Tomorrow’s pile of books has a good chance of being the most ludicrous pile I’ve ever posted; most of these books were not here last time I did this. I did nothing but read in July.
Month: July 2024
In which Indiana is awesome
Yes, really, I said that. I have a rule, and I’ve had this rule for, I don’t know, three or four elections now. I do not vote for straight white men if there is an acceptable candidate who is not a straight white man on the ballot. That is, effectively, the tiebreaker.
Y’all, look at my ballot for this fall’s election:
Starting from top left, clockwise:
Kamala Harris, President of the United States
Jennifer McCormick, Governor
Valerie McCray, Senator
Maureen Bauer, State House Representative, District 6
Destiny Wells, Attorney General
Lori Camp, House of Representatives, IN-02
The Vice-President will almost certainly be a white guy and Lieutenant Governor is a white guy. I will vote for both of them, of course. My State Senate representative, Dave Niezgodski, is also a white man, but I will not be voting for him as he is a sex pest. Amazingly, the Republicans are not running anyone for the seat and his sole opponent is a Libertarian (and an engineer, which I find hilarious) so Niezgodski will likely win 70-30 without my help. And honestly the Indiana statehouse is so Republican-dominated at the moment I don’t even care if we lose the seat for a cycle. It genuinely won’t matter.
I’m basically casting six votes here, and all six are either for women or for tickets where a woman is at the top of the ticket. I have never been able to do that before, and it’s fucking awesome. I can’t wait to get into the ballot booth.
Yay, nuts!
It’s official: as of today, my son is no longer allergic to tree nuts or coconuts. Peanuts, unfortunately, are still on the no-go list, and are likely to remain there for the rest of his life, but he’s gone from a kid with a laundry list of allergies as a baby to just peanuts as a nearly-teenager and, even better, he’s managed to do it without ever having any reactions to anything stronger than a mild rash. Every other person I know with a peanut allergy has had to reach for an epipen at least once.
I probably have a similar post back in the archives from the Egg Challenge and the Strawberry Challenge, but the way this works is that they do a skin test first. He passed the skin test for everything but peanuts. So they pick one tree nut– apparently the allergen is common to all of them so it doesn’t really matter what kind you get– and they bring you into the doctor’s office, and they feed you a tiny sliver of the thing, then wait half an hour, then a little more, then half an hour, then a little more, then half an hour, and then a nice mouthful and this time they wait an hour. It takes forever and most of it is spent sitting around hoping to continue to be bored, because if something interesting happens it will be something terrible.
I forgot to bring a book, so I spent the whole morning holding forth on BlueSky. You should join me over there!
Also, speaking of joining me, I’m two minutes away from the White Dudes for Harris kickoff. Are you a white dude? Come on over. I don’t really plan on being there for much more than half an hour or so– from the list of Names they’re expecting, this is going to go on for hours, and I don’t have the stamina– but I’ll show up at the start and donate money again to pump up the numbers.
Tomorrow, Deadpool & Wolverine. For reals this time.
Sunday night book reviewlets
I was gonna go see Deadpool & Wolverine today and life intervened, so let’s review a whole bunch of books.
The Tide Child Trilogy, by RJ Barker: Excellent, although it took me fifty pages or so of the first book to get used to RJ Barker’s writing style. Nautical fantasy is a sorely underexploited subgenre, and damn near the entire trilogy takes place on a boat. Now, it’s a boat made from dragon bone, and it’s sailed with the help of a walking bird-thing who can magically create wind, but outside of that I can’t imagine anyone who enjoys historical fiction would want to pass on this, and the fantasy elements are not as extensive as a lot of the other books I have read this year. Combine that with some lovely, subtle world building and a feminist perspective that is omnipresent and will still fly over the heads of some readers and you have something I really enjoyed.
Mornings in Jenin, by Susan Abulhawa. This is the second of Abulhawa’s books I’ve read this year and is actually her debut novel, but in all honesty it’s superior to Against the Loveless World in nearly every respect, and Against the Loveless World is a book I enjoyed quite a lot. Abulhawa is a Palestinian author and this book begins with the creation of Israel and follows a small handful of characters up to, more or less, present day (the book came out in 2006, and ends … 2002-ish, maybe? So close enough.)
All of the trigger warnings, and if you’re remotely human this book will leave you incandescent with rage at several different points. I need to do a whole bunch of research and then read it again. It might be the most important book I’ve read this year; everyone needs to read this one.
The Hunter, by Tana French, is the second book she’s written about Cal Hooper, the main character of her previous novel The Searcher. I don’t have a lot to say about it that I didn’t have to say about the first book she wrote about this guy; Cal is an American ex-cop who moves to Ireland in search of a slower, calmer life and ends up in the tiny (fictional) town of Ardnakelty, where he quickly forms a bond with Trey, a local teenager with some trauma in her background. In the first book, Cal got pulled into the disappearance of Trey’s brother, and in this book, her father reappears for the first time in years and brings all sorts of pain with him. This book is less about the central mystery (it’s technically a murder mystery, but the murder doesn’t take place until about the 60% mark) and more about the relationship between Cal and Trey and what it’s like to be an outsider in a small town, and I really feel like this and The Searcher are both triumphs. I’d love to see more about these two.
the book of elsewhere, by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville. I was super excited about this one, so I’m sad to say that this is quite easily the single most disappointing reading experience I’ve had this year. I don’t have any idea how the co-writing process worked between Reeves and Miéville; Reeves also “co-writes” the comic book series that this book builds upon, but I can say that the only thing in this book that felt like Miéville was the vocabulary. Had those two names not been on the cover, I’d not have made it past the prologue, which is so choppy and poorly-written that I can barely believe it made it to publication. I made it through about 120 of the book’s 340 or so pages before deciding I had other things to do, and I don’t see myself picking this back up. You should avoid this unless you’re a huge fan of BRZRKR, the comic it’s based on … and I don’t really think BRZRKR has any “huge fans.” Definitely stay away if you are a fan of Miéville; just pretend this book never happened.
More Veepery & some other nonsense
If you had asked me more than four or five days ago, I would have told you that, at least for me personally, Bluesky (follow me!) was beginning to approach the levels of usefulness of pre-Nazi Twitter, but had yet to even come close to pre-Nazi Twitter in its ability to be funny.
This JD Vance couch-fucking shit has absolutely put that concern to bed. It’s been going on for days, and it’s still funny. It may literally never stop being funny.
This might not be true, but I’m pretty sure it is: every single time in the history of the human race someone has asked “But where’s the ______ for white men?” that person has been a racist asshole. This fact made me at least a little nervous about trying to find out if there was, in fact, a White Men for Kamala Harris group. Why was I wondering so specifically? Well, in the last few days we’ve seen a number of other identity-based groups getting off the ground, and White Women for Kamala Harris broke Zoom, and damn it, I wanna play too! And frankly, given that white men are the other guy’s biggest demographic, I think it’s probably perfectly reasonable to suggest that those of us of that persuasion who are very much not in favor of the fascist felon and his merry band of dipshits should be loud and proud of it.
I’m happy to say that White Dudes for Harris is a thing, and our Zoom call is Monday at 8:00 EST, and Pete Buttigieg is gonna be there, and if you’re also a white dude you can sign up for it here. And you should. We’ve got some numbers to live up to, dammit.
The more I hear about Josh Shapiro the less I like him, and Bloomberg is claiming that the Veepstakes is down to him, Mark Kelly, and Tim Walz. Of those three, I am 100%, unreservedly, whole-chestedly, full-throatedly on Team Walz. Let’s do this right, damn it.
You have at least one book review coming and possibly two, but just in case I don’t get to one or either of them: R.J. Barker’s Tide Child trilogy is really damn good, and unless it utterly fails to stick the ending– I’m about 100 pages out– Rachel Caine’s The Hunter is an absolute return to form on her part and I’m happy as hell to see it.
Also, despite previous reservations, I may actually be seeing Deadpool and Wolverine in theaters tomorrow, marking my first in-theater Marvel movie since 2019. That will almost certainly receive a review if I manage to actually get out to see it.
How’s your Saturday going?
Taking tonight off
Today involved a funeral and then a four-hour nap, and I just looked at my watch and was quite startled to realize it was 8:00 already, which is a thing that happens when you sleep the entire afternoon away.
If you’re looking for something to do, I would appreciate a word– a sniglet, you might say– for a funeral that you attend out of social obligation and not personal loss, so that you can mention you went to it without someone telling you they’re sorry for your loss.
Next!
All right, FromSoft. I just strapped on my heavy shield and my bleedin’ stick and absolutely melted Promised Consort Radahn. What else you got?
On being creepy
What you are looking at is the foliage in between our house and the house behind us. There’s a fence buried in there, and until yesterday there was a shitton of broken branches as well. That tree that is more or less in the center of the picture lost a couple of big branches during a storm last week, and while the tree itself is in their yard, the branches all landed in ours.
I don’t want to hear anything about the condition of my lawn. I hate green things. This is known.
So anyway: the way the rules work in Indiana, it doesn’t matter who the tree belongs to; if some shit falls in your yard, it’s your problem. And the branches were still attached to the tree up top but were way too high for us to reach so we had to call out some tree guys. I got an estimate on Monday and they took me by surprise yesterday by calling and telling me they were on their way. I was a little worried that they’d have to go into the neighbors’ yard for part of the job, so I figured it was at least polite to let them know that the work was being done– and, again, given the density of the plant life between our house and theirs, it was reasonable to believe they hadn’t even noticed the branches had come down.
Problem is, because of peculiarities in how my neighborhood is laid out, it’s either a good ten minute walk or an actual ride in my car to get from my front door to their front door. And the guys were on their way, and I’d literally just gotten “on their way” from the dispatcher, so I didn’t know if that meant “five minutes out” or “they’re coming from Dowagiac and they’re gonna grab lunch along the way,” so actually leaving my house to go talk to them seemed kinda problematic.
But lo! Standing in my back yard (I’d been doing yard work, as it turned out) I realized I could hear people in their back yard! A conversation! Multiple people! Okay, cool– I can just talk to whoever that is over the fence, right? No problem.
Well, except for, again, the dense foliage. I walked over to the fence and tried to figure out who was in their back yard. Complicating things: this house has what seems to be a huge cast of rotating teenagers and I rarely see the adults– they either have an enormous family, are constantly letting the kids have friends over, or are fostering a bunch of kids. So it was probably going to be kids in the back yard– and it sounded like teenagers– and, what, do I start the conversation with “Go get your dad”? Or do I just tell them and assume a sixteen-year-old is an acceptable vehicle to deliver the message “there may be strangers in your back yard soon”?
I do not normally suffer from social anxiety– I’m a teacher, for fuck’s sake, I stand in front of people and talk for a living— but I discovered quickly, standing in my back yard, that I had no idea how to begin a conversation with a stranger who 1) would not know in advance that I was even there and 2) would absolutely not be able to see me for a moment or two after realizing I was there and talking to them. I mean, how do you start that conversation?
“Excuse me! Hi, I’m over here, in the bushes. It’s your neighbor!”
(They do not know my name and I do not know theirs. It’s 2024.)
Yeah, it was gonna be awkward.
And then, still not sure exactly what I was going to do, I got closer to the fence and found an appropriate spot where there was at least a chance they would see me.
So, um, I’ve left out the part where they have a pool in their back yard? And I’d heard them but not seen them yet, and there hadn’t been, like, splashing or anything. And what I was greeted with once I’d put myself in a position of being able to see my neighbors was a high school-aged girl, in a skimpy bikini, and what I can only assume was her boyfriend, shirtless and in a bathing suit. He was sitting in a beach chair, and she was … enthusiastically twerking on him.
A whole lot of thoughts went through my head really fast, and I decided that under those circumstances I was not terribly interested in being hi-I’m-in-the-bushes guy. I retreated, as far as I know without detection, and decided that they would figure out that there were people in my back yard cutting down branches when they heard the saws, and that if I actually needed to talk to them, I’d cross that bridge when I came to it.
And that’s how I got arrested for being a Peeping Tom, your honor.
The end.
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