By Any Other Nerd

The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist by Marcus Rediker My rating: 4 of 5 stars Lay was a man who lived in the late 1600s and 1700s. Born in England, he was a small person who also dealt with kyphosis, an illness that curves the back. He lived as a shepherd for a while and eventually lived as a sailor for about a decade before returning to England. Upon returning, he joins with his local Quaker community and he starts to call out the Quaker leadership for their hypocrisies. He spends much of the rest of his life, getting kicked out of Quaker communities for speaking his mind and increasingly, calling out Quaker leadership for owning and profiting from slavery both in England and in Pennsylvania. He even publishes a book through Benjamin Franklin's press, All slave-keepers that keep the innocent in bondage (yes, you can even read it today). He was a vegetarian and performed guerilla theatre st...

The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel My rating: 4 of 5 stars In this memoir of body, mind, and relationships, Bechdel explores how she's come to better understand herself and her close relationships through her pursuit of physical excellence. The narrative moves chronologically through the decades of her life and is filled with a mixture of general themes and specific scenes that often focus on her latest physical pursuit, recent relationship challenges with parents or partners, her coping mechanisms, and increasingly unhealthy work habits. Interspersed, Bechdel calls upon a mixture of Buddhist writings, Enlightenment poets (Wordsworth & Coleridge), Transcendental thinkers (Emerson and Fuller), and Beat poets (namely, Kerouac) to frame and connect her own narrative as well as highlight the intellectual giants who have guided her in this deep reflection of her life. In many ways, Bechdel outdoes her previous accomplishment (Fun Home) a...

Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts by Rebecca Hall My rating: 5 of 5 stars Hall's historical exploration of women-led slave revolts is reminiscent of Maus by Art Spiegelman in its storytelling and some of its visual layering. It's an amazing work that ingeniously melds together the story of the history, Hall's story, and the actual history that she aims to cover.  As a Black, lesbian, mother who gave up her work as a lawyer to pursue a Ph.D. in history, Hall takes readers through the practices of historians as she dives deep into archives in the United States and England to unpack the history, the historiography, and the lapses in understanding by a field dominated by white men that made them blind to the fact that there were, in fact, numerous slave-revolts in the Americas and on the slave-ships in the Middle Passage that were led by women.  That mixture of storytelling itself is enough to warrant attention and to see how the...

Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels by David A. Beronä My rating: 4 of 5 stars Beronä explores the world of wordless books from the early and mid-20th century. These wood-cut novels (and other types of wordless visual stories) were a phenomenon within storytelling that seemed to operate in parallel to art movements and the development of comics.  Beronä's effort here is to provide a preliminary history of their emergence and the most well-know creators such as Frans Masereel, Lynd Ward, Otto Nuckel, Giacomo Patri and Laurence Hyde. The book does not necessarily have a critical through the line but sits more as an introductory exploration into the creators and the works. Besides the introduction and the conclusion, each chapter explores a particular creator and some of their works. The essays are brief biographies of the authors and some detail and complexity about the nature of the works being discussed.  Much of the book is dedicated to excerpts (ind...

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes Welcome to  stranger days--my blog series  exploring daily life, challenges in times of the COVID-19 pandemic, and just sharing insights or thoughts about how to make it through these days.   Ok, so this is day 3 in a row of being on a "let's explore my library" kick. I can't promise it will be the last but I do hope you're enjoying it.  So we delved into the Mysteries of the Motel on Tuesday, and then on Wednesday, we got into looking at Fransisco De Goya .  Today, we're looking at Winsor McCay ! He is a fascinating creator from the early 20th century. He's most well known for his amazing and visually stunning comics, but he also played around with film.  He created one of the earlier (and quite fun to watch animated films, Gertie the Dinosaur - 13:51 minutes ).   I knew the second I saw the book that I was going to need to write a post on it and share his work with folks because he's just too good in m...

And we close out the year with another great selection of readings that I'm hoping some of you will get the opportunity to read.  I'll be doing a 2018 year in books post shortly so I won't go much into the "year-end" retrospective, but I certainly did end with a mad flurry of reading, once my semester ended (Between December 19th and December 31, I read/listened to 12 books).  So let's take a look at the ones that grabbed my fancy enough to talk about.   Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism  by  Derrick A. Bell Bell uses allegoric storytelling to explore the legal, cultural, and philosophical racial underpinnings of American white culture and its impact on black identity and methods of surviving in this hostile racialize structure. His approach in many ways reminds me of the philosophical dialogues that we see in the works of Plato and the like. They are sometimes clear and simple settings and other times fantastical, but with each,...

As you'll see, I got into reviewing books this month a bit more.  I have several reasons as to why.  The first is that books are conversations and after reading one, I sometimes have a lot to say in return.  The second is that I've been getting more requests from friends and readers to hear more about what I think about certain books and so I'm happy to indulge in some reflecting.  The third is just that I find I retain more (that reflecting thing) when I write a bit about what I read and what resonated (or didn't) with my reading.  Finally, it gives me something to put on the blog, right?   In other news, I broke my 200 book goal for reading in 2018 and at the time of writing this (the last week in November), I'm at 210.  I have a forthcoming post about reading practices that may highlight some of this.  As I close in on December though, I'm hoping that I achieving my other reading goal of the year which is to read at least 24 physical boo...

Well, I may not have gotten to as many physical books as I wanted (I'm almost done with one--does that count--also, it's 700+ pages, so it's slowing my average--hahaha), but I definitely reviewed a lot more books this month, finding that if I write up the reviews right after listening, I've got a lot to say (no surprise there, right?).  It's another month of fascinating reads and I invite you to try some of these great books! Powers of Darkness: The Lost Version of Dracula  by  Bram Stoker Shortly after the original Dracula was published, it was translated and published in Iceland. However, this version is a significantly different version of Dracula than what readers are familiar with. This version focuses about two-thirds of its time on Thomas Harker (as opposed to Jonathan in Stoker's original novel) and his time spent traveling to and in Dracula's castle. Within the castle, readers are exposed to entirely new plot threads that include a seductive fema...