
Mutant, librarian, poet, union rabble rouser, dog, Ashkenazi Jewish. Neuroweird, bodyweird, mostly sleepy.
I write about transformative justice, community, love, Judaism, Neurodivergence, mental health, Disability, geography, rivers, labor, and libraries; through poetry, opinionated essays, and short fiction.
I review Schoolhouse Rock! songs at @PropagandaRock
We got this YA novel in at work called Cub which is about a 17-year-old chubby gay guy who works for a commercial kitchen and has various relationships where his low self esteem about his body causes him to let himself be taken advantage of by his boss working at a commercial kitchen—and an older guy named Mama Bear teaches him to have confidence and turn down creeps. It's one of those "high interest novellas" written for older teens who are struggling with reading and need something very short and easy to read but not written for children.
But this is the cover image. This guy is absolutely not a cub or plus-sized at all. This guy is only slightly too large to be a Twink but is certainly conventionally attractive. It drives me crazy like we can't even feature a fat person on the cover of a book about being fat?! Literally a book about learning to love your plus-sized body through a community of plus-sized people and you can't have a plus-sized model on the cover?!
It actually seems like a pretty good book too and as someone who was an insecure gay teen who was mentored by an older bear, it's super touching to see that portrayed so well in a book! Even though very soon after turning 18 I ended up transitioning.
The publisher credits the cover image to a stock photo company. So I guess the issue was they couldn't find a plus-sized model in a chef's outfit in any stock photos. That's also messed up!!! Booo
I'm reading the graphic novel adaptation of the 1970 classic Ringworld and while I'm sure that the quality of the original novel is much greater, it's still fascinating how a book that was so influential just has... such bad character writing. In particular the protagonist is such a Cool Guy Party Dad who is always smarter and more reasonable than everyone else, stronger, cooler, tells everyone what to do and is always correct, has no real personality beyond being gary stu wish fulfillment fantasy for the presumably male reader. It really does feel like the parody of a pulp sci-fi novel as portrayed in a later story about a nerd who escapes into fantasies and imagines himself as a Cool Guy who Gets All the Babes. In terms of world-building, this book invented so many of the sci-fi tropes we take for granted now. So that certainly takes a lot of creativity. But a lot of it is just so stupid, like humans being bred for luck through eugenics simply through making it so you have to win a lottery to have children. Therefore, all humans became very lucky. That's... so dumb... IDK I guess it just really makes me appreciate how far we've come with science fiction. I'm really grateful that of the influential 1970s sci-fi authors, it is LeGuin and Butler whose work is most influential on today's Hugo winners, and not Ringworld.