Audible.com Book Deals Thru January 31, 2024

Get these Audible.com book deals through the end of January 2024.

This book is an amazing primer on intersectional feminism. I'd recommend it to anybody. Tressie McMillan Cottom is brilliant. 

46% off. Affiliate link: https://amzn.to/47VDSwy

This special edition of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is read by Claire Danes. It's disturbingly relevant now that Americans have lost our Constitutional right to privacy and states can tell us what we can and can't do with our own pregnancies. (Vote for people who will pick good Supreme Court justices, my fellow Americans. Don't stop there, but please do start there. I have no patience for non-voters in the year of our lord Carly Rae Jepsen 2024.)

73% off. Affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3ucBy6F

Thick and Other Essays is, of course, a wonderful choice to read during February, Black History Month. Or at any time of any other year. So is Alex Haley's Autobiography of Malcolm X, read here by the legendary Laurence Fishburne.

73% off. Affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3w0c2Sx

Not to turn this books post into All My Criticisms of the United States, but I'm still angry that I was taught in school that Malcolm X was some kind of "dangerous radical." That was only racism, Islamophobia, and an attempt to revisionist history. Almost all of the things Malcolm X said were factually accurate. He was right about so much. 

I'm also angry that September 11, 2001 was 23 years ago and if you're a white American, you can still get away with so much public Islamophobia. It's sickening. It literally costs you zero dollars and zero cents to treat people who practice Islam as your fellow human beings who are each an individual person.

I want Benjamin Netanyahu imprisoned at the Hague, next to Donald J. Trump, both of them awaiting their trials for crimes against humanity. This is a non-controversial statement: It's bad to starve your neighbors to death. That is an objectively bad thing. Every single Palestinian person is, objectively, entitled to eat food, drink water, and receive medical care. 

I've been told in the recent past that voting for President Joseph R. Biden is the same thing as supporting the genocide of Arabs in Gaza. I explicitly reject that notion.

But that's me up on my soapbox again. Now back to books.

Everybody likes music, right? You know her, you love her, you heard her song "All I Want for Christmas Is You" while you were shopping in December.

73% off. Affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3Szlsxc

This one looks interesting.

61% off. Affiliate link: https://amzn.to/47QVAl6

I own this one in paperback. I haven't finished it yet, but the first chapter or so that I read seemed intriguing. I'll finish it one of these days.

71% off. Affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4bibIz1

If Mariah Carey isn't to your musical taste, maybe you're rather read about Stevie Nicks.

Affiliate link: https://amzn.to/49aLk8h

And lastly, this one is just for fun.

56% off. Affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3ukIui5

A Spoken Word and Music Playlist for Lewis Carroll's Birthday

192 years ago today, on January 27, 1832, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (pen name: Lewis Carroll) is born. Here's a Spotify playlist I made combining some spoken word tracks with music inspired by Carroll's best-known work, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

Artists include Lady Gaga, Franz Ferdinand, Danny Elfman, P!nk, Taylor Swift, Jewel, and Clive Owen. Happy listening!

More Unfortunate Literary Happenings of Past Januaries

Read last year's post "Bummer New Year: Unfortunate (Mostly Literary) Happenings of Past Januaries."

Here are only a few more updates I've added over the past year:

January 6, 1977: Natalina Maria Vittoria “Dolly” Sinatra, age 79, the mother of singer/actor Frank Sinatra, dies when the private Learjet she’s taking to visit her famous son in Las Vegas crashes into the San Gorgonio Wilderness in southern California. Mrs. Sinatra’s friend Mrs. Anthony Carboni is also killed, along with the jet’s two pilots.

January 13, 1908: One hundred seventy-one people die as a result of a fire that started during the intermission of a stage play at Rhoads Opera House in Boyertown, Pennsylvania. The audience was in its seats to watch a Magic Lantern show. A Magic Lantern machine was a technology somewhat in between a slide show and a movie projector, with slide-like images that gradually faded into the next image.

The gases used to run the Magic Lantern caught fire after someone knocked over one of the kerosene lamps being used to light the stage. The dead include 170 audience members and one firefighter killed while responding. This tragedy spurs the Pennsylvania state legislature to pass a variety of safety laws governing indoor public spaces.

Incidentally, the playwright of the drama being performed was Harriet Earhart Monroe. Mrs. Monroe was not present, but her sister Della Earhart Meyers was on stage as the narrator or chorus of the drama. Della Earhart Myers was among those who perished. Harriet and Della were the sisters of Samuel Stanton Earhart, who was the father of aviator Amelia Earhart.

January 14, 1986: Actress Donna Reed dies of pancreatic cancer. She’s been diagnosed with the disease only three months earlier.

January 15, 2018: Limerick, Ireland’s alternative rock band The Cranberries’s lead singer Dolores O’Riordan dies at age 46 after becoming intoxicated with Champagne and five small bottles of liquor and then accidentally drowning in a London hotel bathtub.

January 26, 2010: Boa Sr, an approximately 65-year-old woman of the Bo people on her mother’s side and the Jeru people on her father’s side, dies. She was the last fluent native speaker of the Aka-Bo language of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, part of India.

January 28, 1856: Robert and Margaret (called Peggy) Garner and their four children, an enslaved family running for their freedom along the Underground Railroad, shelter at the home of free person of color Joseph Kite on the west side of Cincinnati, Ohio. U.S. Marshalls, required by the cruel Fugitive Slave Act to track down escaping enslaved persons, surround Mr. Kite’s home and demand the surrender of the Garner party. 

To their horror, Peggy has attempted to kill her two sons and two daughters rather than seeing them returned to slavery in Kentucky. She’s succeeded in killing her second-youngest child, her 2-year-old daughter Mary. She’d intended to kill her children and then herself; the other three children were wounded but survived. After a trial, the surviving Garners were forced back into enslavement. Peggy Garner’s story became the basis of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved.

January 31, 1957: A Douglas DC-7B aircraft takes off from Santa Monica Airport on a test flight, accompanied by two U.S. Air Force Northrop F-89 Scorpion fighter jets. The role of the jets is to test the DC-7B’s radar capabilities. At 11:18 a.m. local time, one of the Scorpions collides with the DC-7B. The pilot of the Scorpion is killed in the crash; the radar operator ejects from the jet, and despite severe burns and a broken leg, survives. 

All four crew members aboard the DC-7B are killed when the craft crashes, partially into the grounds of Pacoima Congregational Church and partially into the grounds of Pacoima Junior High School, where a boys’ gym class is taking place outdoors. Three students are killed, and approximately 75 students are injured by falling debris. 

Among the witnesses of the mid-air collision is musician Ritchie Valens, 15 years old at the time. Valens himself will die in a plane crash two years and three days later.