Books
“Life just ran more smoothly when she got her way.” Leigh Bardugo, KING OF SCARS. Oh, Zoya, I love you so. 📚
I finished reading SIX OF CROWS almost 4 months ago. It’s time for me to get back to the Grishaverse with KING OF SCARS. 📚
Loading my advanced readers’s copy of Brent Spiner’s mem-noir Fan Fiction to my ereader in honor of Star Trek Day. 📚📺🖖
“She tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy.” Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray 📚💬
there is no separation between mother and writer, nor can I tease apart the time I spend tending to my child from the time I spend thinking about my writing, or actually doing it.
Finding Literary Spaces Amid the Intensity of New Motherhood 🔖📚💬
🔖📚 Sara Fredman’s How Motherhood Helped Me Reject the ‘Father Tongue’ of Academia is both about writing the kind of thing I want to write and is itself the kind of thing I want to write.
Want to read: Thinking Inside the Box Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them by Adrienne Raphel 📚
How come every time Rachel Cohn & David Levithan collaborate the result is adorable? What’s up with that? 📚
📚 Just finished the introduction of Data Feminism & am jotting down some thoughts. I hope to expand on these later.
-
To what extent and how do the 7 principles of data feminism intersect/interact with Jennifer Armbrust’s 12 principles for prototyping a feminist business?
-
Women were the first computers. Is there a relationship between this history and the default woman-coded voices of digital virtual assistants that goes beyond generic sexism?
📚 Data Feminism has the best (and perhaps only) definition of positionality I’ve ever seen: “Positionality is a term that describes how individuals come to knowledge-making processes from multiple positions, including race, gender, geography, class, ability, and more. Each of these positions is shaped by culture and context, and they intersect and interact.”
Want to read: Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly 📚
Setting aside my TIME 100 list plan to play in the land of YA rom-coms. Just started NICK AND NORAH’S INFINITE PLAYLIST. 📚
Some notes on my Time's 100 Best 📚 Plan
Because fantasy is the genre I read the most and YA is the market segment I read the most, I’ve already read a lot of the books on these lists.
If I come to a book I’ve already read, I will ask myself if I want to re-read it. If the answer is yes, boom, I’ll re-read away.
If the answer is maybe but not right now, I’ll keep moving down the list and ask myself again later.
If the answer is no, I’ll write a quick blog post about what I remember about the book and how I felt when I read it and move on to the next.
Another thing: a lot of these books are in series. If the book is the first book in a series and I enjoy it, I’ll do a check-in with myself to see if I want to take a detour from the list and read more of the series. If I do, I will.
If the book is a later book in a series, I will attempt to read the books that come before it. I like to read books in (publication) order, even if I don’t have to. If I decide not to finish the first book in the series, then I will move on with the list and try the listed book on its own later.
These plans are intended to prevent me getting bored and giving up on the project and to make sure I try as many new-to-me books as possible.
Don’t think of fantasy as mere entertainment, then, but as a way to train for reality. It always has been, after all.
📚🗯️ Read Once & Future Vol. 1: The King Is Undead by Kieron Gillen and Dan Mora. Arthuriana and a story about the nature of stories, plus a kickass grandma. Looking forward to reading more. 🗡️
📚📺 At Electric Literature, Meera Vijayan writes about the value of seeing Alina Starkov build her strength a little at a time in the face of staggering self-doubt and how good representation doesn’t always require “strong” female characters.