booktweeting , to bookstodon group
@booktweeting@zirk.us avatar

“MEKONG DELTA BLUESMAN” Son Vo tells the story of his life both offstage and on. From an early childhood in Saigon to a hardscrabble life in Maine to discovering his gift for music, Vo relates some wild adventures in a voice full of warmth and hope. B PLUS

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/tales-of-the-mekong-delta-bluesman-son-hoang-vo/1144215403?ean=9798868916854

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pivic , to bookstodon group
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https://bookwyrm.social/book/1628641/s/rebel-girl

I've just started reading Kathleen Hanna's autobiography, 'Rebel Girl'. I'm 5% in and it's enthralling, in a few different ways, as you can tell from the quotes.

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I want to tell you how I write songs and produce music. How singing makes me feel connected to a million miracles at once. How being onstage is the one place I feel the most me. But I can’t untangle all of that from the background that is male violence. I wish I could forget the guy who stalked me while I was making my solo record. How he sat on the roof of the building across from mine and looked into my windows with binoculars as I worked. How he told my neighbors he thought I was a prostitute who “needed to be stopped.” I wish I could slice him out of my story as a musician, but I can’t. I also don’t want this book to be a list of traumas, so I’m leaving a lot of that on the cutting room floor. It’s more important to remember that I’ve seen ugly basement rooms transform into warm campfires, dank rock-bro clubs become bright parties where girls and gay kids and misfits danced together in a sea of freedom and joy, art galleries that had only ever showcased white male mediocrity become sites of thrilling feminist collaborations. I also ate gelato on a street in Milan with my bandmates and cried because it tasted THAT FUCKING GOOD. But yeah, there were also rapes and run-ins with assholes who threw water on my shine. I keep trying to make my rapes funny, but I have to stop doing that because they aren’t. I want them to be stories because stories are made up of words, and words can’t hurt me.
I had hair down to my butt in the second grade, but my mom got sick of washing it, took out her sewing shears, and gave me the ugliest short haircut imaginable.
My sister was always in trouble, and not just because she was bullied at school and screamed back at men—but because she had a father who stared at her like she was a Playboy Bunny and not his own daughter. When they fought, which was often, it sounded like cats fighting, if the cats were a teenage girl and a full-grown man. All I wanted to do was escape that sound. I spent a lot of time on our front stoop with my hands over my ears, trying to make a facial expression that was the equivalent of writing “help” in a fogged-up window.

mostaurelius , to bookstodon group
@mostaurelius@mas.to avatar

📚 Just finished reading: The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto Guevara (2021 edition)

The diary of Che Guevara's journey to discover the continent of Latin America while still a medical student, in 1952 on a vintage Norton motorcycle with his friend Alberto Granado, a biochemist. It captures the exuberance and joy of one person's youthful belief in the possibilities of humankind tending towards justice, peace and happiness.

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