lunabee34

1. I absolutely adore my ridiculous children. Fiona is reading War and Peace. It's the book with the most AR points, and we kept telling her that she was probably not going to like it or understand it well, which just fueled her desire to read it more. Joke's on us, I guess, because she's moving through it a pretty fair clip, and while I'm certain that a significant amount of it is going over her head, she seems to be understanding the plot well enough (we debrief what everyone is reading over dinner every evening).

2.

A Century of Poems - TLS 100 by The Times Literary Supplement

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Well, this makes clear that I do not share taste in poetry with the editors of the Times Lierary Supplement, all however many of them served for the 20th century. Lol

So many war poems, which I get given the time period, but I am not a fan of most war poetry. Also so much rhyming, way more than I'd anticipated.

I did like some of the poems, but on the whole not for me.



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3.

( Scholomance by Naomi Novik--major spoilers )

4.

The Best Cook in the World by Rick Bragg

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I kept finding myself in the pages of this book as I read it. My people are not mountain Southern, but some things about being Southern are universal. The backstory of poverty and wringing a living out of the land with backbreaking work in Bragg's memoir could easily describe many aspects of the backstory on both side of my family. Most especially, though, reflected here is that truth that no matter how poor my grandparents were or how stingy my parents were when I was growing up to avoid poverty we still ate well. Like Bragg, my family was almost self-sustaining in eating what we grew, caught, and raised, and we ate like kings. Still do.



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5.

The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman and Other Queer Nineteenth-Century Short Stories by Christopher Looby

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This collection of short stories is divided into four sections: queer places, queer genders, queer attachments, and queer things. Most of the stories in the queer things section don't seem to be queer to me (especially the Melville one where the protagonist is obsessed with his chimney and the Hartman story where a little waif girl drowns herself in the sea). Many of these stories are sad and/or violent, but a few of them are happy and hopeful--notably the Walt Whitman and the Mary Wilkins Freeman. The titular story of the book is incredibly fascinating.



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I have a PDF copy of this book, so if you'd like to read me, PM me and I'll email it to you.

1. Dylan has been diagnosed with lupus and given medication. When we got done with the appointment, I sat in the car and cried. It's been so long with no one helping us that I had started to despair that it would ever happen. I'm scared, of course; I don't want my child to have lupus. But this means they can now take medicine to make them feel better, and they can get accommodations at school if they need to because they have a formal diagnosis.

I am also incandescently angry at the first rheumatologist we saw. Dylan's labs are essentially THE SAME as when we saw that doc; she just didn't think Dylan was SICK ENOUGH to do anything about. They could have been getting help all this time.

In the same vein, I've got a routine appointment with my PCP later this summer; I'm going to have her run the same labs she did on Dylan that led to the referral, and if my labs are at similar levels, I'm going to get a referral to the same rheumatologist. I have always firmly believed that Dylan and I have the same issue, just that they started on the path much earlier and much more severely. I couldn't get that awful rheumatologist to take me seriously, but clearly this one will.

I haven't said anything to my parents yet. I guess I will next time we talk, but I don't want to initiate contact with them. I know mom's going to be hurt and sad that I didn't immediately tell her, but I don't want to talk to them.

2. ( spoilers for all of Dragon Prince )

All in all, deeply enjoyable and highly recommended.

1. Fiona and I have been re-watching She-Ra; our first watch was long enough ago that she really doesn't remember much of the show. Y'all, I had forgotten how fucking gay this show is right from the gate, and it is delightful. This is no Korrasami walking through a portal in the last frame. Adora and Catra are IN LOVE from episode one. Scorpia is fucking gone on Catra, and her feelings for Catra are explicitly compared to Seahawk's romantic feelings for Mermista. I love it so much. Scorpia was my favorite character the first time around, and that hasn't changed; I keep wishing Catra would pull her head out of her ass and love Scorpia back.

2. I have been listening to music again. I don't know why, but after I had Dylan, I stopped listening to music. I mean, I'd have the radio on in the car, and we'd listen to albums on long trips, but I stopped really caring about and listening to music. Mostly I would listen to NPR and classic rock playing the same songs over and over again. I'm not exactly sure what triggered that shift; when I was pregnant with Dylan, music actively annoyed me (IDK why; such a bizarre thing), and then after they were born, I was just out of the habit.

Ever since we got Fiona a laptop for Christmas, she has been getting into music--mostly the music Dylan likes but also finding some on her own. So I've been playing a bunch of music for Fi so she can figure out what she likes. I started playing NIN's The Fragile album, which she hated. "This sounds like a DJ, mom," which okay. Clearly she does not know what a DJ is. LOL She also hated The Barenaked Ladies except for "If I Had a $100000000." She barely tolerated Moby, and then I hit the jackpot with Tori Amos. She also really liked Temple of the Dog (Chris Cornell's early album before Soundgarden).

Oh, I had forgotten how much I love Tori Amos. It's like she somehow saw right into the heart of me for a lot of those songs, especially the ones on Little Earthquakes. It feels good to be listening to music again.

3.

every night my mind is running around her by magneticwave
Stranger Things
El/Dustin, Mike/Lucas, Jonathan/Nancy/Steve
This is borderline cracky and incredibly funny.

a revival by hatsandapoodles
Stranger Things
Steve/Eddie
A lot of people die in the mall fire. Including Steve Harrington. Eddie doesn't care, until he does. Featuring- falling in love with the memory of a dead boy, too many exorcisms, Robin Buckley's love of radical zines, and a heavy dose of religious trauma.

when you shine, you’re a hilltop mansion (so how’d you lose the light?) by actuallymaxie
Stranger Things
Steve/Eddie
So, Steve runs away after Vecna and spends ten years homeless and pitiful, and it's not super believable that he would do this, but I love it so much because he is miserable and sad and it makes me cry and cry and cry, which is my favorite thing to do while reading fanfic. LOL

1. Fiona has walking pneumonia. Poor kiddo. :( She had a respiratory thing about three weeks ago (not COVID, flu, or strep), and it settled into her lungs. She's okay, but it breaks my heart hearing her cough.

2. About a month ago, Dylan started having an autoimmune flare up and has been experiencing fatigue so bad they are having trouble going to class and completing school work. There's some question of whether they'll be able to finish out the semester. They got tested at urgent care for mono, covid, flu, vitamin deficiencies and just basic cbc--all of which are fine, of course. We went to the GP today and got them tested for Hashimoto's, celiac, lyme, and a few other things. I'm not expecting any of these except the Hashimoto's and celiac to potentially come back positive. I hate that my 22 year old kid is going to have to figure out how to live hurting and tired all the time. I can hardly stand it and I'm 45. It's really not fair.

3. I got a pack of the Pentel Mattehop pens and they are awesome. The color is so saturated.

4.
An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is an enormous brick of a book--almost 800 pages--and at first it wasn't grabbing me. I was reading it in a desultory kind of way, 2 pages here and 3 pages there, and suspected it was going to take me months and months to finish as a result. The book is divided into four sections, and once I got to the end of section one and realized that each section is about the same set of events told from the perspective of a different narrator and each subsequent section reveals that the previous narrator was mistaken in some of their conclusions about those events, I was riveted. There was squealing at one point.

This takes place during Restoration England, and I think I would have enjoyed this book even more if I was more familiar with that historical time period; I'm a 19th century gal, through and through. In addition to the plot, I enjoyed reading about 17th century ideas about medicine, philosophy, and religion.



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5. From Vecna to Van Nuys (And Back Again) by EddieSpaghetti
Steve/Eddie
Is the amount of miscommunication and hiding feelings in this fic utterly ridiculous? Yes, yes, it is. Do I eat it up with a spoon anyway? Yes, yes, I do. (The fic does offer a reasonable explanation for it, though.)

1. Yuletide is did! I am so relieved.

2. Colonoscopy went well with good results: no polyps. I also got the results of my antibody test, and they were normal. This means that I am not currently being accidentally glutened. Tom has been much more careful since the last big blow up, and I have been hiding my lunch meat, so clearly that's working.

3. Tumblr has come to the middle school. Fiona started telling me yesterday about how two of her friends are pan and one of them is aroace and several of them are therians. One of her therian friends identifies with an OC animatronic she made up for the Five Nights at Freddy's universe. Y'all, I had no words.

4. Moar Christmas stuff! I got a card from troisoiseaux and a wonderful package of goodies from misbegotten. Thank you both so much!

5. There is no five.

I nominated Moths again this year, so here's the link to my promo post.

Also, you should know that Fiona is now dismissing me with, "That's so 1900s, mom." *dies laughing*

1. Fiona placed fifth in the nation for extemporaneous poetry composition at the National Beta Club Convention Elementary Division. We are so proud of her!!!

2. I have already started to get glorious birthday presents. My SIL got me some elegant stationery from a shop in her hometown, amejisuto got me a gorgeous purple quill with ink stand and a journal to record the books I've read, and misbegotten sent me an Etsy gift card which I have used to buy some earrings. Our honeymoon was a cruise that left out of New Orleans, and Josh bought me a gorgeous garnet bead necklace and earrings set at the Riverwalk while we were waiting to board. But somewhere along the way, I lost one of the earrings, so I got some beaded hoops that are a perfect match! Thanks to everyone!

3. I've been rereading some books I've kept since childhood that Fiona has outgrown so that I can say goodbye to them.

( children's books )


The New Poetic by C.K. Stead

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I know very little about W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot and very little about modernism, so this was very informative for me. I also like the author's writing style; for a book of literary criticism written in the 60s, it's very readable with clearly cited sources.

And then the author loses me in the last two chapters where he explains in-depth Eliot's theory of writing poetry and whether or not he thinks Eliot accomplishes it in specific poems. Some of it is just that I don't like Eliot, and some of it is that his ideas about the poetry writing process are incredibly opaque and bizarre to me.



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Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book is so good. Atwood captures the cruelties of adolescence in disturbing and moving ways.

I think that what I enjoy the most about this novel (besides Atwood's always beautiful prose) is that the narrator always feels herself separate from other girls and then women; she feels more comfortable with boys and then men and feels contemptuous of many women. Throughout the course of the novel, though, she comes to realize that many, if not most, of her assumptions about about the other women she's known in her life have been flawed.



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1. Dylan has been accepted into grad school with a tuition waiver and stipend! We are so happy for them. They graduate with an undergraduate degree in anthropology on May 1.

2. I took Fiona to get her ears pierced. She is enormously proud of herself. It's pretty fricking adorable.

*Apparently one of her classes at school has a playlist of music they listen to while doing group work, and the teacher has put lots of music from the 90s on it, so Fiona has started to develop an interest in alternative music from that decade. She asked me if she could listen to a couple of Weezer songs she had looked up that weren't on the playlist, and after that, I played "Undone (The Sweater Song)" for her, and she looked at me with all the gravitas of an NPR music critic and said, "That's so Weezer." LOL

3. For anyone following along, I have reversed my opinion on the Living Proof Full Volume and Texture Spray. My hair is just too thin for it and because I have to rewet my hair pretty copiously to refresh at all, it just turns into a sticky mess. I think it would work really well for people with thicker, curlier hair than mine. I have gone back to thinking the Bumble and Bumble counterpart product is superior.

4. ( book reviews of Spiner, Beerbohm, and Urrea )

I also reread Ouida's Syrlin, which I'm contemplating nominating for Yuletide this year.

1. I got home yesterday and slept in my own bed on clean sheets, and it was glorious.

I had been very anxious about this conference; I know many of you travel frequently, but I don't, and I was worried about basically every step of the process. LOL But it all worked out fine, and I think I will be more confident the next time this sort of opportunity arises.

2. Fiona got second place in the poetry competition at the Beta Convention, which qualifies her to go the National Beta Convention competition! It's being held in Savannah this year, so she'll definitely get to go; she didn't go last year despite qualifying because it was too far away. We are very proud of her. :)

3. I think we have finally found a regimen of meds that is working for Sammy's asthma. He takes an antiviral pill twice a day followed by an OTC supplement that is also an antiviral. He is such a good kitty. I shake the pill bottle, and he comes running and lets me pick him up. I put him on his back in my lap with his head against my chest and pop open his mouth, and he swallows down his pill with no fighting. Then he runs to go get his next med which is in paste form. Originally, we bought this med as a chew, and he would have nothing to do with it. We mixed it in his food, ground it up and mixed it with water, whatever--he would not eat it. So, I bought it as a paste with the intention of just holding him down and squirting it down his throat if necessary. Indeed, he would not eat it at first, but after a week of squirting it down his throat, Sammy decided his paste is the bomb, and now he begs for it.

We also have acquired a kitty inhaler but not had to use it yet. We've been getting him used to the mask, and he doesn't seem to mind it. We'll see.

4. When A. S. Byatt died, I didn't have the chance to make a proper post acknowledging how much her writing has meant to me since I encountered it decades ago. I'll link my Byatt reading tag here because I talk at much greater length in each of those posts about her novels and short story collections than I will here, especially Possession. That book was a game changer for me when I first encountered it as a college freshman and remains very special to me. It encapsulates like nothing else I have ever read the joys and frustrations of literary scholarship. The Potter Quartet is a structural masterpiece; I remember the moment when I was reading the final book and I realized what Byatt had done structurally with the way each book is introduced and the chronology and the awe I felt at that realization. And then, always, the words--such beautiful, beautiful words--sentences to read over and over again because they're too lovely to be done with quickly. I'm sad there will be no new words but glad the ones she gave us are words I want to visit again and again.

5. And last not but least, amejisuto sent me a wonderful early Christmas present--Brent Spiner's Fan-Fiction and a beautiful bookmark that says, "I have been and always shall be your friend." <3

I also got my first Christmas card of the season from troisoiseaux!

1. Josh got sick on my birthday, so we weren't able to Go To Town and have a date like we'd planned, but the kids gave me the sweetest gifts--some stickers, an emery board shaped like a cat, purple paperclips, and a collection of face masks.

2. gloss wrote me the splendor splits, a genderbent Moths AU that is pushing all my buttons. Go read!

3.

Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Boswell really sets the conventions for the genre of biography. He's biased; he wants to present his friend, mentor, and pseudo-father in the best light. But he also is committed to what he sees as truth--revealing the truth about Johnson even when it is not flattering or might even be something Johnson wouldn't have wanted revealed. I also am impressed by his commitment to citing his sources, to including letters, to speaking to the people involved in situations, and to avoiding speculation about people's motivations or their thoughts as much as possible. His bio is so much better researched and cited than many early 20th-century bios that don't cite sources or which endlessly and baselessly speculate or psychoanalyze (I'm thinking of Ouida's various biographers here). And especially early 20th-century literary criticism that will just quote someone with no attribution or say the quote is by that esteemed Chalmundey as if I'm supposed to know who that is or when or where or under what circumstances the illustrious Chalmundey uttered this wisdom. So frustrating.

I find both Boswell and Johnson sexist and racist at times. While Johnson is pro-abolition, Boswell is pro-slavery. Both of them, however, are convinced of the inferiority of people who aren't white. I also find their treatment of Mrs. Thrale pretty infuriating. I don't think Johnson ever thought to marry her, but all his friends pretty clearly thought he'd marry her after Mr. Thrale died, and even if Johnson had no aspirations of marrying her, he clearly thought he was going to continue as a member of her household until he died and she and her daughters would caretake for him. Who can blame the woman for remarrying when she fell in love again? And who can blame her for not wanting to spend however many years caretaking for a difficult man she wasn't even related to who spent a lot of time criticizing her and belittling women in general? It's truly a mystery. LOL

On the whole, though, the deep friendship between Boswell and Johnson is endearing to read about as is Boswell's genuine joy at being chosen to be the dearest friend of such a literary lion.



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