What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Fat, Aubrey Gordon
Gordon’s no-nonsense book is exactly what people, both fat and straight size alike, need to be reading, especially in these days in which each is more fatphobic than the last. She goes through the common tropes about fat people, such as that just by being fat, they are unhealthy (false), that fatness causes disease (false), and that fat people are lazy (false), while also exposing the truth about each of these tropes, such as that weight is no indication of health, that 95% people who diet regain the weight after only a year or two plus 20% more weight, and that the large majority of people’s weight is due to genetics (i.e., uncontrollable). She also delves into the health problems fat people face not due to the weight itself, but the stigma and discrimination that fat people face on a daily basis. She talks about how major gains have been made about racism, homophobia, and sexism, but that if anything, fatphobia has only gotten worse. Oh and by the way, she uses ‘fat’ as merely a descriptive word, just like ‘tall’, ‘short’, or ‘thin’, which I have also been trying to do for a few years now, mainly thanks to work like Gordon’s, as well as by other fat activists.
Horse, Geraldine Brooks
I sure had my reservations about this book as soon as I read the synopsis on the book jacket, mainly because it was a white author whose main characters – except for one – were all Black. However, (1) I hate not finishing something I have started, and (2) Brooks won the Pulitzer in 2006, so I decided to go on ahead. The book centers around Lexington, the greatest racehorse of the nineteenth century, and the enslaved Black man charged with taking care of him, and flashes to the present as a Black graduate student and a white Australian researcher cross paths while researching artwork of the horse and its skeleton. I found much of the present day dialogue awkward, but the plotline from the 1800s more than made up for it, as Jarrett, the groom in charge of the horse, struggles to never leave the horse’s side as outside forces contrive to pull them apart. There were a lot of moving parts in this book, but Brooks did a good job pulling it all together in the end in a way that seemed natural enough, and even if not every ending was a happy one.