The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
You’ll notice two things about this image: first, that none of these books were on the shelf last month, and second, that I have obviously dropped my “don’t buy new books unless they’re part of a series I already have” rule entirely as of June. Also, there are three different books on the shelf with the word “bone” in them, which entertains me quite a lot.
The Monthly Reads pile tomorrow is going to be staggering.
I haven’t set anything or anyone on fire today and I’m just going to have to count that as a win.
Pretty sure you can click for bigger, if you want— but I popped over to work this morning so that I could drop a few things off, and my classroom has officially been moved, so I went in and sat for a while, trying to figure out where to put everything.
Two big problems to be solved right now: one, you will note in one of the pictures that there are huge globs of thick brown glue all over one of the walls. That glue used to be behind a blackboard which they just removed; I don’t mind losing the blackboard in favor of more wall space, but I was assuming they’d take the glue down with it? Maybe it’s on somebody’s To-Do list; I’m just gonna hope and not worry about it until August. Also, there’s print on one of the whiteboards– that bit that looks like watermarking on one of them is actually there— which is hopefully also removable somehow.
Second, I’m coming from a classroom where there were literally wall outlets every two feet around the perimeter of the classroom (my old room used to be a computer lab) to a room with a total of eight– two in each corner of the room. I am trading this for more floor space and an actual window, so I’m not mad about it– I made this decision on purpose, after all– but it’s still something I need to figure out, since I have a shitton of stuff that needs to be plugged in. I mean, extension cords exist, but at some point the building services folks are gonna get mad at me, right? Plus I have to control all those cables somehow, and that’s going to be a lot of work.
There’s a ton more storage, too, so I can probably get away with putting one of my bookshelves back in the old classroom, but I also want to have at least a small classroom library this year, in case we are doing silent reading in Advisory again.
(I am thinking about cell phone solutions, too, and I just discovered this exists. I don’t really want to pay for it, but an actual locking cabinet specifically to hold phones seems like a pretty useful idea, more so than a bunch of pouches on the wall.)
(falls down a rabbit hole)
Actually, let’s talk about that a little more: the state of Indiana just passed a law literally making it illegal for kids to have their cell phones in school, or, to be slightly more specific, requiring schools to have a policy that says the kids can’t have their cell phones. Now, we can say that all we want; we’ve been saying it for years and it doesn’t matter. The kids aren’t going to leave their phones at home, and they aren’t going to leave them in their lockers, but it’s not impossible to set up something where they put them in a specific place in the classroom, so long as it’s reasonably secure and other people can’t walk off with their phones. This is the problem with the “pouch poster” system– anybody can walk off with anybody else’s phone, and if I’m going to monitor when people get their phones out of a pouch on the wall, I may as well lock the damned things up somewhere so that I can just lock and unlock a box at the beginning and the end of class. I’m already planning on having as deviceless of a classroom as possible next year; we’ll be starting most days next year with everyone’s iPads in a pile in the back of the classroom where they’re out of reach. I just have to figure out a phone solution.
Anyway, back to thinking about what to do with that classroom. Anything stand out to you?
I’m going to write a few sentences, finish my Arabic and then I think going to bed several hours early might be the move tonight. I’m not only not going to watch the debate, I want to be in a position where monitoring it online isn’t possible, so I need to either turn off every device in the house or actually be unconscious, and one of those two options requires a lot less work.
Let me begin with some Statements which are Generally Known to be True:
That said!
Wait. No. Let’s do this first:
Two things are Correct about this costume.
I hate every single other fucking thing about the fucking costume.
Do not get me started on Clark’s hair:
(Actually, the hair is whatever; I think Clark would have a more conservative haircut than that ramen-looking GenZ mop bullshit but it definitely makes him look less like Superman, so I’ll deal.)
Okay. I’ve got that out of my system now, I hope. I have seen a couple of images today that I can’t find now where someone took the Corenswet suit and basically Photoshopped in the edits that I suggested above, and it looks perfect, and I’ll update if I find one again. And I will get over it, especially now that I’ve written this. It’s not the most important thing about the fucking movie. All the same: blech.
This will be my second post in a row that is about a book but which I’m not calling a “review,” mostly because in the case of Sydney J. Shields’ The Honey Witch I’m not convinced I know how I feel about it yet. It is also the second book in a row where the thing about it that grabbed me was the title. I don’t know what a honey witch is, or at least I didn’t before I picked the book up, but for some reason I found the idea immediately intriguing– so intriguing, in fact, that I decided to overlook the fact that nearly everything else about it indicated that it was likely to be something I wasn’t necessarily going to enjoy. I mean, take a look at that pull quote. Those of you who have been here a while– have you ever heard me recommend a book with the phrase “sweet feast”? “Tender longing”? Okay, I’ve been reading a fair amount of romantasy lately, and I’m pretty sure if I went through my books in the last couple of years and counted up the ones with gay relationships in them versus the ones that were primarily hetero, the gay stack would be quite a bit taller. But everything about this just kinda feels like Not Me. I mean, this is the blurb:
The Honey Witch of Innisfree can never find true love. That is her curse to bear. But when a young woman who doesn’t believe in magic arrives on her island, sparks fly in this deliciously sweet debut novel of magic, hope, and love overcoming all.
(And see that “deliciously sweet” bit there again? All the pull quotes have honey- or tea-related puns in them and they’re excruciating.). But yeah. Honey Witch. The concept sold the book. Fuck it, I got it on sale for nine bucks. Who cares about nine bucks? I don’t care about nine bucks.
The first 80% was, indeed, sweet and whimsical and I might be starting to overuse this word lately but delightful and also, I dare say, cozy, another word that is maybe a sign of Not for Me sometimes. And it’s a fast read; 340 pages and I was reading about a hundred pages an hour while going through it.
And then after that first 80%, it gets really dark going into the ending, and I don’t want to spoil anything but I either loved this book or the ending ruined it, and as I’m sitting here I honestly can’t tell you which it is yet. I five-starred this and even put it on my shortlist for the end of the year, and it’s either going to end up at, like, number nine or something or it’s going to be a book that I quietly pull off the list in October. And it’s really going to depend on whether the first part of the book sticks with me more than the ending.
(At this point, I’m changing the title to my standard “Review” template, because screw it, this is a review. “I loved it up until the ending and I’m not sure about the ending” is a review. #myblogmyrules)
(And it occurs to me that, while this feels pretty standalone and as far as I know is not intended to be part of a series, but if a sequel were to come out, I’d pick it up, mostly because I like the characters so much. That, in and of itself, may seal the “review” part of the review.)
I am going to deliberately not use the name of the book I just finished, either in the title or in the body of the review itself. I have sprinkled clues here and there, however! I didn’t like this book at all, and I feel like talking about what the book did wrong, but I don’t just want to shit all over it. It has this weird enthusiasm to it that got me through 740 pages in, like, two days. It’s not entirely shit! It’s just … not very goddamned good.
So. Let’s provide some advice to authors.
God, there’s more, but I two-starred this on Goodreads and the more I think about it the more I want to go back and change it to one. That second point is just for enthusiasm. If this book made a whole bunch of right turns where it chose to make left turns it might have been a good book, and I can almost see where this author might be writing stuff I like in the future. But Christ, this book was a Goddamned mess.
Pfah.
Woke up this morning with my head swimming, and while I’m not unused to occasional dizziness first thing in the morning, holy shit— this, with no other symptoms, knocked me flat on my ass for almost the entire day, and I took a four hour nap this afternoon. That didn’t really leave a lot of time for much else; I’ve been reading a book that I’m not enjoying very much, and I’m trying to decide whether I dislike it enough to review it after I finish it or if I should just put it down and not worry about it. Advice, to future writers: you are not allowed to introduce time travel as a plot element with only a hundred pages left in your book. Don’t do that. Please.
Tomorrow I go back to studying in the mornings, after taking a couple of weeks off– my test is July 1st, and I am bound and determined to pass this damned thing on the first try. I have one more practice test handy, so I’ll start going through my last remaining study guide tomorrow, and take that test Wednesday, maybe, and then use the last couple of days to make sure of things like “I know how to use the calculator” and “my computer will run the software without a hitch.” I have no reason to leave the house next week other than a handful of tasks to take care of on Wednesday, so I have plenty of time to get myself ready. I popped into my classroom for a few minutes last week, and told my boss that I was about to take the test, and she didn’t say “Oh, that class isn’t happening,” which I’m hoping means that there’s still at least a good chance.
I dunno, that’s what I’ve got. How was your Sunday?
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