Mass Incarceration on Trial: A Remarkable Court Decision and the Future of Prisons in America. Jonathan Simon.

Simon, Jonathan. Mass Incarceration on Trial: A Remarkable Court Decision and the Future of Prisons in America. The New Press, 2014.

The book focuses on a handful of court cases that have significantly affected law regarding prisons and prisoners in California. While Simon is ultimately arguing that mass incarceration is wrong and should be discontinued everywhere in the United States, he says that he focused specifically on California for this book because California's prison system is the worst and most over-crowded. What we learn here, though, applies throughout the country.

Pros: This book contains a lot of information about court cases with direct bearing on the problems inherent in a mass incarceration system--especially one that consistently operates at 200-300% over capacity. It also does a good job of centering the importance of social narratives: The way we think about prisoners affects how we're willing to (mis)treat them, and sometimes changing the narrative is even more important than changing individual laws.

Cons (no pun intended): The book was repetitive. It was clear and easy to read, but each chapter repeated too much information from previous chapters, which became irritating over time.

There were glancing references to issues of race and class, but it seemed to me that these subjects--so important when discussing the justice and penal systems--were glossed over more than I would have expected.

The High King's Golden Tongue. Megan Derr.

Derr, Megan. The High King's Golden Tongue. Less Than Three Press, 2015.

The first thing you should probably know when figuring out whether you'd enjoy this book is that the author is particularly into writing m/m slash. "I love writing slash," she says on her website, "it works for me in a way that writing other things never did." I don't quite know how to describe what this means, but you'll know it if you're into the stuff: The book reads a lot like m/m slash. I guess in part what I'm identifying is that it's kind of a lot about the sex...but it's not porn or erotica, exactly. It's slash. If this isn't making any sense, you could just read the book to get a sense of what I mean.

Soul On Ice. Eldridge Cleaver.

Cleaver, Eldridge. Soul On Ice. Delta, 1968.

Soul On Ice is a collection of essays Cleaver wrote during his nine years in Folsom State Prison. He covers various topics, from Muhammad Ali's boxing career to "soul food" to Malcolm X vs. Elijah Muhammad to the relationship between black men and white women. The tone is personal, even casual throughout most of the essays, like Cleaver's talking to the reader directly.

There's some rough content in here, but it's also fascinating and worth reading. It's been a little while since I actually read it, and apparently I didn't write much about it at the time, so I'm going to leave this entry short and sweet for now. Later on, when I re-read it (as inevitably happens eventually), I'll add.

Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Louis Althusser.

Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." From Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, tr. Ben Brewster. New Left Books, 1971. In Contemporary Critical Theory, ed. Dan Latimer. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989.

Okay, so Althusser starts with Marx' ideas of "infrastructure" and "superstructure." There's the infrastructure--the economic base--and the superstructure, which stands atop the infrastructure. The superstructure has two parts: culture (law, politics, art, etc) and ideology (world views, values, beliefs).
Althusser adds to the superstructure the concept of Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), which he distinguishes from the Repressive State Apparatus (RSA). The RSA includes all the agencies that function by direct violence (police, courts, prisons, etc).

The Curse of Chalion. Lois McMaster Bujold.

Bujold, Lois McMaster. The Curse of Chalion. Harper Voyager, 2006.

This is the first book in the Chalion series, though actually I read one of the later books first. It was a "found this on my bookshelf" situation, and I enjoyed it enough that I then sought out The Curse of Chalion so that I could continue being in the series' world. It took me a while--I think I read the first book over a year ago--but here we finally are.

The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria. Janine Di Giovanni.

Di Giovanni, Janine. The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria. Liveright, 2016.

Di Giovanni works at Newsweek, regularly writes for a bunch of other big news sources--The New York Times, Granta, The Guardian, etc.--and has published multiple books based on her experiences as a war correspondent in different countries. If you'd like to see and hear her, check out her TedTalk, "What I Say in the War." You can also link to various articles and other video/audio on her web site.

Beka Cooper Trilogy (Terrier, Mastiff, Bloodhound). Tamora Pierce.

Pierce, Tamora. Terrier. Random House, 2006.
Pierce, Tamora. Mastiff. Random House, 2009.
Pierce, Tamora. Bloodhound. Random House, 2011.


I loved the first two books and liked most of the third one. I'll get the negatives out of the way first: I felt that the final book wrapped up way too fast, neatly tucking in all bits and bobs...except also glossing over one or two things that I wouldn't have expected to be glossed over. Also--though I'm not going to get into spoilers--I found the final "trick" that saved the day to be oddly...juvenile, or maybe just too silly, I guess? I didn't have a problem with it on its own, really, but I felt it didn't fit with the tone of the rest of the trilogy. (I admit that I feel guilty saying this, and I can't help wondering if it's me somehow; I haven't found this to be an issue in any of her other books, and I've read quite a few. It's still bugging me, though, so here it is.)

Now that that's out of the way...

Modern Man in Search of a Soul. C.G. Jung. (Part II)

5. The Stages of Life

Problems exist because of the growth of consciousness in man; consciousness means turning away from instinct/nature, and that messes with us.

I actually already typed up all my thoughts about this chapter, and I must have done something wrong because Blogger ate them. So I'm going to throw a few interesting points out there and move on...hopefully also moving on from my irritation.

Modern Man in Search of a Soul. C.G. Jung. (Part I)

Jung, C.G. Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Trans. W.S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes. Harcourt Brace, 1933. 

Note: I'm breaking this review/reaction/whatever-you-want-to-call-it into two parts because I get irritable when the page goes on too long. 

I've been hearing about Jung here and there--in various texts about psychology, character creation, and other subjects--for years, and I realized recently that I've barely read any actual Jung. I found this book on my shelves (no idea where it came from; I have a book-collecting itch), and it seemed like a good place to start. I mean, hey, it bills itself as "the basic introduction to the thought of Carl Gustav Jung, who, with Freud and Adler, was one of the chief founders of psychoanalysis." The back-of-the-book blurb is always accurate, right? Right?!

Wolfsong. TJ Klune.

Klune, TJ. Wolfsong. Dreamspinner Press, 2016.

This is the kind of book where you know the characters will stay with you long after you've finished reading. Seriously, the characterization was awesome, each character gaining more and more depth as the story continued.

I had the plot figured out early on...except I didn't. It didn't go where I expected, but where it went felt RIGHT as it happened.

The use of repetition in this book is lovely. The writer clearly has a feel for the rhythms of sentences and does fantastic things with language.

I would recommend this book to everyone. Whether you enjoy well-crafted characters, an exciting plot, a way with words...This book has it all.

Banner of the Damned. Sherwood Smith.

Smith, Sherwood. Banner of the Dammed. Daw Books, 2012.

I've never read anything by Sherwood Smith before, and I can't entirely remember why I put this particular book on my Amazon wishlist (and thus ended up with a copy of it for Christmas this year). I think it might have had to do with liking the intro:

The scribes have three rules.
First Rule: Do not interfere.
Second Rule: Keep The Peace.
Third Rule: Tell the truth as we see it (3).

#1. Between the World and Me. Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. Spiegel & Grau, 2015.

Written in the epistolary style as a letter to his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me has pretty much become a sensation. Everyone's reading it. I've received multiple copies from people who are pretty sure I'm going to love it (and I do). I took a copy to the doctor's office, and my doctor said, "Oh, I'm reading that, too! Very interesting perspective."