I’ve been reading…I just haven’t been posting.
- A Cathedral of Myth and Bone by Kat Howard
- A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers – I love Becky Chambers’ writing and this book is no exception, but I also found this work centrally flawed. I’ll keep it short, but: AN AREA ABANDONED BY HUMANS IS NOT “UNTOUCHED.” There’s a huge literature about this, in fact – about the inherent misconceptions of the idea that “culture” and “nature” are two separate things – and given that the relationship between humans and nature is so central to the entire concept of this work, I found the lack of understanding of this to be a huge problem. One concrete (hahaha) example of this: as anyone who has spent time in the backcountry would know, bicycling along a road through a forest that had been abandoned two hundred years prior would not be possible. It’s in fact kind of amazing how quickly human infrastructure turns to ruins…but it is still there, and it leaves a legacy. An abandoned place is not a “wilderness,” if you are defining wilderness as “untouched by humans” (as this book explicitly does, in a few places).
- An Unkindness of Magicians by Kat Howard
- The Promise by Damon Galgut
- Black Water Sister by Zen Cho
- Banana Rose by Natalie Goldberg
- The Great Spring by Natalie Goldberg
- Cultivating the Mind of Love by Thich Nhat Hanh
- Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga
- The Actual Star by Monica Byrne
- Miss Austen by Gill Hornby
- People from my Neighborhood by Hiromi Kawakami
- Her Name is Knight by Yasmin Angoe