[REVIEW] A Plagued Sea, by Bo Young Kim, translated by Sophie Bowman

(Lovecraft enthusiasts can buy this book here.)

3 minutes read time

Mu-Young plans a relaxing beach town getaway with her niece Hyun. At first it’s a welcome respite from her controlling sister and the stresses of her job as a bodyguard, but the earthquake that hits the coast as soon as they arrive changes everything. Eldritch beings crawl from the depths of the sea, carrying a disfiguring disease that threatens to turn humans into monsters. It’s contained through harsh quarantine, but after several years, a new visitor leads Mu-Young to a heartbreaking discovery and a final attempt at freedom.

I was initially intrigued by what the author’s note promised was a Korean take on H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. I appreciated how cosmic horror was introduced in a way that seemed to omit some of Lovecraft’s less savory ideas, while keeping the grotesquerie and monstrous scares. I was even excited to see a Korean-Vietnamese woman, Mu-Young’s only friend in quarantine, portrayed richly and sympathetically.

I was less excited to see that character become the subject of one of the crueler moments of body horror in the book, in a nastily symbolic, sexualized way. I didn’t love how the horror slowly became less cosmic and more about the fear of weird looking outsiders with a strange language genetically infiltrating a pure country, starting with immigrants and enabled by clueless progressive intellectuals who change their minds after firsthand experience. I cheered when Mu-Young, strong and resolute as she is, ultimately ventures into the sea to confront an offshore menace and then winced a bit as her moment of awesome consisted entirely of telling it to go back to where they came from.

(Note; I do know that telling the being from beyond to return is a Lovecraftian, genre-accurate bit of adventure. That’s exactly the problem. Or rather, how it’s portrayed is.)

I’m sure there are cultural nuances I’m missing. There’s a lens needed to fully understand everything in this book that I almost certainly don’t have. If you don’t think about it too much, this is pitch-perfect Korean Cthulhu horror that doesn’t shy away from the really good, gross scares and has a bad-ass heroine.

But you know how sometimes a book feels like it’s telling you something uncomfortable that the author didn’t actually intend? Yeah, that.

Lovecraft would be proud, is all I’m saying. That might not be a good thing.

A…I dunno, a really big pointy boat? to A Plagued Sea.

Thank you to Netgalley and Tor for the ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

(Fellow readers! This is one of those books that seems like it would be quite interesting as either a)part of a deeper study on neo-Lovecraftian horror b)a fun casual read if you’re the type of person who doesn’t care about or acknowledge that fiction imparts deeper social and political meaning or c)a cautionary case study for those who think that it’s enough to just retell stories from the colonial canon if you want to break into foreign markets. I found this a little disappointing, If you want to read horror from a diverse perspective, check out I Am The Monster: Horror by #ownnormal Writers on the Equal Opportunity Bookshop. If you buy something from a link on this site, a commission is paid to me, which I use to buy charms to keep the fish-monster under the bed at bay. Now, go and read something good. Peace!)

[REVIEW] The Colored Museum, by George C Wolfe

(Buy this book ethically at Bookshop!)

About 3 minutes read time

A hostess on the Middle Passage gives grim travel instructions. A Vietnam vet recounts how he helped his fellow soldiers reconcile with their futures. A drunk, impassioned drag queen tells it like it is, and still remains. An upwardly mobile Black man comes face to face with his living past. A pair of wigs give their wearer competing relationship advice.

All these strange scenarios and more form the 11 sketch exhibits of the 1986 play The Colored Museum, a satirical look at Black life, art, and history. The exhibits cover a range of emotions, from funny to strange to nostalgic to outright horrifying. All of them illuminate some facet or other of Black American culture, from our history to our hair to our constant self-criticism and future ideation.

This may be my favorite play, ever. I read it for the first time in Black Thunder, an anthology of Black theatre that I checked out from the library and seriously contemplated stealing because I loved it so much.(I should have–it’s now long out of print. That book had Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, The Colored Museum, and The First Breeze of Summer all together in the same place. Damn my ethics.) Something about the Museum, with all its weird, culturally cathartic exhibits, scratched a part of my developing brain just right, and still does to this day. Maybe it’s the speculative nature of the exhibits and the way they stretch reality to help it make more emotional sense. Maybe it’s the fearless juxtaposition of humor and horror, and the uncompromising emotional whiplash between each scene. Maybe it’s the way that many of these characters, despite being fundamentally unrealistic, are written in the voices of people I feel like I know.(Yes, even the talking wigs. Maybe especially them.)

I’ve never seen a live production of this show, but I’ve read it many times, which should tell you how readable it is. I hope one day I do get to see it, but reading it on its own is still an immensely satisfying experience. Until then, I’ll keep re-reading it, snapping my fingers to Aretha along with Miss Roj, giggling at the OTT bathos of The Last Momma on the Couch, and feeling the hairs on my arms rise whenever I read “Psst. Psst.”

A full house and a standing ovation to The Colored Museum.

(Fellow readers, I dare you to read one of the monologue scenes from this play out loud to yourself in the mirror and not feel something new and think something smart. Double dog dare. I’m also here to remind you that the links on this page lead to the Equal Opportunity Bookshop, which is an affiliate and therefore puts a little coin in my pocket every time you buy a book. Thank you for visiting, and go read something good! Peace!)

[REVIEW] Another Appalachia: Growing Up Queer and Indian In a Mountain Place, by Neema Avashia

(You can purchase this book ethically here.)

2 minutes read time

In the 1970s, a handful of Indian scientists signed contracts for good jobs at West Virginian chemical plants. As people do, they settled down and had children, including Neema Avashia.

Like many children of immigrants, Neema’s identity ia a bit fractal. For every all-American pursuit like high school basketball, pickup truck driving or dodging racism, there’s a thick tendril of connection back to Indian culture and Hindu praxis. To further complicate things, she’s also queer and married to a white lady from New York. All of this intertwines to form a meaningful, singular life that unearths surprising experiences from the mountains Avashia was made in.

This is billed as a memoir, but feels like (and works best as) a collection of essays about the author’s unique identity and how it intersects with all of the worlds that created it. Some really stand out. “Nine Forms of the Goddess”, about the Indian women who raised Avashia, is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read about motherly love and women in community. “The Blue-Red Divide” is one of the few really honest, non-performative works I’ve seen about what it feels like when people who were once very close to you become MAGA adherents and how avoidance and simmering personal hurt can seem like the best response even if you regularly fight ideological dragons in the rest of your life. Thanks to “A Hindu Hillbilly Elegy”, the sight of a coconut in a grocery store the other day made me want to cry.

These are good essays about what it’s like to bridge not only culture but subculture. Avashia uses all of her hesitant connections to mismatched places and cultures to really explore all the way to their jagged edges, using her own identity as a base to match the pieces together on.

For all its uniqueness, this is also a surprisingly calm read. There’s a wholesome, laconic quality to the writing that makes even the grittier bits of Appalachian queer Hindu immigrant life more calming than incendiary.

I’m glad I read this. Vegetarian food seasoned Indolachian-style to Another Appalachia.

(Fellow readers! The original purpose of this site was to highlight DIVERSE books for DIVERSE readers and I think it’s time to be a little more intentional about that. I’m slowly putting together a list of desi authors of emotional note, which you can find on the Equal Opportunity Bookshop, along with lots of other booklists compiling works from #ownnormals from all over the world. If you buy something from the shop, this site earns a little commission too. Thank you for visiting, and go read something good! Peace!)

[REVIEW] Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burke

(This book is available on Bookshop.)

Read time: 4 minutes

Tradwife influencer Natalie Heller Mills seems to have it all. She shows off her successful organic farm, cheerful children, home-cooked recipes and red-blooded provider of a husband to millions on social media, proving that the conservative American dream can be a reality.

Of course, real life is actually very different. The husband is a redpill boob, the children neglected brats, the food sucks, and the real work is all done by hired hands, nannies, and a pink-haired liberal producer. When Natalie suddenly wakes up in 1855 and has to be a tradwife for real, things get even more complicated.

This book has been riding high on the wave of a very timely concept and Anne Hathaway-helmed film option. It’s sparked some interesting discussions about gender politics and feminism, helped along by very simple writing reminiscent of Christian self-help books and a particularly nasty plot twist meant to drive its Aesop home hard.

But I can’t shake the feeling that ultimately this book hates women just as much as the movement it’s satirizing.

Every woman in this book is miserable, whether liberal or conservative. Harvard grad? Miserable. Full time mom? Miserable. Stupid women are miserable, smart women are miserable, and angry women are doubly miserable, but not quite as miserable as the nice women they torment with their opinions. Wife, sister, mistress, saint, girlboss, diva? All miserable.

In counterpoint, every man is rich, dumb and unpunished. I felt a little sick at how glibly the men in this book were enabled in their frankly evil behavior, and never really questioned once. They were assessed frankly, but never expected to be or do any better. The judgement is all reserved for the women suffering as a result of their selfish, ideologically bankrupt behaviour.

On top of this embarrassingly enabling gender polemic, no one is actually given the courtesy of a viewpoint specific enough to feel truly meaningful. Natalie is a generic caricature of a conservative rural white lady from an unspecified but tacitly ridiculous religion. Geographically she should be probably be Mormon given the part of Idaho this book is set in. However, her language and highly personalized prayer style seems evangelical, and her theology is very conservative Catholic. Despite all of the religious signaling, however, she doesn’t have a church. No pastor, priest or even well-meaning co-believer has a presence in her adult life. She’s apparently sustaining her fervent faith with only fresh sourdough bread and stale platitudes. There’s no real sense of a larger world or any engagement with it in this book–Natalie and her family are simply embodied 2D stereotypes, flat and flimsy. Even when they venture off of the farm to a county fair, an Ivy league school or the vast world of the influencer internet, there’s really not much impact.

By the time we get to the twist (spoiler alert: it’s a psychotic episode, no real time travel involved) Natalie is more punching bag than person. She exists for readers to feel superior to, rather than as a reflection of the actual beliefs and existence of conservative white women. She’s basically a revenge fantasy, and a mean-spirited one, too.

There’s also quite a lot to be said of the grand old tradition of making the suffering of an insufferable woman implicitly her fault because of her mental health. Crazed women in the attic (or in this case, isolated off-grid ranch) are not a new thing in literature, but using it here is dismissive in a way that I feel is dangerous. It’s almost mocking. Political regression can’t be dismissed as simply insanity, and while I’m a big believer in laughing at the ridiculous, you can’t use “these people are just pathetic and crazy” as a complete explanation when they’re literally running the country unless you’re prepared for their crazy asses to lock you up for not sharing their delusions.

Also, you may have guessed and it goes without saying, but this book is super white. I hoped to gain some insight from it on what’s happening in America’s cultural bubbles, both right and left. Instead, I got a 400-page treatise on self-righteous mean-girlism. (Maybe that IS what’s happening?) I’ve never been so glad to be Black and weird and womanist in my life.

Finally, you absolutely cannot knit with sewing needles and that part almost got the book returned.

Names in the Burn Book for Yesteryear.

(Fellow readers, whew. While I didn’t enjoy this book very much, I’m glad I read it because sometimes it’s just good to keep up with where the level of public discourse is at. Everybody’s talking about gender politics, but we’re all starting at different places and viewing through different lenses. I guess I learned something I wasn’t expecting from this. If you’d like to learn something you didn’t expect from a book, check out the picks in the Equal Opportunity Bookshop. Just remember that everything you buy there earns us a little commission. Now, go and read something good! Peace!)

[REVIEW] It’s Not You, It’s Capitalism: Why It’s Time To Break Up And How To Move On, by Malaika Jabali

(Buy this book here.)

Read time: About 3 minutes

25-year old me would think that 45-year old me is ballin. 45-year old me thinks that I work too hard not to be. Both of us are pissed off. Somehow, the steady rise of my income is far outmatched by the upward sprint of the cost of living, and after having spent most of my life in countries with socialized healthcare and bigger budgets for education and art than weaponry, American economics are deeply dissatisfying.

So this book, which explains the racist, classist underpinnings of many of America’s financial policies and provides reasonable socialist alternatives, came along at exactly the right time. It’s a great primer on what was, what is and what could be in American finance. Jabali kneads together history, politics, economics and current affairs in just the right amounts to educate readers without overwhelming us with stats or manifesto. The result is a really hopeful, comprehensive overview of how capitalism doesn’t work in the USA, how socialism could, and why we should consider it.

It’s also really funny. Artist Kayla E has provided some whimsical line illustrations and infographics playing off the relationship motif in the book’s title to go along with the light, tongue in cheek tone a lot of the trickier explanations use. Facts and future-building are presented seriously, but for the practical examples and historical commentary? This book got jokes. Leftists, socialists and progressives in the US have gained a well-deserved reputation for being didactic grumps. It’s nice to see something like this that doesn’t take anything but the stats too seriously. The humor is also very Black American millennial woman, and you know I’m always here for writing that uses an #ownnormal lens to educate the masses.

The only thing missing here is maybe an explanation of how and why failed socialist governments aren’t a good way of understanding potential applications of socialism in the USA. That trips a lot of people up and always needs to be addressed. Also, the author grew up in the Republic of New Afrika movement, and while she does mention it and uses it as a case study for some of her larger propositions, I wanted to know more about the actually community experience, too. Maybe another book is on the horizon?

I finished this book just before seeing the Boots Riley film I Love Boosters. Fittingly, it makes a great companion reader to the film, and if you liked one, you’ll probably enjoy the other.

Worker’s rights to It’s Not You, It’s Capitalism.

(Fellow readers, I am fully aware of the irony of doing a quick plug for an online bookshop at the end of a review of a book on anti-capitalism. At least I chose the most ethical means of new book consumption? Anything you buy there does go straight back into keeping this site up and slowly lessening the amount of annoying ads I let the WordPress microdeities run in lieu of self-financing, which I can’t really afford, tbqh. But it’s also fine if you cannot or do not buy a book. Go to your local library instead! I don’t care, as long as you read something good! Peace!)

Last While In Books: Sorry To These Men

Read time: about 4 minutes

Hello, fellow readers. I don’t seem to have the time to post bookish news updates on social media anymore, so here’s a roundup of some of the more interesting bits of literary news–diverse and otherwise–that I’ve come across recently.

  • Between Daniel Krause winning this year’s Pulitzer Prize and Ben Lerner giving an interview about using AI while being named America’s most acclaimed novelist, I think we can finally put to bed all past, present and future claims that there’s no place for white men in fiction writing. To be absolutely clear, that’s no shade to either of these men on a personal or professional level. I don’t know them and I’m sure they’re both very deserving of their accolades. (Krause, in particular, has an exceedingly lovely reputation in the horror writing community.) But I also haven’t read them and y’all know I read a little of everything that passes my eyes. Interestingly enough, none of the other hardcore readers I know had heard of these guys, either. Lots of the writers I know had, however. Again, no shade, but it’s an interesting observation of the business of publishing and literary acclaim on a few different levels. I was definitely looking like Keke Palmer when the announcement was made. [Wilmington Star, GQ]
  • From a diverse reader’s viewpoint, this year’s Pulitzers were otherwise a bit disappointing. Yiyun Li won the memoir prize for Things In Nature Merely Grow and Gabriela Lena Frank(who is of East European Jewish and Peruvian Chinese descent) for music, with a particularly interesting composition that uses Andean legend to explore climate disaster. But the literary categories in particular seem to have mostly gone in an otherwise predictable direction, awarding prizes to work that shores up the mythology of America rather than re-examines or properly contextualizes it. (Yes, I am talking about that book about the Schuyler Sisters.) [The Pulitzer Prizes]
  • But we still have the International Booker Prize! This year’s longlist is very interesting. I personally am pulling for French and Senegalese writer Marie N’diaye’s The Witch, which is having a bit of a renaissance after being translated into English thirty years after its original publication. [The Booker Prizes]
  • There are a lot of really interesting, trailblazing releases that have just been published and are soon to be, as well. Shay Kauwe’s The Killing Spell is the first traditionally published fantasy novel by a Native Hawaiian author. It’s a magical murder mystery that delves into the complexity of language, power and the intersections of colonized peoples as they move beyond atrocity and begin to gain back a bit of their own. Sounds fascinating, right? [Bookshop]
  • B. Sharise Moore, prolific children’s author and the poetry editor of award-winning Black spec-fic magazine Fiyah, has been chatting on Threads about her upcoming middle grade compendium of African mythological beings. It’s called Curious Creatures of African Folklore and while there’s not a lot of official publisher info out about it yet, you can sign up for updates on her website to get alerts about it. [B. Sharise Writes]
  • Another book that’s on my radar is Ashia S Ajani’s Tending the Vines, which can perhaps best be described as a botanical history of the African diaspora in eight plants. I’m definitely going to get my hands on this one soon. [Bookshop]
  • I’ve waxed poetic about Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko before on this site, and I’ve been eagerly awaiting her next novel as soon as I heard the title. Very excited that American Hagwon will be out in September. By all accounts it’s another epic story of Korean diaspora, this time starting during the 1997 financial crisis in Korea and moving through Australia and Southern California. Can’t wait. [Bookshop]
  • Finally, I’ve got a few pieces of writing out recently as well that I want to tell you about. My essay “How I Became My Own Fun Auntie” (the title is self-explanatory) has been included in the coffee table book Black Women In Bloom, which will be out this summer. [Carefree Magazine]
  • I’ve also got a new short story in the May 2026 issue of Lightspeed Magazine, called Sarah’s Laugh. It’s part of a larger project I’m working on that envisions revolution in a corporatocratic America, and…well, I wish it didn’t feel timely? But I wrote it four years ago, and somehow it does. Please check it out, especially if you’re Team Audiobook. The incredible Janina Edwards performs the story and did a wonderful job. Thanks in advance for reading.[Lightspeed Magazine]

That’s it for diverse bookish news of the last while, fellow readers. Kind reminder that any books you buy from links you find in this blog earn a commission that helps keep the site running, and your local library needs your patronage and book suggestions to keep their shelves stocked and diverse, especially in these times. Now, go and read something good! Peace!

[REVIEW] Crossfire, by StaceyAnn Chin

(Buy this book here.)

Read time: about 3 minutes

Back in the day, I used to attend poetry performances almost as often as church. (And I went to church a lot!) Unsurprisingly, I was especially drawn to the words of other Black women, and while like most people I’m made up of a million different influences, listening to sistren speak honestly and lyrically on love, emotion, politics and identity is in the top ten.

(Side note: if you’re a Black millennial from Denver do you remember Cafe Nuba? It’s hot and…?)

Stacyann Chin was one of the poets I always made time to see, so I’m shocked to see that 2019’s Crossfire is her first and only full-length poetry collection. There are poems in here that I heard once 20 years ago and still remember, yet you mean to tell me they’ve been in print less than a decade? How?


Chin is both singular and emblematic. She’s a Jamaican of African and Chinese descent, a out and horny lesbian, a single mom, a documentarian, an activist, a deep lover, and one of the originators of Def Poetry Slam. Her work covers all of this territory and then some, but always through the lens of emotion. We believe and do and move because we feel, right?

It’s those feelings, and how perfectly Chin captures the rage and joy and love and confusion and longing of being fully human in a world with increasingly little tolerance for being so, that have kept her poems in my mind over the years. Revisiting them feels a lot like sitting in a dark cafe/club on a Friday night in your 20s, nibbling words with your beer and allowing yourself to feel what the work week wouldn’t allow.

But it’s not nostalgic. There are quite a few newer poems in this book that address what it’s like to still feel, believe and care deeply about the workings of the world as we get older. There’s grace for questions about what’s coming and how we connect meaningfully to the past. There’s frustration with the frictionless ahistoricity of some modern iterations of the struggle, but no real bitterness.(Although sometimes there’s anger, but that doesn’t automatically equate to bitterness.) Things change, and grow, but not always in the way you hoped. That doesn’t mean they can’t be pruned and nurtured. It doesn’t mean they won’t eventually blossom. It’s words like the ones in this book that help us see how.

She also cusses about the president the way only a Jamaican can, and that alone is worth the cover price.

Meaningful aging and eternal words to Crossfire.

(Fellow readers! While I tend to read with more of an eye for the future, not the past, every once in a while a book reminds me that the life I lived is just as cool at the life I’m living and I think we all need a little bit of that in our spirits now and then. For more diverse poetry that reminds you of the now and the then, check out this booklist, courtesy of our very own Equal Opportunity Bookshop. Full disclosure–anything you buy there will earn both me and the poets pennies. But pennies add up! Now, go and read something good! Peace!)

[REVIEW]Once Upon A Marquess, by Courtney Milan

(Buy this book here!)

Read time: 2 minutes

After her father’s death and her brother’s disgraced exile, Judith Worth is tasked with caring for her three younger siblings and keeping the family name in good, if socially lowered, standing. When a challenge to her hard won domesticity arises, there’s only one person she can turn to for help–the Marquess Christian Trent, who happens to be not only her scorned first love but the man whose testimony was the cause of her family downfall.

(Somehow, the latter doesn’t matter as much as it should. It should really matter, though.)

Usually this is where I scold you all about how romance is all the same and we read it for the setting and characters, but this one is a bit different. The Victorian setting is vividly rendered and the cast of characters are lovingly created but the romance itself is…kind of odd? I could not figure out why these two like each other. Sure they have cute banter and matching neurodivergencies, but there are glaring issues of the main guy’s righteous betrayal and addiction to laudanum hanging over this couple that just aren’t discussed enough to feel resolved.

That said, I still enjoyed this. Courtney Milan excels at writing relationships that aren’t romantic, and that’s the best thing about this book. Judith’s stalwart but imperfect care for her siblings, including her autistic-coded sister, is really beautifully done. So is her friendship with a local who has no idea she was once a Lady. Neurodivergence, poverty, addiction and even a pretty horrifying human trafficking subplot are also handled well, if a little glibly at times. Milan has a way of creating communities that are so interesting to read about that they can overshadow the romance, but I can’t be mad at that, even if does make the spicy scenes feel a little out of place when they happen(and when they do, they’re almost clinically frank.)

It feels strange to recommend a romance novel for everything but the romance, but hey, there’s a first time for everything.

Continued sobriety and buckets of cat toys to Once Upon A Marquess. 

(Fellow readers, this wasn’t the spiciest romance I’ve ever read, but if you want spicy diverse romance look no further than this booklist. It’s part of the Equal Opportunity Bookshop, where I curate booklists for and about everyone. If you buy a book there, I get a commission, and that commission keeps this website going, and with what’s left over, I buy books, then I review those books and then I tell you about the bookshop and vicious cycle achieved! Thank you in advance for contributing to it, or visiting your local library and doing the same. Now, go and read something good! Peace!)

[REVIEW] Dungeon Crawler Carl, by Matt Dinniman

(Buy this book here.)

Read time: 4 minutes

One minute Coast Guard meathead Carl is rescuing his absentee ex-girlfriend’s prize Persian cat from a tree in the middle of the night. The next, every building on earth is smashed flat and at the behest of an alien voice, Carl and Donut(the cat) are forced to flee into the creature-filled underground dungeon that suddenly appears. Cue sentient talking pets, silly magic weapons, boss fights, NPCs, anti-capitalist critique, and plenty of other LitRPG shenanigans.

At my big age I think I’ve finally learned that I don’t have to love everything I respect. While many of my generation are grieving the ideological failures summed up in current events and adjusting to the way the world is moving steadily past our individual politics, there are a lot of things that are socially good that I still just don’t vibe with, personally.

So while Carl’s story has a surprising amount of depth and provides a lot of needed emotional affirmation for people who are discovering that they must express their dissatisfaction with the status quo despite their apparent privilege and comfort…

…I, perhaps have been Black and grown and countercultural for a little too long to fully appreciate this. Fellow readers, you might feel similarly.

It’s fun, easy reading, packed with scatological millennial humor and nerd lore. Carl is one of those ultra-regular PNW dudes who probably shovels his neighbor’s sidewalks for them, and that heart is apparent and enjoyable throughout. This is a story about learning to do good wrapped in fart jokes and level-ups.

But the ultra-white, side-of-right lens this story is told through lends itself to some well-intentioned othering that doesn’t make sense to us over here in the multicultural literary bazaar. The first boss fight turned my stomach–I almost closed the book when I realized what was happening. Immigrants, the elderly, the disabled, working-class POCs–all cannon fodder, albeit often the well-portrayed badass type. Even the cat is every edgelord girlfriend joke with fur, albeit subverted via XP and Carl’s emotional arc.

This isn’t a bad book, generally speaking. I just genuinely forgot that there are folks in my ideological neighborhood who think and talk like this.

There’s a lot of things I personally dislike about the book. But I also can’t piss on someone else’s parade because it takes a different route than mine.

By this I don’t mean that any of the things that made me–and will probably make you–uncomfortable are okay. They’re not, at all. I mean that everyone has to start somewhere, and I’ve been reliably informed that Carl grows past this in later books, or at least that these books are a launch pad for a certain demographic of people to either Do Better or remember to keep doing what they already are. A lot of people are finding a mix of ideological inspiration and silly cathartic humor in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series that is perfect for them. Most of those people have the same social goals in mind that I do, ultimately, and even though we’d probably get on each others nerves and clearly do not read the same books or have the same sensitivities or see the same people as the default in our every day lives–not everything is for me. This is for the folks it’s for, and those folks are not me. It’s fun and inspiring and emotionally resonant and character developing for those people. I don’t have to try to be a part of everything that does some ultimate good in the world, and I don’t have to read everything that says it does, either.

In other words, Carl is a goofy white boy, but they need love and protest literature, too. Carry on!

A French pedicure and bottomless cat treats to Dungeon Crawler Carl.

(Fellow readers! Listen, if you like these books, I totally get it. Were I reviewing this for a different publication, I may have taken a gentler, more mainstream approach. But this right here is Equal Opportunity Reader and you can’t do what this writer did with immigrant, Black and mentally ill characters in this book and not have me say something about it. Yes, he writes about them sympathetically and the people who do them dirty are the villains–but they’re also all victims or muscle, and in these parts we’re #ownnormal, not cannon fodder or story foils. Speaking of, for a booklist of #ownnormal fantasy stories, check out the Equal Opportunity Bookshop and be aware that if you buy one, we get paid a commission that helps keeps the blog alive and not in an underground bunker. Now, go read something good! Peace!)

[Hear Me Out] A Year of Deeper Reading

Read time: 13 minutes

(To skip to the booklist, click here.)

I’m still here.

Fellow readers, I almost quit the internet last year.

And last month.

And last week.

And about an hour ago.

Rest assured, this isn’t some “goodbye, cruel virtual world” post. You’re stuck with me for the virtual moment. But like many, the events of the past year or so have made me reconsider how I participate not only in the real world, but the virtual one.

(Warning: this is a really long post.)

It’s strange, but even though much of my life and career is built around constantly articulating difficult concepts, I’m having a really hard time crystallizing what exactly it is that I’m finding so hard about the world of social technology over the past few years. Between corporate-driven enshittification, bots and gen AI trying to forcibly ruin everyone’s conversational and aesthetic abilities, the commodification of every human thought and experience into mind-numbing artificial content, and the constant, exhausting exposure to mass ignorance there just seems to be too much negative happening to understand.

When I started using the internet and social media, it was because it was a place to hold all the deep, funny, niche conversations I couldn’t have in the conservative, religious real world circles I often found myself trapped in. The internet was one of the ways in which I found people I could speak with more freely, and how I found ways to learn and be and do so that I could engage with the world as a fuller, more knowledgeable, more joyful person.

It’s not that you can’t do that now. It’s just that you have to wade through considerably more bullshit to get there, and there are ideological landmines hidden in the muck.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that as an elder millennial, the internet is part of how I learned to really like more people. Now, it seems purposefully engineered to make me dislike everybody much more.

This has all made me think carefully about how I engage with the internet and what it is that I contribute. Nobody wants to be a grumpy, bitter fool online–or at least I don’t. With over 400 million terabytes of data being uploaded to the internet daily, I don’t want the 500 mb or so that I upload here and there to be part of the problem.

I don’t always achieve my goal of not contributing to stupidity (have you seen my Threads account? Ugh.) but I do my best, and I’m pleased that I get to commune with this little bookish, culturally diverse village that seems to have coalesced around mutual reading habits and curiosity. I’m proud that I’m emphatically not an influencer(I DON’T WANT TO SELL YOU STUFF!), yet an alarming amount of people still take the time to pay attention when I talk. I’m glad that I can still engage with so many different people about so many different things, that I can enjoy art from all parts of the globe with people from all over, and that I can have my own perspectives and understandings enriched constantly, even if I have to fight a little harder for the privilege than I used to.

But, full disclosure: I still kind of want to quit.

I’m tired, y’all. The world is in a harshly anti-intellectual phase at the moment (while folks will say it’s just America, don’t be fooled–everybody’s out here hating on critical thinking and curiosity right now). It doesn’t feel as safe to be a hapless nerd in public anymore, especially since the worst of us took over tech and higher ed and are making the rest of us pay for whatever their 6th grade bully said to them that one time. Fandom cults are repulsively parasocial, and ruining everything genre. A lot of people really just want to talk down to Black women (or worse, impersonate us for cash) on the internet. LLMs scrape my blog for wrong answers to people’s English lit exams. (I actually got an email from some poor undergrad about this. It’s not my fault Chat doesn’t understand nerd humor.) It’s all so exhausting.

But despite myself, I like talking to people, most of the time. Annoying folks are exhausting, but in the minority. While I’m getting a smidge more misanthropic as I edge towards middle age than I think I want to be (yes, my therapist is helping), I’m never going to stop believing entirely that more people want to be good than bad, and that we all have the essentials of human experience in common yet expressed in very different ways, and that books are a critical gateway to understanding that. At the end of the day, I’m a real, very unimportant human being trying to share a little bit of the best of myself in the wider world and hoping that people respond with the same.

But how do I responsibly, meaningfully continue to share in the vastly expanded, rapidly changing, negativity-breeding environment of what was once my intellectual safe space?

Well, first, I’m going to talk about it. Lots. On- and off- line. One thing I’ve learned is that no matter how isolated I may feel in moments of dissatisfaction and irritation, I almost never am. It’s just that nobody wants to talk openly about things in non-decisive ways. It’s either love or hate, never “how do I navigate this thing in ways that increase the good rather than exacerbate the bad?”

We’re not all having the same experience, of course, but I hope that talking a little bit about my internet malaise and how I’m handling it helps others understand and maybe address their own similar feelings.

In terms of the way that I engage in bookish spaces, there are 3 things I’ve been doing that have helped me maintain my sanity and sense of integrity.

I turned off the likes.

Meta lets you turn off the ability to view likes and shares on all of their apps, and I have. It’s a bit tricky, but I have it set up so that if I want to see likes or shares, I have to do so intentionally, taking a few extra steps. I can still see comments though, which for me is the whole point of posting on social media–the socializing part.

This has actually done a lot for my posting peace of mind. I like seeing how many people have liked a post and I genuinely appreciate when people do so, but checking occasionally instead of constantly means that I’m not distracted by notifications when a post goes viral. I know virality is the holy grail of engagement online, but as I’ve repeatedly said, I’m not an influencer or even an extrovert. Massive amounts of strangers yelling at me because I didn’t like Wicked or asked the wrong question about Heated Rivalry is never a good experience. It also means that I feel a little freer to keep it real and post honestly. I don’t immediately know if my latest thought got 100 likes or zero, so all I can go by is the comment discussion, and I’ve found that that doesn’t actually correlate as heavily with likes or clicks as I thought.

Ironically, since I turned off the immediate like/share views, I’ve been repeatedly accused of clout chasing and engagement farming, on one occasion by a big content creator who has since left Threads. Perhaps my natural uncensored state is actually troll. Either way, I’m finding the bookish internet more engaging and meaningful

I stopped posting so much.

First, the living room pachyderm — I’m aware I’ve been gone from the blog for four months. I started this post in January and have had it open in a browser tab until today, taunting me while I tried to figure out what the hell I wanted to do on the internet from now on, if anything. The short answer is that I’ll be blogging and recording videos a bit more, social media-ing a bit less.

I’d built, I thought, a thoughtful algorithm across apps. Writers, publishers, book talk, and the occasional swirls of social justice and cultural education just to keep things seasoned properly. I was learning a lot, sharing and amplifying the kinds of things I wanted to see and furnishing a corner of the internet in a way that I thought would be inviting and restorative to like-minded folks.

Immediately after the inauguration of that guy in the White House last year, my feeds on all the US-owned apps went straight to hell. Overnight, everything shifted and my feed became a stream of unsolicited, force-fed bigotry, rage bait, and ignorance. It was genuinely upsetting, and I logged right out for a couple of weeks as a result, except for a couple of admittedly crazypants TikTok posts. When I logged back in, it was still terrible, and it took a lot of purposeful hiding and searching and intentional likes to try and get it back to normal.

Even with that, my feeds are about 50% terrible, and I don’t think people who are interested see my posts very often unless they come looking for them specifically. The reason for this is official behind the scenes meddling for the purposes of propaganda and data farming. The powers that be want us to be upset, miserable, and mean to each other online because that drives engagement, and engagement makes them money. Even if I can ultimately fix my own algorithm, do I really feel good contributing to human data for profit schemes? But on the other hand, do I want to disappear entirely, and let it remain a wretched hive of scum and villainy?

Just call me Luke Skywalker, I guess. I still get good and thoughtful things from social media despite the general atmosphere shift. Also, we’ve become internet friends and I don’t want to ghost you just because Mark Zuckerberg is a human pitcher plant, Elon Musk is the devil’s deformed right hand, and Shou Zi Chew forgot that senator, he is from Singapore.

So, for now, at least, I’m taking the third way. I’m posting much less, and focusing more on original thoughts and reviews and videos, less on reposting the best of what I find on my own feeds. There’s no way to really beat the tide of bot posters, hired trolls, and general weirdos but I’ll leave the light on just until we can figure out where we all go from here or I just give up on the internet entirely and retreat to real world spaces.

I’m trying to read more deeply

This is the big one. We all know now that the way social media and the general internet is currently structured is destructive to attention spans and critical thinking. I’ve noticed it in myself, and got caught out posting a few things that, upon reflection, were blatant misinformation. Also, I stopped enjoying the world of books because I got a little too immersed in the news and a little less involved in the actual words on the pages.

The antidote to this is to slow down a bit and look at things a little more deeply. Instead of reading to keep on top of what’s happening in the art world, I’m trying to also reflect on what the art makes happen within me. I started to love literature because of how it connected dots within the real world for me, and reorienting how I approach what I’m reading is helping me get back to that place of wonder and appreciation and learning.

I can’t log in, complain about how reactionary and derivative the internet is, and then continue to create lots of throwaway short content that diminishes the value of reading and thinking and talking about it. It’s not that I don’t want to do short content, it’s just that I want to make sure that whatever I do is meaningful.

It’s not that I wasn’t already thinking deeply about just about everything–I spend a little too much time inside my own head, to be honest. But being emphatically uncool and slow and long-form without being didactic on the internet seems to be more conversational and intentionally de-influencing, which is what I’m going for.

To that end, I’ve been guiding sort of an ad hoc book club across the apps, inviting readers to read books in weekly chunks. I’ve been recording my thoughts in weekly videos and will be posting written reviews of the ones we’ve already finished up here soon.

These books are selected in response to the times, not the trends. While I love a popular book just as much as everyone(and will continue to read and talk about that), I wanted to continue to challenge all our reading muscles a bit by going slightly off the beaten track by staying in the backlist, with diverse writers exploring timely themes.

So far, we’ve read:

February: My Documents by Kevin Nguyen, a speculative novel about Vietnamese-Americans being placed in internment camps after an act of domestic terrorism.

March: Dazzling by Chikodili Emelumadu, a Nigerian fantasy novel about two young girls touched by very different supernatural forces and how it affects the end of their childhood.

Right now, we’re reading:

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, a critically acclaimed first novel by an Iranian-America poet about a Midwestern Iranian-American struggling with identity and the idea of martyrdom

Coming up, we’ll be reading:

May: I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, a speculative novel about 39 women and girls trapped in an underground bunker, translated from Belgian French

June: Jazz by Toni Morrison, a classic literary novel about cheating couples, death and perhaps revenge?

I’ll announce books for the rest of the year in upcoming months. So far, it’s been an interesting experience. I’m doing it for the vibes more than anything–I actually don’t like books clubs much in reality, so I have no idea how to run one online and would rather just jabber about what I think about the book and hope that you all join in. So far, you have been, and I appreciate it!

But all that said…

…I still might quit the internet, eventually. Should I be fortunate enough to get a multi-book deal, the first thing I’m doing is retreating to a tower somewhere to write for a while, anyway. Eventually, the way our online social and informational spaces works has to change, and us first-generation hopeful Web 1.0 holdouts with it.

But until then, let’s read together. And talk about it. And share the things that the words connect to, and connect us to.

Peace, beautiful people. No post-script today, but a reminder that while I don’t want to sell you stuff, this site does cost a little money to run, and the Equal Opportunity Bookshop is where that money comes from. Peace!