Kimberly Hirsh

Finished reading: The Undefeated by Kwame Alexander 📚

A gorgeous picture book poem.

Looking at my online presence you might believe all I do is read books, but I also play Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters.

Thank you @cygnoir@social.lol for sharing this link of how you can be an ally on Transgender Day of Visibility and every day! 🏳️‍⚧️

Finished reading: Since the Surrender by Julie Anne Long 📚

Julie Anne Long is really good at the job. Lots of yearning in this one, in the best way.

Bio update! My bio everywhere now reads:

Three books in a trench coat. Escribitionist. Mom. School librarian. Citizen of Romancelandia. I manage multiple chronic illnesses. I love books and games. 🌈♿

📚💬 “The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminized and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice a community of support. A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care.” Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom

📚💬 “Maybe the blast radius of disability destroys everything and also makes new worlds. Maybe these are worlds of paradox: both the radical limitation of what you used to be able to do and an explosion of the horizon around what you thought would ever be possible.” Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom

📚💬 “In illness, the now feels like punishment.” Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom

📚💬 “…this is the conundrum all sick and disabled people live with. To be pathologized is to be allowed to survive.” Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom

Finished reading: How to Steal a Galaxy by Beth Revis 📚

Super fun but also upsetting because of the social commentary middle book in a space heist romance trilogy.

Finished reading: Like No Other Lover by Julie Anne Long 📚

So great. Julie Anne Long is excellent both at the plot level and at the prose level.

📚💬 " What about stories that are enlivened, vivified, not despite illness and disability but because of them?" Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom

📚💬 " All the ways we cannot do something, all the ways we won’t be able to do something—what sort of political dreams can come from this as a starting place?" Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom

📚💬 “Disability describes a condition that is both more othered from and profoundly closer to one’s body than any other political condition that I can think of.” Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom

📚💬 “How many of us have already met our doom and then had to get out of bed and go on?” Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom

📚💬 “How can you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed?” Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom

Finished reading: Swim Team by Johnnie Christmas 📚

A great graphic novel!

📚💬 “When you have chronic illness, life is reduced to a relentless rationing of energy.” Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom

🎭 I’m at Beetlejuice The Musical and it’s like the musical theater version of Bats Day at the Fun Park. Everyone is here in their goth finery and it makes me so happy.

📚💬 “…reading Is the sort of activity that largely operates according to its own schedule.” Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

📚💬 “…the presence of problems in your life… isn’t an impediment to a meaningful existence, but the very substance of one.” Oliver Burkeman, Forty Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

Oliver Burkeman writes about professor Robert Boice’s attempt to get PhD students to work a little bit daily and take weekends off. The students wouldn’t do it and their desire to rush the work actually got in the way of their progress. I found something similar when I did a dissertation boot camp where for the whole day I was working on my dissertation instead of the small increments that I normally did. I was so exhausted after that week of pushing really hard that I had to take a 2-week break which obviously did not advance me as far as you might hope a boot camp would.

📚💬 “…having large amounts of time but no opportunity to use it collaboratively isn’t just useless but actively unpleasant…” Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

Please read today’s Book Riot Literary Activism Newsletter and EveryLibrary’s statement on the appointment of Keith E. Sonderling as Acting Director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services. It’s always a hard time for libraries in the US but it’s been an especially rough couple of weeks.

Finished reading: Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman 📚

As great as everyone says. It’s striking how much chronic illness and grad school prepped me for accepting rather than struggling with the ideas here. This is a perfect book to read when you’re in your 40s.