Volumes of Value

  Trigger warning s: domestic abuse/violence, lynching, racism, colorism, sexual assault, transphobia The Vanishing Half is a novel beginning with the story of two Black twin sisters born in Louisiana. When both sisters leave home one chooses to pass as white and the other does not. The book follows the twins: Desiree and Stella as well as various other characters including their respective daughters Jude and Kennedy. I listened to The Vanishing Half as an audiobook over the course of a few days and I had such a hard time hitting pause when I needed to sleep or do anything that took my attention away from the story. There are so many layers and themes woven throughout the book and there is even a trans character that has a fairly big role and is portrayed expertly.  I highly recommend The Vanishing Half for anyone, particularly those interested in race and its politics, family/sisterhood and honesty. It is clear why it  is so well loved.

  Trigger Warnings : child abuse/neglect, alcoholism, sexual assault  The Glass Castle is a memoir about Walls’ childhood into her early adult years growing up in a highly untraditional life with a dysfunctional family. I found The Glass Castle to be extremely gripping and I was never bored. The chapters are short and the way in which Walls uses anecdotes to give the reader a feeling of what her life was like gripped me from start to finish. This being said there were parts that were extremely hard to read: there were many mentions of her and her siblings being sexually assaulted as children and other instances of abuse. Walls paints a picture of a family that loves each other but is deeply flawed and takes a nuanced look at each individual. Overall I loved The Glass Castle and would highly recommend it.

       A Room of One’s Own is an essay that sets out to discuss the relationship between women and fiction. As A Room of One’s Own is rather short and I was never bored–I read the whole thing in about two hours. I really enjoyed Woolf’s writing style and although I was slightly confused by the first chapter I found most of the book relatively easy to understand. As it was written almost a hundred years ago there are some outdated concepts but I found it to provide a nice history of women and fiction and other forms of writing as well as the relationship between men and women in general. I want to be very clear though that this is a very Western take (it centers England in particular). The gendered structures that Woolf writes of lacked nuance in terms of race, ethnicity, and nationality, as well as other identities and can’t be applied to everyone. Even so, I found myself agreeing with a lot of what she said which I found surprising considering it was written a fair...

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado  Trigger Warnings : Body-shaming, domestic abuse/intimate partner violence, suicidal ideation It’s been months since I first read In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado and it’s safe to say I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. Macho is a queer woman and In the Dream House is a memoir in which she recounts the story of a relationship she had with another queer woman. An extremely toxic relationship with Macho was psychologically and emotionally abused by her partner. As this is absolutely central to the story I advise caution and hope that everyone takes care of themself if they choose to read or pass on this book.  What led In the Dream House to take its place as my favorite book of all time is the absolutely brilliant writing style. The title of each chapter follows the same formula: “ Dream House as ” followed by a word or two that frame the way the story will be told for that chapter. Examples include “Dream House as ...

  Disability Visibility , as the title states, is a collection of stories by a diverse range of disabled people. Topics range from Jeremy Wood’s narrative of being deaf while incarcerated to Britney Wilson’s account of her experience using New York City’s paratransit service Access-A-Ride. The book is divided into four sections: Being, Becoming, Doing, and Connecting, each containing many essays ranging from three pages to thirty.  As a person who always tries to center diverse narratives in the books that they read I am ashamed to say that Disability Visibility is one of the few books I have read in recent years or perhaps ever that centers disability within its pages. As a nondisabled person, much of what I have learned of disabled people comes from TikTok or various other random sources. As a result, I found that when reading Disability Visibility I was often struck by how ignorant I was (and in many ways still am) of even basic knowledge of disability. What I mean ...