Books I Liked

Book: Sugar Town Queens Author: Malla Nunn Listened to on audiobook read by Bahni Turpin     I didn't know what "sugar town" meant when I started reading Sugar Town Queens. Which was a little silly, because I'd just been to a sugar town. But somehow I didn't put two and two together. In the book, Sugar Town is a shanty town outside (if I recall correctly) Cape Town in South Africa. It is eventually explained that it's named that because the town borders the sugarcane fields, and is where much of the sugar refinement and processing occurs. That's when it finally clicked for me.  Sugar cane fields as they should be viewed: in the morning sunlight through a dirty windshield.      I'd recently been to a sugar town in Mexico (Mahuixtlán), and although that sugar town was much less destitute, the concept of one-stop sugarcane harvesting and processing held true. Approaching Mahuixtlán, I'd seen the sugarcane crops being harvested in a field, then loaded...

 Turtles All the Way Down, spirals all the way out  Book: Turtles all the Way Down; Author: John Green; Listened to on audiobook Finished January 2023 Like all the books on this blog, I liked it... but this one I liked just  ok . This is a YA book, but I don't think I would have made it through the book at that age. The protagonist has compulsive thoughts that spiral out of control  —  with the main worry being an irrational fear of acquiring a C. diff infection, but also a more existential compulsive worry that she  as doesn't really exist in a sense. Part of this later fear comes from her lack of ability to control her own thoughts (so she has little confidence in her abilities of self-agency), and part comes from the factoid that non-human cells (like bacteria) outnumber human cells in the human body. So there's a lot to read through along the lines of "am I even me if I'm mostly made up of microbes?" When I was younger I likely wouldn't have had the pa...

Dear Martin: Reflections on MLK Day Book: Dear Martin Author: Nic Stone; published in 2017; listened to on audiobook (read by Dion Graham) Of the books I've read focussing on racial injustice and prejudice, Dear Martin has been my favorite, so I decided I'd do a quick write-up for MLK day. I finished the book Oct 17th of 2022 (about three months ago from the time of this writing), and finished the sequel, Dear Justyce, on Nov 15th.  The premise of Dear Martin is that the protagonist, a black high school student named Justyce, starts a diary of sorts to help him process his experiences as a young black man. The book's title comes from Justyce's approach of journaling as if he were writing to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Time and again, he asks what Martin would do in his situation. How to balance anger and compassion? How to respond to offenses, small and large? Superficially this book has a lot in common with The Hate U Give (by Angie Thomas). Both books focus on black h...