Tootfinder

Day 16: Mayra Cuevas & Marie Marquardt
Okay so this is cheating, but they're co-authors of multiple books together, and there's no way for me to separate their contributions... I've already got too many authors I'd like to list, so why not?
I read their book "Does My Body Offend You?" and absolutely loved it; it's a celebration of teen activism while also being a deep exploration of feminist issues through practical situations that bring out the complicated side of things, which the authors refuse to reduce back to a simple formulaic answer. It has a supporting cast of appropriately-complex male characters that help in exploring the nuances of issues like the line between female empowerment & male gratification, and it brings race and macho culture into the conversion as well.
CW for sexual harassment & deep discussion of the resultant trauma.
I'll cheat again here to sneak in mention of two male authors whose work resonates with theirs: Mark Oshiro's "Anger is a Gift" has a more pessimistic/complex take on teen activism along with a gay romance (CW for racist cop murder), while Jeremy Whitley's graphic novel "Navigating With You" deals with queer romance & disability, while having a main character pairing that echoes those from "Does My Body Offend You?" in a lot of ways. Another connection (to non-men authors this time) is with "Go With the Flow" by Lily Williams and Karen Schneemann. Their graphic novel about teen activism and periods is a bit more didactic and has a much lighter tone, but it does necessarily have some overlapping themes.
To bring it back to Cuevas & Marquhardt, their writing is great and their ability to discuss such complex topics with such nuance, all wrapped up in a story that feels completely natural, is amazing to me, and makes their book feel like one of the most valuable to recommend to others.
In writing this I've realized a grave oversight in the list so far that I'll have to correct tomorrow, but I'm quickly running out of days. The didn't-quite-make-it list is going to be full of more excellent authors, and I'm honestly starting to wonder whether it might actually be harder to name 20 male authors I respect now that I've found the sense to be mostly somewhere between disgusted and disappointed with so many of the male authors I enjoyed as a teen.
#20AuthorsNoMen (cheating a bit)

This summer, Mikhail Loshchinin set out for Russia on a motorcycle with German plates, reaching the border in Latvia on July 1.
At the Ubylinka checkpoint on the Russian side, he presented his Russian passport.
According to his mother, Olga, he didn’t use his Belgian passport because of the urgency of the trip and to avoid needing a visa.
Russian border guards examined Loshchinin’s phone and likely discovered his many contacts in Ukraine.
After holding him for several…

Belgian-Russian dual citizen charged with treason after trying to visit father in St. Petersburg following a heart attack
A 48-year-old man with dual Russian and Belgian citizenship has been charged with treason in Russia following an attempt to visit his father, who recently suffered a heart attack. Mikhail Loshchinin’s family is scattered across Europe. He has lived in Germany for the past several years, working as a database administrator in Luxembourg. His mother is in Poland, his father is in St. Petersburg, and his sister is a Ukrainian citizen. Mikhail also has many friends in Ukraine, i…

Challenge: "Name 20 female authors you admire, 1 per day"
Day 11:
Lisa Moore
I discovered this Canadian author via the Edinburgh Book Festival - what a find. I loved her novel "Alligator" - it's on my shelf for favourite books.
#FemmeÉcrivain

"...the scams perpetrated during the Corbyn period by Labour Together, CCDH and its sock-puppet ‘Stop Funding Fake News’ (SFFN) to topple Corbyn and install Starmer in his stead, have led directly to the burgeoning police state Starmer is building against the people of this country, their rights and their freedoms, all to protect Israel and its interests."
Starmer's attempt to destroy Corbyn reaches US

Starmer's Corbyn smear accusations FINALLY go global with US coverage
Starmer's attempt to bring down Corbyn was notably investigated in The Fraud - which is now making its way over to American audiences

by accident i stumbled on this review by the #NSA on Bruce Schneiers "Applied Crypto" book from long ago.

I remember Cal Berkeley in 1984 when I was trying to park my car somewhere within hoofing distance of campus so I could take a final exam. I drove around the campus perimeter twice trying to find a spot. No parking space was to be found. But I did find an old woodie station wagon parked snap dab in the middle of two parking spaces. A bumper sticker on it read, "Visualize World Peace." I got out of my car long enough to leave a note on the windshield: "Visualize not taking up t…

One of the great shames of my software career is that I have not once but •twice• been a part of a project where I found out only after I was off the project that a male manager or client had been just absolutely, utterly •wretched• to a female teammate.
In both cases, it happened out of my sight. I had no idea what was going on.
I still think to this day about my obliviousness: how I could have found out sooner, what warning signs I missed, what I could have done to stick up for my female colleagues.
1/ https://toot.cafe/@baldur/115570002490755386

Front yard garden as we head into Australian summer. Those beans on the right are 4 metres tall. Tromboncino battling it out with grapes for the pagola that shades all the east side of the house - green air conditioning for the summer. Tomatoes, capsicums, eggplants ripening, cucumbers to give away, snake beans coming on, carrots & fennel flowering to feed nectar to the ladybugs & make seed, so many geen beans I'm leaving some to mature. Onions & garlic nearly ready. Still p…

Just finished "Twice as Perfect" by Louise Onomé. This is now the third novel I've read by her about a teenage Nigerian-Canadian second-generation immigrant, two of whom deal with some form of family estrangement ("Like Home" and "The Melancholy of Summer" are the other two). I checked it out because I liked her other novels and was not disappointed; in fact I feel like this is her best novel of the three. Dealing with cultural appropriation, both implicitly and explicitly, along with deep family trauma and a bit of romance, "Twice as Perfect" is suspenseful, wise, and heartfelt. It's got a thread of Nigerian Pidgin in it, which I thoroughly enjoyed although I didn't 100% understand, similar in some ways to the sprinkling of Spanish in "Each of Us a Desert", but with even less of an attempt to subtly explain each instance in English, which I don't mind at all.
The 2nd generation immigrant authors writing YA ~romances I've read recently have all been great, including Adiba Jaigirdar, Samira Ahmed, Sabina Khan, and Randa Abdel-Fattah (a slightly different era), and to a lesser extent Romina Garber (I didn't like "Lobizona" quite as much as stuff by these others). It's been super interesting to contrast their stories with those of people like Mark Oshiro, Angie Thomas, Randi Pink, and Angela Velez who talk about American racism from a non-immigrant perspective (perhaps Ahmed is in between the two groups).
#AmReading #ReadingNow

Just finished "Beasts Made of Night" by Tochi Onyebuchi...
Indirect CW for fantasy police state violence.
So I very much enjoyed Onyebuchi's "Riot Baby," and when I grabbed this at the library, I was certain it would be excellent. But having finished it, I'm not sure I like it that much overall?
The first maybe third is excellent, including the world-building, which is fascinating. I feel like Onyebuchi must have played "Shadow of the Colossus" at some point. Onyebuchi certainly does know how to make me care for his characters.
Some spoilers from here on out...
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I felt like it stumbles towards the middle, with Bo's reactions neither making sense in the immediate context, nor in retrospect by the end when we've learned more. Things are a bit floaty in the middle with an unclear picture of what exactly is going on politics-wise and what the motivations are. Here I think there were some nuances that didn't make it to the page, or perhaps I'm just a bit thick and not getting stuff I should be? More is of course revealed by the end, but I still wasn't satisfied with the explanations of things. For example, (spoilers) I don't feel I understand clearly what kind of power the army of aki was supposed to represent within the city? Perhaps necessary to wield the threat of offensive inisisia use? In that case, a single scene somewhere of Izu's faction deploying that tactic would have been helpful I think.
Then towards the end, for me things really started to jumble, with unclear motivations, revelations that didn't feel well-paced or -structured, and a finale where both the action & collapsing concerns felt stilted and disjointed. Particularly the mechanics/ethics of the most important death that set the finale in motion bothered me, and the unexplained mechanism by which that led to what came next? I can read a couple of possible interesting morals into the whole denouement, but didn't feel that any of them were sufficiently explored. Especially if we're supposed to see some personal failing in the protagonist's actions, I don't think it's made clear enough what that is, since I feel his reasons to reject each faction are pretty solid, and if we're meant to either pity or abjure his indecision, I don't think the message lands clearly enough.
There *is* a sequel, which honestly I wasn't sure of after the last page, and which I now very interested in. Beasts is Onyebuchi's debut, which maybe makes sense of me feeling that Riot Baby didn't have the same plotting issues. It also maybe means that Onyebuchi couldn't be sure a sequel would make it to publication in terms of setting up the ending.
Overall I really enjoyed at least 80% of this, but was expecting even better (especially politically) given Onyebuchi's other work, and I didn't feel like I found it.
#AmReading