A note on this blog's organization

Since I first started this blog, I've read over 600 books. I decided to organize them by sections, so to navigate to specific blog entries, review the sections below. To look for a specific book, you can check the list below, then use it to find the right page of the blog. Alternatively, you can try typing the book title or author's name in the search bar at the top left of this blog, but that seems to only pull from 'Conquering the Classics' and '101 and Beyond'.

Book Bingo #13 - 2025 - Rebellion, Resistance, Revolution, & Liberation Book Bingo

Book Bingo #13 - 2025 - Rebellion, Resistance, Revolution, & Liberation Book Bingo (59 books in total, 0 crossovers with '101 and Beyond' list)


Another one of my own creation, inspired by the state of the world, the country, etc. I don't imagine that requires much more explanation. ;) I clearly went with a blend of fiction and non-fiction in terms of approaches to the content, which worked out pretty well, imho.

In case you can't read my handwriting, here's the list of books and titles (top down, left to right). The blurbs are from the author's websites or bookstores. When possible, I've linked to the author's page to purchase a copy from them directly or an independent seller. Or use the library! Or buy local! As you wish. ;)

I want to reflect on this post more, so I think I will write a reflection post at a later time!

Category: Features a rebellion
    • ​At university in Manila, young, bookish Soledad Soliman falls in with radical friends, defying her wealthy parents and their society crowd. Drawn in by two romantic young rebels, Sol initiates a conspiracy that quickly spirals out of control. Years later, far from her homeland, Sol reconstructs her fractured memories, writing a confession she hopes will be her salvation. Illuminating the dramatic history of the Marcos-era Philippines, this story of youthful passion is a tour de force.

Category: Banned book
    • Thirteen-year-old Ugwu is employed as a houseboy for a university professor full of revolutionary zeal. Olanna is the professor’s beautiful mistress, who has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos for a dusty university town and the charisma of her new lover. And Richard is a shy young Englishman in thrall to Olanna’s twin sister, an enigmatic figure who refuses to belong to anyone. As Nigerian troops advance and they must run for their lives, their ideals are severely tested, as are their loyalties to one another. Epic, ambitious, and triumphantly realized, Half of a Yellow Sun is a remarkable novel about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race—and about the ways in which love can complicate them all.
Category: Features a revolution
    • In a surreal, but familiar, vision of modern day Egypt, a centralized authority known as 'the Gate' has risen to power in the aftermath of the 'Disgraceful Events, ' a failed popular uprising. Citizens are required to obtain permission from the Gate in order to take care of even the most basic of their daily affairs, yet the Gate never opens, and the queue in front of it grows longer. Citizens from all walks of life mix and wait in the sun: a revolutionary journalist, a sheikh, a poor woman concerned for her daughter's health, and even the brother of a security officer killed in clashes with protestors. Among them is Yehia, a man who was shot during the Events and is waiting for permission from the Gate to remove a bullet that remains lodged in his pelvis. Yehia's health steadily declines, yet at every turn, officials refuse to assist him, actively denying the very existence of the bullet. Ultimately it is Tarek, the principled doctor tending to Yehia's case, who must decide whether to follow protocol as he has always done, or to disobey the law and risk his career to operate on Yehia and save his life.
Category: Author in exile
    • A savage indictment of religious extremism and man's inhumanity to man, Lajja was banned in Bangladesh, but became a bestseller in the rest of the world. The Duttas--Sudhamoy and Kironmoyee, and their children, Suranjan and Maya-- have lived in Bangladesh all their lives. Despite being members of a small, vulnerable Hindu community, they refuse to leave their country, unlike most of their friends and relatives. Sudhamoy believes with a naive mix of optimism and idealism that his motherland will not let him down. And then, on 6 December 1992, the Babri Masjid is demolished. The world condemns the incident, but its immediate fallout is felt most acutely in Bangladesh, where Muslim mobs begin to seek out and attack Hindus. The nightmare inevitably arrives at the Duttas' doorstep, and their world begins to fall apart.
Category: Overthrowing the government
      • Laia is a slave. Elias is a soldier. Neither is free. Under the Martial Empire, defiance is met with death. Those who do not vow their blood and bodies to the Emperor risk the execution of their loved ones and the destruction of all they hold dear. It is in this brutal world, inspired by ancient Rome, that Laia lives with her grandparents and older brother. The family ekes out an existence in the Empire’s impoverished backstreets. They do not challenge the Empire. They’ve seen what happens to those who do. But when Laia’s brother is arrested for treason, Laia is forced to make a decision. In exchange for help from rebels who promise to rescue her brother, she will risk her life to spy for them from within the Empire’s greatest military academy. There, Laia meets Elias, the school’s finest soldier—and secretly, its most unwilling. Elias wants only to be free of the tyranny he’s being trained to enforce. He and Laia will soon realize that their destinies are intertwined—and that their choices will change the fate of the Empire itself. 
Category: Freedom from slavery
  • Throne of Glass series - Sarah J. Maas [NOTE: Some variations are suggested around reading order! This was order of publishing, but do your homework to see reading order suggestions!]
    • Series synopsis: When magic has gone from the world, and a vicious king rules from his throne of glass, an assassin comes to the castle. She does not come to kill, but to win her freedom. If she can defeat twenty-three killers, thieves, and warriors in a competition to find the greatest assassin in the land, she will become the king’s champion and earn her freedom. Her name is Celaena Sardothien – beautiful, deadly, and destined for greatness.
Category: Indigenous revolt
    • Series synopsis: In the far future, on a remote planet, an epic adventure awaits. Here are the first three novels of Frank Herbert’s magnificent Dune saga—a triumph of the imagination and one of the bestselling science fiction series of all time. The Dune Saga begins on the desert planet Arrakis with the story of the boy Paul Atreides—who would become known as Muad’Dib—and of a great family’s ambition to bring to fruition humankind’s most ancient and unattainable dream….
Category: Struggle for survival
      • I decided that Orion Lake needed to die after the second time he saved my life. Everyone loves Orion Lake. Everyone else, that is. Far as I’m concerned, he can keep his flashy combat magic to himself. I’m not joining his pack of adoring fans. I don’t need help surviving the Scholomance, even if they do. Forget the hordes of monsters and cursed artifacts, I’m probably the most dangerous thing in the place. Just give me a chance and I’ll level mountains and kill untold millions, make myself the dark queen of the world. At least, that’s what the world expects. Most of the other students in here would be delighted if Orion killed me like one more evil thing that’s crawled out of the drains. Sometimes I think they want me to turn into the evil witch they assume I am. The school certainly does. But the Scholomance isn’t getting what it wants from me. And neither is Orion Lake. I may not be anyone’s idea of the shining hero, but I’m going to make it out of this place alive, and I’m not going to slaughter thousands to do it, either. Although I’m giving serious consideration to just one.
Category: War and oppression
    • Forcibly removed from the olive-farming village of Ein Hod by the newly formed state of Israel in 1948, the Abulhejas are displaced to live in canvas tents in the Jenin refugee camp. We follow the Abulheja family as they live through a half century of dispossession. Amidst loss, fear, and pain, as their tents are replaced by more forebodingly permanent cinderblock huts, there is always the waiting to return to a lost home.
Category: Living in a dictatorship
    • Set in the Dominican Republic during the waning days of the Trujillo dictatorship of the 1960s, this extraordinary novel tells the story the Mirabal sisters—four women who opposed Trujillo, and became immortalized as Las Mariposas, “The Butterflies”.It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo’s dictatorship. It doesn’t have to. Everybody knows of Las Mariposas—“The Butterflies.” In this extraordinary novel, the voices of all four sisters—Minerva, Patria, María Teresa, and the survivor, Dedé—speak across the decades to tell their own stories, from hair ribbons and secret crushes to gunrunning and prison torture, and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo’s rule. Through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez’s imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in this novel of courage and love, and the human cost of political oppression. 
Category: Age-old conflict [I regret this title in retrospect. Let's just call it...Conflict]
    • On the eve of her daughter Alia’s wedding, Salma reads the girl’s future in a cup of coffee dregs. She sees an unsettled life for Alia and her children; she also sees travel and luck. While she chooses to keep her predictions to herself that day, they will all soon come to pass when the family is uprooted in the wake of the Six-Day War of 1967. Salma is forced to leave her home in Nablus; Alia’s brother gets pulled into a politically militarized world he can’t escape; and Alia and her gentle-spirited husband move to Kuwait City, where they reluctantly build a life with their three children. When Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait in 1990, Alia and her family once again lose their home and their land, scattering to Beirut, Paris, Boston, and beyond. Soon Alia’s children begin families of their own, once again navigating the burdens (and blessings) of assimilation in foreign cities. A remarkable work of diaspora fiction, Salt Houses is a debut novel that challenges and humanizes an age-old conflict we might think we understand.
Category: Explores colonization
    • Lilith Iyapo is in the Andes, mourning the death of her family, when war destroys Earth. Centuries later, she is resurrected — by miraculously powerful unearthly beings, the Oankali. Driven by an irresistible need to heal others, the Oankali are rescuing our dying planet by merging genetically with mankind. But Lilith and all humanity must now share the world with uncanny, unimaginably alien creatures: their own children. This is their story.
Category: Power and control
    • When Rin aced the Keju—the Empire-wide test to find the most talented youth to learn at the Academies—it was a shock to everyone: to the test officials, who couldn’t believe a war orphan from Rooster Province could pass without cheating; to Rin’s guardians, who believed they’d finally be able to marry her off and further their criminal enterprise; and to Rin herself, who realized she was finally free of the servitude and despair that had made up her daily existence. That she got into Sinegard—the most elite military school in Nikan—was even more surprising. But surprises aren’t always good. Because being a dark-skinned peasant girl from the south is not an easy thing at Sinegard. Targeted from the outset by rival classmates for her color, poverty, and gender, Rin discovers in this grimdark fantasy that she possesses a lethal, unearthly power—an aptitude for the nearly-mythical art of shamanism. Exploring the depths of her gift with the help of a seemingly insane teacher and psychoactive substances, Rin learns that gods long thought dead are very much alive—and that mastering control over those powers could mean more than just surviving school.
Category: Racism & witchcraft
    • This wild and entertaining novel expands on the true story of the West Indian slave Tituba, who was accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, arrested in 1692, and forgotten in jail until the general amnesty for witches two years later. Maryse Condé brings Tituba out of historical silence and creates for her a fictional childhood, adolescence, and old age. She turns her into what she calls "a sort of female hero, an epic heroine, like the legendary 'Nanny of the maroons, '" who, schooled in the sorcery and magical ritual of obeah, is arrested for healing members of the family that owns her.
Category: Focus on social justice
    • A timely and moving bicultural coming-of-age tale about the daughter of a Danish immigrant and a black G.I. that is now a New York Times Bestseller and already a book club favorite. A beauty with light brown skin and blue eyes, 11-year-old Rachel attracts much attention in her new home. The world wants to see her as either black or white, but that’s not how she sees herself. Meanwhile, a mystery unfolds, revealing the terrible truth about Rachel’s last morning on a Chicago rooftop. Interwoven with her voice are those of Jamie, a neighborhood boy who witnessed the events, and Laronne, a friend of Rachel’s mother. Inspired by a true story of a mother’s twisted love, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky reveals an unfathomable past and explores issues of identity at a time when many people are asking “Must race confine us and define us?”

Category: Features a civil war
    • Yalini, the daughter of Sri Lankan immigrants who left their collapsing country and married in America, finds herself caught between the history of her ancestors and her own modern world. But when she is summoned to Toronto to help care for her dying uncle, Kumaran, a former member of the militant Tamil Tigers, she is forced to see that violence is not a relic of the Sri Lankan past, but very much a part of her Western present. While Kumaran’s loved ones gather around him to say goodbye, Yalini traces her family’s roots—and the conflicts facing them as ethnic Tamils—through a series of marriages. Now, as Kumaran’s death and his daughter’s politically motivated nuptials edge closer, in the tradition of her family, Yalini too must decide where she stands. Lyrical and innovative, V. V. Ganeshananthan’s novel brilliantly unfolds how a new generation of war both forms and fractures families.
Category: Immigration rights
    • Accomplished poet Palacio seamlessly transitions to fiction in her debut novel about identity, stereotypes, and prejudice in a Phoenix suburb. Isola leaves her San Francisco home and university community to claim the house in Chandler, Ariz., she inherited after her mother's death. Long estranged, Isola is unfamiliar with her mother's life, except for a monthly postcard of a blooming ocotillo cactus that proclaimed dreams came true in Chandler. Isola is startled to find a man, Cruz, asleep in the kitchen, whom she learns he knew her mother well and was one of many undocumented immigrants her mother (as a part of her work with Rescate Angeles) had helped cross the border, learn English, and find work. Additional surprises await Isola when new visitors arrive, slowly revealing the mother she never really knew. Palacio's poet's eye reveals a vibrantly painted desert culture of fragile beauty and uncompromising harshness. 
Category: Features a daring rescue
  • Wintersong series - S. Jae-Jones [just sharing the synopsis for the first so as not to spoil!]
    • The last night of the year. Now the days of winter begin and the Goblin King rides abroad, searching for his bride. All her life, Liesl has heard tales of the beautiful, dangerous Goblin King. They’ve enraptured her mind, her spirit, and inspired her musical compositions. Now eighteen and helping to run her family’s inn, Liesl can’t help but feel that her musical dreams and childhood fantasies are slipping away. But when her own sister is taken by the Goblin King, Liesl has no choice but to journey to the Underground to save her. Drawn to the strange, captivating world she finds—and the mysterious man who rules it—she soon faces an impossible decision. And with time and the old laws working against her, Liesl must discover who she truly is before her fate is sealed. Dark, romantic, and powerful, Wintersong will sweep you away into a world you won’t soon forget.
Category: Women making history
    • Bombay, 1921: Perveen Mistry, the daughter of a respected Zoroastrian family, has just joined her father’s law firm, becoming one of the first female lawyers in India. Armed with an Oxford, legal education, Perveen also has a tragic personal history that makes her especially devoted to championing and protecting women’s legal rights. Mistry Law has been appointed to execute the will of Mr. Omar Farid, a wealthy Muslim mill owner who has left three widows behind. But as Perveen examines the paperwork, she notices something strange: all three of the wives have signed over their full inheritance to a charity. What will they live on? Perveen is suspicious, especially since one of the widows has signed her form with an X—meaning she probably couldn’t even read the document. The Farid widows live in full purdah—in strict seclusion, never leaving the women’s quarters or speaking to any men. Are they being taken advantage of by an unscrupulous guardian? Perveen tries to investigate, and realizes her instincts were correct when tensions escalate to murder. Now it is her responsibility to figure out what really happened on Malabar Hill, and to ensure that no innocent women or children are in further danger. Inspired in part by a real woman who made history by becoming India’s first female lawyer, The Widows of Malabar Hill is a richly wrought story of multicultural 1920s Bombay as well as the debut of a sharp and promising new sleuth, Perveen Mistry.
Category: Equality & civil liberty
    • Ann Drayton and Georgette George meet as freshman roommates at Barnard College in 1968. Ann, who comes from a wealthy New England family, is brilliant and idealistic. Georgette, who comes from a bleak town in upstate New York, is mystified by Ann’s romanticization of the underprivileged class, which Georgette herself is hoping college will enable her to escape. An intense and difficult friendship is born. Years after a fight ends their friendship, Ann is convicted of a violent crime. As Georgette struggles to understand what has happened, she is led back to their shared history and to an examination of the revolutionary era in which the two women came of age.
Category: Tribal power struggle
    • Every generation on the island of Fennbirn, a set of triplets is born: three queens, all equal heirs to the crown and each possessor of a coveted magic. Mirabella is a fierce elemental, able to spark hungry flames or vicious storms at the snap of her fingers. Katharine is a poisoner, one who can ingest the deadliest poisons without so much as a stomachache. Arsinoe, a naturalist, is said to have the ability to bloom the reddest rose and control the fiercest of lions. But becoming the Queen Crowned isn’t solely a matter of royal birth. Each sister has to fight for it. And it’s not just a game of win or lose…it’s life or death. The night the sisters turn sixteen, the battle begins. The last queen standing gets the crown.
Category: Climate justice
    • American Indian Youth Literature Award Winner: Best Middle Grade Book! Brian Young’s powerful debut novel tells of a seemingly ordinary Navajo boy who must save the life of a Water Monster—and comes to realize he’s a hero at heart. When Nathan goes to visit his grandma, Nali, at her mobile summer home on the Navajo reservation, he knows he’s in for a pretty uneventful summer, with no electricity or cell service. Still, he loves spending time with Nali and with his uncle Jet, though it’s clear when Jet arrives that he brings his problems with him. One night, while lost in the nearby desert, Nathan finds someone extraordinary: a Holy Being from the Navajo Creation Story—a Water Monster—in need of help. Now Nathan must summon all his courage to save his new friend. With the help of other Navajo Holy Beings, Nathan is determined to save the Water Monster, and to support Uncle Jet in healing from his own pain.
Category: About resistance
    • What fuels and sustains activism and organizing when it feels like our worlds are collapsing? Let This Radicalize You is a practical and imaginative resource for activists and organizers building power in an era of destabilization and catastrophe. Longtime organizers and movement educators Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes examine some of the political lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic, including the convergence of mass protest and mass formations of mutual aid, and consider what this confluence of power can teach us about a future that will require mass acts of care, rescue and defense, in the face of both state violence and environmental disaster. The book is an assemblage of co-authored reflections, interviews and questions that are intended to aid and empower activists and organizers as they attempt to map their own journeys through the work of justice-making. It includes insights from a spectrum of experienced organizers, including Sharon Lungo, Carlos Saavedra, Ejeris Dixon, Barbara Ransby, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore about some of the difficult and joyous lessons they have learned in their work.
Category: Abolition/liberation
    • Borders harm all of us: they must be abolished. Borders divide workers and families, fuel racial division, and reinforce global disparities. They encourage the expansion of technologies of surveillance and control, which impact migrants and citizens both. Bradley and de Noronha tell what should by now be a simple truth: borders are not only at the edges of national territory, in airports, or at border walls. Borders are everyday and everywhere; they follow people around and get between us, and disrupt our collective safety, freedom and flourishing. Against Borders is a passionate manifesto for border abolition, arguing that we must transform society and our relationships to one another, and build a world in which everyone has the freedom to move and to stay.
Category: Escaping damnation
    • Shizuka Satomi made a deal with the devil: to escape damnation, she must entice seven other violin prodigies to trade their souls for success. She has already delivered six. When Katrina Nguyen, a young transgender runaway, catches Shizuka's ear with her wild talent, Shizuka can almost feel the curse lifting. She's found her final candidate. But in a donut shop off a bustling highway in the San Gabriel Valley, Shizuka meets Lan Tran, retired starship captain, interstellar refugee, and mother of four. Shizuka doesn't have time for crushes or coffee dates, what with her very soul on the line, but Lan's kind smile and eyes like stars might just redefine a soul's worth. And maybe something as small as a warm donut is powerful enough to break a curse as vast as the California coastline. As the lives of these three women become entangled by chance and fate, a story of magic, identity, curses, and hope begins, and a family worth crossing the universe for is found.
Category: Rebellion
  • Empyrean series (continued from last bingo) - Rebecca Yarros [I'm sharing the Fourth Wing synopsis here so as to avoid spoilers]
    • Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general—also known as her tough-as-talons mother—has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders. But when you’re smaller than everyone else and your body is brittle, death is only a heartbeat away...because dragons don’t bond to “fragile” humans. They incinerate them. With fewer dragons willing to bond than cadets, most would kill Violet to better their own chances of success. The rest would kill her just for being her mother’s daughter—like Xaden Riorson, the most powerful and ruthless wingleader in the Riders Quadrant. She’ll need every edge her wits can give her just to see the next sunrise. Yet, with every day that passes, the war outside grows more deadly, the kingdom's protective wards are failing, and the death toll continues to rise. Even worse, Violet begins to suspect leadership is hiding a terrible secret. Friends, enemies, lovers. Everyone at Basgiath War College has an agenda—because once you enter, there are only two ways out: graduate or die.
Category: Explores power dynamics
      • Bryce Quinlan had the perfect life—working hard all day and partying all night—until a demon murdered her closest friends, leaving her bereft, wounded, and alone. When the accused is behind bars but the crimes start up again, Bryce finds herself at the heart of the investigation. She’ll do whatever it takes to avenge their deaths. Hunt Athalar is a notorious Fallen angel, now enslaved to the Archangels he once attempted to overthrow. His brutal skills and incredible strength have been set to one purpose—to assassinate his boss’s enemies, no questions asked. But with a demon wreaking havoc in the city, he’s offered an irresistible deal: help Bryce find the murderer, and his freedom will be within reach. As Bryce and Hunt dig deep into Crescent City’s underbelly, they discover a dark power that threatens everything and everyone they hold dear, and they find, in each other, a blazing passion—one that could set them both free, if they’d only let it.
Category: Banned in three countries
    • Since its publication in 1842, Dead Souls has been celebrated as a supremely realistic portrait of provincial Russian life and as a splendidly exaggerated tale; as a paean to the Russian spirit and as a remorseless satire of imperial Russian venality, vulgarity, and pomp. As Gogol's wily antihero, Chichikov, combs the back country wheeling and dealing for "dead souls"--deceased serfs who still represent money to anyone sharp enough to trade in them--we are introduced to a Dickensian cast of peasants, landowners, and conniving petty officials, few of whom can resist the seductive illogic of Chichikov's proposition. 
Category: Prison abolition
    • Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work from over three decades, Abolition Geography presents her singular contribution to the politics of abolition as theorist, researcher, and organizer, offering scholars and activists ways of seeing and doing to help navigate our turbulent present. Abolition Geography moves us away from explanations of mass incarceration and racist violence focused on uninterrupted histories of prejudice or the dull compulsion of neoliberal economics. Instead, Gilmore offers a geographical grasp of how contemporary racial capitalism operates through an “anti-state state” that answers crises with the organized abandonment of people and environments deemed surplus to requirement. Gilmore escapes one-dimensional conceptions of what liberation demands, who demands liberation, or what indeed is to be abolished. Drawing on the lessons of grassroots organizing and internationalist imaginaries, Abolition Geography undoes the identification of abolition with mere decarceration, and reminds us that freedom is not a mere principle but a place.
Category: Disability rights
    • According to the last census, one in five people in the United States lives with a disability. Some are visible, some are hidden--but all are underrepresented in media and popular culture. Now, just in time for the thirtieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, activist Alice Wong brings together an urgent, galvanizing collection of personal essays by contemporary disabled writers.There is Harriet McBryde Johnson's "Unspeakable Conversations," which describes her famous debate with Princeton philosopher Peter Singer over her own personhood. There is columnist s. e. smith's celebratory review of a work of theater by disabled performers. There are original pieces by up-and-coming authors like Keah Brown and Haben Girma. There are blog posts, manifestos, eulogies, and testimonies to Congress. Taken together, this anthology gives a glimpse of the vast richness and complexity of the disabled experience, highlighting the passions, talents, and everyday lives of this community. It invites readers to question their own assumptions and understandings. It celebrates and documents disability culture in the now. It looks to the future and past with hope and love.
Category: Free
    • Luke Nolan has led the Hope congregation for more than a decade, while his wife and daughters have patiently upheld what it means to live righteously. Made famous by a viral sermon on purity co-written with his eldest daughter, Abigail, Luke is the prototype of a modern preacher: tall, handsome, a spellbinding speaker. But his younger daughter Caroline has begun to notice the cracks in their comfortable life. She is certain that her perfect, pristine sister is about to marry the wrong man—and Caroline has slid into sin with a boy she’s known her entire life, wondering why God would care so much about her virginity anyway. When it comes to light, five weeks before Abigail’s wedding, that Luke has been lying to his family, the entire Nolan clan falls into a tailspin. Caroline seizes the opportunity to be alone with her sister. The two girls flee to the ranch they inherited from their maternal grandmother, far removed from the embarrassing drama of their parents and the prying eyes of the community. But with the date of Abigail’s wedding fast approaching, the sisters will have to make a hard decision about which familial bonds are worth protecting. An intimate coming-of-age story and a modern woman’s read, God Spare the Girls lays bare the rabid love of sisterhood and asks what we owe our communities, our families, and ourselves.
My Reflections on this Book Bingo

As with the other book bingos, I won't blog separately on each of these books, as it has been a little while since I read many of these, and I wouldn't want to give them short shrift. What I will do instead is share passages I liked and/or general reflections from this bingo board. I may have a bit more to say on these since this was my most recent reading adventure before my current project, 40(ish) books for my 40th year.

I'll preface this by saying that I borrowed some of these books from the library, and at least one I listened to on audiobook, so I don't have notes on every book. Please don't take this as a sign of me not liking these books!
  • Half of a Yellow Sun [side note - vehemently against Ndichie's anti-trans stance, however she claims to justify it. That said, I very much enjoyed this book, and these are just some of my many underlined bits. I learned so much in reading this book about the Nigerian Civil War (Biafran War), and about the intensity and trauma and bravery of the people who lived it.]
    • Ugwu did not believe that anybody, not even this master he was going to live with, ate meat every day.
    • 'There are two answers to the things they will teach you about our land: the real answer and the answer you give in school to pass. You must read books and learn both answers.'
    • Late at night, after Master was in bed, Ugwu would sit on the same chair and imagine himself speaking swift English, talking to rapt imaginary guests, using words like decolonize and pan-African, molding his voice after Master's, and he would shift and shift until he too was on the edge of the chair.
    • None of them thanked Maxwell. Olanna wished they would; it was such a simple thing to do, to acknowledge the humanity of the people who served them.
    • 'I knew what I wanted to run to. But it didn't exist, so I didn't leave.'
    • This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.
    • They will sell other Igbos for a tarnished penny.
    • 'We do not look for quarrels, but when your quarrel finds us, we will crush you.'
    • 'We will never run from our homeland.'
    • The war would continue without them. Olanna exhaled, filled with a frothy rage. It was the very sense of being inconsequential that pushed her from extreme fear to extreme fury. She had to matter.
    • He believed now in preciousness.
    • How will you account for this to your God?
  • The Queue - this book was trippy in a wonderful way. Painful, dark, haunting, but beautiful.
    • Yehya and Nagy wandered trhough the near-empty streets. No one knew when rush hour was anymore; there were no set working hours, no schedules or routines. Students left school at all sorts of times, daily rumors determined when employees headed home, and many people had chosen to abandon their work completely and camp out at the Gate, hoping they might be able to take care of their paperwork that had been delayed there. The new decrees and regulations spared no one.
    • People should unite and forget the Gate, they said, but they couldn't offer any convincing alternatives, so everyone in the queue - those behind the barriers and the rest - refused to give up hope. No one was ready to leave without receiving the resolution they had come for.
    • What friends did she have here in times of need, with this mouth of hers that would only get her into more trouble? 
  • Lajja - it is WILD to me that the author has been banned from returning to Bangladesh for 20 years for writing this book and others. Lajja is still banned in Bangladesh. As with Half of a Yellow Sun, I learned a great deal about Bangladeshi history, at least around the 1990s. This book was a harrowing read, and an incredible one. These are just a few of my underlined bits.
    • Why did he need to seek refuge in Kemal's house? 
    • Why did he need to flee his own home while Kemal did not? 
    • Why could he not claim that he was a child of this land and that no harm should come to him? 
    • Could the events of 1990 be called riots? Riots mean fights - a conlfict between one community and another is called a riot. But we could not call these riots - these were attacks by one community on another. Torture. Persecution.
    • At that moment, Sudhamoy felt certain that it was not safe to use his Hindu name.
    • Where could Sudhamoy go, away from home and hearth?
    • The house felt heavy, almost stupefied, like it was waiting for an imminent death.
    • Was he in hiding? Why was it that he felt like a refugee in his own home and land?
    • 'Why are you outside?' he asked anxiously. 'Am I not allowed outside?' Suronjon shot back.
    • Where were the missing Hindus?
    • Who was her neighbor? Whom could she possibly call?
    • Sudhamoy was keen to find out exactly how many Hindus in Bangladesh would have to die so that they could conclusively say that they had atoned for the wrong-doings of all the militant Hindus of India - those of the past, present and future. If he had a definite answer, he would gladly kill himself. He would also ask many others to kill themselves. He would do it if it helped the Hindus who remained.
    • 'So, why do you remain here?' 'Because this is my country.'
    • 'What will we do with roots? If roots were worth anything then why do we have to sit with our doors and windows shut tight?'
    • He felt like an alien in his own country.
  • An Ember in the Ashes series - I very much enjoyed this series!
    • 'I have hunted stories before and speared them. This one will be no different.' 
    • 'You say it like it's a living thing, Mamie.' 
    • 'It's Kehanni magic, child. A Kehanni can sense a story. Feel out its contours, its breath. I do not just speak a story. I sing it, I become it. That is what it means to be a Kehanni. All of us trained to tell stories have a bit of magic in our bones.'
  • Throne of Glass series
    • I have mentioned this elsewhere in this blog, but just to reiterate - while I recognize that Sarah J. Maas has had some problematic moments and I do not condone them, I am, nonetheless, a fan of her fiction. This series might be my favorite of the three I've read so far, although I really enjoyed Crescent City also. Celaena is one of my all-time favorite protagonists. (Though interestingly, I've heard she is VERY polarizing! I guess I'm on the 'like' side of that coin. ;))
  • Dune series - I read the first book in the series, Dune, as part of the original "Conquering the Classics'. You can read my blog on that book here. I have to say that after reading the rest of the series, perhaps for the first time ever, I'm like... maybe just read the first one? Ok, no, definitely think about reading them if you want to, the world building is next level, and one of my favorite fictional spaces. That said, Dune loomed so large in my memory from my first reading and I also think it just kind of sits on a different level than the rest of the books. Herbert is definitely a magician and a seer, and he thinks of so many things so far before his time! He literally talks about the abomination of AI and he wrote that 45 years ago. Wild! Here are some of my favorite lines from across the series.
    • from the intro to 'Children of Dune', of Herbert as he thought of Muad'Dib/Paul - He believed that charismatic leaders could be dangerous because they could lead their followers off the edge of a cliff. sound familiar? (cryface emoji)
    • 'Can you collect chaos?' the ghola asked.
    • What mattered a single moon in such a universe?
    • 'You think yourself educated, but all you are is a repository of dead lives. You don't yet have a life of your own.
    • 'Duncan, Duncan, it is absolute prediction which equals death to me. How unutterably boring death is.'
    • 'This is their weakness, Duncan. Radicals always see matters in terms which are too simple - black and white, good and evil, them and us. By addressing complex matters in that way, they rip open a passage for chaos. The art of government as you call it, is the mastery of chaos.'
    • 'It would not offend me to be your friend,' she said. Such a curious way of putting it. He had felt vaguely embarrassed. 'Yes...well, certainly.'
    • 'That painting says you cannot suppress the wild thing, the uniqueness that will occur among humans no matter how much we try to avoid it.'
  • The Scholomance trilogy - this series was a delight to devour. My siblings and I all read it and enjoyed it immensely. Wonderful world-building, great characters, such a fun and thought-provoking read.
    • Words can't describe how much I hate crochet. I'd gladly do a thousand push-ups over a single line. I forced myself to learn because it's a classic mana-building option for school: all you need to bring is one tiny lightweight hook...But I'm horrible at it. I forget where I am in the pattern, how many stitches I've done, which kind of stitch I'm on, what I'm trying to make, why I haven't stabbed out my own eyes with the hook yet. I loled so hard at this line. I feel the same way about crochet, though I love knitting! The whole concept of mana-building is so cool!
    • Aadyha silently went and dug a leftover half of a granola bar out of a small warded stash box on her desk. Liu tried to refuse it, but Aad said, 'Oh my God, eat the freaking granola bar', and then Liu's face crumpled and she got up and put her arms out towards us. It took me a few moments longer than Aadhya - three years of near-total social ostracization leaves you badly equipped for this sort of thing - but they both kept a space open until I lurched in to join the hug, our arms around each other, and it was the miracle all over again, the miracle I still couldn't quite believe in: I wasn't alone anymore. They were saving me, and I was going to save them. It felt more like magic than magic. I love this line. 
  • Mornings in Jenin - for fairly obvious reasons I wanted to learn more about Palestinian history and experiences, so I added this book and Salt Houses to the list, and both were incredible and illuminating. I want to point out, as you read the quotes below, that this book was written in 2010. Sixteen years ago.
    • They repulsed attacks and called for a truce, wanting only to live on their land as they always had. For they had endured many masters - Romans, Byzantines, Crusaders, Ottomans, British - and nationalism was inconsequential. Attachment to God, land, and family was the core of their being and that is what they defended and sought to keep.
    • Hasan somberly wrote the names of his fallen friends and countrymen on the sleeve of his dishdashe as he hollowed the earth in such shock that he was unable to grieve.
    • The land was as beautiful and as peaceful as it had always been.
    • In the sorrow of a history buried alive, the year 1948 in Palestine fell from the calendar into exile, ceasing to reckon the marching count of days, months, and years, instead becoming an infnite mist of one moment in history.
    • Defeated by the quiet nag of his hands wanting things to do.
    • For days he had roamed his fields, greeting his carob and fig trees with the excitment of a man reuinting with his family.
    • 'Those people don't know a damn thing about olives.'
    • How was it that a man could not walk onto his own property, visit the grave of his wife, eat the fruits of forty generations of his ancestors' toil, without mortal consequence?
    • We had meager possessions and scarce necessities. I never knew a playground nor swam in the ocean, but my childhood was magical, enchanted by poetry and the dawn.
    • 'No one can own a tree', he continued. 'It can belong to you, as you can belong to it. We come from the land, give our love and labor to her, and she nurtures us in return. When we die, we return to the land. In a way, she owns us. Palestine owns us and we belong to her.
    • Bethlehem looked just like Jenin, crumbled, torched, and strewn with death.
    • No one spoke much, as if to speak was to affirm reality. To remain silent was to accommodate the possibility that it was all merely a nightmare.
    • I had no dreams save the wish to be loved and free, as I had been during the dawns with my father.
    • 'I have tried to use my mind and my heart to keep our people linked to history, so we do not become amnesiac creatures living arbitrarily at the whim of injustice.'
    • Nothing could be counted on to endure, neither parents nor siblings nor home.
    • The soldiers in my life had raised the bar for bad guys.
    • 'Amal, I believe that most Americans do not love as we do. It is not for any inherent deficiency or superiority in them. They live in the safe, shallow parts that rarely push human emotions into the depths where we dwell...Consider fear. For us, fear comes where terror comes to others because we are anesthetized to the guns constantly pointed at us. And the terror we have known is something few Westerners ever will. Israeli occupation exposes us very young to the extremes of our own emotions, until we cannot feel except in the extreme.'
    • Our anger is a rage that Westerners cannot understand. Our sadness can make the stones weep.
    • I no longer possess myself. I drown in a sorrow you cannot fathom, and a rage you cannot imagine presses upon my heart.
    • Only the latter occurred because of the former, underscoring for me the inescapable truth that Palestinians paid the price for the Jewish holocaust. Jews killed my mother's family because Germans had killed Jolanta's.
    • 'The world cannot possibly let this go on,' I said to Huda. 'The world?' Huda asked sarcastically, rhetorically, and uncharacteristically, deeply bitter. 'Since when does 'the world' give a goddamn about us?'
    • How does one live in a world that turns away from such injustice for so long? Is this what it means to be Palestinian, Mother?
  • In the Time of the Butterflies - as with several of the other books on this list, I learned a TON about the history of the Dominican Republic, particularly under Trujillo's dictatorship. Don't worry, for each book, the characters and storyline drove me to read up and research the historical events, I'm not just relying on fiction to define my cultural awareness. :) 
    • Perhaps this is the only way to grieve the big things - in snippets, pinches, little sips of sadness. 
    • Any Dominican of a certain generation would have jumped at that gunshot sound.
    • We could talk freely in the car, since there was no one to overhear us.
    • 'They weren't in their own country so they didn't have to answer to anyone.'
    • She decided not to read the papers anymore. They were turning her upside down inside.
    • I'm a bundle of nerves. I never was any good at being brave all by myself.
    • My sisters were so different! They built their homes on sand and called the slip and slide adventure.
    • Our mission was to effect an internal revolution rather than wait for an outside rescue.
    • Whether she joined their underground or not, her fate was bound up with the fates of her sisters.
    • Never believe them. Never fear them. Never ask them anything.
    • from the Postscript - A novel is not, after all, a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart.
  • Salt Houses - As I mention above, I chose this book and Mornings in Jenin to learn more about Palestinian history and the experiences of Palestinians, not as a monolith, but as fictional renderings timed to historical realities.
    • They stood on the veranda while the children slept, watching the fire streak across their land, listening to the muffled shouts. The smell of burned oranges rose to them, scorched and sweet. 
    • on coffee-reading: 'We are blessed to have this gift of seeing. Allah willed it and we must not misuse it,' her mother would tell Salma. And Salma felt that duty profoundly, the connection that it carved ancestrally with her mother and a great-aunt and others who'd died before Salma lived. She felt, whever handed a hollow, still-warm cup, that she was being entrusted with something profound. Cosmic. 
    • The youth drawn to glitter, the elders to bitterness.
    • Every day he woke feeling like he might surge, like he wore his skin too tightly.
    • This is what Alia thought as she stood in front of the bathroom door: Mustafa, dead. Every incarnation of him, young and old, had to be folded away.
    • Nostalgia is an affliction, Someone said that once in front of Alia, and the words reach her now, years later. Like a fever or a cancer, the longing for hwat had vanished wasting a person away.
    • That house. The ones that came after. He thinks of them, instinctively touching the soil again. All the houses they have lived in, the ibriks and rugs and curtains they have bought; how many windows should any person own? The houses float up to his mind's eye like jinn, past lovers. The sloping roof of his mother's hut, the marbled tiles in Salma's kitchen, the small house he shared with Alia in Nablus. The Kuwait home. The Beirut apartments. This house, here in Amman. For Alia, some old, vanished house in Jaffa. They glitter whitely in his mind, like structures made of salt, before a tidal wave comes and sweeps them away.
  • Lilith's Brood trilogy - this series was fascinating, and a really provocative read. 
    • There was no real comfort in being alone with her thoughts, her memories, but somehow the illusion of freedom lessened her despair.
    • She had not realized until she actually began looking how important it was for her to find someone.
    • 'You are horror and beauty in rare combination. In a very real way, you've captured us, and we can't escape.'
    • If you knew a man was out of his mind, you restrained him. You didn't give him power.
    • 'All people who know what it is to end should be allowed to continue if they can continue.'
    • 'When can you be yourself?'
    • 'Give yourself time. You're a new kind of being. There's never been anyone like you before. But there's no flaw in you. You just need time to find out more about yourself.'
  • The Poppy War series - I enjoyed the world building of this series, but overall got weighed down with the (imo) oppressive darkness of it.
    • 'Why do people dream what they dream?' 'Why indeed?'
    • 'Eventually you learn to exist on the precipice of insanity.'
  • I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem - this was in incredible read. Should be a partner read for anyone reading The Crucible or studying the Salem witch trials. Beautifully rendered and imagined.
    • Condé speaking about writing: Writing is like going on a journey to find something one dreams of. It is like crossing a mangrove with its entangled roots, its pools of briny water and its many layers of mud to reach the sea. It is like mapping a dark and rebellious land.
    • from the foreword: Tituba looked for her story in the history of the Salem witch trials and could not find it.
    • from the foreword: Tituba's revenge consists in reminding us that all the doors to our suppressed cultural histories are still ajar. If we are courageous enough to peer through the narrow openings, we will discover our fears, our rage, our hopes, and our roots.
    • I discovered the sad, yet wonderful universe around me? 
    • What is a witch?
    • There is no happiness in motherhood for a slave.
    • The Indians? I was less frightened of those 'savages' than I was of the civilized beings I lived with who hanged old women from trees.
    • And yet they needed me to season the insipid gruel of their lives.
    • We did not belong to the same universe, Goodwife Parris, Betsey, and I, and all the affection in the word could not change that.
    • Something inside me was slowly but surely coming undone.
    • Now, in the twinkling of an eye, all that had been forgotten and I had become the enemy. Perhaps, in fact, I had never ceased to be one.
    • Few people have the misfortune to be born twice.
    • Too late! Too late! The truth always arrives too late because it walks slower than lies. Truth crawls at a snail's pace.
    • Love Marriage - this book was wonderful. I learned a ton about Sri Lankan history (from research I did as I was reading, as well as from understanding the experiences of the characters) and I also loved the lyricism of it.
      • You cannot go unfettered into a family's history if you are one of them.
      • [In the town of Jaffna] they never forget birthdays, favorite curries, or unkindnesses.
      • They have built a wall around their two-ness, and each brick laid in place is a secret that only they share, or perhaps an exception one has made for the other.
      • As a Hindu, he will not be buried in a coffin. Someday, fire will find his body.
      • She forgot that she did not like her teeth and bared them at him. I love this line.
      • And there on the screen, my father saw everything he had once believed in, burning. Halfway around the world, in the country he had loved first and best, people were being killed for their Tamilness.
      • Our lives are not clean. They begin without fanfare and end without warning. What an incredible line.
      • But even now, she still thinks in Tamil.
      • I told you a story that no one should have to know. Write it down, write it down.
      • Sri Lankan Tamils are not a violent people; they are a people who have had violence imposed upon them.
      • Once upon a time in Ariyalai, everyone was related closely enough to be kin, but distantly enough to be lovers.
      • Hold my madness for me please.
      • My mother would only allow me to borrow as many books as I could carry.
      • When I misbehaved, my mother would punish me by forbidding me to read.
      • Sometimes when I dream, I dream in Tamil. But when I wake up I never remember the words. It is like remembering a fever, or a blessing.
      • Wintersong series
        • I trailed regrets and reproach in my wake, my moods as mercurial as quicksilver.
        • I vacillated between rage and despondency, furious I couldn't force happiness on myself.
        • For all that I could not bear my own silence, I wanted the voices of the world around me to disappear. Solitude was different from loneliness, and it was solitude I was seeking.
        • The dark was oppressive in those parts, the sort of dense black that had depth and weight, familiar to those of us who had grown up in the wild.
      • The Widows of Malabar Hill - I listened to this as an audiobook, so I don't have a copy to flip through. That said, I found it very interesting! Darker than I expected, I think, but I learned a ton about Zoroastrianism and some particular bits of Indian history. 
        • The Last of Her Kind - this gave me interesting insight into a generation I don't know enough about.
          • During the Great Depression, hoboes used to draw pictures of cats on sidewalks and fence posts outside certain houses to let other hoboes know: Kind lady lives here. 
          • After Woodstock, there would be such a swell of destitute vagabond youth that it created a kind of national emergency, and official and unofficial charities organized to cope with it.
          • The truth was that at the same time young Ann was learning about all the evil that existed in the world, she was also learning that she herself was the cause of it. She was learning that all the wonderful advnatages and good things she enjoyed in life were hers only through the exploitation of others less fortunate.
          • (I wonder: if we knew how much was going to be lost, would we pay more or less attention to our lives?)
        • Three Dark Crowns series - Complex feelings on this one. I really enjoyed the series as I was reading it, but I ultimately really hated the way things turned out, which kind of soured the whole series for me. 
          • Healer of the Water Monster - this book was an absolute joy to read, I highly recommend it as an addition to anyone's library! I chose it because I want to continue to experience Navajo/Diné culture to inform a character in my own book series.
            • 'Look at all the sǫ,' Nathan. 'Sǫ', means 'star.' She pointed up with her lips. 'Níníł'į́, in the Navajo way, each and every sǫ has a story behind it.'
            • As Navajo, we live in two worlds, and those two worlds have different ways of healing.
            • 'Would you be so kind as to spread the moon sand and stardust?'
          • Let This Radicalize You - this book was invigorating. I have so much more underlined than I'll share here, but I highly encourage folks to read it.
            • When we consider the origin of the word 'radical' in relation to 'roots', let's not forget what roots do: they make life possible. 'Radical', in its historical definition, is synonymous with 'vital' - 'designating the humour or moisture once thought to be present in all living organisms as a necessary condition of their vitality. I think that in a world facing ever more-urgent existential threats, growing more radical - going deeper politically, becoming more courageous in both our dreams and our daily practices - will indeed be a necessary condition for life on earth.
            • How do we hope without a map?
            • quoting Krista Franklin: 'If You find Your imagination cannot stop itself from churning out  the scripts of the Death Machines, pull its plug. Dismantle it. Reprogram it. Dream Daylight. Manufacture Daylight. We are the Magicians. Make Magic.'
            • Organizing is the work of dream new worlds into being.
            • To understand the past, we must investigate the stories we were not told, because those stories were withheld for a reason.
            • Storytelling is a fight for the future. That fight is inescapable in a world on fire. The only questions are how the fight and the fire will shape us, and how we will shape the fight and the fire.
            • Possibility is the hope we wear when we charge into battle.
            • Life will be a scramble, but we will not scramble alone.
            • Our imaginations must be contagious.
            • We urge organizer to spend more time with books and other modes of learning, not as an admonition (after all, you are reading right now) but to encourage you to claim an inheritance of knowledge your oppressors hope you never discover, embrace, or build from.
            • quoting Audre Lorde, battling cancer: 'I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I'll be sending messages on a ouija board, cryptic complaints from the other side. When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less important whether or not I am unafraid.
            • Active Hope is a practice.
            • How much discomfort is the whole world worth?
            • I have hope that you will rebel against the continued normalization of mass death, human suffering, and annihilation. I have hope that you will choose to keep feeling the things that are hard to feel, even as people around you may surrender their values.
            • The work before us is the work of our ancestors and the work of those who will come after: to relentlessly build new worlds, even on the edge of oblivion, and live in them anyway - together. That work, which sounds epic in scope and scale, begins with human connection, human relationships, and reciprocity in struggle. It begins with care.
            • You are not needed everywhere, but we are all needed somewhere. It's important to find your somewhere and plant yourself there.
            • For me, hope is not a metaphor; it's a lived practice. It isn't a thing I possess. Rather, I have to remake it daily. I don't have hope, I do hope. 
            • Even if the end times are upon us, we should still plant trees.
          • Against Borders: The Case for Abolition - this book and 'Abolition Geography' were both fascinating in that they invited me to explore radically different versions of our world in a wonderful way. Thanks very much to the Making Worlds bookstore in West Philly for putting these books into my hands.
            • quoting Mariame Kaba - 'To live by hope is to believe that it is worth taking the next step.' Hope is not the same as optimism, but rather defined by 'a worldly attentiveness to what is emerging in the conditions of the present as they are carried into the future.' We offer this book as an example of such hope. We invite you to consider what borders actually do in the world, and to entertain, however briefly, the possibility that communities across the world can relate to one another without recourse to immigration controls.
            • Freedom from racism means the freedom to move unchained - emancipation being inseparable from the right to locomotion.
            • What about the families we choose? Our friends and comrades our kith as well as our kin? Immigration controls would fall apart if there were such a thing as a friendship visa, which tells us something important about what is to be gained by valuing a wider range of intimacies. I love this idea so much.
            • Crucially, the fight for border abolition, like that for prison abolition, needs to be both practical and utopian: committed to radical action now while also to orienting ourselves to longer time-frames.
            • Citizens are not equal, and they are not protected by the state. Our aim, therefore, should not be to include more people in the citizenry, but to struggle against connected forms of organised violence that affect both citizens and non-citizens: borders, police, prisons, the military and surveillance.
            • Border abolition should not reinvest in the magical powers of citizenship, but seek instead to explode its core tenets.
            • Stuart Hall described identity as less a fixed state of being than a kind of story we tell ourselves so that we can sleep at night.
          • Light from Uncommon Stars - this book was a bit wacky and off the wall, but I ultimately enjoyed it! I listened to it on audiobook, which maybe did it a disservice, because I tend not to like books I've listened to as much as ones I've held in my fingers. Super cool characters, though, great humor, love the trans protagonist, and the classical music through line was very fun for me as a classically trained cellist.
            • Empyrean series (continued from last bingo) - As with below, I don't have particular passages underlined in my copies, but I did enjoy Iron Flame and Onyx Storm. Since I am not a monster like many of the crazed fans on the interwebs seem to be, I will wait patiently (and perhaps forever, if necessary!) to see if the storyline continues. Ms. Yarros, please rest, heal, relax, and take your time.
              • Crescent City series - I don't have specific underlinings from my copies of these books, but I very much enjoyed this series. I occasionally struggled with the complexity of the world building, and sometimes I hated Bryce, and I did NOT like the pseudo-villainization of the ACOTAR characters in the crossover bit (sorry, SPOILER) but on the whole I very much liked them.
                • Dead Souls - I loved reading this book. My copy has notes scribbled all over it and "lol" and "hagh" on many pages, so the snippets below are just a few I selected for you. Conceptually, it's fantastic - Chichikov is trying to gain 'dead souls', as in deceased serfs, to add to his nobility claim so that he can rise in society.
                  • His arrival created no stir whatever in the town, and was not accompanied by anything out of the ordinary.
                  • Somehow the new arrival was never at a loss for anything, and he came across as an experienced man of the world.
                  • Every man has his mania.
                  • 'But whatever do you need them for?' said the old woman, looking at him wide-eyed. 'That's really my business.' 'But after all, they're dead.'
                  • That is not what is cause for wonder in this world: in an instant joy can turn into sadness, if only you linger too long before it, and the nGod only konws what will pop into your head.
                  • But back to the road! Back to the road! Away with the wrinkle that has beamed the brow, and the stern gloom of countenance! Let us take a sudden, headlong plunge into life, with all its noiseless chatter and tinkling bells, and have a look at what Chichikov is doing.
                  • Is it not possible that others have taken possession of your heart?
                  • What was the meaning, really, what was the meaning of these dead souls?
                  • It is very doubtful that the hero chosen by us will prove pleasing to readers. lol
                  • The reader couldn't care less whether Chichikov will get angry with him or not, but as for the author, he must under no circumstances quarrel with his hero: not short is the road they must still travel ogether, arm in arm. HAGAHGahgahghg.
                  • How can I train them to be orderly when I myself am disorderly?
                  • 'But Your Highness, which one of us is as good as he should be?'
                • Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation - First, I would like to state that I did not know that abolition in this context means prison abolition. That said, I learned quite a bit in reading it, and very much enjoyed learning about the concept and the activism behind it.
                  • Ruth Gilmore, quoting herself: 'Unshackle ourselves because nobody will do it for us.'
                  • We are not afraid, and to tell you the truth, we weren't as afraid as you thought we were.
                  • This is the culture we live in because we lost the revolution.
                  • How to ask and answer questions and hear the world in our asking and answering is the task before us.
                  • In the year 1970 an advisor to then-governor Ronald Reagan told his boss the expansion of public postsecondary education was a problem because ' an educated proletariat is dynamite.'
                  • The stakes are the control of epistemology: Who teaches? What is taught? Who learns?
                  • Herein lies the ground work for a more secure fascism. Just for the record, she said this in 1993.
                  • on studying geography as a scholar: Not 'Where is Nebraska?' but 'Why is Nebraska?'
                  • The rise of prisons in the United States is a potentially prime factor in future 'global circulation models' because prison-building is state-building at its least contested, and the United States is a prime exporter of ideologies and systems.
                  • Killing somebody has always been on the American agenda.
                  • The rise of the cage as a large-scale, all-purpose solution to problems is a relatively recent phenomenon in world history.
                  • The statistical inversion, by race, of those arrested (70 percent white) to those put in cages (70 percent persons of color) quantitatively indicates that the system punishes different kinds of people differently.
                  • Many activitists in Critical Resistance warn us not to think of the prison system as broken. Rather, they insist, we should imagine it is working and thank about what that means.
                  • It is not clear that the growth of the prison system will reach some natural plateau. If the state seems to require more enemies, who will be next? 
                  • We have already seen that innocence is not secure, and it's a mystery why it ever seemed reliable.
                • Disability Visibility - Note: I unintentionally read an adapted version of this for young adults. Not necessarily an issue, but as I am not a young adult anymore, I'd be curious to read the unadapted version. 
                  • quoting Harriet McBryde Johnson - 'Storytelling itself is an activity, not an object. Stories are the closest we can come to a shared experience...Like all stories, they are most fundamentally a chance to ride around inside another head and be reminded that being who we are and where we are, and doing what we're doing, is not the only possibility.'
                  • Each person has a story; it's up to you to discover yours and tell it if you want.
                  • We are all more than our bodies, more than the placement of and relationship between our facial features.
                  • quoting Sandy Ho - 'Taking up space as a disabled person is always revolutionary.'
                  • Anyone can become disabled at any time.
                  • My ancestors are disabled people who lived looking out of institution windows, wanting so much more for themselves.
                • God Spare the Girls - I think I borrowed this from the library, and a friend had recommended it because she likes some of the author's other works. It was interesting fodder for a bestie convo, but I don't know that I have much more to say than that. 

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