an explanation of the "all-time-faves" shelf

(Why does this have to be in a section called "your writing"? Can't it come up as more of a blog/newsletter thing?)

I've added the "all-time-faves" shelf to indicate books I highly recommend. I'll probably add more of my "read" shelf to it (I need to skim through some titles again to make sure), but not so many that it'll become meaningless.

All-time-favorite nonfiction are books I think are very well-written, fairly comprehensive and accurate, and often, they were groundbreaking/controversial and/or the "definitive" book on the topic. Most left me exhilarated (and often outraged). They're often either the first work I read on a certain subject, or the one I think best gets the point across. (I first learned about the shameful history of coercive adoption in America from Rickie Solinger's _Wake Up Little Susie_, but _The Girls Who Went Away_ is much more accessible.)

All-time-favorite fiction, poetry, and memoirs are harder to explain. They're ones I loved reading and they "stuck" with me (I've read much more fiction than my book list here so far indicates; it's just that I forget so much of it so quickly, even if I thought it was great at the time).

Some all-time-faves are books I'd give 4 stars to (_Backlash_ is excellent, but I have to mark it down for Sarah Schulman's point that it doesn't mention lesbians. At all).

And some 5-star books aren't all-time-faves (yet). (Sometimes I give a good book 5 stars to counteract anyone trashing it for petty and/or political reasons. This is why I've never put reviews on Amazon--I'd have to do so much of that to balance out nuts who show up to trash a book they've never read but someone's told them is evil. Remember Judith Levine's _Harmful to Minors_. Actually, that is a 5-star book.)

I've added only a tiny fraction of my art books and cookbooks so far, but I'll have many favorites from those categories, too.