Tag Archives: nonfiction

#2601 – 2022 Book List

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2022 was a busy year, so I didn’t read as much as I wanted. However, I still managed a total of 70 books! That included: 25 nonfiction books; 27 fiction books and comics; 18 collections of poetry and/or short prose; and 35 books either by queer authors or featuring queer main characters.

Some of my favorite reads of the year included Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer, What Moves the Dead by T Kingfisher, The Merciless Ones by Namina Forna, and of course Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. The Luminous Dead was a reread from last year because it was so good I couldn’t wait any longer to have it back in my brain.

The full list is below. If you’ve read anything from this list, let me know what you thought!

  1. The Dead and the Dark – Courtney Gould
  2. The Elpis Pages: A Collective – Ed. Kayla King
  3. Warning Lines Issue 3: FALL’N CHERUB
  4. The Witch’s Heart – Genevieve Gornichec
  5. Wave – Sonali Deraniyagala
  6. Signs: The Secret Language of the Universe – Laura Lynne Jackson
  7. Corporeal: Volume 1 – Ed. Katharine Blair and Lucca Hermes
  8. Whispers of Stone (The Last Gift Book 2) – Allegra Pescatore
  9. Japanese Death Poems: Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death – Ed. Yoel Hoffmann
  10. Gender Euphoria: Stories of Joy from Trans, Non-binary, and Intersex Writers – Ed. Laura Kate Dale
  11. Lady of the Wood – Mark Braun
  12. Emotionally Raw: Second Edition – Carlos Cabrera
  13. Analogies and Allegories Literary Magazine Issue 7: Zodiac Signs – Ed. Mollie Williamson
  14. Seven Mercies (Seven Devils Book Two) – Laura Lam and Elizabeth May
  15. The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why – Amanda Ripley
  16. The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth and Other Curiosities from the History of Medicine – Thomas Morris
  17. Zenith Literary Magazine Volume 3: Wasteland – Ed. Catalina Irigoyen and Mikey Waller
  18. Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law – Mary Roach
  19. Tempest: Wild Weather Collections – Ed. Sam Bellamy
  20. Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World – Paul Stamets
  21. The Saint of Witches – Avra Margariti
  22. Death, Ritual and Belief: The Rhetoric of Funerary Rites (Third Edition) – Douglas Davies
  23. Warning Lines Literary Magazine Volume 4: Otherworlds – Ed. Charlie D’Aniello
  24. The Golden Wave: Culture and Politics After Sri Lanka‘s Tsunami Disaster – Michele Ruth Gamburd
  25. The Body Is Not An Apology: The Power of Radical Self-love – Sonya Renee Taylor
  26. These Gossamer Strings (The Last Gift Book 3) – Allegra Pescatore
  27. If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho – Anne Carson
  28. Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women that a Movement Forgot – Mikki Kendall
  29. Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States – Samantha Allen
  30. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants – Robin Wall Kimmerer
  31. Dead Dad Jokes – Ollie Schminkey
  32. Maiden, Mother, Crone: Fantastical Trans Femmes – Ed. Gwen Benaway
  33. Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm – Ed Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol LeBrón
  34. The Gift of Blood (Crimson Tears Book 1) – Vaela Denarr and Micah Iannandrea
  35. Genderqueer: A Memoir – Maia Kobabe
  36. What Moves the Dead – T. Kingfisher
  37. The Halloween Tree – Ray Bradbury
  38. Queers Destroy Fantasy! Special Issue – Ed. Christopher Barzak
  39. Tsunami! – Walter Dudley and Min Lee
  40. The Merciless Ones (The Guilded Ones Book 2) – Namina Forna
  41. Lady of Water and Flame: Ancient Hymns for Tefnut – Chelsea Luellon Bolton
  42. Tsunami Alert: Beating Asia’s Next Big One – Oakley Brooks
  43. Treasury of Egyptian Mythology: Classic Stories of Gods, Goddesses, Monsters, and Mortals – Donna Jo Napoli
  44. Furrows: Deep Earth Collections Vol 2 (Green Ink Poetry) – Ed. Sam Bellamy and S. Farrar
  45. Disaster by Choice: How Our Actions Turn Natural Hazards into Catastrophes – Ilan Kelman
  46. Avatar, The Last Airbender: The Dawn of Yangchen (Chronicles of the Avatar Book 3) (Volume 3) – F. C. Lee
  47. Nona the Ninth (The Locked Tomb Book 3) – Tamsyn Muir
  48. Antiracism in Animal Advocacy: Igniting Cultural Transformation (The Encompass Essays) – Ed. Jasmin Singer
  49. Creepy Cat Volume 1 – Cotton Valent
  50. Nights with a Cat Volume 1 – Kyuryu Z
  51. A Cat Story – Ursula Murray Husted
  52. Will the Flower Slip Through the Asphalt: Writers Respond to Capitalist Climate Change – Ed. Vijay Prashad
  53. Seven Blades in Black (The Grave of Empires Book 1) – Sam Sykes
  54. Pink Pansy Press Volume One: Haunting – Ed. Jay Hogan, Asher Cookson
  55. The Scratch Daughters (The Scapegracers Book 2) – H. A. Clarke
  56. Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History – Dan Flores
  57. The Raging Sea: The Powerful Account of the Worst Tsunami in US History – Dennis Powers
  58. Kiki’s Delivery Service – Eiko Kadono
  59. Soul of the Deep (Of Mermaids and Orisa Book 2) – Natasha Bowen
  60. We are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place – Kelly Weber
  61. The Blue Mirror – Kathe Koja
  62. Corporeal Volume 4 – Ed. Katharine Blair and Lucca Hermes
  63. The Luminous Dead – Caitlin Starling
  64. Lord of the White Hell Book One (The Cadeleonian Series 1) – Ginn Hale
  65. Lord of the White Hell Book Two (The Cadeleonian Series 2) – Ginn Hale
  66. Champion of the Scarlet Wolf Book One (The Cadeleonian Series 3) – Ginn Hale
  67. Champion of the Scarlet Wolf Book 2 (The Cadeleonian Series 4) – Ginn Hale
  68. Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? And Other Questions About Dead Bodies – Caitlin Doughty
  69. Myth and Lore Issue 4: Midwinter lights are dimming – Ed. Mark Ryan
  70. Master of Restless Shadows Book One (The Cadeleonian Series Book 5) – Ginn Hale

#2522 – 2021 Book List

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This was a good year for reading – or at least better than 2020! I read a total of 73 books, zines, graphic novels, etc. including: 33 with queer characters or by queer authors; at least 24 with POC main characters or by authors of color; 12 poetry collections; and 16 nonfiction books. I even got through most of my physical TBR pile from the beginning of the year, though it’s grown again thanks to holiday gifts. Guess I better get started on my 2022 list! ;)

  1. So Our Idols Are Dead: Empowerment Poems – K.D. Hume
  2. Between Death and the Devil: Tarot Poems – K.D. Hume
  3. Gramarye, a Witch’s Perzine: Issues 1-4 – K.D. Hume
  4. So Happy to See Cherry Blossoms: Haiku from the Year of the Great Earthquake and Tsunami – Ed. Mayuzumi Madoka
  5. She and Her Cat – Makoto Shinkai and Tsubasa Yamaguchi
  6. The Endless Possibilities of Beatrice – Annie Goodyear
  7. Raven Goddess: Going Deeper with the Morrigan – Morgan Daimler
  8. Goddess of the Hunt – Shelby Eileen
  9. Up from the Sea – Leza Lowitz
  10. Tsunami Vs the Fukushima 50: Poems – Lee Ann Roripaugh
  11. Coffee with Orange Sherbet – S.E. Shell
  12. The Phone Booth in Mr. Hirota’s Garden – Heather Smith and Rachel Wada
  13. I Survived: The Japanese Tsunami, 2011 – Lauren Tarshis
  14. The Warrior Moon – K. R. Arsenault
  15. Beyond Me – Anne Donwerth-Chikamatsu
  16. Hathor: A Reintroduction to an Ancient Egyptian Goddess – Lesley Jackson
  17. The Guest Cat – Takashi Hiraide
  18. Alanna: The First Adventure (The Lioness Quartet Book 1) – Tamora Pierce
  19. In the Hand of the Goddess (The Lioness Quartet Book 2) – Tamora Pierce
  20. The Guilded Ones – Namina Forna
  21. Cemetery Boys – Aiden Thomas
  22. Educated – Tara Westover
  23. Only the Sea Keeps: Poems of the Tsunami – Ed. Judith Robinson, Joan Bauer, Sankar Roy
  24. The Woman Who Rides Like A Man (The Lioness Quartet Book 3) – Tamora Pierce
  25. How Long Til Black Future Month? – N.K Jemesin
  26. Lioness Rampant (The Lioness Quartet Book 4) – Tamora Pierce
  27. Gramarye, a Witch’s Perzine: Issue 5 – K.D. Hume
  28. Gramarye, a Witch’s Perzine: Issue 6 – K.D. Hume
  29. Gramarye, a Witch’s Perzine: Issue 7 – K.D. Hume
  30. Love Songs for the Sun: Poems – KD Hume
  31. This Precious Life: Buddhist Tsunami Relief and Anti-Nuclear Activism in Post 3.11 Japan – Ed. Jonathan S. Watts
  32. First Test (Protector of the Small Book 1) – Tamora Pierce
  33. Page (Protector of the Small Book 2) – Tamora Pierce
  34. Squire (Protector of the Small Book 3) – Tamora Pierce
  35. Lady Knight (Protector of the Small Book 4) – Tamora Pierce
  36. Valor and the Vain: A Fairytale – K. D. Hume
  37. All Night Long: Haiku, Senryu, and Other Short Poems, and a Haibun on the Great Tohoku Earthquake – Kirby Record
  38. Red Skies: A Creators Response to 2020 – Ed. Rachel Small and Amanda Edwards
  39. The Last Girl Scout – Natalie Ironside
  40. Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey – Marie Mutsuki Mockett
  41. A Constellation of Cats – Ed. Denise Little
  42. Where Shadows Lie (Book One of The Last Gift) – Allegra Pescatore
  43. Find Your Goddess – Skye Alexander
  44. I Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter – Isabel Falls
  45. The World that Belongs to Us: An Anthology of Queer Poetry from South Asia – Ed. Aditi Angiras & Akhil Katyal
  46. One Year on T: On Non-binary Sex and Transition – Sage Pantony
  47. 1.5 Years on T: My Non-binary Body, Transition, and Ambivalence – Sage Pantony
  48. Unspeakable: A Queer Gothic Anthology – Ed. Celine Frohn
  49. Coming Off of T: Transition As Cycle – Sage Pantony
  50. Silk and Steel: A Queer Speculative Adventure Anthology – Ed. Janine Southard
  51. Lead and Roses: Love Songs at the End of the World – Natalie Ironside
  52. Full-Rip 9.0: The Next Big Earthquake in the Pacific Northwest – Sandy Doughton
  53. Wild Magic (The Immortals Quartet Book 1) – Tamora Pierce
  54. Wolf-Speaker (The Immortals Quartet Book 2) – Tamora Pierce
  55. The Cruel Sister – KD Hume
  56. Emperor Mage (The Immortals Quartet Book 3) – Tamora Pierce
  57. The Realms of the Gods (The Immortals Quartet Book 4) – Tamora Pierce
  58. Persons of Consequence – KD Hume
  59. Great Goddesses: Life Lessons from Myths and Monsters – Nikita Gill
  60. And the River Flowed As a Raft of Corpses: The Poetry of Yamaguchi Tsutomu, Survivor of Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki – Chad Diehl
  61. Life Everlasting: The Animal Way of Death – Bernd Heinrich
  62. Non-binary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity – Ed. Micah Rajunov, Scott Duane
  63. Who By Water: Reflections of a Tsunami Psychologist – Ronna Kabatznick
  64. The Luminous Dead – Caitlin Starling
  65. From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death – Caitlin Doughty
  66. Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster – Adam Higginbotham
  67. Warning Lines Magazine Issue 2: Echo – Ed. Charlie D’Aniello
  68. Hellebore Issue #1: The Sacrifice Issue – Ed. Maria J Perez Cuervo
  69. Sorrowland: A Novel – Rivers Solomon
  70. Skin of the Sea – Natasha Bowen
  71. Girls of Fate and Fury (Girls of Paper and Fire Book 3) – Natasha Ngan
  72. The Jaguar Princess – Clare Bell
  73. Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster – David Lochbaum and The Union of Concerned Scientists

#2437

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I’ve carried the burden of extinction on my shoulders since I was a child, haunted by the sacred spirits of panthera uncia, tigris, and leo, by puma concolor and acinonyx jubatus, by the wailing specters of the burning Amazon and the melting Arctic. Even then I saw the irreversible trajectory of our folly and in the years since no amount of hope in mankind nor faith in divinity could shake that nihilistic certainty. I do not need cursed Cassandra’s terrible gift to know we crossed the point of no return long ago; we will never invent a technology capable of undoing the evils mankind has wrought, and certainly not in time to reverse the mass death we’ve set in motion. Even my childself, full of the dreams and promises of youth, understood the planetary genocide to which she’d bear witness in her lifetime.

Yet as I drown in grief I must remember my own words: turn to geology on your deathbed, it is the only science that can save you. When the ocean is clotted with orcinus orca’s ghosts and plastic shopping bags, it will still wear away continents and heave forth cataclysmic waves. When the mountains are littered with canis lupus corpses and abandoned solar panels, they will still cleave the sky and bury empty cities in eruptions of ash and mud. When every living thing is dead and we have finally committed the last of our species’ incomprehensible crimes, the earth will still remain. The planet will continue its endless cycles of upheaval and erosion, rupture and subduction, its titanic geologic metamorphosis, as if we had never been. Earth, at least, we cannot truly kill, no matter how hard we try.

2415 – 2020 Book List

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Behold, my 2020 book list! 2020 wasn’t kind to me reading-wise, as being part of my state’s covid response really messed up my overall schedule, so I read way fewer books this year than in most years. Still, I made up for that by reading some REALLY good books – including 26 with queer characters and at least 13 from authors of color. Highlights included The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home, The Shadow of Kyoshi, and the Locked Tomb, Broken Earth, and Ascendant trilogies. House of Leaves was good, but I was expecting it to have a higher body count and I wanted more spooky house shenanigans and less relationship angst.

Did you read any of these books? DO YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT THEM WITH ME?? Let me know!

  1. All the Windwracked Stars – Elizabeth Bear
  2. The Grand Escape – Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
  3. Flaming Lioness: Ancient Hymns for Egyptian Goddesses – Chelsea Luellon Bolton
  4. By the Mountain Bound – Elizabeth Bear
  5. The Sea Thy Mistress – Elizabeth Bear
  6. She-ra and the Princesses of Power: Legend of the Fire Princess – Gigi D.G
  7. House of Leaves – Mark Z Danielewski
  8. Ice Ghosts: The Epic Hunt for the Lost Franklin Expedition – Paul Watson
  9. Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns From Sumer – Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer
  10. The Cat in Ancient Egypt – Jaromir Malek
  11. Karen Memory – Elizabeth Bear
  12. March Was Made of Yarn: Reflections on the Japanese Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Meltdown – Ed. by Elmer Luke and David Karashima
  13. Down With the Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the Titanic – Steven Biel
  14. Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone – Richard Lloyd Parry
  15. Deathless Divide (Dread Nation) – Justina Ireland
  16. Stone Mad: A Karen Memory Adventure – Elizabeth Bear
  17. The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your Home: A Welcome to Night Vale Novel – Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor
  18. Lord of Strength and Power: Ancient Hymns for Wepwawet – Chelsea Luellon Bolton
  19. Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women – Sylvia Brinton Perera
  20. The Essential Rumi – Trans. by Coleman Barks
  21. The Best of Elizabeth Bear – Elizabeth Bear
  22. Mongrels – Stephen Graham Jones
  23. Gideon the Ninth (The Locked Tomb Trilogy Book 1) – Tamsyn Muir
  24. The Shadow of Kyoshi – FC Lee
  25. Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb Trilogy Book 2) – Tamsyn Muir
  26. Drowning in the Floating World: Poems – Meg Eden
  27. Lord of the Ways: An Anthology for Wepwawet – Ed. Dianne Bolton
  28. Seven Devils – Laura Lam and Elizabeth May
  29. The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth Book 1) – N K Jemisin
  30. The Obelisk Gate (The Broken Earth Book 2) – N K Jemisin
  31. Heathen: Volume 3 – Natasha Alterici
  32. The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth Book 3) – N K Jemisin
  33. Dragon Pearl – Yoon Ha Lee
  34. Excuse Me, Are You A Witch? – Emily Horn and Pawet Pawlak
  35. Crow And Weasel – Barry Lopez and Tom Pohrt
  36. Girls of Paper and Fire – Natasha Ngan
  37. Wilder Girls – Rory Power
  38. The Scapegracers – Hannah Abigail Clarke
  39. The Deep – Rivers Solomon
  40. The Priory of the Orange Tree – Samantha Shannon
  41. Three for the Road: Stories from Dread Nation – Justina Ireland
  42. The Tiger’s Daughter (The Ascendant Trilogy Book 1) – K Arsenault Rivera
  43. The Phoenix Empress (The Ascendant Trilogy Book 2) – K Arsenault Rivera
  44. Girls of Storm and Shadow – Natasha Ngan
  45. Witch Pilgrim Heretic – K.D. Hume
  46. Titanic: Psychic Forewarnings of a Tragedy – George Behe