Books shelved under “Non-Fiction”

Hate to DNF an eARC (from NetGalley and publisher University of Chicago Press), but I just cannot with Battle of the Big Bang. It’s written like a fever dream of a science book, and on every page I was left asking, who is this book for?

Niayesh Afshordi is a cosmologist; Phil Halper is a science comms YouTuber. Together, they’ve teamed up to write a tour of cosmology. They trace the various theories of…

Nuclear war is … bad. That’s a premise on which most of us can agree. However, for the past eighty years, nuclear war has been possible and—at various times, including this past week as I write this review (looking at you, India and Pakistan)—more or less likely. In Six Minutes to Winter, Mark Lynas catalogues the potential scope and consequences of nuclear war—including the dreaded but much-misunderstood nuclear winter—and then makes a passionate plea…

The Tetris movie was an unexpected delight when I had three months free of Apple TV+. I had never heard of it before, and I was so skeptical going into it—yet it was a surprisingly solid movie. Part biopic, part historical drama, it somehow managed to sensationalize and lionize the bringing of Tetris from Russia to other markets. So when I heard Henk Rogers had decided to tell the story in his own words, of…

Oh boy, I don’t know if this was the best time or worst time to read The Age of Insecurity. It was certainly A Time. Written just prior to Donald Trump’s second term as President of the United States, Astra Taylor’s Massey Lectures for 2023 nevertheless capture the zeitgeist of the 2020s with uncomfortable clarity and, dare I say, prescience. This book is not a salve for our age, alas, but it might be…

Space is so cool, and I love reading books that explain how we learn the stuff we know about space. That’s exactly what Dr. Lisa Kaltenegger delivers in Alien Earths. This is the story of how we look for exoplanets—worlds orbiting stars other than our own Sun—and specifically, how we might determine whether those exoplanets can support life similar life on Earth. Along the way we learn, as Kaltenegger did, so much more about…

Most of you probably know already: Star Trek is my first science-fiction love. Before Stargate, before Buffy, before even Supergirl, I grew up in the nineties watching the bright primary colours of TOS on a 13-inch CRT TV. I eschewed for a long time the muted, overly polished sequel series—the simplicity of the 1960s original made more sense to my kid brain. Yet I eventually succumbed (DS9 is my favourite, though TNG…

This was a tougher read than I expected. I was about to write “not being a sports girlie myself” but stopped because I do play sports now—but I only got into that last summer, and it’s recreational, co-ed, and very inclusive. Anyway, I wasn’t expecting Fair Play to hit me as hard as it did considering it’s about transgender issues. Katie Barnes covers the debates around the inclusion of trans people in sports with sensitivity…

I picked this up on a whim at my local indie bookshop. It’s a trim and cute little volume, definitely pocket-sized (and yes, many of my dresses have pockets). Beyond the Gender Binary is an essay about exactly that: what does it mean to be nonbinary? Furthermore, how can our society itself move beyond the idea of binary gender? Alok Vaid-Menon relates some anecdotes from their own life while passionately breaking down the myths, stereotypes,…

Ursula K. Le Guin is the GOAT. I think the only one who rivals her in my esteem of science fiction and fantasy authors is Octavia Butler. I say this not to claim to be an expert on either author or even that I like their work beyond any other SFF author … but those two gals just … have something. So naturally, when I heard that The Language of the Night had been…

This was a birthday gift for a friend who is a fierce feminist. She lent me Men Explain Things to Me so many years ago, and when I was pondering what book to buy her for her birthday, Rebecca Solnit came to mind. I was delighted to discover Solnit had penned a memoir. My friend is in between my age and Solnit’s, and so I am curious to hear her thoughts on Solnit’s reflections of…

A few years ago, probably during lockdown, I watched the excellent Netflix documentary Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know about the Event Horizon Telescope and the effort to photograph the supermassive black hole at the centre of galaxy M87. Black holes have always captivated me ever since, as a wee lass, science and science fiction came on my radar. How could they not? So even though Marcus Chown is a new-to-me science writer,…

Some books are plodding and predictable (even if they are ultimately rewarding). Others are byzantine and meandering (even if they are ultimately rewarding). The Message is a secret, third type: it is a careful bundle of missives about the struggle for liberation. Writing about events and stories across space and time, Ta-Nehisi Coates unifies these long essays under the guise of talking to his workshop students about writing. The title belies its simplicity by taking…

Books like this are really tough to review. Sixteen years ago, I read Shake Hands With the Devil, and I was humbled. I Am Malala is a similarly humbling memoir. Malala Yousafzai went through a terrible ordeal that catapulted her into the world’s consciousness. More than that, however, the book she has written here with the assistance of Christina Lamb is a testimony. For Western readers like myself, it’s a crash course in the…

Last year I reviewed the internet’s favourite ace dad’s book I Am Ace: Advice on Living Your Best Asexual Life. Now, Cody Daigle-Orians is back with The Ace and Aro Relationship Guide: Making It Work in Friendship, Love, and Sex. While both books are aimed at aspec readers, this latter is a more focused and broader exploration of the nature of relationships—of all kinds—as an acespec or arospec person. Jessica Kingsley Publishers has…

Nicole Maines as Nia Nal/Dreamer in Supergirl was a revelation in more ways than one, and I have loved following her on Twitter even as that site slides deeper into the abyss. So when I heard she had a memoir, It Gets Better … Except When It Gets Worse, coming out, of course I needed to read it. Thanks to NetGalley and publisher Dial Press for the eARC.

As the introduction establishes, this is…

I have followed Meg Vondriska on Twitter for a while now, and when I heard she was coming out with a book based on the concept of her @MenWritingWomen account, I ran, not walked, to the bookshop (well, I emailed them) to preorder. A Tale of Two Titties takes the basic concept of this account, amplifies it, but also twists it into something far more subversive and acerbic. The result is entertaining and potentially…

Although over a decade old at this point, Undoing Border Imperialism still feels relevant today in 2024—maybe even more urgent and important than it was when Harsha Walia first wrote and assembled it. Part how-to, part manifesto, part oral history, this compact volume works hard to syncretize different modes of resistance, from academic theory to grassroots activism. It is a volume I sorely needed to read as I navigate my own journey trying to figure…

I came to my Anna Kendrick obsession sideways, in a low-key way I am realizing is very apposite for Kendrick’s brand of celebrity. I have never watched Pitch Perfect. If you asked me which of her movies cemented her in my mind as a celebrity crush, I couldn’t tell you (but I can tell you my fave—more in a moment). To top it off, I found Scrappy Little Nobody as a publisher overstock purchase…

Wait, this book isn’t by Naomi Wolf? Why did I even bother … jk. Although, ironically, I haven’t read anything by Naomi Klein previously, and I’ve read two books by Naomi Wolf (more on that in a bit). I don’t think I personally have conflated the two Naomis myself, but I’m sure that’s just the lack of opportunity. Doppelganger intrigued me because I wanted to hear about Klein’s deep dive into the world in which…

Women are some kind of magic, to quote amanda lovelace, so it’s no wonder the patriarchy thinks we’re witches. The metaphor (and, for parts of history, literal belief) of woman-as-witch is a potent one. In Defense of Witches seeks to connect contemporary feminist struggles with the legacy of the witch hunts and trials that ran through Europe and America. Mona Chollet, translated here by Sophie R. Lewis, looks at a number of themes, like beauty…