🔖 Read if we’re all about to get Omicron, here are 5 tips from a long-hauler (via @agilelisa on Micro.blog).
This is sound advice for living with any chronic illness.
I don’t know how your December 25 is going, but my spouse gave me a Roy Kent Christmas card so mine is going very well.
I’m that annoying friend who loves Christmas way too much but, like, the exhausted goth version of her. I hope you have a good December 25, whether it has any additional significance for you or not. I wish you ease and fun and freedom from anxiety. ❤️
It’s unseasonably warm here in central NC and will be even warmer tomorrow. Many people have complained that this doesn’t feel like Christmas, but I have had many Florida Christmases, so to me it feels just right. Just before Christmas 2015 was my last Florida Christmas.
💬 “North Americans practice embalming, but we do not believe in embalming.” Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty 📚
Bodies donated to Western Carolina University’s forensic anthropology program end up in the John A. Williams Human Skeletal Collection and I’m not sure I can think of a better way to deal with an academic’s remains than to put them in a skeleton library.
My Reading Year 2021 📚
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This was a slow reading year for me. I read a lot more fiction than last year, a little less nonfiction, many fewer comics, and no poetry.
I only read 28 full-length books for myself (as opposed to for my kid). I range widely each year, usually coming in the 30 - 50 book range, so this is a little less than even a normal slow year would be.
But of course, year 2 of a pandemic, especially when finishing a PhD, is not a normal year.
All of the fiction I read this year was good, because I don’t keep reading things that aren’t. But my favorite was Gideon the Ninth . It took me a little while to get into, but once I was into it, it blew me away. It also helped me realize, along with the Star Trek: Discovery episode “Su’Kal,” that space gothic is a subgenre I love.
I’m still into Dark Academia, which explains the presence of The Historian , If We Were Villains , Bunny , and Ace of Spades on my finished books list.
My other fiction reading decisions were driven primarily by media tie-ins. I read the Shadow and Bone trilogy and Six of Crows duology in anticipation of Shadow and Bone on Netflix, then decided to stick with Leigh Bardugo and read her Wonder Woman book . I also read The Last Wish , the first book in the Witcher series. It will probably be a while before I get around to that show but I enjoyed the book.
None of my nonfiction reading blew me away, but it was all good.
I definitely read some fanfiction, but I couldn’t tell you what. And I read a lot of articles, most of which you can find in my Links category.
I hope to read for pleasure a lot more next year.
What did you read in 2021? If you had a hard time reading, what did you do instead?
I had assumed that since I, a 40-year-old mother of a young child, have been very into Dark Academia for more than a year, it must be over. But it looks like I was wrong.
🔖 Read The Scholarship of Sexy Privilege: Why Do I Love Dark Academia Books?
…there will always be fringe groups who parade their complete rejection of the source material and make it their own. This ownership over dark academia gives me the courage to keep going with real academia; to forge a space again in the gaps and achieve immortality in the sharing of ideas without boundaries.