couldreads

Polar bears would write books about climate change

When you imagine a polar bear these days, two images spring to mind. One is the contended and playful bear of Coca-Cola commercials, a bear that dances with penguins and wears a scarf and enjoys an endless supply of glass-bottled soda. The other image is from the real world (or at least the TV series Planet Earth) and it is much sadder. This bear straddles a too-small ice floe that’s bobbing across vast swaths of melted ocean. This bear loses more of his natural habitat every day.

If polar bears could talk, I like to think they’d feel mildly insulted by this binary, and eager to expound upon the diverse array of experiences that truly embody being bear. I think Yoko Tawada likes to thinks that, too, because the ursine characters in her Memoirs of a Polar Bear can expound. They can also perform, live among humans, and write articulate analyses on everything from geopolitics to literature. They author books and speak at conferences and flirt shamelessly with arrogant sea lions.

I read KFC’s chick[en] lit so you don’t have to

If there’s one thing I love about today’s feminism, it’s the budding objectification of male brand mascots. Sure, the Brawny Paper Towel Man has been sexing it up in supermarket aisles since 1974, but it took another four decades before America was ready to ogle Mr. Clean’s butt. And Brawny bro was just replaced by a woman anyway.

This Mother’s Day brings with it a new addition to the sexy manscot canon (the sexy manscanon?)—a youthful and dashing Colonel Sanders. In honor of moms everywhere, KFC has released a romance novella called Tender Wings of Desire… because apparently Mother’s Day is big for fried-chicken sales.

John Douglas is a murder whisperer, and David Fincher is a very smart man

As mass-market paperbacks go, John Douglas’ Mind Hunter is a joy to behold. The cover features a soft-focus photo of Douglas, a benign middle-aged white man wearing a trench coat with a popped collar. Half of Douglas’ face is overlaid with thin red concentric circles that emanate from the red eyeball of what might be… a dog? Unclear. Bought used, my copy also has a much-broken spine and yellowing pages. It looks like it came from a supermarket aisle reached via time machine.

Three books for the ladeez

Perhaps by chance, perhaps as some sort of subliminal political backlash, I’ve read a handful of books with fabulous female perspectives lately. Let me tell you about them.

Yes, you really do need to read Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad

If you’re doing this whole “reading” thing right, there should ideally be a shortlist of books that changed your mind/blew your mind/expanded your mind, whether on specific subjects or just in general. They don’t have to be the greatest books ever written, or even particularly literary or influential (though it’s always nice if they are). They’re just the ones you read in the right place at the right time in your life, or in history. They’re the ones you consciously or unconsciously absorbed into your worldview. A shortlist book is one you finish and then think about, constantly at first and then on and off for years, or even decades, afterwards.

My shortlist for books about racism, and specifically slavery, is particularly short, mostly because I’m an asshole who spent at least 50% of her formative years reading Stephen King and Sookie Stackhouse novels (no regrets though, no regrets). Many of the books on that list I’ve only read in the past few years—The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Homegoing, Americanah—and this month I added a new one: Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad.