Books shelved under “Non-Fiction”

I thought I would balance out my recent mathematical non-fiction read with a non-fiction read about the English language. Not only did I have one gathering dust on my to-read shelf for years, but it’s one that is just as technical and interested in education as The Math(s) Fix was. So, of course, it took me longer to read too. Also, I was apprehensive regarding Steven Pinker (more on that at the end of the…

My best friend Amanda recommended this to me a few years back, but if you don’t put a book in my hands when you recommend it, then good luck! Fortunately I was reminded of this book while looking for excerpts of travel writing to show to my Grade 11/12 English class last week. I was in the mood for some “adventure non-fiction” as one might call Into Thin Air. The library had an ebook…

The Math(s) Fix wants you to believe that computers are coming for your math.

Scary, isn’t it? You should find it scary. Computers are way better at calculating than we are, yet we insist that “real math” means learning how to do long division by hand!

Wolfram Media kindly provided me an eARC of this book via NetGalley in exchange for this review. I was definitely very interested in this.

Some positionality, because even though…

You’d think the pandemic would mean I have more time to read rather than less, right? But for some reason my reading speed has decreased rather than increased. I’m making more of a comeback, but it still took me a long time to read and review Non-Binary Lives: An Anthology of Intersecting Identities. That shouldn’t reflect on the quality of this book. Similarly, I’m going to explain later that I’m kind of over these…

Since I wrote this review, Knox has come out as nonbinary! I have updated their pronouns accordingly throughout, but please be aware that the review itself largely discusses Knox’s perspective as they share it when this book was written, i.e., as an ally rather than as a trans person themselves.

If I had read this book last year shortly after it came out, I would be writing this review from the position of a cisgender…

My boss, fittingly, gave me Bossypants! She gave it to me in June after I broke my elbow, and I promptly put it on my shelf and did not read it, like I do with most books. But now is the time! The time to read Tina Fey’s comedic memoir.

Let’s start with the obvious: Fey is a comedy genius. That isn’t in question. She is funny. This book is funny. If you like…

So I guess this is my coming out review? I actually have a blog post for that, but of course, some of my transition experiences thus far will be interspersed throughout this review.

Hello, world. I’m Kara now. (That’s pronounced Car-uh.) I’m a trans woman. My pronouns are she/her.

To My Trans Sisters seemed like a perfect book to read and then review on the day I came out online. It’s a collection…

Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life has been on my to-read list for a while (I blame Hannah Witton), but I finally bought it as a birthday present for a friend who shares my interest in these subjects. Emily Nagoski’s book is a comprehensive guide to how people with vulvas can become more comfortable and fulfilled in their sex lives. It’s a little bit science text, a…

Sometimes the perfect storm occurs. No one decision, no one action or inaction, leads to the outcome—it’s the combination that brings us to disaster. Sometimes, though, that perfect storm happens because of structural racism, as Mary Jane Logan McCallum and Adele Perry seek to demonstrate in Structures of Indifference: An Indigenous Life and Death in a Canadian City. This is the story of Brian Sinclair: his life, his death in a Winnipeg emergency room,…

Huge note: Since writing this review, I’ve actually come out as transgender! So, uh, enjoy all the parts here where I laughably reaffirm my cis-ness! I will revise this review at some point. (Note to future Kara: actually do that.)

I received this book as a gift from a friend who shares my interest in feminism. She found For the Love of Men: A New Vision for Mindful Masculinity somewhat revelatory. Like me, she…

I am white. I am extremely white, because I grew up (and currently live) in Thunder Bay, Ontario. Despite this city being situated on the lands of Fort William First Nation, it remains incredibly white and segregated (see Seven Fallen Feathers for more info). That’s changing a little now, and we have more people of colour coming here as immigrants and refugees. But I grew up largely sheltered from socializing with children of immigrants or…

As some of you may be aware, one of my many hats at my day job involves being a math teacher. I try to cover as much financial literacy as I can manage, regardless of the course I’m teaching, because this is a fundamentally important topic in our society. So I’m always looking to learn more about how finances actually work in our society. We hear a lot about the “stock market,” but what does…

I bought this as a birthday gift for someone I know who has quite the collection of shoes/heels, although it was on my to-read list before I considered it as a gift. High Heel is an unconventional treatise on this type of footwear. In short, easily-digestible chunks, Summer Brennan ponders the evolution of high heels in our history and culture. She wrestles with the conflicting attitudes towards high heels evinced by feminists, as well as…

Women are monsters, according to the patriarchy. That’s the thesis of Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power, Jude Ellison S. Doyle’s follow-up to their 2016 Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why. To elaborate a bit more, Doyle argues that the portrayal of women (and femininity) in our media and culture overlaps with our understanding of the monstrous, the Other, the…

I heard about this book on Twitter, I think, and read an excerpt (basically the introduction of the book) in The Guardian, and I was immediately sold. These days I read history books because I’ve discovered since leaving school that history is actually really, really difficult to learn. There’s just so much of it, and it’s just so subject to interpretation depending on the evidence available, the lens you use for that evidence, and…

I’ve been watching a lot of Dragons’ Den lately. It’s good TV, and it’s easy to watch bits and pieces of an episode at a time while eating breakfast or taking a break from other tasks. As entertaining and soapy as the show can be, it’s also a disturbing reflection of how capitalism pervades our society. In an episode I recently watched, the Dragons went gaga over a chiropractor peddling a spray that purportedly improved…

As previously discussed in my review of The Hatred of Poetry, I struggle with reading poetry. So I was tantalized by the title of this book. The previous book was a gift from a fellow teacher friend whose feelings about poetry are a bit less ambivalent than mine. When I learned about Don’t Read Poetry, I thought it would be a good reciprocal gift to her. Stephanie Burt’s thesis is basically that we…

I don’t remember how Freedom Fallacy: The Limits of Liberal Feminism came on my radar. Someone somewhere must have mentioned it; it looks like I bought it from Book Depository four years ago. Anyway, I finally got around to reading it last summer. I was hoping to dig deeper into some of the essays, but honestly things like breaking my elbow took up most of my time, and now I just don’t have the inclination…

I live in Thunder Bay, the place of the eponymous sleeping giant, Nanabozho, and a location steeped in anti-Indigenous racism and an ongoing legacy of colonial oppression. So, despite being a white settler and thus the privileged party here, I do have to deal with these issues—and like other settler Canadians, I’ve got a tremendous responsibility here. I picked up The Sleeping Giant Awakens: Genocide, Indian Residential Schools, and the Challenge of Conciliation because…

I love reading science fiction, and you might expect me to open this review with an encomium of how science fiction helps us imagine a way into a better future. But no. One of the reasons I love science fiction is for how it asks us to truly confront our assumptions about the way things are, and whether that’s inevitable.

So many science fiction stories involving artificial intelligence place that intelligence into humanoid or human-like…