all books all the time

Spared Angola: Memories from a Cuban-American Childhood - Virgil Suarez. Rather patchy collection of essays & poetry about Suarez's life being moved from Cuba to the US as a child to be “spared Angola”--a conflict described succinctly multiple times only as “Cuba's Vietnam.” Now, I realize that my historical ignorance of this is totally my fault. At the same time, if Angola was important enough to spur his family's move from Cuba, & thus to lend itself to the title of this book, I expected a bit more detail on how it was affecting other Cuban families or what might've been going on.

Rethinking Tourism and Ecotravel - Deborah McLaren. This is the kind of academic book that spawns a “no duh” reaction from me, as the arguments against tourism as a beneficial mechanism of development are ones that seem patently obvious to me. At first I felt like McLaren was making statements about the harms of tourism without enough examples to back them up, but once she finally decided to get specific, the book got more compelling. This would probably be a good text for someone who'd never really thought about these issues before, though I still found it a bit timid at times in terms of its condemnation of tourism & its willingness (or lack of, I guess) to even entertain the cessation of tourism as a potential option.

At Grave's End - Jeaniene Frost. This third book in the Night Huntress (ugh, what a name) series about half-vampire vampire hunter Cat Crawfield was much better than the second. I disliked immensely the graphic torture bits, though, & find it disturbing that, as in many vampire novels, the vamps have a violent retribution-based code of justice that seems to be aimed at simultaneously raising the disgust & the grudging admiration of the reader. Also, I thought Frost was going to be much bolder in terms of killing off a major character, but she wimps out, & the book is less interesting for it.

Thanking the Monkey: Rethinking the Way We Treat Animals - Karen Dawn. ( Read more... )

The James Tiptree Award Anthology 3 - Edited by Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Murphy, Debbie Notkin, and Jeffrey D. Smith. ( Read more... )

Halfway to the Grave - Jeaniene Frost. ( Read more... )

Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing - Edited by Delia Sherman & Theodora Goss. ( Read more... )