DriftScribe

Queer feminist, liberal socialist, abolitionist she/her | 🇨🇳🇺🇸 | 📚🎧🎓🧠📖 mostly nonfiction, always on hunt for books on topics I’m into

1021 points

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My Taste

dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss

Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights

Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Reading...

The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care

DriftScribe commented on Yazii's update

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Feminism Without Exception

Emerald: Finished 40 Main Quest books.

145

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How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University

Theo Baker

DriftScribe TBR'd a book

How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University

Theo Baker

DriftScribe started reading...

The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care

Anne Boyer

Award-winning poet and essayist Anne Boyer delivers a one-of-a-kind meditation on pain, vulnerability, mortality, medicine, art, time, space, exhaustion, and economics—sharing her true story of coping with cancer, both the illness and the industry, in The Undying.A week after her forty-first birthday, the acclaimed poet Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living paycheck to paycheck who had always been the caregiver rather than the one needing care, the catastrophic illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness. A twenty-first-century Illness as Metaphor, as well as a harrowing memoir of survival, The Undying explores the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in ancient Roman dream diarists, cancer hoaxers and fetishists, cancer vloggers, corporate lies, John Donne, pro-pain ”dolorists,” the ecological costs of chemotherapy, and the many little murders of capitalism. It excoriates the pharmaceutical industry and the bland hypocrisies of ”pink ribbon culture” while also diving into the long literary line of women writing about their own illnesses and ongoing deaths: Audre Lorde, Kathy Acker, Susan Sontag, and others. A genre-bending memoir in the tradition of The Argonauts, The Undying will break your heart, make you angry enough to spit, and show you contemporary America as a thing both desperately ill and occasionally, perversely glorious. Includes black-and-white illustrations

DriftScribe finished a book

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

Audre Lorde

Presenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider celebrates an influential voice in twentieth-century literature. In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. This commemorative edition includes a new foreword by Lorde scholar and poet Cheryl Clarke, who celebrates the ways in which Lorde's philosophies resonate more than twenty years after they were first published. These landmark writings are, in Lorde's own words, a call to "never close our eyes to the terror, to the chaos which is Black which is creative which is female which is dark which is rejected which is messy which is . . . "

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Moonchild_7

Controversial opinions👀👀👀

Hi Boundlings 🪄

Its me Moonchild, How are you all? Hope you are fine😇

Just wanted to know if you have controversial opinions about books or authors 😅👀??!!

190

DriftScribe TBR'd a book

White Feminism: From the Suffragettes to Influencers and Who They Leave Behind

Koa Beck

JOURNALIST KOA BECK’S AMBITIOUS HARVARD RESEARCH-BASED DEEP DIVE INTI HOW FEMINISM HAS BEEN COMMODIFIED AND RACIALIZED—AND THE REVOLUTIONARY WAY OF THINKING THAT COULD DRIVE A NEW MOVEMENT Fourth-wave feminism preaches empowerment for women, centering an intersectionality that has been missing from the start. Long before the Lean In phenomenon and branded empowerment conferences, women have been encouraged to “find their power” and to “know their value” when combatting institutional sexism. But we’ve also funded patriarchal institutions that have cashed in on “feminism” without actually making a real difference in the lives of the women they supposedly uplift. From the formation of the suffragette movement over a century ago to the Women’s March in 2017, mainstream feminism has been defined by parameters dictated and sanctioned by the white women they most benefit. In White Feminism, Koa Beck details the conventions that marginalized genders have needed to adopt in order to be recognized and exposes how Indigenous, Black, brown, transgender, disabled, and undocumented women, among other disenfranchised peoples, have been overlooked in order to champion a different feminist narrative. With insights spanning from the rise of girl bosses to widespread civil unrest during a global pandemic, Beck illuminates how white feminism adheres to a political strategy that commercializes struggle and reinforces white Western supremacy. Combining her quick-witted, cutting commentary with methodical historical research, Beck pulls from years of experience in the media industry to highlight the extent of racial prejudice, elitism, and privilege that fuels the dominant feminist discourse. She delivers a call to action that urges readers to reinvent the narrow feminist ideas that have become staples in modern gender politics, asking readers to join her in scrutinizing the capitalist, individualist, and heteronormative paradigms under which white feminism operates. In this wide-ranging analysis of the dangers of homogenizing the global feminist experience, Beck advocates for a new landscape that accounts for visibility and inclusivity.

DriftScribe is interested in reading...

Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson

Tourmaline Tourmaline

Black transgender luminary Tourmaline brings to life the first definitive biography of the revolutionary activist Marsha P. Johnson, one of the most important and remarkable figures in LGBTQIA+ history, revealing her story, her impact, and her legacy. “She is the preeminent and foremost scholar on Marsha P. Johnson. . . . To us, Tourmaline is the expert.”—Janet Mock, Allure “Thank god the revolution has begun, honey.” Rumor has it that after Marsha P. Johnson threw the first brick in the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, she picked up a shard of broken mirror to fix her makeup. Marsha, a legendary Black transgender activist, embodied both the beauty and the struggle of the early gay rights movement. Her work sparked the progress we see today, yet there has never been a definitive record of her life. Until now. Written with sparkling prose, Tourmaline’s richly researched biography Marsha finally brings this iconic figure to life, in full color. We vividly meet Marsha as both an activist and She performed with RuPaul and with the internationally renowned drag troupe The Hot Peaches. She was a muse to countless artists from Andy Warhol to the band Earth, Wind & Fire. And she continues to inspire people today. Marsha didn’t wait to be freed; she declared herself free and told the world to catch up. Her story promises to inspire readers to live as their most liberated, unruly, vibrant, and whole selves.

Post from the Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches forum

DriftScribe

Quote from 61%

”It is easier once again for white women to believe the dangerous fantasy that if you are good enough, pretty enough, sweet enough, quiet enough, teach the children to behave, hate the right people, and marry the right men, then you will be allowed to co-exist with patriarchy in relative peace, at least until a man needs your job or the neighborhood rapist happens along. And true, unless one lives and loves in the trenches it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.”

DriftScribe started reading...

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

Audre Lorde

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China's Invisible Crisis: How a Growing Urban-Rural Divide Could Sink the World's Second-Largest Economy

Scott Rozelle

A Stanford economist challenges claims about China's unstoppable ascendance, arguing that the nation's past failure to invest in its rural population may lead to economic stagnation China's future seems certain. Marveling at its stratospheric growth, observers have christened it "the inevitable superpower." But as Stanford economist Scott Rozelle and writer Natalie Johnson reveal, China faces a massive crisis invisible to outside observers, and to the Chinese themselves. China's future will be decided in the countryside, where over two-thirds of Chinese children are growing up. It is not a pretty picture. For decades, rural Chinese received poor nutrition and education. Now, as wages rise, manufacturing flees, and automation progresses, many of those left behind are ill-equipped for jobs in a new knowledge economy. As China's Invisible Crisis shows, hundreds of millions of people could soon be without work, with grave potential costs in China and around the world.

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Taiwan Travelogue

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ

A bittersweet story of love between two women, nested in an artful exploration of language, history, and power May 1938. The young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki, Japan, and arrived in Taiwan. She’s been invited there by the Japanese government ruling the island, though she has no interest in their official banquets or imperialist agenda. Instead, Chizuko longs to experience real island life and to taste as much of its authentic cuisine as her famously monstrous appetite can bear. Soon a Taiwanese woman―who is younger even than she is, and who shares the characters of her name―is hired as her interpreter and makes her dreams come true. The charming, erudite, meticulous Chizuru arranges Chizuko’s travels all over the Land of the South and also proves to be an exceptional cook. Over scenic train rides and braised pork rice, lively banter and winter melon tea, Chizuko grows infatuated with her companion and intent on drawing her closer. But something causes Chizuru to keep her distance. It’s only after a heartbreaking separation that Chizuko begins to grasp what the “something” is. Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, this novel was a sensation on its first publication in Mandarin Chinese in 2020 and won Taiwan’s highest literary honor, the Golden Tripod Award. Taiwan Travelogue unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships.

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DriftScribe

May 13, 2026

Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life

4.0

Enjoyment: 4.0Quality: 4.5Characters: Plot:

[WANTED] Full-Time Wife

Job Reference: 1984-WIFEDOM

Role Overview: We are seeking a dedicated woman to provide total life support for a celebrated male author (the "Employer") who is currently busy saving humanity and exposing the evils of power.

What You Will Do:

Survive in Poverty: Keep a "civilized" home in a freezing, soot-filled cottage with no running water or electricity. You will cook, clean, tend to pigs, and run a village general store, all while staying perfectly silent so the Employer can think about "The Truth."
Provide the Brains (and the Labor): Use your education and psychology background (Oxford degree preferred) to work full-time within government intelligence and censorship agencies (like the Ministry of Information). You will hand over the secrets of how these systems work so the Employer can use them in his books. You will also type up his messy notes, fix his prose, and help him come up with ideas. Note: The Employer gets all the credit.
The Great Escape: When his idealism gets him into trouble, you are the one who handles the passports, the visas, and the escapes. If the Employer gets wounded, you must navigate intelligence networks and cross war zones to ensure his safe evacuation.
Manage his "Muses": Ensure the home remains a peaceful sanctuary even when the Employer is chasing "artistic inspiration" elsewhere. You are responsible for making sure his affairs never cause a scene or interrupt his writing schedule.
Solo Critical Nursing: Handle all medical emergencies, including his coughing up blood. Crucially, you must be prepared to face your own life-threatening surgeries alone. You must accept that while you are on the operating table, the Employer may need to "escape" to another country to advance his career.
Become a Ghost: In every letter, diary, and official biography, you will voluntarily fade into the background. Your humor and brilliance must be treated as nothing more than "ambient noise."

Who You Are:

Talented but Silent: You must have a brilliant mind but be perfectly happy never using it for yourself.
The "Hidden" Pillar: You must truly believe that "His Freedom = Your Labor." You are comfortable being a footnote in history.
A Heart of Stone: You must be able to watch him write love letters to your best friends (while you are nursing him) and tell yourself it’s just a "Great Soul" exploring the free will of humanity.
Perfect Professionalism: You have the discipline to hide your own terminal illness and postpone your own surgery so you don't "distract" him from his deadline.

What You Get:

A Dedication: Your name (or initials) might appear on the first page of a masterpiece, though no one will ever know what you actually contributed.
Quick Replacement: If you die from exhaustion, the Employer will find a replacement immediately to ensure his creative continuity is never interrupted.
The Illusion of Being Needed: You get to feel "essential" until you die quietly on an operating table while he is busy editing his book on the other side of the world.
Posthumous Fame: Eighty years after you’re gone, a writer named Anna Funder might finally try to find your name in the scraps of history.

Compensation: No salary. No bonuses. Your only pay is the "halo" of being a Great Man’s wife. Please be advised: this halo is highly opaque and is guaranteed to keep you completely invisible under the spotlight of human history.

How to Apply: Simply walk into a marriage and surrender your future.

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Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life

Anna Funder

This is the story of the marriage behind some of the most famous literary works of the 20th century —and a probing consideration of what it means to be a wife and a writer in the modern worldAt the end of summer 2017, Anna Funder found herself at a moment of peak overload. Family obligations and household responsibilities were crushing her soul and taking her away from her writing deadlines. She needed help, and George Orwell came to her rescue."I’ve always loved Orwell," Funder writes, "his self-deprecating humour, his laser vision about how power works, and who it works on." So after rereading and savoring books Orwell had written, she devoured six major biographies tracing his life and work. But then she read about his forgotten wife, and it was a revelation.Eileen O’Shaughnessy married Orwell in 1936. O’Shaughnessy was a writer herself, and her literary brilliance not only shaped Orwell’s work, but her practical common sense saved his life. But why and how, Funder wondered, was she written out of their story? Using newly discovered letters from Eileen to her best friend, Funder re-creates the Orwells’ marriage, through the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War in London. As she peeks behind the curtain of Orwell’s private life she is led to question what it takes to be a writer—and what it is to be a wife.A breathtakingly intimate view of one of the most important literary marriages of the twentieth century, Wifedom speaks to our present moment as much as it illuminates the past. Genre-bending and utterly original, it is an ode to the unsung work of women everywhere.

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Against the State: Anarchists and Comrades at War in Spain, Myanmar, and Rojava

James Stout

A book about those that cannot wait any longer for the world to change. Stumbling across a Reddit forum in 2021, James Stout established contact with teenage Burmese rebels who were in military conflict with the junta. This unprofessional "army" was intuitively antiauthoritarian and resourceful beyond imagination—they 3D print working firearms in the jungle. The dreams, motivations, and hardships of these young adults are immediately recognizable, despite differing context across space and time. These young revolutionaries, colloquially referred to by journalist James Stout as “anarchists” for their nonhierarchical forms of organization based on mutual aid and solidarity, face incredible danger to pursue their expression of freedom. Against the State seeks to understand these anarchists, to honor their struggles, and ask tough questions about confronting the state. In doing so, Stout invites us to reimagine war in the twenty-first century. Against the State draws on Stout’s research and experiences of conflict as an academic and journalist. What interests him in these regional conflicts, are places where people are taking care of one another while building new cooperative social relations. Stout provides testimony from those building democratic confederalism while fending off Turkish drones and ISIS fighters in Kurdistan, the young insurgents beating back the military junta in Burma, and, for historical context, those storied workers in 1936 that fought capitalism and fascism in the Spanish Civil War and Revolution. While these movements look and operate unlike guerrilla movements of the past, they still have their martyrs. Crucially, the book presents current movements as evolving, growing and shrinking after setbacks, and mourning the loss of combatants. Against the State centers the voices of those too often overlooked in conflict studies and misunderstood by Western radical movements.

Post from the Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life forum

DriftScribe

Thoughts from 20%

Like what Orwell himself said, an artist is also a citizen and a human being. He is a symptom of the world’s illness.

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Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life

Anna Funder

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Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America

DriftScribe

May 08, 2026

Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America

4.0

Enjoyment: 4.5Quality: 4.0Characters: Plot:

DriftScribe finished a book

Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America

Gilbert King

Devil in the Grove is the winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Arguably the most important American lawyer of the twentieth century, Thurgood Marshall was on the verge of bringing the landmark suit Brown v. Board of Education before the U.S. Supreme Court when he became embroiled in an explosive and deadly case that threatened to change the course of the civil rights movement and cost him his life. In 1949, Florida’s orange industry was booming, and citrus barons got rich on the backs of cheap Jim Crow labor. To maintain order and profits, they turned to Willis V. McCall, a violent sheriff who ruled Lake County with murderous resolve. When a white seventeen-year-old Groveland girl cried rape, McCall was fast on the trail of four young blacks who dared to envision a future for themselves beyond the citrus groves. By day’s end, the Ku Klux Klan had rolled into town, burning the homes of blacks to the ground and chasing hundreds into the swamps, hell-bent on lynching the young men who came to be known as “the Groveland Boys.” And so began the chain of events that would bring Thurgood Marshall, the man known as “Mr. Civil Rights,” into the deadly fray. Associates thought it was suicidal for him to wade into the “Florida Terror” at a time when he was irreplaceable to the burgeoning civil rights movement, but the lawyer would not shrink from the fight—not after the Klan had murdered one of Marshall’s NAACP associates involved with the case and Marshall had endured continual threats that he would be next. Drawing on a wealth of never-before-published material, including the FBI’s unredacted Groveland case files, as well as unprecedented access to the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund files, King shines new light on this remarkable civil rights crusader, setting his rich and driving narrative against the heroic backdrop of a case that U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson decried as “one of the best examples of one of the worst menaces to American justice.”

DriftScribe commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

eleanors

What’s the worst book you’ve read because of social media hype?

Inspired by a few videos I’ve seen on BookTok.

I’ll go first with my pick: Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant.

This was soooo hyped everywhere I looked. Reddit, Tiktok, Instagram… The plot looked promising and I was told to expect building tension and full-blown horror! Instead I got bad prose, rushed plot, too many characters with boring backstories, and no horror. I’m still bitter tbh and although other reviews say Grant’s other works are better, I’m unsure whether to even try. I just wanted scary mermaids. 🥲

355

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