Tag: nonfiction

AI is freaking everywhere these days, whether we want it or not. Sometimes it feels like my Facebook feed is 80-90% garbage AI “art”, or people complaining about garbage AI content.

Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer by Alberto Ledesma is sort of a hybrid memoir. It intersperses essay-style text sessions with sketches, illustrations, and political cartoons, some depicting Ledesma’s life, others illustrating the more general experience of being currently or formerly undocumented.

This book covers a little bit of everything about owls: their biology and what makes them unique; their ecological niche; myths, legends, and public attitude about owls; current challenges to their survival, and conservation efforts trying to counteract that; and of course, the answer to the question, are owls really that wise?

What a great title! It evokes images of a mushroom that might outlive us, which is funny, because matsutake thrives in sites of human disturbance. If we died out tomorrow, how long would the mushroom survive?

The rise of the animal rights movement in the United States seems like an interesting topic, but the somewhat dry, detached writing style and a mid narrator for the audiobook made this a slog.

Sometimes it’s nice to just sit down and write an uncomplicated review where I don’t have to analyze why a book didn’t work for me, or try to convert my absolute delight into coherent words.

I’ve put off writing this review for weeks because I don’t want to be the bad feminist who says she didn’t enjoy reading bell hooks.

I think this book is really approachable, because Oluo uses accessible language, her real-life experiences, and examples of how we can be better.