Diversity good, but maybe vet the books first...

So the school division has decided to introduce a lot of new titles into our library that celebrate diversity and tell stories from the LGBTQ community's perspective. This is all well and good, but if you are going to add books to the list, they still need to be teenage live relevant (I think). This book is written from the transgender experience, but the historical content would be lost on 21st century high school kids. However, it does have one of the best one-line poems I have ever read. So there's that.

SLIP

"I want to be as thin as the scars on my wrist". Brilliant. 

Mathew Shepard...RIP.

I had almost forgotten how horrific the world can be and then this arrives in our library at school. The murder of Mathew Shepard is one of the most heinous hate crimes in recent memory. Sadly, the world he left has not necessarily improved. However, the fact that we can have gender neutral bathrooms and Gay Pride and LGBT diversity in our schools must mean we are trying to do something right. Although some of these poems seem trite on their own, the book as an artifact is, at times, as powerful as The Book Thief.  Read the introduction, the poems, the footnotes, the explanations...read it all, then read it again. The brutality and the loneliness of his death is heart wrenching. 

Another from the pile...off the table, in the closet..inside, outside, upside, down...

The best here...well that cover is clever. Based on the opening three pages of ads..I still want a Prada bag (to display like art in a room all its own), the mini-article on Nazis and amphetamine, and a funny Adam and Eve cartoon....bakes him an apple pie..."I'll be damned!" Ah, yup. 

Sometimes I read Magazines...from stacks that never seem to dwindle.

The best of the best here: a funny cartoon about hipsters and their moleskines, "Cut to the Bone" an essay on the horrors of working in a chicken factory if you are an illegal/semi-legal/totally legal immigrant...yes, capitalists are still assholes, and possibly the small review about a book called The Great Cat and Dog Massacres whereby Londoners killed their pets prior to the expected German attack in 1939.  

Convoluted...Like many big events in the DC Universe

This collection is excellent if you can fight through the convoluted story line. Great splash pages, Wonder Woman as a Star Sapphire, and crazy old Sinestro going really crazy. However, if you don't know this universe you will be reading this three times just to figure it out.  

Wow...Not so much Boys Scouts...IE...Not so much prepared

So this is the first book I have "read" by listening to it. I will probably buy a hard copy later as it is excellent. So far the most intriguing, though horrific part, is the Japanese's treatment of the Chinese in the event known as "The Rape of Nanking" I knew it was awful, but the accounts here are seriously disturbing. Aside from that, the first-person accounts all say the same thing;

1. The Americans completely underestimated the "small people".

2. The Americans were completely unprepared for this attack.

3. The Americans were so unprepared and delusional with regards to what an Asian nation could do that even during the attack, especially early, they thought it was a training exercise. They could NOT believe in a Japanese attack (to their detriment, obviously).

4. That heroes would emerge, because heroes needed to emerge.