O Brave New World...

I did not get, at first, why there were no ANSWERS to these generally mostly interesting questions. It's because you are supposed to ask Sabotabby (or have someone ask YOU, if you repost it) any of the questions you are particularly curious about. That might prolong people's interaction with it, I guess?

I have been posting SO MUCH, recently, but only for my own eyes. It's been a great relief to type a journal, honestly, and to know that no one else is seeing it. Today, however, Facebook prompted a Memory (and for some reason in the past couple of weeks or so, I have been clicking on that) and it turned out to be a "15 Book Meme" from 2009, which I wheedled my mother into doing, and that was fucking touching, honestly. She -- before her dementia took greater hold -- followed the instructions (don't think too hard; 15 books which have stayed with you) to produce this list:

15 Books from MQ

1. Perdido Street Station, China Miéville
2. Socialism On Trial, Albert Goldman
3. The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
4. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
5. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
6. Lad, A Dog, Albert Payson Terhune
7. In the Pond, Ha Jin
8. Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson
9. Gaudy Night, Dorothy Sayers
10. And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
11. The Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky
12. American Notes, Charles Dickens
13. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
14. The Censors, Luisa Valenzuela
15. Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

That list made me look for my own, because most likely I did the meme first and then pressured her to do it. But I have the WORST time searching fucking Facebook, and did not find anything. Which led me to the second of the rabbitholes I went down today. (The first, by the way, was ... god, how did this happen? Oh, another FB post, this one from a friend-of-a-friend philosophy professor in Canada who is a very cool woman raised Buddhist and anarchist... she posted a quote from Stuart Hall (whose work I enjoy) about preferring people's young or middle periods, e.g. The Eighteenth Brumaire to Capital, Vol. 2, or Althusser's For Marx to his Reading Marx... which led me to Althusser's extremely disturbing Wikipedia entry. Not that I didn't know he'd murdered his wife, just that I didn't know much about her, or his personal life. In a way, too, it re-awoke all my loathing of French intellectual life. I was interested in some Althusser in my 20s partly because he was a pied-noir marxist, like Camus. But what I texted my older niece about this was: "Also, reading it all [the Althusser Wiki entry] just makes me loathe the French intellectual world more. It’s shitty, no doubt, to smear a whole raft of thinkers with a national character, but UGH. I think I far prefer German (well, before fascism), Italian, Spanish, and even some English theorists and writers...The only exceptions I might make are Voltaire, Hugo, a lot of poets, Foucault, the whole of the Jeunesses Communistes Revolutionaires — opposition youth group in the PCF which broke away to become Trotskyists and join the Fourth International just before Mai 68 — and de Beauvoir, Sartre, and Camus... Oh, and Paul Nizan. He goes with de Beauvoir, etc.")

If you are wondering, yes, that is the length at which I generally text.

Yeah, so that long tangent was my first rabbithole. The second was looking at old LJ entries from 2009, fifteen years ago. God, I'd forgotten that I used to write several times a month, at length, and people would comment. And that was already during the Decline of LJ! I didn't find the book meme. It is probably buried in the search-resistant bowels of Meta.

Here is the meme Sabotabby posted. If anyone reads this and is curious about any of the questions, I will do my best to oblige with answers... but in a week or so, I might just answer the questions for my own satisfaction.

- - - - - - -


1 What was the first piece of furniture you bought?
2 What proportion of your meals do you cook?
3 Foaming hand soap or normal hand soap?
4 Favorite chore?
5 Least favorite chore?
6 Most precious thing one of your pets has destroyed?
7 Any groceries you've been getting into lately?
8 What cleaning product do you swear by?
9 What's your emotional support craft?
10 Youtube, cable TV, or streaming?
11 What's something you saved up for and then regretted buying?
12 How many cups can you see from where you're sitting?
13 Which filter are you most likely to go "eh, it's probably fine" when you find out you need to change it?
14 How often do you take baths?
15 Do you go down each aisle when you grocery shop, or only the ones you know you need stuff from?
16 Where do you go when you need to get out of the house but it's raining?
17 What's a movie you saw recently that you liked?
18 Pro or anti tchotchkes?
19 What's your go-to tape?
20 What's in your freezer right now?
21 Last concert you attended?
22 Favorite grocery store?
23 Paper bags, plastic bags, or reusable bags?
24 Do you get your government mandated 8 hours every night?
25 Favorite old person activity?
26 Would you rather sit on the porch drinking sweet tea or sit by the lake drinking beers?
27 Do you prefer Boardgame Night, Build-Your-Own-Pizza Night, or Movie Night with your friends?
28 Be honest, do you like all of the pictures of their babies that your friends send you?
29 Go-to holiday card format?
30 How many pairs of scissors do you own?
31 Do you still own your first car?
32 How do you take your morning coffee/tea?
33 What's something you collect?
34 What's your commute like?
35 Aisle at the grocery store you never bother walking down?
36 Do you keep a daily journal or agenda?
37 Do you still listen to the same music you listened to in high school?
38 What's the last filter you changed?
39 What little treat do you always get when you run errands?
40 Grocery list or no grocery list?
41 What's the oldest thing you own?
42 What's an unjustifiably expensive appliance that you really want?
43 Favorite book you've read recently?
44 Honest feelings on Settlers of Catan?
45 What's something you wish you had more time for?
46 What kind of stuff do you keep on the door of your refrigerator?
47 Lamps or overhead lighting?
48 If you could build your home from scratch, what outrageous feature would you want to build into it?
49 Do you bring a bag with you everywhere you go?
50 Pro or anti throw pillows?
51 How many blankets do you keep in your living room?
52 Did your relationship with your parents get better when you stopped living with them?
53 What's worse, the DMV or the Social Security Office?
54 Do you decorate your house for holidays? Which ones?
55 Favorite high-effort meal that you make?
56 Favorite low-effort meal that you make?
57 Do you tend to bring an appetizer, entree, dessert, or drinks to a potluck?
58 What kind of bag do you use for your bag full of bags?
59 If you died and your ghost was stuck in the outfit you're wearing right now for the rest of time, would you be happy with it?
60 Do you have an opinion on your local weather reporter?
61 Do you have a favorite brunch spot?
62 Where are you on the minimalism-maximalism kinsey scale?
63 Opinion on Bath and Body Works?
64 Last time you visited a farmer's market?
65 Anything you're procrastinating on right now?
66 Do you get your taxes in as soon as possible, at the last minute, or late?
67 Do you keep any stuffed animals on your bed?
68 Are your garbage bags scented or unscented?
69 What are you looking forward to next week?

I keep a regular journal besides LJ/DW. I have since I was 9 years old -- it's a well-worn story I tell kids when we start weekly journaling at the beginning of each school year. I was nine years old, in the winter of 1975/76, and my mom told me I had to go clean up the trash cans that had been knocked over in our alley. In the slush and the snow and the ice of February. I was so pissed, because **I** hadn't knocked over our trash cans, and there were two units in our two flat apartment, and why ME? Anyway, I stomped downstairs and put the heavy, dingy, dirty metal trash cans upright and gingerly picked up trash to put back in them. Somehow thrown clear from the trash, on a dirty bank of snow near the back fence in the alley, there was a brown and maroon book with the word "Journal" embossed in gold letters on the front. It wasn't new, but only one or two of the first pages had been used -- just numbers, no name or anything. It was ruled as some kind of account book, maybe? Anyway, I considered it a perk of the unfair chore, and took it upstairs and began a very banal diary, printed in pencil. We were learning cursive that year, and I complained about that in one of the first entries. I love my semi-cursive normal handwriting now, but I hated my handwriting until I changed it by force of will in ... maybe sophomore year of high school? Anyway, it's not like my entries were fascinating, not even for a nine-year-old. Stuff about the TV my sister and I watched. Stuff about how stupid the Bicentennial was. When our cat Inessa (after Inessa Armand, Lenin's lover and a revolutionary in her own right) died.

That diary lasted through the rest of fifth grade, sixth, and into seventh grade. It was journal Roman Numeral I. I am on journal LXXII now. I have lost one or maybe two over the years, which is horrifying. One I lost in the Northwestern University Library, and one the first year I was a teacher, at my middle school in West Oakland. Luckily, that one I had only just started, and in both cases I had gotten over writing "[Redacted First Name] [Redacted Last Name] 827 Monroe St. Evanston, IL United States, North America, Earth, the Solar System, the Milky Way, the Universe."

I did not write in my journal this year once between my total hysterectomy in December of 2021 and the end of radiation treatments in April of 2022.

I don't write when I am depressed. I am starting to write a little, now, in the past couple of months (though I wouldn't say I am NOT depressed, right now). It's also hard, when I am depressed (or perhaps this is just laziness, which I have a strong tendency towards) to keep track of my reading. I read indefatigably, but I don't read very... consciously? With discrimination? Reading for me is comfort of the most basic sort, and maybe because of that, I do a prodigious amount of re-reading. There are books I would not be surprised if I have read more than 50 times, no lie. Anne of Green Gables, for instance. Ha, it just struck me that it's a Canadian classic, and it's a Canadian series that sparked my impulse to write this LJ/DW entry.

In terms of keeping track of my reading, I joined Goodreads several years ago (I was going to write "a few years ago" but time surges on, and I think it's been more than "a few" by now) and signed up eagerly to the book challenge, knowing that if I include re-reads (probably illegal in some way) I would EASILY read 365 books a year. It absolutely astounded or horrified kids when I would show them completed tallies of 365-books-a-year. I think I reached 500 one year? But recording the books... oh, that's a pain in the ass, including re-reads. I have a million tags, and I have to add one for what year I am re-reading the book in and it's a slow process to look it up on Goodreads, and just... annoying. For new books, choosing all the categories, deciding whether to review the book, etc. Just tedious, especially since I would never do it when I finished a book, but only in great gulps, every few months.

I haven't done it -- set a goal or tried to record my reading -- for maybe two years now? Or three? Probably three.

But tonight, as I start the fifth book in a mystery series I never read before (I might have heard of the author, maybe? I'm not sure) I felt an inclination to write about my reading in 2022. Not in great detail. Don't expect any challenging titles (I don't think). But in lieu of the Goodreads challenge, and because several of the people I enjoy reading on LJ/DW write about what they read, I thought I'd list some -- dunno if I could even do ALL by November of this year -- of what I've been reading.

First of all... there are categories/genres I read a lot: historical fiction, mysteries -- and within mysteries, especially historical mystery series (all periods and all places), mysteries of place (that is, they are contemporary but their settings are crucial -- National Parks (Anna Pigeon, by Nevada Barr), Ireland, England, France (including a series I am very conflicted about because the author seems like an asshole Washington journalist who gets wet dreams about spy bullshit but chooses to write about the Dordogne, a little like a mash-up of My Year in Provence (which I hasten to add, I've never read) and that idiot insurance agent (I think) Tom Clancy. These are the Inspector Bruno novels...), India, the American South in various locales, etc., some fantasy, some sci-fi series (Kim Stanley Robinson, Neal Stephenson, Lois McMaster Bujold, John Varley, Vonda McIntyre, Octavia Butler and so on), Regency Romances, Young Adult Fiction, some contemporary novels (though rarely super recent ones; I seem to require some years, maybe even a decade, for new releases to mellow, or something. Well, except for YA. I read more recent YA, more quickly, probably because as a teacher, I want to be able to make current recommendations. Or I just like a lot of new YA. Not all of it. Some stuff my nieces used to recommend... nope. Nope to Sarah J. Maas, for example. And to Rick Riordan.

Anyway, the series I encountered belatedly (there are 18 books now, apparently) thanks to The Guardian, my comfort read of a daily newspaper -- yes, it's a liberal rag, but it's a marginally better liberal rag than the NYT, though I read both -- is one I also have some conflicts about. I am suspending those hesitations for now. It's a mystery series -- probably close to the "cozy" subgenre -- by Louise Penny, with the main character as a homicide Chief Inspector with the Sûreté de Québec. This is an Anglo writing about a Francophone Québecois character, so from get, it makes me uncomfortable, but fascinated. I think Penny started the series in 2005, and already there was a movie deal by 2013. I even like the actor chosen to play Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. But oh, man, I didn't make it five minutes into the movie before I had to quit. As a student told me this week (it made my heart pitter pat) "All movies are worse than the books". This one, damn. Nathaniel Parker is a Brit, but he went for what seemed like an American accent (though the first book lays down the canon that Gamache's English is Oxford English... weirdly, because as a college student, he learned English there, which seems... kind of ridiculous... not that he wouldn't have learned English earlier -- I've met plenty of Québecois for whom not learning English is a political act -- but that he'd be accepted to a program at Oxford knowing none. ANYWAY... There was no attempt for any of the actors to a) speak any French, b) have a Québecois accent... which is my preferred French accent. I went there when I was fourteen, the summer after graduating 8th grade, to stay with lefty friends of my parents as a graduation gift. It was a transformative experience for me... right after the failure of one of the referendums on separation (1980), and at the same time as le jour de Saint Jean-Baptiste, the 24th of June, Québec's national holiday. I got to help at a working class neighborhood's fête, despite my pretty pathetic two years of middle school French. But man, I learned to say "Tu veux une bière? Labatts ou Molson? Un sandwich au jambon ou au fromage?" flawlessly. I was a hit with the neighborhood kids younger than me, though we could barely communicate... we managed with drawings and chalk art on the sidewalks. Québec flags and "Québecois et fière de l'être" and "Gens du Pays".

So reading this series is weird. Its setting -- in a Brigadoonish cozy village in the Eastern Townships just over the border from Vermont -- is both attractive and unbelievable, a pastiche of Canadian and Québecois comfort food (pouding au chômeur à l'érable, habitant soup, poire Hélène, etc...) and an Anglican church, a proud heritage of United Empire Loyalists (that is, for Americans, Loyalists who fled their defeat in the American Revolution) (I should be grateful that at least, so far, there are no Orange Lodge Protestants from the North of Ireland or Scotland in this mythical village) and Francophone Québecois villagers.

Louise Penny

Still Life
A Fatal Grace
The Cruelest Month
A Rule Against Murder

C. J. Sansom (Tudor mystery series I somehow never read until a few weeks ago, a very odd lacuna in my generally robust collection of early and late medieval mysteries)

Dissolution -- fascinating, taking the backdrop of Cromwell's and Henry VIII's money grab from dissolving the monasteries of England.
Dark Fire
Sovereign
Revelation
Heartstone -- includes the backdrop of the wreck of the Mary Rose, Henry the VIII's gigantic flagship, in a naval battle against the French
Lamentation -- includes a lot about the Religious struggles, and Catherine Parr
Tombland -- I'm still reading this one; it's very good so far, but these mysteries tend to be intense (definitely not cozies) so I sometimes take a break... into which fell the Armand Gamache series.

Sara Sheridan (Brit mystery series centered in Brighton in the 1950s, with a female lead who was with OSS during WWII, and is now a private detective cum debt collector)

Brighton Belle
London Calling
England Expects
British Bulldog

There are five more of these, but ONLY THE FIRST THREE are available on Kindle, and only two more of them have been uploaded to my new (but quite old in internet years) love, Internet Archive. They are available in Amazon.uk, but not .us Bastards. I think Operation Goodwood is on Internet Archive, but I'm almost saving it, because it's depressing that the other books aren't there. I really like this series, which is close to a subgenre of historical fiction I enjoy -- WWII homefront books -- and post WWII historical (and YA historical) novels, such as those by Michelle Magorian. I do wonder whether the racial aspects of the friendship between the main character and a Black Brit woman whose parents are from the Caribbean is all that realistic. I can't decide if it's super woke (or if that is a problem for me).

Okay, this entry got away from me. It's been a while. Next time maybe more books and less autobiography. I miss Québec, though.

I haven't done a lot. But I am not experiencing the Sunday night blues, because we don't have students tomorrow, just meetings. "Professional Development", which about 95% of the time is godawful worthless stuff you could communicate by email. Then, Tuesday, setting up my room. I will try very hard not to make any copies. I'm generally good all year at getting by without making copies. Mostly.

What have I done?

I made the muesli I first started making after I came back from my junior year abroad, having encountered non-sweetened commercial muesli in Britain, in 1986, and loved it. For a long time, it was a reliable breakfast, but I don't think I've had (or made) it for... at least four years? Maybe a lot more. I fucking swear to god I am going to eat breakfast this year and not a) skip it, or b) buy it at Starbucks.

Muesli: (note; there are no measurements in this 'recipe')

1. A LOT of rolled oat flakes.
2. A lot fewer rolled wheat flakes or rye flakes or something...
3. a lot of roasted sunflower seeds (better if you roast the raw, unsalted ones yourself, in a cast iron skillet... but commercially roasted and even salted works okay)
4. a lesser amount but still a lot of pecan bits
5. golden raisins.

Mix.

I think I occasionally put dried cranberries or date bits in, but I like this mix best. With 4% plain yoghurt (full fat yoghurt, in other words) and some honey, this is delicious and long-lastingly satisfying.

I have not done laundry yet, but I will.

I thought about writing in here on the subject of my Reading Guilty Pleasures. I definitely have them. I am not completely indiscriminate in what I like to read... but I am somewhat indiscriminate. Often these are books I first read when I was in middle school or high school, somewhat randomly accumulated in the many, many bookshelves in our apartment.

So. Books I Have Read (and in Many Cases, Still Read) that are Pretty Much Guilty Pleasures, Especially Politically.

Anne McCaffrey -- her Dragons of Pern series and everything else she wrote. I am pretty sure I have read (and reread, and reread) literally everything she ever wrote. But I have to say, if you ever liked her or think about reading her... avoid the hell out of her son's continuation of the series. Todd McCaffrey is fucking NUTS. Also very into poly, from what seems like a super cis hetmale point of view. I mean, Anne McCaffrey implied and at some points finally even just stated that some dragonriders were definitely gay (the ones who rode green dragons). But Todd has some obsessions about dragonriders and their sex lives.

Of her other series (plural)... I liked the Killashandra Ree books because one thing McCaffrey did well was write women characters who are kind of arrogant and not very nice. It was refreshing.

Jean M. Auel... oh, ludicrous Cro Magnon inventions by one woman of everything ever, from flint fire strikers to domesticated horses and wolves, from the atl-atl, to the travois. But I was hooked on this fictional depiction of the cultural and physical overlap of Cro Magnon (homo sapiens sapiens) and Neanderthals (homo neandertalensis) from the beginning, no matter how self-indulgent it became by the end (... or is it the end? Auel is still alive, and could still wind up a few dangling plot ends in another 900 or so pages...). Possibly most embarrassing part: her whole payoff after all this Mother Goddess stuff is that humans realize that it takes a MAN to impregnate a WOMAN, so children are descended from men, too, who now will suddenly want to control reproduction. I am not sure if this was Engels' line. Maybe it was. I should reread the Origins of the Family.

Dick Francis I am actually rereading my favorites of this extremely prolific author's mysteries right now. He wrote literally a hundred (maybe not quite that many) formulaic books about straight white upper class British men involved either directly or indirectly with horse racing, who encounter chicanery and violence and stiff-upper-lipedly overcome said baddies with their virtue and Old Fashioned Manliness. Yes, I am guilty about liking any of these. My grandmother read them too, though I probably went further into the 2000s than she did with him. Well, partly because she died in 2002, I guess. My favorite titles, in no particular order: Proof, where a wineseller solves a mystery about stolen scotch and forged wine labels (the horse connection is pretty tenuous in this one); Straight, where a jockey inherits his brother's gems business on his death, and hunts missing diamonds; Flying Finish, where a disregarded "failure" scion of a toff-y family (this is a common trope of his) gets involved in a Cold War mystery that involves exporting horses, flying planes, and Italian contraceptives smuggling (published in, I think, 1964?) (ish?); Banker, where an investment banker (you SEE the cause of guilt, here?!) finds skullduggery among horsebreeders... this one is good because there is a lot about brood mares and retired racehorses, and bad because there is a needless death of a sympathetic character; Twice Shy, about a math teacher who accidentally gets involved with a statistics-based betting scheme, and the violence that flows from that, and then how it boomerangs and also affects the math teacher's younger brother, who buys Irish foals for rich people; and Reflex, where a jockey is getting close to being too old for jump racing and gets mixed up in a photos and blackmail scheme -- along with digging into his youth, when his rich but drug addled young single mother abandoned him. You can tell I am rereading these because I have too much to say about them right now. Francis was clearly a Tory; clearly a favorite of the Queen's (seriously); and clearly a sexist, racist, etc., in that starchy upper class way. And I still enjoy reading him!

Jeffrey Archer Speaking of Tories. I don't actually reread Jeffrey Archer... except once in a while, As the Crow Flies about a self-made barrow boy. And incest. But it's... it's popcorn reading. And I've read a lot of his.

Colleen McCullough... not The Thornbirds or some other similar one. Just her historical novels. She's super gross -- was super gross -- on defending Pitcairn rapists. But, oh, her First Man in Rome series... I learned a lot reading all of those. And I fucking love Morgan's Run, her partly family history novel about transportation and the founding of Australia. I really wanted a sequel to that. I hope you don't hate me now, ironed-orchid!

Judith Krantz. Scruples was my generation's Forever, in that we all passed it around to read the sex scenes, in the summer between 8th and 9th grade. I read that one, and also Princess Daisy -- ESPECIALLY guilty, because it's not only chick lit about wealthy, wealthy people, but one of them is a fucking White Russian! But that is one of those books whose plot I know so well (also true of Jean Auel, Anne McCaffrey, and obvs. Dick Francis) that I can retell the stories at great, great length... much as Bobby Sands did in the Maze when he retold, from memory, Leon Uris' Trinity, which probably really belongs on this list of mine.

And, I think last but worst: Tom Clancy... yeah, I know. I hate all of his books except The Hunt for Red October (it's about submarines... I am absolutely a sucker for submarines... and Cold War stories, like the movie Red Dawn) (TV movie? Was it? I don't remember. Wolverines!) and Red Storm Rising which imagined a survivable World War III with no nukes. That was kind of reassuring to read in the mid 80s. All his other sickening novels, faugh.

So there you have it. I bet there are more, actually, but enough for now...

I've spent a lot of this summer so far feeling crappy and angry at myself, but I don't feel like that right this second, so I thought I might do something zany and post an entry on LiveJournal (uh, and Dreamwidth, which I still don't really believe in).

My reasons for being proud of myself are silly and fleeting, but so the fuck what; they feel good right now.

1) I spent some money this summer. Ordinarily I only spend money (which is not to say I am at all frugal; I'm NOT) on groceries and lots, and lots, and lots of Amazon e-books. There's something about being able to carry probably almost 2,000 books around in my purse that is deeply rich-feeling. Book security. ANYWAY. Things I have bought with money this summer:

* a knife block. A good one -- I think? I mean, I read a lot of reviews of various blocks in the price range I thought I could stand. This one is Chicago Cutlery, with the knives forged, all one piece. It has a serrated bread knife, which I've been lacking for several years now; an in-block sharpener; nice, hefty knives including hella sharp steak knives which I'll barely ever use, and a good butcher knife.

Tangent: my mom had a couple of venerable pieces of kitchen ware that for some reason hold a lot of childhood memories for me -- a really old glazed bowl, some linen dishtowels from England, mostly, brought back by my grandmother, some melamine dishes and glasses that were my grandmother's (I really like melamine, and my mom and I would always check at Target to see if they had any pretty patterns, and buy, like, one small plate each... I like having mismatched, colorful plates, as well as a set of plain grey ceramic IKEA plates & bowls...) -- and, point of this aside, an old butcher knife that was practically black, whose tip had been broken off sometime in the early 60s. That butcher knife was weirdly talismanic to me -- nothing worked as well as it; my mother would carefully get down on the floor to roll it sharp in one of those little rolling sharpeners; it was perfect for smashing garlic... anyway, I have no idea where that butcher knife went to after she moved out here. But my new one seems good, so far. Maybe I'll cook more? I mean, that's the point.

* several pairs of stretchy black pants and "swing tee-shirts" in different colors. I have beloved black stretchy pants, but they all have many, many holes in them, and I've defiantly worn them to work anyway, which sends my sister into a disapproving tizzy. So these not-as-nice, not-as-soft jersey trousers are my new effort. We'll see. Swing tee-shirts have a seam down the back so they are loose and don't cling, and damn, they're lovely. I bought some gorgeously intensely colored cotton ones last summer with my sister at a very expensive store, but these are just mostly oil-based cloth cheapish ones from Lane Bryant. Still comfortable and pretty, though.

* Because no spending frenzy for me would be complete without more books, I got five books that have been deaccessioned from various libraries, i.e. ordered used hard backs of historical fiction by one author that are all long out of print, and do not exist electronically. The author is Gillian Bradshaw, and I have just really enjoyed everything I've read by her -- people compare her to Rosemary Sutcliff... they both often write about Roman Britain, for example -- but she's less detached than Sutcliff. I'm really looking forward to reading them.

-- Dark North, about an African Roman official who visits Britain in the waning days of the Empire.

-- The Bearkeeper's Daughter about Byzantium and an Empress.

-- Imperial Purple an early Christian weaver, murex (the purple shells that create imperial purple), and the Byzantine emperor.

-- Alchemy of Fire 672 CE, Byzantium -- Moslems threaten Constantinople, a woman struggles to raise her daughter, some alchemist is involved.

-- Horses of Heaven 140 BCE in Afghanistan (Ferghana)... um, this one doesn't sound as good as the others now that I read a different description of it... and it has magic. Hmm. I think it's one of her earlier efforts. She published her first novel right out of college, and it was the start of a Celtic Arthurian trilogy that is A LOT like Sutcliff. I'm reading that now, but I took a break. I'm not all that into Arthurian retellings. One year, when I was twenty, THREE DIFFERENT PEOPLE sent me, as a birthday gift (in England; I was there for my Junior Year Abroad) Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon. Honestly, even though she is absolutely a fucking nut (though not an abuser, unlike Bradley), I prefer Patricia Kenneally "Morrison"'s Arthurian trilogy, The Hawk's Grey Feather, The Oak Above the Kings, and The Hedge of Mist.

* a new comforter set for my mom's bedroom... I gave the old set away to my friends R. and D., who slept over with their toddler J. last week over the Fourth of July... they were escaping, for the second year in a row, the extravagant neighborhood insanity of Oakland's 4th of July. The new comforter was pretty online; it's not on the bed yet, so I don't know how it feels and looks in real life yet.

2) My house is clean, my dishes are done, the last load of laundry is drying, I have a pot of tea and toast, my cat is here between me and the keyboard as it should be.

3) My nieces and sister and bro-in-law get home from the Midwest tomorrow, and I will get to hang out with Ruby and Rosie. Ruby's going to be a freshman at Cal in a little more than a month! Insane!

4) I bought a tape-into-digital device and software months ago, and FINALLY used it (and am still searching through the tapes) to make digital recordings of my mom singing. She did not leave very many examples of her voice behind, but Mary brought me out some tapes with handwritten labels. Most are just junk -- things my mom recorded from records... but a couple had her singing and playing guitar. I've transferred five so far, and although they still make me cry, it's so good to hear her voice, and to hear her singing and playing. One is a song I'd never heard, which she wrote herself, about her brother and father's suicides.

5) Adam and Lucie (his new wife) are coming to stay over this Thursday; it will be really nice to see him. We chat online as often as we can, but the time difference with Saudi Arabia, where he teaches at Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd University, is wretched. I'm looking forward to meeting Lucie; we've Skyped, and she seems hella sweet. But I will be glad to actually meet her. I just read this thing a nihilistic-kid posted on FB about how scientists may have cracked the problem of cat allergies with some kind of egg-powder coating for... I didn't really get that part... a pill? Everything you eat? (That won't work) and I wish it was in circulation NOW! Adam is allergic, though he takes antihistamines when he visits...

So. None of those are earthshaking things, none of them are political, but whatever. LJ feels like a fucking echo chamber these days, so I decided to try to add a teaspoonful of written noise.

I have an embarrassment (finally learned to spell that word a few years ago) of riches to read on my iPad. I got SO MANY Amazon gift cards at Xmas and I spent them hella quickly. But that leaves me the following to read (some purchases were books I want to own and re-read, so they don't feature. Quite a few, in fact).

Up soon:

Thrones, Dominations a continuation of the Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane, now Lady Wimsey (kind of ew, to go back to the days when women changed their names on marriage; I feel like that's not so frequent -- almost nonexistent among friends of mine, and not all that common outside the Bay Area Bubble) -- but written (with a partially completed manuscript by Sayers) by Jill Paton Walsh, a YAF author whose work I like a lot, especially her plague novella about a real village which sacrificed itself, A Parcel of Patterns, okay, off topic.

The Attenbury Emeralds -- another new Wimsey/Vane mystery, this time entirely by Jill Paton Walsh, though it looks back to Wimsey's more-than-once referenced first case. How did Paton Walsh get this permission?

A Presumption of Death the third post-Sayers Wimsey/Vane novel by Paton Walsh, set during WWII. God, do I love a WWII on the (British) home front novel.

Navigating Early by Clare Vanderpool, which is a historical YAF novel, probably on the quirky side, as was the first one I read by her, Moon Over Manifest.

Will Sparrow's Road the new Karen Cushman YAF historical... not her usual Medieval setting (though she's also done orphan train in American West, Western homesteading girl, and (my favorite, in another subgenre I am extremely fond of: McCarthyism in the US) The Loud Silence of Francine Green.

Telegraph by Michael Chabon, which I have been avoiding a bit because I really like everything else I've read from him, but this is local and has local politics in Berkeley and ... I don't know.

also by Chabon:

Wonder Boys which is older.

Shipwreck and Beware This Boy both by Canadian author Maureen Jennings. The first is a prequel to her 1890s Toronto police procedural series, and the second is a follow-up historical mystery to Season of Darkness (I think that's the title)... both of them ALSO set on the home front in Britain -- WWII.

Garment of Shadows the latest Mary Russell/(Sherlock Holmes) novel by Laurie R. King.

Dark Places thriller by Gillian Flynn, whose bestseller Gone Girl I avoided for ages, and then, in a weak moment, read. It was strange but somewhat compelling -- kind of as if Sophie Kinsella was going to write a really dark murder mystery set in the midwest with loathable characters. The second of her midwest-based (Missouri bootheel, to be precise... though I have argued in the past that Missouri is more the South than the Midwest) thrillers is better, I think. Or else it was the first -- Sharp Objects, and Gone Girl is the third.

Diabetes: A Sugar-Coated Crisis -- Who Gets it, Who Profits, and How to Stop it by David Spero, RN. No idea whether it's good or not, but at least it is a political/social discussion.

Some Embarrassing Star Trek novels I Refuse to Name -- Mostly ones by Peter David, who is apparently really sick, and people have been FB announcing that sales would help the family. To be honest, I once bought these same novels in paperback.

Swim a new novella or short story by Jennifer Weiner with whose chick lit I have a like-hate relationship.

Breed to Come, The Jargoon Pard (how could anyone resist that BRILLIANT title?), The Crystal Gryphon, and Gryphon in Glory, all by Andre Norton, whom I adored in middle school and was reminded of while reviewing some of my re-reads by Octavia Butler. For some reason I thought Andre Norton was a black woman when I was growing up.

and

War Brides by Helen Bryan, about which I know nothing except that it is also WWII home front in Britain, and appears to be sort of historical chick lit.

A new Charles Todd post-WWI mystery is being released on Tuesday, and that will be flying to my iPad, too.

Yes, I don't read many serious books.

Yes, random topic generator

What I tend to do to wind down from a tiring and stressful day in the classroom (which is most of them) is to get everything squared away in the classroom, then get in my car, drive to the drive-thru Starbucks (yes, yes, corporate heinousness, etc. etc), order their largest black tea with lots of half 'n half, and sometimes a piece of pumpkin bread (not their banana bread, which I think is a very bad example of banana bread), park in their lot, drink the tea, eat the pumpkin bread, and read whatever it is that I am reading at the moment. Tomorrow afternoon, that will probably be an Agatha Christie novel -- either Sleeping Murder, or A Murder is Announced. I've read all of her stuff before, but it doesn't quite rise to read-it-thirty-or-forty times level of rereading. Right now, though, I am watching on Netflix the more recent Marple series -- I still have not got my courage quite up to watch the replacement for Geraldine McEwen's Jane Marple, whom I thought was the best EVAR. But I'm working my way up to that. And both of the Christies I've named are part of that made-for-television series -- very good ones. I love how the newly crafted versions work in lesbians and gay men everywhere, and I am partly reading these particular ones to see whether there is any textual evidence hinting at that.

I had to click through a lot of snoozers before getting this adequate topic.

I got my first job in seventh grade. I mean, apart from babysitting my sister and other children, including infants. (Now I look back and wonder what the fuck were parents thinking letting a seventh grader babysit their six month old baby, or their six year old and his three year old autistic brother, until 2 AM or later sometimes... the 1970s were a freewheeling decade, for sure.)

In fact, I got my first job because the older sister of a boy I babysat told me about it, because she was quitting. The job was as general dogsbody and cleaner at a boutique in downtown Evanston called Kay Campbells, right on Church Street, a block from the Evanston Public Library. After it closed my second year working there, it became an Indian imports shop called The Peacock, which was a store I loved. I didn't love Kay Campbells so much. At all. My job was tedious, tiring, and also ripe for humiliation, since girls I went to school with would routinely show up to buy sleeveless cotton button down shirts and sneer at me (literally) as I scrubbed the floor at their feet. And polished the pedestals of the shirt rack/rounders. And mopped the changing room floors. And took out the garbage and washed the mirrors and steam-pressed the newly arrived clothes. Ugh.

Since I was only thirteen, I couldn't work legally, so the manager paid me out of petty cash. I believe my hourly wage was $3.10. That was more than I got for babysitting. I think I got $2/hr for babysitting. With my first cash from that job, I walked a block over to Kroch's and Brentano's Bookstore, and bought three books: George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984, and an incredibly right wing edition of The Communist Manifesto. It was all they had, and the introduction was classic Cold War propaganda 'know your enemy' stuff. I worked at Kay Campbells all through 7th grade and 8th grade, after school and during the summers, until the store went bust. Then I got a job, at age 15, at the Evanston Public Library, and after that, at the Northwestern Library. Parental pull was involved in both places. I never had a teenage job like waitressing or fast food. Only books, after Kay Campbells.

The second one that came up (after Fun With Poodles) was "The Secret Life of Benjamin Franklin".

I don't think it is all that secret that he was an inveterate flirt and womanizer, especially in France, as Ambassador.

What I remember enjoying about Ben Franklin was a young adult fiction book about him by one of my favorite 1940s/1950s authors, Robert Lawson, who is probably most famous for writing Rabbit Hill, but who wrote a number of other excellent books as well, including a sequel to that one. His books remind me of the ones by Robert McCloskey, who overlapped with him, though Lawson was much older (b. 1898, d. 1957). Lawson illustrated The Story of Ferdinand, the pacifist bull, which is older than I thought, having been published in 1936. Anyway, it looks like the very first book he wrote as well as illustrated was Ben and Me (1939), which was about a mouse who lived in Benjamin Franklin's headgear, a sort of capacious fur hat. It was an enjoyable biography and mouse adventure. Seems to me there was a long spate of time during which tales about talking mice were all the rage in the 1930s through 1960s. He also illustrated Mr. Popper's Penguins and Adam of the Road. I was never that fond of the former, but the latter was one of the many books set in the Middle Ages that I loved.

Other excellent books actually by Robert Lawson:

I Discover Columbus (1941)
Rabbit Hill (1944)
Mr. Revere and I (from the perspective of Paul Revere's horse) (1953)
The Tough Winter (sequel to Rabbit Hill( (1954)
Captain Kidd's Cat (1956)
The Great Wheel (1957) -- about Robert Ferris who designed the huge ferris wheel for Chicago's Columbian Exposition... a really nice book.





And this one is the scarred old veteran rabbit, Uncle something or other, lecturing the young fry about the dangers of dogs. From Rabbit Hill. Or possibly from The Tough Winter. I wonder if any of these are available as ebooks? I'll have to look.

This question makes me remember wouldprefernot2's answer on some three-peat meme, to "three things you'd like to see" -- he had a very beautifully articulated (as when did he not) response involving a world-historical defeat for the US that didn't involve religious nuts. What two things do I want?

1. Socialism, not barbarism -- the defeat of capitalism's rapacity and inhumanity, but not its replacement by squalor and environmental disaster. Or fascism. Not that either.

2. the ability to turn any book I already own into a compatible ebook file that will easily go into Kindle or iBooks or whatever. Some kind of autoscanner, I guess.

I guess the solution is to just continue this as an occasional series, once I'm done with today's and tomorrow's entry, which would finish the thirty entries in thirty days challenge. So, for THESE two hundred words (see, I managed it last time), another local-ish author.

Actually, I guess I don't know whether N. M. Caldwell is local exactly. I just know that she was published by Milkweed Press, which is some kind of equal-opportunity-new-authors-not-quite-self-publishing deal, which mostly publishes fiction with a social message. Possibly even a social-work message. That's often a recipe for disaster. In this case, however, it is not.

Caldwell has written two books -- one story and its sequel (as far as I know, these are the only ones) about adoption. They're interesting studies of very withdrawn and self-protective teenage girl who has bounced from foster home to foster home, and how she is adopted into a very self-confident, very STRUCTURED family. The first book is called The Ocean Within, and the second one is Tides. Much of both of the books takes place at the family's strong grandmother's house near the Atlantic Ocean. Maine, quite possibly. Or Massachusetts? I don't remember. In any case, again these two books are a character study of a stubborn and defensive girl. The author doesn't flip the stereotype and transform her into a sweet girl, rescued by unfaltering love, either. She stays prickly and possibly Aspergers-ish, without that diagnosis being raised. And the family is something. They're one of those -- do these really exist? -- families with an extremely well-developed persona, where everyone knows their place and there are traditions and rules and consequences and everlasting parental patience, and firm discipline. Now that I think about it a little bit, it's sort of as if this writer imagined what the ideal kind of a family to adopt someone who's been through an unending stream of insecure foster homes. They're interesting books, though, and I find myself rereading them fairly often, somewhat with the same attitude I bring to Cynthia Voigt's family, the Tillermans. They're not much like my family.