Books
📚💬📝 “No woman is writing too much. Women need to write more. We need to know what it feels like to be submerged in language, carried away by the passion of writing words.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work
📚💬📝 “…we must not let the commercial success of writing by women lead us to believe that the struggle to create and maintain a culture where women’s words will be heard and valued is over. That struggle continues.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work
📚💬📝 “Even in academic circles it has become much more fashionable to do work on gender than work that is distinctly feminist in outlook.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work
📚💬📝 “…we all should feel utterly free to write as much as time, grace, and the imagination allow.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work
📚💬📝 “Since I have never tried to make a living as a writer, I have had the extreme good fortune to be able to write only what I want to write when I want to write it.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work
📚💬📝 “No writer writes often or well if they despair of ever having an audience for their work.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work
📚💬📝 “Since my interests are broad and wide-ranging, I am not surprised that there is an endless flow of ideas in my mind.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work
📚💬📝 “There is always someone who waits for words, eager to embrace them and hold them close.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work
📚💬📝 “Writing that keeps us away from death, from despair, does not necessarily help us to be well.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work
📚💬📝 “… the being we become in the very act of writing is only ever intimately present to the one who writes.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work
Finished reading: Up: A Mother and Daughter’s Peakbagging Adventure by Patricia Ellis Herr 📚
An uplifting and compelling read. Herr documents her daughter’s successful climbing of the 48 NH mountains taller than 4000 ft. Highly recommend.
Finished reading: Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones 📚
Super fun! Highly recommend.
I’m reading Howl’s Moving Castle. Bit of a spoiler & Miyazaki left it out of the movie (rightly, I think) but Howl is actually a post-ac wizard whose family is v. disappointed he isn’t doing more with his PhD. This delights me. 📚🍿
Want to read: Ghosts of the Forbidden (Glazier’s Gap Book 1) by Leanna Renee Hieber 📚
When my brain won't read 📚
I hate when my brain won’t read, which it won’t today. Reading is my core way of interfacing with the world. The tools we use shape our thought processes, and writing and reading have been my primary tools since I was a small child. Reading heals me, distracts me from pain, comforts me when I’m lonely, and gives me new ways of thinking.
I know this inability to turn other people’s words into things that cohere for me will pass. And I can do audiobooks some. But there’s also something about the physicality of reading that I miss when I do that. So it is a great companion to reading text, especially for times it’s not smart to focus on texts like when I’m driving or trying to fall asleep.
Maybe I’ll try reading something middle grade instead of YA or adult and see if that helps.
Currently reading: Fabric by Victoria Finlay 📚
Finished reading: The Hobbit, Or, There and Back Again by J. R. R. Tolkien 📚
Listened to the audiobook narrated by Andy Serkis, which I think made it much more enjoyable than when I read it in print 20+ years ago. Highly recommend.
💬📚 “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
Did not finish: A Little Life: A Novel by Hanya Yanagihara 📚
Beautifully written. After 400+ pgs of almost non-stop trauma, this book was actively making me unhappy so I set it aside. Definitely search around for content warnings before reading.
💬📚 “It was impossible to explain to the healthy the logic of the sick, and he didn’t have the energy to try.” - Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
💬📚 “This was not what he thought acting would be, but what had he known about what acting would be?” - Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
💬📚 “…he was an optimist. Every month, every week, he chose to open his eyes, to live another day in the world.” - Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
💬📚 “He felt in those minutes his body’s treason… that he would be betrayed by it again and again, that he could expect nothing from it and yet had to keep maintaining it.” - Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
💬📚 “He experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved fall in love with other people he loved. - Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
That feeling when your favorite people meet your other favorite people and everyone gets along.
Finished reading: Different Seasons: Four Novellas by Stephen King 📚
This dude is so prolific and so fun to read. I would like to write things that are fun to read.