How to End One Year and Begin Another

If our calendars made sense the new year would start the day after the December solstice. We make it through the shortest day and longest night (for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere). We begin to turn toward the light, toward warmth, toward growth.

Or maybe instead of immediately writing a new date we would have a set of "un-days". Days that appear on no one's calendar (except those that bring you wages or benefits). Days with no work, no expectations. Time dedicated to wrapping things up, taking stock, making everything clean and organized or catching up on sleep. Whatever it takes to feel refreshed and recharged, ready to begin again.

We don't have that. Instead we have a hurly-burly of various traditions that mark the turn toward the light but in so doing create expectations and pressure.

Buy this, cook that. Wrap this, decorate that. Don't clean to create a fresh, calming space -- clean so that people can be impressed by your housekeeping and then mess it all up so you have it to do all over again.

That's what I grew up with. My mom created a beautiful Christmas every year with delicious food, she selected and wrapped gifts with care, she made dozens of cookies of various types to create those magazine-ready plates, she decorated the whole house and everything smelled good. She also didn't work full-time outside the home.

We're done with that model and it feels pretty damn good.

It helps not to have small children who are subjected to social pressure that creates expectations that fall on parents. We have grown kids who profess delight with the cash and gift cards and whatever we feel like cooking.

This year it isn't exactly a "help" that I ended up really sick with a respiratory flu the week before a planned two-week vacation. The days that had few meetings, that I would have spent writing and analyzing and dealing with the email backlog in peace and quiet, turned into days lying on the sofa with generic cough/flu syrup, a water bottle, my Kindle, and some pillows to soften my fall into the sleep that kept dragging me downward to the horizontal.

Oh well. It is what it is.

That's the key to my winter holiday plan: It is what it is.

Examples of what this looks like as I do the things I enjoy, maintain continuity with my memories in ways that work for who I am today, and keep it manageable:

No Christmas tree. 

Instead, Second Daughter and I spent a very pleasant day (on a weekend before the flu hit) going through the ornaments. I had accumulated a bunch I didn't really care about, and had some I got to give each of the kids a start on their own collection. We sorted these out and made a box for Youngest who wants to build up her collection.

I used the ones I like to decorate windowsills and hung them from lamps. We have a cheerfully decorated living space that will be easy to clean up and I emptied one of the storage boxes from the garage as part of my ongoing downsizing.

No giant spread of forty-'leven kinds of cookies. 

I experimented a week or so ago with a vegan shortcake. Pro tip: don't substitute ground almonds for part of the flour or you'll have a gooey something that tastes good but isn't shortcake. Next time I may try this cardamom snickerdoodle recipe instead.

While Second Daughter was there for the weekend I made a batch of cinnamon stars from the 1963 Betty Crocker Cookbook I grew up with because they sounded interesting and were pretty easy. I also made (with her help) the one cookie I'll make every year due to popular demand, the candy cane cookies topped with crushed peppermints/sugar from that same cookbook. Talking about this cookbook on Twitter led to a fun exchange.




In years past I've made spritz with my mom's old cookie press; frosted cookies that took forever and honestly were more interesting to look at than to eat and thus not worth the effort; snickerdoodles with green and red sprinkles because snickerdoodles are The Cookie for me as long as they're bendy in the middle; and various other treats.

Cooking what I feel like eating, spread over a few days instead of in one massive blowout that encourages overeating.

The flu is passing and cooking is one of my favorite things to do when I have a whole day and no time pressure. Yesterday I made a batch of Sarah Gailey's lasagna (did you know "lasagna" is the singular and "lasagne" is the plural?).

Today we made a grocery run to get ingredients for things I feel like cooking and eating over the next few days while Second Daughter hangs out for some cuddle time and Mom cooking. These recipes let me make maximum use of oven heat and will yield some leftovers I can freeze for future lunches. The list is likely to include:

  • Portabello mushrooms stuffed with something along the lines of quinoa, sweet bell peppers, and pine nuts, topped with vegan romesco or muhamarra (it's a toss-up -- love them both)
  • Roasted butternut squash with really good 25-year-old balsamic vinegar (the kind that pours like rich syrup, from The Oilerie in Burien where we did some tasting on one of our coffeeneuring dates as part of my birthday celebrating that stretched over a few weeks) and some chili garlic oil my younger sister gave me on one of our sisters' weekends, with the option of regular feta or a vegan feta I found in a nicely expanded vegan section at Fred Meyer
  • Roasted broccoli because I love it
  • Champagne mashed potatoes, another Sarah Gailey recipe she shared in a series of tweets starting with this one
  • Waldorf salad with a vegan cashew cream dressing (the one from the recipe below) or the yogurt-based dressing from this vegan Waldorf salad recipe
  • Vegan broccoli/red grape salad with dressing options: Thai peanut or a balsamic vinaigrette because I have those on hand. To this recipe I always add shredded red cabbage, grated carrots, and some diced sweet bell peppers in various colors. It's beautiful and tasty.
  • Southern lemon pie with a saltine cracker crust that I'm going to try converting to vegan. I link to the NPR story with the recipe because that's what got me started making this. I found a recipe for vegan sweetened condensed (coconut) milk and picked up some vegan spread to use in the crust in place of butter.
  • Vegan cream of mushroom soup. Super simple and so delicious. Last time I made this I had some cauliflower I needed to use up. I boiled that and a few potatoes, pureed them in the food processor with some homemade veggie broth, and made that part of the creamy base for the soup. It was fantastic. I add celery to this recipe.
  • Decidedly unvegan cornbread from an old New York Times Magazine recipe that involves pouring whipping cream into the middle to create a custardy center, baked in a heated cast iron pan for a crispy crust.
  • Vegan nog, which takes all of about 5 minutes because I have nut milk and coconut milk on hand and make cashew cream ahead and keep it in the freezer

This sounds like a lot. But my mom would have done something like this list plus a turkey, gravy, three more kinds of pie, glazed carrots, peas and mushrooms in a wine sauce, and rolls, all for one day in which she also trotted out at least half a dozen homemade hors d'oeuvres platters and the forty-leven cookie varieties.

I'm doing my cooking spread out over at least two days, maybe three. And this list is only one in my head, not something to which I've committed that a dozen or more people will show up to eat at a specific date and time.

No gift shopping on a timeline. Don't get me wrong; I love giving gifts. I like giving them at times people aren't expecting them as a "just because".

I don't ignore the gift-giving element at this time of year; I'm enough of a product of my upbringing that it would feel pretty cold not to give a gift now. But it's sure easier when I don't have to fight people at the mall.

I gave Eldest Daughter and her beau a movie gift card early so they could use it for the Star Wars opening and they now have half a dozen or so movie dates to look forward to. (She also got dental work paid for, which is a little challenging to wrap....) Second Daughter is going to get a shopping expedition to prepare her for some international travel with things she needs (or things I think she needs, like mosquito netting and a rechargeable flashlight -- shhh, don't tell her). Engineering Student Son gets a gift certificate for the online gaming platform he frequents. Youngest Daughter -- yep, another gift certificate.

Seriously, I remember the year my mom finally gave up trying to guess at my personal style and instead just sent me downtown with her credit cards as one of the best Christmases ever so this is not a copout, this is responsive parenting.

 As for Sweet Hubs, the other thing I did to make the end of the old year and the beginning of the new year pretty perfect was to book a getaway to the hotel where we spent our honeymoon. We'll celebrate our date-a-versary there: the 14th anniversary of our first date, which happens to fall on my parents' wedding anniversary. We'll have a fireplace, a spa tub, a view of the ocean, and no expectations other than being together.

That's how to end the old year and start the new year. Relaxed, happy, content, in love. It is what it is.


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What I'm Reading: September-October 2019

My September reading rate was surprisingly high, considering that I had cataract surgeries: Left eye Sept. 9, right eye Sept. 30.

For well over a year I've had an increasingly smeary view of the world -- as if someone put greasy thumbprints right in the middle of my glasses. I have "complicated" eyes: extreme myopia (-10.5 left eye, -10.0 right eye), scars from an old radial keratotomy, and a longer eyeball depth than many.

Thanks to an intraocular lens in each eye I am now reading without any glasses at all. I'm not quite 20/20 -- surgeon didn't want to overshoot on the correction and I don't fit on the normal charts they use to calculate lens power. But it's good enough to read many things (with cheaters for really small print that shouldn't be allowed to exist), ride my bike, look out at our backyard bird feeders and see at least some of a bird's markings.

Recovery from the implant takes place pretty much right away, hence the prolific reading as I tested my new visual acuity. My prescription will continue to settle down for a few more weeks, then I may get some prescription glasses if needed. Otherwise it will be Dollar Store cheaters. And of course, more reading.

I powered on into October without time to put together a post so this is another two-month list. November is my birthday month and maybe I'll get back into my habit of noting each book in a draft post as soon as I've read it when my memory is fresher.

With appreciation for the authors and those who recommend good books, here's what I read in September and October:
  • The Fated Sky, Mary Robinette Kowal (@MaryRobinette): Wonderful sequel to The Calculating Stars, which won the Hugo Award and kept me up until after 2 a.m. on the very last day of August. Before I went to sleep I ordered this. Without feeling dated, both of these nonetheless take me back to my early days of reading science fiction and the sense of wonder, with a writing style that feels as if it comes straight from that time and yet addresses modern issues and concerns. 
  • Followed by Frost, by Charlie N. Holmberg (@CNHolmberg): Circled back to pick up this 2015 work by an author whose other books I've enjoyed: her Paper Magician series and the more recent one that started with Smoke and Summons.
  •  The Bear and the Nightingale Katherine Arden (@ArdenKatherine): Reread so I could continue with the Winternight trilogy with The Girl in the Tower and then The Winter of the Witch. I don't know Russian fairy tales well enough to know how much it echoes and how much it departs from source material. Didn't matter. Great choice for those who love Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik as much as I do.
  • The Shades of Magic Series: A Darker Shade of Magic, A Gathering of Shadows, A Conjuring of Light, V. E. Schwab (@VESchwab)
  • The Evermore Chronicles: Before the Broken Star; Into the Hourglass, Emily R. King (@Emily_R_King): Love the central character, Everley Donovan, with her clockwork heart, fencing, and fierce quest for justice for the death of her family. But perhaps it didn't all happen quite as she remembers. I'll be getting the third book in the trilogy, Everafter Song. (Fencing came up again in Creatures of Will and Temper, below.)
  • The House of Sundering Flames, Aliette de Bodard (@AlietteDB): Wonderful conclusion to her Dominion of the Fallen trilogy.
  • The Analog series, Eliot Peper (@EliotPeper): Bandwidth, Borderless, Breach. Like a shorter version of Malka Older's wonderful Infomacracy trilogy, which I read in 2018. If we all rely on a constant feed of information, what happens if someone uses that feed to shape your perceptions, beliefs, even who you might love? And if the company that controls the feed can shape politics and policy, at what point do we outgrow the nation-state?
  • The Rosewater Redemption, Tade Thompson (@TadeThompson): Great conclusion to the Rosewater trilogy; I devoured the first two books while traveling in August.
  • Where the Forest Meets the Stars, by Glendy Vanderah: Picked up on Kindle Unlimited. Loved having a woman scientist at the heart of the story. Lost child enters her life -- or is this child really an alien intelligence that entered the body of a human child who died?
  • Strange Practice; Grave Importance; Dreadful Company, Vivian Shaw (@CeruleanCynic): Thoroughly enjoyed the Dr. Greta Helsing books and I'll look for them in the future if she's writing more. As a human doctor to vampires (which come in different subspecies--who knew?), werewolves, zombies and others Dr. Helsing has quite the practice. Reconstructive surgery for mummies, for example.
  • Creatures of Will and Temper; Creatures of Want and Ruin, Molly Tanzer (@Molly_The_Tanz): Love the idea that a devil possessing you may not be all bad. It depends on the devil, and there are rewards to go with the down side. Both books rest on that same central concept but don't follow the same characters directly and can be read as stand-alones. The women who are central characters aren't traditionally beautiful and they're certainly not helpless. Creatures of Want and Ruin centers on a polyamorous woman engaged to a bisexual man and takes on racists, and Creatures of Will and Temper has both gay and lesbian central characters.
  • The Winter World; The Solar War, A.G. Riddle (@Riddlist): Riddle writes a lot of apocalyptic books and I think I've read most of them thanks to Kindle Unlimited. I have to say they start to blur together after a while.
  • Alif the Unseen, G. Willow Wilson (@GWillowWilson): Computer programming, authoritarian religious government censorship and surveillance, and the world of the djinn come together in a really wonderful book; the author, who converted to Islam, says the semi-clueless American Muslim convert in the book isn't really her.
  • The Pearl that Broke Its Shell, Nadia Hashimi (@NashimiForUS): Story jumps back and forth between different generations of Afghan women who followed the tradition of bacha posh, which allows them to dress and be treated as a boy until they're of marriageable age. I so appreciated this look into what it's like for at least some Afghan women. In looking up her Twitter account I discovered she's not only a novelist, she's also a pediatrician and a candidate for a seat in Congress!
  • A Dream so Dark, L.L. McKinney (@ElleOnWords): Loved this sequel to her earlier book A Blade So Black about a new kind of Alice in a darker and more dangerous Wonderland. This has been optioned for a TV series that I will totally binge.
  • The Vine Witch, Luanne G. Smith (@WriterSmith1): Definitely easy to believe that good wine is the result of magic. 
  • The Wolf of Oren-Yaro, K.S. Villoso (@K_Villoso): First in Chronicles of the Bitch Queen. The "wolf" of the title is a young queen in an invented Asian land built around Filipino cultural traditions. In the first sentence of the book she kills a man and her husband goes into exile. Several years of difficult, lonely rule later, she goes in search of him in a country that doesn't respect her nation or her royal status. Good thing she's a trained fighter.
  • Heart of Briar, Laura Anne Gilman (@LAGilman): When a cruel Fey woman bewitches your new boyfriend, takes him away and begins sucking the living essence out of him, what do you do? Partner up with the non-humans who explain the danger to you and head out to save him.
  • Series of very different novellas in the Forward collection, each thought-provoking in its own way: Randomize by Andy Weir (@AndyWeirAuthor, who wrote The Martian), with quantum computing and gambling; Ark by Veronica Roth (author of the Divergent series), about the scientists racing against the impending meteor strike to save as many plant species as possible; Emergency Skin by N.K. Jemisin (@NKJemisin, author of the Broken Earth trilogy), which is exactly the way I hope it would go if all the racists and eugenicists were to leave Earth. 
  • Started, haven't finished The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City, by Eric Avila. Recommended by Peter Flax in a string of tweets as a corrective to someone's lack of knowledge about the history of highways and what they did to segregate neighborhoods. Highly recommended for anyone working in transportation.
I'm going to skip this month's additions to my TBR (to be read) list and instead may someday publish an updated long list of everything waiting to be read eventually as an update to the list from February.

The importance of online reviews for the author: The numbers matter as much as the content of your review so don't stress out over your writing ability -- just praise what you like about theirs.

A note on local economies and these links: You should shop at a local, independently owned bookstore. Or check these out through your local library -- did you know they can do that with e-books too, if that's how you read? Links on this page are Amazon Affiliate links unless otherwise noted. I've never made a penny from Amazon but these links give you access to more information and reader reviews. If I ever do make anything I'll donate it to a local nonprofit, maybe Books to Prisoners (if you live in Seattle, Spokane, Olympia, or Portland, Oregon you can volunteer with them in person).

Writers on Twitter: I have a Writers list on Twitter. It isn't everyone I read/enjoy but it's a good starting place if you find your tastes and mine overlap. I so appreciate the chances I get to interact with people directly to tell them I enjoy their work.

Related Reading on Reading

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Digital Housework

"No matter how many times you save the world, it always manages to get back in jeopardy again. Sometimes I just want it to stay saved, y'know, for a little bit. I fee like the maid: 'I just cleaned up this mess! Can we keep it clean for ten minutes? Please?' " - Mr. Incredible starting at 0:55 in this clip from The Incredibles

I can't keep entropy at bay. The tendency toward randomness and disorder keeps creeping back in. Today I'm dealing with the equivalent of that mountain of laundry that needs to be done. Or more aptly, the garage you need to clean that holds all the boxes you've moved from place to place without ever opening and sorting them. Today, I'm cleaning up digital files.

In How to Do Nothing Jenny O'Dell wrote about the attention economy's logic "that 'disruption' is more productive than the work of maintenance--of keeping ourselves and others alive and well." She wasn't referring to digital maintenance--if I really do what she calls for I'd have a lot less to maintain--but her point still applies.

It's so much more exciting to start something new than to clean up something old, right? To heck with Marie Kondo; in a consumer economy the thrill of buying a new set of shelves far outweighs the tedium of sorting the things we'll set on them and making a run to donate the items we no longer need or want, let alone dusting those shelves in a couple of weeks after they're no longer new and exciting. In the digital context it's more fun to take today's pictures than to review yesterday's pictures, delete the ones we don't want, and organize them in some useful way.

I appreciate and am inspired by O'Dell's deep thinking about the ways in which we have given away our ability to pay attention, to concentrate, to notice what really matters. We are creating enormous economic value for nothing, doing unpaid digital labor that Facebook or Twitter or Google Ad Services monetizes and sells to shareholders. If we are to extract any true value for ourselves, we're going to have to give some thought to maintenance, not just creation.

I have the digital footprint (and attention span) of an early adopter of some, but not all, of the many shiny-object services of the digital age. I've been on Twitter for over a decade, Facebook about that long. I got interviewed as an early user of LinkedIn in my former hometown because I had so many connections before others were using it regularly. I let a TV station follow me around when I was checking in on Foursquare when that was still a thing. I have an Instagram account I never post to and no doubt dozens of dusty spaces on the web with my name on them created for some forgotten reason. When I changed jobs I had to do at least 59 things to deal with my online presence.

There's no way I can track down and delete all these things I'm not maintaining. I do wonder at times about the amount of server space being held for neglected accounts. How long do you suppose my old "burner" email accounts will be available?

I'm not even going to try to find and delete everything I don't use. I'm going to start by cleaning up what I do use. I'll try to define some rules for what I do and don't save that may make maintenance easier going forward.

Take Dropbox, for example. Handy utility. I have that and Google Drive and wherever the images go that are all automatically saved by my cellular service. How much cloud storage does one person need? Not as much as I have access to. Yet I managed to fill the free Dropbox space and start paying for more a few years ago when I was taking lots of pictures in my work as executive director of Washington Bikes. Every bike ride, ribbon-cutting, Bike to Work Day Energizer Station got captured with multiple images.

And they're all still sitting there.

I keep meaning to go in and clean up. Every time I start, I get a few images deleted, then get side-tracked into thinking about whether I want to save some, renaming a few so they have a more meaningful filename than the date they were taken, opening several to determine which one is the best in a series (and I'm no photographer so none of these are very good to begin with), thinking about whether someday I may want to be able to illustrate this particular historic moment for some reason and no one else has any pictures of this, and and and.... You can understand why my Dropbox is so full it will no longer sync across devices and they want me to pay more to get more storage space.

No. It's maintenance time. By which I primarily mean, be bold and hit DELETE, at least on some of those folders.

Like housework in the real world AFK (Away From Keyboard), this may not stay done. The dust bunnies will creep back in. I'll lose track of my good intentions about not saving everything as files when I could simply bookmark a report I want to refer to.

(Oh no, my bookmarks--those need organizing and clean-up too. Or maybe not. My maintenance energy only extends so far and I need to prioritize. Focus, Chamberlain, focus.)

A while back thanks to Twitter, which I do find valuable as a place to give and receive information from people who are still better value filters than a Google search, I encountered The Maintainers, "a global research network interested in the concepts of maintenance, infrastructure, repair, and the myriad forms of labor and expertise that sustain our human-built world."

Working in transportation as I do, I know our maintenance backlog is enormous and still growing. The belief that something new is more important than taking care of what we have is evident there as in other sectors of public policy and our economic structures. Lack of maintenance carries a hidden cost to all of us, from repairs to personal vehicles shaken by rough roads and potholes to the broken elbow I received crashing on a trail thanks to a broken surface I tried to avoid on my bike.

 One of the costs of failure to maintain my digital space is direct: I'll be charged another year's storage on Dropbox if I don't get my usage down. Another is indirect; if I try to find something in those files I'm digging through all the clutter, just like going through boxes in my garage in search of a specific item time after time.

Maintenance protects, sustains and adds real value in the real world. We need more of it. It may not be shiny, but it's essential.

And here I sit, writing a shiny new blog post instead of digging into those dusty old cloud files.



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What I'm Reading: July-August 2019

How I spent my summer (including some vacation)--Well, for one thing July absolutely whizzed past. So did August.

That's in no small part because in early August I headed to a fantabulous weeklong study tour in Copenhagen that I could participate in thanks to a scholarship from the Scan Design Foundation.

Followed immediately by vacation days in London with family.

Followed quasi-immediately by the better part of a week at the Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Professionals conference and an FHWA meeting in Portland. (I got one day at home to sleep 15 hours straight and do laundry, then back on the train.)

That last bit accompanied by a vicious head cold that started tickling my throat on the plane home from London. Still sick, in fact, and tired of blowing my brain matter out my sinuses, but you can't have everything.

I spent July cramming in all the work I could get done (and still not enough) to hit deadlines that would come up while I was on the road in one of the premier bicycling cities on the planet, plus doing the homework to prep since the "study" part was quite serious. Our agenda ran a solid 11-12 hours most days since we had dinners on the agenda and spent that time processing what we saw and heard each day.

For more on the study trip, vacation time, and conference you can check out my tweet threads:

Copenhagen masterclass


London vacation


#APBP2019
I got a surprising amount of reading done despite all of this. All those hours on the planes and trains, for one thing, and then being sick enough that I couldn't think or work but not so sick I couldn't lie on the sofa with my Kindle and power through. I read really, really fast too. Books in these two months represent a mix of working on the backlog waiting on my Kindle and making some impulse buys along the way.

With appreciation for the authors and those who recommend good books, here's what I read in July.
  • Starless by Jacqueline Carey (@JCareyAuthor). Really wonderful story of a strong young person who fights, protects and loves. Gender identity and the strictures placed around women's behavior by their culture are dominant themes in this quest and love story.
  • Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity, Kim Scott (@KimballScott). Recommended by friend and colleague Ida van Schalkwyk, @RoadSafetyPhD on Twitter. Great advice for being a boss -- being clear is not unkind. Scott does write from the perspective of someone who has had large teams to manage and from her tech sector experience. Those of us with a tiny staff in a public agency can nonetheless apply her principles.
  • Rick Steves London 2019 (@RickSteves): Had to read this to prepare for my tourist time in London after the Copenhagen study tour. Lots of great detailed advice, some of which I even took.
  • The Magic of Unkindness, The Grave Raven, and The Halls of Midnight (Books of Conjury trilogy), Kevan Dale (@DaleKevan). First in his trilogy The Books of Conjury. Really enjoyed his tough, resilient one-eyed heroine in this alternate history. She's a witch and Salem's witches died long ago in the battle against demons. Now she has to learn how to use her magic in time to stop the demons from rising again.
  • Sorcery of the Stony Heart by Kevan Dale. A prequel to The Books of Conjury.
  • The Plastic Magician by Charlie N. Holmberg (@CNHolmberg): Another in her series in which magical practice means the ability to use a particular material, whether that's paper or stone or this new-fangled stuff "plastic", to embed and carry out spells.
  • The Green Man's Heir, Juliet E. McKenna (@JulietEMcKenna): As a child I loved works grounded in Celtic myths such as Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series. This work shares that background but puts its central character, a woodworker and laborer whose mom isn't human, into the list of suspects for the murder of young women.
  • Native Tongue trilogy: Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin and Susan Squier; The Judas Rose and Earthsong by Suzette Haden Elgin and Julie Vedder. How on earth did I miss these when they first came out! Native Tongue was published in 1984, the year I graduated from WSU with degrees in English and Linguistics. These are works of feminist science fiction with linguistics at the very heart of their plot. If you enjoyed Arrival (based on the short story "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang) and its grounding in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (very roughly, the idea that the language we uses shapes our perceptions and understanding of the world around us and the world is genuinely different if you use a different language) then you should check these out. The editions I read had extended scholarly essays at the back to place these in context and point to other novels and resources.
What I read in August:
  • Storywalker, David Bridger (@DavidBridger): You're a best-selling author with a well-beloved central character in your fantasy series. Come to find out he's your twin and you're living in parallel worlds and now those worlds have touched.
  • Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward (@JesMimi): Her writing is so strong, unflinching, beautiful, stark. A story of ghosts, pain, imperfect humans, racism, the brutality of incarceration, love.
  • The Mermaid's Sister, by Carrie Anne Noble (@NobleBat): I enjoyed The Gold-Son by Noble (leprechauns are not so cute after all) so when this one popped up as a suggestion for Kindle Unlimited I grabbed it. A wonderful story of the love of sisters grounded in fairy tales without feeling like a retelling.
  • Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit: Didn't actually finish this. I started it on the plane to Copenhagen, knowing that if I actually should be sleeping to reset my body clock to the new time zone then nonfiction is better than fiction. A dense and well-researched work, this, and deeply philosophical about the places walking holds in our societies, cultures, literature, and more. Once I was in the heart of Copenhagen walking everywhere, though, and being pretty continuously lectured at about everything we saw, if I read anything it needed to be some fiction.
  • True Places: A Novel, Sonja Yoerg (@SonjaYoerg): I used to read more books like this, in which a woman stifled by an unfulfilling life has a breakthrough and finds herself. This one has more to recommend it than many with the character of Iris, a young girl raised in the forest by parents who wanted to keep her away from the contaminations of modern society, and what she endures in losing them and entering "civilization" with all its shallowness. If you like Ann Patchett, for example, you'll like this.
  • Storm of Locusts, Rebecca Roanhorse (@RoanhorseBex): Preordered because I so enjoyed her Trail of Lightning, with a kick-ass young Native woman, Maggie Hoskie, as the central character and the grounding in Indian traditions. Another great read in which Maggie wrestles with what her clan powers make her, and what they don't.
  • The Book of Flora, by Meg Elison (@MegElison): Another preorder because the first two works in this series, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife and The Book of Etta, were gripping, amazing, terrifying. Post-apocalyptic dystopian worlds are absolute shit for women and those are gay, lesbian, nonbinary, boundary-breaking in any way. Although not a major plot element, living in the Seattle area as I do I enjoy the way the action in this one ends up at "Settle" (post-apocalypse Seattle) and "Bambritch Island" (Bainbridge Island).
  • Gabriel's Road, by Laura Anne Gilman (@LAGilman): I love Gilman's Devil's West series. This is another in that -- I'll keep getting these as long as she keeps writing them. This work gives us insights into Gabriel both before and after he mentors Isobel.
  • Rosewater and Rosewater Insurrection, by Tade Thompson (@TadeThompson): Found thanks to Twitter recommendations (which I generally supplement by looking at reviews -- a good way to find out you're picking up an award-winning book). Put together a science fiction premise (weird alien thing growing in Nigeria that generates free electricity, heals humans, endows some people with a mindreading capability, may have an agenda....) with the politics of a breakaway city, secretive government agencies, imperfect people who do what they can as things fall apart. Can't wait to see where Thompson takes the story in Rosewater Redemption -- preordered. Read these. 
  • The Rewind Files, by Claire Willett (@ClaireWillett): Popped up as a recommendation and that algorithm knows me. Time traveler who works for the government agency tasked with keeping the "real" timeline intact isn't a brand-new concept but this is fast-paced with enjoyable characters. Playwright Willett, who lives in Portland, plans two sequels -- yay!
  • The Sisters of the Winter Wood, Rena Rossner (@RenaRossner): A beautiful work of fairytale retelling grounded in Jewish traditions that brings together several stories including the shapeshifter who puts on and takes off a cloak of fur or feathers. If you're a girl growing into womanhood do you really want to become a bear?
  • Torn and its sequel Fray, Rowenna Miller (@RowennaM): I used to sew quite a bit (made my own clothes and matching dresses for Eldest Daughter and Second Daughter every Christmas when they were little), so I liked the premise of magic stitchery in this. It's much more than that, with a class struggle between the nobility and the working class and international politics and trade agreements. Hmmm, now I wonder if someone has a list of science fiction and fantasy works that do a good job of highlighting the implications of political structures and philosophies. 
  • The Calculating Stars, Mary Robinette Kowal (@MaryRobinette): I loved her novella The Lady Astronaut of Mars; that led me to this and now I'm starting on the sequel The Fated Sky. I stayed up until after 2 a.m. to tear through this on the very last day of August. Evolving understanding of racism, the double family losses of the Holocaust and then a terrible meteorite strike endangering survival of the human species, the greenhouse effect creating urgency to get off this rock and colonize space, homage to the women who worked as "computers" and made space flight possible that you may have learned of from Hidden Figures, true, passionate love between two people who make each other laugh and admire each other's intellectual brilliance -- so much here! No wonder it just won the Hugo Award. This also led to a NY Times article and quite the Twitter thread on peeing in space.


I'm going to skip this month's additions to my TBR (to be read) list and instead will publish an updated long list of everything waiting to be read eventually as an update to the list from February.

The importance of online reviews for the author: The numbers matter as much as the content of your review so don't stress out over your writing ability -- just praise what you like about theirs.

A note on local economies and these links: You should shop at a local, independently owned bookstore. Or check these out through your local library -- did you know they can do that with e-books too, if that's how you read? Links on this page are Amazon Affiliate links unless otherwise noted. I've never made a penny from Amazon but these links give you access to more information and reader reviews. If I ever do make anything I'll donate it to a local nonprofit that helps people who need it most.

Writers on Twitter: I have a Writers list on Twitter. It isn't everyone I read/enjoy but it's a good starting place if you find your tastes and mine overlap. I so appreciate the chances I get to interact with people directly to tell them I enjoy their work.

Related Reading on Reading

Did you spot the Easter egg? Yes, "things fall apart" was a deliberate reference to the work by Chinua Achebe. Not that the works are directly parallel, simply couldn't resist.
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