A Reader Is Me!

Title: Eating Animals
Author: Jonathan Safran Foer
Number of Pages: 341 pages
Book Number/Goal: 38/40 for 2010
My Rating: 5/5

Jacket Summary: Like many others, Jonathan Safran Foer spent his teenage and college years oscillating between omnivore and vegetarian. But on the brink of fatherhood--facing the prospect of having to make dietary choices on a child's behalf--his casual questioning took on an urgency. So Foer set out to find answers for himself. This quest ultimately required him to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from his childhood, amd probe some of his most primal instincts about right and wrong. This book is what he found. Brilliantly synthesizing philosophy, literature, science, memoir, and his own detective wokrd, Eating Animals explores the many stories we use to justify our eating habits--folklore and pop culture, family traditions and national myth, apparent facts and inherent fictions--and how such tales can lull us into a brutal forgetting.

Review: This is a really good read. I picked it up because it sounded interesting and I liked his writing in Everything Is Illuminated. I did not expect it to change my mind about what I eat, but it did. Even more than the treatment of animals (which is horrible, but on its own, probably not enough to make me want to give up tasty animals), the stuff that's in them and the environmental effects of the "farms" are what did it. I don't want all that stuff in my body.

I'm not going to go totally vegan or even totally vegetarian, but I am going to limit my meat-eating to an occasional thing. I don't think it will be hard, and I was already planning to limit meat just for financial reasons (plus already limiting dairy and eggs and red meat).

Title: God and Sex: What the Bible Really Says
Author: Michael Coogan
Number of Pages: 238 pages
Book Number/Goal: 35/40 for 2010
My Rating: 5/5

Amazon Summary: Readers looking for an unbiased appraisal of what the Bible says about premarital sex, homosexuality, and polygamy can trust Coogan, a biblical scholar of the highest order. Concise, clear, and accessible to general readers, this book covers all the usual topics plus a few that may surprise. A professor of religious studies at Stonehill College and editor of the New Oxford Annotated Bible, Coogan has also taught at Harvard and Wellesley. He covers predictable ground in unpredictable ways, frankly noting, for example, the pervasive biblical assumption that women are subordinate while explaining how that reflects the Bible's foreign and ancient context. The author does not overreach the evidence to promote his own agenda, but notes the Bible's contradictions on certain issues and admits the limits of modern scholarship. Readers may be surprised to find a convincing discussion of evidence for God's own (sometimes unflattering) sexuality, in metaphor if not in fact. Coogan's reminder at the book's end that modern application of biblical texts requires interpretation and nuance is a welcome corrective to selective, literalist use.

Review: This was another one I got from the library the other day. The new non-fiction shelf had so much interesting-looking stuff! I could have gone home with a whole bag full of books just from that section, but new books are only two-week loans, so I limited it to just three. Anyway, this one stood out because of the title, and also because it has a faux-leather Bible-esque cover, so it caught my eye right away.

I have been interested in reading books about the Bible and about Christianity lately. I have a lot of issues around the Bible due to my mom, and for a long time even just thinking about reading about the Bible or Christianity was enough to stress me out and make me feel really anxious, but I think I'm starting to get to a place where I can deal?

Anyway, I enjoyed this book. It was a pretty quick, easy read, and looked at various topics related to sex and gender, including homosexuality, marriage, abortion, divorce, etc. As the Amazon summary notes, he doesn't handpick verses to hold up one view or another, but lays out all the verses related to each topic, acknowledging contradictions and such. (I also found it interesting because a lot of liberal Christians are all about how Jesus wouldn't be down with this or that judginess, but Jesus was pretty damn judgey himself, sometimes even more so than the Old Testament.)

Title: Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare
Author: Dorothy Roberts
Number of Pages: 341 pages
Book Number/Goal: 4/50 for 2010
My Rating: 5/5

This is an excellent analysis of the US child welfare system and how ridiculously broken it is. While the general view of foster care is that children are only taken from their families when they are abused or grossly neglected, the truth is that many children (especially black children) are taken from their families for no reason other than that they are poor.

And because regardless of how true it is for individual cases, as a whole, biological parents are coded as black and foster parents are coded as white, so the government is willing to spend tons of money on foster parents (for example, in California, not only foster parents, but also parents who adopt through the state get paid monthly for each child until they turn eighteen, plus the children can go to any UC or Cal State school for free), but is unwilling to instead spend that money on helping poor families so that their kids aren't taken from them in the first place simply because they had too small an apartment or couldn't afford a babysitter or had no food in the house or were homeless.

The book lays out how the current system ends up harming not just children by taking them away (often unnecessarily) from their families but the black community in general, and the unconsious racism that drives the decisions to favor placing children in foster care and terminating parental rights rather than working to keep families together.


Mooch from BookMooch.

Title: I Am America (And So Can You!)
Author: Stephen Colbert
Number of Pages: 228 pages
Book Number/Goal: 2/50 for 2010
My Rating: 5/5

It's Stephen Colbert! In book form! This is totally hilarious and I especially loved his margin notes, which often answer questions in the main body of text or give a summary of a paragraph or just otherwise comment on stuff.

Title: Rabbit-Proof Fence
Author: Doris Pilkington
Number of Pages: 137 pages
Book Number/Goal: 63/75 for 2009
My Rating: 4/5

This is the true story of how three girls, Molly, Daisy, and Gracie, escaped from a residential school designed to turn half-white Aboriginal children into servants for white families and walked 1600 km back to their home.

It's a good story and I enjoyed learning more about Australian history, but I found the writing style sort of hard to get into. It's neither a novel nor a straight historical account, but a mix of both, and that didn't really work for me. There would be bits written in a very fictional tone, including thoughts from characters the author couldn't have known the thoughts of, and then you'd hit a big section with excerpts of historical documents, complete with citations.

Still, I enjoyed it (and it helped that it was quite short) and would definitely recommend it.

I'm curious to see the movie and see how it compares with the book.

Title: Transgender History
Author: Susan Stryker
Number of Pages: 190 pages
Book Number/Goal: 59/75 for 2009
My Rating: 3.5/5

A better title for the book would be Transgender History in the US, as there's barely any acknowledgement that other countries exist, much less that there might be trans people living there. It's also really short. The last forty pages are notes and such, and the first thirty are defining terms, so only 120 pages are actually devoted to the topic at hand. But for what it is, it's a pretty good read. While focusing primarily on white trans people, it does include PoC fairly often and acknowledges their contributions (which is frankly better than I expected when I saw it was published by the now infamous Seal Press).