I haven’t been tagged for a meme in ages which makes them kind of fun when they don’t come along often. Jess at Once Upon a Book tagged me with one that has a coffee theme and since I love coffee to the core of my caffeinated heart, how could I resist? And all you weird tea lovers, don’t worry you get your chance here too.

Black: A series that’s tough to get into but has hardcore fans
This is a tough one because I don’t go in for a lot of series. I’m going to go with Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell books. I know lots of people didn’t like the first book and never reached the end of it. I loved it from the start and the second book was great too. When, oh when, is the third and final book going to be published?

Peppermint Mocha: A book that gets more popular during the winter or a festive time of year
I love peppermint mochas so much! They are great even when it isn’t the holidays but I admit they are best when it is cold outside. As for a book, I don’t read according to season except for the RIP Challenge in the fall when it is always fun to read “scary” books and melodramatic gothic goodness. Rather than a specific book, how about an author? Because while Shirley Jackson is a good read any time of year she is especially delicious in October. I have already read Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, this year I hope to add another to my I love Jackson list.

Hot chocolate: Favorite children’s book
I love hot chocolate even more than I love peppermint mochas! This is a tough one because there are so many books I loved as a kid. Charlotte’s Web, Where the Red Fern Grows, Island of the Blue Dolphin, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, A Swiftly Tilting Planet… how can I choose just one?

Double shot of espresso: A book that kept you on the edge of your seat from start to finish
Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin. That’s the first book in the series and I am very glad I read it before the TV show began. It was a real nail biter and the ending was so very shocking. Sadly when I got on to book five, the whole story seems to have lost momentum and why can’t the Starks ever catch a break? Makes me wonder why Martin hates them so much or whether he just likes to rip out the hearts of his readers and eat them from breakfast. Martin must be a Lannister!

Starbucks: A book you see everywhere
This is tough because on public transit most people these days are using ereaders and their phones and the people I see reading actual books are generally reading textbooks. So I am going to go with a book that keeps popping up around the internet lately: My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout. I haven’t read it (nor have I managed to read Olive Kitteridge yet) but it sounds really good.

That hipster coffee shop: A Book by an indie author
I am not exactly sure what an indie author is. Does it mean self-published? Or an author who publishes with an independent press? I have a Kickstarter book sitting on my reading table I haven’t gotten to yet, The Velocipede Races by Emily June Street. That surely counts as indie.

Oops! I accidentally got decaf: A book you were expecting more from
Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier. I know a lot of people like this book but I was expecting more since the only other du Maurier book I had read was Rebecca and I loved it. I wanted more menace and suspense and I feel like I was short changed with too much damsel in distress.

The perfect blend: A book or series that was both bitter and sweet but ultimately satisfying
I am going to go for a nonfiction title here, This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein. Bitter because she details all the ways we have f-ed up this planet and the horrible future we have to look forward to with climate change. Sweet because depressing as it is, and pessimistic as Klein is, she does admit it is not too late to stop the worst of it. Note, I did not say stop climate change because it has already begun, but we still have have a small window in which we can keep the worst possible outcomes from happening.

Green Tea: A book or series that is quietly beautiful
The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector. This book was so astonishingly beautiful in so many ways. If you haven’t read it, you are missing out. I mean to read all of Lispector’s other novels eventually.

Chai tea: A book or series that makes you dream of far off places
Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie. What better book for dreaming of far off places than one about the imagination and stories? Plus it is a rather magical and heartwarming adventure. I have not been able to bring myself to read the companion book Rushdie published in 2010, Luka and the Fire of Life, because I am afraid to tarnish my happy feelings when I think of Haroun. Has anyone read Luka?

Earl Grey: A favorite classic
Only one? Impossible! I have a cat named Dickens so there is a clue. I have another cat named Waldo (after Emerson). If I had a girl cat she would probably be called Woolf. If you twist my arm to name a title I might yell out The Waves or possibly Mrs. Dalloway depending on what phase the moon is in.

Filed under: Books, Memes

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What to make of The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli? The story is told in seven parts and each part’s title lets you know what sort of flavor that portion of the story is going to take on. For instance, part one, “The Story (Beginning, Middle, and End)” is told in a straightforward way. But the rest of it, not so much. We have part two “The Hyperbolics” in which we are told:

I am not a naive man, and I knew my teeth were not as valuable as John Lennon’s, but I could raise their value by the apposite use of my hyperbolic method. For each tooth, I would tell the hypertrue story of one of my favorite people, in the style of the profiles of Suetonius wrote. After all, as Quintilian says, a hyperbolic is simply ‘a fissure in the relationship between style and reality.’

There are also “Parabolics” and “Allegorics.”

The story is about Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez who prefers to be called Highway. The book is Highway’s “treatise on collectibles and the various values of objects” and it is the story of his teeth.

Highway lives in Ecatepec, Mexico. He has bad teeth and hardly ever opens his mouth because of it. He does well in school and at the age of twenty-one gets a job as a security guard at a factory that makes juice. After many years in the job and a series of events, he is promoted to Personal Crisis Supervisor. From here his career spirals to ever greater heights and he eventually becomes the greatest auctioneer ever. Highway buys Marilyn Monroe’s teeth at an auction and when he becomes rich enough, has all his own teeth pulled out and Monroe’s teeth implanted in their place. He saves many of his old teeth and later in the book he auctions them off one by one.

What makes an auctioneer so great, Highway tells us, is the stories they tell about the items up for auction. The stories add value to the item so that what people are actually buying is the story and not the item itself. And can Highway tell stories! He tells them with such confidence and assuredness that we have no reason to doubt them even when they seem like they couldn’t possibly be true. In the ultimate auction, Highway sells himself to his estranged son, Siddhartha, who then drugs him and pulls out all of Highway’s teeth and steals all of Highway’s collections from his warehouse.

But Highway refuses to be beaten. He keeps telling stories and eventually meets a writer and hires him to write his story. Part six of the book, “Elliptics” is written by the writer and it is the first inkling we get that Highway’s story may not be what we thought it was. Highway’s job is to tell stories and he tells us a whopper and we raise our auction paddle and buy it with pleasure.

The final part of the story, “Chronologic,” is written by the book’s translator. Luiselli invited her to write a timeline of events for the story. But it is not just any timeline, it is one that fits in so perfectly with the book that not until the Afterword when Luiselli talks about it did I believe it was written by the book’s actual translator.

The Story of My Teeth is fundamentally about stories. It is funny and charming and pulls the reader along at a fast pace. There are literary references galore throughout, some subtle, others not so very. Some of the ones I enjoyed most came as part of stories Highway told about relatives like his uncle Marcelo Sánchez-Proust:

who had many theories about many things, [and] used to say that a man should marry a woman who had an understanding attitude toward this natural condition of men. ‘You have to find a madame,’ he would say, ‘who tempers the fury that accumulates during the long sleepless hours of men who are sensitive to the elasticity of time.’

Ha! He also has an extremely existential cousin named Juan Pablo Sánchez Sartre.

While the story rollicks along in an often outrageous fashion, I got to like Highway and his seemingly indomitable spirit. But when we come to “Elliptics,” the story got rather sad in a kind of Don Quioxte way, meaning you want everything the great Don relates of his adventures to be true but the glorious tale doesn’t exactly match up with reality. But then, the whole book asks us to consider truth and stories. And, just like Don Quixote fighting dragons in the shape of windmills, wouldn’t we rather have the value-added of Highway’s hyperbolics and allegorics than the strict facts?

Luiselli wrote Story of My Teeth for the workers at the Jumex factory in Mexico, the very factory where Highway began as a security guard. She wrote in pieces with the intent that the workers would read it aloud (the book was a commissioned part of an art exhibit). They did and then they would give Luiselli feedback and she would write the next section accordingly. In this way, she sees the book as a kind of story collaboration. There is the further collaboration with her translator who wrote a chapter of the book. But it goes beyond that too because Luiselli knows English even though she writes in Spanish. She and the translator worked together to write the story in English which Luiselli considers not so much a translation but more of a “version” of the original.

Luiselli has a couple other books, one of which is a book of essays called Sidewalks that has gotten high praise. I will definitely be looking into it some time. As for Story of My Teeth, I am certain I would benefit from rereading it, it is that kind of book, so full of things that you can’t catch them all on the first go around. The book is slim so a reread would not take long at all. Unfortunately my time with the book expired and I had to return it to the library so other people waiting for it could read it. Maybe in a year or two I will remember to request it back so I can discover what other treasures are hiding in its pages.

Filed under: Books, Reviews Tagged: Valeria Luiselli

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We nearly reached 50F/10C one day last week. Of course it was a work day so I did not get to fully enjoy it. Nonetheless when I left work it was sunny and drippy still. I did not have to zip my coat or wear gloves and my scarf was lightly draped around my neck. The air felt fresh and humid from all the melting snow. And then, in intimations of things to come, my allergies flared right up and I spent the rest of the evening enjoying itchy, burning eyes. While the week ahead will not see 50F, the forecast for each day is at or a little above freezing and then dropping below freezing each night.

Spring seems to be making an attempt at an early arrival. I had best find my bottle of allergy medicine. Sigh. In the good old days I used to be able to make it until early to mid April before taking antihistamine every day. Then I’d get a break around mid-June for a few weeks before having to take them again through frost. A couple years ago my June break disappeared and I had to start taking them at the end of March through frost. I hope this year is a fluke and I won’t have to start taking them in February especially since frost is coming later and later every year. I might have to eventually break down and see an allergist to — I’m not sure what — reassure me that taking over-the-counter loratadine for months on end is not going to cause me any kind of harm. If you don’t have seasonal allergies consider yourself lucky. That I do and that I also love gardening and cycling and being outdoors in general creates a special kind of misery that will only continue to get worse as the climate gets warmer.

But enough complaining and feeling sorry for myself, there are plenty of other people with problems worse than mine.

On a happier note, I seeded peppers in sprouting pots today. We are doing cayenne, paprika,

pepperoncini, jalepeno, orange bell and a mini red bell. Last year we had no luck at all with the peppers. Most of them didn’t sprout and the ones that did were weak and tiny and died shortly after being moved outdoors. Hopefully we will have much better luck this year. Long-term weather forecasting is suggesting our summer might be a hot one. Perfect pepper weather, though not so great for the humans of the house.

I had to make more paper pots for the seeds so while I did paper pot origami, Bookman worked on the baby blanket he is crocheting for a coworker and we watched the final episode of History of British Gardening. I learned that I have been mispronouncing Gertrude Jekyll’s name since forever. I’ve been saying “Jek-ill” and it is apparently “Gee-kill”. But then the Brits pronounce words in weird ways in general like how do you get “ho-kum” out of Holcombe and “lester” out of “Leicester”? There were so many words in this series of garden shows that I could not comprehend, mostly place names but not always, that at times the host might as well have been speaking something other than English. Do those of you in the UK ever feel that way when you hear Americans speak or do you think we have just gone and ruined a perfectly good language?

Dickens decided to help me make pots. Lucky for me he did not feel compelled to help for long.

The leek and onion seeds I planted last Sunday have already begun to sprout. Next weekend it is tomato time.

Friday I picked up Richard Mabey’s newest book The Cabaret of Plants from the library. My turn has finally come and oh, it is going to be such a treat. Here is a little something from the introduction:

[We have] mostly sublimated our interest in the existence of plants into pleasure at their outward appearance, and the garden has become the principal theatre of vegetal appreciation. Plants in the twenty-first century have been largely reduced to the status of utilitarian and decorative objects… We tend not to ask questions about how they behave, cope with life’s challenges, communicate both with each other and, metaphorically, with us. They have come to be seen as the furniture of the planet, necessary, useful, attractive, but ‘just there,’ passively vegetating. They are certainly not regarded as ‘beings’ in the sense that animals are.

It is Mabey’s goal in the book to challenge that view. Does it make me odd that I find that really exciting?

Filed under: Books, gardening Tagged: allergies, Gertrude Jekyll, Richard Mabey

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I was away last night having a consultation with my tattoo artist. Yup, I’m going to get a new tattoo. Some of you may know I have a couple already. It has been several years and for a while I thought I might be done. But I have always wanted something bookish. I never thought it would ever happen because every time I thought about it nothing felt right and when you are getting something permanently inked on your skin you want it to be right.

As the years passed I’ve been leaning toward a quote, but what one? There are so many good ones, so many meaningful ones for me that I just couldn’t decide. But about a year ago I landed on a quote from a Sonia Sanchez poem (if you have never read Sanchez, she is a-mazing!) and thought just maybe. I have been sitting with it for months mulling it over to make sure it felt right. And it began to feel so right that I started to imagine what it might look like on my skin. And late in 2015 when I could picture myself with this tattoo I decided it was time to get it.

The shop I am going to is called Jackalope and it is not far from my house. It is a woman-owned shop and I heard about it on public radio. Their reviews are nothing but positive. Their online portfolios are amazing. I sent them an email.

I met my artist last night. Her name is Amo (short for Amoreena). She is twenty-something, has blue hair, a nose piercing, beautiful tattoos. She is perky and confident, loves doing lettering and is also an expert in watercolor technique. Perfect. We talked about what I want and I left feeling like she is going to do a really beautiful piece. My appointment to get inked is April 23rd. I can hardly wait.

Amo is going to design the script herself but I am to send her examples of lettering I like. I am also to send her examples of watercolor tattoo work I like.

At this point you are probably wondering what the tattoo is going to be of. Here is the quote:

The words loved me and I loved them in return

A perfect bookish quote for both reading and writing. The words are going to spiral down my left arm and there will likely be some watercolor ink drops splashed along it in a few places.

The rightness of the quote was cemented even more a few days ago when I found out there is a Sonia Sanchez documentary. The Los Angeles Review of Books has a great article about Sanchez and the making of the film. It has a few examples of her poetry and an interview with the women who made the film that will be airing on March 8 on PBS for International Women’s Day. At first I was worried that Sanchez had died and I had not heard about it, but she is 81 and happily alive and well and participated in the film.

There is no denying now that this is the right quote and the right time to get it. So many things to look forward to in April. Chickens at the beginning of the month and a new tattoo at the end! And yes, I will take pictures so you can see what it looks like.

Filed under: Books, Personal, Poetry Tagged: tattoo

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So here’s a question for you because I am always curious about how readers organize their reading and their time. We all read books but I know, if you are reading this, you also spend time on the interwebs and you probably spend time reading blogs but I also know you spend time reading other things online too. At least I am assuming you do because I know I do. I’m not talking about news, but longer stuff. Let’s call it long-from internet writing whether it is a long book review essay at the Los Angeles Review of Books (if you don’t read LARB by the way you are missing out I actually tend to like them better than NYRB because they have more variety and are less pretentious and know the world does not revolve around New York or Los Angeles) or maybe an article at Slate or The New Yorker or Bicycle Magazine or any number of the many places you like to visit on your internet rounds.

I’m going to bet that you are also like me in that you often find interesting long-form writing but gosh darn, just don’t have the time or brain power when you come upon it to read it right then and there. So you save it for later.

First question: Where/How do you save your read laters?

Since I am asking you, I will reciprocate and tell you that if something comes up in my feed reader (Feedly) I will save it for later there. I have a Mac and use the Safari browser that has a handy “read it later” feature where it will save articles in the browser but not as bookmarks. It’s hard to explain, but it is a useful feature for anything I come across through channels other than my feed reader. I have tried other methods like Delicious and Reddit but those are so out-of-sight, out-of-mind that I forget about them. Plus, no offense, but I really don’t care about the social aspects of those sites — what everyone else is reading, nor am I particularly interested in sharing what I am reading (or saving for later as the case may be).

Inevitably, the number of items I save for later pile up because I never have enough time later to catch up with them all. Just like books piling up on my reading table, I think I have more time and opportunity to read everything I want to read than I actually do.

Second question: What do you do with all your saved for later reading when you realize that later is not going to come?

Sometimes I might unsave an article or two but most of the time when I scan my lists I still want to read what I have saved so I end up hardly ever deleting anything unless I actually read it which, as I mentioned, is not as often as I expect. And then of course the saved things end up becoming a big, unwieldy mess. When that happens I am tempted to just delete it all and start fresh but then I see all kinds of things I still want to read and, well, you can guess what happens then, or doesn’t happen is more like it.

Eventually, like now, I start to feel overwhelmed by it all and I hold extensive debates with myself over what I should do. Before I allow myself to get sucked into another one my pointless internal debates, I thought I would ask you my two questions. So lay it on me, share your wisdom. How do you manage it all? Or maybe, like me, you don’t, and that’s okay too. I’ll be happy to know that I have company.

Filed under: Books, Reading Tagged: online reading, organization, time time I need more time

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Zen Cho’s book Sorcerer to the Crown has had so many people crowing about how wonderful it is that I caved in and had to find out for myself what the buzz was about. When I first started reading it I thought, uh-oh, this is so Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell-y how can this possibly not have people crying derivative! But the similarities didn’t last long and in the end it turned out to be a very different novel. Thank goodness.
 
The story is set in Regency England. English magic is on the wane and no one knows why. The British are in an uneasy truce with France agreeing that neither will use magic against the other. But there are goings on in the small nation of Janda Baik that might make things very bad for England without some careful diplomacy. It also turns out that England’s magical stores are shrinking because of some unhappy and very powerful lamiae and witches in Janda Baik. And the fairies are rather peeved at an English sorcerer who broke a treaty with them regarding taking new familiars from the land of Fairy.
 
In the world of this book anyone can have magic but of course the ones in charge, the thaumaturges, are all men and there is a definite hierarchy. Magical women are scandalous. Sure no one minds the maid or the cook using a little magic to help them in their daily duties but a female of gentle birth using magic? Girls are sent to special schools so they can learn how not to use their magic. The male thaumaturges are convinced that the female frame is too delicate for anything more than minor household magic. Are they about to get a rude awakening!
 
The very popular Sorcerer Royal, Sir Stephen, dies suddenly one night and is immediately succeeded by his protégé, Zacharias. The only problem is that Zacharias is a black man, a former slave, bought by Sir Stephen when he was a baby and brought up as if he were his own son. To be a sorcerer, one must have a familiar and the familiar of the Sorcerer Royal has been passed down from one to the other. What has happened to Sir Stephen’s familiar? Rumors spread that Zacharias killed both of them. To add even more complications to his situation, Zacharias returns from giving a speech at one of those special schools for girls with one of the girls.
 
Prunella, whose mother was Indian and father British, was orphaned young and raised by the proprietess of the school. Prunella has some powerful magical abilities that impress Zacharias so much he brings her back to London to teach her how to be a thaumaturge. Since Prunella does not have an independent fortune, she gets Zacharias to agree to have Lady Wythe, Sir Stephen’s widow, launch her into Society that she might find a husband with money. Prunella is a sassy, savvy girl who speaks her mind and has a penchant for adventure and trouble-making. Both she and Zacharias have secrets that make for all sorts of delightful twists and turns in the story.
 
Along with being a fast-paced tale full of magic and adventure and a number of I’m-not-taking-any-crap-from-you magical women, the story also very nicely weaves racial and gender issues throughout. It is done in such a subtle way too that not one of the thaumaturges who votes to remove Zacharias as Sorcerer Royal ever mentions it has anything to do with him being a black man, but as the reader you understand it has almost everything to do with it. There is also a quiet revelatory moment during which the ghost of Sir Stephen comes to understand that his protégé’s life has been very different than he had thought because the white Sir Stephen had no reason to notice all of the slights and sly remarks directed at Zacharias because of his color.

It is because of Zacharias and Prunella that the book has gotten so much attention. A fantasy novel with a hero and heroine who aren’t white and that doesn’t make excuses or tie itself into knots in order to make that happen is a big deal. That the book also manages questions of race and gender so adeptly and in such a matter-of-fact manner is also a big deal. At the same time, it is kind of sad that the race and gender of the main characters of the book are unusual enough that it has people buzzing. Hopefully one day there will be so much diversity in books that it is no longer such a newsworthy item.

Sorcerer to the Crown is Zen Cho’s first novel and she is a little surprised I think by its popularity. Born and raised in Malaysia, Cho moved to the UK to pursue a law degree. She began practicing law in the UK, got married and a couple years ago started writing the novel. She had been writing short stories and fan fiction, had even done some editing so she wasn’t a complete novice. She still practices law part time, at least according to one interview I read. And she is at work on another novel, purportedly one that takes place in the same world as Sorcerer but with different main characters, though Cho has said Zacharias and Prunella will make an appearance.

I found Sorcerer to the Crown a delightful book. It is well paced and plotted, the characters aren’t always so very three-dimensional but they are interesting and definitely not cardboard cutouts. Sometimes Prunella seems a bit too wise to the ways of the world and society and just a smidge too composed for her age and upbringing, but her sass and confidence are contagious and make it easy to overlook the other things. Quite the debut, it will be fun to follow Cho’s career and see where she goes from here.

Filed under: Books, Reviews, SciFi/Fantasy Tagged: magic, race and gender, Regency England, Zen Cho

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Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!

Some very exciting news! The Minneapolis City Council voted unanimously on Friday to pass the new chicken rules. That means I no longer need to get the signatures of my neighbors to have chickens. It’s not that I thought any of them would object, it was the bother of it all. Most of my neighbors work and catching them at home and getting them to open their door when it is freezing cold outside is not something Bookman looked forward to doing. So the only thing we have to do now is finish building our coop and pay for a permit. Easy!

To celebrate, Bookman and I went to Egg Plant Urban Farm Store today to gather supplies and talk to the folks there. The authors of my chicken book are not from Minnesota and had no advice about when the chicks would be able to go outside. After talking with the people at the farm store we learned that six weeks is about the right time. Given we still need to finish the coop and spring weather is inherently unreliable, we decided to hold off ordering our chicks for a couple weeks. So instead of having babies the first weekend of March, we have postponed new parenthood until the first weekend of April which also happens to be my birthday weekend.

We did, however, buy the supplies we needed to set up the brooder, that is not something you want to be doing when you have four confused new babies that need warmth and food and water. We got a big bale of pine shavings, a feeder and waterer, and a heat lamp with a red bulb. The red bulb is so the light does not disturb the wake/sleep cycle of the chicks. We will get the feed when we get the chicks. I was worried it might go stale if we had it sitting around for a month.

We haven’t built the brooder box yet. I need to bring home one more cardboard box from work. Then Bookman and I will get creative with the box cutters and tape to make a nursery for our babies.

I admit to being a little disappointed to have to wait until April for the chicks. I wanted so badly to throw all caution to the wind and order them today. But it’s best to make sure we won’t be scrambling to finish the coop and/or have to keep them indoors longer than we should. And okay, I admit, baby chickens for my birthday is a pretty cool thing.

Seed starting also began today. I am trying something new this year. Instead of playing musical seed

trays on top of the refrigerator, I have placed our mini greenhouse in front of the south-facing kitchen window. The tray of seeds I planted is mostly cipollini onions with a few pots of leeks. I have not had any luck growing either of these to full size because I think I have always started them too late. Maybe this will be the year it all works out.

I continue making paper pots and hopefully next weekend I will have enough ready to get peppers started. We have a couple different kinds of bell peppers and quite a few varieties of hot peppers. Last summer was unusually mild and the peppers did not do well, they like it hot. I hope they do well this year, not because I want a hot summer, but because Bookman is very excited about purple jalepeños. I like spicy but hot peppers are not my thing.

In spite of several days of arctic temperatures last week, it doesn’t seem like there has been much winter at all this year. I feel like I have barely gotten a chance to breathe and rest before beginning the whirlwind of seed starting and early spring. I have all the supplies and plans prepared, now I just have to get my brain and energy focused there. It’s a shift I’ve known I have to make but it still feels like everything is rushing at me. Then again, it feels like this every spring. I’m like a hibernating bear that has smelled spring coming from its den for a few weeks and now that it is imminent it takes a bit of stretching and shambling about to shake off the winter. But it’s all good; just have to stretch a bit and maybe scratch my back on that tree over there…

Filed under: chickens, gardening

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Even with the success of Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Game of Thrones and so many other genre books over the last years the genre wars are apparently still raging. The latest salvo has come from Kazuo Ishiguro. With the release of his book The Buried Giant (one of my favorite books last year), the criticism the book received for its fantasy elements came up in a recent interview.

Unfortunately, it seems this interview is behind a subscription firewall so I can only go by what the articles, mainly The Independent, report about the interview.

It seems what is getting folks up in arms is Ishiguro’s comments that educational systems have been for a long time focused on conformity and turning people into productive citizens to grow the economy:

Education’s task was to get pupils to abandon the fantasy that comes naturally to children and prepare them for the demands of the workforce.

Ishiguro suggests there is a reason why geeks, who as a group tend to read science fiction and fantasy, are in demand by big companies. The big companies are looking for creative thinkers and the geeks, not beholden to mimesis, are sought after people.

And perhaps that is true but I don’t think it is the whole story. I am inclined to agree with Charlie Ander’s thinking that Ishiguro has oversimplified just a bit because there is also the matter of math and coding skills to consider. I read SFF and have no problem thinking up all sorts of imaginative worlds and creatures, but Google is not going to hire me based on that and my mediocre html skills.

Still, the author of the Independent article gets a bit grouchy by declaring that while fantasy may be good to read, “life is more like bullshitty literary fiction” and he’ll put his trust in people who “think inside the box” to make decisions about how we live our lives.

Sigh.

Ishiguro doesn’t just talk about fantasy but all genre fiction and how it is not taken seriously, how it is just as valid a means of exploring human lives, feelings and relationships as “literary fiction” is. With that I am completely on board. That we even still argue over genre seems ridiculous to me. Good literature is good literature whether it is realist or fantastic, involves a murder mystery or a romance. It is convenient to use genre as a means to discuss books that partake of certain tropes and plot elements, but as a way to categorize readers or assess literary value? We really need to get over it.

Filed under: Books, Mystery/Crime, SciFi/Fantasy Tagged: genre wars, Kazuo Ishiguro

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It’s February and do you know what that means? An extra day for reading! It’s Leap Year y’all! Twenty-nine days this month instead of twenty-eight. I almost said I wish every year were Leap Year but then it would just come to be a regular year and the joy of an extra day of reading would get washed away. Any plans for cramming in some extra reading? It is unfortunate that the extra day falls on a Monday but we’ll just have to make the best of it.

The piles on my reading table are shrinking and it’s not because I am reading the books on there that I own. Nope, it is shrinking because I am working my way through the library books that got added to the table. It feels good to have my library reading under control. At the moment I have only four books checked out, two of which came today, The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli and All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Anders. Also out from the library is a book of poetry by Joseph Massey called To Keep Time. It is most excellent. And then there is Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho with which I am just about finished. It too is good.

I have six outstanding hold requests at the library, for two I am up next, for the rest I am in the nebulous who knows when my turn will come, probably all at once realm. Only six outstanding requests is pretty darn good though given my profligate ways of late. I can even see several of the non-library books on my reading table and I am eyeing them and thinking , oh, I forgot you were there! Looking forward to reading you! I am quite proud of myself and if I am not careful I will cause harm to my shoulder and arm from patting myself on the back so much. That or my inflated sense of self-worth will be too large for me to fit through my door.

Other books on the go at the moment include Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. This is my slow, meditative read of the moment. Very much enjoying it. Then I am still working my way through The Art of Slow Writing by Louise DeSalvo. She writes in short chapters and it is the perfect book for the spare ten minutes here and there. While it is quite good, I don’t want to try reading it in bigger chunks, it would lose its umph and quickly become boring.

And finally, I just began reading a review copy of a new biography of Charlotte Bronte that will be out in March. Charlotte Bronte: A Fiery Heart by Claire Harman is pretty good. It is advertised as being groundbreaking but since I haven’t read any other Bronte biography I can’t say whether it is or not. At the moment Charlotte is still a young girl and the family has just moved to Haworth. There are a good many more siblings than I knew about which means bad events ahead.

There are a couple other books I am in the midst of that have been moved to the back burner and not worth mentioning at the moment since I haven’t picked them up in a few weeks. I will get back to them, just probably not this month! Or perhaps the extra day will grant me the chance to get them in front of my eyes again. Ha! The odds in Vegas don’t seem to be leaning in my favor. Imagine that!

Filed under: Books, In Progress Tagged: Read the Table

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Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates is a powerful and passionate book. As a white person in America, it was at times difficult for me to read. I found myself whispering I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry over and over. How do we make things different? What can I do? And at other times, reading the words of a black man talking about how white society does whatever it can to control his body and lets him know regularly that his body is not his own, I thought, yes, I understand from my place as a woman in a patriarchal society what it means for the culture and the law to always be trying to control your body. The control comes in different forms, but I too know what it’s like to walk down the street and be afraid. And so Coates’s book had the curious effect of making me feel guilt and sympathy and anger in repeated waves of various intensities.

Between the World and Me is a “letter” Coates wrote to his fifteen-year-old son. It is inspired by James Baldwin’s 1963 book The Fire Next Time, a book about what it means to be black in America. Certainly a great deal has changed since 1963 but so much remains stubbornly the same. I got the impression at times that Coates felt like nothing would ever change, that we will never see an end to racism, while at other times, especially when he was reflecting on his son’s life and experiences and how they have been different from his own, Coates seemed hopeful in a clear-eyed there is still much work and struggling ahead sort of way.

In thinking about the book and how I should read it and understand it, the best approach was to just listen. Don’t try to say, it’s not like that; don’t even think about suggesting things aren’t that bad. Don’t argue and critique or dismiss. Don’t compare my experience of oppression with his in order to determine who is worse off. Don’t go to an insensitive place and think, I have a black friend so I can’t possibly be racist. Don’t get defensive and definitely don’t try and claim I am not part of the system.

It is not always easy to listen, to refrain from Yes, but… I think I managed pretty well. Being open to Coates’s experience was unsettling at times. I caught myself thinking at one point when he was talking about slavery that my ancestors came to America after the Civil War, none of them owned slaves, my family had no part in it and can’t be blamed. But that is beside the point, isn’t it? While my ancestors may have had nothing to do with slavery they certainly reaped the benefits of a country made wealthy by the work of slaves. And they were definitely not immune from participating in casual and thoughtless racism.

It is hard to shut up and listen and not try to exonerate oneself, to think other people are like that but not me. When you grow up and live in a racist society, especially when you grow up and live with the privileges that come from white skin, you are not free from prejudice, I am not free from prejudice. And it hurts, I don’t want to be a “bad” person. And that is good. Because that is the only way we can move as individuals, as a culture, as a country, through prejudice to a society that is as free and equal as it imagines itself to be.

Filed under: Books, Nonfiction, Reviews

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Have I mentioned lately how much I love Minneapolis? It is by no means a perfect city and the winters are long and hard, but by golly how many other cities have a community advisory group that works with the city council on things like urban agriculture and food security issues? Homegrown Minneapolis is the name of the group and their latest newsletter included a map of all the vacant city lots that can be leased for community gardening and urban farms. Also in the newsletter is information regarding a proposal to turn a public golf course near my house into a food forest.

What’s a food forest? It is exactly what it sounds like. It is a designed landscape that mimics a natural ecosystem while incorporating food producing plants like nut and fruit trees, shrubs, perennial vegetables and herbs. Annual plants can also be grown in the mix. And of course it is a space that also utilizes native plants to attract pollinators and other beneficial insects, control weeds and build soil fertility.

The site of this proposed food forest is a public golf course near Lake Hiawatha. The golf course is very expensive to maintain not just because it was built on a wetlands and requires millions of gallons of water to be pumped out of it every year. It turns out the amount of water being pumped far exceeds the permit limits and is therefore illegal. A portion of the golf course has also been closed since 2014 when we had so much rain that the “back nine” was flooded and is still so soaked and damaged the park board can’t really afford to fix it. This golf course also drains into Lake Hiawatha which suffers greatly from water quality issues do to run-off into the lake. This golf course covers 140 acres and serves very few people, costing to my mind and many others, more than it is worth.

So a young, brilliant city resident has put up a proposal and taken up the challenge to advocate for repurposing the land. His vision allows for a much reduced golf course, fruit orchards, nut trees, and more. His vision even includes returning wild rice to Lake Hiawatha which, I just learned, used to be called “Rice Lake” because local Native Americans grew and harvested wild rice there before they were forced to move elsewhere.

The food forest would be grown on public land, would be tended by volunteers, and would welcome all from the community to go and harvest food from it. It would solve the water pumping problem and the lake’s water quality issues as well. And it would provide learning opportunities for both adults and school children. Plus it would be far cheaper to maintain than a full golf course not to mention more beautiful and useful.

This is such an incredibly exciting thing and if it goes through, if the Park Board decides to go along with it, it would mean Minneapolis would be home to the largest food forest in the United States. And yeah, you know I’ll find a way to be involved with the project even if it is only volunteering a few hours every month. There is a meeting being held on February 27th. It’s scheduled for four hours in the afternoon which is a big chunk of Saturday time for me, but I might just see if I can make it for at least a portion of the meeting. If not, I am sure there will be other opportunities as the proposal picks up steam.

In my own garden, I have a tray full of paper pots ready for onion seeds next weekend. I must continue working at making pots because at the end of the month I will need to get the peppers and tomatoes started. I love this time of year. While it feels so hectic getting everything started, it is also the most hopeful time of the gardening year because there is still so much possibility. The slugs haven’t eaten the greens yet, the squirrels haven’t dug up or stolen anything, there hasn’t been too much rain or not enough, too much heat or not enough. In my mind’s eye my garden is lush and green and perfect. Reality will kick in soon enough, but until then, everything is still perfect.

In chicken news, the same newsletter that brought word of the food forest proposal also informed me that the city council will be voting on the new chicken ordinance on February 12th! I wasn’t expecting anything from the city council until summer. But perhaps they want to get it all settled before spring when people who want to start keeping chickens will be looking to get underway. Bookman has not yet begun to collect neighbor signatures, it has been too cold and snowy. But now we will wait and see what happens come Friday. Bookman may just be saved the trouble of collecting signatures after all. Fingers crossed!

In cycling news, I am still riding in virtual races on Thursday nights. Each week is different and sometimes I finish first or second and sometimes I finish last. One thing for sure, my fitness has improved immensely. I am also in the final week of a 6-week workout program that has meant hour-long (or more) workouts four to five times of week doing intervals of varying intensities. This too has paid off. On a (virtual) ride after my workout yesterday I decided to see if I could beat my personal sprint records on the two sprint sections of the course and I blew each one away by several seconds! I even managed to ever so briefly hit 4 watts/kg, something I thought I would never manage. I also noticed I now frequently go over 3 w/kg which means that after this week I will start racing in group C instead of D. Technically I should start this week but I want to give myself one more “easy” week before I go to the next group and start coming in last all the time. I will be good incentive to work hard and improve, right?

Also this last week on Wednesday night I participated in my first virtual group ride. It was so much fun! I am part of a group on Zwift called ROL (Ride On Ladies — in Zwift you can give riders a “ride on” thumb’s up, it’s a way to offer support and tell other riders they are doing great or thanking them for a good ride, etc). There is an ROL group ride on Wednesday nights but I had not joined in because it is a fast ride and with the races I’ve been doing Thursday nights I didn’t want to overdo it the night before. Anyway, a slower group ride was introduced this week so I joined that one. We used an app called TeamSpeak which allows us to actually talk to each other while we ride. I rode with a couple people from Seattle and someone from Ohio and I think maybe Texas. Technology is awesome!

Also, there are enough ROL women who are interested in racing that we are going to have our own women’s race on Saturday upcoming. It will be a 30km race and I will have to race in group B which is both exciting and scary. There are not a lot of women on Zwift, I saw somewhere that women are only about 8% of the Zwift population, but among them are some really strong riders and racers. It is exciting to ride with them because it forces me to work harder and they are all supportive and encouraging so even though I feel intimidated, it comes from my own personal worries of not being very good rather than anything anyone else has said or done. Currently there are 24 women who have indicated they will be racing Saturday and 56 who have said maybe. We’ll see what kind of turnout there really is. I just hope I don’t finish last in my group. But hey, if I do, incentive to improve!

Filed under: biking, chickens, gardening Tagged: Food forest, Lake Hiawatha, Minneapolis, sustainable gardening

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There is a new edition of Kate Millet’s ground breaking book Sexual Politics coming out this month. It’s been 45 year since it was first published and some things have changed and some things remain stubbornly the same.

There is a great article at the New Yorker by Rebecca Mead that is partially adapted from the afterward to the new edition. It discusses why the book was so revolutionary and some of the ways it is now dated and some of the ways it is still frighteningly relevant. Here’s a taste:

Re-reading ‘Sexual Politics’ today, I am struck anew by two things. One is that, while Millett was publicly cast in the polarizing role of polemicist, there is often in her tone the cool, controlled archness of the literary essayist, a role she might easily have inhabited had the times not called upon her to do otherwise. The book is suffused with a strain of very dark, angry humor, an aspect of Millett’s writing that seems to have been barely noticed—or was perhaps invisible—upon publication. […] If ‘Sexual Politics’ has endured, it is not just because so much of the political work it recommends remains undone, but also because it is an astringent pleasure to be in the company of Millett on the page

I have the book on my bookshelf. I read parts of it in college but not the entire book. I remember it being rather eye-opening and rage inducing. Perhaps that is why I never read it completely? Not sure. But Mead’s piece makes me want to pull it from the bookshelf if for no other reason than the stellar literary analysis it contains and the presumption that art is important. I am not certain one could take a such a stance on the broad cultural value of art these days which is heartbreaking in its own way.

Two of my library hold requests are currently on their way to my library so I won’t have time to pick up Millet’s book now, unfortunately. Perhaps in a month or two I will be at a place I can pick it up. Or maybe that is just more delusional thinking on my part; I seem to be into that lately.

Filed under: Books

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One of the books I currently have from the library is a graphic novel called The Explorer’s Guild. I borrowed it because one of the co-authors is the actor Kevin Costner. I wouldn’t call myself a huge Costner fan, he is a good actor but I haven’t seen all of his movies and have no plans to do so. I borrowed the book because I was curious.

The book looks really nice and sets the mood for the story. A heavy chunkster with an old-timey looking adventure story cover, when you open it the paper is a pleasant creamy “old book” color slightly darker around the edges than in the middle of the page. And the drawings a sort of monochrome palette and highly detailed laid out in a comic book fashion. There are also pages of text, usually one or two, integrated between the comic panels with little illustrations. It is a pleasing look and feel.

However, after one chapter I am not so sure I want to keep reading because I don’t really care for the story. It is made clear from the start that the Explorer’s Guild is made up of all men, mostly of the gentlemanly sort. And while the story takes place during WWI, I don’t know why the Guild has to be all men. Paging through the book there is a woman who appears much later, an actress known to have many affairs, so I am not certain what sort of role she has in the story.

Also, the story is set, at least in the beginning, in “Arabia” and the company of British soldiers is worried about being attached by two thousand “Turkmen” and angry looking “Mohammedan” armies wearing turbans and carrying scimitars. Um…

That this adventure story is set during a time of racism and colonialism is one thing, that it plays into it is bothersome to me. If I keep reading, maybe the story redeems itself in some way, but then it might not.

When I started writing this I thought perhaps it would end up convincing me to keep going for at least one more chapter. But now, I think I am going to mark it down as DNF and return it to the library. I fell better already.

Filed under: Books, Graphic Novels Tagged: DNF, Kevin Costner

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I’ve seen quite a few mixed reviews of Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies and wasn’t so very keen to read it but I got curious about it and had to find out for myself whether it was brilliant or so-so or terrible. It seems that many people don’t like the first half but those who stick with it and get to the second half end up liking that part better. So I began reading with low expectations. Perhaps it was this that helped me fall into the book, I don’t know, but I certainly didn’t struggle to read it or like it. In the end, I didn’t find the book brilliant but I did like it very much.

The story is that of a marriage told from both sides. The first part is told from Lancelot “Lotto” Satterwhite’s point of view. He grew up in Florida in a wealthy family, his father, Gawain, having made a fortune selling bottled water. But his father died young and left Lotto and his sister to the care of an increasingly distant yet controlling mother and Aunt Sallie who ran the household. Left to run wild, Lotto turned to sex and drugs and alcohol and when his mother found out, she sent him away to an all-boys boarding school. There he had few friends, but this bright, very tall boy discovered the joys of Shakespeare and determined to go off to college and become an actor.

Near the end of his senior year of college he met Mathilde, statuesque, beautiful, smart. The charismatic Lotto gave up seducing women and decided to marry Mathilde. He believed her to be pure and because she was pure he considered her his savior. He failed in the real world as an actor but in a dark night of the soul moment, discovered he had a talent for writing plays. Soon he became a famous playwright and grew wealthy in the process. Until his mother died, he saw not a penny of his inheritance because she was so angry he had married without her permission that she cut him off financially.

In spite of his profligate sex life -pre-marriage, he remained loyal to Mathilde throughout, forever worrying that this pure, saintly woman would leave him:

If she was happy, it meant she wouldn’t leave him; and it had become painfully apparent over their short marriage that he was not worth the salt she sweated. The woman was a saint. She saved, fretted, somehow paid their bills when he brought in nothing.

Mathilde, of course, was no saint. Because of a terrible family tragedy when she was very young girl, her parents basically abandoned her. They shipped her off to a grandmother who didn’t want her and who then shipped her off to another grandmother who made her sleep in a closet. Mathilde was French, born Aurelie, and when she was a teenager she was shipped off to her uncle’s house. He lived in the United States and left her to raise herself. He was wealthy, however, so she was never wanting for anything but attention. Unable to make friends at school, she became Mathilde, a girl who was angry and hard, who would not let the world take advantage of her, and who was very, very lonely.

She was also terrified of Lotto abandoning her like everyone else in her life did. She never talked about certain parts of her life:

Great swaths of her life were white space to her husband. What she did not tell him balanced neatly with what she did. Still, there are untruths made of words and untruths made of silences, and Mathilde had only ever lied to Lotto in what she never said.

Any husband paying attention might wonder what she was hiding, but that is one advantage to being married to a charismatic, rather self-absorbed man. She did quite a few things he was never even aware of not least of which was edit his plays to make them better. And how she managed to hide the ongoing and ferocious war between her and Lotto’s mother without Lotto once suspecting a thing is beyond me.

As much as they both feared the other leaving them, in the end Lotto does leave Mathilde by an untimely death. She is devastated and her grief at losing her husband and once again being left is uncomfortable reading as well as heartbreaking.

I thought the book’s structure worked really well with clueless Lotto in the first half of the book and revelation after revelation from Mathilde’s part of the book. Still, as much as Mathilde knew and kept secret, Lotto had secrets too, though certainly not of Mathilde’s caliber. I liked getting both sides of the story and seeing how each one created and navigated their marriage. It is a more complete picture than we would ever get in a real life marriage and I found the completeness satisfying. From the outside, one would think their marriage would never work, and some of their friends even took bets on how long it would be before they were divorced and some, even after the pair had been married for years, tried to sabotage the relationship. The ending with an elderly Mathilde reflecting back on her marriage made me a little teary.

Contributing to my enjoyment of this book was a personal connection. Mathilde and Lotto were married at the age of twenty-two ( I was twenty-three when Bookman and I got married) and they married a year before my own wedding. So in many ways it felt like I was reading the story of a couple I might have known, except of course I didn’t and wouldn’t have known them if they were real, they not being the sort I would generally be friends with. Nonetheless, there was a certain happy friction, a bit of voyeurism and self-satisfaction regarding my own good fortune that smoothed away some of the annoying bits about the book (like the bracketed narrative intrusions, what the heck were those about?).

I’d like to say wow, you should read this book, but it isn’t that sort of book. I think it is one that will appeal to many, be enjoyed by some, and really liked by a few. Which one of those you might be, you’ll have to decide for yourself.

Filed under: Books, Reviews Tagged: Lauren Groff, Marriage

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I have managed for two entire weeks to not add a book to my library requests. I would have made it past today too but the book gods sent me a message and I am not one to mess around when they are trying to get my attention.

It seems their message has a duel intent, good books and for me to come to terms with squirrels.

The first message came last week with an article at the Guardian of top 10 squirrels in literature. Who knew there were so many books with squirrels in them? While the description of the squirrel in Nabokov’s Pnin sounded amusing, the demon squirrel in Small Game by John Blades seemed more realistic. I saved the list because, you know, it could be amusing to read a few of the books at some point in time.

I went on my merry way until today when it came to my attention that The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie contains an “an intimate tête-à-tête with a very charismatic squirrel.” I checked my library and of course they have it and of course there is a line for it. I hesitated for about a second before I put myself on the list. I am number 82 so it will arrive sooner that I want it to but not as soon as I expect.

While I was thinking of squirrels I checked to see if there was another volume of Squirrel Girl and there is! In volume 2 she faces off against Ratatoskr, the Norse god of squirrels! So of course I had to request that too! I am number 26 in line for it.

In the meantime other books in my library queue are moving up faster than I expected but it’s all cool. I finished Fates and Furies and should have something to say about it tomorrow. I am working my way through Sorcerer to the Crown and Between the World and Me is moving right along as well. That means I will be ready for the squirrels whenever they should arrive! And, I have followed the directive of the book gods so all will be well.

Filed under: Books, In Progress

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I noticed on my way from my porch to the bus stop earlier this week that birds are starting to sing in the morning. At 6:30 it is still dark but a few voices are sleepily chirruping hello in the pre-dawn. This made me so happy that I would have danced my way down the sidewalk if it weren’t for treacherous slicks of ice hiding in the shadows. We might be having a thaw this weekend —it’s 40F/4C as I write this — but spring is still two months away.

Still, one must plan and prepare. Today I began folding newspaper pots for starting seeds. In just two weeks the onion seeds will need to get going. Last year I got started late with the onions and the late start combined with putting them out when they were too small meant I ended up with no onions at all. Not having grown onions before, it was all trial and error. Mostly error. This year I try again and see if I have any success.

Folding pots out of newspaper is messy and a bit tedious after the first pot or two. What does one do to entertain oneself? Watch the Secret History of the British Garden of course! I just watched the third episode about the 19th century and there is only one more episode left and that makes me very sad. A few years ago I watched and loved A Year at Kew. There are three seasons of this marvelous show and if you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it, especially on a cold winter’s day. Why can’t Americans make good gardening shows? It’s not like we don’t have any spectacular gardens.

I almost titled this post “Pot Making” but decided it might give the wrong impression. Have I ever told the story about my pot garden? Way back before Bookman and I bought our current house we had a townhouse with a large south-facing deck. We began container gardening on it before container gardening became a thing. To me at the time it was growing plants in pots. We were at a social event once, I don’t recall the exact occasion, but I was talking with someone and said with great enthusiasm that I had a pot garden. The astonished look on the person’s face and her sudden loss of words made me realize what I had just said. I quickly explained I was growing tomatoes, peppers and herbs in pots on my deck. I wasn’t entirely certain she believed me. I beat a hasty retreat.

I have been lost my gardening journal. It had three year’s worth of notes and plant lists and plans in it. I have no idea where it has got to. I have looked in all the likely places more than once and even in unlikely places too. It never leaves the house and my house isn’t that large. The last I recall seeing it was during the summer on my reading table. Bookman kindly surprised me with a new notebook that even has a pocket in it, very handy. But I remain nonplussed about the missing notebook and terribly sad about not only the disappeared garden notes but also reading notes. My hope is that it will turn up eventually and I will wonder why I failed to look for it in that location. In the mean time, planning for this year’s garden moves ahead.

I have begun a list of things that need to be done once the ground thaws. Last year at the Friends School Plant Sale in May we bought a few shrubs in anticipation of our garage being knocked down and an expansion of garden space. It took far longer for that to happen than we expected so we had to plant the shrubs in a temporary location in the main garden. They will need to be transplanted into what we now call the chicken garden. The list keeps growing every week. Spring is such a busy time!

And speaking of the Friends Plant Sale, I got the save the date postcard in the mail during the week. It is magneted to the refrigerator door where Bookman and I can see the date and the photo of the beautiful flowers. Every year I think it will be the year when I get to finally plant up my front yard and pack it full with prairie flowers and grasses and every year it gets put off. This year it is being put off again because I need to plant a green roof instead. I have already begun a list of plants I know will be good but looking at the catalog when it becomes available at the end of March will be when the planning really happens.

Lots of things in the works and the closer spring gets, the busier I will be. But it is all fun and I love it or I wouldn’t do it.

In cycling news, 250 Kung Fu nuns biked 2,000km in India to spread a message of women’s empowerment and environmental conservation. They are amazing and inspiring women.

Filed under: biking, gardening

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I came across an interesting article by Maggie Doherty in Dissent Magazine the other day via Arts and Letters Daily that discusses how and by whom a writer is paid might affect how and what they write. For instance, if you are being paid by a big commercial publisher and your compensation and future book publication is tied to how many copies of your current book sells, how much money it makes the publisher, then you are more likely to write the kind of fiction that caters to the mass market. And that is fine if that is what you want to do. What, however, happens to the genre of literature we call art? What happens to experimentation?

today’s writers must meet market demands. Those who succeed often do so by innovating no more than is necessary. Many of today’s most celebrated writers marry experimentalism with accessibility; they produce prize-winning fiction with just a dash of formal excitement, enough to catch the eye of cultural gatekeepers but not so much that it renders a work unmarketable. They forge aesthetic compromise and favor political consensus. Their work reassures readers more often than it unsettles them. This isn’t so much bad literature as boring literature. After all, what’s more exhausting than reading, time and again, experimentation you’ve come to expect?

The article provides a thoughtful look at the history of public funding of literature in the United States, mostly through the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), but other organizations as well such as the Federal Writer’s Project (FWP) during the depression. When public funding was high, literature thrived, there was a diversity in viewpoint and a wider engagement with issues. Think Zora Neal Hurston and Ralph Ellison both of whom received funding from the FWP. Think Tillie Olsen and Raymond Carver, both of whom received grants from the NEA when they were just starting out as writers. But thanks to Ronald Reagan and the 1980s, public funding has been cut back to a pittance and the NEA has to be extremely careful in who it gives grants to so it doesn’t ruffle conservative feathers and lose even more funding.
 
What about universities you may ask since many writers support themselves these days by teaching:

many of today’s writers have retreated from the public sphere and are holed up in private and increasingly corporatized universities. Endowment managers are their patrons now, rather than representatives of the public. More and more writers cycle through temporary faculty appointments, teaching at the undergraduate level and in MFA programs. At a time when some English departments must make do without a medievalist or an eighteenth-century specialist, creative writing is flourishing. Since 1975, the number of MFA programs across the nation has increased tenfold. Some critics have also complained about the standardizing of literary style, while others, such as Junot Díaz, have voiced concerns about the lack of diversity among MFA faculty and students.

So while universities may offer some support, they are clearly not the answer either. After all, there are only so many jobs to go around and if you don’t have an MFA you are completely out of luck unless you have already made a name for yourself as a writer.
 
I’ve sometimes wondered what the big deal was with most writers not being able to actually make a living from their work. I mean all of us regular people who write manage to do it. Sure it takes a long time but we keep at it anyway because it is important to us. Even the likes of Kafka and Hawthorne had jobs that were not related to writing and they seemed to do just fine.

But that is short-sighted of me. Because the single mother who has to work two jobs to make ends meet and take care of her children and everything else is not going to have the time or energy to write even if she wants to. What a gift it would be for her to have all her expenses covered for a year or two! But even if she has shown talent, published a few pieces that prove her potential, she is not the sort of person who gets grants these days. Grants tend to go to writers like Jonathan Franzen and Jhumpa Lahiri after they have won major awards, after they have begun to make a name for themselves, rarely new and unknown, unproven writers.
 
All things considered, Doherty says we can’t fault writers for “selling out.” But the results are a literature that appeals to the mainstream and is aesthetically compromised, a literature that reassures rather than unsettles, a literature that flirts with innovation and excitement but never truly is innovative or exciting. In short, a literature that is boring.

What might a literature that is not beholden to anyone look like? Wouldn’t it be interesting and exciting to find out? Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear as though that will happen any time soon. Doherty suggests we need a return to a patronage type of system, preferably a public one like the NEA used to be. There is no political will for that in the US.
 
I wonder though what enterprising authors might not be able to achieve with crowdfunding? I contributed to a crowdfunded novel a few months ago and actually received the book in the mail a week ago. I haven’t gotten a chance to read it yet but I am looking forward to it whether or not it is good. As if writing isn’t hard enough already for writers looking to do something truly innovative, to have to do a Kickstarter or similar campaign just adds to the burden. But it does seem a possible viable alternative from my perspective because it would offer a kind of freedom they might not otherwise have. As Doherty says,

When writers are forced to conform to consensus positions, either political or aesthetic, the literary world starts to look depressingly monochrome. Literature that appeals to the mainstream isn’t just politically anodyne—it’s aesthetically predictable. We need a literary world, and a political order, in which writers, from a range of social positions, feel encouraged to surprise their readers. We need fiction and poetry that will confuse us and trouble us, challenge us and incite us.

A range of social and political positions, surprises, challenge and incitement. Yes please!

Filed under: Books, Writing Tagged: public patronage of the arts, Writers gotta eat and pay the rent

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I always thought the first Paolo Bacigalupi book I read would be The Windup Girl. I even have a copy of it on my bookshelf. But as these things usually work out, at least in my reading life, I was wrong. Windup Girl sits unread on my shelf still. After NerdCon in October and Bacigalupi mentioning several times his book The Water Knife, that is the one I ended up reading first.
 
You can’t really blame me. The book is all about water rights in the western United States; California versus Nevada and Arizona mostly. I wasn’t always a Minnesota girl. I was born and raised in southern California, the San Diego area to be precise. I went to college in Los Angeles. There were always droughts, though not as bad as the one going on right now, and there were always people arguing about water rights. And I remember wondering many times just how precarious the whole house of cards was and how long would it be before it all fell apart?
 
The scariest thing about The Water Knife is that Bacigalupi’s book is completely plausible. The story takes place in an undated but clearly not too distant future. Climate change has caused a series of huge weather disasters that have strained the resources of a federal government that now seems to be only nominally in charge in the western states. Between hurricanes and droughts and prolonged heatwaves Texas is entirely uninhabitable and refugees are streaming across the borders of neighboring states whose own resources are growing more and more scarce. Nevada and California have formed their own militias and closed their borders to anyone who does not have permits to cross. There is a kind of guerilla war going on between California, Nevada and Arizona over rights to the Colorado river. The war is being fought both in courtrooms and on the ground. Water pipelines to entire cities are shut off and hundreds of thousands of people are immediately turned into refugees with nowhere to go. The Red Cross sinks relief wells and tent cities spring up around it but the water is not free. Prices fluctuate daily and at one point in the book it costs $6.75 for a liter of water.
 
Meanwhile the Chinese are investing heavily in building arcologies in Las Vegas and Phoenix. An arcology is an almost self-contained living environment that recycles 95% of the water. And it isn’t just water that is recycled, pretty much everything is. In this way an arcology can be climate controlled, crops can be grown, the air can be filtered and kept clean and safe from the frequent dust storms outdoors, people living inside can almost pretend like life is normal. It is the poor and desperate who build the arcologies, the poor and desperate who never make enough from their work to live inside them. It is the wealthy and powerful who get to live in comfort and safety.
 
A Water Knife is one of those people only rumored to exist. A Water Knife is the one who does the dirty work for the people in charge of the water, the one who does what has to be done whether that is killing someone or blowing up an entire water processing facility. Angel is a Water Knife and he works for Catherine Case, the most powerful person in Nevada. She is in charge of the water and the existence of the state of Nevada, Las Vegas in particular, depends on her.
 
Arizona is pretty much a lost cause and the city of Phoenix is will soon be drinking its last glass of water unless someone can find some water rights that trump those belonging to California or Nevada. Someone does. Digs them out of some old dusty files, documents well over 100 years old that trump every other right in existence. The person who has the rights in his possession can make billions from their sale and he plays buyers from California and Nevada off each other and pays with his life. But no one knows what happened to the documents.
 
It is a life and death race to see who can get the documents first. Angel is on the hunt and so is everyone else it seems with no one sure who is working for who. Lucy, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who has been living in Phoenix for a number of years documenting its decline gets mixed up in all of it as she investigates who killed her friend, the guy who had originally found the water rights. Maria, seventeen, a Texas refugee and orphan living with her friend Sarah and forced to prostitute herself in order to not be fed to the hyenas of the local gang leader for being unable to pay her rent, also gets mixed up in the business.

The Water Knife is a fast-paced mystery/thriller but also more than that. It alternates between the point of view of Maria, Lucy and Angel until eventually all their individual story threads come together. It wasn’t so long ago that life was normal, that there was enough water to go around, but each one is forced in their own way to come to terms with the world as it is now not as it once was and not as it could be. And when it comes down to your own personal survival versus the potential survival of an entire city, what choices are you forced to make and who can really blame you for them?

Also running through the book is a refrain about how those who knew and could have done something long ago to make sure the present day of the story didn’t happen did absolutely nothing, or worse, precipitated the disaster and even profited from it. Bacigalupi does a marvelous job at character development and it is fascinating to watch each of the three main characters change over the course of the novel as their personal beliefs and illusions, hopes and dreams, are ripped away. And while the ending provides a conclusion, it leaves much up in the air. I appreciated that because given everything that came before an ending that tied everything up nicely would have been false.

I am pleased with my first venture in reading Bacigalupi and looking forward to reading more of his work. Perhaps The Windup Girl will be next!

Filed under: Books, Clifi, Reviews

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It was just back on the 13th that I mentioned how deluded I am regarding, in particular, a book that I was next up for at the library and that I was sure I’d have at least a week’s wait before I had to worry about it. Nope. Two days later, I got an email from the library telling me that Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho was ready to pick up. I ignored it for a few days, until the middle of the following week, when a couple books had to be returned. Then, looking at my library holds list I thought, phew! I really will get a break for a little while now!

Yes, that is exactly how deluded I am!

Because you know, right, that three days later I got an email from the library to tell me that Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates was waiting. And then the next day I got another email from the library to let me know The Explorer’s Guild, Volume One had been added to the shelf. I ignored them until today when a book had to be returned.

This all happened last week when I was beginning to feel as though my reading was getting under control. I’ve been really zipping through Fates and Furies and have reached close to the two-thirds mark. Really liking it! I am plugging away diligently at Sorcerer to the Crown on my lunch breaks at work. Haven’t made it far yet but I’ve only had it for three lunch breaks and it reads fairly quickly. I’ve felt so good I have been eyeing my reading table, certain I will be able to begin digging into those books very soon.

After I got the email about the Ta-Nehisi Coates book, however, and looked at my library holds requests, I had a moment of fretting. I am moving way too fast up the list for the new China Mieville book, The Census-Taker. I did something I have never done before. I suspended my hold request until March 1st. That has left three books that might come rushing at me faster than I expect: The Cabaret Of Plants (currently I am 6 on the list), Strong Female Protagonist, Book One (I am also 6th on this one), and The Story of My Teeth (I’m at 10). In my formerly deluded state I would relax and figure I have plenty of time. But the veil has been rent and I know better, at least until I can stitch the tear back together.

That leaves only two other books on my holds list and both are currently on order, The Vegetarian by Han Kang for which I am first in line, and All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Anders for which I am number 11. There is no telling how long it will be before the book is available. They are like jokers or wild cards. The likelihood that in two days I will get an email from the library telling me The Vegetarian is ready to pick up is high given how these things seem to go. The messed up crazy thing is, that when I think about it, if I don’t get an email in a couple days regarding The Vegetarian I will be disappointed rather than glad!

Part of me is looking at my hold requests and thinking, hey! I got this! I can totally add Svetlana Alekseevich’s Voices from Chernobyl to the queue because I’ll be number 33. Or maybe I could be number 64 for Rushdie’s Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-eight Nights? Or maybe even number 14 for Beauty is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan would be okay?

Except the other part of me is yelling really loud right now and it is so distracting! She is saying things that, well, let’s just say I didn’t know she knew some of those words! She says I can’t add any books to my hold requests until I have finished one book from the reading table.

Fine, be that way. Sometimes I can be such a party pooper.

Filed under: Books, In Progress, Library Tagged: Read the Table

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This weekend has zipped by! I feel like I have been busy but for the life of me I can’t tell you what I have been busy doing. Not a feeling I like to have because it makes me tired without seeming to have a reason.

I suppose much of what I have been doing is planning and that is mental work that doesn’t have anything immediately to show. What kind of planning you ask? Chickens!

We will be getting them as babies only a couple days old. They will be living indoors with us for a while in a brooder. My chicken book says it definitely does not have to be anything fancy, it just has to be big enough. It suggested big plastic tote bins or even sturdy cardboard boxes taped together. Since I have access at work to free paper boxes that are quite sturdy, we are going to build their home out of those. I have two boxes already. I think we will ultimately need four. But if we need more that will be easy enough. So brooder solved.

In the bottom under the bedding we will put old cookie sheets to keep the cardboard from getting damp and to make cleaning easier. We can then also use the cookie sheets out in the coop beneath the roost to make cleaning up easier there too.

I have a checklist of other items we will need including bedding, feeder, waterer, heat lamp and baby chicken food. We will get all of that in February when we order the babies. Then we will have time to get everything set up but there won’t be a long time to wait after that before the girls move in. I will be sure to have my video camera battery charged and ready so I can share the fluffy cuteness with you.

We have also finally decided what breeds of birds we will be in our small flock. Our chicks will come to us via Egg Plant Urban Farm Store and they have eight breeds to choose from. Unless they tell us when we order that our chosen mix is not a good idea we will be getting one Rhode Island Red, one Ameraucana/Easter Egger (so named because they lay green and blue eggs), one australorp, and one barred rock. We decided one of the advantages of getting four different breeds is being able to tell them all apart.

And yes, we have names for them already. Since we are getting four, we have decided to call them The Dashwoods. Which one will be Elinor, Marianne, Margaret and Mrs. Dashwood remains to be seen. We have plans once the coop is completed to paint it up as Barton Cottage with a faux brick paint job. Why not? There will be no Mr. Willoughby or Colonel Brandon or Edward Ferrars, only the ladies. I wouldn’t mind a rooster, but the city requires I get 100% approval from all my neighbors within crowing distance. Stupid city regulations.

While we are on the topic of stupid city regulations, let’s talk about those for a second. My neighbors can have big dogs that bark at all hours and none of them require permission from anyone. For me to have four hens that hardly make any noise at all I have to get permission from 80% of my neighbors who live within 100 feet/30.5 m of my property. The city sent me a list of all the addresses I have to solicit and there are fourteen! That fourteen includes four houses across the street from me who will never even see the chickens because they can’t see into my backyard. At least they should be easy to convince to sign the form.

We need eleven signatures. We don’t foresee any problems, we get along well with our neighbors. It’s just having to go through all the trouble of getting their signatures that is ridiculous. Last year the city held hearings to drop this requirement but nothing has yet come of it so we have to jump through that silly hoop.

The Dashwoods will be worth the trouble, right?

Filed under: chickens

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Poor beleaguered print books.

I came across a report at the end of December that print books were making a recovery. E-book sales have leveled off, even dropped a little, and sales of print books were having a little rebound. Huzzah!

The tech evangelists predicted the ebook market would eventually be 50 to 60 percent of books sales. Of course one could say these were tech people making these predictions, not actual readers so what did they know anyway? It appears they were waaaayyyy off because ebook sales are pretty much staying steady at around 25 percent of the market.

But just as I begin to breathe a sigh of relief, I come across another article talking about a new threat to print books: audiobooks!

Say what?

Oh yes, MarketWatch is all about audiobooks as the future of reading. They even have a bold header stating “Audiobooks have begun to outsell print.” They go on to toss out some numbers, audiobook sales totaled $1.5 billion last year. Spewing dollar amounts doesn’t really tell you anything really. Audiobooks are expensive, sometimes they cost a lot more than the print books. For instance a paperback copy of the first Harry Potter book can be had at Barnes and Noble for $6.76 but the audiobook costs $28.66! So don’t tell me dollars, tell me how many actual audiobooks were sold. They don’t of course.

What they do is provide examples of titles where the audiobook outsold the print book. We have a debut spy thriller, some supernatural romance novels, a business book. Based on these and the popularity of audible.com, the trend watchers have declared that audiobooks are the future of books.

Oy. I wonder how long this will last before someone else declares the real threat to print books is billboards or bumper stickers or some other crazy format. It’s all starting to sound like The Perils of Pauline with print books tied up on a railroad track. Or maybe it’s more like the boy who cried wolf?

Whatever the case, I’m not worried. Print books are not yet gasping their last breath.

Filed under: Audio Books, Books, ebooks

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Isn’t it a really wonderful thing when a book you didn’t know you needed to read unexpectedly comes into your life? Last week Sigrun at Sub Rosa mentioned a really good book she is reading, The Art of Slow Writing by Louise DeSalvo. She mentioned it in the frame of thinking about the ideal writing life and Virginia Woolf’s “room of one’s own,” how this room is something that is pretty close to a fantasy for most of us.

I commented that DeSalvo’s book sounded interesting. Sigrun provided a link to the publisher description of the book and I thought, I should read that sometime! In the process of checking to see if it was something my library has, I decided to request it. Even though I am not looking to publish a novel or anything, I always enjoy a good book about the craft and process of writing and the idea of slow writing had an interesting sound to it.

The book arrived and I started reading it.

At this same time I have been struggling to write my next essay for Vocalis, that essay website I created with the lofty goal of publishing a new essay to it every week. How quickly that schedule has crashed! Because it turns out that even though I am great at writing a blog post in around an hour, essays take a bit more time. Go figure.

The process of writing an essay is an entirely different one that a blog post or book review or even an essay for class back when I was in library school about six years ago (wow has it been that long?!). I was surprised by this discovery and then I was surprised that I was surprised. And then I started worrying about timelines and whether or not I should shut down Vocalis now before I got too attached.

But then DeSalvo told me to not be so stupid. Most of the kind of writing I do is not exactly the creative sort and here I am expecting to produce creative essays in the same way I do everything else. I had forgotten how much time and extra work it takes, how different it is to dashing off a blog post. And I was getting frustrated. But DeSalvo reminded me:

We can take as much time as we need in our projects’ initial stages, allowing ourselves to be unsure of what we’re doing or whether we’ll succeed. We can commit to the process of learning and honoring our craft even as we acknowledge the anxiety and frustration that often occur early on. We can commit to working slowly, taking time to figure out our work, one slow step at a time.

That turned out to be exactly what I needed! Permission to learn a new process, to not rush but take the time I need.

I began writing a new essay last week but didn’t get far before I discovered I needed to do a bit of research. Research accomplished I then had to figure out how to use the research because, while it supports what I want to say, it also changes the scope of things and possibly even the direction I had thought I wanted to go.

I worked on the essay for about three hours Sunday and only stopped because I was starting to feel stuck and noticed my stomach was growling. Instead of an almost complete first draft, I had not even two pages. Disappointed. But also exhilarated because during that time I had found that place you go when you are fully focused and time and the world fall away.

DeSalvo talks about working at writing, how the process from project to project is not going to be the same, how we have to find our own rhythm and routine. All that and I have only read through page 22! She is right about what she says and I know she is right, I had just forgotten all these things in the regular routine and rhythm of blogging that has become so familiar, so comfortable and very close to easy.

Thanks to DeSalvo I am working at getting past the layers of disappointment from not being able to hit the ground running with this essay writing thing. I did, after all, want to try something new and different. I did want a challenge. I knew there were things to learn. That I am surprised, impatient and a bit vexed that I got exactly what I wanted makes me laugh. What? You mean I’m not a secret super genius writer?

Nope. But then most people aren’t. I guess I can be okay with that. It certainly isn’t a reason to give up and pull the plug on Vocalis. I wanted to be the hare but it turns out I am the tortoise. Slow and steady. Writing is not a race and there is no true finish line anyway. What’s the hurry?

Filed under: Books, In Progress, Writing

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Looking for an off the beaten path superhero comic? The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Volume One just might be the ticket. Squirrel Girl is in the Marvel Universe of comics and was actually first introduced back in 1991. Back then she was fourteen, in high school and crushing on Tony Stark (aka Iron Man), kind of scrawny and looked so 1990s. Thank goodness she has gotten an update! Current Squirrel Girl even comments on her past poor fashion choices.

Now heading off to college Squirrel Girl, also known as Doreen Green, is a full-bodied young woman. Her

tail is much fluffier and squirrelier, she has a much better outfit and she no longer has black diamonds around her eyes that make her look like an evil clown. She wears a squirrel ears headband, acorn earrings, has a bit of a buck-toothed smile and her squirrel friend Tippy-Toe wears a pink bow around her neck. When Squirrel Girl is incognito as Doreen, she tucks her tail into her pants which gives her a rather round and pronounced booty, much to her delight.

Technically, Squirrel Girl falls into the mutant class of superheroes but doesn’t want to have anything to do with the X-Men. She is half squirrel, half girl which means she has the proportional speed and strength or a squirrel. She also speaks squirrel and she and Tippy-Toe are frequently helped by their squirrel friends when fighting evil.

Doreen is majoring in computer science at college and her first day there doesn’t quite go as planned. her roommate is ok but when they go to orientation Doreen doesn’t get a chance to sign up for a single club because she has to rush out in order to save the earth from being destroyed by Galacticus, Devourer of Worlds.

Squirrel Girl is confident, smart, sassy, and fun. Being part squirrel she kind of acts like one, zipping here and there, never staying still for more than a minute or two and constantly chattering about something. She is strong but she is not the kind of superhero who solves things by throwing punches. She is tricksy and in fact manages to defeat Galacticus by turning him into a friend.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl is not a thinker. There are no lessons to be learned. It is nothing but pure frenetic squirrel entertainment. I enjoyed the comic so much that my antipathy for real-life squirrels may have slipped a little. I’m not about to run out to the garden and try to make friends with them, only, perhaps, I can appreciate their daredevil antics a little more than I did before.

Filed under: Books, Graphic Novels, Reviews Tagged: Iron Man, squirrels, Tony Stark, X-Men

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The seeds I ordered last weekend arrived already this week! I was not expecting them for another week or two, but here they are. It is far too early to be able to do anything with them yet. As I type this it is -3F/-19C outside with a wind chill of -19F/-28C. Ah, winter in Minnesota!

Despite the cold, I was rather disturbed to learn that 13 of the last 16 winters in my area have been “Zone 5” winters. If you aren’t a gardener or in the U.S. you might not know what that means, so let me explain. The United States Department of Agriculture, USDA, long ago created a plant hardiness map. It is based on average annual extreme minimum temperatures over a 30-year period and goes from zone 1, the coldest, to zone 13, the warmest. My zone in Minneapolis is 4 which means minimum winter temperatures regularly dip below -20F/-28.9C. That’s air temperature without wind chill added in. The last time the USDA updated its zone map was 2012. I’m not entirely certain, but I think they update it every ten years.

For 13 of the last 16 winters to be zone 5 is a big deal. It won’t yet put me squarely in a warmer zone but it is definitely moving there. State climate watchers and meteorologists are speculating that within the next three to four years we will begin seeing zone six winters. This is both crazy and scary. A zone 6 winter would mean a minimum temperature of only -10F/-23.3C. Some people might wonder why I’m not cheering, why I am not excited about the bigger variety of plants I might be able to grow, why anyone would be upset over a winter that never got colder than -20F/-28.9C because, wow, -10F/-23.3C is still pretty cold.

But it is not cold enough.

Minnesota ecology has evolved around long, frigid winters. Already forests in the northern part of the state are showing signs of stress and disease. Our moose population is getting smaller every year. The emerald ash borer is spreading at a faster rate, killing the state’s ash trees. And every year incidents of West Nile virus occur earlier and earlier in the season. That we even have to worry about the virus at all is a fairly recent, within the last ten years or so, thing.

And it isn’t just ecology that is affected by warmer winters, people are too. Minnesota culture is heavily invested in cold winters. Heck, we have a frozen lake’s worth of jokes about it. And we tend to think we are better than everyone else because we can endure the frigid cold. There are winter carnivals and events that warmer winters will make difficult. This year it took so long before the cold hit, the lakes have not been able to build enough ice for the various pond hockey tournaments and many of them have been postponed or cancelled entirely.

Warmer winters are no small, inconsequential thing.

I am not quite sure how to plan for shorter, warmer winters in my garden. I continue to operate under zone 4 assumptions but clearly I am going to need to adapt. I don’t know what that means, exactly. Today I spent an hour or so figuring out where to plant all those seeds that arrived in the mail earlier this week. I am supposed to rotate my “crops” to keep garden soil healthy and avoid hungry insect problems. But, as big as my garden is—pretty much my entire backyard—it still is not large so rotating is a flexible term. I mean growing my tomatoes three feet from where they were last year and moving the zucchini from one end of the garden bed to the other counts as rotating, right?

I got it all figured out though, at least on paper. There are always revisions when it comes time to plant because I can never remember exactly how much room I have in all the various garden beds. And bundling up and walking around the garden right now won’t work because everything is under snow and I can’t even tell where the paths are and where the beds are. Spring and planting time will reveal all!

Biking

Just a quick bike note today. I did another race on Thursday and it was an entirely different mix of people than the week before. There were eight people in group D and I was still the only woman. It was a crazy fast race and I think the guy who won by just over five minutes should have been racing in the C group instead, but maybe he has low self-esteem issues and needed an ego boost or something. I came in fifth in my group riding pretty much at the same rate I had the week before. I had a great time though riding with a C group rider who had gotten dropped from the main group and playing tag with another D group rider.

I’ll try again this coming Thursday and see how it goes. One thing for sure, it is most excellent exercise and I work a lot harder in a race than I do during a regularly scheduled workout. I will be really interested to see how it all translates to riding outdoors again when spring comes.

Filed under: biking, gardening Tagged: climate change

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With Nimona and the Small heart of Things I managed to clear two books off my reading table. However, I picked up three books at the library yesterday. Two steps forward and three steps back.

The good news is that I shouldn’t be getting any more books at the library at least for a couple weeks. Though I just checked and I have moved from second position to first in line for Sorcerer to the Crown. Perhaps I am too hopeful that everyone who has it checked out now will be slow and I’ll have at least two weeks before my library sends me an email to come pick it up. Or I’m probably deluded.

Definitely deluded.

Nonetheless, my poor little table remains standing despite Bookman’s dire predictions regarding its load-bearing capacities. And, I have a three-day holiday weekend approaching for which the weather is forecast to be even colder than last weekend—we probably won’t even get above 0F/-18C! Get the coffee brewing and the quilts piled up, it’s going to be the perfect holiday weekend for reading! Hopefully I can convince Bookman to bake me up something delicious to nibble on too. I can hardly wait!

But wait I must.

The books I brought home from the library are ones I’ve had in the holds queue for quite some time. Months. They are Fates and Furies, Part of Our Lives: A People’s History of the American Public Library, and The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Volume One: Squirrel Power.

Squirrel Girl is a superhero comic and our hero is part human, part squirrel. She has a squirrel sidekick named Tippy-Toe. I started reading it last night and it’s as crazy and frenetic as two squirrels chasing each other around the trunk of my maple tree. It’s cute though and there was a brief moment, and thank goodness it was brief because it worried me a little, in which I might have actually thought squirrels were cute and kind of cool. But then I remembered how they are not good garden sharers—I’ve had a hazelnut tree for ten years and have never gotten a nut off it because the squirrels eat them all first. Every. Single. One. I’m cool with sharing but the squirrels, not so much.

Anyway, Squirrel Girl, so far, wacky fun. Haven’t started the other books yet. Those will be for the frigid weekend ahead.

Filed under: Books, In Progress, Library Tagged: Read the Table

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