completed

• the hurting kind, ada limón (0121)
  • There is a solitude in this world
  • I cannot pierce. I would die for it.
  • i'm like three poems in and just like THIS IS FUCKING BEAUTIFUL!!!!! it's taking everything in me to not just quote constantly
  • honestly i just wish more nature poems included nods to strip malls and drainage ditches and government websites
  • Who would have told you life was a series of warnings, but also magic.
  • overall i loved these but was not super into the seasons as framing device, idk i love cyclical time but it didn't work for me here
  • but fortunately what did work: every goddamn one of these poems
  • We were
  • both human and animal-hearted,
  • bound to the blades, bound to outrun them.
• beloved beasts: fighting for life in an age of extinction, michelle nijhuis (0123)
  • hooting, hollering as i read The story of modern species conservation is full of people who did the wrong things for the right reasons, and the right things for the wrong reasons.
  • about halfway through now and i really do appreciate the balance of "here's how this person influenced the conservation movement! and also they were a slaveowner/championed eugenics/put human beings in sideshows." like i feel like a lot of conservation works try to stress that conservation is of dire importance (true!) so it doesn't matter what early conservationists did (extremely untrue!)
  • The problem [...] is that Homo sapiens is monumentally unprepared for divinity. As the presumptive drivers of evolution, we may not be dumb, but we are often drunk. We are clever cousins of the mushrooms, promoted beyond our experience.
• the long covid survival guide, ed. fiona lowenstein (0124)
  • i read this even though afaik i've stayed covid-free because i thought it might have some good stuff for self-advocacy re: talking to doctors about chronic invisible illness. lo and behold i was right! as ever, the chronic illness community is way more helpful than literally any government resource :/
  • anyway read this! read this book! it is better to read it and never need it than the other way around!
• ninth house, leigh bardugo (0216)
  • reread bc i know i liked it the first time and i'm waitlisted at the library for the second one, but i don't remember much
  • By the time Alex managed to get the blood out of her good wool coat, it was too warm to wear it.
  • honestly such an absolute banger of an opening line
  • He'd known the truth of the building, all of its faces, that it had been built to the Platonic ideal (the building was a temple), employing the same ratios used by some typesetters for their pages (the building was a book), that its marble had been quarried in Vermont (the building was a monument).
  • i know better than anyone the pain of an unavoidable morning class but alex scheduling an 8 am spanish lecture for friday when she's gotta be up til 4 to watch ghosts during secret society haruspicy? when we've already established she did not have to take spanish? girl wyd
    • okay we have since established that she did not in fact choose her classes with the knowledge she would have weekly 4am haruspicy interfering so that's something
  • He didn't know how precious a normal life could be, how easy it was to drift away from average. You started sleeping until noon, skipped one class, one day of school, lost one job, then another, forgot the way that normal people did things. You lost the language of ordinary life.
  • honestly there's something so funny about the idea of being passive-aggressive in the secret society group chat because someone's too busy on the new moon to return your friend from the pocket dimension and/or hell he appears to have accidentally magicked himself into
  • not to be dramatic but i would both kill and murder for pamela dawes
  • "Most cities are palimpsests," Darlington had once told her. When she'd searched for the word's meaning, it had taken her three starts to find the right spelling. "Built over and over again so you can't remember what went where. But New Haven wears its scars. The big highways that run the wrong way, the dead office parks, the vistas that stretch into nothing but power lines. No one realizes how much life happens between the wounds, how much it has to offer. It's a city built to make you want to keep driving away from it."
    • i like this bit but mostly it reminds me of how i'd never heard this word before i read this book the first time and then i heard it about five times in the next two days and got freaked out. haunted by palimpsests
  • Why do you think they built so many churches here? Somehow the men and women of this city knew: Their streets were home to other gods.
  • fun reread overall, excited for book 2 whenever it ends up in my holds
• entangled life, merlin sheldrake
  • i've been wanting to read this since i read underland and my library finally got it, but then i was waitlisted forever?? like how are there so many locals desperate for mycorrhizal network non-fiction and why are they not my friends already
  • o to be a little bug in the devonian period living in my little prototaxite cubbyhole
  • normally i'm super into pop science but this might be the rare occasion where i already know too much going in so it's not exciting me like i thought it would :(
    • also over the last few years i've gotten really into, like, science writing that is so evocative it's almost sensual? like pal i can tell you like fungi a lot but this is somehow a little too platonic for me
  • i do appreciate him venturing into animism tho.
  • reading the biocomputing section and i'm just like... four-word horror story: AI-powered fungal network
  • reading the words "a paper called 'queer theory for lichens'" and immediately abandoning this book to go read the journal of critical environmental studies
  • i promise that if i ever write a nature-related book i will never mention john muir or aldo leopold even once
  • ok well i guess i'm done bc 350 out of like 900 pages were acknowledgements and citations? love the paying of dues but damn. anyway i did not care for this and i'm very disappointed
  • ok so it turns out i had covid when i was reading this so like, probably it wasn't this poor dude's fault i couldn't enjoy his book. i honestly don't even remember reading it
    • me, my brain baking at 103 degrees: hm i wonder why i'm not enjoying this
• marple: twelve new mysteries (0325)
  • standouts for this: ruth ware, jean kwok, dreda say mitchell, elly griffiths, karen mcmanus, kate mosse, leigh bardugo
  • ok now i'm getting defensive over the stories i didn't really like bc i looked at goodreads and sooooo many people are just like.... you know how people on that site can get
  • kinda like damn why am i not getting miss marple fanfic published tho
• hell bent, leigh bardugo (0407)
  • i've been waitlisted since january and i was afraid my library hold would come in while i was finishing my capstone but it came in like 12 hours after i submitted it!! excited to dig in
  • It was hard to breathe. Once bones broke, they learned the habit.
  • once again i say: not to be dramatic but i would both kill and murder for pamela dawes
  • "I don't know how to forgive," Alex admitted. "And I don't think I want to learn." she's just like me fr
  • i do love the way this is getting set up kinda like a heist but the assembling-the-team part is "ok so who are the most ethical murderers we know"
  • Things you love, things you need, they don't stop taking.
  • Pam had done her best to smile. She'd never liked that phrase, diamond in the rough. All that meant was they had to cut you again and again to let the light in.
  • reading tripp's murder section like damn this guy's my friend now, and my son, and he should get to do a little murder as a treat
    • ngl i had my fingers crossed for how things shook out for him lmfao
  • 'happy phantom' by tori amos as a ward against ghosts... incredible
  • tripp's "i believe in transformative growth" i love him
  • anyway very enjoyable!!!
• the lifecycle of software objects, ted chiang (1015)
  • wait have i really not read a book that wasn't for work or school since april... ugh reading books for a living sounds so great on paper but my eyes can only handle so much. i miss the fun reading
    • especially bad since this was in fact for school, lmao
  • anyway i really enjoyed this, but possibly because i had to do four incredibly dense anthropological theory readings before this and it was absolutely a breath of fresh air. but also i think because ted chiang is very good
  • i mean you know i eschew "hard science" fiction bc i'm so much more into the le guin-style thing, what i always think of as "hard social science" fiction. i don't care about the actual physical mechanics of what's happening, tell me about the social implications
  • which is what ted chiang does so well! yes yes there's some very complicated AI going on but more importantly oh god we just created 70000 ethical dilemmas and also our AI children are learning to swear from AI fortnite
• tlön, uqbar, orbis tertius, jorge luis borges (1020)
  • ok i'm switching this list from books to lit bc my social science classes suddenly became very short fiction oriented out of nowhere and i do not want to omit this one bc goddamn!!!
  • Almost immediately, reality yielded on more than one account. The truth is that it longed to yield.
• the ones who walk away from omelas, ursula k. le guin (1020)
  • another one for class. not my favorite of hers but i mean le guin is always worth reading
  • i'm just like. very glad it's only a few pages though bc i can only stand to think about utilitarianism so long

abandoned

• fisherman's bible: the world's most comprehensive angling reference
  • i took this out of the library to satisfy my vague curiosity about fishing lures. i pass them every time i buy camping gear and i'm just like "why are some of these so pricy. why are some of these so cheap. are there, like, luxury fishing lures."
  • was my question answered? well i clicked on the lures section and here's an excerpt of the first lure review:
  • Features: Hottest bait to hit crappie fishing in a long time; serious slab enticing features; tight wobble; highly detailed design; 3D lazer eyes; quality components; fiving depths up to 10'.
  • anyway so i just have more questions now BUT i do think fishing lures are very pretty so maybe i will buy some and make a piece of wall art with them and/or protect myself from enemies with their 3D lazer eyes
• fen, bog and swamp, annie proulx
  • i've had a hate-on for annie proulx since the shipping news (newfoundland stuff by non-newfoundlanders is so very often ???????) but ya boi can't resist a bog
  • "we have our modern-day thoreaus in Inuit people" aaaaand ya boi is closing this book, jesus christ
• dracula, bram stoker
  • never actually finished dracula daily last year but let's see how this year goes!
  • very nice to be hanging out with my good friend jonathan again
  • update: stopped after like day 2 lmao. i do love dracula but maybe it was too soon

work not detailing stuff i read for work here for privacy reasons but my current book count is: 7