- Rising from the Ashes: Los Angeles, 1992 by Paula Yoon, 2024. Nonfiction, marketed as YA but reads like adult nonfiction with meticulous detail and sourcing. I remember the Rodney King case and protests, but barely, as I was absorbed with the final semester of college and graduation, no regular TV exposure. The additional context of LA’s Korean community and the Latasha Harlins case was unfamiliar. This book treats every person with respect and explains complex background and contributing factors, with lots of quotes and photos from then and now.
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The Pushcart Prize XLIX: Best of the Small Presses, 2025 Edition. When I was a teenager in the 1980s I used to check out the Pushcart Prize volumes from the public library. I don’t think my library carried any of the small-press and literary magazines the poems and stories came from. All I knew was there was some weird shit in there and it wasn’t like reading other books and magazines. Friends, it is still good, and still gives me a feeling of something unfiltered coming from the minds of individual people that is a balm right now. I thought I would skip a lot more than I have.
- The Country of the Blind, by Andrew Leland, 2023, audiobook read by the author. I’m not very far in this one, although I think I previously read an excerpt I haven’t gotten to yet, about his training at Colorado Center for the Blind. Leland has retinitis pigmentosa and learned as a teenager that his sight would deteriorate drastically over the coming decades. I’m sometimes iffy on memoirs that alternate the author’s experience with related instructional anecdotes about people in other times and places, but so far this one’s working for me.
- Memory, by Lois McMaster Bujold, 1996. Sanguinity is reading this to me, usually while I’m cooking or preparing to cook. I like this one– mystery is a better genre for me than military SF. I enjoy Ivan, Illyan, and Galeni, and there’s even a few look-ins from Cordelia.
books
Mishka
Refugees and asylum-seekers are on my mind, of course, and therefore so is one of my five favorite books read in 2024– Mishka, by Anoush Elman and Edward van de Vendel, illustrated by Annet Schaap, translated from the Dutch by Nancy Forest-Flier.
I thought when I requested it from the library that it would be a picture book, but it’s a chapter book. 160 pages.
I love it for the bizarre details of rabbit ownership. I love it for Roya’s family of six (plus Mishka) and how they share and compete over the rabbit and how they take care of each other. I love how the book reveals bit by bit, in little asides almost, what a long journey it was (it took years, pre-Mishka) to go from their home country, to transitional, temporary homes, to their new home-for-keeps. Weirdly, I love it for Roya’s breakdown at school, because her teacher loves her, and her class understands what’s important.
Highly recommend this book and a browse through other titles at Levine Querido, which is dedicated to diverse kidlit.