Books I’m Reading This Fall

As I’ve previously mentioned, I’m nearly always in the process of reading several books at once — or rather, I’ll get distracted by a new book before I’ve finished the one I’m currently reading, so it will sit on the figurative back burner for a while (on the shelf or in my bag, depending on how much I really want to read it) until I get back to it. In the past few months, I’ve received a handful of new books, and I’ve been steadily working my way through them — books about everything from fine dining to the prison industrial complex, Haiti to hot sauce, Le Cordon Bleu to why being trans is awesome . 

The New Jim Crow: The #1 Book I Recommend

Go buy Michelle Alexander‘s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Or check it out from the library, or borrow it from a friend — I don’t really care how you obtain it, but you absolutely should read it. I know I recommend a lot of books, but of all the books I own — of all the books I’ve ever read — if I could only suggest one book, it would be The New Jim Crow. 

My Reading Lists: What I Want To Read

I’ve never been very good about reading one book at a time. There are so many books, and there’s so little time — I’m nearly always in the middle of several books at a time. I’ve recently finished Queer (In)Justice (written by Joey Mogul, Andrea Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock), which I’d strongly recommend to everyone, and I just started Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness yesterday (I can already tell it’s going to be excellent). I’m also in the middle of The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, which I’ve been working my way through it for a while now. 

GenderQueer: Voices From Beyond the Sexual Binary

GenderQueer: Voices From Beyond the Sexual Binary

(Edited by Joan Nestle, Clare Howell, and Riki Wilchins)

I refer to this book, and the collection of essays in the front by Riki Wilchins, constantly. It’s a wonderful anthology, and it shows — in real people’s voices, not just academic theory — that there’s so much more to gender than merely “man” and “woman.” It’s one of the first trans-related books I ever read; I bought it, Wilchins’ Queer Theory, Gender Theory, and Leslie Feinberg’s Trans Liberation at the 2009 MN Trans Health and Wellness Conference.

Perhaps one of my favorite quotes about gender is in Wilchins’ essay “A Continuous Nonverbal Communication:” “In fact, throughout our entire waking lives we are carrying out a continuous nonverbal dialogue with the world, saying, ‘This is who I am, this is how I feel about myself, this is how I want you to see me‘” (12). To me, that statement sums up why it is so important to allow people to identify and express their gender as they will — to do otherwise would be to render them invisible and deny who they are.

Girls Will Be Boys Will Be Girls

Just after posting about that massive children’s book fail, I now have found a complete children’s book win! Okay, so, Girls Will Be Boys Will Be Girls is actually a coloring book. And I really want it. The Amazon product review calls it “a comic deconstruction of traditional gender roles.” How awesome is that? 

Children’s Books Teaching Homophobia and Transphobia

Are you serious? I just came back from a vigil in memory of the 9 teens who killed themselves last month because of anti-gay bullying. And then I discovered this link about the book Chased by an Elephant, the Gospel Truth about Today’s Stampeding Sexuality, by Janice Barrett Graham, which is apparently intended to “help shed the clear light of truth on today’s dark and tangled ideas about male and female, proper gender roles, the law of chastity, and the God-given sexual appetite.” The book “champions ex-gay therapy and curing people of their homosexuality.”

Dean Spade Wrote a Book!

Dean Spade has a book coming out! I’m so excited! !!!!!

Okay, now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, I’ll continue in a more sedate manner.

What We Want, Not What We Can Win

I’m currently reading a book by The CR10 Publications Collective (CR10 referring to Critical Resistance‘s 10th anniversary of its first conference in 1998); it’s called Abolition Now!: Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle Against the Prison Industrial Complex, and it’s really fascinating reading. I haven’t added it to my book recommendation list yet because I haven’t actually finished it, but it’s been really great so far.

Rachel Herzing, the CR10 Project Director at Critical Resistance, is quoted as saying

Prison industrial complex abolition is dreaming wildly and having that be okay. It’s genuinely asking for want we want, rather than what we think we can win [emphasis added]. Why should I not want to be completely liberated and have my people around me and feel healthy and stable and be able to engage with people, to be able to hold people accountable? (11)