6. Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, by Gretchen McCulloch (2019)
Fairly entertaining and provided a number of "oh!" moments. Not as systematic as I would have liked it to be, more conversational in its flow and structure. One thing that bugged me, which to be fair is not the focus of the book I found her happy-go-lucky perspective on social media (something like "it's just social interaction, like we've always had, looking a little different from the last generation's social interaction, like always") to be lacking. I would say that social media is unique and mostly unprecedented, and there is some really wild sh*t going on design-wise and data-wise. Be informed if you're going to speak to a subject, even lightly!
7. Womonseed, by Sunlight (1986)
What a mystical lesbian feminist vision. I opened this thinking it would be all stories from a womyn's land in a future time (ironically now a past time), and was surprised when some were stories of women's lives prior to their coming to the land, but quickly I found that most of the book was exactly what I thought: imaginings of life on a rural women's commune, some time after mainstream US society went drastically downhill due to resource scarcity and environmental degradation. What rituals would the women and girls there have? What would their lives be like? How would they establish such a place, and what would its young history look like? Told one character at a time, around a fire on one of the holidays of their sacred calendar.
8. Elske, by Cynthia Voigt (1999)
The first two-thirds of this young adult fantasy were so, so striking. It has quite a special tone to it, dark, fierce, simple yet vivid. I think this has a lot to do with the protagonist's experiences and way of looking at the world - she is a fearless and intensely pragmatic girl who escapes ritual death in her home country and proceeds to follow her feet into adventure's path (adventure taking the form of an exiled young queen seeking to regain her throne). Toward the end, it petered out and became rather typical. But gosh, this has stuck with me and I wouldn't take back reading it.
9. No Matter the Wreckage, by Sarah Kay (2014)
Spoken word poetry translates onto the page with varying degrees of success. I didn't dislike this book, or reading it, but it wasn't quite my cup of tea as poetry goes.
10. The Girl Who Played with Fire, by Stieg Larsson (2006/2009)
Ah, it's been so long since I read the first book (and watched the Swedish trilogy a number of times through). Suspenseful and easy to get sucked into - which is exactly what I need from a book right now.
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