I'm a huge nerd about STORYTELLING, especially MYTHOLOGY and FAIRY TALES.
I also run Artist Expose
And the simple fact of the matter is, if you are a female author, you are much more likely to get the package that suggests the book is of a lower perceived quality. Because it’s “girly,” which is somehow inherently different and easier on the palate. A man and a woman can write books about the same subject matter, at the same level of quality, and that woman is simple more likely to get the soft-sell cover with the warm glow and the feeling of smooth jazz blowing off of it.
but omg yeah literary academia’s detachment from the day-to-day realities of life drives me up the proverbial wall - particularly at a secondary school/high school level. bc i think growing up it’s very easy to feel a sense of isolation/being the only person who is having x experience/enduring y emotion, in essence feeling ~different~ to whatever is considered the norm (tho i don’t mean “difference” in the paul dano’s character in little miss sunshine kinda way; yt boy pls) and having the right literature fall into your hands at that age can be v reassuring and formative. so like, handing out idk dickens or bronte (and admittedly at age fourteen, i did find bronte kinda formative! but not to the same extent as i would have probably found say, junot diaz) to kids who are poor or poc or struggling w/their sexuality/gender or all of those things combined, giving them these texts which are in a lot of ways so removed from their lives is just like ????? maybe i am being melodramatic/projecting too much based on my own experiences but it just seems to invalidate the capacity literature has i think to reach out and affect people, even if its in the relatively small way of saying “it’s okay, i have been where you are, and it’s gonna turn out okay”. (especially if these same kids don’t have easy access to books outside what their schools give them). idk i just rly want to see greater diversity in literary curriculums in my lifetime/will probably end up working towards it myself despite my promising career as a cool, yung scholar of women’s romantic fiction iDK
Does anyone else hesitate to reread your favorite childhood books out of fear that they won’t be as absolutely amazing as you remember them?
All of the books are in MOBI or AZW format for Kindle. If you want to convert the files to PDF or ePub I recommend Calibre or online-converter. If you have any problems with downloads or formatting please let me know and I will fix it asap.
- Myths of Gender by Anne Fausto-Sterling [X]
- The Second Shift by Arlie Hochschild [X]
- Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich [X]
- Feminism Is For Everybody by bell hooks [X]
- The Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills [X]
- Dude, You’re A Fag by C.J. Pascoe [X]
- Sociology and Modern Social Problems by Charles A. Ellwood [X]
- The Goffman Reader by Charles Lemert [X]
- The Cambridge Companion To Simone de Beauvoir by Claudia Card [X]
- Genders by David Glover [X]
- Cultural Geography by David Sibley [X]
- Critical Theory After Habermas by Dieter Freunlieb [X]
- Punishment For Sale by Donna Delman [X]
- Everything Is Obvious by Duncan J. Watts [X]
- Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch by Dwight A. McBride [X]
- Encyclopedia of Sociology by Edgar F. Borgatta [X]
- Bodily Citations by Ellen Armour [X]
- Suicide by Emile Durkheim [X]
- The Rules of the Sociological Method by Emile Durkheim [X]
- Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser [X]
- Handbook of Social Theory by George Ritzer [X]
- The Blackwell Companion To Major Classical Social Theorists by George Ritzer [X]
- Between XX and XY by Gerald N. Callahan [X]
- How To Observe Morals and Manners by Harriet Martineau [X]
- Habermas and Contemporary Society by John F. Sitton [X]
- Critical Pedagogy For Social Justice by John Smyth [X]
- The Power of Labeling by Joy Moncrieffe [X]
- Gendered Lives by Julia T. Wood [X]
- Gender Trouble by Judith Butler [X]
- Undoing Gender by Judith Butler [X]
- The Spirit Level by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson [X]
- The Myth of Choice by Kent Greenfield [X]
- Essentials of Social Research by Linda Kalof [X]
- Food Politics by Marion Nestle [X]
- The Digital Divide by Mark Bauerlein [X]
- The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber [X]
- Sister Citizen by Melissa Harris-Perry [X]
- Brandwashed by Martin Lindstrom [X]
- August Comte by Mike Gane [X]
- The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf [X]
- Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire [X]
- The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo [X]
- The Sociology of Culture and Cultural Studies by Pierre Bourdieu [X]
- Drift by Rachel Maddow [X]
- The Marx & Engels Reader by Robert C. Tucker [X]
- Let Them Eat Junk by Robert Albritton [X]
- Consumer Culture by Roberta Sassatelli [X]
- The Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu by Simon Susen [X]
- Gang Leader For A Day by Sudhir Venkatesh [X]
- Quiet by Susan Cain [X]
- From Marriage To the Market by Susan Thistle [X]
- The Cambridge Companion to Marx by Terrell Carver [X]
- Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen [X]
- White Like Me by Tim Wise [X]
- Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness by Toure [X]
- Building A Housewife’s Paradise by Tracey Deutsch [X]
- The Other Wes Moore by Wes Moore [X]
Books to read for leisure or if you’re trying to figure what you should study/major in
I wish this came up on my dash before I rushed off to buy Rachel Maddows book. Not that I don’t love supporting her but I could have used that money to get books I would use in grad school..
that said here are some of the things i love about ya lit
- it provides safe spaces for the validation of emotions often dismissed because of the category of people expressing them
- like oh whatever she’s just an angsty teenager
- i mean fuck you
- it has a lot to work on w/r/t diversity but it’s also a) significantly more genuinely inclusive and progressive than adult lit and b) literally the only genre aside from romance that’s dominated by books about and for girls
- the fantasies of teenage girls who want to have it all are way more ground-breaking and important than the fantasies of middle aged white men who already do
- it explicitly rejects and reconstructs the oppressive adult ~real world that we are taught to view as normal and inevitable
- it’s allowed to be hopeful and earnest where adult lit feels obliged towards boring cynicism
- you will almost never read a ya book with the theme hrm hrmm i guess it’s all useless what can we do but grow cruel and die
“Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn’t carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.”
-Stephen King
From riumplus:
This is a project I’ve been working on for six years - a replica linking book from the video game Myst.
Inside the book is a full desktop computer, completely self-contained without any external wires or hardware. In the above photo, the embedded screen isn’t just showing a still photo or a video: it’s running a full copy of real Myst PC edition. On board is a copy of all the Myst games. It’s fast enough it plays all of them smoothly (even End of Ages at ~30fps). You play the games by touching the touch-screen.
Holy shit.
