November 3, 2017

Hello friends, it was a short week for me because I took a few days off to catch my breath, but I’m back at it now. Is it too early for me to get into the holiday spirit? Because the cold weather has got me feeling COZY

1. Jane, Unlimited by Kristin Cashore. I’m about a quarter of the way in; this book has been a bit of a slow start, and jarring since Cashore’s other series was more explicitly set in a fantasy world. The magic here creeps in slowly, but I trust this author to tell a good story. 
2. The Joy of Not Wearing a Bra, New Yorker. “I like the way most clothes feel on my bare skin: silk camisoles and thick knit sweaters and the patterned blouses from my grandmother’s closet. I like the way my breasts sound against my ribcage when I run down the stairs, like someone clapping politely for a performance that they didn’t particularly enjoy. I like how unassuming they can be when they haven’t been hoisted to full mast and fixed there…As I move through the world, sometimes making only the slightest of gestures, there’s always a part of me that is dancing.” This is truly beautiful writing, and I appreciate it more coming from someone shaped like me.
3. Dreamer’s Pool, Juliet Marillier. Okay, so this is like my 3rd time reading this book, but this time, I finally found it on audiobook! Blackthorn and Grim, an unlikely pairing of broken people struggling to heal, are bound up together in a small village after making a promise to a mysterious person. I can’t summarize this series in a way that will make you want to read it, but if you value myth and story and you like a tale of unlikely friends, you couldn’t do better than this medieval Irish fantasy series.
4. When Men Treat Assault Stories Like Ghost Stories, The Cut. Some potentially upsetting material here, but nothing too specific – the excellent Jess Zimmerman talks about disbelief and personal experience. “It’s not that men (and also, to be fair, women who are committed to the status quo) think the women reporting these things are liars. It’s just that they think they know better. They believe that you think you experienced harassment, just like I believe that you think you saw a ghost. But just as I’m privately assuming it was probably sleep paralysis or just the house settling, men are privately — and sometimes publicly — positing that it must have been a misinterpreted compliment, or oversensitivity, or wishful thinking, or a tendency to take offense.”
5. 50+ Design Fails, Bored Panda. Lighter fare. I actually laughed aloud at some of these typography/placement/bizarre design errors.

See you next week!