camilla_hoel ,
@camilla_hoel@hcommons.social avatar

I don’t generally do reading challenges (my to-read list is too, too long), but I have made an exception this year for The Big Fat Anti-Oppression reading challenge from Books in the Time of Chaos. It has 24 entries, and I figure I will add my reads to this thread at the end of each month. @bookstodon

8. A book speaking about AFSPA or other military laws; 9. A book about the migrant experience; 10. A banned book; 11. A book told from multiple PoVs; 12. an Afrofuturist/Africanfuturist book; 13. A book in your mother tongue; 14. A book on climate change
15. A book about a natural disaster; 16. A book with investigative journalism; 17. A non-fiction graphic novel; 18. A book about revolution/rebellions/uprisings; 19. A queer epistolary novel/bookk; 20. A book of South Asian speculative fiction; 21. A book with a Dalit protagonist; 22. A book about an escape; 23. A book with a neurodivergent protagonist; 24. A book with a Maori author.
Bonus prompts : 1. BIPOC adoptee story; 2. A book with a trans protagonist; 3. A Middle-Eastern fantasy. Guidelines: You can pick books published anywhere in the world; by authors og any natuonality. That said, the idea is to deepen our appreciation of the diversity of voices, especially of voices outside the US/UK who dominate publishing around the world, and so we would encourage that when choosing your books you prioritize those writers who live/work in countries in the Global South

1. A book that starts with the letter D; 2. A communist memoir; 3. A book that inspired a TV show; 4. A book about colonialism in the 21st Century; 5. A book about witches; 6. A book that has a heavy police presence/related to police procedures; 7. A book featuring an animal as one of the main protagonists
ALT
  • Reply
    • camilla_hoel OP ,
    @camilla_hoel@hcommons.social avatar

    January:
    13. Sumaya Jirde Ali’s (amazing) Et liv i redningsvest: dagboksopptegnelser om norsk rasisme. A book in my own language about the insisious nature of Norwegian racism as experienced by a girl and young woman born in Somalia.
    23: Rivers Solomon’s The Unkindness of Ghosts. Afro-futurist SF that deals intelligently with race, class, and gender.
    1: Samuel Delany’s Driftglass. SF short story collection in which he explores a number of ideas he later turns into books, but also some he doesn’t.
    18: Joe Succo’s Palestine. A graphic non-fiction treatment of the first intifada and life in Palestine at the time.
    @bookstodon

    image/png
    Cover of Samuel R. Delany’s Driftglass
    Cover of Joe Succo’s graphic journalism, Palestine.

    camilla_hoel OP ,
    @camilla_hoel@hcommons.social avatar

    @bookstodon February:
    6: Rana Ayyub’s The Gujarat Files: an account of investigating into police behaviour in Gujarat and violence against muslims.
    14: Pankaj Sekhsaria’s Islands in Flux: the Andaman and Nicobar Story. A collection of journalism on the modern colonisation and exploitation of the islands and the resultant genocide/ecocide.
    16: Jessikka Aro’s Putin’s Trolls. An account of the backlash she received when covering the Internet Research Agency, and how the regime uses information warfare against its critics.
    11: N. K. Jemisin’s The World We Make. The second in her duology on living cities. Total send-up of Lovecraft and xenophobes more generally.

    Cover of Islands in Flux
    Cover of Putin’s Trolls
    Cover of The World We Make

    camilla_hoel OP ,
    @camilla_hoel@hcommons.social avatar

    @bookstodon March:
    2: Angela Y. Davis’ excellent Autobiography. From growing up on Dynamite Hill to studying under Adorno in Frankfurt and Marcuse in California while organising all sorts of amazing protests. A manifesto of seeing people in statistics of oppression.
    4: Adania Shibli’s En liten detalj (Minor Detail), which got her banned from the Frankfurt book fair. A Palestinian perspective on the Apartheid state.
    7: Sun-Mi Hwang’s The Dog Who Dared to Dream, which is predictably depressing in new and interesting ways.
    22: Esi Edugyan’s excellent Washington Black, which was not what I expected (the sky ship on the cover gave me the wrong idea), but which gives an idea of the horror of escaping slavery only to fall into a world which still does not accept your equal humanity.

    Cover of The Dog Who Dared To Dream, white with coloured trees and a small black dog.
    Showing the cover of Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black, with illustrations of a kind of sky boat under a balloon.

    camilla_hoel OP ,
    @camilla_hoel@hcommons.social avatar

    @bookstodon April:
    20: Shehan Karunatilaka’s amazing The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, set in the afterlife in Sri Lanka in the 90s.

    3: Prayaag Akbar’s Leila, which gives a dystopian extrapolation of Indian nationalism and follows the logic of purity/separation.

    Cover of Leila, title given kn red letters on a pale photo pf a person playing by the waves.

    camilla_hoel OP ,
    @camilla_hoel@hcommons.social avatar

    @bookstodon May:
    21: Vauhini Vara's The Immortal King Rao, in which Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are preempted by the Coconut corporation, and the world still goes to hell.

    8: Parismita Singh's excellent short story collection Peace Has Come, telling stories of life under ceasfire and curfew and not-quite-peace.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • [email protected]
  • kbinchat
  • All magazines
    •