Seething

The only reason I'm giving this as high a rating as I am is, as a Utah native and someone who has always felt disillusionment with my homestate precisely because my family and I do not have the access and racial power that many of the folks involved in this situation have/had, I found the conversation in this book about the LDS church useful; reflecting the realities I have lived while challenging my perspectives by situating the LDS church's relationship to land in the more rural parts of the state (where I have always lived closer to Salt Lake City proper), and placing the Bundy's and their movement in that conversation. 
Despite that, I felt Pogue made mistakes in the organization and flow of this. 

• The timelines are jumbled, both political/historical timelines as well as Pogue's personal timeline.
• Pogue's consistent asides about his own emotional history, while humanizing, always felt placed in the middle of the action in such a way that I felt that it disrupted the flow of what was happening.
• Pogue's ruminations on the socio-political positioning of the Bundyite movement alongside leftist concerns felt... underresearched and underexplained. I understand Pogue is not an expert in that field, but I found myself wishing that Pogue had looked a little closer into some history of the region, especially that of Indigenous activism, before making the claims he did. 
• In fact, on that note, for all the handwringing Pogue does about the racial tribalism and white supremacist-adjacent politics happening, I felt he truly failed to place this movement in relation to Indigenous livelihoods (especially in rural Utah; like, just a huge community/history to completely leave out of the conversation about public land usage) and politics, especially the LandBack movement. I'm not saying Chosen Country should have been about that; I am saying Pogue's consistent linguistic usage of “Indian” and complete silence on the LDS church's historical relationship to the Ute, Paiute, Goshute, and Shoshone nations felt to me like I was reading half a book, truthfully. I could go on. 
• In general, I felt the racial aspect of this was not explored in the depth it deserved- we heard about it constantly, worried about it in the prose, but never really got into it, and it shows some weaknesses in Pogue's political imagination.

I've never been a fan of self-help books, and I felt this was billed as a memoir and/or a historical record of Einstein; that's partially my fault, and to be fair, I did find the occasional nugget of wisdom. I feel that if I wasn't in such a transitionary period in my conversion, this would have landed even worse for me. Plus, it's choppy! Levy jumps back and forth and back and forth from stories of people, to memoir, to Einstein, and it felt like 4 books Levy smashed together. 

As a historical and policy primer, this was super good. As a pop polisci/sosh “what now” book it was super weird! It's contradictory and Love has the most whiplash shitlib vs goofy Marxist take side by side that I didn't know what to do with all that. As a goofy Marxist I was like huh?
Basically she was like it's white people's job to turn neonazis back to the good side by working them through it but also white folks are the enemy, in true Black nationalist fashion, which was just... I think this needed another editing pass in the last few chapters or like... a spiritual editing pass in terms of what Love wants the reader to do.
As someone who gobbles this stuff up, I did feel that generally another pass to take out some repetitive themed work/emotional prose would have really helped the pace of this, as certain chapters felt like a story or two (so, let's say like 15 minutes of content) and double that in repeating the takeaway (i.e antiBlackness and capitalism are ruining our schools) in a way that didn't feel additive. Yeah.
But lots of good info here that is necessary, just not sure if I was the right audience or what's going on there.

Was I frontloading a ton of books at once when I read this? Yes. Is it still not super memorable? Also yes. I remember liking it but my girl asked me what I thought of the moon passage in the first third and I relistened to the first third and deadass missed it twice so the prose must not have been that brazy. Anyways it was fun and sort of fucked up, which I was looking for.

I spent the last third of this book tearing up and calming down and tearing up and calming down and then just tearing up until the last page which did make me just cry. Incredible prose, incredible characters, incredible emotion. Themes of motherhood, racial and class boundaries and what it takes to maintain them without ever actually putting a physical gate up, of judgement and hatred masquerading as love, as regret and hope, of art and love; Ng just does not stop with the punches. My god. If this has been on your list, you have to read it today. YESTERDAY!! 

Incredible writing here! I'm not usually one to do this when I read anthologies, but I found myself stopping to look up authors and see if I could find other works they had written to read later! This is an incredible show of work here. There is maybe one story in here that wasn't for me, and that I found myself skimming just to get past it- but one out of so many is a great hit rate for anthologies, especially ones with such an interesting theme! Many of these stories take that idea of monsters and they RUN with it. Some standouts for me include:

• Fossil Heart by Amanda Downum
• Those Gaddam Cookies by Scott Sigler
• Little Widow by Maria Dahvana Headley
• Whose Drowned Face Sleeps by An Owomoyela and Rachel Swirsky

The absurd antiblackness, imperialist fantasies of Naipaul are stomach churning, and his obsession with writing of peoples and ideologies as if they are pests to be crushed make it impossible to slog through the rest of this overwrought travel writing for anything that might be gleaned about Jonestown and the People's Temple. I cannot be expected to take any thoughts or conclusions Naipaul might make about Jonestown in good faith considering how he writes of Black folks and Black thoughts, so I do not see the point in wasting my time.

 My partner read this for a class and recommended it to me, and she has very smart things to say about this novel like how Ozeki uses quantum theory to challenge how we, as readers, understand novels as an art form of many worlds, how Ozeki recontextualizes folks who have Alzheimer's' and their experiences by putting us in Ruth's (the character's) shoes, how Ozeki connects Japanese generational ennui and Buddhist philosophy to WW2 patriotism and that suicide is a through-line in Japanese sociopolitical history, but what I have to say about this novel is thus: 
Oh boy! I cried my eyes out in the last third, and the epilogue just about killed me. It's good. Nao's story hurts to read, and what stops me from making this a 5 is that Ruth and Oliver's story never grabbed me like Nao's. I found myself wanting to get through their story ASAP to get back to Nao. I didn't get attached to them, and their relationship and their stories... just didn't land for me. 
Great book! You should read it.

Damn I loved this. Super interesting and genuinely one of the first pieces of media that has given me any hope regarding climate change/destruction of our coral reefs. I teared up when I finished just because it felt like a weight lifted to know that there is still something we can do beyond like... the stuff we can't talk about actually doing. My hesitation here is the language/politicking around capitalism solving our problem, and the fact I couldn't tell if it was a “sponsorship” issue or a “bad take” issue- knowing one way or another would let me go half a step higher even if I disagreed. Sometimes it felt dishonest or intentionally vague in a way that left a super bad taste in my mouth.

As my first foray back into sociological scholarship since I graduated from my undergrad, this book put the hunger of academic scholarship back into me. Well-written, accessible, self-aware in her positionality, and thorough in her investigations, Talley is doing incredible work on opening the door to crip and gender theory through the lens of face work. If you're new to either, you might find this a little dense, but if you aren't, this is a great beginner step to bridging that gap.

Such a beautiful and heartbreaking retelling of a brilliant young woman's life and how her sister has pushed against bureaucracy and history to make sure this gets heard. Wow. Really fantastic work here, really haunting, and I think this is the only kind of “true crime” (sucks that this is even used in the same convo as this book) that should exist.