Episode 165: Transcript
Episode: 165: These Books Will Help You Get Through the Cold, Cold Winter
Transcription by Alexander
Charlie Jane: [00:00:01] Emily Dickinson said, “There is no long-range interstellar recon ship like a book.” And Annalee, I just want to know, why is it so great to get lost in a book?
Annalee: [00:00:12] You know, that's like one of the deep-cut Emily Dickinson quotes, so I'm really glad that you brought that back to light. You know, I don't think a lot of people know about her sci-fi side.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:24] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:00:25] You know, I think that getting lost in a book is one of the most more pleasurable ways to enjoy media because you're completely inside your own imagination in a lot of ways. Not completely. I mean, it's really that you're inside your imagination visually and like in terms of audio. So it's like very low bandwidth. And I think that can be really restful at a time when so much of our media comes to us through our eyes and our ears.
[00:01:00] It's nice to kind of build your own and like just kind of have this gentle textual relationship with the thing that you're consuming. So I think that's kind of why I like it. I totally understand people who want to listen to audiobooks. And I'm not saying that an audiobook experience is different just because you're listening to it. I think when you're listening to an audiobook, it's the same kind of thing. You're still building that world in your head.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:26] Yeah. And I think there's like there is an immersive, imaginative thing about books where the words are kind of conjuring impressions in your mind and you're getting sucked in. And it's not does not necessarily just sight and sound. You can have like really vivid descriptions of smells, textures, you know, it can be, you know, tastes like, you know, one of my favorite things in books recently is where you read a book where there's just like the food is described in a way that you're like, “Oh, my God, now I really want to eat what they're talking about here.” Like, for example, there's a great book about noodles that's coming out this coming summer where it's like, “Oh, my God, I have to have noodles. Put noodles in my face.”
Annalee: [00:02:05] Yes, I have a novella coming out that's called Automatic Noodle. And indeed, I did have to spend a lot of time thinking about noodles as I wrote about it and writing about noodles. And then I had to eat a bunch of noodles.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:16] So terrible. I'm so sorry for your sacrifice. That's so terrible. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, 2024, we're recording this in mid-November 2024. It's been a heck of a year. It has been a just a horrible, horrible year in many ways.
Annalee: [00:02:32] It's been a roller coaster ride, shall we say.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:35] It's been a roller coaster ride where mostly you go down and then occasionally you go up.
Annalee: [00:02:40] And you're like barfing all the time and like your neighbor is barfing on you. So you're going down into your neighbor's barf.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:46] The up parts are so fast that you're just like smushed into the back of your seat by like the g-force and then you go down again. It's been a terrible year, I think. And one thing that's kept me kind of going in 2024 that I hope will keep you going this winter through our recommendations that we're about to give is I've just read a ton of books.
[00:03:05] I've read, I guesstimated recently, I've read at least 70 books this year, which feels like a high watermark for me. That's probably more books per year than usual for me. I have been doing monthly book reviews for the Washington Post and I read a lot of books for that. And I just have been reading a lot of books in general. It's been just keeping me, you know, in one piece.
[00:03:25] And another thing that really makes me happy and fulfilled is when I read a book that I love getting to shout about it, getting to stand on the rooftops and just yell about how great it is. So I'm super pumped that once again, we're doing our annual episode about books that will get you through the winter months and also just get you through a bunch of other stuff that's going on. And, you know, I feel like books give me and hopefully you strength and inspiration and motivation and they make you feel connected to humanity and to the world of imagination. And as I get older, one of the things that becomes more and more a pleasure for me is just sinking into a nice long story.
[00:04:01] Oh, and I should add that most of the books we're talking about in this episode came out in 2024, but not all of them. Some of them are just books that we've appreciated lately.
[00:04:10] Okay, so you are listening to Our Opinions Are Correct, the podcast that literally cannot find anything under all the piles of books. I'm Charlie Jane Anders. My next book is Lessons in Magic and Disaster. It's about a young witch who teaches her mother how to do magic while also uncovering the secrets of a mysterious book from 1747.
Annalee: [00:04:33] I'm Anna Lee Newitz. I'm a science journalist and a science fiction author. As you mentioned at the top, I do have a novella coming out next year about robots who make noodles called Automatic Noodle. My most recent book, which is pretty relevant to our current situation, is called Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. It's about the history of propaganda in America and how to fight back against it.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:58] All right. And in our mini episode next week, we'll be talking about books that we initially could not get into, that we bounced off at first and then later fell in love with.
Annalee: [00:05:07] And don't forget, we are an entirely listener-supported podcast. Thanks to you. If you'd like to kick in some bucks to make our opinions more correct, you can always find us on patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. All right, let's get literary.
[00:05:24] [OOAC theme plays. Science fiction synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]
Annalee: [00:05:57] Charlie Jane, you've been reviewing science fiction, fantasy, horror books all year. What trends have you noticed in 2024? Yeah. So some of the trends that jumped out at me are definitely continuations of past years. We're still in the era of romantasy, something that everybody wants, but nobody can actually define what it is. I mean, we know that it's romance plus fantasy, but the boundaries of what lies within that are always a little bit wobbly.
[00:06:22] We're still seeing a lot of fairy tale retellings, a lot of mythology retellings, including a ton of Greek mythology retellings. We kind of talked recently to author Nghi Vo about how fantasy is kind of going to these extremes of like extreme coziness or extreme darkness at the moment, and you’re kind of seeing books that are kind of picking one or the other.
[00:06:45] I've also seen something that's new, I guess, this year is I've seen a lot more books about flawed utopias, including like a handful of books that all came out around the same time about black separatist communities that are kind of flawed utopias where black people are trying to live apart from white people. And, you know, various things go wrong. And, you know, sometimes it's, sometimes it's more dystopian than other times, but it's always a flawed utopia.
[00:07:09] I've seen more really just like depressing dystopias this year, like dystopias where it's not just like, “Oh, we're fighting for freedom or whatever”, but it's just like, “There is no hope. We are being ground into the dirt.” Climate change, corporate overlords, you know, inequality, just general oppression creates like just a grim scenario that there's no escape from and no hope.
[00:07:35] I've seen a bunch of books lately that I just most of which were published as more literary science fiction and fantasy, I'm going to say, that just left me like feeling just a sense of deep despair and malaise where to the point where it's like, “Wow, I guess we're just completely fucked.” I think I've seen more of those this year, which is sad to see because, you know, I feel like it does reflect a certain amount of how people are feeling in the face of some really tough problems.
[00:07:58] But okay, so let's talk about some specific books that have been making us happy lately with kind of an emphasis on books that, as we say, will get you through the winter months. Annalee, tell us about a fiction book that you recommend lately.
Annalee: [00:08:10] Oh, man. One of the books I really liked from this past year is Metal from Heaven by August Clarke, which just about has every single thing that I love in the world, which is hot, queer, genderqueer people in a secondary world where they have some superpowers like Magneto-type superpowers over metal. But mainly what they're doing is swashbuckling train robberies.
[00:08:40] And as if that wasn't enough, they are also creating a utopian commune of union organizers. So it's like union organizing queer train robbers in another world. Run, don't walk. You need to read this right now.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:57] It is so good. I love it so much. It's such a great book.
Annalee: [00:09:01] Give us one of your recommendations.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:02] Yeah, I mean, there's so many great books that have come out lately. One that I really love is The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy. It's about a trans girl who joins this roving band of witches and they're traveling around the countryside. And she's learning to be a witch and like she's worried that people are going to find out that she's trans. But then she finds out that there have been trans witches before. I don't want to give too many spoilers, but it's a really sweet book where there is like some scary action. There's like evil witches kind of who they have to fight. And there's people who want to get rid of the witches. But it's a book that just felt so kind of comforting and so sweet. And just like I loved the main character and I loved her kind of struggle to find herself, you know, in this witch community. I highly recommend it. OK, Annalee, give us another novel that you love.
Annalee: [00:09:50] So this was a great year for the author, Premee Mohammed, who we both love and have hung out with. And I think she had like nine billion books come out this year.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:03] She is prolific.
Annalee: [00:10:04] She is incredible. And I'm going to recommend her recent novella called We Speak Through the Mountain. It's the sequel to her novella, The Annual Migration of Clouds, which is set in a kind of a post environmental collapse world where most people live relatively impoverished lives in rural communities. But a few lucky techno elites have built literal domes where they are continuing to live kind of the way people live now with lots of abundance and consumerism. And the main character in the first novella, she's in her rural community and she manages to get a rare invite to go to college in one of the domes.
[00:10:51] And in the second novella, which came out this year, We Speak Through the Mountain, we see what happens when she goes to the dome and sees the kind of super abundance that has been hoarded by these upper class people and how she responds to it and basically how she deals with being essentially someone who's from a developing place coming to a developed place and kind of how her politics end up affecting a bunch of the people who live in the dome.
[00:11:17] And it's just beautiful. Like all of Mohammed's writing, it's incredibly lush and full of natural imagery that will just arrest you immediately. But also politically, it's super interesting. It's a coming of age story. It's a going to college story, which is one of my favorite subgenres. Highly recommend.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:36] Yeah, I love Premee Mohammed's work. Her book, Butcher of the Forest, was another great one this year.
Annalee: [00:11:41] Lots of people are talking about that one already. And so I wanted to put in a plug for my fave. Give us another one of your hit books.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:49] So, you know, by the way, by the time you listen to this, my list of the year's best books will probably be out in the Washington Post. And there's going to be some books in that list that I'm not going to talk about today just to mix things up. So definitely look for that.
[00:12:01] One thing that I really noticed this year that was like a really fun trend that I was so happy about was a lot of novel about fox spirits.
Annalee: [00:12:11] I love a fox spirit.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:12] Me too. Like, I've been into fox spirits for a very long time.
Annalee: [00:12:17] Since before they were cool, right?
Charlie Jane: [00:12:18] Yeah. And like, you know, there have been at least, I would say off the top of my head, four fox spirit books that came out this year. And one of them is a huge spoiler, so I won't say what it was. But if you know, you know. But two in particular really like stuck with me.
[00:12:33] One is Ninetails by Sally Wen Mao and the other is The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo. So Ninetails is a collection of like linked short stories about foxes. And the linkage is that there's like a running story about Asian immigrants coming to San Francisco in the late 19th century, early 20th century, coming to a place called Angel Island, which is San Francisco's version of Ellis Island, where Chinese people are segregated and kind of like forced to be judged before they can come into the United States because there's all these laws against Chinese people.
Annalee: [00:13:04] Sounds too real.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:05] And there's like people who have connections with fox spirits there. But there's a bunch of other short stories about people and foxes. Sally Wen Mao is an award winning poet. And this was her first work of fiction. And it is just beautifully written. It's gorgeous and haunting. And I just really love it.
[00:13:21] And then there's The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo, which is a novel about a lady fox spirit who wants revenge on a hunter who killed her child. She looks like a beautiful woman and she's like very seductive, but she's also extremely vulnerable. And she teams up with a couple of other foxes who are getting involved in like revolutionary politics in the 1930s.
Annalee: [00:13:42] I love that. Radical foxes of the 30s.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:46] Yeah, it gets a little bit dark and scary, but it's also really beautiful. And there's like an undercurrent running through it of people who lost their chance at love when they were young, kind of rediscovering that love as they're older. There's a lot of like second chances in that book, which I really love. It's such a beautiful book. Highly recommend both of those books. It's been a good year for fox spirits. Tell us about another book that you read recently, that you love.
Annalee: [00:14:10] So I just read Cary Vaughn's new novel, The Naturalist Society.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:16] Oh, yeah. You told me about that.
Annalee: [00:14:19] Yeah. So it's another book kind of like Metal from Heaven that feels like it was written personally for me because it's about queer polyamorous scientists in the late 19th century.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:29] Love it.
Annalee: [00:14:30] And it's a delight. It centers on a woman who is a birder. And I chatted with Cary Vaughn about it when we were at Mile High Con a few weeks ago in Denver. And she said that she actually based this character on a real life woman who popularized birding in the late 19th century by encouraging people to use their opera glasses to go out into public parks and look at birds.
[00:14:58] Because it was a time when, you know, most people wouldn't have had a very expensive, you know, spyglass or binoculars. But almost everyone who was middle class had opera glasses. And so this character in the book she is a bird watcher. She's an incredible naturalist. She's, you know, watches migrations and takes incredible notes. And she marries a guy who is kind of a genial but bad scientist. And he consensually uses all of her research to publish her work. And he's kind of her science beard. But then this is not a spoiler. It's kind of the premise. He dies almost immediately at the very beginning of the book. And she discovers that unbeknownst to herself, she was his beard, because he was queer.
[00:15:41] And so she gets to know some of his scientist colleagues who are also queer and gets kind of drawn into this amazing polyamorous romance with two hot gay guys who are like Arctic explorers and totally appreciate how smart she is and fully are trying to like change the scientific community to accept female scientists.
[00:16:02] It's like every wish fulfillment you could possibly have in that, you know, everyone is a great person who is a main character and then the bad guys are all like patriarchal dipshits who don't understand nature. And by the way, I didn't mention there's also magic. So there's naturalist magic that comes from the more you learn about nature and the more you understand the truth about nature, the more powers you have.
[00:16:25] So if you just need like a warm, cozy, scientific romance, you've got to check out Cary Vaughan's The Naturalist Society.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:36] I am dying to read that. You've been telling me about it. It sounds incredible.
Annalee: [00:16:39] It's delightful. All right, give me another one.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:41] So, yeah, I guess this is my last one. I'm just going to shout out some comics. Because this has been such a good year for queer and especially trans comics. So right off the top of my head, a book that came out like last summer, I think, is The Science of Ghosts. It's a graphic novel by Lila Sturgis and El Garing. It's about a trans woman who is an expert on ghosts. She's like a paranormal expert. And she goes to investigate a haunted house and discovers a huge mystery.
[00:17:14] But meanwhile, you know, she's kind of a spiky person and she's having trouble with her relationship. It's a really just like tense, exciting, but ultimately super like lovely story.
[00:17:24] Also, Simplicity by Mattie Lubchansky, which I just read and it comes out next year, unfortunately. So just save that in your back pocket. It's about a trans guy who goes to a community in the middle of nowhere in kind of a future where civilization is starting to break down. It's so weird and surreal, but it's about community and survival. And I really loved it.
[00:17:45] Also, Jadzia Axelrod published a graphic novel of Hawkgirl this year, featuring her character, Gravity, the prettiest star, which is the trans character.
[00:17:55] And finally, I've been looking at a lot of comics on Marvel Unlimited lately. And there's some beautiful queer storytelling on there that's like Marvel kind of infinity comics that are made for the app. And especially shout out to Avengers Academy, by Anthony Oliveira and a rotating series of artists. It's about a group of young, mostly queer teenagers who are learning to be the next generation of the Avengers. It includes Escapade, the trans superhero that I helped to create, but also there's a lot of super awesome gay characters. There's the daughter of Blade, who has a relationship with Escapade, who's awesome, like dhampir: half vampire, vampire hunter. Fucking it's just so beautiful and so great. You can get like a trial subscription to Marvel Unlimited for $3 a month and just put it directly into your brain right now. It's so good.
[00:18:47] All right. Any final recs from you, Annalee, before we move on?
Annalee: [00:18:50] I'm going to leave it there. That was great. And I hope that y'all find some books to keep you cozy this winter there.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:56] Yeah. And we'll talk in the Discord about other books that we recommend or that you recommend. Okay, we're going to move on. When we come back, we'll talk about nonfiction books that we love right now.
[00:19:06] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Annalee: [00:19:09] Hey everybody, this podcast is entirely independent, and that’s because it’s funded by you: our listeners through Patreon. That’s right. So, if you become a patron, you can give us five bucks a month, you can give us ten bucks, whatever you want. That is what’s making this podcast happen every other week. And if you do become a patron, you get all kinds of awesome extras. Like we have mini episodes every other week so that on weeks when we're not coming at you in the main podcast, you can hear little snippets of weird ideas that we have. Plus you get access to our Discord channel, which is full of awesome folks talking about everything from books and technology to science and politics. And we hang out there all the time and chat.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:54] All the time.
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[00:20:14] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:17] So Annalee, you know, can you recommend a science book that is good for this particular moment?
Annalee: [00:20:24] You know, a book that I keep thinking about a lot is Life on Other Planets by Aomawa Shields, who we interviewed actually last year on this podcast.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:36] Oh my God. Yes.
Annalee: [00:20:38] And she's an incredible astrophysicist. And she searches for planets in other solar systems. And she talked to us a lot about not just the experience of discovering new worlds, but also what it was like to grow up as a black girl who wanted to enter a field that's, you know, really dominated by white guys and like what it's like to, you know, really enter into outer space and cross into, you know, new frontiers.
[00:21:09] It's just like, it's a book that's a memoir, but it's also about our future as a species that may be spreading to other worlds. And it's just full of incredible facts about like, we talked to her about snowball earths and eyeball earths. And it's really, it's a perfect book for opening your eyes to incredible discoveries, but also just the joy of doing science. So that's going to be my first recommendation.
[00:21:37] Charlie Jane, do you have a science or non-fiction book that you would like to recommend?
Charlie Jane: [00:21:42] Yeah. So I read a bunch of non-fiction books. These are not new, but they're, you know, they're not super old. I read a bunch of non-fiction books in preparation for my novel Lessons in Magic and Disaster. And one that really stuck out to me that I think is actually a book that anybody could pick up and really enjoy is Queen of the Wits by Norma Clarke, which is about Laetitia Pilkington.
[00:22:04] She was a poet and raconteur and writer in the 18th century. She was friends with Jonathan Swift, you know, the author of Gulliver's Travels. And he bullied her mercilessly. He was a complete bully who just like was constantly being an asshole to her, like all the time. Like he was a complete monster.
Annalee: [00:22:24] He was like a substack bro of history.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:26] He was just kind of a crappy dude. He was just kind of a shit, to be honest. So he was like really mean to her. He kind of threw her away eventually once she had like a scandal. But she, she was kind of like basically everybody tried to throw her away because she had this scandal. Her husband was trying to get rid of her and he kind of contrived for her to be caught in a compromising situation. But she turned the tables on everybody by becoming like this famous wit and like living outside this gentleman's club where people would come in and out of the gentleman's club and hear her telling jokes.
Annalee: [00:22:58] She was basically like a comedian, right?
Charlie Jane: [00:23:00] She was kind of a comedian. She also wrote a best-selling memoir and her whole thing was like, “This was part one of my memoir and you better like pay up front to sponsor the second volume of my memoir or you're going to be in it.” So a bunch of people gave her money to not mention them in the second volume of her memoir.
[00:23:17] She wrote this like incredibly popular tell-all book about her husband, about Jonathan Swift, a bunch of these other dudes who'd fucked with her. She was just like a total badass and she unfortunately went through some really, really, really tough times. But she was just a survivor and I was, I'm in awe of her. I'm super in awe of her like incredible resilience. So that's a book that I highly recommend.
[00:23:39] Annalee, give us another nonfiction book, please.
Annalee: [00:23:42] Yeah. So again, this is not from this past year. It's from 2020, but the anthropologist Rebecca Wragg Sykes published this book called Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art. And like I said, it came out in 2020 and it's just this beautifully written nonfiction book based on all the most recent scientific evidence about Neanderthals who were another type of human on the planet alongside Homo sapiens - who could live among Homo sapiens. They intermarried with Homo sapiens. I guess they didn't, we don't know if they had marriage, but they had families with Homo sapiens.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:24] I'm part Neanderthal.
Annalee: [00:24:25] I mean, a lot of us are part Neanderthal because of the fact that there were a lot of interconnections between Neanderthal people and Homo sapiens people, you know, over 50,000 years ago. And she does this incredible job bringing to life the research that lets us understand the Neanderthals and understand that they were basically humans, a different type of human, but still human. And she talks about their culture, their funeral practices, what kind of art they left behind, their interactions with Homo sapiens, and really just brings to life this extremely misunderstood cousin to Homo sapiens. And it's another one of those books that's just it's a pleasure to read. It transports you to another time and leaves you knowing a heck of a lot more about human evolution.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:19] Awesome.
Annalee: [00:25:19] All right, give us another recommendation.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:23] OK, so, you know, this is a weird choice because it is a comfort read, but it's a very it's a very niche comfort read. A book that I've been obsessed with recently that I've been reading sometimes late at night just to kind of like cool my brain down is called The Doctor Who Production Diary: The Hartnell Years by David Brunt.
[00:25:42] And basically what it is is David Brunt is he's a Doctor Who fan. He went into the BBC archives and read every single memo that was sent out.
Annalee: [00:25:51] Oh, wow.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:52] Every single like piece of correspondence and every memo that was sent out during the first like three and a bit years the Doctor Who was on the air from like 1963 to 1966, roughly covering the period where William Hartnell was playing the Doctor. And it's a book that's comforting and also kind of boring, but it's boring in a way that really soothes me because it'll be like, “Here's all the props that they had to get for this one episode. Here's this one actor who got paid to do this thing, but then he actually did this other thing.” There's a lot of really weird little details that are just like random things that people were fussing over like 60 something years ago. And it's just like trivia in some cases.
[00:26:32] But then there's actually really big things that happen, too. But the reason I find it soothing is, first of all, because it is so kind of low stakes and you know that Doctor Who was fine.
But it's them freaking out like regularly because Doctor Who is always about to be cancelled. Like in the early 60s, in the mid 60s, they're just like, “Well, can we authorize Doctor Who to run for another 10 episodes?” And like every single, like almost every memo is about like, “Well, we don't know if Doctor Who is going to continue after these next 10 episodes. So we can't make plans for the future of Doctor Who because it's just like being renewed 10 episodes or 13 episodes at a time.”
[00:27:06] And it's just, it's very like, I find that very reassuring because obviously now we know that Doctor Who lasted and continues to last long after those 10 episodes that they were trying to get it renewed for. And also just like finding out, just feeling like you're in it with them. You're in the production office dealing with all the day to day challenges of making this show happen on a tiny budget and all the like, just “Can we afford three extra candles for this one set?”
Annalee: [00:27:31] Oh man…
Charlie Jane: [00:27:32] Can we, you know, just that sort of stuff. It's actually very soothing because it's so low stakes and it's just like it's weirdly immersive in a way.
Annalee: [00:27:41] It sounds like it's a really good like commentary track almost like where you're just like learning all the behind the scenes stuff. That's super cool.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:49] Yeah. It's very soothing in a weird way. Okay. Annalee.
Annalee: [00:27:53] Okay. So I want to recommend two books that came out in 2022, which are both about the world of non-human animals, but they come at it from totally different angles.
[00:28:07] So the first one is an An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong, who is probably one of the most famous science journalists in the United States right now. And he has this very warm, funny writing style, and he's incredible at research. And this book is all about the ways in which non-human animals sense the world differently from humans. And it's a lot like reading really hard science fiction about aliens, because he kind of walks us through all the ways that our perceptions, our physical perceptions shield us from so many things that other living creatures see and hear and smell and taste and experience. And it's a really great way to appreciate all the ways in which humans are just one example of how life can kind of bumble through a planet. And we definitely don't have the clearest perspective or the best perspective. We just have one way of experiencing the world. And it's very, very different from the way lots of other life forms do.
[00:29:21] The other book I want to recommend takes the opposite perspective. It's by Sabrina Imbler, who is a science journalist. And they wrote this book that won the L.A. Times Book Prize in 2022, and it's called How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures.
[00:29:40] And Sabrina Imbler's perspective is that one way that we can come to know the natural world is through empathy and identifying with creatures, especially creatures very different from us, like sea creatures who are invertebrates, who have none of our senses, who don't even have bones, and who have bodies that are just completely alien. But Imbler always finds a way to identify emotionally with these animals. And the book is kind of part memoir about growing up being biracial and non-binary and how that has helped them kind of identify with creatures who don't really have gender as we know it and have life cycles, physical life cycles that are completely weird compared to what we have, which is also very weird. And so it's an incredibly beautiful, poetic, empathetic portrait of life in a region where humans could never survive deep under the ocean.
[00:30:43] And so I would recommend both: An Immense World and How Far the Light Reaches. It's a great way, again, to escape in the cold winter months or the political instability months and really ground yourself in like what it is that's wonderful about planet Earth.
[00:31:01] All right. Give us one more recommendation and then I'll have one more recommendation.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:05] Awesome. OK, my final nonfiction recommendation, I think, is actually a book that came out, I think, a year or two ago from our friend, Julia Serano, and it's called Sexed Up.
Annalee: [00:31:17] Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:17] And it is such an incredible book. It is basically about sexualization and, you know, how people are coded as being like who is coded as having sexuality or being sexual and who is coded as not being sexual and how objectification works and how people are turned into sex objects and why that can be a problem. It's, you know, it's basically like Julia comes up with like a different framework for thinking about sexuality and sexualization that kind of sidesteps a lot of the debates that we've been having about like sex positivity and sex negativity or about like whether it's ever OK to like be sexualized or any of that kind of stuff.
[00:32:01] She kind of looks at it in a very different way that really gets into the gendered implications of this and the ways that these things affect genders differently and the ways that these are kind of used to reinforce these hierarchies that we all struggle with. So highly recommend that book. You know, it's a total game changer. I think it's as important as Julia's writing about trans issues. And it actually helps to inform how I think about trans people as well.
[00:32:29] OK, Annalee, one more recommendation. Give it to us.
Annalee: [00:32:32] Yeah. So this is another book from 2022. I'm sorry I haven't represented any 2024 books. But another episode will do that. So this is called African Europeans. It's by a British historian named Olivette Otele. And she has spent her life studying representations of non-Europeans in Europe, both representations created by non-Europeans from Africa and also representations created by Europeans of Africans in Europe. And she goes all the way back. She goes back almost 2000 years to the third century and takes us up pretty much through the present.
[00:33:17] And her basic argument, this is a very readable, very fun book. It's like a fantastic, like breakneck speed history, like a race through European history seen through African eyes. And she just does this great job of reminding us that, you know, there's never been a white Europe and that that's a complete myth that there have always been Africans in Europe. There's always been people of color in Europe. They've been part of the political elite. They've been part of social movements that have been really important. They've played major roles. They've played minor roles in European history.
[00:33:56] And, you know, it really reminded me of this Twitter account that I used to love called Medieval POC. She was just a fantastic, I think amateur historian, but very incredibly well read. I think she did mostly art history and she would just post pictures like all the time that were medieval images of people of color and just showing that like, yeah, like they were everywhere, like all over the place all the time. And she used to get attacked by people saying like, “That's not real European history.” It's like, yeah, actually it is. And so if you want like a serious, hardcore historian to remind you that medieval POC was right, Olivette Otele is a great one to do it. So, check out African Europeans if you want an amazing look at history told more accurately than most histories are.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:51] Hell yeah. Awesome. Those are some great fricking recommendations. I'm going to look for some of those books that I haven't read yet.
Annalee: [00:34:58] Same. I'm very excited for everyone to stay cozy this winter with lots and lots of reading.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:06] Curl up with a good book or like 10. Okay. Thank you so much for listening. This has been Our Opinions Are Correct. If you've never heard us before, we come out every other week and you can find us wherever you find your podcasts. Please subscribe. Please, please, please leave a review if you would like to in all the review leaving places. You can find us on Mastodon, on Patreon, on Bluesky, on…
Annalee: [00:35:31] Instagram.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:31] Instagram. On all the social blurbles. All the social things. On Patreon we’re patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. Most places, we’re either “our opinions” or “our opinions are correct”. Thanks to our incredible intrepid producer and engineer, Niah Harmon. Thanks to Chris Palmer and Katya Lopez Nichols for the music. And you know, we'll be back in two weeks with another episode. But if you're a patron, we'll have a mini episode next week and we'll see you in Discord.
Both: [00:35:59] Bye!
[00:36:00] [OOAC theme plays. Science fiction synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]