Books
📚 Book Riot’s Literary Activism newsletter is always valuable. This week, Kelly Jensen takes a deep dive into the use of ChatGPT to decide whether books should be removed from libraries.
Finished reading: Payback’s a Witch by Lana Harper 📚
It’s a witchy romance between two bi women and it has a punny title. What’s not to love? Moderately steamy.
📚💬👱♀️ “When Pearl Dragon and cheap wine and even magic have all failed us… there will always be Buffy marathons.” Lana Harper, Payback’s A Witch
😭 I’m not crying, you’re crying.
Bookstore Romance Day Recommendations 📚♥️
We’re just a few days out from Bookstore Romance Day!
A couple things to know about romance novels:
First, they always end with the love interests having either a happily ever after or a happy for now.
Second, they range in smuttiness from super sweet with hardly any physical intimacy, to quite explicit. But the emotions are always the core of the story, not the smut.
Here are some of my favorite romance reads. Pick some up at your favorite indie bookstore!
Mr. and Mrs. Witch by Gwenda Bond. Like Mr. & Mrs. Smith but with a lady witch and her dude witch hunter fiance. World travel, intrigue, blisteringly hot.
The Widow of Rose House by Diana Biller. Gilded Age, haunted house, widow unfairly subjected to scandal, cute inventor man, fairly steamy.
Ayesha at Last by Uzma Jalaluddin. Pride & Prejudice but everyone lives in Toronto, is Muslim, and is Indian or Indian-Canadian. Sweet, not even kisses until close to the end.
Hana Khan Carries On by Uzma Jalaluddin. You’ve Got Mail but with halal restaurants instead of bookstores. Everyone lives in Toronto, is Muslim, and is Indian or Indian-Canadian. Sweet, not even kisses until close to the end.
Red, White, & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston. Transatlantic shenanigans where the son of the president of the US hates and then loves the spare prince of England. Very hot, a little explicit but not much, super witty, unputdownable. Read if you watched the movie but wanted more. (Skip the movie if you read it and will be disappointed that they had to combine or change characters and drop a lot of detail to make it work for the screen.)
The Neighbor Favor by Kristina Forrest. A publishing assistant corresponds with her favorite author, who stopped writing fiction after his book about black elves didn’t sell much and his publisher closed. He ends up being her neighbor and they fall in love. Pretty steamy.
If you’re more of an audiobook person, see if you can support your local indie bookstore via Libro.fm.
Finished reading: Chef’s Kiss by TJ Alexander 📚
This book is super queer and super cute. Simone’s a chef. Ray’s a kitchen manager. They take a long time to get together but once they do, it’s 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥. Warning: Transphobia & a relatedly garbage workplace.
Want to read: Disabilities and the Library by Clayton A. Copeland 📚
Want to read: Kids Across the Spectrums: Growing Up Autistic in the Digital Age by Meryl Alper 📚
Want to read: 90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality by Allison Yarrow 📚
Want to read: Birth Control: The Insidious Power of Men over Motherhood by Allison Yarrow 📚
📚🔮 “…the Tarot constitutes first and foremost an apprenticeship in seeing.” Marianne Costa, The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards
Finished reading: Solomon’s Crown by Natasha Siegel 📚
Gorgeous prose in this book that’s like if The Lion in Winter was mostly a romance between Richard and Philip. Recommend!
📚💗 August 19 is Bookstore Romance Day!
My fiction reading has been almost exclusively romance (across a variety of subgenres) since May and it’s making me very happy. Why not support your favorite indie bookshop & buy a romance from them?
I’ll write up some recommendations in the coming days.
Finished reading: The Enchanted Hacienda by J.C. Cervantes 📚
This one didn’t click with me right away, but that was about me and what else I’ve read recently, not about the book. It’s beautiful and sweet with a bit of spice, too.
📚💬 “…my body is the keeper of secrets, and this pen is its liberator.” J. C. Cervantes, The Enchanted Hacienda
📚📺 The trailer for The Power dropped. I loved this book so much. The show has an amazing cast. I’m looking forward to watching it.
Finished reading: The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune 📚
Listened to the audiobook. I understand why so much of the beginning of this book had to establish for us the dreariness of Linus Baker’s life. I didn’t really get into it until he arrived at the eponymous house. And from then on it made my heart sing.
📚💬 “We are who we are, not because of our birthright, but because of what we choose to do in this life.” TJ Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea
📚💬 “Why can’t life work whatever way we want it to? What’s the point of living if you only do it how others want you to?” TJ Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea
Finished reading: The Neighbor Favor by Kristina Forest 📚
Adorable romance about a publishing assistant who starts an email friendship with the author of her favorite book, then he unknowingly moves into her apartment building. I love stories about book people. Highly recommend.
Finished reading: Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett 📚
Lovely! A scholar of faerie lore travels to a frozen Scandinavian town to research for her book and along the way, her annoyingly wonderful colleague decides to join her. Brilliant use of both academia and faerie stuff in this one. Highly recommend.
📚💬 “I was supposed to remain comfortably outside the stories with my pen and my notebook.” Heather Fawcett, Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries
📚 Research methods in Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett
📚 I am a very specific kind of nerd. In this book, set in 1909, a scholar studying faeries says she’s going to use naturalistic observation and ethnographic interviews as her research methods. I immediately thought this was anachronistic, because I knew Naturalistic Inquiry wasn’t published until 1985.
I was wrong. It’s not anachronistic, but it does show that Dr. Wilde is using cutting edge methods. While ethnography was first developed as a science in the 18th century, naturalistic observation wasn’t formalized until the turn of the 20th century.
So. Who cares? Well, me, because I’m a qual nerd. But I’m also a book nerd, so I feel like Wilde’s choice of methods reveals something about her as a character.
The way she writes about her research shows that she thinks of herself as a natural scientist, observing faerie behavior much as one would observe animal behavior. At the same time, the questions she’s asking and the way she treats her research “subjects” (a term that isn’t cool to use now but is absolutely what you’d use in 1909) shows that she can’t help but treat her research as social research, because surprise! in her world, faeries are people, not animals.
(What distinguishes people from animals? I’d say for Wilde’s purposes, speech and self-awareness.)
And now that I’ve written 200+ words about an imaginary scientist’s research methods, I should probably get back to bed.
📚💬 “He felt lighter somehow. Like he wasn’t paint blending into the wall. He felt real. He felt present. Almost like he could be seen.” T. J. Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea
📚 Finding my throughline: Library enthusiast 💻
I recently listened to Katie Rose Guest Pryal on Camille Pagán’s podcast, You Should Write a Book, talking about how she found the throughline in her work and life. (Just listen to her articulate it on the podcast. I am afraid if I try to sum it up, I’ll get it wrong.)
At the time I listened to it, I was like, “I don’t know what mine is. Maybe I’ll never find it. Waaaah!”
But as I sat and let the idea marinate for a while, and I think I’ve figured it out.
I recently bought the above sticker and several other library-themed stickers, as well as a Read Free or Die t-shirt, from its creator.
One of the possibilities I was considering for after my postdoc was going back to being a school librarian. I don’t think that one’s going to pan out, but it did sort of launch me in the direction of identifying my throughline.
In May, several folks working on different grants funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services, including myself, met and talked about what we’d learned from our work and what our capacity was for working on connected learning in libraries moving forward. All of the other academics indicated that they had to move on to other work, which might incorporate connected learning, but would not focus on it.
I found myself heartbroken.
This is what I want to work on. And nobody else, nobody with an institutional affiliation, was going to be able to work on it anymore?
Well.
Over the course of many weeks, I decided that I would still work on it. That I would find institutional partners who were willing to do a little bit of the work, so that I don’t have to have an institutional affiliation myself to get the work funded, but that I would be happy to do the bulk of the work so long as I could get a consultant’s fee for doing it. Enough to pay my student loans, mostly.
I’m in the process of refining this vision.
But the throughline, I’ve got that now.
Fine, it needs refinement, too, but here’s the basic idea:
My work builds libraries' capacity to facilitate learning and connect with their communities. The two modes I use to do this are research and professional development.
This describes so much of what I’ve done for the past 8 years. And more than that, it describes what I want to do going forward. It’s expansive enough for me to take on a variety of projects, and narrow enough that I can continue to establish my areas of expertise and grow my network.
What’s your throughline?