📚💬 “Farming is not for everyone, but society chooses what kind of farmers to support, and what those farmers get to grow; they’re part of a larger system.” Mark Bittman, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal
📚💬 “[The USDA’s] first loyalty has always been to the ag/food industry and to destroying any knowledge that would jeopardize the industry’s profits.” Mark Bittman, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal
🍿 Watched A Merry Little Ex-Mas. Excellent cast and Alicia Silverstone made me cry.
📚 Quick Book Review: Golemcrafters by Emi Watanabe Cohen
Faye and her brother Shiloh are half-Japanese and half-Jewish. At their school in Boston, other kids bully them. Over their spring break, their estranged grandfather visits, determines that it’s time to teach them how to build golems, and invites them back to his apartment in New York for training.
While there, Faye and Shiloh start having shared dreams where they are living the lives of other people with the same Hebrew names as them. Faye has the makings of a powerful golemcrafter, but she’s afraid of her power.
Emi Watanabe Cohen has meticulously researched the history of the Jewish diaspora and incorporated the history of Japanese people and Japanese Americans along with that history. Cohen provides an extensive bibliography.
This book is hard to read because it so clearly reflects the struggles Jewish people have faced and continue to face and explicitly connects the antisemitism of the past with the antisemitism of the present. Cohen presents this challenging story beautifully.
Structurally, the story wasn’t quite what I expected. I expected something with a sort of classic fantasy structure, but instead there is a lot of time spent in the dreams and a conclusion that felt to me like it should really be the beginning of the next part of the story rather than the end of the whole thing.
Readers looking for an exploration of Jewish history and why it’s important for Jewish people to hold onto who they are will find that here, from the perspective of modern kids.
I myself am three generations out from the Jewish people in my family who assimilated and intermarried so successfully that nobody was really around to pass on Jewish culture directly in our family. I’ve had to seek it out through other sources. As assimilated as my family has been, I still felt a deep connection to the story of these two kids and their ancestors.
Recommended for kids with interest in Jewish heritage and the commonalities between Jewish people and other oppressed peoples throughout history.
Book: Golemcrafters
Author: Emi Watanabe Cohen
Publisher: Levine Querido
Publication Date: November 12, 2024
Pages: 264
Age Range: Middle Grade
Source of Book: ARC via NetGalley, Public library
Finished reading: Golemcrafters by Emi Watanabe Cohen 📚
💬📚 “Hyperlexia is an early sign of golemcraft aptitude. Golems are made of words, just as Jews are made of books.” Emi Watanabe Cohen, Golemcrafters
This is a kid’s novel about two half-Japanese, half-Jewish middle schoolers who learn to make golems from their estranged grandfather.
🍿 Watched A Royal Montana Christmas.
I always love a horse movie and Warren Christie makes a great cowboy. Not much chemistry between the leads here, though. And I wish the horses had gotten more screentime.
Finished reading: Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid 📚
Finished reading: Game Changer by Rachel Reid 📚
📚 Thank goodness someone is thinking of the men (novelists). 🙄
The Guardian seems grateful that this year’s Booker winner puts masculinity back at the center of literary fiction, claiming that for a decade women have dominated litfic.
Novelist Caro Claire Burke looked at the numbers: men have ⁷won 60 - 80% of major book awards in the past decade. Seems like “female interiority” is sharing the stage.
Let’s imagine for a minute that litfic was dominated by women for a decade, contrary to fact.
Literary fiction as a term seems to have been popularized around 1980. That’s 35 years before women dominated. Take it back to modernists in the 1920s. Men dominated for 90 years, then. Or go back to the beginning of printing: 500+ years.
Even if women were winning 70 - 80% of literary prizes (and we aren’t), there’s a long way to go before anyone needs to worry that men are being pushed to the margins of literature.