Kimberly Hirsh

🎮 Played Assemble with Care.

I’m really feeling wholesome games lately, especially those with a warm pastel color palette and soothing music. In this game, you fix people’s stuff and inspire them to fix their relationships.

On sale on Steam for $3.19 through June 11, iOS & Android for $3.99.

Finished reading: The Essential X-Men Volume 3 by Chris Claremont 📚

Read as single issues and only the Uncanny X-Men books, not the annuals, but this is the easiest way to track reading the comics.

Midnight is very sleepy.

Finished reading: The Prince of Broadway by Joanna Shupe 📚

I loved it. A delightful heroine, a debutante with dreams of owning a women-only casino. The bitter casino owner she’s chosen to mentor her. Excellent stuff.

Finished reading: The Rogue of Fifth Avenue by Joanna Shupe 📚

Gilded Age New York, a hotshot lawyer, and a responsible eldest daughter who finds her responsibility chafing. What’s not to love?

That feeling when you went to the pool with children and you only had snacks for lunch and your knee hurts and you’re ready for bed at 3:30. Hashtag relatable. Am I right?

I’m attending FanLIS this morning. This is my favorite little academic space: the intersection of fan studies and library & information science. I probably won’t be live-posting but I’ll take some notes to share.

Whoops, I was too busy actually paying attention to FanLIS to take notes. Also, it turns out virtual conferences are much less exhausting when you’re not liveblogging them.

Finished reading: Never Judge a Lady by Her Cover by Sarah MacLean 📚

This has my favorite of Sarah MacLean’s heroes. Give me a guy who is clever and made his own way over a titled rogue any day. (But I like to read about titled rogues, too.)

Finished reading: The Essential X-Men Volume 2 by Chris Claremont 📚

Again, read as single issues in Marvel Unlimited, but this is the best way to track. It’s a powerhouse of a run with both Dark Phoenix and Days of Future Past in it.

🔖📚 Read Jamaica Kincaid and Kara Walker Made an Irreverent, Charming Kids’ Book by Stephen Bell (Harper’s Bazaar).

I’m super curious to see the book. The article only contains one sample page. It’s gorgeous and I look forward to seeing more.

📚 Reading The Dark Phoenix Saga (not for the first time) and I had forgotten how heavily this whole deal, especially Scott talking to Dark Phoenix about love, influenced Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Dark Willow storyline.

Finished reading: Essential X-Men - Volume 1

I read these as single issues in Marvel Unlimited, but this is the easiest way to track them.

🍿 Watched UHF on the big screen today, when I’d only watched it at home before. Early on I seemed to be the only person laughing but maybe people were feeling shy or something because they laughed more as the movie went on. It’s a funny movie every time.

Currently reading: The Best There is at what He Does: Examining Chris Claremont’s X-Men by Jason Powell 📚

Started watching X-Men 97 📺 which reminded me that I love the X-Men, so now I’m reading this and reading the comics mentioned alongside. Super fun.

Want to read: A Web of Our Own Making by Antón Barba-Kay 📚

Finished reading: No Good Duke Goes Unpunished by Sarah MacLean 📚

I love every Sarah MacLean heroine.

My kid told me, “A cross between a piglet and a pug is a puglet.” When I replied, “Good night,” meaning to indicate that it was time to sleep and not to talk, he said, “I just wanted to give you that very valuable information.” I love him the most.

🔖📚 Read If You Read a Lot of Fiction, Scientists Have Very Good News About Your Brain.

It’s always good to look at the actual studies behind news articles like this, but the evidence that reading fiction is associated with improved cognition suggests the importance of libraries, I think.

📚🔖 Here is the actual study with the evidence of the correlation between fiction reading and cognition.

Hello world, I am full of hormonally-induced ill feeling including headache, nausea, and cramps. Until further notice, I hate everything except my family and friends, romance novels, Pepsi with real sugar, and Star Trek.

Finished reading: One Good Earl Deserves a Lover by Sarah MacLean 📚

Lady Phillipa Marbury is a refreshing take on a bluestocking.

🔖 Read a pair of pieces about art and mothering:

The ‘Impossible Life’ of Equal Devotion to Art and Mothering by Jessica Grose (NYT Gift Link)

“Is This The Best Use of My Time?” Sara Fredman in conversation with Catherine Ricketts, author of The Mother Artist.

Austin Kleon introduced me to a newsletter issue in which director and writer Mark Slutsky talks about the feeling of being in good hands:

I’ve come to trust a certain feeling that comes over me when I first make contact with a piece of art. The opening lines of a book; the first 30 seconds or so of a movie; bars of a song, etc. It is a feeling of being in good hands, an intuitive sense that the author knows what they are doing and that the experience will be worth my time.

I felt this way as soon as I read the first sentence of Cat Sebastian’s We Could Be So Good:

Nick Russo could fill the Sunday paper with reasons why he shouldn’t be able to stand Andy Fleming.

I loved that book so much, so I was thoroughly psyched to get the chance to read an advanced reading copy for You Should Be So Lucky, a novel set in the same mid-20th-century America narrative world, about a grouchy, grieving arts reporter and the golden retriever/foulmouthed jerk baseball player whose slump the editor of Mark’s newspaper has tasked him with writing about. As often happens in a romance, these two knuckleheads learn, grow, and fall in love, not necessarily in that order.

What I loved: So much. Woof. Hard to even think of how to explain it all. I’ll start by saying that mostly, I love these two characters, and most especially I love Mark, who is a snarky reporter with a squishy heart, who simultaneously so appreciates the way his deceased partner William made him feel worthwhile and loathes the way William’s political ambitions meant that they could never seem even at all possibly queer. I just love him so much. I imagine him as a young Trent Crimm (from Ted Lasso, in case you’re not familiar).

I love Eddie, too, his inability to hide his feelings just ever. His willingness to throw caution to the wind and let his blossoming friendship with Mark just exist in the world without constantly looking over his shoulder about it. His beautiful relationship with his mother and his own bruised heart in the face of learning he was about to be traded to a team that would take him far from his home and everything he knew.

What I wanted more of: Let’s be clear. There is nothing that I’m like, “Cat Sebastian didn’t do enough of that,” because Cat Sebastian is awesome. But let’s also be clear. I will read more of whatever Cat Sebastian wants to write, and if she wrote a lovely Christmas novella about Nick and Andy (from We Could Be So Good) and Mark and Eddie all being at a Christmas party together, I would read it so hard.

What I need to warn you about: This book is about two dudes falling in love, so if you don’t want to read about that, skip it. There is some spice but the language isn’t very explicit. I’d say, medium-ish, maybe slightly less than medium spice? There are some of the kind of things that people usually want content warnings about: death of a partner before the book starts, period-appropriate homophobia, parents kicking a son out due to their own homophobia.

Who should read this: People who want a romance with a lot of interiority, minimal conflict between the two main characters, people who like baseball mixed in with their love.

Just a little reproductive system education, because I’ve met many adults who have uteruses and don’t know this: the menstrual cycle refers to the entire span of time from the first day of one period to the day before the first day of the next. Not just when you’re shedding uterine lining.