a sort-of best of list...

[littlebutfierce]

I've been slacking off on book blogging in general & to this community in particular--but I thought I'd at least mention some of the more interesting reads from the past year or so.

Links go to my reading blog; the reviews are mostly pretty short but if nothing else, at least this might make more folks aware of the books.

I tried to focus on books &/or authors that I think hadn't already been mentioned here.

• American Chinatown: A People’s History of Five Neighborhoods - Bonnie Tsui
  
• Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles Of Incarcerated Women - Victoria Law
  
• Short Girls - Bich Minh Nguyen. A novel about two Vietnamese American sisters & their father, an unsuccessful inventor obsessed with what he sees as the disadvantages of being short in US society.
  
• "Lesbians" in East Asia: Diversity, Identities, and Resistance - Edited by Diana Khor and Saori Kamano
  
• Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture - Angela Y. Davis
  
• Chorus of Mushrooms - Hiromi Goto. A novel about 3 generations of Japanese women in Canada.
  
• The Other Side of Paradise - Staceyann Chin. Spoken word artist Chin's memoir of growing up poor, parentless, mixed-race & queer in Jamaica.
  
• San Francisco's International Hotel: Mobilizing the Filipino American Community in the Anti-Eviction Movement - Estella Habal
  
• The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World - Vijay Prashad
  

(Additional tags: Chinese-American; African-American; creative nonfic; Indian; activism; history; prison; Asian-American; Vietnamese-American; Asian; Japanese-Canadian; Asian-Canadian; memoir; Jamaican; Caribbean; mixed race; Filipino-American; GLBT ... & probably a bunch I missed.)