reader. writer.

I frequently blog about what I have read, sometimes analyzing it as a writer, sometimes reacting as a reader. 

What I’m reading–drawn from my weekly check-ins.

I recently completed a quick read of Lisa Mangum’s Write Fearless. Edit Smart. Get Published, and Kate McKean’s Write Through it, both engaging and encouraging. McKean’s book is especially helpful for someone seeking the traditional publishing route, which I am not, though I still found helpful insights. I also recommend her Substack. I took note of several of Mangum’s writing tips to try in the future.

I’ve started and stopped a few books, which I won’t name because my rule when writing about other writers’ work is that if I can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. I almost always gain a few insights, no matter what I read, including to figure out why I quit reading. I often stop when I feel like a protagonist just did something stupid that didn’t make sense in context (to err is, of course, human, but it has to make sense). In one book, I liked almost everything but had to stop because the stakes for the characters’ actions were too low. In another book I quit, the stakes were so high that I felt weighed down by all the hardships the protagonist was experiencing. Some of this may be my own shortcoming as a reader, I confess. Still, it is intriguing to try to figure out why some books pull me in so easily, and others don’t.

I read Natalie Sue’s I hope this finds you well in one sitting, especially loving the acerbic take on office dynamics. I approved of the pacing and logic of the narrative, an element of craft I need to ponder further. I’ve also been savoring Naomi Novik’s Buried Deep and Other Stories. I’m a huge fan of her Scholomance and Temeraire series, partly because I am blown away by her skill at world-building and because the moral compass of her protagonists is so essential to these stories. This collection includes stories set in both worlds, a treat for a fan like me.

I’d had Leif Enger’s I cheerfully refuse on my TBR list, though I wasn’t sure when I’d be brave enough to read it. With a book both dystopian and literary, I suspected it would be wrenching, despite the words in the title. I was right, though I am nonetheless glad I read it. His characters felt alive to me from the very start, as if I stood in the kitchen with them. There were lines that simply sang, and a rising conflict kept me turning the pages. Reading this book at this point in our history reminded me of when I read Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven in the fall of 2020. Both books depict worst-case scenarios of current crises, Enger’s on the rise of a brutal oligarchy and the fracturing of social bonds, Mandel’s on surviving an extremely deadly global pandemic. Thanks to Enger’s skill in making me care about the characters, I was hollowed with grief at points in the reading, partly for the loss of an important character and partly for the parallels to horrors both real and potential in our country right now. The hope the book offers is that one can come out on the other side to reach a space of stability and community again. It is small comfort when we are sitting on this side of it.

Od Magic by Patricia McKillip has classic fantasy elements, but there was an emotional layer to it that caught me by surprise, that feeling of living with/after grief, a club many of us belong to. I hope it won’t be a spoiler to add that something I especially admired was that the story built suspense and conflict without resorting to what I have nicknamed the Thanos effect–that is, too many stories depend on infinitely raising the stakes, as if it’s not bad enough that one person gets hurt or dies, but somehow the number of casualties has to keep increasing until you reach Thanos level, in which half of all life in the universe is destroyed. Yet don’t we all know that even one life lost can be heartbreaking? And fearing even one person being harmed can be enough to make us hope that somehow things will  change for the better? 

Everything is tuberculosis by John Green This book finally popped up on my Libby app this week after being on hold from the local library for months. Reading it inspired me to periodically ask my husband questions like, “Did you know that the Bronte sisters all died of TB?” To which he began responding, “Why are you so obsessed with TB?” You have to read the book to understand, and everyone should. I encouraged my daughter to, and she said, “What’s it about?” and I said, “The title says it all.” 

Reading a sensitive, nuanced book that explores the history and politics of an issue always feels like good use of my attention because it boosts rather than harms my ability to make sense of the world we live in. 

“On my first day of training, she said to me, ‘Death is natural. Children dying is natural. None of us want to live in a natural world.’ Treating disease—whether through herbs or magic or drugs—is unnatural…Hospitals are unnatural, as are novels and saxophones. None of us actually wants to live in a natural world.”

“Framing illness as even involving morality seems to me a mistake, because of course cancer does not give a shit whether you are a good person. Biology has no moral compass. It does not punish the evil and reward the good.”

“We could reimagine the allocation of global healthcare resources to better align them with the burden of global suffering—rewarding treatments that save or improve lives rather than treatments that the rich can afford. When markets tell companies it’s more valuable to develop drugs that lengthen eyelashes than to develop drugs that treat malaria or tuberculosis, something is clearly wrong with the incentive structure. And we are not stuck with that incentive structure.”

Multiple excerpts from Everything is tuberculosis by John Green (read it, read it, read it)

Careless People by Sarah Lynn-Williams: At first, it read like an engaging celebrity tell-all, the kind that makes me grateful I don’t move in those circles. Then, it got darker, as Facebook’s global expansion provided tools that boosted the rise of autocrats, a trend the company chose to embrace rather than reject. Plus, the managers reminded me of the worst trolls now running our government. They aren’t just careless—they are truly terrible. Between it and the Netflix Buy Now documentary, it’s clear that we must always assume corporations are lying, even under oath. Our government has to push private companies to prove they are acting in good faith to prevent or redress harm. Never take their word for it. Of course, for that to happen, we need a state and federal government that is responsive to voters, the opposite of what happens when there is gerrymandering and voter suppression. 

Robert Macfarlane’s Is A River Alive? The beginning moved slowly for me, though it had a lovely meditative quality. The more I read, the more I got into it. I just finished the first section, in which I felt transported to experience firsthand the estimated 1.5 million-year-old Los Cedros Cloud-Forest in Ecuador. Macfarlane then skillfully introduces lively individuals connected to the “thunderclap” ruling in 2021, when the Constitutional Court sided with the Rights of Nature against the mining companies. The ongoing political histories and environmental concerns hit home hard, and turned out to be exactly what I needed to be reading right now.

The Protectorate series by Megan Keefe: I just finished burning through a SF trilogy that I picked up at our library used book sale (I ❤️ libraries)— the Protectorate series by Megan Keefe. It was a fun read that reminded me of Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch series and James S.A. Corey’s Expanse series. Immersing in a series sometimes helps me clear my head during these turbulent times.

Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: In the book Among Others, the protagonist mentioned Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, including the concept of ansibles which reminded me of the tech I assume to be possible in my SF series. So I read the book, unsure what to expect. When I began, it felt like a dated conceptualization of the future, plus I had trouble connecting to the protagonist. I persevered, and by the end, I felt that Le Guin had been incredibly insightful and that so many of the tensions and philosophical concerns were highly relevant to today. Plus the closing was so moving.

Reading can be a hit or miss experience: Sometimes I skim or sample books that don’t quite grab me, and I won’t name them because I don’t like to post something that may sound critical of another author’s work. I gain insights no matter what I read, sometimes about the craft of writing and sometimes about myself, my current mood/state of mind in the moment, which always affects what captures my attention.

Flavia de Luce books by Alan Bradley. In this series, a precocious eleven-year-old girl uses her knowledge of chemistry to solve mysteries in 1951 England. My local library has an e-book that contains a collection of seven books, so I am binge-reading them. The stories are written in a lively style, with rich setting and characters, and lots of humor. There are a few parallels with my series (and countless differences!), one reason I was curious to read it. It’s also fun. Here’s a line that made me grin: “Although it is pleasant to think about poison at any season, there is something special about Christmas…”

Jo Walton’s Among Others: Eclectic would be a generous description of my reading tastes. Lately, I’ve been in a science fiction and fantasy mood, and I’ve found great options by looking up past Nebula nominees. I just finished Jo Walton’s Among others, which was a lovely read because I could relate so well to the protagonist as a teen in the 1970s spending hours reading science fiction.