Another treasure discovered via Katherine May‘s newsletter. Musicians have submitted a petition to have Los Cedros Cloud Forest (which already has legally established personhood) recognized as a co-creator of their song. It features “frogs, birds, the slowed down echolocating frequencies of bats & vibrations from the mycorrhizal networks of a newly discovered fungus.”
https://open.spotify.com/track/3H182DGezvqGcpcUwIALNW?si=-exWOuJtS9-EUGZf55o_Ng
“I want my parents to be in love in both ways, not Dad by himself. So I fall in love for them, over and over again.”
#BibliologistBio
WHAT ARE YOUR FAVORITE GENRES?
Literary fiction, speculative fiction, nature writing, memoirs, essays, & romance.
WHAT ARE A FEW OF YOUR DESERT-ISLAND READS?
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood, I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, and Devotions by Mary Oliver.
WHAT'S YOUR GO-TO READING SNACK?
Coffee and frosted animal crackers or beer and wasabi peas.
Cont‘d 👇🏻
I reactivated MyTBR account & have been daydreaming about being a bibliologist ever since. What would your profile look like if you worked for them? I‘ll share mine in a separate post!
QUESTIONS:
•What are your favorite genres?
•What are a few of your desert island reads?
•What‘s your go-to reading snack?
•Weirdest or most interesting place you‘ve read a book?
•What do you do when you‘re not reading?
#BibliologistBio
pickDalton, a political adviser forced into a rare period of inactivity by the pandemic, finds an injured leveret on the path behind her country home and nurses it back to health. Though she never closes the door to the fields & meadows beyond her threshold, the hare chooses to spend pieces of each day with her. Dalton‘s cottage is viewed as a safe haven — so safe that the hare eventually opts to give birth to her wild babies in the author‘s bedroom.
“The atmosphere of calm suffused by her throughout the house lingers even when she is gone. I hope always to be able to summon it at will, along with the memory of the light and trusting touch of her paws in the palm of my hand, and her steady…gaze. And when one day I can no longer see her, I will watch the hares in the field knowing that her being is woven into theirs, and I only have to look up at night to see her symbol etched in the stars.”
Happy milestone, @dabbe !
My #moodboardcontest vibe is, “Everything‘s a mess but at least the tender buds are blooming.” Easter has always been my favorite but my family is going through a rocky patch right now…as is our country, as is the world. I‘m taking comfort in soft breezes, soft petals, & soft puppies whenever I can. I‘ve also been conducting scientific research re: how long the average 39-year-old woman can stay submerged under coffee.
pickIf I wanted to review this book properly (and follow the author‘s lead), I‘d give each essay a rating out of 5 stars and then calculate the average. My actual method was far less scientific, which is how I roll. I basically just went with my gut.
This was my first John Green book. I say that as a librarian who works in Youth Services, by which I mean I‘m saying it very quietly so as not to be publicly shamed. The good news is that I loved it.👇🏻
pickWow, I cried so much at the resolution. 😅 Get ready for a post-book, post-cry headache (in the best way).
This was an absolute pleasure — one of the best romances I‘ve read in a while — with two small caveats:
1. Reading about anything you have intimate knowledge of is always tricky; it leads to hyper-criticism. After raising a house rabbit for 12 years, I have intimate knowledge of what it takes to be a bun-mom. And Lane had a pet bunny.👇🏻
“That‘s what I wanted, more than anything: a low pressure way to say hey, we‘re cool, how are you. No need to be weird anymore; we‘re too old, and the world is too fragile.”
pick“Pour Some Sugar On (Past, Present, & Future) Me”
It was the summer of 1996. My best friend, Dana, and I had decided to start a band. Never mind that neither of us knew how to play an instrument. Never mind that at least one of us (me) couldn‘t carry a tune. Our name was Azalea and we were going to be HUGE. I knew this because I‘d read what was written in Dana‘s composition notebook. 👇🏻
Recently, I asked for book recommendations. I was/am seeking something on the lighter, funnier side. Approximately a bazillion books came in for me (with lots of side-eye and ribbing from my coworkers). I whittled the stack down to those where the first few pages snagged my attention. This is what I ended up with.
Thanks to those who chimed in!
Fingers crossed. 🤞🏻
pickI fell in immediate & unabashed love with this novel. Batuman‘s clever writing & strange sensibilities made me laugh & read sentences aloud every other page. I even went to her website to learn more about the weird & wonderful person writing. When I saw that she‘d used code to make the words “web design” appear in rainbow font (stating that she‘d learned how in the 90‘s), I felt myself swoon. Then, my feelings became more convoluted & complex.👇🏻
Whoops! Late to post my (nonfic heavy) #ReadingBracket2025.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil will *always* end up on the board whenever she‘s got a book to enter into the fray.
Titles written below (for those of us who struggle with tiny print):
Jan: The Witching Year by Diana Helmuth
Feb: Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson
Mar: Bite by Bite by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Wild: Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel 🏆
Wild: Eight Bears by Gloria Dickie
Anyone read any good, contemporary, offbeat, funny fiction lately?
Everything on my shelf seems to be diametrically opposed: weighty, dark, lyrical, and poignant OR a floofy romance. I‘m looking for something more like the titles pictured. Witty, modern, and not *necessarily* sweet (but it‘s okay if there‘s some sweetness, too).
*It should probably be noted that I‘m not a fan of massively unlikeable characters.
Check out my (very red & angry) new tattoo!
It‘s a memorial tribute to Moxie (my pet house rabbit), taken from Brian Wildsmith‘s picture book “The Princess and the Moon.”
My artist (who just happens to be a descendent of Owen Chase, first mate onboard the Essex — the shipwreck that inspired Moby Dick! 🐋) used a process called “bloodlining” to get the color bleed right. Pretty bad-ass, tbh.
She said I sat like a champ. 🏆
On my love/hate relationship with StoryGraph stats:
I almost never categorize the books I read as lighthearted. Yet, it‘s one of the biggest pieces of my moody pie! How? Eg: Unreliable Narrator is tagged as lighthearted. Written by a comedian, it‘s mostly about living with depression. Kind-of the opposite of lighthearted! The point is “things feel so heavy”; then, “how do we go on, anyway?” Finding the light is not the same as BEING lighthearted.
pickAre there sentences I wish Choi had never penned (or at least had edited out)? Yes. Chief among them, “It reorganized her thoughts with such an intensity that she had the sudden urge to pee.” Still, this book is *compulsively* readable. I loved the sci-fi story-within-a-story that Penny crafts for her Creative Writing course. And I‘m a sucker for both misfits *and* an epistolary component (be it letters, emails, or texts)…👇🏻
“By the time I was ten or eleven, everyone had moved on from sticker collecting—everyone, that is, except for me…I particularly loved the fruits…
God, I loved scratch and sniff bananas. They didn‘t smell like bananas; they smelled like the Platonic Ideal of bananas. If real bananas were a note played on a home piano, scratch and sniff bananas were that same note played on a church‘s pipe organ.”
pickI used to try to read aloud to my pet house rabbit and, though she was my little soul-twin in many ways, she was decidedly uninterested; she preferred a cozy silence.
Bite by Bite will go down in personal memory as the first book I read aloud to my pup. He *loved* it. We started with Nezhukumatathil‘s essay on potatoes. Jett is now my “best spud.” 🥔 He also loved the chapter on maple syrup. As such, I‘m unable to rate this book objectively.
My March reads, roughly in order of enjoyment (from least to greatest). The bottom row features all of my favorites.
I keep shocking myself with how many books I‘m managing to read each month. Either this is my new norm, thanks to deleting my social media accounts (and what a confirmation of my choices that would be!) or it‘s going to taper off at some point. With the gradually warming weather, I‘m starting to let myself dream of beach reading…
so-soQuite possibly the most three-star book I‘ve ever read. 😅
Too many small details, which I normally don‘t mind, but it doesn‘t feel like they add anything (e.g. “I dropped the keys into the bowl on the table”; “I slid the bin from the shelf and lowered it to the ground”; “I pulled onto the shoulder…sliding the gear into park”; “I opened the door, getting out of the truck”, “I reached out…I pushed it open…My eyes widened,” etc).👇🏻
pickIn recent years, there‘s no show I‘ve been more obsessed with than “Joe Pera Talks with You.” I‘m mentioning this because I subscribe to Jo Firestone‘s newsletter; she plays Sarah. Sometimes, she lets her friends (and fellow comedians) take over her newsletter for her. One such installment was written by Aparna Nancherla. In it, she mentions her forthcoming book. This one. I can‘t say I recommend the book as much as the show but…it was okay. 👇🏻
pickI can‘t count the amount of people to whom I‘ve enthusiastically gushed about this book!
Wholly compelling & nuanced characters (Niamh, I love you), great writing, a vivid setting, horrifying scorpion snacks, the gleeful destruction of every binary, and Spice Girls references *aplenty.* I‘ve heard the series described as a direct & oppositional response to JK Rowling‘s TERFdom — and yes, it‘s (needfully) that — but it stands on its own, too!👇🏻
I‘m at a lakehouse in upstate NY with two of my high school besties. We‘ve hit up 3 bookstores in 2 days. 🤓 This is my haul from the most recent stop.
It‘s BONKERS windy here! Obscured book title tagged. 🐈⬛
pickIt‘s hard not to compare this to Erica Berry‘s Wolfish (tagged below, which I also enjoyed). Eight Bears is less of a memoir and more just straight-up science journalism and travelogue. It‘s also *far* more organized. Previously, if you‘d asked me how important organization was to me, I would have scoffed. I tend to think of myself (and my taste) as being sort of dreamy, floaty, and tangential. But Gloria Dickie proved me wrong! 👇🏻
pickAnother book down for my kids‘ fantasy book club at the library. I think they‘re going to love this one. Clear sentences, a shorter page length, whimsical illustrations, and some higher thinking about cruelty vs. kindness & how to manage deep emotions (anxiety, loneliness, abandonment, loss) make it an appealing & balanced book.
At the end of each meeting, we always make corner bookmarks. This time, it‘s twirly, leafy Green Man mustaches. 🍃
pickYeah…that was great!
It‘s been a bit since I stayed up past midnight to finish a book but this was worth it. I only want to read about unlikeable characters from now on if it ends like this.
That the author thanks her “beloved sphynx cat, who sadly passed away as [she] was completing this novel”, stating “I would have started a death cult for you,” only makes it better. I know the feeling. R.I.P. Moxie Crimefighter. 🐰 Long live Samantha Allen!
“I had developed a habit of making tea and not drinking it. Small swamp waters multiplied on every hard surface of the apartment.”
pickThe kind of novel which immediately makes you jealous that you‘re not a 30-year-old debut author with a longlisted book being considered for a prestigious award.
Callahan‘s stream-of-consciousness style might not be for everyone. But it is for me — and it lends itself to some brilliant one-liners. My favorite might be, “She said that coincidence was a religion and that she was agnostic.”
The form fits the plot exceedingly well. 👇🏻
Beth Brower, author of The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, on what she looks for in a March read.
I think this might be what I look for *always.*
“I didn‘t think you were that keen for marriage…”
“Yeah, but that was with you,” he said.
“Cheers.”
“No, I mean, the future you decide with a person is different for every person, isn‘t it? It‘s not like you decide what you want, then someone fits into that. We decided we wouldn‘t have gotten married. Lucy and I discussed…that we would…”
“All these things we thought about each other…funny how wrong we were.”
“We weren‘t wrong…we were growing up.”
“I had never known a feeling as unbearable — as sour, wrenching, and unshakeably sad — as pity for a parent.”
pickIt‘s a testament to Alderton‘s writing (& my own healing) that I was so immersed in the story, I didn‘t even think to compare it to my formative heartbreak until 3/4 of the way through! Being “ghosted” by someone you care about, when you‘ve been lead to believe that what you have together is valuable, is so damaging to your self-worth. I love that in her novel, Alderton suggests we trust our friends to be keepers of our hope. Just for a while.👇🏻
pickThis romance, featuring the statue of a medieval knight who comes to life and the museum conservator working to restore him, was somehow both more ridiculous and less ridiculous than I anticipated. 😅
The author says she took some liberties with “Griffin‘s speech patterns, because if he really spoke like someone from the early 1400‘s, he and Emily would struggle even more to understand each other.” And that‘s all well and good but…
Reading about Paddington‘s home — the cloud forests of “darkest Peru” and the creatures who live there, including the pictured hummingbird. It‘s called a Sparkling Sunbeam and being reincarnated as one is now my plan for the afterlife. They‘re so pretty, are a part of something called “the brilliants tribe” (how aspirational!), they‘re a species of Least Concern, & they build those tiny little moss cups as their home and live in the clouds.
Sold.
Moominland Midwinter was my pick for February, given that I read and loved it first. But I can see Giving Up the Ghost potentially sweeping the whole board.
I‘ll tag each of the remaining books below (to make it easy for anyone who may be considering adding them to their TBR).
#ReadingBracket2025
This is the face of someone who has just applied for admission to Sophie Blackall‘s “Workshop for Writers of Picture Books” (published and unpublished) at her farm retreat in upstate NY. What a stupidly amazing opportunity that would be! It‘s beyond competitive (10 spots), so I‘m not expecting miracles.
STILL.
Wish me luck! 🤞🏻
“I am writing in order to take charge of the story of my childhood and my childlessness; and in order to locate myself, if not within a body, then in the narrow space between one letter and the next, between the lines where the ghosts of meaning are.”
“You need to find yourself, in the maze of social expectation, the thickets of memory: just which bits of you are left intact?”
“It was afternoon: that time, around three o‘clock, when a day seems to pause and yawn, before stretching itself and ambling towards teatime.”
“Since then I have always been addicted to something or other, usually something there‘s no support group for. Semicolons, for instance, I can never give up for more than two hundred words at a time.”
pickHave you ever wanted to burst into a round of applause at the end of a book? God, this was so good.
Hilary Mantel‘s memoir isn‘t especially uplifting. Her story is shaped by institutional — specifically, medical — neglect. It makes the pleasure I took from being welcomed inside her brain, where I could luxuriate in the craft of her sentences, feel almost shameful. I‘m choosing to feel wonderstruck (and a bit star-struck), instead.
What a writer!
pickJust a few chapters in, I texted a friend in my book club and lamented, bluntly, “I don‘t like our book.” The fact that I came around is a surprise to me!
I never did come around to Rendon‘s writing style, however. Her short, declarative sentences are not my cup of coffee (nor are they my peanut butter cookies). More variation of sentence structure would‘ve gone a long way. 👇🏻
I‘ve felt sort of scattered and dissatisfied lately; I think those feelings have transferred to my reading life, too.
For the second month in a row, I read more than I typically do. But the vibe is off. 🙈
I did read two books I absolutely adored: Moominland Midwinter and Giving Up the Ghost. I hope that same passionate energy guides me and focuses me in March.
I‘m still reading the last two. But I‘ll be done before the clock strikes noon!
“It‘s a life skill: finding the sweet spot between solitude and loneliness.”
“It is time for me to take up skipping…I don‘t want to but I have to try. I‘d rather turn the rope and say the rhyme than skip…
[Hopscotch] is better than skipping, but I find that when I try to stand on one leg, the pressure of my thoughts pushes me over.”
Perhaps this explains why I‘ve never had any luck with sports? 😅
You‘ll have to forgive me. I know folks have complained about Litsy not being as book-focused anymore (a complaint I don‘t share…but maybe I‘ve just been vigilant in muting hashtags I‘m not interested in). Anyway, I deleted all of my social media when Meta made its most recent changes (re: fact-checking & hate speech). So, this is all I have left. And I need the world to know that yesterday was my puppy‘s birthday! Jett tasted his first ice cream.
so-soIn college, I took a course called Celtic Christianity. I learned that in the Celtic version of the Adam & Eve story, all of nature prays in the river alongside the Edenic couple while they beg for divine forgiveness: the fish, the frogs, even a big, blue whale. It shouldn‘t have surprised me, then, to read about all of the animals in this story, set in Wales, who help Gwynn process the grief of losing his sister: …👇🏻
pickI discovered that I‘m way less of a word nerd than I think I am! 🙈 Listening to Curzan‘s musings on the English language, I found myself feeling amused and surprised by the text as often as I caught myself zoning out. The main takeaway is that language evolves; unless clarity is being lost, we should watch how it does so with interest and curiosity instead of gatekeeping and policing usage. 👇🏻
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