We Should All Be Feminists.. and other July reads

Note: None of the below pictured books have been read. None of them are the additions to my July list. Not a single one.

A fraction of what I have on my physical & written queue

There's been rather an influx of books on my bookshelf these past number of months. Some come on recommendation & on loan from friends - Roadside Picnic, After Dark, and The Virgin Blue - but most of these are pretty recent purchases, both new and used. I splurged on the Natsume Soseki & Osamu Dazai section to the left, but everything from A Little Book of Language, excepting the three mentioned above, are from used bookstores and donations to the library. I'm actually more than a little excited to read these - essays on the secondary colours? I'm game! Too bad they didn't have the first collection of essays on primary colours though. An entire book about laughter? YES! On romantic mythology? Jung? Sartre? All down my alley. And of course, an entire book dedicated to exploring those imaginary existences such as the Tooth Fairy and Santa Clause didn't stand a chance of getting left behind by me - but the sheer volume of these pages is starting to weigh down on me (and perhaps more importantly my bookshelf, poor thing). The good news is that I'm reading, though! The bad news, of course, is that what I am reading these days consist entirely of library material (I have discovered Overdrive, through which I can borrow e-materials via my library. While it's not ideal, as I already spend more than enough hours staring at a screen, occasions where I would sit in front of a computer doing not much else anyway have been cropping up more and more frequently - and will likely continue to do so - so I may as well do something more productive with that time. I've also been searching up residencies and calls for applications, in addition to briefly glancing at masters programs for library studies.)

On the topic of library books, I have a couple more to add to the July list of reads:

1. We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Please read this! It's a short essay and not in the least intimidating (as I instinctively think when I think "feminist text"), being in fact very approachable.
2. Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)
3. Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli
• Almost too brief for me. I'd like to point you towards this interactive website supplement to the book though!
4. Naked Statistics by Charles Wheelan
• "All else equal, it's better not to be a low-status baboon, which is a point I try to make to my children as often as possible, particularly my son" (Wheelan 207). Why particularly your son and not your daughter also? I admit I didn't read this book in-depth because pretty much of all of it was a review for me (I took stats for psychology and only just wrote my thesis this year, so it's still relatively fresh), but unless there was something about job strain being more of an issue for males that I happened to have missed out on, I don't see why not tell that to the daughter also.
• More probable real-life examples would have made the book better - it would have made it easier to see how stats can be, and is, applied in the real world - than using some of the fantastical examples (the missing bus the only one I can think of right now) that were in fact used. If I didn't have any interest in stats and was willing to give it a chance through this book, this one time, I would probably come away from it very far from enamoured.

And this just today, to start August off.

1. Animal Wise by Virginia Morell
• The tiny parrotlets' chattering as conversation sounds delightful! And I think it's absolutely wonderful that it's beyond our comprehension, which is not to say we should stop studying it or keep ignorant so much as that despite how intelligent we believe ourselves to be as humans, so much of the rest of the natural world eludes our understanding.
• Also, fish feel pain, especially around the mouth area. Have fun fishing!