Currently reading: The Best There is at what He Does: Examining Chris Claremont’s X-Men by Jason Powell 📚

Started watching X-Men 97 📺 which reminded me that I love the X-Men, so now I’m reading this and reading the comics mentioned alongside. Super fun.

Want to read: A Web of Our Own Making by Antón Barba-Kay 📚

My kid told me, “A cross between a piglet and a pug is a puglet.” When I replied, “Good night,” meaning to indicate that it was time to sleep and not to talk, he said, “I just wanted to give you that very valuable information.” I love him the most.

Finished reading: No Good Duke Goes Unpunished by Sarah MacLean 📚

I love every Sarah MacLean heroine.

Finished reading: One Good Earl Deserves a Lover by Sarah MacLean 📚

Lady Phillipa Marbury is a refreshing take on a bluestocking.

Hello world, I am full of hormonally-induced ill feeling including headache, nausea, and cramps. Until further notice, I hate everything except my family and friends, romance novels, Pepsi with real sugar, and Star Trek.

📚🔖 Here is the actual study with the evidence of the correlation between fiction reading and cognition.

🔖📚 Read If You Read a Lot of Fiction, Scientists Have Very Good News About Your Brain.

It’s always good to look at the actual studies behind news articles like this, but the evidence that reading fiction is associated with improved cognition suggests the importance of libraries, I think.

Just a little reproductive system education, because I’ve met many adults who have uteruses and don’t know this: the menstrual cycle refers to the entire span of time from the first day of one period to the day before the first day of the next. Not just when you’re shedding uterine lining.

Austin Kleon introduced me to a newsletter issue in which director and writer Mark Slutsky talks about the feeling of being in good hands:

I’ve come to trust a certain feeling that comes over me when I first make contact with a piece of art. The opening lines of a book; the first 30 seconds or so of a movie; bars of a song, etc. It is a feeling of being in good hands, an intuitive sense that the author knows what they are doing and that the experience will be worth my time.

I felt this way as soon as I read the first sentence of Cat Sebastian’s We Could Be So Good:

Nick Russo could fill the Sunday paper with reasons why he shouldn’t be able to stand Andy Fleming.

I loved that book so much, so I was thoroughly psyched to get the chance to read an advanced reading copy for You Should Be So Lucky, a novel set in the same mid-20th-century America narrative world, about a grouchy, grieving arts reporter and the golden retriever/foulmouthed jerk baseball player whose slump the editor of Mark’s newspaper has tasked him with writing about. As often happens in a romance, these two knuckleheads learn, grow, and fall in love, not necessarily in that order.

What I loved: So much. Woof. Hard to even think of how to explain it all. I’ll start by saying that mostly, I love these two characters, and most especially I love Mark, who is a snarky reporter with a squishy heart, who simultaneously so appreciates the way his deceased partner William made him feel worthwhile and loathes the way William’s political ambitions meant that they could never seem even at all possibly queer. I just love him so much. I imagine him as a young Trent Crimm (from Ted Lasso, in case you’re not familiar).

I love Eddie, too, his inability to hide his feelings just ever. His willingness to throw caution to the wind and let his blossoming friendship with Mark just exist in the world without constantly looking over his shoulder about it. His beautiful relationship with his mother and his own bruised heart in the face of learning he was about to be traded to a team that would take him far from his home and everything he knew.

What I wanted more of: Let’s be clear. There is nothing that I’m like, “Cat Sebastian didn’t do enough of that,” because Cat Sebastian is awesome. But let’s also be clear. I will read more of whatever Cat Sebastian wants to write, and if she wrote a lovely Christmas novella about Nick and Andy (from We Could Be So Good) and Mark and Eddie all being at a Christmas party together, I would read it so hard.

What I need to warn you about: This book is about two dudes falling in love, so if you don’t want to read about that, skip it. There is some spice but the language isn’t very explicit. I’d say, medium-ish, maybe slightly less than medium spice? There are some of the kind of things that people usually want content warnings about: death of a partner before the book starts, period-appropriate homophobia, parents kicking a son out due to their own homophobia.

Who should read this: People who want a romance with a lot of interiority, minimal conflict between the two main characters, people who like baseball mixed in with their love.

🔖 Read a pair of pieces about art and mothering:

The ‘Impossible Life’ of Equal Devotion to Art and Mothering by Jessica Grose (NYT Gift Link)

“Is This The Best Use of My Time?" Sara Fredman in conversation with Catherine Ricketts, author of The Mother Artist.

Finished reading: A Rogue by Any Other Name by Sarah MacLean 📚

I do love a good 19th Century casino. Thank goodness for the romance-guaranteed happily ever after, because there was a lot of this book that made me sad when the two main characters had huge misunderstandings.

Thanks to everyone for your kind words over on Manton’s post about my joining the Micro.blog team!

I want to be clear that I’m not taking over for Jean as community manager. I’m the first of I hope many people who will contribute to curation and community work.

My little sister M.E. is expecting a baby. Her due date is July 20. She’s 4 and a half years (and 4 days and 30 minutes) younger than me. She hasn’t had a baby before.

I’ve never been an aunt before.

When my mom was pregnant with M.E., I called my mom’s belly my belly. When the two of us lived with my dad for 6 months while he was working in North Carolina and my mom was finishing her undergrad at Florida State University, a lot of M.E.’s care became my responsibility by default. When our dad stayed in NC and the two of us returned to Florida to be with my mom while she did her Master’s coursework, I was still heavily contributing to M.E.’s care. During those years I was 8 and 9. She was 3, 4, and 5.

If she has her baby on her due date, I will be 43 and she will be 38. She is very grown.

I asked W. to help me remember that being a big sister and an aunt does not mean being a volunteer postpartum doula. I don’t trust that I won’t sacrifice my own health and my time with my own child in order to show up for her and her baby.

Postpartum time is one of the most isolating times of life and I forget that when she is postpartum, I won’t also be immediately postpartum. (Because once you’re postpartum at all you are always postpartum, but being immediately postpartum is different.) I have ingrained anxiety that I will have to relive that time alongside her.

The first few months postpartum were one of the most isolating times of my life and I don’t think I can take that away from her. Even if it were possible, I think it would be detrimental to my health to do so.

I hate this distrust I have of myself, of my ability to hold boundaries. I hate that I feel like holding my boundaries will mean hurting her.

It would be good for me to remember that I am not remotely the only person in her life who can show up for her. It would be good to remember that while I kind of was when we were kids, except for the things our parents did for her, I’m not now.

Finished reading: Eleven Scandals to Start to Win a Duke’s Heart by Sarah MacLean 📚

Yes, I finished this less than 36 hours after I finished the last one.

Between chronic illness and acute illness it feels like I have so little time when I can be doing things besides resting.

🔖📚 Read How Pregnancy Forever Transforms the Body and the Mind by Lucy Jones (Literary Hub).

First pool visit of the season yesterday. If I could do everything in water, I would. 🧜🏻‍♀️

Finished reading: Ten Ways to Be Adored When Landing a Lord by Sarah MacLean 📚

I love the heroine in this so much. Big eldest daughter, have-to-hold-it-together energy, and I’m so happy the hero is ready and willing to act as a partner and show her that just because she can do everything alone, that doesn’t mean she should have to.

🔖📚 Read What Eve L. Ewing’s Career Trajectory Tells Us About Black Women’s Place in Mainstream Superhero Comics by Ravynn K. Stringfield.

Dr. Stringfield does an awesome job illuminating how Eve L. Ewing’s comics career highlights structural inequality in the comics industry

🔖📚 Read A Daughter Becomes a Mother: On Inhabiting Both Roles in Fiction and in Life by Heidi Reimer (Literary Hub).

Finished reading: Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake by Sarah MacLean 📚

My first MacLeaniverse adventure and, of course, I loved it.

Finished reading: The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo 📚

So great. I loved it so much. More later.

Me: goes to Target Ah, it’s so nice to be out in the world.

🔖 Read The films that gave us unrealistic expectations about what makes a ‘home’.

…I too had one of those houses I had always dreamed of. But it wasn’t by design… It was by living my life and creating a home that served the needs of that life.