i have eight bazillion things to do already so obviously i should be blogging, too

So here are all the things I have going on right now:

• I’m in graduate school like a chump

• I work a full time job

• I’m trying to make a quilt for my future nibling and geez why did i pick such a hard pattern

• I’m still trying to write my novel (more on that later)

• Sometimes I remember to do life things like eat, see my parents, exercise the corporeal prison of my body, etc

so what the heck am I doing here?

I dunno, I feel like even if I rarely ever update it, I should probably have a blog thing. There’s a few reasons for that:

1. I deactivated facebook again, and I like talking about books there

2. Maybe someone in my life wants updates about quilting? And I don’t want to write about it in my journal

3. I also don’t like writing about my book too much in my journal, because most of those thoughts are also tied in with thoughts about narrative structure and they don’t have that much to do with my emotional landscape (usually)

4. Ok, the real reason is that I grew up terminally online and I don’t know how to exist comfortably without a public space to share my thoughts. A blog seems healthier than facebook, right?

Ok, so with that aside, here are the books I read recently (as in, in 2021)

• So Far From God

• Mistborn (book 1)

• The Doors of Perception

• And Then There Were None

• This Is How You Lose the Time War

• The Hate U Give

• Wicked Saints

• Gideon the Ninth

Ok, so I’m far from breaking any records here, but honestly I am just glad that I’m reading again in my adulthood because it was bleak for me for a while. How does that happen? I read obsessively as a kid. Now it’s hard for me.

Why am I blogging about something that’s hard for me? I dunno, I want to love it again, I guess, and this feels kind of motivating?

Here’s what I’m currently reading:

• Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo

• Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston

And here’s some books I started and then gave up on:

• Children of Blood and Bone

• Star Daughter

• The Cruel Prince

• Midnight Sun

Ok so there’s a bit of a pattern in that last list — yeah. Does this mean I don’t like YA Fantasy anymore? Yikes. I was reading at least a few of those because I’m on the hunt for comparative titles for my own book. It turns out when you’re bad at reading and you are trying to read stuff that’s no longer your thing, you don’t get very far. So, I gave up on that mission. I guess it’ll just be Shadow and Bone meets The Golden Compass (but with Dragons) forever for my silly little (lol) book.

Alright so the real reason I’m here is because I disliked Mistborn, decided I needed to wash my mouth out with something that was, I dunno, the opposite of Fantasy-by-white-men, read So Far From God, and was left absolutely flummoxed by it.

Which, I have to say, might be the point.

A Book Review, or something, for So Far From God:

So Far From God utterly fascinated me. I know this book came out when I was an infant and everyone else has already read it if they’re gonna read it, but I only read it just now and I found it bizarre and fascinating and really, really sad.

So Far From God is a hard book to review because it doesn’t follow the typical commercial fiction approach to narrative. My take on it was that it was supposed to feel lived in, clipped of detail because that’s how the stories we tell in day-to-day life are, and if someone was actually a neighbor of this family in small town new mexico, that’s how this story would reach me: filtered, tightened around the edges, not wholly believable, but then who’s to say it didn’t happen?

It left me feeling angry in a way that is not unfamiliar, but somehow it was all fresh. Angry at men, at colonialism, at capitalism, at a form of medicine that sees us as parts instead of wholes. Is it about any of those things? No? Yes? Kinda. When I first finished it I wasn’t sure how to feel about it, but now I remember not the tragic things that happened but the way the characters responded to them: with vitality.

It’s a short book and a good read, and I recommend it.

Alright, now I have some very queer books to go read before June ends. Maybe there will be another post of this nature. Maybe I will forget about this forever, lol.

Oh, and writing a book is hard and I took a break from it for a while after I finished my draft last year. It was an OK draft! But it had serious problems. I’m fixing them. It’s hard. I think I’m getting there. Ok, that’s all. Here’s a picture of me with my platonic soulmate Jillian who I got to see this weekend:

Bye for now.