Books
📚💬 “…surely ghosts will follow wherever there is bad record keeping.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻
📚💬 “Here, then, is a central paradox in the way that ghosts work: to turn the living into ghosts is to empty them out, rob them of something vital; to keep the dead alive as ghosts is to fill them up with memory and history, to keep alive a thing that would otherwise be lost.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, writing about the dissonance between Richmond’s history as the home of slave trade and torture and the fact that all Richmond’s ghosts are white 👻
Finished reading: Kiss the Girl by Zoraida Córdova 📚
This is such a perfect move of Disney’s The Little Mermaid to contemporary romance. There is so much perfection to be had here, such magic work taking movie moments and making them part of our world. If you’re an Ariel person, you should read it.
North Carolinians, use this tool from EveryLibrary to contact your state senator about H636, a bill that “threatens student rights, undermines local control of school libraries, and risks costly censorship battles across the state.” I’ll try to do a detailed breakdown of the bill soon. 📚
Finished reading: By the Book by Jasmine Guillory 📚
A sweet Beauty and the Beast retelling.
📚💬 “The contemporary attitude toward Spiritualism as a particularly ridiculous belief stems in no small part from the misogyny with which it was attacked in the second half of the nineteenth century.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻
📚💬 “Ghosts, you could say, flock to women left alone.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻
📚💬 “Even though the soles of her feet felt like she was walking on broken glass, she glided across the greenroom and stood face-to-face with her father.” Zoraida Córdova bringing a little Hans Christian Andersen to her Disney-inspired Little Mermaid romance retelling, Kiss the Girl 🧜♀️
📚💬 “Live in a house for any length of time, and you make it your own memory palace.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻
📚💬 “Uncomfortable truths, buried secrets, disputed accounts: ghost stories side out of the shadowlands, a response to the ambiguous and poorly understood.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻
📚💬 “Those aspects of a life that are discontinuous, fragmented, or unexpected, are made whole through the ghost story.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻
📚💬 “A haunted house is a memory palace made real: a physical space that retains memories that might otherwise be forgotten or that might remain only in fragments.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻
📚💬 “The past we’re most afraid to speak aloud of in the bright light of day is the same past that tends to linger in the ghost stories we whisper in the dark.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻
Finished reading: If the Shoe Fits by Julie Murphy 📚
Super cute modern Cinderella retelling.
Finished reading: Deep Blue (Survival Instincts, #0.5) by Adriana Anders 📚
Thank you @cygnoir@social.lol for pointing the way to this beautiful thread about the power of connections we make online. 📚💬 “She strode the earth clad in the invisible armor of their virtual companionship.” ― Lev Grossman, The Magician King
Finished reading: Between the Devil and Desire by Lorraine Heath 📚
Finished reading: In Bed With the Devil by Lorraine Heath 📚
Lorraine Heath is great at her job.
Finished reading: Born In Ice by Nora Roberts 📚
This one made me a little weepy.
Finished reading: Oathbound by Tracy Deonn 📚
Ugh so good, Tracy Deonn is so wonderful and I hate that I have to wait a long time for the next book in the Legendborn Cycle and I also know writers need time to do their work. Probably will do a full series re-read ahead of the next.
Finished reading: Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat by Javaka Steptoe 📚
A gorgeous picture book biography.
📚💬 " ChatGPT has access to every poem ever written, at least in theory, but it can’t feel anything when it generates a poem from a prompt. Is this still poetry?" John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI
📚💬 “It’s a near certainty that generative AI can have some positive effects on human writing, but for that to be true, we must hold fast to what makes writing meaningful to humans.” John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI
📚💬 “What do we make of a technology that is simultaneously undeniably powerful, has access to all the information in the world, and can produce outputs at a speed unmatchable by humans, but at the same time is also untethered from reality?” John Warner, More Than Words