Red Dwarf Book Reviews

New Beginnings - Or, What I've Been Reading Lately

Apologies readers for the radio silence between my introduction post and my next post. Time moves differently when you're disabled, and it's something I am learning not to begrudge myself for. Grand ideas and ambitions you have can be set back by weeks as flare-ups give no consideration to your needs.

I've been trying to forgive myself for this more, to reframe time lost to illness, time I thought of as lost to healing. I think of what Ellen Samuels refers to as "crip time" in the essay Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time. With my birthday on the horizon, I struggle to reconcile ideas of what I should have been doing with my youth versus the reality of being chronically ill. Though I may not be accomplishing all that I have envisioned for myself at this age, much of my rest and revitalization comes through reading.

So in extending understanding to myself, I come back to this blog. Free of any expectations of a rigid posting schedule, my words will flow along a stream of consciousness. I give myself permission to post the words as they come to my mind, letting myself present my thoughts - incoherent as they may be at times. Here is just some of what I've read since the year began. Note this is not everything - if you wish to see all that I've read, you can find me on The Storygraph @readdwarfreviews.

My first read of the year was Nada Elia's Palestine and Feminist Liberation. It's a small, but mighty book that I feel folks must read. Especially in light of ongoing imperial violence perpetrated throughout West Asia by the United States and Israel, we in the Global North must not hem and haw and try to justify such aggression. Elia focuses on pinkwashing, a tactic used to justify violence. "We're saving these women!" "It's nothing worse than what their men would do to them!" These are likely sentiments you have heard and perhaps even echoed, thinking them to be logical. However, there is nothing feminist about what we are seeing. We must resist orientalist framing that position certain societies as uniquely misogynistic and barbaric.

Now a book series I wished I had left back in 2025 was We'll Always Have Summer by Jenny Han. In 2025, I hateread the first two books in the series. Unfortunately, my hold for the third book didn't come in until the new year, and so I subjected myself to Belly Conklin and the Connor boys one last time. It was pretty bad. I need not say any more. I think Belly Conklin should've been able to kill every boy and man in this series.

While I experienced the lows of young adult fiction in January, I also experienced one of the highs. I read Jesmeen Kaur Deo's Reasons We Break and I loved it. I read the author's debut novel, TJ Powar Has Something to Prove, when it first released back in 2022 and it captured my whole heart. TJ Powar follows one bold and brash brown girl as she embarks upon a journey of self love. Reasons We Break is set in the same world as TJ Powar, but the stakes are much higher. Readers follow Simran - TJ's cousin, as she gets tangled up with a gang. I'll be the first to admit that when I read the synopsis for RWB, I was very dubious. I thought that perhaps the author had fallen prey to certain trends in publishing and I almost didn't give it a chance. However, I was very glad to be wrong and have my expectations blown out of the water. The characters are written with such depth and Deo looks at how average people end up getting involved in gangs. Just as I finished reading RWB, the author announced that she is writing a third book in the same world, and know that I will run to the shelves the minute it is out.

We had a pretty rough winter where I'm at, and I found myself reading the first treasury of Lynn Johnston's For Better or For Worse. Growing up, I recall regularly going to my grandparents place. My grandparents had a very limited selection of toys, no cable TV, and no computers or any internet. Starved for entertainment, I found it in a box of newspapers they kept in a closet. Thick stacks of papers, but I only had eyes for the comics pages. It is here that I was first introduced to Sue Lynn Johnston's work. Reading the treasury during snow days this year really was nostalgic. More than that though, I really appreciated the author's commentary alongside the strips. For those unfamiliar with the series, it follows the Patterson family through good times and bad. Elly is the homemaker and mother to two children. Among Elly's central conflicts for some of the strips in this treasury is her desire for her work as a wife and mother to be taken seriously. She often catches herself thinking of a life outside of mothering, the desire to not be tied to the kids all day, to have her husband appreciate her work. Reading these strips alongside the author's commentary about women's liberation movements at the time is just fascinating. The one downside to reading the treasury is that it did get repetitive at times. Serialized comic strips like these are best enjoyed over a long period of time rather than being binged. I do plan to read the rest of the strips at some point, but probably at a much slower pace than I did with the first treasury.

I picked up the Blue Period manga last year and am slowly catching up. This series is quite a treat and a punch to the gut. Art about making art has always held a very solemn space in my heart, and this series is no exception. This quote from volume 5 really struck a chord with me, as has the character who spoke it: "I'm always worried about how people see me. I believe that my wants are the only thing protecting me, but I don't even know what I want sometimes." That entire chapter in volume 5 with the self-portraits. Whoof. Perhaps someday I'll make a separate post on art about making art.

I really have to give Yah Yah Scholfield all the flowers for On Sundays She Picked Flowers. I don't keep an eye on new releases all too closely anymore, but this was on my radar for a couple of reasons, one of them being that P. Djèlí Clark blurbed it. Though the year is still young, I see this keeping its place as a favourite read of the year. The prose is so lush and visceral and Scholfield is intimately aware of the underpinnings of Southern Gothic horror.

Sometimes you pick up a book because the cover reminds you of something else. The cover art for Drew Huff's Landlocked in a Foreign Skin reminded me immensely of Wolf 359, and turns out, the similarities didn't stop with the cover! This is a short little read that follows a creature known to the reader as The Fisherman as they are taken captive by a heiress who wishes to use The Fisherman for her own gain. Though I didn't particularly care for the ending of the book, I did love being in The Fisherman's head and trying to solve the mystery alongside them.

Much like how a character in Blue Period really saw me, so did one of the main characters in The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't A Guy At All (referred to here on out as green yuri because I am NOT typing that title out again. The library got the third volume of this at the start of the month and so I picked up where I left off. I loved the first volume when I read it last year. We see a turning point with Mitsuki Koga this volume and how she chooses to present to her peers. There's this line that really cuts me, as does the events that precede it. "What's great about me? If Osawa-san says there's something, and if people are going to misunderstand me, then I have to let others know me on my own terms."

I'm going to put the next two reads as one entry, though I didn't read them back to back. The game has been afoot for over 100 years, and I am late to the absolute delight that is Sherlock Holmes! In March I read both A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four. A friend of mine is a huge fan of all things Sherlock and has been an invaluable source of information about the canon and beyond. I'm so mad that I've been duped by so many bad Sherlock adaptations that cast him as this cruel, detached, and unfeeling character. I remember being so delighted by Holmes and Watson's first meeting that I read the first chapter three times. I've been interested in how the horror genre reflects fears that are founded and unfounded, but I guess it never occurred to me that was something seen in mystery as well. Though it is not the focus of the second book, I could not help but think of history and how certain events overseas were perceived by Victorians at the time. I really hope to get to The Hounds of the Baskervilles this year, and so I will continue along my adventures with one of the most iconic literary duos.

Next on the list is Lindsey Fitzharris's The Facemaker. I listened to it on audio over the course of a couple of weeks and it made me think so much of war. The book follows the true history of surgeon Harold Gillies and his team that revolutionized plastic surgery. The horrors of war also led to scientific breakthroughs like these and I was in such admiration at how thorough this book was. This may be a deterrent for some folks, but the author tends to go on tangents. I do understand the temptation - there are little details you find when researching that you just want to share - I've been guilty of going on long-winded tangents in my line of work. I have so much respect for the people who worked tirelessly to develop treatments often as they went along for facial reconstruction. A hard read for sure, but one I highly recommend. A fun fact for Trans Day of Visibility - Harold Gillies not only made significant advancements in facial reconstruction, he also performed the first recorded phalloplasty and vaginoplasty.

Again, this is not a comprehensive wrapup of what I've been reading, but I'd be remiss not to mention what I've read by Tatsuki Fujimoto. Chainsaw Man part two ended on March 24th, and I can't say I liked the ending. Granted, I binged the final 60 or so chapters to ensure I could read the final chapter on the day it dropped, so perhaps some of my disappointment comes from the fact that my brain was nearly mush after reading all that so fast. It felt rushed, and there's quite a few loose ends that don't get tied. I will still recommend the first part (volumes 1-11) to anyone as I loved those. I also continued my tradition of rereading Goodbye, Eri during my birth month. I love that oneshot more than I can ever express and I hope the author takes a break from serialized stories to put out more neat experimental works like that.

I'm currently reading two books:

Signing off, memoria

P.S: I am still trying to figure out how to enable comments and stuff like that. I don't care if this is the most prettiest site in the world, but I do want to try and focus on ensuring a smooth user experience on both mobile and desktop.

Works Cited

Samuels, E., (2017) “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time”, Disability Studies Quarterly 37(3). doi: https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v37i3.5824