Tag: Race

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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ARC, Books

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

Geoff W

Cover art of The Cost-Benefit Revolution with affiliate link to Amazon.comWhat. 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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Books

Book 639: The Music of What Happens – Bill Konigsberg

Geoff W

cover art for the music of what happensNo matter how many of these I read I’m always going to ask where these were when I was in high school. Kids these days don’t know how great they have it. I’m legit laughing at myself writing that, because I know how much better things were for me when I was in high school/college than it was just 5-10 years before that.

This is the third Konigsberg I’ve read and I feel like I should read The Porcupine of Truth and Honestly Ben just to complete the novels! I have enjoyed all three of them so it’s not like it’d be the most difficult thing in the world, but I do have a lot of books on my TBR list, so maybe I should wait a little longer. Spoilers to follow, so don’t read it if you don’t want to know any major plot points.

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Books

Book 548: The Waste Lands (The Dark Tower #3) – Stephen King

Geoff W

I am now, with a lot of stretching of my imagination and film maker interpretation, starting to see where they may have gotten the screenplay for The Dark Tower.

Tentative doesn’t even begin to cover it. If you cut all of the books into paragraphs throw them in the air and then pick just enough to make a script you might get the same thing the directors and writers got for that adaptation? Even with that, I feel like they changed so much to “make it fit” (it doesn’t really) that I’m still not 100% sure where they pulled things.

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Books

Book 537: The Drawing of the Three (The Dark Tower #2) – Stephen King

Geoff W

I’m starting to see why people really like this series. I’m only two books in now (with pretty big gaps between the books), but I get it. And even with that crappy film adaptation—so far nothing in the first two books was in the film really—I’m being drawn in.

I’m struggling to write reviews of this as I’ve taken to heart what King writes in the forward that this is one long book/story broken across quite a few books. It’s some how barely moving forward but taking massive steps at the same time. This picks up not long after The Gunslinger and plows steadily forward. I’m still not sure I have any idea what’s going on, and I have no idea where it’s going, but so far I’m enjoying where King is taking me.

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