Notes
Finished reading: Pleasures of a Notorious Gentleman by Lorraine Heath 📚
Today is a great day to tell your representative to support library funding in next year’s budget (FY26). Let’s be sure Congress comes back from recess to find a flood of messages supporting library funding. 📚
💬📚 “How many times could a mother’s heart break? An infinite number. Each time her children were hurt.” Lorraine Heath, Pleasures of a Notorious Gentleman
Finished reading: Passions of a Wicked Earl by Lorraine Heath 📚
Lorraine Heath is just so reliably excellent.
Finished reading: The Invisible Parade by Leigh Bardugo and John Picacio 📚
I’m very obsessed with this Día de Muertos picture book with an Own Voices illustrator. So much of the storytelling is in the images and it’s a gorgeous collaboration. Highly recommend for reading around Día de Muertos or anytime. 💀
I just renewed my family’s membership to the Friends of the Durham Library. Have you joined your library’s Friends organization? It’s a straightforward way to support an institution that’s losing a lot of structural support right now. 📚
Finished reading: Vanish by Sophie Jordan 📚
Finished reading: Storm Front by Jim Butcher 📚🎧
James Marsters reads the audiobook and he’s great.
Finished reading: Protecting What’s His by Tessa Bailey 📚
Finished reading: The Last Wicked Scoundrel by Lorraine Heath 📚
Finished reading: Midnight Pleasures With a Scoundrel by Lorraine Heath 📚
This is an absolutely bananas book. A great ride.
🔖 Read Why I’m One And Done (And Not Feeling Guilty About It) by Stephanie Fallon (The Good Trade).
My experience is so similar to Fallon’s. Before having M, I thought maybe 2 kids. But he’s very high touch and when people ask, I always say, “I don’t have enough Kimberly for a second kid.”
Been watching the Disney original movies in the Zombies series and these are thinly veiled metaphors for prejudice against different groups.
Original Zombies: racism (zombies basically stand in for Black people).
Zombies 2: prejudice against Indigenous people, settler colonialism (werewolves stand in for Indigenous people)
Zombies 3: prejudice against immigrants (aliens stand in for immigrants)
I’m curious to see what they do in Zombies 4, which we’ll watch tomorrow.
Finished reading: Stranger in My Arms by Lisa Kleypas 📚
Finished reading: Because You’re Mine by Lisa Kleypas 📚
You should go vote for my colleague and friend Erin Dawson Linn & her spouse Alder Linn in the America’s Favorite Couple contest. These two’s wedding was probably the most beautiful I’ve ever been to and left me in happy tears and feeling grateful for all the love in my life. I still have the little bottle of olive oil with a heart charm that they gave out as favors on display in my living room. These are two kind, loving people and it would make me so happy to see them win this contest and have more amazing adventures together!
💬📚 “Each [major innovation in industrial farming] has benefited the biggest [farms] and penalized the smallest.” Mark Bittman, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal
📚 Leigh Bardugo has a picture book about death and grief that she wrote with John Picacio available for pre-order.
[This book is] for kids like me who spent a lot of time in graveyards reading epitaphs, who didn’t quite feel safe among the living.
This book is for me. 💀🖤
Finished reading: Somewhere I’ll Find You by Lisa Kleypas 📚
They’ve scheduled a 90s Dance Party for our work retreat in a couple weeks. I am tempted to send everyone Rebecca Schuman’s The 90s Are Old Longreads series to read.
Just go ahead now.
Finished reading: The Bladesmith Queen by Sarah MacLean 📚
📚 Hear me out: sun-soaked summer gothic literature. These Summer Storms by Sarah MacLean. The Villa by Rachel Hawkins. What else?
Another day, another autoimmune flare, another medical specialist, another round of blaming myself for chronic illness and also telling myself I should not blame myself. The road goes ever on and on…. (Advice not requested.)
📚 Reading Zoraida Córdova’s Labyrinth Lost and realized I had the perfect bookmark for any book by this author.
