Loftwings and Demons

So, by my calculations, I am now about 55% through Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation by Sunaura Taylor. I can't recall any nonfiction book I've read so quickly and so sequentially. While I've read a number of nonfiction books with rapt attention, it's not my habit to read them cover to cover as I would a novel but rather to skim to parts that seem relevant to my situation or are of particular interest to me. I've also read plenty of nonfiction books that presented ideas I found valuable, but that felt like they were padded with unnecessary additions merely to make them 'book-length'.

But every part of this book felt relevant to the main points Taylor is discussing. She expertly links personal anecdotes, history, and current events with philosophy and activism.  Throughout the book, she touches on a many different ideas and perspectives, showing their connections and similarities as well as their tensions and differences. I wasn't sure what to expect going into this book--while I very much believe that problems in this world  are interlinked in ways that defy neat boxes and categorizations, I also think discussion of those complicated intersections can be difficult.  I worried the book might be full of superficial connections or long meandering narratives that I would struggle to follow, as has been a frequent issue I've encountered with books on topics like this, topics that sounded promising but highly ambitious.

But every piece of this book is deeply connected, both to her central thesis and each other, in a web of incredible intricacy. The philosophy she presents considers a multiplicity of different perspectives both within and outside of the animal rights and disability movements and examines how they intersect or conflict. She tells the story of her own life and the lives of others and each time stops to consider what these stories might tell us and how they might inform our activism.  She patiently lingers on ideas to explore them and consider their many and multifaceted implications.

I'd definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in better understanding disability or animal rights activism.  I also think it's just really well-written?  Anyway it managed to hold my rather fickle attention so I consider that alone impressive.  Tastes and experiences differ greatly, so I'm sure not everyone would get the same things out of this book that I did, but I think there's a lot of value here. As I said, I'm not yet finished with this book, but the first half alone made this text more than worth my time.

Just finished The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson, and this has become one of my favorite stories. Though I will warn that the subject matter touches on some more commonly  triggering material such as domestic violence, physical and emotional abuse, and assault.

It's a scifi story about an Earth where travelling to parallel universes is possible, and there's a huge demand for the information and resources that can be collected this way.  The protagonist, Cara, is a traverser, someone who walks between worlds.  Only similar worlds can be traversed, of which there are a limited number.  And only a select group of people can traverse most of these worlds, because in order to do so, a person has to have already died on that world.  The type of person most likely to have such a dearth of alternate selves in these similar worlds is the type who was born with the deck of life stacked against them. People who are poor, had neglectful or abusive parents, who have people out to kill them, who were likely to develop serious health problems.  And few people have had the deck stacked against them as much as Cara has.

Of the three hundred-some worlds that are known, Cara has died in all but eight of them.

I really love the premise of this story--the idea of parallel universes holds a special appeal to me.  I wouldn't consider this a hard scifi story, though it does throw in the occassional real scientific reference.  There's just not much emphasis or focus on the details of how interdimensional travel fit into current scientific theories.  Still, I also don't think the purpose of this story is to explain how travelling to parallel universes would work, but rather to use parallel universes to explore the idea of 'what if', and this is something I think it does particularly well.

This is a story about the deeply personal, even as it puts society as a whole under a microscope.  It's full of action, high stakes, complex characters(and their multiple iterations), and a few surprising twists.