I'm reading again!

[morgan_dhu]

The ongoing health crises of the past two years seem to have had serious negative consequences for my ability to read in a sustained manner, but recently I've been having more success in managing to read.

I have liked to read multiple books at the same time - this allows me to pick the subject that most suits my mood when my brain goes "I want to read sonething now, please."


Current books in progress:
The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander
Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler, edited by Rebecca J. Holden and Nisi Shawl
First of the Tudors, by Joanna Hickson, historical fiction about Jasper Tudor, uncle of Henry VII.

And I've just begun reading Adilifu Nama's Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film, which looks to be very interesting. As the author describes his work:

"The present work examines the symbolic discourse and ideological messages encoded into black representation, including its structured absence, across a multitude of sf films as a symbolic dialogue with the multiple racial discourses and ideas surrounding black racial formation, past and present, that are circulating in American culture. Moreover, sf films of the 1950s to the current moment are discussed in this book with an eye toward drawing connections between sf cinema, black racial formation, and shifting race relations in America over the past fifty years. Too often the sf film genre is regarded as addressing only signature divisions in the genre: humans versus machines, old versus new, individual versus society, and nature versus the artificial. In this book, however, I place black racial formation at the center of these common dichotomies. As a result, a more complex and provocative picture emerges of how sf cinema, in imagining new worlds and addressing a broad range of social topics, has confronted and retreated from the color line, one of the most troubling and turbulent social issues present in American society."