Reviews and Comments

Just finished "A Paradise Built in Hell" by Rebecca Solnit. It describes how the vast majority of ordinary people actually behave in a disaster ("in Hell" to quote the title), and that it is mostly good, calm and very social (so much so that some even describe it as "a Paradise"). The book was published 2009 (16 years ago), so it's content has already become well-known on the left, meaning that it didn't have quite as much new stuff for me as it probably had for the typical reader back when it came out.

While it has a lot of good and I therefore consider it a must-read for everyone who doesn't already know the topic, it is far too little ideological for my tastes (although this admittedly might increase it reach). For example the book at length portrays the viewpoints of people who are wrong and have no real bearing on the point of the book (which I therefore would have left out) and despite showing pretty in depth that anarchism is much more "natural" (for what it's worth… – I'm not generally in favor of such arguments, but it's one that is brought up here) and better for most people, it doesn't come out for anarchism straight out and the author also seems to not be an anarchist herself (although my judgement of the book here is of course somewhat colored by the fact that I'm an anarchist myself…).

To make its point the book talks about a couple historical cases of disasters, ranging (among others) from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the Blitz in Britain during WW2 to the more modern ones of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina (it's very funny/weird to me as someone who was born between 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina that it treats these things as if they were recent (because of course when in was written from 2004 to 2009 they genuinely were.)).

Just finished my first book since joining BookWyrm. It's "The Sapling Cage" by Margaret Killjoy. It's a nice story of a trans girl who wants to become a witch despite her AGAB.

Since it's set in a medieval-like setting, our modern labels are not used, so the author has to actually describe the things she wants the reader to take away from it, instead of being able to just name-drop them. Therefore the trans representation for example is not shallow like usually, but very deep (which is of course helped by the fact that the author is herself trans).

Also a place where this is important is with her politics (she's an anarchist). She can't just let one of the witches go on a tirade about how they're anarchist or how good anarchism is or something, but instead has to show how an anarchist society would actually work in practice and then has to hope that she did it well enough that the reader notices that it's supposed that.

One thing that striked me (someone who is only used to witch stories in the vein of Harry Potter and who spent the majority of their live in the school system) quite strongly is how the idea of a central school is actually not at all necessary for a magic story. I have heard Harry Potter being called the "bourgeoisation of magic" due to that, but didn't really understand it because I wasn't able to believe that a formalized school system (or any school at all) wasn't actually necessary.

All-in-all a quite nice story. If you're able to cope with the bit of transphobia that is necessary(-ish) in story set in a world that doesn't really know of trans people, I think it could become a comfort story for many trans people (or at least for trans women – I can't really speak to the experience of other people of course).