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Book 761: Mediocre – Ijeoma Oluo

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

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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Book 633: When Brooklyn Was Queer – Hugh Ryan

Book cover for "When Brooklyn Was Queer"I’m split on this one. It was better than I thought it was going to be, but not as good as I wanted it to be. I find it very hard for any book to really and truly dig deep into LGBTQ+ history satisfactorily, they’re always scrounging for resources or materials and there are always more questions than there are answers. I reached out to the publisher after I stumbled across this on an LGBT news blog.*

There were times in the book where I kept asking myself, is this really Brooklyn or is it Brooklyn-adjacent or is it “this probably happened” in Brooklyn too (there was quite a bit of this). Ryan was open about there being a lack of primary resources, but I felt that it wasn’t as acknowledged as much as it should’ve been in the introduction and left more to a footnote of the epilogue.
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Book 588: Crashed – How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World – Adam Tooze

What a tome. I requested a copy of this from the publisher back in August 2018 after reading this review from the NYTimes.* It took me three months to get to it and another month-and-a-half to actually read it! And it was worth the read, now I just need to read the “Framing Crashed” posts on his website to see what else I missed!

There are some mixed reviews on Goodreads, some people think it’s boring (uh duh – hello finance, politics and history), some think they’ve written better books or articles (get out of here self-promoters, nobody wants you), and others, like myself, appreciated the staggering amount of ground covered by Tooze in this work.

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