This small book was given to me as a Christmas present. It is very short — I read it in an evening — and found it lovely.

Although, now I must say I am forgetting the details! I did close the book convinced that I need to read her longer book, Braiding Sweetgrass.

I do remember one quote that has stuck with me, and which I have been meditating on endlessly since finishing the book: “If there’s not enough of the think you want, learn to want something else”. Wall Kimmer grounds this lesson as something that we learn from evolution and the natural world. I find it extremely potent and often useful, in how I think about small things, and big ones.

I love Octavia Butler. So much!! I think her Xenogenesis trilogy (also called Lillith’s Brood) is so creative and wonderful, and works on a special type of “organic sci-fi” that I’ve been unable to find anywhere else. I also really love her seed-to-harvest cycle; I read it years ago and those characters have still stuck with me.

It’s sort of silly that Parable of the Sower is my 9th Octavia Butler book. Liz and I read it together, for a book club at our local bookstore (Golden Hour Books!). It had all the hallmarks of a great Butler novel: a bleak setting, pessimistic narration, surprisingly brutal characters, and an incredible amount of perseverance. It was great.

My caveat here might be a reaction to the book club discussion more than to the book itself, but: I don’t necessarily want to give this book the credit for being as “prescient” as it’s usually portrayed. It’s full of deeply cynical, distrusting, fend-for-yourself type people and individuals, reacting to a world whose government and other institutions have repeatedly disappointed and attacked their members.

But I think it’s important to remember that that’s not the only reaction that people have to crumbling institutions. Another reaction is for people to pick up the initiative and connective work otherwise done by institutions, and simply do it themselves. Introduce themselves to their neighbors. Shovel each other’s driveways. Find something in common with someone new. I don’t think this pro-social (rather than anti-social) response to various forms of instability is any less likely to occur; and in fact there’s evidence that that is, in fact, how people behave: see this article entitled How Communities are Rallying Together in the Wake of Natural Disasters.

I don’t know that Octavia Butler was trying to “predict” and anti-social response to failing institutions when she wrote Parable for the Sower. And it’s a good story, regardless. Not for everyone, but if you like Octavia Butler (or N.K. Jemisin, or The Road by Cormac McCarthy), then you’ll love this book. But, perhaps due to the fact that there are some parts of Parable that feel very real, it’s worth noting that not all stories come true 🙂

I absolutely inhaled this book in about a day and a half. Granted, I read a lot of it on a plane. But it was still great.

Kevin Wilson feels like a very well-kept secret: I rarely hear about him, but I only hear absolute wonderful things. This was a book that a cousin gave to me for Christmas a year or two ago, and I am sorry I let it sit on my shelf so long!

The elevator pitch isn’t what makes the book good, so I won’t even go into the plot. This book could be about paint drying and it would still be great. What makes it good is the realness of the characters, and the humanness of all the scenes. Each moment feels ordinary enough and relatable enough that you could slide right into the book; which makes it all the wonderful and awesome when absolutely extraordinary and bonkers things happen.

I am sort of floored that it took me so long to read this book - this is exactly the type of book that I love. I feel like I should have read it in high school! I read it on family vacation and had a blast talking about it with many of my in-laws (who have all read it, of course). The entire time I was reading it, it seemed like every conversation I was in somehow related to the book; it was one of those books that was “about” everything.

One central tension from the book that has stuck with me in the weeks since I’ve finished it is that of external stimulation vs deep thought. The “Brave New World” society seems to stave off the latter by constantly enjoining the former. This is something that rings so true to me, and of course is no undocumented or mysterious phenomenon. In my work and in my personal life, either I’m thinking and processing, or I’m doing something else. Quietude and the fruits of quietude are their own domain, I suppose: and not replicable alongside other activities.

One line that has stuck with me from the book: “Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery.” I don’t have much to say about it. But I like it.

Lastly: the book was great because it doesn’t have any heroes. Ideologies are presented and clashed, both through the narrative and in actual dialogue; but the way they are shared in the book shows the flaws of each. It seems clear to me that Huxley chose to present a less than pristine version of each worldview presented, which makes sense: we’re only human, and so our ideas are flawed.

This book is super short, too, so there’s much juice for not much squeeze. I’d recommend it to anyone.

I’ve struggled for a long time to read short stories… my intuition was that they needed to be approached differently from novels, and so I could never really find a rhythm for them.

As a result, I’ve had this book on my shelf for several years. I finally decided to stop treating it like different stories, and just read it cover to cover like a normal book, whenever I had time (revolutionary, I know) and I ended up enjoying the book mightily.

The stories of this book are their own genre. Not sci-fi, not horror; always? More than both? Or, getting at the existential awe and intellectual humility that accompanies encounters with the unknown.

Harlan Ellison also writes in a way that makes ME want to write. As I’m reading, I can tell he’s making up the story as he writes, coming up with the beginning first, then the middle, then the end. You can tell he’s having so much fun. For the first time, it made me consider whether I have stories in me that might be worth sharing.

676 issues of Captain America have been published by Marvel since 1968, and the number continues to tick up each month. I’ve now read a large enough of a percentage that I’m confident in the silent goal I’ve had for about two years: I’m going to read them all.

It’s only a completionist goal like that which motivates me to read very old collections like this - this one covers 1969-170.

Sometimes the quality of these stories reveals their target demographic of kids walking through grocery stores, not adult nerds: there are some minor characters who names magically change between issues (or within issues) and there are a couple plot lines that get re-used, just a few issues a part.

But it was cool to see a comic book wrestling with such topical social issues: there were two different (albeit almost indistinguishable) issues about student protests, and an issue that reckoned with apartment building fires in Harlem. And asides on the destructive forces of racism and ground/air/water pollution are peppered through the book. It’s extremely political in a way that I found attractive.

But was surprised me was how romantic it was… which is to say: very. Surprising in a good way- I love sappy love in action comics: each tends to enhance the other.

This was also the debut of Captain America on his motorcycle: not stuck in New York, but riding all around the country. This is another version of Cap I really like, and wish we saw more of. It’s cool to see him in this mode so early on.

I wanted to read this book after seeing Wicked Part One last year. There is a light subplot in that first movie about the rights of individuals as it pertains to humans vs animals, that I could tell was hinting at a greater theme from the source material (the book). That theme was explored again a bit more in the second movie, so I decided to give the book a go.

Boy was I glad I did - this book is an absolute banger. Perhaps the first fantasy book I’ve truly loved. I frankly didn’t really like the movies; I thought they were a bit long and a bit uninspired. But the book was absolutely phenomenal. Dark, transgressive, political, complex. The author works to make Elphaba unlikeable as possible while still having you root for her, in an impressive and gripping way.

I haven’t seen the play, but I’ll say the book is nothing like the movie, plot-wise. Instead of a single story that takes place mostly during college, the book is spread out into five parts, each of which have multi-year time gaps between them. And Glinda plays a much smaller role in the book than in the movie.

What I was most enamored with was Maguire’s commitment to the religious and philosophical lore of Oz. There are a whole stable of different folk religions, each which weave in and out of different political leanings. One theme of the book seems to be how what we believe about ourselves and others has less to do with the truths of the universe we observe, and more to do with the stories we must tell ourselves in order to cope with our own selves and choices.

This book absolutely ruled. People with attachment to the musical or the movies should be warned: you may not like how the book originally portrayed these characters. But it’s a phenomenal read.