TIL about the author Richard Flanagan. This excerpt from his new book, 'Question 7', is compelling and a bit horrifying. While reading, I found myself making sure I could breath.The book is out in the UK and coming to the US in September.
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin audiobook review – from the civil rights frontline
Law & Order’s Jesse L Martin narrates two powerful essays examining the Black experience in the US, the first in a series marking the author’s centenary year
#books#comicbooks#comicbookseries#booksodon#booksofmastodon#blackfriday #blackmastodon#blackfediverse
These comicstrips are too funny,had this book for some time,needed a laugh or two today.Huey and Riley,their grandfather, and crazy ass Uncle Ruckus to damn funny
The series was created by Arron McGruder
Here's the first big book of The Boondocks,more than four years and 800 strips of one of the most influential, controversial,and scathingly funny comics ever to run in a daily newspaper
The Church in a Secular Age series of books is just. So. Good! The historical narrative Andrew Root expertly describes of 20th and 21st century America and how mass consumer culture, mass media, and Protestant Christianity contributed to and adapted to each other to create the hell we live in today is just 🤯.
It's also up on 3 out of 5 ebook vendors. I'll add the universal link to my site once the other 2 are finished lagging. As always, there is a discount for buying direct. 😀
Just finished 'Not Without Flowers' by Amma Darko. It is definitely very readable. Some of the dialogue feels clunky, but only some. It feels like it doesn't quite have a moral vision though it is reaching for one. It reminds me of Soyinka, though with less big grammar and without Soyinka's metaphysical and political vision. ( This could just be me lumping West African writers together, because you know that old racism thing).
Darko gets extra points for not taking time to explain her Ghanian cultural references. I suspect other authors from the region get pressured into it by editors and publishers. It really grinds my gears when the narrator explains things that may be unfamiliar to an English reader like me. You are not writing ethnographic studies for tourists. You are writing, in this case, a Ghanaian novel. So I appreciated her consistency there.
It is also sad and scary. It is a cast of sad broken people. In Soyinka's hands they would have looked for redemption and failed to find it without extinguishing hope. In Darko's, I think, that they somehow find absolution or punishment. The ending feels weak. Having said that the build up towards the ending is magnificent. The various characters story arcs come together in a well worked crisis. It is the crisis itself that I'm unsure about.
Her plotting and pacing is great. The story telling pleasantly demanding. It was a Sunday well spent.
I just finished "Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't Rhyme and Other Oddities of the English Language" and I can heartily recommend it for folks who, like me, are fascinated by language and how it changes over time. [Also why English words are such a bitch to spell (turns out you really can blame the French!).]
And I'd be remiss if I didn't also mention how amazing "Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language" is in the same vein.
I just finished Witch King by @marthawells and really enjoyed it!
A refreshingly new take on fantasy and magic which centers queer characters with complex lives, experiences, and motivations. It's a plot-driven story arc but the characters and dialog elevate the journey -- these are no cookie-cutter relationships!
Heartily recommend this book for queer SFF readers. 🦄❤️