July 2024 Reading

I don’t track my reading by weight, but maybe I should.  This month, I read 13 books.

Four of those books were audiobooks.  I continue to enjoy listening to the Louise Penny books because who doesn’t want to live in Three Pines, eat fabulous food, and hang out with the cool people?  A murder or two is a small price to pay.  This month, I read The Long Way Home, The Nature of the Beast, A Great Reckoning, and Glass Houses.  Comfort reading that I can do while quilting!  What’s not to like?

 

As a person who majored in English with an emphasis on the medieval period (I am SO employable, right?), I consider Chaucer one of my homies.  Before this month, I had read more than the average person, but now I have read the entirety.  I have had this very gorgeous book sitting on my shelf for a long time.  I am glad I read it.  Before I talk about the contents, I need to talk about the book.  It is a facsimile of the Kelmscott Press Chaucer, printed by William Morris with illustrations by Edward Burne-Jones.  It’s just beautiful as an object and I bought it a bookstand so I can look at it more often.  The Chaucer itself is pretty awesome, if you’re into Middle English.  He wrote in diverse forms, so the book has everything from a treatise on how to use the astrolabe to a translation of the philosophical writings of Boethius to dirty stories about people getting poked in the butt with hot pokers.  I enjoyed some parts more than others, but still love Chaucer in all his scope and breadth.  Thumbs up.

 

The other book achievement this month was finally finishing The City of God by Augustine.  I don’t remember why I wanted to read it in the first place, but there it was on the shelf, so I did.  On the plus side, Augustine has a snarky way of throwing shade that can be really entertaining.  There is a certain fascination inherent in the notion that someone needs to do a reasonable refutation of belief in the ancient Greek and Roman gods.  He has a charming faith that everything can be reasoned through to the glory of God.  But that really isn’t enough to make more than 800 pages interesting, especially since he feels the need to reason through stuff in the Bible that is clearly metaphorical.  Let’s just say that he finds some stuff really important that is far from central to my personal faith.  He’s a saint and I’m not, so what do I know?  Well, I’m not reading it again.

 

Having accomplished Augustine and Chaucer, I deserved some more recreational reading.  Ursula Le Guin to the rescue!  I read the whole Catwings series (not a big time commitment):  Catwings, Catwings Return, Wonderful Alexander and the Catwings, and Jane on Her Own.  They are delightful.  Even in her books for children, Le Guin explores the differences between cultures, in this case, cat culture, human culture, and the special circumstance of cat-with-wings culture.  The adventures have real stakes, but end happily. 

 

Gail Carriger’s work is so much fun, too.  I am slowly working my way through all of her books.  This month I read The Sumage Solution, the first in the San Andreas Shifters series.  Adorable gay werewolves.  What else do you need to know?  A fun plot, an ingenious solution to a difficulty, and spicy bits.  Check it out.

 

I have written over and over about how much of a Rick Riordan fangirl I am.  I adore his writing.  I also adore the way he uses his power for good.  The Cursed Carnival and Other Calamities is a collection of short works by Carlos Hernandez, Roshani Chokski, J.C. Cervantes, Yoon Ha Lee, Kwame Mbalia, Rebecca Roanhorse, Tehlor Kay Mejia, Sarwat Chadda, Graci Kim, and the man himself as an imprint of Rick Riordan Presents.  Riordan uses his star power to lift up other voices.  Where other writers might appropriate the myths of other cultures in their work, Riordan makes a platform for writers from those cultures to explore their own myths.  That is being a good ally.  The stories themselves are pretty uniformly great.  Of course I liked some better than others, but there were no stinkers in the bunch.  I also feel like I have more writers whose work I want to explore more.

 

July total:  13

Summer total to date:  21

Year to date:  73

Politics and Religion, Y'all

There are at least two things I don’t write about much, but times being what they are, I decided that I need to take a moment to write about politics and religion.

This last week, I had a meltdown.  The proximate cause was a group of people showing up to play pickleball.  It was several families with approximately 87 children ranging in age from about 14 on down.  The men were dressed like anyone else coming to pickleball.  The women were all wearing skirts with hems that fell below the knees.  Even the toddler girls were wearing skirts like that.  Of course I was polite and friendly because that is how I roll.  Everyone was perfectly well behaved.  The adults and the older children all played with the other folks who showed up.  And my anxiety grew the whole time.

 

Let me be clear.  The people did absolutely nothing wrong.  They seemed to be nice, well-adjusted folks with a strong sense of family.  They played together.  They seemed healthy and happy.

 

And they scared the heck out of me.

 

I’m going to make an assumption or two or ten here.  I will assume that most women would not choose to play sports in a long skirt without a good reason.  I’m going to assume that the good reason in question was that these women believed it was the appropriate, decent attire.  I’m going to assume that the adults believe that they should train up their daughters to be decent women (all the children, with the possible exception of the very new baby were girls, so I can’t speak about sons).  I assume, based on what I could see, that these families cared about each other.  But I have the roaring heebee-jeebees about one premise of that culture being that women need to dress a certain way.

 

Yes, I know that we are all enculturated.  We swim in cultural waters we can’t perceive most of the time.  My normal is not universal.  I won’t presume to tell anyone that my culture is The Way It Should Be.

 

The thing is, in our political situation, there are a lot of folks out there who DO want to make their culture The Way It Should Be.  What kind of skirt I wear is, ultimately, no big deal.  But if someone wants me to wear a particular kind of skirt, it’s not that far to go to other kinds of control issues.  I very much want to be in control of my own body, my own property, my own being.

 

I am afraid.  These pickleball-playing folks were truly nice people.  And I worry that they were the kind of people that made good Nazis.

 

I am afraid and I am a white person of privilege.  I can’t even imagine the microagressions and macroagressions that make up daily experience for BIPOC and underprivileged people.  I fear for my trans child, for my LBGTQ+ friends, for all the precious weirdos who make my life rich and diverse and wonderful.

 

I was the frog this last week, finally realizing that the water is getting darn hot.  The cumulative stress got to me.

 

In this context, I went off to church on Sunday, as I do.  I am blessed with wise priests in my church.  One of those wise priests preached about fear and faith.  It was exactly what I needed to hear.

 

The world seems pretty dark and hopeless a lot of the time.  What keeps me going is faith.  I don’t know how it’s going to work out.  I don’t understand what the heck God is going as we go through this pile of crap.  I yell at God about that from time to time.  (God can take it.)

 

Which brings me to my favorite saint.  The photo at the top of this is Botticelli’s version of St. John the Baptist.  John’s job was to prepare the way for the Lord.  He did that, even when it was weird and hard and complicated (at least there was honey to go with those locusts…).  And he did it even when he didn’t know if it was working.  He sent his disciples to check Jesus out because he just wasn’t sure.  If John could wonder, I can, too.

 

Friends, I’m going to be out there trying to be friendly and kind and wonderful and also trying to ensure that the future is available to all of us, no matter what color we are, who we love, how we identify, and all the rest.  Faith, I hope, will see me through.

 

And please:  vote like someone’s life depends on it.

June 2024 Reading

I tend to read less in the summer, unlike when I was a kid.  This is not an advantage of being a grown-up.  However, my new habit of audiobooks is allowing me to multitask:  I can do my craft projects and read at the same time!  (Yes:  audiobooks count as reading.)  This month, I read eight books.

The first six of those were, in fact, audiobooks.  (Have I mentioned that I LOVE Hoopla and get my audiobooks from the library?  Check it out!  It’s free and really cool!)  I am listening my way through the entire Louise Penny works.  This month, it was A Rule Against Murder, The Brutal Telling, Bury Your Dead, A Trick of the Light, The Beautiful Mystery, and How the Light Gets In.  As I keep saying every time I read Penny’s books, she has a knack for writing cozy thrillers.  I’m not sure that’s a real genre, but that’s the best description I can manage for books that both feel comforting and put characters I love in deadly peril.  I want to hang out in Three Pines and drink Scotch and eat fabulous food and have Armand Gamache solve all my problems.  Try them; you’ll like them.

 

In paper book form, I read The Adventures of Tom Bombadil by J.R.R. Tolkien.  It’s a collection of poems, several featuring our friend Bombadil from LOTR.  In true Tolkien fashion, the commentary and origin stories and other stuff takes up more space than the actual works.  We all need to geek out every once in a while and it was fun.  Plus the book is really cute.  It would be a great gift for the Tolkien nut in the family (looks at T.R.).

 

Speaking of T.R., for my birthday he gave me A Sinister Revenge by Deanna Raybourn, the next in the Veronica Speedwell series.  There is nothing not to like about the series as a whole.  There’s a lepidopterist detective, a sexy taxidermist, and plenty of Victorian skullduggery.  This particular one resolved a situation from the end of the last one, so it was particularly satisfying.

 

On to July.

 

June total:  8

Summer total to date:  8

Year to date:  60