Barbara McVeigh: Essays

Showing posts with label Essays. Show all posts

Sunday, 11 February 2018

Top 20 Books I Read in 2017

My friend Natalie asked me to create a top ten list of the books I read in 2017. Of course, I have more than ten. So to celebrate this plethora of riches, I present to you my favourite reads of 2017.

Historical Fiction

His Bloody Project: Documents Relating to the Case of Roderick Macrae by Graeme Macrae Burnet
Outlander by Diane Gabaldon

Very different books. Both set in Scotland. There may be a few more Scottish titles on this list. I've been hypnotized by the Edinburgh Book Festival.

I had intended to add book covers and links to all of the books below. But then I'll never get this posted and it's already February. Here goes!

Young Adult

Rodent by Lisa J. Lawrence
Fifteen Lanes by S.J. Laidlaw

Both titles were nominated for the White Pine 2017 awards. Please keep in mind that I'm only listing books which I actually read in 2017. There are a couple of other White Pine 2017 titles that I loved, but I read them in 2016.

Education
Launch: Using Design Thinking to Boost Creativity and Bring Out the Maker in Every Student by John Spencer

Enjoyed meeting up with my Tweeps old and new in the #LaunchBookChat this year!

International
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
Goblin by Ever Dundas

Essays
Nasty Women by 404 Ink
One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter by Scaachi Koul

Nasty Women led the revolution in the year of the great shake up of #MeToo #BlackLivesMatter and #OscarsSoWhite.

Scaachi Koul's acerbic essays hit the funny bone. Clever book jacket design, too.

Non-Fiction
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
Mind blown
The Fact of a Body by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
Finely peeling away the layers of secrets
The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Valazquez by Laura Cumming
Winner of the 2017 James Tait Black Prize for NonFiction, a stunning tale of how art can consume us.

Picture Books
The Tale of Tam Linn by Lari Don
Scottish fairytale. A favourite of my niece's.
Journey by Aaron Becker
Only illustrations. Beautiful ones, at that. Great way for pre-literate or early literate children to tell stories.

Literary Fiction
What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell
Nominated for the 2017 James Tait Black Prize for Fiction
The Last Neanderthal by Claire Cameron
Made me mourn for the extinction of the neanderthal. I want a lip like Girl's. Nominated for the 2017 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.

Mystery
All the Devils by Neil Broadfoot
Broadfoot's writing keeps getting better. Novel is set in Edinburgh. Scotland, yet again!
Glass Houses by Louise Penny
A perennial favourite - it's a good thing that Penny tends to publish a book a year!

Fantasy
A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab
This book was partly written in Edinburgh. And it shows.

Short Stories
The 2017 Short Story Advent Calendar by Hingston & Olsen Publishing
Forget about the chocolate - open a new short story every morning leading up to Christmas. Great being introduced to new writers and chatting with other readers about the tales on Twitter. #ssac2017

Poetry
I tend to read bit and bites of poetry, but what got me hooked on poetry this year like never before was the FutureLearn course, "Literature and Mental Health". Highly recommended.

Other Recommendations
This list from Kirsty Logan who read 220 books. Quite a diverse range of books that puts my list to shame. Enjoy!
http://www.kirstylogan.com/best-books-of-2017/

Wednesday, 13 July 2016

Page 110

In light of recent events, page 110 got me thinking...

And then page 352 came along

The Context

What's Wrong With "All Lives Matter"? (2015)

Baby Storm Five Years Later (2016)

Why you should stop saying "all lives matter," explained in 9 different ways (2016)

LGBTQ activists call for scrapping sex markers on ID cards (2016)

Tuesday, 30 September 2014

Bad Feminist: Essays

Bad Feminist: Essays by Roxane Gay
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I quickly devoured Bad Feminist. Even though Roxanne Gay cites some academic heavyweights, the text is utterly readable. These essays are more personal and political than theoretical, and my favourite topics include:

• the question of privilege
• race
• gender: featuring Judith Butler & Helene Cixous
• humour
• pop culture: Loved her essay about the Hunger Games, “What We Hunger For”
• fairy tales
• misogyny –topics as diverse as Junot Diaz’s “This is How You Lose Her” and Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”

The book won me over at the beginning. When talking about advising and helping students, Gay reports that the students would “generally say, ‘Don’t tell anyone I came to see you.’ It wasn’t that they were embarrassed to get help, most of the time. They were embarrassed to be seen putting effort into their education, to be seen caring” (9-10). A couple of years ago, we had a documentary filmed at our school called, Colour Me. It was about race and education. The students reported that doing well in school wasn’t considered the “black” thing to do. Wow. Together with Roxanne Gay’s observations, I am stunned.

Sometimes I was bothered about the "shape" of the essays. In some cases, I anticipated that I was being led somewhere and found myself left hanging at the end of the text. Maybe a re-read is necessary.

Some mature content and language.

View all my reviews

Video credit:
Barsoum, Sherien. "Colour Me Documentary Film Official Trailer."YouTube. YouTube, 13 May 2011. Web. 30 Sept. 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZzesdSPdeI>.