March 20 through March 27 is the Trans Rights Readathon on all the social media platforms. I am participating and next week’s Recap will be focused exclusively on books by and about trans people. If you can, I encourage you to join in by posting about the readathon or promoting other people who are.
Anti-trans legislation is sweeping the nation and our trans friends and neighbors are under attack in the public and private square on a daily basis. It’s been incredible to see how quickly, thoroughly, and joyfully TikTok has taken up Simkern’s call for the Trans Rights Readathon. I hope you will join in whatever way you can.
On Repeat
I’m a sucker for a good music video1. And “Be Sweet” by Japanese Breakfast is just the right kind of silly and fun that makes a music video click for me. I also am a huge X-Files nerd, so this was a nice confluence of interests. The song is great, too.
Finished This Week
The Great Escape2 by Saket Soni
I just finished this book a few hours before the publication of this weekly recap and I was floored by how good this book was. Full disclosure, the publisher sent me an ARC (which I basically didn’t read, just made it through the first three chapters). I missed the publication date and thought this would just be one that got away when I saw it in a bookstore and decided to pick up a physical copy. This book (and my on-going Kim Harrison reading) crowded out everything else this week — I couldn’t put it down.
Except a TikTok on this book sometime in the next few days. The short story is that this book covers an on the ground labor organizer’s perspective on a basically unknown human trafficking scheme that went down in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Several hundred Indian men were defrauded and coerced to come to the United States with false promises of green cards and then shuffled into forced labor camps in Texas and Mississippi to work on oil rigs.
The conditions of the camps were squalid, recalling WWI trenches more than anything else. These immigrants had staked family savings and their livelihoods on the false promises of greedy American men just trying to save a buck before their company went IPO.
We follow the author, Saket Soni, a labor organizer at the time, as he learns about this mess and tries to help and empower the men to organize and fight back. There is a thrilling night time escape, labor actions, internal strife and betrayal, and a bittersweet ending. I really highly recommend this book.
Still Reading
Frankenstein: The 1818 Text by Mary Shelley
No progress at all on Shelley this week. Will pick this back up in the last week of March.
Every Which Way but Dead by Kim Harrison
I’m about two-thirds of the way through Every Which Way but Dead, and it continues to be much stronger than the first two Hollows books. It’s definitely taking its time, which seems to be a very common theme for Harrison (with basically all of her books clocking in at around 500-550 paperback pages). But she’s much more seamlessly weaving together the stories within the plot and is showing a pretty deft hand with complex character interactions.
Rachel’s most recent struggles with love and sex are also fascinating and pretty damn spicy. There was a pretty spicy sex scene in book two, but not nearly as intimate and intense as the vamped up on in this book and while there was no sex scene in book one, there is a very intense interaction between Rachel and Ivy that definitely would get someone hot under the collar. Every Which Way but Dead tops all of them, but not in a needless or thoughtless way. I guess I’m withholding spoilers on a nearly 20 year book for some reason, so I won’t get into the who/what/where of it.
At around the two-thirds points, we just are coming off the some big relationship-impacting events when we smash into a cliffhanger chapter ending that clearly is setting up the final climax (no pun intended, I think). I’m excited to return to this in late March and continue with the series.
In fact, in the second of two podcasts that I co-hosted a long, long time ago, we dedicated several episodes to discussing music videos. Was it tricky to do an audio podcast about mostly visual works and ultimately perhaps ill conceived. Well, that podcast no longer exists, so you tell me.
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