The Weekly Wrap: July 27th to August 2nd

Weekly Review

1. What I’ve Read This Week
2. ‘Up Next’ Progress
3. Want to Read Updates

Upcoming

4. TBR for Upcoming Week
5. Looking Forward

You will like The Secret Women if you appreciate:
✨ Centring of female friendships
✨ Multi-generational storytelling
✨ Unpacking mother-daughter relationships

You will like The Shadow King if you appreciate:
✨ Historical fiction (World War II)
✨ Empowerment of women
✨ Lyrical prose

You will like Deathless Divide if you appreciate:
✨ Dread Nation (the first book in the series)
✨ Historical Fiction (Zombies and alt-post Civil War USA)
✨ Centring of Black women and friendships

This Book is Anti-Racist is geared towards Middle-Grade children. As I’m working through other books in my antiracism reading list (I’m currently working through Me and White Supremacy), I’m interested in how to clearly explain racism and the institution of racism in language that doesn’t get wrapped up in theory. I’m also interested in what the by-line ’20 Lessons on How to Wake Up, Take Action, and Do the Work’ means by actionable tasks. Overall, I’m very excited to read.

The V Girl has been on my reading list since April. I keep putting it off despite it being right up my alley… and it honestly fits in perfectly with my feminist theme I’ve been on this past week.

✨ Dystopian patriarchal society (women have few/no rights)
✨ Enemies to lovers
✨ Coming of Age
✨ Standalone
✨ “Loosely based on documented evidence of unpunished war crimes”

The last point–taken from The V Girl‘s synopsis–is what I love so much about dystopian, women-centring, YA/NA novels. Some think, thank God that doesn’t happen in real life. But, it does happen! And, unfortunately, it takes fictional literature for people to understand that the behaviour we think is normal in our society is actually oppressive.

How to Be An Antiracist is another book on my antiracism reading list. It was difficult to choose which books to start my re-education with. However, I’ve decided to first focus on unlearning the bad/good binary where a racist is defined as a bad person. Reconceptualizing racism within institutions and systems made me understand how and why racism is still prevalent despite the surface understanding of racism = bad.

Unlearning the binary also allows me to honestly look back on my past behaviour, education and interactions. One of the most important lessons I’m learning as I do more reading is that history follows our behaviour. And, the impact always matters more than the intention. As white people I feel that we’ve never properly had to confront the horrible acts our ancestors committed to allow for racism to become a norm. And, how many children are taught well, it’s the thought that counts rather than the impact.

I’m so excited to buy Midnight Sun on Tuesday! I’m definitely going to be pulling an all-nighter to finish this book. I hope that I enjoy Edward’s perspective as much I’m expecting to. I’m also curious if Meyer is going to include scenes that go beyond the last scene in Breaking Dawn… it would be awesome to catch up with the Cullens (and maybe see where Jacob and Renesmee are in the future).

I also have two new book reviews releasing on Wednesday and Saturday. The books I review are usually ones that I really like to dig into–which can be either books I loved or books I hated. Lately though I’ve seemed to hit a 4-star streak. To be determined if I keep that up.

I’m also way behind in my 2020 Reading Challenge but I’ve had much more academic reading to do this year on account of my dissertation and research proposal. I’m starting to think I won’t hit my goal. But, I’ve also realized that I only started to keep track of my reading because I like breaking down the stats of my reading habits. It was never about reading a certain number a year. So, I just need to get back into that mindset.