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We've Always Been Queer

The podcast is Books That Burn because the original idea was "books that burn you", discussing fictional depictions of trauma. It's also an intentional reminder of the pile of burning books, you know the photo I mean, the one from WWII. It's a pile of books about queerness, gender, and sexuality. Just in case you don't know, the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) was headed by Magnus Hirschfeld.  It was a resource for gay, intersex, and transgender people, both of knowledge and medical help. It also helped the community with addiction treatment and contraception. It wasn't perfect and some of the ideas they had seem out of date now, the ones we know about anyway. But they were trying to make queer people's lives better, and they were a community resource at a time when people really needed it. Which is all the time, we always need these accesses. And the Nazis burned the whole library. It took days, they had to drag the books ou
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Binti by Nnedi Okorafor (Binti, #1)

Binti is about restitution and amends, bravery and voyage, halting a cycle of violence and miscommunication...in space. The tech is described with the surety and shorthand of familiarity to say you don't need more, for Binti knows what she's doing.

The pacing was strange and dreamlike. I don't normally read novellas and this one felt far too short of an exploration for such a rich world as was hinted at in the text. Luckily for my satisfaction there are sequels which I will be exploring, as I have been intrigued and want to linger longer here. There is just enough explanation of technology as to be satisfying without being hard sci-fi. I'll have to see how the later books handle it before I can say whether this is due to the brevity of the text or if it's a stylistic choice that will persist in the series. Overall I liked it and will be fine with either in the sequels.

I appreciated how it doesn't slow down for my lack of understanding, while also conveying some of the feel of the emotional burden in being alone in a crowd and constantly code-switching to explain one's self to others.

I shouldn’t leave this without mentioning that it has a lot of trauma in close succession with very little after-care, neither for the characters nor the reader. Since it’s very short and it has sequels I’ll be looking there for what this book is missing, and I’m reserving judgement until I see how it all plays out.

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