Books shelved under “Essays”

Bad Feminist has been on my radar for years, but as with many such books, it took someone physically putting it in my hands for me to get around to it. In this case, my best friend Rebecca (with whom I have started a podcast!) gave this to me as a going-away present when she moved to Montreal (I’m not sure she understands how going-away presents work?). She inscribed it, “To our first book,…

One year ago I read Tanya Talaga’s Seven Fallen Feathers, in which she remembers the seven Indigenous youths who died far from home while attending Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School here in Thunder Bay. In that heartbreaking and essential work, she links these deaths to a structure of colonialism and white supremacy and an ongoing form of cultural genocide in which the government and the rest of us remain complicit. Now Talaga is back…

While I was not a fan of the last collection of Massey Lectures that I read, the brilliant thing about this series is that every year is very different. Each year brings a new speaker, a new topic, and an entirely new way of approaching the topic and the format. (I am very excited for this year’s lectures delivered by Tanya Talaga, author of Seven Fallen Feathers). Last year’s lectures by Payam Akhavan work…

“My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit.”

This powerful statement, first deployed and used in this essay by Flavia Dzodan, is often on my mind. And I choose to open my review of The Feminist Porn Book with it, because that is how I want to position myself. As a white man who tries his best to be feminist, I recognize I have a hell of a lot of privilege in…

Laurie Penny has been one of my favourite authors for a while now. Her incisive takes on how feminism can be more intersectional, more anti-capitalist, have continued to be on point as the United States and UK shamble towards their respective political armageddons (armagedda?). Penny’s Unspeakable Things is the feminist primer for my generation. So when I heard that she had a new book coming out, and that it was called Bitch Doctrine: Essays…

Here Douglas Coupland goes again, trying to break our brains and our library cataloguing systems. Is Bit Rot fiction or non-fiction? It’s a collection of both! Oh noes! It contains short stories, including some previously published in Generation A (which I read almost 7 years ago, so I have zero recollection of any of it), and essays and assorted musings. In general, this is Coupland’s most up-to-date published writing on how we’re dealing with the…

I suppose I should start with one of those disclaimers about how I received a free electronic copy of this from NetGalley and Algonquin Young Readers. However, I also preordered two hard copies with my own money (OK, someone else’s money in gift card form) even before that request was approved. But why wait a whole three weeks when I could read it earlier than that? That’s how excited I am for Here We Are:…

It’s with no regret, but some shame, that I admit I’m not a fan of poetry, and that I actively avoid teaching it. I use poems in my classes, when we’re talking about other subjects. But I avoid teaching the mechanics and technique of poetry, analyzing the metre and rhythm, looking into the intricacies of imagery and similes and repetition. I do this largely because, as a reader, I am not comfortable with poetry, and…

First off, an update on the shoe situation: I’m much faster at putting on shoes now. I’ve been training hard, lots of montages and such, and I’m proud to say I’ve seen great improvement.

Why Not Me? is the second autobiographical set of essays from Mindy Kaling. In Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns), Kaling told us about her childhood and the path that led to her involvement with The…

The same friend who lent me Decoded asked me if I wanted to borrow Men Explain Things to Me, which is great, because it has been on my list for a while now. When I went over to her house, she handed me the book. A mutual friend who was there and only in town until early the next week then said, “Can you read it really quickly so I can have it?” So…

Sometimes you see a book and you just know that it’s the book you’ve been waiting for. That was my reaction when Chelsea Vowel, who blogs and tweets as âpihtawikosisân, announced Indigenous Writes: A Guide to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Issues in Canada. You really should read her blog and follow her, because she her writing is clear and informative, and she is excellent at providing further resources. This continues in her…

Back in Grade 4, a small group of peers asked me if I was a virgin.

Not knowing what a virgin was, I said no. Well, that certainly got them laughing. And I got very upset.

This incident has stuck in my memory (which is otherwise very much a sieve through which most details inevitably fall) for a few reasons. Firstly, it was one of the few times I ever felt bullied in school,…

“But what about the men?” It’s a common refrain heard from people who have misinterpreted, or been misinformed about, the aims of feminism and its related movements. So-called “meninist” and “men’s rights activists” encourage the question, because they want to push the view that feminists want to attain women’s liberation and equality at the expense of men. As one men’s rights activist discovered, when one engages with the actual critical theory underlying feminism,…

After my pre-ordered copy of Furiously Happy arrived in the mail last week, I went looking for my copy of Let’s Pretend This Never Happened. I wanted to tweet a photo of the two books together—Jenny Lawson now has a running theme of taxidermied animals on her book covers; I think she should stick with it. The copy of her first book was not on my bookshelf under “L.” I briefly pondered if I…

Mindy Kaling is absolutely right: men do take too long to put on their shoes. At least, I do, and I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Send help!

It’s safe to say I probably wouldn’t have read this book if my friend Rebecca had not literally put it in my hands. (As Goodreads friend Megan remarked recently, this is the one way to ensure I will actually read a book you recommend…

The human body is weird. I mean, it’s a wonder we function at all. We’re fragile bags of mostly water that support a strange and wonderful organ that seems to give us consciousness. All this happens through a complex set of interconnected systems that work to keep us alive. I’m really not down with the ickiness of my biology: bring on the robot bodies! Until that happens, though, I’m forced to agree with Lawrence Hill: …

Wait, Queers Dig Time Lords? But I thought Chicks Dig Time Lords! Who else digs time lords—small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri? Soon there won’t be any time lord left for straight, white men! Think of the menz!

Seriously though, having read three of these fandom-celebration books from Mad Norwegian Press already, I was looking forward to Queers Dig Time Lords. I should note that since reading Chicks Dig Time Lords three…

This book is the dead tree equivalent of a BuzzFeed post. Its title could be “I Got 99 Cognitive Biases But a Psychology Degree Ain’t One.” Or maybe not.

Rolf Dobelli enumerates 99 thinking errors, or cognitive biases, in The Art of Thinking Clearly, dispensing as he does tips for leading a more rational, less error-prone life. Anyone who has done even the least amount of reading in this subject will recognize many of…

Rick Mercer is a national treasure, and if his show hasn’t convinced you of this, then you need to get this book and re-read some of his rants from years gone by. Having been living in the UK for the past year and a half, my opportunities to watch The Rick Mercer Report have been reduced (I could probably get it, but it would require time and effort I don’t really have right now). I…

I’m not exactly up on the Chinese history; it’s not a subject that we covered much in school. Most of what I know comes by way of hazy pop culture references and exposure via the slightly counterfactual nature of science fiction and historical fiction. Moreover, having been born and raised subsequent to the Cold War and the height of anti-communist sentiment in the West, not to mention just after the Tienanmen Square incident, the history…