Books shelved under “Non-Fiction”

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…

My brain hurts, but I did this to myself! Métis: Race, Recognition, and the Struggle for Indigenous Peoplehood is a juicy but chonky read that demands quite a lot of one’s focus as Chris Andersen explores issues both contemporary and historical. While not for the faint of heart, this book definitely needed to be written, and I am glad I read it!

This book definitely favours the academic end of the non-fiction spectrum. Not only…

At the start of the year I published my 2021 book awards in my bookish newsletter (have you signed up yet?). I delighted in making up the categories. If I do awards for 2022, A Burglar’s Guide to the City might win Missed It By That Much (though my actual awards I tried to keep positive). Geoff Manaugh’s promise of a foray into the ways burglars exploit, undermine, or otherwise abuse architecture for nefarious ends…

I love works of popular science and works of popular history, so naturally I love works of popular science history. One of my favourite books of all time is A Short History of Nearly Everything, but it is getting on in years and could use some updating. I rather naively hoped that The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged) might be a worthy spiritual successor to that volume. Both Hannah Fry and Adam Rutherford…

Longtime readers of my reviews should not be surprised that I love time travel. I have a whole bookshelf dedicated to it, and I love Doctor Who. So Time Travel: A History by James Gleick was really a no-brainer. This is going to be a short review, because I don’t have a lot to say: this book does what the title promises. Gleick presents a brief history of the concept of time travel…

Anyone who has read even a smattering of my reviews probably knows a few things about me. First, I am a teacher. Second, I live in Thunder Bay, Canada, which unfortunately is a strong contender for one of the most racist cities in the world. Third, a large proportion of the adult students I teach in this racist city are Indigenous. So over nearly a decade, I’ve done a lot of learning about anti-Indigenous racism…

In my review of The Transgender Issue, I said I was more interested in manifestos than memoirs when it comes to trans people. This remains the case. However, as Redefining Realness demonstrates, memoirs can still be powerful and useful. I read this as part of the same book club that got me reading White Tears/Brown Scars. I was initially apprehensive to be one of the few if only transfeminine people in a group…

Audre Lorde is one of those people whom we white people find so quotable yet seldom do we stop to listen to her words (we have done this to Martin Luther King, Jr. as well). Every time I see a quotation from Lorde or another prominent Black activist on a T-shirt, I cringe. One of the insidious aspects of whiteness is how it appropriates the radical language of oppressed people (just look at the evolution…