Tag Archives: recentreads

end of march catch-up

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Hello from SE Michigan where winter is hopefully dwindling and allergy season has yet to start cranking. It’s a rare moment of quiet around here, Spring Break for our area schools and the kiddo is off in warmer weather and sunshine with her father. When she gets back, soccer and spring activities will come roaring back, and then – everything that comes with graduation.

My daughter has begun to finalize her plans for next year, and I’m so proud and excited (and sad, but trying not to let that show too often). This is the season where everything starts to become real.

We went to the Whitney Hotel in Detroit to celebrate and if you are ever nearby and want to splash out to celebrate something, this is a place to go. It’s a fine restaurant and bar in the home of a Gilded Age lumber baron, filled with its original woodwork, art, and Tiffany glass. (And possibly a ghost or two? The top floor bar is named Ghost Bar accordingly.)

I’m working on her college dorm room blanket (the Cozy Comfort throw) and her winter scarf (the Bug Collection scarf). These are both longer term projects and although I try to pull them out of my knitting basket multiple evenings a week, this past month they took a little backseat. I ordered a beginner embroidery kit from Clever Poppy and absolutely loved it! I finished it up and ordered another one.

I made some charm kilt pins, and also fell down the sourdough rabbit hole and although I haven’t had much success with my first couple of loaves, my starter is still pretty young. I’m following the Kelly Welk tutorials on YouTube and hoping for a good focaccia here very soon.

March was also a good month for books. I read “Coffin Moon” by Keith Rosson and although it’s definitely not for everyone- it’s horror, and pretty gory horror at that – it was one of the first books of the year that I couldn’t put down. I’m also progressing through Juno Dawson’s “Her Majesty’s Royal Coven” trilogy and although it took me a little while to get into it, by the second book I was hooked. I find a lot of fantasy formulaic and simply not very well written, but Ms. Dawson’s characters are interesting, very diverse and appealing, her stories move quickly, and I like her enlightened, progressive feminist and queer themes.

I hope that you all enjoy the beginning of spring (or autumn, in the Southern Hemisphere) wherever you are. And my personal opinion- even if you don’t celebrate Easter, there’s nothing wrong with crunching the ears off a chocolate bunny.

recent reads – summer 2022

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Dipping my toe back into blogging (I’ve been absent from this space FOREVER) with a recap of some recent reads. It’s been a real mixed bag this summer of 2022, with some excellent and some meh – but fortunately no DNF (‘did not finish’) in the bunch (my Do Not Recommend selection came close, but provided too many belly laughs to entirely abandon). I’ve pulled out a few notables (for better or worse) for your perusal.

Recommend:

  • The Silence of the Girls and The Women of Troy, Pat Barker. If you like mythology and / or Greek ancient history, I cannot speak highly enough of these novels. The Silence of the Girls picks up the Trojan war when the Troy is under siege by the encamped Greek forces, and tells the story mostly from the perspective of Briseis, a young noblewoman. Achilles has sacked and burned her neighboring city, and taken her as his prize of battle. Ultimately, she plays a large role in the dispute between Agamemnon and Achilles, and the trajectory of the war. At any rate, while you do see the bones of the Iliad and recognize the so-called ‘heroes’ of the Trojan war – Odysseus, Achilles, Ajax – this story is told from the perspective of the women, who saw their brothers and husbands and male children murdered, were raped and abused and taken as property of war, and turned into slaves. They’re dark yet fascinating historical stories of women and I highly recommend both (Women of Troy picks up immediately after the fall of Troy and introduces characters such as Cassandra, Andromache, and Pyrrhus).
  • The Quarter Storm, Veronica Henry (not pictured above). First in a proposed series about a modern young Vodou practitioner solving a ritual murder in the French Quarter of New Orleans. We took a quick family trip to NOLA in June and reading this shortly afterwards was a great look back at the Quarter. It’s fast-paced and mixes a modern detective feel with highly atmospheric Vodou / Haitian American culture, history, and a healthy dose of supernatural vibes.
  • Becoming Odyssa: Adventures on the Appalachian Trail, Jennifer Pharr Davis. I don’t know that this was especially exciting or well-written but I absolutely love reading books about hiking the Appalachian Trail and if you do too, you’ll like it.

Meh:

  • The World Cannot Give, Tara Isabella Burton. I had high hopes for this one – a Sapphic dark academia thriller that was compared to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. Unfortunately it just fell flat for me. I didn’t really like any of the characters and as a result, didn’t care what happened to them; nothing really propelled me through the story.
  • Thousand Steps, T. Jefferson Parker. Again, this had a ton of promise – a teenage boy living in Laguna Beach during the psychedelic summer of 1968 searches for his missing sister. I loved the vibe of the place and the time, and I liked the main character, a scrappy kid trying to keep things together, his brother in Vietnam, an absent dad and a spaced-out mom, but this one took a strange cult turn that I didn’t quite follow.
  • Anatomy: A Love Story, Dana Schwartz. It breaks my heart to put this in ‘Meh’ but it just didn’t do it for me. Again, on paper, it checked all the boxes – a strong female lead, a fascinating time and place (Edinburgh 1817) and a goth plot featuring archaic surgeries, resurrection men and corpses – but it just didn’t deliver all the goods. Don’t get me wrong, it was okay, and I absolutely love Dana Schwartz’s ‘Noble Blood’ podcast, but something was missing for me.

Do Not Recommend

  • The Last Goodnight, Kat Martin. I thought this was a straight mystery when I picked it up at the library (I was desperate) but it had a romantic subplot that was unintentionally hilarious. Lots of gross descriptions of the male lead (of course a millionaire rancher with a gorgeous horse farm, an extensive staff, and a rock-hard body that is constantly described in his cowboy boots, tight jeans, chaps and cowboy hats) checking out the female investigator’s hot curves and cascading hair whilst trying to ignore his throbbing manhood. I laughed my way through it and read several of the paragraphs to my family out loud until my adolescent daughter left the room gagging. If you like bodice rippers, heaving bosoms, almost-offensive sexual advances and descriptions of clothes confining turgid genitals, you may like this as well.

I hope everyone is having a good summer. I also hope this foray back into blogging will wake up my mojo and I’ll be back soon, either with more books or a general life update, but we shall see. Until then!