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Moving is stressing me out. I will be delighted to be back in Vermont this fall, but at the same time I feel that it's much harder to be your adult self in the same environment you grew up in - different vectors act against you in social groups that knew you when.
So my brain is a bit busy and all I want to do is sit around re-reading The King of Attolia and the Miles Vorkosigan books. Things I've read before that are well written and emotionally twisty enough to keep me engaged again and again, but which have no chance of ever making me go "no, what, horrible, can't be, makes no sense, grr" and throwing them against the wall.
In this kind of mood, only books by authors who are absolutely safe, known quantities have any appeal. Preferably books I've read before. I think I've read The Pinhoe Egg three times this summer. I'd have read Conrad's Fate as many times, but it got packed up and shipped to my mother's basement a few weeks ago, so its total stands at two for the summer. I re-read all of the Dalemark Quartet a few months back in one long go.
Nonfiction books quickly try my patience, though I did have the immense and unexpected pleasure of actually being able to recommend Hourani's History of the Arab Peoples to someone last week as a genuine Readers' Advisory recommendation. I was so happy I did a little dance. The cultural history of impotence I'm reading is pretty amusing but the book on tricksters struck me as bad and pretentious and got quickly returned to the library.
Also I felt full of joy when I saw a picture book called "Flying!" by Kevin Luthardt at the library because it is a) a brightly colored and happy and about a little boy who thinks about flying and there are birds and a loving daddy, plus, b) the little boy and his dad are not-white.
There is a severe and tragic shortage of picture books where the main characters are not-white AND the book itself is bright and cheerful. I like The Moon Ring by DuBurke for this too. Because about 94% (by unscientific make-up-a-numberness) of the non-white-kid picture books in my library are all full of dark saturated blah blah colors, even if they are not sad stories. Hellooooooo, small children of all skin tones do like brightly colored stories, I believe. Even this book I'm praising is honestly a bit flattened in color tone for my taste. I don't get it. How about not just bright colors, but shiny happy saturated colors? Something as bright as a Jan Thomas book like Rhyming Dust Bunnies. (I looooove Jan Thomas books. They make me laugh so hard.)
So my brain is a bit busy and all I want to do is sit around re-reading The King of Attolia and the Miles Vorkosigan books. Things I've read before that are well written and emotionally twisty enough to keep me engaged again and again, but which have no chance of ever making me go "no, what, horrible, can't be, makes no sense, grr" and throwing them against the wall.
In this kind of mood, only books by authors who are absolutely safe, known quantities have any appeal. Preferably books I've read before. I think I've read The Pinhoe Egg three times this summer. I'd have read Conrad's Fate as many times, but it got packed up and shipped to my mother's basement a few weeks ago, so its total stands at two for the summer. I re-read all of the Dalemark Quartet a few months back in one long go.
Nonfiction books quickly try my patience, though I did have the immense and unexpected pleasure of actually being able to recommend Hourani's History of the Arab Peoples to someone last week as a genuine Readers' Advisory recommendation. I was so happy I did a little dance. The cultural history of impotence I'm reading is pretty amusing but the book on tricksters struck me as bad and pretentious and got quickly returned to the library.
Also I felt full of joy when I saw a picture book called "Flying!" by Kevin Luthardt at the library because it is a) a brightly colored and happy and about a little boy who thinks about flying and there are birds and a loving daddy, plus, b) the little boy and his dad are not-white.
There is a severe and tragic shortage of picture books where the main characters are not-white AND the book itself is bright and cheerful. I like The Moon Ring by DuBurke for this too. Because about 94% (by unscientific make-up-a-numberness) of the non-white-kid picture books in my library are all full of dark saturated blah blah colors, even if they are not sad stories. Hellooooooo, small children of all skin tones do like brightly colored stories, I believe. Even this book I'm praising is honestly a bit flattened in color tone for my taste. I don't get it. How about not just bright colors, but shiny happy saturated colors? Something as bright as a Jan Thomas book like Rhyming Dust Bunnies. (I looooove Jan Thomas books. They make me laugh so hard.)
