Books shelved under “Non-Fiction”

Philosophy of the mind has always been one of my favourite realms of philosophy. I love thinking about how we think. About why we think. Consciousness, sentience, intelligence—how did these traits evolve? How do they even work? Patrick House explores Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness (literally what it says on the tin) and tries to address these questions. As he admits in the introduction, he doesn’t have all the answers—none of us do—but…

Sometimes being asexual (and in my case, aromantic) can feel very lonely, for reasons perhaps obvious but which I will elaborate on in a moment. In particular, it feels like we are usually an afterthought when it comes to research about queer people and sexuality. I know that’s not entirely the case, though, and am always looking to broaden my knowledge about those who study and write about asexuality. So of course I leaped at…

Much like author Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell discusses in the preface to this book, I adore wearing dresses (and skirts, though I find them slightly more difficult because you then need the right top). She’s preaching to the choir when she talks about wearing them pretty much exclusively. For me as a trans woman, dresses are my way of embodying and expressing my femininity (they are not, of course, the only way to be feminine). I’ll talk…

Talk about lengthy subtitles! This book has a retro styling to it, but scratch the surface and you’ll find it quite modern in its outlook. Sam Kean takes us on a journey through the periodic table: its history, the properties of its elements, and how those elements have fascinated/charmed/influenced our lives from ancient times to the modern era. The Disappearing Spoon is a blend of physics and history, science and sociology.

Although loosely chronological, Kean’s…

Famously, I was told the internet is for porn. That can’t be true, of course, because as far as I am concerned, the internet is for writing book reviews! Anyway, The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Obscene Obsession is yet another entry in a long line of books that looks at how people have lined up against one another to support or oppose the creation, distribution, and consumption of pornography. Some…

I am such a junkie for popular science books, especially popular physics books. The Disordered Cosmos appealed for a few reasons: I want to read more popular science books by people of colour; from the description, it sounded like it also would address discrimination within the fields of science; and I enjoy Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s tweets.

The first few chapters are heavy on physics. It is tempting to be lazy and call it your “standard” rendition…

I received this book nearly a year ago (maybe a whole year ago) from my friend and former teaching colleague Emma. I had gifted her Come As You Are, Dr. Emily Nagoski’s earlier book about sex. Burnout is, as the title implies, about the sustained sensation many of us feel when we have overextended ourselves and depleted our resources. As the subtitle implies, this book promises to deepen our understanding of burnout. It is…

Somewhere along the way—likely from Inferior, but I can’t remember—I learned that women are excluded from most clinical trials for medication because our hormonal cycles are considered “too complicated” and they might throw off the trial results. Consequently, most of the medicines that make it to market have only truly been tested on men. Then there are inevitably—you guessed it—complications in some women who take these drugs, except doctors are just as likely to…

Machine learning is a hot topic. You have probably seen those social media posts that start with, “I made an AI watch …” and then proceeded to share a script “written” by the AI? Those are almost entirely fake, of course—as Janelle Shane explains in You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place, artificial intelligence is just not there yet.…

I’ve always maintained that Jenny Lawson is hilarious in the best possible way, and Broken (In the Best Possible Way) only sustains this opinion. What is the best possible way to be hilarious? With a generous helping of compassion. With self-deprecation that also recognizes that your self is human and valuable too. Even as Lawson makes fun of herself and others, she acknowledges that she deserves compassion and patience. To be broken is not to…

Personal essay collections are often hit-and-miss for me. So many elements must align: the writer’s voice and style, the topics of their essays, and what I take away from the book. Sometimes I Trip On How Happy We Could Be is a great example of an essay collection that I enjoyed reading a great deal, yet I’m not sure I emerged as transformed as I might expect. Which, honestly, is fine—not all reading has to…

Dinosaurs grabbed me, as usual, when I was a kid, but I wouldn’t say that my fascination has endured as it has with some. Nevertheless, at some point last year, I had a moment where I decided to seek out more information on these creatures and their extinction. This is not the first book I added to my to-read list, but it happens to be the first book I’ve read, mostly thanks to getting an…

A few chapters into Untamed, Glennon Doyle opened one of her essays with, “I have a son and two daughters, until they tell me otherwise.” Just like that, I knew I was safe reading this book. There is an acceptance of the reader here that I found quite powerful. It isn’t just that Doyle is sharing a lot about her past, her traumas, her hopes, her mistakes, her triumphs. It’s that she is willing…

There is a story going around about Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time wherein his publisher told him that each equation included in his book would halve the book’s sales. Consequently, Hawking chose to include only Einstein’s equation from special relativity, E=mc^2. The book was beyond successful for any book about theoretical physics in its day (and I quite liked it when I read it, especially the special illustrated edition). Michael Dine has…

Let me begin by saying that everyone who says this book’s illustrations and layout are beautiful is absolutely right. As a print book, I suspect this would be gorgeous. I received an eARC from NetGalley and MIT Press, and it was a little harder to read on my phone screen, but that isn’t why I didn’t finish Rewilding. Rather, as beautiful and perhaps comprehensive a review of this subject as it is, I found…

This year is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the premiere of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Did you know that I host a Buffy rewatch podcast, Prophecy Girls? So when this book came up on NetGalley, I jumped at getting an eARC—and I was also fortunate enough that Hachette sent review copies to myself and my podcast co-host for us to promote on our show. And what an easy book to promote: Evan Ross Katz’s…

To say that I windmill-slammed the request button on NetGalley for this book is an understatement. Treasured: How Tutankhamun Shaped a Century promised something very tantalizing: a look into a cultural phenomenon that took the world by storm a hundred years ago. Christina Riggs does not exaggerate when she talks about the “Tut-mania” that swept the world over and over throughout the twentieth century, literally inspiring so many people like her to become Egyptologists. Though…

Not so sure about the brief part of this title. Aside from that, A Brief History of Timekeeping: The Science of Marking Time, from Stonehenge to Atomic Clocks indeed covers quite the range of timekeeping science and history—and you all know how much I love science books, and how much I love history books, so in case it isn’t clear, science history books are absolutely some of my favourite non-fiction. Applying to read this eARC…

This book was recommended to me by my French friend Emeline! I definitely need to read more books about disability. Sitting Pretty is part memoir, part educational polemic about the need for our society to shift how we view and act upon disability. It is heartfelt, humorous, but also really affecting. Rebekah Taussig makes so many good points through both her personal experiences and her research into the academic study of disability. While she cannot…

When reading books like this, I often approach them from the point of view of my students. As a teacher, especially as a white teacher, it is important that I bring issues of race into my classroom. I seldom have the time or opportunity to use entire books. Still, you never know when a chapter or couple of pages might come in handy. In the case of Racism, Not Race, this book provided an…