lunabee34

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.

View all my reviews

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.

View all my reviews

1. Fiona, indignant at the sexist nomenclature of manholes, coins a new term: themholes.

2. I randomly thought of the time as a toddler when I made a plan to get rid of my dreaded courdoroy pants. I despised courdoroy as a child. In what seemed impeccable logic, I decided that if I just pooped in those pants, they would surely be thrown away, and I would never have to wear them again. I have an incredibly vivid memory of standing in the hallway and triumphantly soiling those pants. Spoiler alert, Gentle Readers: my clever act of rebellion did not elicit the response I was hoping for.

3.

Life Before Man by Margaret Atwood

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The words are beautiful as always, but with the exception of Elizabeth, I don't really like any of the characters. Lesje is washed out and ineffectual, and Nate is a man-baby. I don't think I'm supposed to like Elizabeth, but she's interesting and complicated and ruthless. This is an early book, and I think Atwood's writing has improved since early days.

View all my reviews

1. Josh turned 44. We had a house full of people. Josh's cousin and his wife who currently live in DC came to visit, his sister came to visit, Emma came for the weekend, and our Atlanta friends (D & J & kids) came, too. It was wonderful!

His cousin's wife has worked for NPR off-and-on for twenty years, and I very much enjoyed all the name dropping and peeks behind the curtain.

Josh's favorite gift was a personalized video message from the announcer of BattleBots. Emma and D conspired on this one. A+++ work

2. ( books what I have read )

1. We had tornadoes come through our town on Wednesday night. I didn't even realize anything bad had happened until everyone started texting us to see if we were okay; sticks didn't even blow down in our yard, but not even a mile away, so much destruction. A colleague's house was really damaged, trees down everywhere, the roof on the funeral home blew off, some damage on campus to roofs. Third Street was evacuated Wednesday night because of a gas leak. School was cancelled on Thursday. Thankfully no one was killed. Feeling very lucky right now.

2. About a week ago, Sammy started sneezing alarmingly, like lots of sneezes in a row. So Josh took him back to the vet on Friday. He got a clean bill of health from the vet; the word perfect was used re: his physical exam. So now we are giving him allergy pills. Sammy makes that kinda hard because he doesn't like wet food. He rejected the pill pockets we bought. He rejected cream cheese. But we discovered that we can coat the pill with butter so it doesn't stick and just pop it on the back of his tongue, and that works pretty well.

3. Mom brought Fiona home on Thursday. They had an absolute blast. But mom broke my heart; dad had some blood work done right before Fiona came to stay with them, and when she'd been there a couple of days, the results were available in the patient portal. They showed that my dad's m-spike (the major cancer marker) was elevated, essentially indicating that he was out of remission. So they spent most of the time Fiona was there thinking his cancer had recurred and that he was about to have to start doing chemo again; that's why mom really stayed to go to his appointment. Fortunately, it was a false positive, and he's still in remission, but damn. I hate that they had that shadow over them the whole week.

4.

My Evil Mother: A Short Story by Margaret Atwood

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As to be expected, I thoroughly enjoyed this.

View all my reviews

amejisuto sent me The Testaments, so I spent this weekend feverishly reading them both.

( reread of The Handmaid's Tale )

And, of course, that novel ends on such a cliffhanger. Atwood loves ambiguity so much. I'll never forget Emma reading Alias Grace and loving all the way up to the end at which point she was completely disgusted because Atwood never says one way or the other about An Important Thing. LOL

I have always wanted to know what happens to June (the academic notes at the end say the narrator is unnamed, but I've always assumed her name is June; in the list of names she recites at the beginning, June is the only name not given to another character in the book), so I was really looking forward to finding out in The Testaments.

The Testaments (The Handmaid's Tale, #2)

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the sequel I've been hoping for since I first read The Handmaid's Tale more than 20 years ago. I really enjoyed seeing more about the initial days of Gilead and about the way the world works from perspectives outside of the Handmaid. Very much enjoyed Aunt Lydia's POV and the POV of the two new main protagonists. Thoroughly satisfying in every way.

View all my reviews

( spoilery review )

So good. Very much enjoyed. Could never watch the TV show. This is harrowing enough to read about. LOL

1. When I was admiring

goss's Vampire Gardener, I said that I would buy a thousand postcards with this image on them. Imagine my delight and surprise when I received in the mail from

minoanmiss a stack of gorgeous, glossy postcards of

goss's drawing with this note: "I couldn't send 1000 but here are 50!" What an excellent gift. *loves*

2. Lately I've been reading mnmlscholar, the stationery blog of what I think is a high school teacher. I can't tell where he's located, but I really enjoy reading about his fountain pen use and even more his teaching. He's got to be at a private school because I can't imagine his focus on LGBTQ issues flying in, say, a public high school in the deep South. It makes me happy to know that some kids somewhere are getting the education I wish Emma had gotten; it would have made such a difference for her to have any one teacher say something positive/accepting about being gay. Anyway, check him out.

3. Nature observed: young deer wandering through yard; another indigo bunting (we now have two males and two females living in the yard); downy woodpeckers; some tiny bird I couldn't identify screeching its head off until a male cardinal basically landed on top of it (that is enough of that, young sir! this is my yard! LOL).

4. We watched the final episode of Escape to the Chateau. Filming was stopped because of the pandemic. I hope it won't be too long before they are able to release new episodes. In this last episode, Dick was using a fountain pen with a hooded nib, but I couldn't tell what brand it was. :)

5. ( reading: kids books, literary criticism, Atwood )

Thanks to my enablers,

executrix and

misbegotten, for sponsoring today's post.

The Dream Life of Citizens: Late Victorian Novels and the Fantasy of the State by Zarena Aslami

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have learned that I am completely disinterested in fantasies of the state. LOL But I have been reminded that I need to read Sarah Grand's fiction (I've only read some of her nonfiction articles on social issues).

View all my reviews

Dearly: New Poems by Margaret Atwood

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Atwood is, as usual, phenomenal. If I could only have one poet to read ever again, it would be her.

Themes include aging, the end of life, looking back to the past, grief over her partner's death, gendered violence, pollution, climate change, writing, the natural world--so, many of the themes her work generally engages.

By the end of the collection, my heart is so full. These are poems written by a woman in her 80s who knows that more of her life is behind her than ahead of her, and that unflinching look at aging and the approach of mortality is rendered in Atwood's wry, blackly funny, and sharply witty tone.

Standouts for me include "Souvenirs" (a poem about writing), "Cicadas" (a poem about grabbing onto joy with both hands because life is fleeting), "Cassandra Considers Declining the Gift" (always going to love her takes on myth and the fairy tale), "Zombie" (a poem about poetry), "The Aliens Arrive" (very reminiscent of "Happy Endings" which is possibly my favorite of her poems), and "Fatal Light Awareness" (about bird death due to light pollution).

She will always and forever be the gold standard to which I hold myself when I write poetry, the impossibly high bar I'm hoping to attain.

View all my reviews

The First Woman Doctor: The Story of Elizabeth Blackwell, M.D. by Rachel Baker

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I knew the vague outlines of Blackwell's story but none of the specifics. She was a truly extraordinary and determined woman; kiddo was amazed at all the opportunities women were denied not so very long ago and at Blackwell's courage in defying conventions. I am grateful to the trailblazers like her who have made our 21st century lives so much more equal than they might have been.

This book is old and contains outdated gendered language and terms for people of color. I just changed it as I was reading it aloud (authoress? no thanks LOL).

View all my reviews

First, a foray back in time to some poetry I loved as a teen.

( so much Rod McKuen )

What is utterly fascinating about McKuen is that he was the most commercially successful poet of the 1960s. His collections sold millions of copies in hardback. But he's been ignored critically because, well, see my reviews. LOL He was a very accomplished composer and songwriter with many songs that became big hits for famous singers like Sinatra. He also wrote a memoir in the seventies that was apparently instrumental in changing the way that adoptees can access information about their birth parents.

Next, a little Atwood:

Murder in the Dark: Short Fictions and Prose Poems by Margaret Atwood

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Only a handful of the stories in this collection are reprinted in Good Bones and Simple Murders, so most of the stories here are new to me, but none of the new stories really resonate with me. I think this volume is completely miss-able.

View all my reviews

And the children's books roundup for November:

( these posts get leaner and leaner as the books I read with Fi get longer and longer )

isabellerecs made podfics of my Darcy/Jane series! Everyone go listen:

Podfic of Only Happy When It Rains and Podfic of The Night Gone Black.

2.

Good Bones by Margaret Atwood

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Most of this early volume goes into Good Bones and Simple Murders, but four stories are exclusive to this collection: "Epaulettes," "Adventure Story," "Theology," and "Four Small Paragraphs." Of these four, only "Theology really resonated with me.

View all my reviews

3. Everyone should go read Beginning Where You Are by

gloss. It's original F/F, and it's truly stunning. It reminds me of Leckie and also of Wells and a bit of Muir, but the story is also very original, and the world building is truly stunning. I am in awe of how good this is.

4. Josh's cholesterol and triglycerides are high. He's supposed to try to get them down and then get tested again in six months. We bought an inexpensive exercise bike on Amazon which I'm really happy with, so we've got the exercise part covered. Anybody have any diet tips or other suggestions? I can and have googled and get the general gist, but it's always nice hearing from people who have experience.

1. I just got a totally unexpected card from my parents with a check for huge sum of money. Dad gave my brother his old Easy Go golf cart, bought himself a new one, and sent us a check for what he estimates to be the price of the old one he gave my brother. I am utterly floored. So generous and amazing. We spent a large chunk of our savings on the new car after the accident with the bear, and I am starting to get the bills for all the bloodwork I had done. I just got the EOB for the bloodwork the rheumatologist did in the spring; it was sent to this special lab out in Arizona, which is obviously out of network LOL, and so looks like I'm going to be on the hook for $1500 worth of labs just for that visit alone, not to mention all the doc visits + labs this fall figuring out the mono. So this is timely and deeply appreciated.

2. GA is going blue!!!!!! Even if in the end the state still goes for Trump, I am feeling heartened that it is so close. Things are changing in this state, and that is powerful.

( cut for spoilers for latest SPN episode )

4.

Good Bones and Simple Murders by Margaret Atwood

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is my favorite Atwood short story collection (so far; I still have a couple of the most recent ones to read). It contains my two favorite short stories of hers--"Happy Endings" and "There Was Once." These are both excellent to teach; students respond really well to them.

She's so funny. The epigraph for "The Female Body" makes clear that someone has written about her work in an academic journal, saying that she's written extensively on the topic of the female body. The story begins: "I get up in the morning. My topic feels like hell." Maybe it won't translate as funny in this review, but I genuinely LOLed when I read that line.

Love these lines from "Homelanding" which remind me so much of Vandermeer's Southern Reach Trilogy: "teeth, by means of which I destroy and assimilate certain parts of my surroundings and change them into my self." (space between my and self is deliberate and lovely)

Highly recommended.

View all my reviews

( grownup books and a couple kid's books )

Minders of Make-Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children's Literature by Leonard S. Marcus

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is absolutely delightful. I knew nothing about the formation of children's books as a genre, and this is really informative and interesting.

Almost all of the movers and shakers are women which is really gratifying to read about (even if it's maddening to see the ways in which sexism hampered their careers and denied many of them the money and the respect awarded to their male counterparts in publishing and editing).

The book kind of peters out at the end, but it's got to stop somewhere, and it's pretty comprehensive up until the early 80s.

Definitely recommended.

View all my reviews

Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I absolutely love this book.

At first I wasn't sold on Felix. I thought he's one of those guys who thinks he's a genius and has an overinflated sense of himself (and he does have that problem, a little), but he quickly endears himself to me, and I spend the whole book rooting for him.

This is for anyone who believes in the transformative power of literature, who enjoys The Tempest, and who can understand the desire for revenge.

It is also deeply sad in places as Felix has lost his wife and daughter, and his grief for his daughter is so hard to read at times. The end of this book hurts so beautifully; it couldn't really end any other way if you are familiar with the play, and it's perfect.

Also, it's funny. Atwood can be so so funny.

View all my reviews

1. My camp for the local high schoolers was today. It was a success! I am so freaking relieved. And now I have a new set of data, properly gathered this time instead of the dumb ass English major way I did it last time, and now just as soon as school finishes in May, I can finish this article and try to get it published! The amount of improvement in implementation from last year (inaugural year) to this year was really nice to see. I learned so much from last time, and I learned even more this time about what we'll do better for next year. So stoked to have this behind me. LOL Now I just need to turn right around and start recruiting university students to lead the camp (they get experiential learning credit for doing so) and writing my IRB proposal and etc.

2. As part of the camp today, I wrote a poem inspired by Dickinson's "Hope is the thing with ~~wings~~ feathers" that I think turned out pretty well.

Love is the thing with legs
That gallops across the heart
And tosses its mane and
Stamps its hooves in time with
The beating.

It races through the blood,
Swift and sleek,
And pulls the weight of longing
Behind it
Faithfully.

A thoroughbred, dependable, solid
But hot-headed,
Pulling at the lead
And chomping at the bit
And dreading always the
Snapped ankle.

3. We have an oven! After what seems like a million years but is really only like a month, we have a gorgeous, sexy double oven with three racks per oven--regular and convection capability--with this ridiculous computer bullshit. I loves it.

4.

executrix always sends me the most lovely things to read.

( Margaret Atwood's Writing with Intent )

5. Reviews of a handful of Guardian episodes and this week's Gotham forthcoming! I am also writing a Lee/Barbara fic inspired from Lee's line in the episode from a couple weeks ago: ( spoilers )

1. I know you're already seen it, but if you haven't, go watch

bironic's The Greatest: a vid featuring characters of color from all our favorite sci-fi,fantasy and horror shows. Brought tears to my eyes. Man, I love these characters.

2. ( The MaddAddam Trilogy by Margaret Atwood )

3. And to bury the lede, we closed on the house last night! We are homeowners! It has happened! LOL The homeowner is going to be vacating 2-3 days earlier than he's allotted via the contract, so that is also a good thing. The next month is going to be jam packed, y'all. But we're meeting my parents halfway, and they're taking the girls mid-month so that we can devote all our energy to painting and moving (and teaching LOL) for a whole week. I'm so stoked!

Crossposts: https://lunabee34.livejournal.com/553325.html

1. ( The Blind Assassin )

2. ( Walking Dead finale )

Crossposts: https://lunabee34.livejournal.com/552400.html

( spoilers for the final (as in ever) episodes of Lucifer )

( Margaret Atwood reviews )

Crossposts: https://lunabee34.livejournal.com/552095.html

I've been doing research for an article which has led me to read two chapbooks published by the Southeastern Louisiana Writing Project about writing marathons. I took part in a Summer Institute at the University of Mississippi Writing Project more than ten year ago (gosh, maybe 15 now), and it was one of the best experiences of my life. It was writing intensive and creative and I really enjoyed being involved in a community of teachers/writers. I am toying with the idea of applying to start a national writing project site at my university, but I know it will be a great deal of work and effort, and I'm not certain I'm willing to put that in. I would need a couple of colleagues who are willing to commit, and I would probably need to try to get involved with one of the existing sites ahead of time (and they're all a couple hours drive from here). IDK It's probably more work than I'm interested in.

Anybody else done anything with the National Writing Project?

(I intended to drop my reviews of these texts from Goodreads here, but DW keeps giving me an error message when I try to upload either; it's very weird.)

( reviews of The Penelopiad, On Rhetoric, and Fantastic Voyage )

Crossposts: https://lunabee34.livejournal.com/551883.html

Stone Mattress: Nine Wicked Tales by Margaret Atwood

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Not my favorite Atwood. I think I expected horror from the title or at the very least to be disturbed. The writing was good, but nothing that really grabbed me. The best story in the collection is the title story, and I'd read it in 2011 when it came out in the The New Yorker.

I also think the structure was a problem. The first three stories contain the same cast of characters, and then all the rest of them are unrelated. In a couple, there's mention of a storm that seems to be the same storm happening in the first story, so I think that's supposed to indicate that the stories are all happening in the same universe, but IDK. I wished as I was reading that either all the stories had been connected or none of them.

I did like that all the stories were about older, even elderly, protagonists and about issues with aging but overall a little disappointed.

View all my reviews

Crossposts: http://lunabee34.livejournal.com/518456.html

1. Who wants to talk about Samurai Champloo?

2. When we're done watching Inuyasha, we're gonna watch Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple with Emma. Any recs for what anime we watch after that? (Remember she's 9.)

3. How closely does the Inuyasha TV show follow the manga? Emma had a conniption fit when she realized Inuyasha comes in book form. WITH WORDS!

4. Josh and I are more than half-way done with Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex. Where's the fandom? There's sixteen fics on AO3. Whhhhhhhhhhhy? This show is so amazing. I already want to write Togusa fic.

5. Next we are (re)watching Fullmetal Alchemist. I watched some back in the day, and Josh watched more. I'm excited. All I remember is the the echoing sound of, "Brother!" LOL, but I'm excited.

6. Finally reading Year of the Flood. Who else wants to make out with Margaret Atwood?

Crossposts: http://lunabee34.livejournal.com/348579.html

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My child is a genius
A Miscellany
how is september halfway done?
what a week
The Handmaid's Tale + The Testaments
Hump Day Happenings
I'm reading again!
all the reading what I've been doing
insert witty subject line
this is the good shit
Lately Read
My friends send me the best books
Gratitudes and Joys
Just another manic (you can tell when I started composing this, yes?)
Reading and Watching
Lucifer ends there?!!!!! *wails*
Reading
Stone Mattress
Some several things

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Entries tagged with reading: atwood

My child is a genius

A Miscellany

how is september halfway done?

what a week

The Handmaid's Tale + The Testaments

Hump Day Happenings

I'm reading again!

all the reading what I've been doing

insert witty subject line

this is the good shit

Lately Read

My friends send me the best books

Gratitudes and Joys

Just another manic (you can tell when I started composing this, yes?)

Reading and Watching

Lucifer ends there?!!!!! wails

Reading

Stone Mattress

Some several things