Remula Wazokana's Dreamwidth

• [Nov 4 Rainbow Book Group] Thunder Song: Essays by Sasha taqwšeblu LaPointe (2025) -- Coast Salish author from the Nooksack and Upper Skagit Indian tribes -- she gets really into riot grrl and punk but also realizes just how white it is, and figures out how to integrate her Indigenous identity
  
  
• [Nov 12 climate change book club] Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Anxiety by Britt Wray (2022) -- I know it was largely because I was tired, but I definitely wished this book was shorter
  
  
• [Nov 19 DEI book club -- November is Native American Indian/Alaska Native Heritage Month] Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology ed. Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. (2023)
  
  
• Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk by Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe (2022) -- near the end of Thunder Song (p.194) she says, talking about her relationship with her ex-husband, "It ended. We both played our roles in that. I wrote a book about it."  Many of us at book club were interested to learn more about the life that isn't talked about in Thunder Song -- and wondered if it might be a more linear narrative (it's not particularly).
  
  
• [Dec 2 Rainbow Book Group] Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo (2021) -- baby lesbian in 1950s SF Chinatown
  
  
• [Dec 10 climate change book club] Perilous Times by Thomas D. Lee (2023, fiction) -- this read really quickly (good because it's almost 500 pages!), which was nice after having struggled a lot with reading recently. I had forgotten that skygiants' reiew talked about it being a Ride that was not well-served by the Serious Business cover art it got.
  
  
• Summer at Squee by Andrea Wang (2024) -- middle-grade novel about a Chinese American kid at Chinese cultural summer camp -- gets into issues of different kinds of Chinese American identity/experience -- seen on the shelves of a local independent bookstore
  
  
• The School for Invisible Boys by Shaun David Hutchinson (2024) -- another middle-grade novel (seen on the Most Anticipated Queer Middle Grade: January-June 2024)
  & its sequel: A Home for Unusual Monsters (2025)
  
  
• Dragon Bike: Fantastical Stories of Bicycling, Feminism, & Dragons ed. Elly Blue (2020) -- volume 6 of the "Bikes in Space" series -- trying for light reading when I was struggling to read, and also trying to read down some of the stuff on my shelves
  
  
• [bff book club] Saving Our Own Lives: A Liberatory Practice of Harm Reduction by Shira Hassan (with Foreword by adrienne maree brown & Introduction by Tourmaline) (2022) -- finally, we finished! Our near-term plan is to pivot to lectionary preview Bible study now that bff is preaching regularly.
  
  
• The Transition by Logan-Ashley Kisner (2025) -- trans-masc werewolf YA horror
  
  I first heard about this from Book Riot, Our Queerest Shelves, "12 New Queer Books Out in September 2025" (Sep 2, 2025) and was intrigued by a GR review that said: "We've all heard about werewolf analogies when in comes to transition and largely that idea has been reclaimed by the trans community as empowering, but Kisner takes it in a different direction, instead emphasizing how becoming a werewolf goes against bodily autonomy in the way that transition doesn't."

• [CST] Summer, 1976 with my mom (who graduated high school in 1977) Abby M from church (my mom was sick) [online program]

  1976. An Ohio college town. The second wave of feminism is cresting. Two very different women are thrown together through a faculty babysitting co-op and an unlikely friendship forms between Diana, a fiercely iconoclastic artist, and Alice, a free-spirited yet naive young housewife. Summer, 1976 is written by Pulitzer winner David Auburn (Proof) with Paula Plum, recipient of the Elliot Norton Prize for Sustained Excellence making her CST directorial debut. She is joined by Elliot Norton Award-winning actors Lee Mikeska Gardner and Laura Latreille as Diana and Alice. In the course of 90 minutes, we are brought directly into their memories and the small moments that change the course of their lives in this funny and poignant play The New York Times praises as “sharply observant…subtly, insistently feminist.”

  This play was sadder than I had expected.  When I went back to the blurb afterward, to see what it had actually said versus my expectations, I realized it says almost nothing about the actual play -- about half of the blurb is just the credentials of the people involved.
  
  Googling, some sites use the phrase "motherhood, ambition and intimacy," which feels like a pretty accurate summary of the themes of the play. In Googling I also came across a WBUR review of this production.
  
  When the season was initially announced, Abby noticed that almost none of the plays were written by women (Silent Sky was the only one of the five). I didn't get "written by a man" vibes watching this play, but it is interesting that the Artistic Director writes in the program for this play (talking about the plays they selected for this season), "We doubled down on our mission - the feminine perspective and science wrapped within our social justice values," when only one play is actually written by a female perspective. (Yes, obviously women shouldn't be the only people writing women. And also.)

I love this discussion tho bc we have talked about how as sports fans, it’s hard to enjoy a sports romance without sports. But then when is it too much sport? Where is the balance?
Has anyone in here read Mac Crane’s A Sharp Endless Need? What did you think of that balance? Maybe we can do that another time—a sports romance that literally opens in scene during a game

• Becoming Baba: Fatherhood, Faith, and Finding Meaning in America by Aymann Ismail -- nonfiction (2025, 272 pages)  -- memoir, son of Egyptian American parents 
• You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat -- fiction (2021, 272 pages) -- Palestinian American author/protagonist, "Told in vignettes that flash between the U.S. and the Middle East—from New York to Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine"
• The Wrong End of the Telescope by Rabih Alameddine -- fiction (2022, 284 pages) -- Lebanese male author, "novel about an Arab American trans woman's journey among Syrian refugees on Lesbos island"
• Between Two Moons by Aisha Abdel Gawad -- fiction (2024, 336 pages) -- "Set in the Arab immigrant enclave of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, following three siblings coming of age over the course of one Ramadan"
• The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley -- nonfiction (1987, 496 pages)
• This is What America Looks Like: My Journey from Refugee to Congresswoman by Ilhan Omar -- nonfiction (2021, 288 pages) -- Somali American immigrant