We are not blogging much are we?

I’ve read three excellent books this year.

Amy Littlefield’s first book, Killers of Roe, knocked my socks off. I thought her murder mystery on how Abortion Rights were killed read like early Thomas Frank and Sarah Vowell (in all the best ways!) and I thought I knew what it would be before I read it and I was wrong. Littlefield is sharp, but also funny and generous. After I turned the page, I immediately thought to myself that I can’t wait for her next book.

I read Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih and, while I liked it, I have less to say about it. It’s short and haunting and made me think a lot about popular Islam, something I had not really considered before. There’s this great vulgar conversation in the book between the character’s grandfather and a bunch of the grandfather’s friends, including a woman. It’s such a funny scene that I could not possibly do justice to describe, but it is so far removed from the racist way that Islam and Muslim women are portrayed in the United States.

I just finished Henry Snow’s Control Science: How Management Made the Modern World. It’s such a smart book, how the architecture of our working world, shifts and managers and wages and all that mishegaas are rooted and were first prototyped and developed in the colony, the Victorian workhouse, slavery, et al. Snow trods some familiar territory, but also has some new histories. It doesn’t just happen, it wasn’t always this way, why is it this way? How many times have we had those thoughts and asked ourselves that question at a shitty job. This is a book that everyone who works for a living should read.