the existing structure rather than risk discomfort and chaos.

Robin and his peers have different views on this fact and what their role should be in revolution. While the three racialized characters agree the system is bad and should be dismantled, none of them agree exactly on what that process should look like. Lettie, meanwhile, very much acts as a stand-in for white feminism, and I am here for it. Kuang’s desire to present revolutionary activities as nuanced not only mirrors myriad examples from history but helps the reader conceptualize the difficult truth: that movements are not monoliths, that some people who say they are allies balk when that means following up with acting as allies (and accomplices), that there is always an unyielding pressure to surrender to the inertia that is “that’s just the way it is.”

Kuang’s willingness to explore the messiness of revolutionary politics is what makes Babel such a standout work. The revolution, when it comes for us, will not be neat or orderly—indeed, it probably won’t even be a single, discrete revolution. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that, by the end of the book, Robin and his allies haven’t toppled the British Empire. At the same time, the empire is irrevocably changed as a result of their actions. And their revolution, Kuang very explicitly points out, was more successful as a result of the gains won from previous revolutions, strike actions, revolts, etc.—a single act cannot unmake a system, but consistent pressure over an era can erode it to the point of collapse. So although in terms of our characters’ journeys, without spoiling much, this book might be deemed a tragedy, Babel seems to be a relentlessly optimistic story.

The characters—and more specifically, their relationships with each other—might be the weak point of the book for me. Robin is decent as a viewpoint protagonist; I often had to take a step back and remind myself that I’m seeing the story from a wider angle than him and have the benefit of a twenty-first–century perspective on colonialism that he fundamentally lacks by dint of being in the thick of it. But Robin was also a little … I don’t know, boring? I found myself a lot more interested in the internal lives of Ramy, Victoire, and even Lettie. Aside from occasional interludes told from the perspective of each of them, Kuang keeps the book firmly focused on Robin, for better or worse.

And Robin just … kind of exists, his relationships attenuating and then springing back to tautness like an elastic. He and Ramy have this initial spark of attraction that I thought was going to become so much more. His relationship with Lovell is marred by the latter’s one dimensionality as an antagonist. Similarly, I never saw him truly connecting with Griffin or his other revolutionary comrades. So while I could feel Robin’s angst, especially as he wrestled with his sense of guilt over his class privilege, I never quite felt that connect to the struggles of the characters around him.

Nevertheless, even if some of the characters strike me as one dimensional or otherwise unsatisfying, I think Kuang overall has put a lot of thought into what she is trying to say with each character, and that’s valuable. As I mentioned at the top of this review, her intelligence and the breadth of her knowledge is apparent on every page—but it is most apparent, I think, in how each of the main characters connects to their personal backgrounds, cultures, and histories. The way that Kuang weaves in allusions to English literature, Haitian politics, or the repression of Punjabi people under British rule in India … seriously. This is no shallowly researched yarn spun for entertainment. I can only imagine the binders, real or virtual, of notes that gird this manuscript, which itself is a hefty thing.

I pitched Babel to someone on Twitter (a linguist) as “Neal Stephenson but without all the squick of ponderous white male privilege,” and I stand by this comparison. This is a novel that overstays its welcome deliberately and without apology. It demands your attention and your thoughtfulness. Yet unlike many other researched and dense books that do this, Babel carefully balances its heavy themes with plot and characters that remain entertaining and fun and, yeah, heartbreaking. Kuang’s writing flits from being bold and brash to quiet and understated. While I don’t think everything she attempts in this book works, longtime readers of my reviews know that I much prefer big swings, even when they don’t completely land. And in the case of Babel, it hits far more than it misses, which is impressive. If science fiction shows us what our society could be (for better or worse), fantasy shows us what our society is, albeit reflected through the funhouse mirror of alternative histories and worlds. Babel achieves this.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Nothing has changed since George Floyd. This year opened with another high-profile murder of an unarmed Black man—Tyre Nichols—by police. While it’s true the officers have already been indicted for Nichols’ death, the commentary continues to privilege the idea that this violence is the result of isolated actions, of inadequate training, of something—anything—other than ongoing systemic racism. Some coverage emphasized the race of the police officers—they, too, are Black—and seemed to say, “How can this be racism?” If you think that too, maybe you need to read a book like White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness. My thanks to NetGalley and MIT Press for the eARC.

Nicholas Mirzoeff starts us off in the ancient world of Greece, but he brings us all the way to the modern era and the murder of George Floyd. Through an analysis of art, from statues to paintings to photographs and performance pieces, Mirzoeff traces how white supremacy has informed an aesthetic of whiteness throughout our society, and how that aesthetic has in turn reinforced and perpetuated white supremacist ideals of beauty, goodness, truth, etc.

If you’re unsure what aesthetics has to do with racism, consider perspective. As Mirzoeff discusses here, the reinvention of perspective drawing in the Renaissance was immediately put to use creating a positive portrayal of colonization. Perspective drawing was an important revolution in art for how it challenged the artist and the viewer to reconceptualize space, something that Margaret Wertheim explored deeply in The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace. The Italian states and early colonial dominions of Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, etc., needed to conceptualize space as something that could be claimed, purchased, sold, lended. Space was something they could move through and indeed have claim to, as white Europeans, while for the people they enslaved, space was something that was laboured over and worked in. As Renaissance styles became more entrenched, artistic styles from other cultures were held up as backwards and barbaric, a way of further Othering and reinforcing the hierarchy between Europeans and non-Europeans.

That is to say, art in the West has always been inextricably linked to the project of white supremacy. Likely one of the most important understandings I try to convey to my English students when I teach them about race is that the problem isn’t white people; it’s whiteness. As Nell Irvin Painter discusses in The History of White People, who counts as white has changed over the centuries. Whiteness is ephemeral, fluid, adaptable—and opportunistic. It admits some, denies others, then reverses course when the winds of fortune have changed direction and it would be more advantageous to say, “Hey, you know the Irish? Yeah, you can be white now?” But these changes in status work only if our visual politics undergo a corresponding shift, if the ways in which we represent and discuss different groups adapt over time to the tides of whiteness.

Whiteness also explains how Black cops can kill unarmed Black people, and how other racialized people can perpetuate racism and white supremacy. Race has never been solely about the colour of one’s skin, and by the same token, that skin colour cannot determine whether someone is racist. When we look past white fragility, get over the knee-jerk reaction that we’re being told having lighter skin makes us bad people, we can see instead that race and racism in our society isn’t just about how we are seen: it’s about how we see.

That’s what I got from White Sight. Mirzoeff chronicles artwork and trends that upheld white supremacy (wisely often refusing to reduce harm by not reproducing some images). However, he also chronicles the long history of resistance through art. How Black and other racialized artists make use of art forms, either from their own cultures or by co-opting European artistic traditions, to punctuate the equilibrium of Eurocentrism. This brings us to the twentieth century, to the meetings of minds of artists of colour from around the world, to the very political works of art that are protest and performance and an attempt to make us very uncomfortable with the world in which we live today.

This book is dense, and at times it is very academic—more so than I was expecting, to be honest. For that reason, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it for a general audience, but I also don’t think that’s its purpose. Instead, I think this should be required reading on undergraduate courses from art history to gender studies to political science: any time you are engaging with writing on representation and visual politics, this book has something valuable to say.

Though not the entire theme of the book, surveillance runs throughout the text and was something that really jumped out at me. It’s initially what attracted me to White Sight: the idea that the systems we build to monitor ourselves or others are inherently racist because of their links to capitalism. This manifests in very obvious ways, like the constant surveillance of incarcerated people, among whom Black and Indigenous folx are overrepresented. But it’s subtle as well, and sometime surveillance can even be connected to language. In the tech world, there’s a popular tool called Git, which is used for tracking versions of software. Git repositories can have different branches of the software’s code, and it’s common practice to designate one branch as the master. (Master–slave terminology pervades technology, alas.) There was a trend a couple years back to rename the master branch of one’s Git repos to main or something analogous but less loaded with history. While many protested this—believing it to be too symbolic, unnecessary, virtue-signalling—I followed the trend because I figured even though it might feel like an empty gesture, it was still a way of reducing harm. Of stopping a cycle.

Our society is constantly being recreated through our interactions. The ways in which we talk, the ways in which we create art, and the ways in which we consume that art all affect how we recreate our society over and over. Whiteness is a property of the system that exists because we constantly reproduce the politics of race and racism, because we uphold capitalism as a framework that values the extraction of labour from people often at the expense of seeing them as human beings. As a result, we cannot ever make the mistake of thinking that art is not political. White Sight is a detailed, thoughtful, well organized exploration of these ideas through specific examples in history and contemporary work. While it is not comprehensive—I don’t think any project like this could be; there’s just so much more that could be written about all the various topics that intersect beneath this umbrella—this book is a fantastic grounding in these topics.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

A long time ago, a decade and in many ways another life ago, I read The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern’s first novel. Also highly acclaimed, it didn’t live up to its hype for me—but I wasn’t surprised. I reviewed it, filed it away, and didn’t really think about Morgenstern again until I saw The Starless Sea in my bookstore. I read the description, and I thought, “Hmm. Another story about stories. Not original. But maybe….”

Zachary Ezra Rawlins is a college student who discovers a book that seems to be telling the story of his life. It recounts a time in his childhood when, walking home alone, he came across a door painted in the wall. He didn’t open the door. If he had, he would have discovered an entire world hidden underground—a world of starless seas and magnificent libraries and temporal anomalies and more. Now he’s playing catch-up, working alongside a shifty guy named Dorian, an passionate painter named Mirabel, and fighting against someone who seems determined to cut off access to the world below by the world above.

You ever read a book that is just one hundred percent vibes? That’s what this is—and I mean that as a compliment.

Stories about stories are not, as I observed, anything new. Cloud Cuckoo Land, as well as N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became and its sequel, are both examples I can pull from my recent reading. Writers love to write about stories, and I don’t blame them. Storytelling is one of the ultimate activities that define our humanity, and so by its very nature it should examine itself. With The Starless Sea, Morgenstern is asking whether the reality of the fairy tale can ever truly be as romantic as the telling of it.

I got strong notes of The Princess Bride reading this. Maybe it’s the mysterious, condemned pirate we meet at the start of the book, or the equally enigmatic Dorian. Maybe it’s the relationship between Zachary and Dorian, the edge of “true love” never quite articulated. The same kind of romance between Mirabel and her paramour. This is a book whose pages resemble dimly lit rooms that cast soft shadows over everything. There are no sharp edges, but there are also no easy answers.

As Zachary attempts to learn more about the mysterious world into which he has intruded, Morgenstern presents the reader with more fairy tales and folk stories. Each one feels related, in some way, to the others. They’re all connected, not in obvious ways but not subtly either—themes and recurring motifs, like pairs of lovers, winding their way through these stories before ultimately being distilled into “reality”—such as that is in this book.

This is what I mean when I say The Starless Sea is vibes. The characters don’t really matter; hell, the plot itself doesn’t matter. What matters is the experience of reading it, curled up on my couch under a blanket in the depths of January winter. The way Morgenstern’s stories-within-stories trickled into me, warding me against the chill, and stoked the fires of my memories of a decade—or even two—ago, when I had more time to read and more latitude to be amazed.

I don’t really know what to say about The Starless Sea as a story. The story exists. It’s fun at times, frustrating at others—the book seems to insist that exposition must be an all-or-nothing affair, and as much as I appreciate Morgenstern’s confidence in the reader’s ability to put the pieces together, sometimes I do just want things spelled out, you know? Moreover, I am often critical of books with ambiguous endings, but this is one of those cases where the book definitely earns it.

As a book, as an experience of turning pages and reading, this was very satisfying for me. It hit the right spots of nostalgia for me and my love of stories. Indeed, it is a great example of what we mean when we say we read to escape: for the hours I spent on this adventure with Zachary, I was able to forget about what was happening in this world around us, so enthralled was I in the worlds he was trying to explore. And why else do we read if not for that?

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

One of those books where the meaning of the title becomes apparent by the end of the book, Children of Memory is the third (and final?) volume of the Children of Time space opera from Adrian Tchaikovsky. What began as a story about the possible evolution of life from Earth on different worlds in one novel has sprawled into an epic meditation on what it means to be alive. Thanks to NetGalley and publisher Orbit for the eARC!

Spoilers for the first and second books in this review but not for this one.

The seeds of this story are planted at the end of Children of Ruin: some time after contact between the Humans/Portiids of Kern’s World and the octopuses and alien creature from the twin system of Damascus/Nod, the tenuous resulting peace has created a multispecies, interstellar, starfaring civilization. Those who want to explore set out in various types of spacecraft, usually with a mixed crew, looking for new things and new experiences—they are, as the Nod creature would put it, “having an adventure.” One such ship has arrived in orbit of another planet that was supposed to be terraformed by humans from Earth and then settled by a subsequent ark ship. They find a strange settlement that probably shouldn’t have survived this long. But as their investigation deepens, the cracks appear wider than they ever thought.

At first, the story seems to be a straightforward plot about a regressive colony being visited by a more “advanced” group of people who then have to decide what to do. Liff, an adolescent girl from the colony, serves as our interlocutor for much of the story. We watch over her shoulder as she puzzles out these newcomers. Liff is perceptive enough to recognize that these visitors are not your run-of-the-mill outsiders and young enough not to be swept up so easily in the xenophobic herd mentality promulgated by her populist uncle. Meanwhile, one of the visitors, Miranda, develops a soft spot for Liff and becomes a proponent of interfering more readily in the colony’s politics, even as her fellow explorers protest that such intervention would be useless at best and harmful at worst.

My thoughts immediately went, of course, to the Prime Directive from Star Trek. The multispecies coalition reminds me a bit of the Federation, even if it is a much less cohesive arrangement. They lack any codified Prime Directive—and indeed, as we see later in the book, interference is practically built into their mission—but many of their early actions are reminiscent of how Star Trek’s characters diligently avoid interfering in the affairs of cultures that haven’t developed faster-than-light spaceflight. Both stances are founded upon the philosophy that sufficiently advanced science does not always mean superior culture or morality, and to impose our own ideologies on other cultures that we encounter could easily lead to a recapitulation of the colonialism and imperialism that both Tchaikovsky and Roddenberry imagined as being firmly in the past of their futures.

As the story progresses, it becomes clear both to Miranda and us (and to a lesser extent, Liff) that something is terribly wrong. The story itself seems to start to break down, with continuity threatened and characterization inconsistent. The ultimate cause of this issue is not, in and of itself, all that original as far as science-fiction tropes go. Nevertheless, I like how Tchaikovsky uses it here. It’s another interesting idea to explore in this universe he has created over the past two novels. It further expands the universe—the mechanism causing this issue is alien in origin, proof of intelligent life out there beyond the creature discovered on Nod, even if that intelligence might not be living any longer. The questions raised by this discovery are profound, and Tchaikovsky’s characters treat them with the gravity they require.

Similarly, Children of Memory asks us to think critically about how we know if we are sentient and self-aware. Two central characters are a bonded pair of corvids who evolved on another failed human terraforming world (well, failed from the point of view of humans—the corvids seem quite satisfied). The corvids exhibit behaviours that seem consistent with sentience, yet they themselves admit that they don’t think they are self-aware! They’re just pretending, the same way that an AI like the currently notorious ChatGPT might pretend to self-awareness. They go so far as to assert that even humans are not, ourselves, actually self-aware either—we’re just algorithms running different software.

(The corvids’ bonded pair nature reminded me a lot of the theory of the bicameral mind, although theirs is split into cataloging and executive function. Very fascinating!)

And it’s true—can we ultimately ever prove that we are sentient beings as opposed to beings who believe we’re sentient and are good enough at faking it? This is the kind of philosophical quandary I’ve come to expect from Tchaikovsky’s writing, and he hasn’t let me down.

I saw a few other early reviews criticize the portrayal of Miranda and how Tchaikovsky reduces the Nod creature, after spending so much time humanizing it in the previous book, to a self-hating caricature of itself. I don’t agree. I think Miranda’s internalized revulsion makes a lot of sense given that she is basically a copy of a Human woman who has all the atavistic reservations about an assimilating creature like the Nod one. The whole point of the Nod creature is that it becomes what it assimilates, so if it assimilates things that feel revulsion or hatred towards it—even subconsciously—of course it will feel those things too. That’s what makes the conflict, Miranda’s characterization, so interesting. She believes she might be responsible somehow for everything that is happening—and in a way she’s right, but in another way she is also so, so wrong.

As far as pacing goes, I will admit that the first half of the book felt like it was slow to me. It was only towards the end, after we know more about what’s happening on this planet, that I started to feel really invested in the story. I think Tchaikovsky’s ideas are always incredible, and his skills as a writer are generally quite strong, but sometimes his storytelling—the way he structures and reveals the exposition of his worlds and characters in particular—leaves me wanting.

Children of Memory was better for me overall than Children of Ruin. I hesitate with how to rank it against Children of Time because they are both great, just for different reasons. I really love the thought experiment at the heart of this novel, whereas the first book in this series is a tour-de-force exploration of interspecies communication, conflict, and cooperation. In any case, this is yet another excellent science-fiction novel that I’m quite happy to have read.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

This is a great example of a book I probably wouldn’t have picked up solely on my own recognizance. However, it’s the January pick for the Rad Roopa Book Club, and I was intrigued. Well, actually, I wanted to know how to kill a city, should the need ever arise. That’s what P.E. Moskowitz covers in this aptly named book—though I get the feeling they are more interested in fighting against gentrification, and I suppose that’s a good thing.

 Part geographical rumination, part political manifesto, How to Kill a City is a tour through four major American cities and how gentrification has come for each of them. Moskowitz begins in New Orleans, examining how state and local officials used the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina as an excuse to enact policy that would encourage gentrification, development, and attract “the right sort” (read: white people) to the city. From there they take us to Detroit, which has been hollowed out by recession and foreclosure. Next up, San Francisco, where the tech bubble has priced millennials out of owning houses some of them grew up in. Finally, Moskowitz’s milieu of New York City, which has waged a decades-long campaign of gentrification across multiple boroughs.

Along the way, Moskowitz explores what gentrification is, according to various sources, how it begins, and the forces that drive it. Their thesis is simple: gentrification is a local effect, but the cause is national and even global, so the solutions have to be a similar combination of these levels of community and government. Boots-on-the-ground activists are essential but if fighting by themselves are in for a losing battle. Rather, Moskowitz points out the need for policy change that recognizes how gentrification works and especially how it affects marginalized and vulnerable groups.

I’ll demonstrate with one example from the book: real estate development. In many cities (I know this is true here in Canada, particularly in Toronto and Vancouver), housing prices are on the rise because developers or other wealthy owners buy up houses, condos, and apartments and then leave them vacant for most of the year. And the ones that are occupied are leased, often without rent control. As a result, people are being priced out of their homes in the cities, putting pressure on them to move to suburbs—and without robust public transit into the city from the suburbs, people often have trouble affording to even work in the city.

As I read, I pondered how gentrification manifests in my own city of Thunder Bay. It’s a tough one, because I can tell it is operation, but I don’t think it’s as evident as it is in larger cities. Thunder Bay’s commercial districts tend to be dense and clustered, and while there are residential neighbourhoods that abut them, we have a lot less urban infill at the moment. We’ve always had a lot of chain and department stores, with local businesses eternally clinging to life as we lurch from one economic hardship to another. So it was challenging for me to apply Moskowitz’s teachings to my own city—something to think about, and perhaps watch out for.

Then again maybe, as Moskowitz themself reflects, maybe I am a gentrifier. I fit the economic demographic of being a white, middle-class, white-collar worker … but again, the neighbourhood is what I struggle with. I’m in a more expensive yet still heterogeneous area of town, heavily residential yet one where walking barely two blocks can put me among houses that are hundreds of thousands of dollars’ difference in value to my own.

Although How to Kill a City acknowledges outright the links between gentrification and racism, I would have liked to see more discussion of colonialism in this book. After all, the land American cities are built on is stolen from the Indigenous nations who predate European contact. The first European settlers were, in a sense, the original gentrifiers, and I think it’s worth examining how present-day settlers like myself benefit from our privilege even if we are not personally in the midst of a present moment of gentrification.

Similarly, while not quite in the scope of the book, How to Kill a City got me thinking about gentrification in Europe. Moskowitz briefly mentions London, where gentrification as a term was coined. So it’s not a phenomenon unique to North America by any means. Yet I wonder how conditions in Europe—differences in population and transport density, differences in culture, as well as states with a heavier lean towards socialism—change the face of gentrification. Again, something to think about.

That’s about where I come down on this book: it gives me a lot to think about. It’s firm and opinionated without being strident, yet it also admits different points of view—Moskowitz interviews developers and other gentrifiers who emphatically endorse what they are doing in these cities, and then Moskowitz presents the points of view of activists and those who oppose gentrification, with whom they clearly sympathize more. Still, I appreciate the attempt to explore this issue from different angles.

Gentrification is ultimately about space, and space does not have to be limited to the physical. I’ve seen people discuss the gentrification of online spaces as well. So I like how this book has me thinking about our relationship with space, physical or not, and especially how I move through it as a white person. I’m thinking about relationality, how I relate to these spaces, to the people and objects within them, and how these things in turn relate back to me.

How to Kill a City is a concrete and careful look at an important contemporary issue. While there is room for more breadth and depth than is on offer here, this book feels like a good starting point on a journey to unpacking one’s own role in gentrification and learning about how policy influences gentrification throughout North America.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.