Tag: Education

Books

Book 977: Don’t Think of an Elephant! – George Lakoff

Geoff W

Book cover of "Don't Think of an Elephant!" with Amazon Affiliate linkI had to read this for a communications course earlier this fall and when I read it I blazed through it very quickly and knew I wanted to revisit it as soon as the semester was done. So I left it as “reading” in my Goodreads for over a month and finally got around to re-reading it and genuinely absorbing it.

I’m glad I re-read it, some of it was pretty obvious and some of it clearly explained things like why “climate change” is the predominant word of choice instead of “global warming.” My professor said that many of his students said they can’t watch the news anymore after reading this, and while I can still watch it I’m much more aware of the framing and terminology newscasters/journalists use than before.

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Books

Book 861: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? – Jeanette Winterson

Geoff W

Book cover of "Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?" with Amazon Affiliate linkI picked this book up way back in November 2014 because I’d been hearing great things about it and remembered enjoying Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit in undergrad (and still languishing on my TBR shelf).

I only read this at this moment in time because a few months ago I created a spreadsheet of all the books on my TBR shelf that were under 250 pages that randomly spits out a book title so when I had a bit of a gap or wanted to actually make progress on my shelves I had an easy tool to select a book.

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ARC, Books

Book 761: Mediocre – Ijeoma Oluo

Geoff W

Book cover of "Mediocre" with Amazon Affiliate linkAs soon as I heard that Oluo was releasing another book I immediately sought out a copy. I couldn’t wait until it was released so sought out a galley ASAP.* I will buy a copy as well, because she’s wonderful. My response is definitely messy, but it’s because she makes me think so much about so many things and I just sort of try to regurgitate all of my thoughts at the same time instead of cohesively sharing them.

First, a diatribe about the early reviews I saw on Goodreads: If you ever needed a reason to read books like this (you don’t), you should take a look at the reviews for this one on Goodreads. Not only have a lot of the 1- and 2-star reviews totally misunderstood the entire book, they have attempted to explain their ratings with the thinnest of reasons that frankly annoyed the shit out of me. Not only are there the men (god fearing Christians if they’re to be believed) who completely missed that Oluo isn’t saying all white men are mediocre, just that the racist-ass systems built by white men reward the most mediocre of them, they straight up appear not to have even read the book, let alone tried to understand it.

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Books

Book 733: So You Want to Talk About Race – Ijeoma Oluo

Geoff W

Cover art of "So You Want to Talk About Race" with Amazon Affiliate linkLike everyone else, but mostly the white people, in America should be doing, I’ve taken some time over the past few months to further educate myself on systemic racism and oppression in the United States. From discussions at work to dozens of articles and books, it has been 100% worth it to self-reflect and be reminded of things I knew and be introduced to things I didn’t.

I was first introduced to Oluo when I read, “The Heart of Whiteness: Ijeoma Oluo Interviews Rachel Dolezal, the White Woman Who Identifies as Black”, a powerful and frank wide ranging interview and reflection on race, privilege, and white supremacy in America. If you haven’t read it yet, go read it.

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Books

Book 539: The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue (Guide #1) – Mackenzie Lee

Geoff W

After seeing this over and over being the darling of the book blogosphere and reading the rave reviews of it I figured I should check it out. I read a lot of LGBT literature, a lot of young adult literature, and quite a bit of adventure literature so I thought why not. And although I wasn’t completely disappointed, I was genuinely underwhelmed and for once it wasn’t the mood I was in. I’ll start with the not-so-great and finish with what I enjoyed.

I’m a finicky reader at best and have curated a pretty good system of choosing the books I read, including taking into account books that fellow bloggers who have similar tastes to me read, but this one just didn’t click for me quite like others have. I kept to my usual style of not reading anything about the author or the book after I decided I want to read it. [Generally I get excited about a book/author and purchase/reserve something by them and then I let it sit for a while so that I can clear my palate.]

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