🔖 Read:

Thanks @gr36 for directing my attention to Whiona!

🔖💻 Read Why the Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore by Kyle Chayka (The New Yorker).

Voting selfie!

A white woman with dark hair, glasses, and blue eyes smiles. On her sweatshirt is a sticker that reads, "No Bull I Voted."

🔖📚 Read A Pennsylvania Public Library Had Funding Cut Because of LGBTQ+ Books. Then, An Olympian Stepped In..

An important reminder from Kelly Jensen about how libraries are on the ballot today in many places.

🔖 Read The US library system, once the best in the world, faces death by a thousand cuts by Brewster Kale (The Guardian).

A useful reminder that even publishers come for libraries now, with restrictions on digital lending.

If, like me, you grieve Halloween’s passing, I’m delighted to inform you that I have officially extended Halloween season. The last day of the season is now November 22.

Get ready for a jump scare next time you open this backpack.

A black kitten sits in an open backpack.

I often find myself watching movies in 22-minute chunks, partly because of being a parent and partly because of having a short attention span lately. I do TV shows with act breaks, so 3 or 4 breaks as I watch where commercials would be. It’s been liberating to realize I can do this. 📺🍿

📺👱‍♀️ Buffy’s experience in the episode “I, Robot… You, Jane” is super relatable. I had two friends with online boyfriends around 1997 and I wasn’t sure about them (though I became friends with these boyfriends). Fortunately, they weren’t digitized demons. Just teen boys.

LinkedIn: Recommended job for you! FBI Special Agent!
Me: Ooh, I wonder if I can get assigned to The X-Files.

Yesterday the House Committee on Education held a session called Protecting Kids: Combatting Graphic, Explicit Materials in School Libraries. In this session, some of the witnesses claimed that they didn’t want to ban books, only remove them from school libraries. They claimed that any book you can still purchase is not banned. But what they didn’t discuss is that not everyone has the funds to buy the books they want to remove. Parents have to decide for themselves whether they should control what their own children read. But they certainly shouldn’t control what other people’s children read. If you’re in the US, please consider using this tool from the American Library Association to contact your legislators and ask them to protect the freedom to read.

A banner reads "Protect the Freedom to Read"

Finished reading: The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas 📚

Great all the way through but extra compelling for the last third. Like Mexican Gothic, it uses Gothic tropes of a spooky house and a mysterious husband to interrogate colonialism in Mexico. Highly recommend.

🔖📺 Read How The Haunting of Hill House conveys the horror of family.

In the world of Hill House, devotion to family is a tender kind of madness that exists just on the other side of mourning, a ghostly insistence that the love that binds us is also the thing that keeps us chained.

I’m having one of those days where you give yourself credit for every single thing you do. So here’s what my work task list looks like today so far.

✅ Download Word.
✅ Install Word.
✅ Download report with comments.
✅ Open report.
✅ Get paper from studio.
✅ Put paper in printer.
✅ Print report.

Want to read: The Brain that Loves to Play by Jacqueline Harding 📚

Want to read: The Brain that Loves to Play by Jacqueline Harding 📚

Feted my kid thoroughly and now I am so tired.

Tonight I’m very obsessed with the idea of reading The Secret Garden as a child as a gateway to a love of Gothic literature. 📚

My kid is 7 today. I love him so much.

Finished reading: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson 📚

Keeping this Gothic train rolling. This one is excellent, of course.

📚💬 “When I am afraid, I can see perfectly the sensible, beautiful not-afraid side of the world, I can see chairs and tables and windows staying the same, not affected in the least, and I can see things like the careful woven texture of the carpet, not even moving. But when I am afraid, I no longer exist in any relation to these things.” Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

Substitute depressed or anxious for afraid here and it’s exactly how I feel.

Finished reading: The Turn of the Screw by Henry James 📚

Another Gothic. Governesses, am I right?

💬📚 Dropping this quote here so that next time I try to hung it down I’ll find it on my own site and not have to go to GoodReads:

“She strode the earth clad in the invisible armor of their virtual companionship.” Lev Grossman, The Magician King

Finished reading: “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe 📚

Making my pivot to Gothic now that it’s October. (I skipped my usual campus novels in September and stuck with romance.)

This one’s a classic, of course. But I like “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Masque of the Red Death” better.

📚💬 Roderick Usher has sensory integration issues:

“He suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses; the most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odors of all flowers were oppressive…” - Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”