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Ok, this is it. I had to read Moby Dick for my grad school comps way back in 1992, and there were so many books on the list that I only had time to read a handful of key chapters from this. I loved it then and meant to pick up it and read it all the way through when I had time. And I guess it’s taken 30 years, and Hester Blum’s new edition, for me to do that. So far so good, excited to just read it slowly and enjoy all its capaciousness. Fingers crossed!

Back to the grungy drug addled Glasgow of her early books, but this time with sex workers and finding and making family. I love the way Mina’s characters make families for themselves, and I love the care she takes here in portraying sex workers as fully fledged people. I did not love the bits of having to see through the killer’s eyes—that misogyny was hard to be dunked into, even though it was the point. It’s a brutal world, like most Mina, but, as is also true with most Mina, the characters make their own escapes and communities.

@ryanstraight@books.theunseen.city I only got halfway through this before my book club met, but I really liked it! I should probably finish reading it

@loppear@bookwyrm.social I’m rereading her book on feminist theory right now and have this one on my tbr pile. She’s just remarkable in her talents and vision!!

I remembered I love Denise Mina and that I’d saved this for a rainy day. Thanks, past me!

This was a great little book, packed full of love for books and bookstores and authors (of course) but also full of angst about incarceration and love and anger about indigenous history and what it means when we lose our connections to community and fail to accept the full circles of who we are. Comes with handy book lists in the back!

Audiobooks might be the perfect way to encounter new translations of epics, bro

It’s an Agatha Christie classic, what’s not to love? My mistake in using the audiobook as a bedtime story, thereby missing big chunks of it, but given that I’ve read this a gazillion times, it didn’t really diminish its joys.

“Enjoy” isn’t quite the right word for a read that’s about something as nuanced and anguished as this is, but it’s also apt. I lingered over it and zoomed through it. It’s generous and devastating, sympathetic to the awful positions poor people find themselves in to get by and to the ways it warps who they are, and devastating in how it depicts the violence directed at everyone—women and the land, especially, but also the men who are used up without regard to turn profits for the company.

Rereading in preparation for teaching the next Feminist Bibliography course

Actually started this yesterday, finding it funnier than I had anticipated? Anyway, optimistic that I will like this.

I loved this. The long intertwining histories, the people and communities, the unfolding of what it is to study history and how the past is allowed to be shaped. Not to mention the language! Deeply glad I read this, will be thinking on it.