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Jaz Ramage

@jazramage

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I like to climb and read books.
I'm a lot better at one than the other.

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It's weird days out here, my cats and kittens, but I love you and want to tell you about the books I read in January. Most enjoyed was probably On Immunity by Eula Biss. Least enjoyed was Storm Front; Jim Butcher is not my guy.

The Message - Good intro to realities in Palestine. Reads like it came out before Oct 7, 2023 though, not in October 2024.

State of Paradise - Florida fever dream. This was weird and I think I liked it. The narrator's belly button keeps getting bigger so she uses it to store stuff.

Data Cartels - Our governments subsidize research, researchers make a pittance, but these massive data companies own it all and profit from withholding it. Not cool, dude. We're in a real pickle.

The Tenth Muse - Fictional autobiography, wasn't really my jam. Kind of similar to Kate Quinn, if you dig her.

Rose/House - Futuristic Haunting of Hill House is an oversimplification, but I really enjoyed this. Creepy houses that draw people in but thrive on solitude are my jam.

Perdido Street Station - the audiobook for Nevada road trip. I enjoyed it, but it was pretty overwrought. Made the drive go quick though!

Villains by Necessity - Very classic fantasy quest story, only they are villains fighting to keep the world in balance. Simple, but a good time.

The Tyrant's Law - #3 in series. I like Daniel Abraham's approach to fantasy. He writes about banking.

Class Struggle Unionism - Very interesting ideas. Highly recommend if you want to examine the underpinning ideologies of different unions (or your own beliefs therein).

The Widow's House - #4 in series. This book was less about banking, but still good.

Storm Front - Ehhhhhhhhhhhh. At best.

On Immunity - History and ethics around vaccination through a personal essay style. I love how Biss writes.

The Palestine Laboratory - Lots of detailed info on Israel's arms dealing. Clunky writing, unfortunately. Really needed stronger editing.

The Spider's War - #5 in series. A bit disappointed with the wrap up, but glad I read it.

The High Cost of Free Parking - Great at identifying problems, worse at solutions that make sense to me. And holy smokes, it could have been shorter. Very repetitive. Very repetitive. by @jazramage

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2 years ago

Hey cats and kittens, it's been a minute. I wrote you a book review.

If I've talked to you in the last few weeks, there's a good chance I've mentioned Doppelganger by Naomi Klein; it really impressed me. It’s an insightful reflection on the widening divide in society; the way folks on the far-right increasingly seem to inhabit an entirely different reality. Using her own experience of being repeatedly confused in public spheres with author and (more recently) far-right conspiracist Naomi Wolf, Klein reflects on what draws people to far-right beliefs like anti-vax, covid denial, racist, homophobic, eugenecist hatred, etc. She calls it the “mirror world” and traces the causes and popularity of its narratives. Unlike some similar books I've read, she writes with empathy that does not devolve into sympathy. She doesn't give anyone a pass for holding beliefs that are so deeply harmful to others, even as she incisively articulates the causes that lead to those beliefs.

At the same time, she is critical of the information vacuums created by mainstream discourse which leave such fertile ground for these false narratives to thrive. One example is covid vaccines – as the vaccines were made publicly available, there was a strong reluctance to talk about risks as media and governments feared this might discourage uptake. But Klein notes that it’s not unreasonable to question big pharma companies when they say drugs are safe, and people with concerns found very limited coverage or resources in the mainstream media. This left them vulnerable to the grifters and con-artists of the far right, who validated their concerns and weaponized them against public health and community good. In many cases, then, the “mirror world” is a warped reflection of fears that the real world does not effectively address.

The whole book spoke so effectively to our present moment, and in this age of great grief as we watch genocide and climate catastrophe unfold on our screens, I highly recommend it to anyone wondering desperately how so many people, even people we know and love, have become so poisoned by dangerous lies - and what we can do that might help.

#bookreview #leftistbooks by @jazramage

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2 years ago

Another short selection for summertime, this time a musing on capitalism and middle class consumption. Fun!!

DM me if you'd like to have the selection sent your way. by @jazramage

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3 years ago

Ok, here's a fun one. Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir is the first in The Locked Tomb quartet. Like the cover comment says, it's lesbian necromancers in a gothic space palace. Pretty badass and the book is FUNNY (if you like dumb jock jokes. I shamelessly loved it).

But that's just the plot. It's actually (and moreso as the series progresses) a compelling look at love and hate and family and belonging and loss and loneliness, about the ways our identity is inextricably tied to and created by the people around us. It's also a hugely spanning story about the destruction of worlds and self-sacrifice and self-justification and the unexpected and irreversible costs to our decisions.

Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself here though. This first book is mostly about a foul-mouthed, emotionally stunted jock of a swordswoman with a collection of dirty magazines and her necromancer. In a haunted castle. In space.

Finally, Moira Quirk absolutely NAILS the audiobook narration. Unbelievably talented, and an absolute pleasure to listen to.

#bookreview #gideontheninth #thelockedtomb #yegreaders #yegbooks #gideonnav #wedobonesmotherfucker #moiraquirk by @jazramage

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3 years ago

Notice: short. Text: even shorter. "The Fifth Story" by Clarice Lispector is only a page and a half long but good and dense! I think we'll have a lot to talk about. The PDF is available online pretty easily, or message me to send you a copy. Everyone is welcome - you don't need to have come to book club before. 😊

Model is Elliot. Photo credit, @carlscurls. by @jazramage

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3 years ago

My mama took a nice photo of me. 🥰 by @jazramage

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3 years ago

The Green Bone Saga by Fonda Lee (Jade City, Jade War, Jade Legacy). ❤️

I truly love this series. One of the most delightful works of fantasy I've had the privilege to read. Lee's world building is marvelous, and her characters are so compelling. They are long books, particularly Legacy, but if you want a long sweeping epic of family, national, and international dramas, as well as a good helping of magical martial arts fight scenes, this is a deeply rewarding read.

It was also so interesting to see Lee develop as a writer. City was good but I found the writing a bit clunky at times; that is pretty well gone in Legacy, and knowing the journey made City even more enjoyable on my second read through.

Book 1 has an early and pretty lengthy, detailed sex scene - I recommended the series to pals who tried to listen to it in a 4-person car on a road trip last month, and it was apparently an awkward time (they did not continue listening). 😅 So, use caution if you're sharing a listen with a group, and know that the book is almost entirely NOT sex scenes, other than that one!

Now, I've read some critiques that have some very fair points - the series isn't perfect, and it's not for everyone. But goddamn, I LOVED it. Truly a delight.

"The clan is my blood, and the Pillar is its master. On my honor, my life, and my jade."

#bookstagram #bookreview #greenbonesaga #yegreaders #yegreads #yegbookstagrammers #trilogy #thekaulfamily #nopeakclan #ilovethesebooks by @jazramage

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3 years ago

I took this pic on a climbing trip in summer 2021, but just now got around to reading the book! 😅

The Illness Lesson by Clare Beams was book 29 on the year, recommended to me by one of the excellent staff at @audreysbooks. It's about a boarding school for young women led by ostensibly well-meaning, progressive thinking men in the late 1800s. To the girls' eventual great harm, the men's good intentions do very little to combat their arrogance, cowardice, self-interest, and ingrained sexist beliefs.

I enjoyed this one a lot. I read some pretty fair and scathing criticisms in other reviews, but hell. I had a lot of fun reading it. It's a bit of a suspense/dark academia story, which kept me turning the pages, but the focus is never really on solving the mystery. Instead, the drive to solve the "mystery" serves to obfuscate the actual problems at the school, and the abuses they enable (which maybe even suggests that the urge to solve/name/define/categorize/control everything is inherently patriarchal/problematic? Hmmm....).

Parts were pretty painful to read, but there's a wonderful slow-burning rage that builds throughout the book, culminating in a quiet but forceful and satisfying conclusion. The book reminds us women that our bodies and our minds are our own - we own ourselves, despite the coercive efforts of the patriarchy to rob us of that ownership. A good book for my babes who are angry at the system and ever feel unable to speak it.

cw: sexual assault

#bookreview #bookstagram #yegreads #yegreaders #feministreading #feministbook #feministrage by @jazramage

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4 years ago

It's already March, book babes! Let's meet!!

We'll be reading two short pieces from Audre Lorde this month: "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power" and "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House". You can find both online, or can visit your local library or independent book shop to find one of Lorde's collections. 😊

These texts are quite short, and considerably more dense than what we've read before. So get your close reading glasses on and get ready to talk about power! by @jazramage

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4 years ago

Worked through 14 books in January, and there were some real standouts! Where It Hurts, a collection of essays from Canadian author Sarah de Leeuw, was one of them. It's a heavy book and I read it pretty slowly, but it was definitely worth the effort.

The essays were set in rural northern BC and Alberta, so they really hit close to home. My friend @fifijeanbell grew up in one of the areas de Leeuw writes about, and man, did this book make me miss that babe. Definitely because she's great (excited to come visit you, Fi!), but also because de Leeuw's prose was so evocative of loss and sorrow and nostalgia and the pain and responsibility of bearing witness and how life just keeps taking that you need to project that emotion somewhere.

Even when tragedy doesn't affect us directly, we live in a world where we're exposed to tragedy every day, and we ourselves are complicit in many of those tragedies. Through her essays, de Leeuw interrogates how/if we can meaningfully bear witness to this pain, and how we can continue to function in the world with empathy and without drowning ourselves.

This is an oversimplification, I think, and I feel bad for trying to summarize the main points. It is a text where the experience of reading it was, in many ways, the point, so summary is necessarily a disservice. It might not be for everyone, but it was an incredibly striking book for me - and maybe for you, if you give it a go!

#bookreview #bookstagram #canadianauthor #readlocal #yegreader #yegbookstagrammers #canadianliterature by @jazramage

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4 years ago

Drinking Up the Revolution (picked up at @glassbookshop) was great! It lays out the harmful workings of Big Alcohol comapnies and the ways they shape societies for their own profit, down to our basic understandings of leisure and relating to each other.

Now, you know I'm not hyped on any big corporations, so I figured Big Alcohol was kinda shitty, but man, I did not know the tenth of it. The amount of lobbying those corps do frankly staggered me. In 2021, Anheuser-Busch spent over 5mill lobbying in America; for context, Meta and Amazon each spent 20mill in the same period. Four times more, but we are at least *aware* that they are powerhouse lobbyists. Turns out, Big Alcohol has a vested interest in controlling legislation about distribution and consumption limits, and suppressing health findings on the effects of alcohol.

The book is written through a socialist lens, which I saw some review criticism for. It's troubling to me that books like this are considered to have an "agenda", while the default capitalist lens most texts use remains largely invisible and unremarked upon.

But also... if an author doesn't have an agenda (read: a point they're trying to make), why would they bother to write a book?

Now, Wilt doesn't ask us to swear off drinking, only to question the ways we've been trained to understand drinking as a primary source of pleasure:

"The response cannot be to reject relations of desire as a bourgeois indulgence, like many particularly hardcore leftists are prone to do, but work to collectively reconsider and reimagine what decommodified desires might look like."

That is, you can still like to drink, but don't do it because the tear-jerker Budweiser ads give you a warm fuzzy feeling, or because you've been trained to understand it as the only way you can socialize. And (Wilt says this doesn't really matter in the grand scheme, but it's important to me) drink things that are produced small scale, locally, and by unionized workers and employee-centered businesses.

#yegreaders #drinkbeerfromhere #bookreview #catsandbooks by @jazramage

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4 years ago

We're reading a whole damn book this time, book club babes.

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton is a wonderfully executed and quietly heartbreaking graphic memoir of the author's time working in Fort McMurray. I first started reading Kate Beaton over ten years ago through her history/literature comic "Hark! A Vagrant", and I've never looked back. She has such a deft touch with her art and a way of capturing the most mundane occasions with pathos and humour and simple elegance. This book knocked my socks off. It's got some tough stuff in it, but if you're in a place to handle some sadness, I promise it's worth your time.

I've left a copy at the front desk of Dirtbag Cafe for anyone to read, if you don't want to source a copy of your own. Ask staff and they can set you up with the book - just be sure to return it to the desk before you leave (please don't take the book out of the cafe!!).

#bookclub #yegbookclub #yegbookclubs #yegreaders #yegbookstagrammers by @jazramage

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4 years ago