lunabee34

1. I got a card from talitha78. Thank you!

2. My 2024 in books from Goodreads

I read 72 books in 2024. Go, me!

3. And here's the first books of 2025:

The Best American Poetry 2002 by Robert Creeley

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Robert Creeley and I clearly do not share taste in poetry. LOL



View all my reviews

The New Yorker - The Fragrance Foundation Book of Cartoons by Luxe Pack New York

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


As with any set of New Yorker cartoons, I didn't get some of them, but on the whole, these are pretty funny.



View all my reviews

Witches Among Us: Understanding Contemporary Witchcraft and Wicca by Thorn Mooney

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is really informative and accessible, especially for people who know very little about witchcraft and Wicca. Mooney spends a lot of time contextualizing and defining terms. She also provides an excellent list of scholarly resources as well as resources from within the community for further understanding.



View all my reviews

1. My Aunt Gail died yesterday.

( cancer talk )

2.

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Look, I get it. Once upon a time, the idea of going into a bookstore and picking up a volume off the shelf and encountering deliberately, egregiously gross descriptions of sex and women's bodies and the writer's own body and bodily functions in general must have seemed truly revolutionary and novel. Now the sort of writing in Miller's magnus opus just seems utterly juvenile, like a teenage boy trying out all the pee pee and poo poo words he's amassed over the course of his adolescence. I'm not shocked, Henry Miller, nor do I think you are, as Ken Shapiro states in the intro to this volume, the GOAT. I think you are funny at times and crass at all times and boring a lot of the time.

Also bonus racism I'd forgotten about from my first read 20+ years ago.



View all my reviews

3.

How to Keep House While Drowning by K.C. Davis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a book about self-care and letting go of shame around cleaning and other tasks. It contains a lot of hacks for people who struggle with housework, meal planning, and hygiene tasks because of depression or executive function issues.



View all my reviews

Charles Portis: Collected Works (LOA #369): Norwood / True Grit / The Dog of the South / Masters of Atlantis / Gringos / Stories & Other Writings by Charles Portis

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This was a gift, and I expected that I wouldn't enjoy it very much. I don't have much patience for a lot of twentieth-century, white, male, American authors; I'm deeply disinterested in the kind of masculinity Hemingway is peddling, for example. As a Southerner, I'm also really weary of nostalgia/apologia for a South I don't miss at all, and I expected Portis to deliver on both those scores.

I'm happy to say that I was very wrong. I thoroughly enjoyed this collection, and Portis has become one of my favorite novelists. Contrary to my expectations, one of Portis's main projects over his body of work is to subvert stereotypical ideas of masculinity in really surprising ways. For example, in Norwood, the protagonist is this sweetly goofy guy who bumbles cluelessly through life being kind and generous to everyone around him and being taken in by con men but who manages to come out all right in the end. In True Grit, the character with true grit is a 14 year old girl, and the two men in the book are a drunken sad sack and a braggart. Dog of the South features a protagonist who makes confident pronouncements that are stupidly, obviously wrong and who gets hung up on irrelevant minutiae but who is confidently assured of his intellectual superiority.

Portis is also incredibly funny, just laugh-out-loud funny. Masters of Atlantis is a satire about a guy who inadvertently starts a cult. The whole thing is a con, but he's a total believer. It's very funny, but also very prescient commentary about the way conspiracy theories work.

I think my favorite is Gringos. This novel is the most realistic of the bunch and the darkest. It's still funny, but not in a satirical or absurdist way like the others (well, True Grit is not very funny). I don't want to spoil the plot, but I will say it involves debunking ancient astronaut theorists.



View all my reviews

Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is violent and gory, which I don't mind but may not be everyone's cup of tea. No one is raped on page, but rape is a constant threat, which gets a bit tedious after awhile. I also get weary of the focus on lust and sexual perversion (while understanding that it makes sense for the plot and themes of the book).

Those caveats aside, this was a quick and entertaining read for me. I especially enjoyed the ending--and I do mean the very, very end, like the last handful of paragraphs--which are a lovely moment of grace in a novel that does not contain many moments I would call lovely given that it is set during an epidemic of the Black Death.



View all my reviews

Revelator by Daryl Gregory

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I really, really like this book.

Explaining why without spoiling plot details of the novel is impossible. What I can say is that the sense of place is incredible, the characters are deftly drawn (even those who only briefly appear), and the story blends genres in really interesting and unexpected ways. This is a novel about family and religion and belonging and choices, and it tells the story of those things with the old, familiar songs but also a fresh melody that made this a page turner for me.



View all my reviews

Bid the Vassal Soar: Interpretive Essays on the Life and Poetry of Phillis Wheatley by Merle A. Richmond

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


I get why Richmond pairs Wheatley and Horton; she's the first African American female poet and he the first African American male poet published in the US and they were once published together in a single collection.

But OMG, this is the most obnoxious book of criticism I've read in a good long while, and it brings absolutely nothing of value to our understanding of Wheatley.

In Richmond's estimation, Wheatley has no genuine selfhood as opposed to Horton's genuine, black selfhood; Wheatley's experiences aren't authentic, black experiences as opposed to Horton's genuine, black experiences; Wheatley's poetry is no good as opposed to Horton's; and Wheatley's education and accomplishments are somehow meaningless compared to Horton's because they were facilitated by her white enslavers rather than being self-taught. Richmond writes about Wheatley as if she has zero interiority at all. It's really, really gross.



View all my reviews

Folle-Farine by Ouida

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book is so kinky, and I wish we could go back in time and ask Ouida to what degree the novel is a deliberate, conscious exploration of kinkiness and what exactly she's intending to argue with that exploration if so.

I reread this in preparation for my presentation on Ouida's treatment of birds in her nonfiction essays because it's probably the novel in which the protagonist is most closely identified with birds and the novel which has the most protracted scenes that deal with birds (just in case someone asked me to elaborate on the way in which her arguments manifest in the fiction).

Additional themes include: principles and aesthetics of Romanticism, sadomasochism, the eroticism of self-sacrifice and self-abnegation, silence (both self- and externally-imposed), scathing critiques of Christianity (with some very startling passages in which the female protagonist allies herself with the devil), commentary on art and the role of the artist, sexuality and asexuality, morality.

This is an astonishing and interesting book and nothing at all like what anyone imagines when they hear the phrase Victorian novel.



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. Valentine's cards have been sent out! We can send mail to Australia and New Zealand again, so *all* my international peeps are getting cards, too. <3

2. I got a sweet Valentine's Day card from amejisuto. :) Thank you, friend.

3. I've been reading some stuff. ( Joanna Beth Tweedy and Anne Sexton )

4. I think Anne Sexton invented the fanfic trope Hanahaki Disease in her poem "The Love Plant."

5. Bless Feefers's heart. She had her jaw alignment stuff put in yesterday, and she started the concurrent invisalign treatment. It is A Lot going on in my baby girl's tiny little mouth. But she is handling it very well, and I am very proud of her. She is exceedingly brave, and already getting the hang of this new routine. *smishes her*

1. ( reading Le Guin and West )

2. I got a Barenaked Ladies CD from misbegotten! Now we have tunes for the trip to Emma's MRI today. This is the last stop on her magical mystery medical tour and then we get the results on Wednesday.

3. I was just remarking to kass that cartoons today are such a far cry from the cartoons I had to watch as a kid. I mean, I loved the Smurfs, but that show never gut punched me in the feels or dazzled me with its narrative construction, you know? LOL

Case in point: the Trollhunters franchise just came out with a movie set immediately following its latest series, and it is so damn good. I cried like five times, and then the ending! OMG, the ending! I don't want to spoil it, but let's just say that the end does one of my absolute favorite tropey things and does it super well. Also, there's canon mpreg. So hurray!

4. It's August. Boo. Back to school for Fi and work for me and off to Atlanta for Ems. Slow down, time. Just a little bit longer, please. :)

1. We received Emma's laptop just a few hours after I'd posted that it had shipped. *boggles* I heartily recommend the Asurion and the Square Trade protection plans that Amazon offers. We've had to use them several times, and every time it has been well worth the small expense.

2. I get up very early in the morning now as is proper for a middle-aged lady, and then Fiona is the next to rise, so the day after we got home from visiting Josh's parents, only the two of us were awake. It was very, very quiet. Fiona got up, went to the bathroom, flushed the toilet, and the toilet began screaming. And then we realized that every time we ran water or flushed another toilet, that toilet screamed. Well, what with all the screaming, Josh woke up, and we just stood around and laughed. What else could we do in such a situation? But I am happy to report that the toilet is no longer in pain, and Josh mostly doctored it himself! He did have a friend come over at one point (it was a multi-stage repair process that took a couple of days), but he did pretty much all of it himself. Hurrah!

3. I am pleased to say that I am not blind yet although I did call the neuro yesterday and ask if I could go back down on the topamax dosage. He had me titrate up to 100mg with that being the goal of my daily dose. After four days at that dose, I felt like a zombie. So I went back down to 75mg last night. I'm going to stay at that dose for a few days, and if I still feel too spacy, I'm going down to 50mg. It's an interesting calculus; apparently I'm not willing to trade never having a migraine again for feeling markedly less mentally acute. Also, at 100mg, I started getting the tingling in extremities and the lips (lips! omg!) that is listed as a side effect, and boy is that annoying. It doesn't hurt or anything but do not like. I have started losing weight which is another side effect (apparently topamax shares a main ingredient with one of the approved weight loss drugs on the market). I've had some stomach upset which I'm hoping is going to resolve soon because even though it's very mild because Josh has cdiff my anxiety brain can't help circling around the fear that I have caught his cdiff. The most positive side effect from my perspective is that since I have started taking this drug, I sleep through the night. Even when I was a teen and in my twenties, I would usually get up to pee. After Fiona was born, my sleep was just shot. I had insomnia and started sleeping for just a few hours at a time. Since I started taking this drug, I've been falling asleep, waking once before midnight and then sleeping straight through until sometime after five and sometimes until after six. That's wow for me.

4. I'm a little more than halfway done with The Beautiful Ones by Silvia Moreno Garcia, and I am loving it so much. It's one of those novels where I really care about the main female protagonist and am anxious for good things to happen to her. (Thank you, executrix!)

It has been such a good birthday. In addition to the lovely gifts I've already mentioned in previous posts, misbegotten sent me a beautiful postcard and some bath bombs from Lush. They are indeed luscious. I've never lived near a Lush and so did not realize what I'm missing out on. I got a birthday card from decynthus and birthday messages on DW from many of you. Thank you so much, everyone. <3

Josh and the kids outdid themselves. Josh got me a lovely bouquet of flowers (I felt like Clarissa Dalloway) and a spa gift certificate which is perfect because I have been thinking I'm going to want to get my toes done and maybe a massage before I start back in fall. Emma took Fiona to Wal-Mart and they got me a beautiful journal (pen and gear brand) with a gorgeous green faux leather cover imprinted with a botanical design. And fountain pens work on this paper! I am shocked; zero show or bleed through with any of my pens, even the broad nib. None of the markers I tried showed through either. The paper is absorbent so there's some feathering and no sheen or shading of inks, but that's fine. I'll be able to write on both sides of the paper with any of my pens. Hurrah! They also got me some bath happies (a face mask, a foot mask, a bath bomb).

I woke up this morning to an email from Brad Dowdy that I'd won the latest PenAddict giveaway of a set of the newest Zebra Sarasa R Gel pens. How wonderful is that? Not only did I win but on my birthday!

( Mrs. Dalloway and That Was Then, This Is Now )

1. Has anybody heard from kore? I see she has deleted her journal, but I don't have an email for her to contact her. I'm a little worried about her.

2.

Thrive Online: A New Approach for College Educators by Shannon Riggs

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I think this is a good manual for someone who is new to online teaching. I think I disagree with Riggs about how to conduct online discussions, but I need to sit with it awhile and ponder whether I'm just having a knee jerk reaction to being told I'm doing it wrong LOL or whether she has a point.



View all my reviews

3.

The Big Mama Stories by Shay Youngblood

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Shay Youngblood was one of the Writers in Residence when I was in grad school at Ole Miss, but I didn't get to interact with her very much.

This collection of short stories is told from the POV of a pre-teen African American girl living in the Deep South in the late 60s, early 70s. The voice is pitch perfect; I've heard people talking this way my whole life.

It's a hard book to read in places (racial and sexual violence, incest, consensual incest), but it's also a funny book and full depictions of kindness and community.



View all my reviews

4. Talking Meme

tamsin asked: Books that influenced you

I could give many answers to this question, but I think I am going to choose Peter Elbow's Writing without Teachers.

( writing and writing pedagogy )

1. I got a package of books in the mail from executrix! And two of them mention Ouida! I can't wait to get started reading them.

2. This was in the last batch of book executrix sent me.

The Matriarch by G.B. Stern

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I really enjoyed this novel.

It's about a wealthy, cosmopolitan Jewish family in the late 19th and early 20th century, and it is full of house porn and clothes porn and food porn. It's a sumptuous book, full of luxury.

Mostly, though, it's about family and what it's like to be a part of this glorious, suffocating, strong, powerful, maddening dynasty.

The book employs a variety of stereotypes about Jewish people which I always struggle to know how interpret when the stereotypes are coming from inside the house (the author is Jewish).

It is a deeply feminist book (although I'm not sure the author would have described her project in that way); the most important characters are female.

Insofar as there is a plot (this is a delightfully plotless book for the most part), it is a romance plot, and I really like the unexpected way it plays out.



View all my reviews

3. Power Rangers has started up again, and ( spoilers )

4. A front is moving through, and it's going to be colder from this afternoon on! Yay! I haven't sat outside and watched the birds in a few days because it was too hot and humid. I'm headed out there right now to listen to the rain. :)