Tag: Class

Books

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

Geoff W

Like 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 708: Hotline (Murmur, Inc. #1) – Quinn Anderson

Geoff W

Along with Walker’s The Weight of It All and Throwing Hearts, I picked this up as part of my Kindle Unlimited download spree after Tim got me a new Oasis for our anniversary.

If I’m honest, I picked this one because it didn’t have the traditional half-dressed/watermarked/super-model handsome cover model on it. Even with the super-hokey heart as an “o”, I liked how clean and simple the cover was. And maybe more importantly, I liked that I got to envision the characters without constantly thinking their descriptions are nothing like the cover models (which yes, I spend WAY too long thinking about this).

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Books

Book 684: Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton

Geoff W

Similar to my reading of The Age of Innocence two years ago, I was pleasantly surprised by my reading of this. I read it in high school, but of course was not impressed and definitely didn’t enjoy it, but now almost 20 years later, I get it. I’m going to keep slowly working through all the books I read in high school.

Not only was I able to appreciate the beautiful prose and stark setting thanks to living in Massachusetts now, I was also able to make connections from this to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, a connection I made last time I read Wharton too! The biggest parallel of the two works was the structure of the novel, a visiting traveler/worker has an interaction of some type with the protagonists and then gets the rest of the story from the locals. It’s all third party he said she said with some basic observations, and it works.

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ARC, Books

Book 664: The Cost-Benefit Revolution – Cass R. Sunstein

Geoff W

What. A. Doozie. Seriously, why do I decide to read the densest books EVER at the holidays and the beginning of the year? Really, I should’ve read this last year when I requested it from the publisher after seeing an advertisement for it on the train, but I kept pushing it off until now.* I requested this because having read Nudge, I assumed all his works were super approachable, but that wasn’t the case for this incredibly dense book.

Honestly, this compares more to last year’s kick-off read, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World. I mean just reading that title makes me exhausted again (it was 700+ very dense pages). This year’s kick-off, though roughly 1/3 the size, was just as dense and basically tried to look at how to make government regulation more even and effective by removing politics and opinion and replacing it with cost-benefit analysis. It’s no wonder it took me roughly three weeks to actually get through this one.

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