Books, Professional Development

Book 1,042: Getting to Yes – Roger Fisher, William Ury, & Bruce Patton

This was the last book I had to read as I wrapped up my master’s degree earlier this year. It was part of the negotiation course it was written for many years ago and we were taught by members of the negotiation project (but not these authors). Reading it for a course made this a bit more of a slog than it probably would’ve been. We only had to read roughly half of it so I was like may as well finish it out. If I would’ve picked this up on my own, I probably would’ve read through it a lot faster.

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

I 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 771: The Chrismukkah Crisis – Ryan Taylor and Joshua Harwood

Well of course I’m going to like a book that starts off with a Wuthering Heights quote and throws in a Jane Austen reference later in the story. Add in the weird/awkward Star Wars reference (see last additional quote) and this book was basically written for me. Thankfully, it was well written, and I enjoyed the story and characters too!

For my 11th book in the 12 Books of MM Holiday Romance binge I decided to read (and have now—without any shock to anyone—surpassed as I’m typing this) The Chrismukkah Crisis. And this one holds the honor of being only the second one written by male authors (a married couple at that!).

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Book 753: Voices of LGBTQ+ – Lynda Wolters

Uhhh…. A for effort?

I said yes to this one when the publisher reached out with a review copy way back in July (it’s been a long year obviously), because it sounded interesting and was nonfiction.*

I was obviously going to come into it with some bias, as a gay man I’m clearly going to have opinions, but I’m also going to come into it with a lot more education and history knowledge, holding an advanced degree in gender, sexuality, and queer theory. And frankly my thoughts are divided on this book. Did Wolters do a good job of starting a conversation and representing the individuals she interviewed? More or less. If I were judging the book solely on this she would’ve gotten four stars.

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Book 718: The Deviant’s War – Eric Cervini

Every couple of years there’s a new kid on the block when it comes to the be-all-end all of LGBT nonfiction books. And every couple of year’s I’m sorely disappointed—I’m not sure if it has to do with the hype machine around the books, if it’s what they decide to focus on, or if it’s the author’s themselves (almost always cisgender white gay men).

When this book started to make waves in the LGBT book blogging community, I took notice. And then when I found out Cervini was giving a talk via the Boston Public Library, I requested a copy of the book via NetGalley to see why there was so much hype.*

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