Peeking into the rock

 through April 4. That appears to be how I'm doing this now.
Completed books:
Caramelo, by Sandra Cisneros slightly magical realist Mexican family saga
Jackaby, by William Ritter, urban fantasy/post-steampunk vol 1 of a series
I'll Never Get Out of this World Alive, by Steve Earle, fantasy/magical realism, the latter life of Hank WIlliams's discredited doctor, and Hank's ghost and...
Fangirl, by Rainbow Rowell, YA college freshmen romcom
Sag Harbor, by Colson Whitehead, semi-autobiographical coming of age novel
New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson, midfuture epic
Ghostly Echoes, by WIlliam Ritter, 3rd in Jackaby series
The Cardturner, by Louis Sachar, YA comic-drama coming of age story involving bridge and awful moneygrubbing parents
A Princess in Theory, by Alyssa Cole, surprise African royalty romance with an orphan scientist
Jepp, Who Defied the Stars, by Katherine Marsh, YA historical coming of age disability science romance-adjacent


Books dropped before the end:
Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell
Makers, by Cory Doctorow
The Reader, by Traci Chee
Wickedly Charming, by Kristine Grayson

Let me get the dropped books out of the way first. Cloud Atlas has some cool characters in it, but it's a setup to prove that humanity is bad and terrible and the worst ones will always win. I gave up maybe 75% of the way through. I do like the gimmick structure--a series of unfinished stories, whose "and then what happened?" is revealed in the story of a later character with only tangential, but at the same time substantive and consequential, connections to the earlier character. But that, and the really quite nice writing, are not enough to elevate the book from the tedious sophomoric "moral."

I was enjoying the hell out of Makers and would have finished it but nobody I knew could assure me that the next bit coming up wasn't going to be a second life-destroying physical attack on a main character graphically and lavishly described for many harrowing pages possibly resulting in the permanent maiming or death of the character. The fact that this character was a woman only opened up even more awful possibilities than the first attack, which nearly finished me. Nobody who talks about this book even notes that the first attack takes place, so the fact that the second potential one isn't mentioned is no kind of evidence at all. There was no reason for the way the first one was written except to highlight the erection that the attacker had.

The Reader is mischaracterized in its publicity materials. It's not about a world with no readers in it, where there is one magical book and one unlikely person who learns to read. It is about assassins. It's well written but not my cup of tea.

Wickedly Charming starts out with the premise that the archetypes of modern versions of fairytales are based on distortions of the real lives of people from backward but very magical countries. The stepmothers' lives have been outright lied about. Two expats from that world, Snow White's stepmother and Cinderella's divorced Prince Charming, collaborate on a novel meant to Tell The Whole Real Truth and have a light romantic comedy of their own while they're at it. And then, halfway through the book, we jump the shark and there's a bunch of artificially injected Plot with Nasty Villains in it, and all the fun goes out of the book as we stare slackjawed at the introduction of dumb stereotyped antagonists. Talk about missing one's own point.

Okay, the finished ones:

Caramelo  This is a rush. I definitely recommend listening to this one rather than reading it, because CIsneros reads it herself andf her voice is soooo perfect for this. Also, while the title is explained by several bits in the story--the fundamental one being the name of the design of the unfinished rebozo that is handed down in the family-- it also describes the impact of the story's structure. The import of every little detail-and every little detail has import-spreads sweetly across your brain like the sugar of candy that you suck for a long time: and then, suddenly, something explodes like when you crunch down on a filled candy. CIsneros reads it in a sweet, high-pitched rush, sometimes full of mirth, other times outrage, other times, deep sympathy. Read it! Or better, listen to it.

Oops I didn't tell you anything about the story. Several generations of a Mexican family reveal their secrets to the modern daughter, especially "The Awful Grandmother" who, it turns out, has her reasons.

Jackaby A plucky middle class English maiden arrives in a fictional Massachusetts town in the late 1800s,  in need of a job after having finished out a stint working on a paleontological dig in Ukraine. She crosses paths with a Seer who is fighting mostly fairytale creatures. This is a four-book series and apparently the stakes accelerate a lot. This is a category of book I usually avoid because I'm not fond of Jim Butcher or Laurell K. Hamilton, but these are their own thing. They have a little Dr. Who feel due to the title character's eccentricity and odd clothing, but the POV character is more than an observer, and the side characters all amount to something interesting.

I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive More than a decade after he screwed up and accidentally killed Hank Williams with a drug overdose,  the doctor is a junkie, patching up gangsters and providing illegal abortions to afford his next fix. He's haunted by Hank Williams's sarcastic and apparently vindictive ghost. And then... everything changes because he provides an abortion for the granddaughter of a curandero, who is just now ready to come into her own powers and use the teachings of her grandpa. This is written by the musician Steve Earle. I believe he avoids the exoticism trap pretty well when he depicts the young woman's point of view. I liked this book a lot.

Fangirl I think a lot of people were mad at this book for one reason or another, but I liked it. The protagonist is one of a pair of twins, freshmen at college, who have always done everything together until recently. The other twin has been fighting to separate herself, and it's not going well for our protagonist, who has some mental issues she handles either well or not depending on the circumstances. While her sister gets in over her head with the fast-living frat-adjacent crowd, the protagonist struggles with the divide between fan writing and mainstream writing (with a teacher who thinks all fan writing is at its core plagiarism, but has some good points about how to write mainstream writing: and an exploitive cowriter) There's a lot more plot: a mother who abandoned them, a manic father (I think it's not bipolarism), a couple of surprise friends.  I thought it was a pleasant book.

Sag Harbor  So apparently rich kid books are a lot more interesting if they are black rich kids. This is an amiable "how I spent the summer of my junior year" ramble, which I guess wasn't really supposed to be out to show how rich kid privilege gets totally undermined by race, but it does do that, while also telling a sweet coming of age story. I haven't read his serious science fiction books yet: I mean to, but the subjects of them make me ancxious, so I thought I'd read this first to get attached to the author before going there.

New York 2140 Kim Stanley Robinson annoyed the hell out of me with the Mars books: I didn't finish the first one because of grotesque stereotyping and I only glanced into the others before giving up. But I loved the California ones. This is more like those. It's pretty damn fine. It has the post-apocalyptic setup but it's not about the post-apocalyptic premise, at all. It's really germane to now, obviously, and though it has a deus ex machina in it, it's weird enough and fun enough that you don't really mind too much, also because the deus ex machina would not be enough without the collective and political action of, well, basically, New York.

Also I'm really looking forward to N.K.Jemisin's The City We Became, which is a different take on New York resiliency.



Ghostly Echoes The 3rd book of the Jackaby series, which I read out of order because availability: I don't think it's a problem, though they afre definitely in a progression.

The Cardturner Did you read Holes? Then you'll understand why I grabbed this book even though it's about bridge. The card game. I mean, that's not entirely true, I love books that are also about a thing, a world that people inhabit, like that. The blurb was a little more saccharine than necessary, but I trust this author! It turns out it's another book that is probably improved by being read by the author. The protagonist's parents are trying to get him to develop a favorite-uncle relationship with a great-uncle because they want to inherit from him. The opportunity arises because the old man has gone blind from diabetes and he needs a cardturner to help him play bridge, since he has just fired another teenager because she questioned his choices.  There's a long-buried complicated love story, and a tentative relationship developing between the teenagers, and problems with longstanding friendships, and and and. And also hefty asides to teach bridge. I thought it was a lot of fun, though aspects of the plot were inevitable and therefore predictable.


A Princess In Theory I have a... complicated relationship with romance. In theory, I should love romance. I certainly love reading about romance books. In practice I am more likely to like reading books that are more what I would call "romance-adjacent"--there's a relationship story there, but there's another main focus to it. One rule that usually works for me is to avoid books with royalty in the title -- like anything "The Duke's Mistress" or whatever. Because I do enjoy reading about romances, I have heard rather a lot about Alyssa Cole, so I was quite willing to break that rule and test whether I would like this book. I kind of do.  The protagonist is an epidemiologist! Very timely (even before the pandemic. We always knew the pandemic was coming). (this book does not have a pandemic in it)

I did like it, and I understand why Alyssa Cole has such stalwart fans. Among the pluses: it's sort of a Wakanda novel: the fictional African country has managed to mostly avoid colonization and so therefore is more prosperous and less unequal than other countries.  Though there's some weird justification for the excesses of the palace. Cole is quite clearly trying to have her twirly princess dress and her social justice too, and that's fine. A strong plus for some people (including me at some time in the past) is its sex positivity. In romance categories I think it is what is called "sexy" rather than "erotic:" if I understand the difference, the former has sex in it, the latter is centered on sex or sexuality (and pornography is writing that is sex itself). At this stage of my life, written sex is very "meh" to me, so that after the first sex scene, I skipped forward over the others. I  don't know why!  I do the same with most fight and battle scenes. 

The romance was fine, the descriptions of not-Wakanda were very nice, the slice of life in New York were nice. I wasn't satisfied with the mystery B plot. I felt that it could have been a lot more interesting and consequential. The revelation of what happened with the protagonist's parents seemed to me to fall flat completely--as if Cole had actually worked out something that made full sense, had consequence, and actually explained what happened--and then didn't write it into the final draft because of word limits or deadlines or ennui or something.

Jepp This is based on the existence, at Tycho Brahe's Uraniborg castle, of a Dutch dwarf named Jepp and a tippling moose. It tells a fictional tale of how he got there and what he did after he got there. I tried checking on the romance but wasn't able to verify it. I hope it was true. I'm certain that the family origins are fictional, and his life at the court of the Infanta in Brussels: though her fondness for dwarfs and what she put them through is historical fact. The high drama and angst of the book are not just provided by the harrowing events in it, but also by the fact that they are the reminiscences of an innocent teenager in the wide world for the first time. Characters have depth, and the landscape is well-drawn. I just finished it and that's why I'm finally writing these books up!

Finished January 4 This side of Married  Rachel Pastan
Dropped January 5 Rooms Lauren Oliver
Finished  January 6 The Look of Love Sarah Jio
Dropped January 6 Social Crimes Jane Stanton Hitchcock
Dropped January 8 The Cruelest Month Laurie Penny
Dropped January 10 The Merry WIves of Maggody Joan Hess
Finished January 13 A Tale for the Time Being Ruth Ozeki
Finished January 16 Ahab's Wife Sena Jeter Naslund
FInished January 18 My Year of Meats Ruth Ozeki
Dropped January 19 The Keeper of Lost Causes, aka Mercy Jussi Adler-Olsson
Finished January 20 Sourdough Robin Sloan
Dropped January 21 I, Coriander Sally Gardner
Finished January 23 The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender Leslye Walton
Will finish before February Kraken China Mieville


Dropped: 6 books, mostly because I'm not the right reader.
Rooms turned out to be a thirllery thing with nastiness frontloaded, not my cup of tea (see Kraken review for more about that)
The Cruelest Month, was because I realized I had read it before and didn't like it well enough to re-read it. 
Social Crimes I read two-thirds of before I came to the conclusion that the protagonist was not on a redemption arc and that the humiliation and antisociality was just going to go on and on. The hook is that very rich man's second wife is done out of her inheritance by her husband's evil lawyer and a pyschopathic probably serial-killer girlfriend and our widow is trying to claw her way back into society...come to think of it I don't know why I thought I might like this? I get a little desperate looking for books on Libby sometimes.
The Merry Wives of Maggody, a comic novel about a small town putting on a golf tournament and somehow Shakespeare is involved. Dropped it because the people were thin cardboard and I decided I had no patience for it.
The Keeper of Lost Causes, a police procedural thriller which I thought might be fun but I was bored and repelled immediately.
I, Coriander, a YA witch child historical which I might like another time but just couldn't get into.

Finished! 8 books. Reviews:
This Side of Married. The three thirtyish daughters of a high-achieving, long-married perfectionist Jewish doctor all in their own ways fail to have the perfect wedding and marriage. The protagonist has quit being a zoo vet and boy is that ever a good idea because she totally misses the philosophy of a zoo. However, she's leaning towards gardening, and her herpetology interests are going to serve her well in unexpected ways. I'd classify this as "women's lit:" it's not quite like a category romance. If you're a romance fan and you're wondering if you'd like it, call it "romance adjacent" and ask yourself how you feel about the romantic-adjacent  relationships not quite resolving satisfactorily, though the characters do have some satisfactory growth.

The Look of Love. The premise is: if you're a certain person born at a certain time a woman will pass on to you w little gift--whenever you are in the presence of love, you'll have visual disturbances. If you are this person, you must write in a book that will be given to you six stories about people you see during the year before you turn thirty, each of  them part of a couple that represents a certain type of love (named by their Greek names). Also you will be a florist because this all started with a florist in 18th or 19th century France, I forget exactly. If you don't do this writing task you'll miss out on the great love of your life unless, after you pass the gift and task on to the next woman, you go out to meet your love on a rainy full moon night. Yes, that's spoilers. I feel free to tell you this because this book is so dumb that you won't be reading it. I did persist for some reason. i had an okay time of it though I also kept saying "no, hospitals don't work that way," and "medical insurance doesn't work that way," and so on. Also I was irked by the fact that the richer a person was in this book, the more likely they were to be virtuous and lovable and honest and kind.

A Tale for the Time Being This might be my favorite Ruth Ozeki book. I think she's written three and I love them all though some are harder to read (My Year of Meats can be pretty hard, emotionally) Why doesn't anybody ever list Ozeki as sff or sff-adjacent? All three of the books I've read (including All Over Creation) have speculative aspects and this one is heavily rooted in ideas about time and space, as well as being about cruelty, kindness, life and death, aging and youth, and lots and lots of loss. I am really glad I read this and I wish there were more of these. It has another thing that's precious to me, and that is culture clash. Oh my the culture clash. It helps to know that Ruth Ozeki, like her protagonist her and in My Year of Meats, had a Japanese mother and spent time as a student in Japan. The story revolves around a Japanese schoolgirl's journal as she recounts the terrible things in her life and begins to plan her own suicide, which is picked up on a Canadian beach ten years later. I am going to withhold information beyond that even though I don't believe in the spoiler theory of reviewism, because in this one case the things that happen are amazing enough that you ought to experience them for new, once. It gets distressing for a while, in case you're having issues with that.

Ahab's Wife starts lout with a horrible childbirth in a snowed-in cabin in the early 1800s. It is narrated mostly first person by a young woman who, among many other things, marries Captain Ahab from Moby-Dick. There's a little tendency to have her meet almost everyone of consequence of her era, but you kind if have to expect that from a book like this. It's a terribly adventurous book, and much that is terrifying happens. There's a dizzying amount of detail and action. And there's only one passage I remember that seems to be lifted directly from Moby-Dick. I had moments when this book was too much of a muchness, but overall I really liked it. If you've ever been enchanted by whaler's sea shanties, this book will tap that vein and then also cure you of it.

Speaking of difficult books, My Year of Meats gets very very difficult by the end. But there's a ramp up to it, and the characters are all interesting and some of them are sympathetic.The protagonist is a documentary filmmaker who gets hired by a Japanese ad agency to make TV shows about American families and how they eat beef. Hijinks ensue, but also things keep getting real.It's Ruth Ozeki, therefore it's great!

Sourdough was a kind of betrayal. Premise: San Francisco techie woman is gifted a sourdough starter by her soup and sandwihich delivery guys who
are being deported. There's something magic about the sourdough starter. Also, she begins to meet modern foodies and ...it all goes sort of satirical for a while, and then it goes haywire.

And the conclusion feels fucking racist to me. So while I enjoyed certain parts of the book, my ultimate feeling towards this book is anger. The presentation of this book is not helped by the fact that nobody saw fit to take the time to teach the reader how to pronounce San Francisco place names.

The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender also feels like a betrayal. It also reads like someone who read through a pile of books labeled "Magical Realism" and decided to program an AI to write it. The deepseated emotional dream logic was just kind of off by a beat? & the ending felt forced and like a slap in the face for many of the best characters and also for the reader. Again, I liked moments of it, but not the story as a whole.

Kraken has the China Mieville Problem. The man is a sadist. He will call time in the middle of the action to put you through a half hour of meticulously detailed gory fatal torture and as far as I can tell it's because he loves writing this stuff. You can tell me this is truthtelling at its unflinchingest.  He just gets off on it.

That being said, there's as usual a lot of great writing, worldbuilding, character development, etc. I'm close enough to the end to recemmend it but I'm not sure what this story is for exactly. It sort of feels like an improvised shadow puppet play made from those graphics Monty Python used to use. I can recommend the book, definitely, and there's a couple ideas I wish I'd had, but it's not a book I wish I'd written, that's for sure.

 I've had a hard time reading books for a few years, more even than I've admitted to (complained about). I have attributed it to mind scatter from all the various One Damned Thing After Another and also widowhood. Maybe so because suddenly I can read again so long as the thing I'm reading doesn't annoy me too much.

For example, my friend Israel lent me Albion's Seed by David Fischer  (you can read a summary and more positive review of it here) and I can't get into its nine hundred pages of argument that American culture  and politics are almost exclusively descended from four waves of English migration. Despite its length and copious documentation, the actual assertions about culture, psychology, politics, etc. feel unsupported to me. I felt like some asshole had cornered me at a party and was booming along about their nutcase theory. Even though the book has a fat bibliography and a lot of material from primary sources. I don't know why it felt that way to me, but I can't finish it right now. I occasionally browse it for story bits, but it's joyless work.

I picked up The Tree Climber's Guide  by Jack Cooke at the San Francisco Friends of the Public Library's book sale and I can't read it either. Again, it's the theoretics that defeats me.  This book should be right up my alley. It's about the trees of London, as a class and as individuals, meant for people who want to enjoy them to the fullest, including climbing up into them. But it's ruined for me with his uninformed pronouncements on human evolution and nearly spiritualistic approach to everything. I can handle a certain amount of spirituality in a nature book, just not this much. But I still have it in my bathroom waiting for me to give it a fourth chance. After all, it's still a book about urban trees.

Another book I couldn't read was an old Charles deLint, The Little Country. I had the usual deLint trouble where his writing hits an uncanny valley of almost being exactly what I want but somehow tweer than I want even though if I try to catalog the things that make it twee I don't find them--it should be "gritty" almost. Except in this case the things that are supposed to make it gritty include a thing I do not tolerate, which is a fancy, "let's get into the twisted mind of a sociopathic serial killer who likes to torture people" element. I think most people like it better than I do.

So what have I finished? Alif the Unseen by G. Willow WIlson. I went looking to see if there was tumblr discourse about this because there's an aspect of this that I thought the kiddies would go wild for--this book is set inside a not-quite Egyptian world and the author is an American convert to Islam. But she seems to have escaped the discourse treatment. I think the book works. There's a very nice self-insertion element--a character is an American convert living in the nameless City (which seems to be a neighbor of the Emirates). But it's well handled, and she's not the main character or even the main character's girlfriend or his other relationship either. Every character has many layers and you can't waves their short description around and think you've told their story. You need the whole book for that. The story is sort of like North by Northwest in that the protagonist is being pursued by evil forces beyond his ken (that is, the secret police) before he even knows why (he thinks he knows why, but he's wrong). The McGuffin is delicious--it's not a spoiler to say that while at first Alif thinks it's a program he's written, it turns out to be a book. And there's djinns in it and they are not what you think they are. No, not that either. 

I also read The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale. I have mixed feelings about this book. It has some things I hate, which I'll get to, but first let me tell you that Hale can write suspense to the point where you want to claw something to shreds. And it has something I love: worker solidarity, though it's a little shallow in that their solidarity is all about elevating a blond queen over their brown selves. Yep, that's there. You can see why: the story has every goddamned element from a particular version of the fairy tale--no worries, there's lots of suspense for you even if you know the fairy tale and think you know how it's going to work out, so if you care about those things know that you're not going to be ripped-off in the dimension of discovery. But there's problems in the world-building that bug me a lot. One, all the people from the goose girl/princess's country are pale and blond while right next door all the people are dark. Two, these countries are next door to each other and share some history somewhere so that their speech is completely mutually comprehensible--the only difference is an accent so mild that it never interferes with comprehension--and yet they are utterly isolated from each other by geography: it takes months to ride from one country's center of population to the other, over nearly-impassable mountains with only one usable pass, and the royal families have never met each other in generations. The only communication between them in the normal course of things is a small handful of trading caravans that apparently never gossip about one country to the other. Excuse me, but I've met real-world languages that diverged farther than that in a shorter time when they had daily contact. There were details about animal husbandry, clothing production, and cooking that felt not quite fully  researched and developed, but I always feel this way except when reading Heather Rose Jones's books honestly, so I don't hold it against this book. Besides, there's other details that are really really nice.

Right now I'm reading Nova Swing by M.John  Harrison and I can tell you I kind of like the poetic language but not the fact that all the characters speak in the same register and I'm truly creeped out by the way all the female characters seem like simulacrums (some of them are supposed to be such, but not all). I'm glad it's short: I think I will enjoy it by the time it's done, instead of hating it as I might if it was long and kept on doing what it's doing.

So I've spent my time for updating and I'll write about my health (mostly great, with Another Big Honking Deal probably cooking itself up in my lungs) and other stuff at another time.

Reading The Global Pigeon by Colin Jerolmack. It's research for the girls who save the world from fascism through their magical connection to urban birds book. It was recommended to me by none other than Donna Haraway who I met through Katie King at FOGCon. It does not have in it what I intended to be looking for but it has all sorts of other things that I didn't know I needed. That last category is a mark of a felicitous reading choice, I think.


Other than that, I'm trucking along. I find it is better for me to work on a bit of this and that right now because I can't concentrate very well what with the sleep deprivation and the chronic intestinal issues. Oh yes and now I have a very mild neuropathy too, so that takes some of my focus away as I obsess over its progress--if it gets to a certain level we have to stop chemo to prevent its becoming permanent. As it is, my dose has been dropped. This phase of chemo is just to be sure anyways: there's reason to think that in many cases the first round withn the adriamycin/cytoxan is all a person needs. But survival rate is higher and recurrence is lower for people who've had both, so that's where we're going. But yesterday was 6 of 12 doses, so the light is at the end of the tunnel either way. The oncologist says most of her patients make it to dose 9 or 10, but some make it all the way to 12. I would like to get to 12 just to be sure (and also quite honestly so I can feel so very tough, but I don't admit to that often), but I'm fine with following her advice.

We've been repairing the outside of the house and clearing foliage because the painters are coming on Saturday. I probably shouldn't own a house because I'm not houseproud enough to do what needs to be done. Honestly when stuff gets broken or dirty I don't care enough at all. It's weird because I used to take pride in just doing what needs to be done and in mechanical competence. But I'm kind of broken a bit myself, I guess.

While at the library I also picked up a Tobias Buckell book because I keep bouncing off his writing and I want to like his work. And another book called Watermind by M.M. Buckner that was near it on the shelves because it looked interesgting and I've never heard of it or the author. I want to read more genre stuff that's more recent but it's hard at the library because most of the requests for material seem to be coming from the grognards.

Emma told me there's a magnificent petrified forest in Chemnitz and now I want to go there more than ever. My dream itinerary for next spring is: Eastercon, a couple weeks with Frank and Hana in Loughborough, some days in Paris with Andrea, and then on to Chemnitz, Prague, and maybe a bus tour of Poland and if my bro-and-sis-in-law are in Langaland, a few days in Denmark. I imagine it would be summer before I got back home.

I would also like to travel in the States some: to Portland to see my aunt and a friend or two, and maybe the Woodstock Memory Hole if anything is going on there right now: to LA to see my other aunt: to Houston to visit Nancy Zeitler, a friend who's been living there for years & I've never visited her there: to Silver Spring Maryland to visit Katie King, who I visited over a dozen years ago: to Chattanooga to visit Sharon Farber, who I visited 29 years ago: to Philadelphia, just to see it again after 50 years gone from it: to New York, to visit Phil Josselyn, who I've never visited & when he visits me I realize how much I miss him: and to Boston, to visit Mary Porter, who I visited 26 years ago but never in the house she lives in now.

That's a lot.

The chapter I am working on is maybe the penultimate chapter of the book, depending on how many words it takes to write the things that are happening now, but it is more likely the chapter before the penultimate one. Oh, I'm sure it is, no matter how long this stuff goes, because certain things need to be in their own chapters.

( oh how I do go on about writing insecurities )

I kind of read Octavia Butler's Fledgling this week too. I skipped ahead to the trials because I am a wuss. It made me wonder just how much of her work is about blending. I will have to read more and re-reading more and figure this out. Also I read Emma Bull's Finder, which was fun enough that I inhaled it but I was also annoyed by its callowness.

On another front, I'm cleaning up the yard to make it pleasant for Frank and Hana when they come later in the month and also so I can see just how much progress I've really made back there. Which is a lot. I have planted a line of coreopsis along one side of one section of the brick path from the garage to Zack's, and parsleyalong the rest of it (and it's still not quite enough parsley for all Zack's and my needs). The front yard is almost cleaned up. After my hand heals from the carpal tunnel release surgery I'm having on Monday, I'll plant the two different abutilons and the one salvia I have in the corner by the almond tree. I have a couple of California milkweeds to plant--they have mousy looking litttle white flowers but they haven't, unlike the other milkweeds, been sprayed with BT to fight light brown apple moth. It's the law, but it makes the milkweeds toxic to the Monarch caterpillars too. So if I had bought one of those pretty ones I would have had to put a net over them for some time--a few months? I forget--to keep from poisoning the animal we're planting it for...

( and I also go on and on about my new knees )
On the Zluta front, even though I don't know what I'm doing, we're reaching a place with the backyard barking that is bearable, I'm able to let her go out there freely for many hours a day before she decides to try to provoke the killer dog next door. My current method of breaking that up is to almost silently head her off, distract her with thrown apples, and herd her or carry her inside. Less shouting--which ramps her up-- and no hose spray--which excites her and is actually a reward, However, when I water the yard, I let her play in the hose as much as she likes. Yes, it is still warm enough for her to get wet outside. Though I turned the heater on today. It's set in the low sixties: I think 66 for a period in the afternoon.

Speaking of communication, she is using the wiggle method of communicating her needs much more than the open-mouthed, toothy swarm method. I try to respond immediately but sometimes I'm in the middle of a thing and she has no patience. I've had to exile her only once every couple-few days this last two weeks (it was getting to be two and three times a day, which is too much). Of course, part of this is her general greater contentment now that I am driving again and getting her to the dog park five days out of six.

She has an unfortunately tender stomach, apparently, and apparently I guessed wrong about her food, so that's a work in progress.

I have a lot to say about a lot of things, but here I'll just  quickly say, between tossing things for Žluta, I have been slogging through The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco forever and forever and I'm about half way through. Why am I persisting? I've tried to read it before and failed. It was one of my father's favorite books I guess is why I am determined to read it now. Also I will feel free to get rid of it once I've read it.

I finally got back to the library yesterday and I got Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie, Mappa Mundi by Justina Robson, and Broken Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin, as well as two cookbooks (Pkease to the table, a Russian one: and The Paprikas Weiss Hungarian cookbook). I'll have to get them back before the 22nd so I can take out enough books to last me until I've recovered enough from the next surgery to get back to the library.

Right. I'm getting my new right knee on the 23rd. Also, I had the nerve conduction test yesterday (the 9th) and Dr. Brunelli said it was an elegant study, confirming carpal tunnel syndrome with a classical (and extreme) presentation. He said the median nerve was "trashed" in the tunnel, and fine in the forearm and across the elbow. Also the ulnar nerve was fine. Best: although the nerve response was dramatically slowed, the volume of the response was normal, which is a good indication for success in treatment, which is a simple surgery where they snip the ligament that holds the wrist bones tight. This makes the  palm a little flatter but it allows the inflammation to subside and relieves the nerve. When I had it done on my right hand 37 years ago my hand was weaker for a couple of years so I didn't do it to my left hand at the time and I didn't need it till now. The right hand recovered its full strength long ago and since I am right handed I frankly don't care that my left hand might possibly be a bit weaker for some purposes for a while.

I have a lot of other things I want to talk about but some of them are very difficult. Ad an easy one is I broke down and bought quinces again yesterday, and also I have frozen tomato puree and apple slices for pie, and I'm gathering windfall apples for apple butter. Also I have a raft of rose hips so maybe rose hip jam? I've made rose hips into a magic conduit in The Drummer Boy.

I had a moment of either slight cowardice or wisdom and decided to get dropped off by car at the library instead of walking both ways to the farmer's market. Except I'm not sure I shaved any distance off: the farmer's market might in fact be midway between my house and the library. Walking back wasn't all that far, but I guess I'm not ready to carry a bunch of stuff yet. It was a bit unpoleasant for a while. I reminded myself I used to weigh more than all of my current weight, the books and the veggies combined, but it didn't cheer me up much. And now I've been home for an hour and a half, still wating for the tylenol to kick in and contemplating tramadol. But it's not bad. I did it, and even though it hurts, I didn't harm myself.

At the library I got a tree gjuide, and another Lisa Goldstein book (because she's always readable) and a Jay ake book and Oliver Sacks's Oaxaca Journal, about a fern huntuing foray he took with a group of enthusiasts. I love his endless interest in everything.

Brought in a meal of wax beans, so that's nice too.

Two weeks ago at this very time (eight-thirty in the morning) I was having the time of my life in the operating room. Swirly colors, feeling no pain, an amusing anesthesiologist, and somehow not-creepy carpentry noises I knew were being directed to my very own bones--I tell you, conscious sedation with the happy cocktail is the way to go if you're going to get your bones milled.

Today I'm walking, mostly without a cane as long as I'm in the house, doing small exercises as often as I think of it (goal is two or three of them an hour), medicating but not heavily. A month or less and I'll return to driving. My biggest complaint is I get so tired so quickly and I'm taking several small naps a day, and not sleeping all that well at night.

I haven't gotten back to work writing yet but I'm doing the laundry and some other housework. Also working on the World's Ugliest Afghan. Seriously, I decided to make it when I saw that somehow I had become the owner of a large box of mismatched, odd colored, odd textured tiny balls of yarn. It will be ugly but also, I think cuddly. I am not the most skilled of crocheters, and the differences in texture mean differences in gauge as well, so the granny squares are coming out different sizes. I will compensate somehoiw when I attach them to each other. I've thought of some dodges. I am not worried. This is not meant to be a blue-ribbon afghan. I asked Emma for additional yarn scraps when I saw that I was coming to the end of the pile before getting to the end of the afghan and she sent me a bag of mainly tasteful neutrals and one skein of absolutely hot pink. I sent her the message "one of these colors is not like the others..." I have decided to arrange the squares with a band of four nine-patches down the middle, flanked by two bands of six four-patches, and bordered sufficiently deeply to make it comfy. And I am using the hot pink in just four squares, to be at the middle of the nine-patches. It will be marvellous.

It's Wednesday, so I should mention what I've been reading. I took an unpromising fantasy novel out of the library before surgery and returned it on Monday.I actually kept muttering Dorothy Heydt's Eight Deadly Words ("I don't care what happens to these people") and I realised I didn't have to finish it. Now I am reading Interface Masque by Shariann Lewitt and my problem is I don't believe in the setup enough to suspend disbelief, if you know what I mean. One problem I can identify with it is that it feels too homogenous and also too culture-essntialist. I took out two other books, and I'll tell you about them later.

II saw this dog at the county shelter website, and I sent an overture to the foster mom. I have to fill out an application for the shelter, but that entails carrying my computer upstairs to the printer, which is not that big a deal normally but I need both hands to go up and down stairs still, so later I'll have K take it there for me. The only thing wrong with the dog is I promised everybody I'd get an adult dog so we wouldn't have to live through puppyhood again...otherwise he's exactly the kind of dog I want. Including the ears, which I don't know if you call them tulip or button? anyway, half-upright. I don't really care too much about appearances though: it's the personality I want. It's just a bonus if the dog looks a bit like Truffle.

I took three books out of the library: another of Paul Stametz's mushroom growing books, Tanith Lee's The Dark Lords, and Lisa Goldstein's Tourists.

I'm a bit disappointed in the mushroom book. I thought that since it was promoted as being more for the home grower than the other one, that it might therefore have more information about the kind of garden cultivation I am trying to do, but it doesn't. It has even less information about it than the other one, and quite frankly I am not planning on getting into large-scale cultivation.

I've been warned that it is "too soon" to be very detailed about being appalled at and not enjoying a book of Tanith Lee's, so I'll leave it at that. Well, I'll hint: sexual politics, race politics, class politics, esthetics, and story structure.

Lisa Gildstein's book would have been written a wee bit differently now, I think, but it stands up (publish date 1989, a momentous year). Americans in a fictional Middle-Eatern/Central Asian sort of country for the father's research become embroiled in a complex magical/national/political crisis, where "nothing is as it seems" in an interesting way. I like that while the teenaged girls' presence is catalytical for the history of the country, they aren't the story at all, in the long view. I mean they are not the American Saviors. Magical forces have simply slotted them into the patterns that are being worked out and fought over. Literally, patterns are key here. There are many things I love about this book. The girls have been engaged for years in developing an imaginary landscape with warring countries, including making up their own languages for them and producing stacks of notebooks with mythologies, histories and literature for them. The older girl has withdrawn from the "real world" to escape the pressures of gifted child adolescence, The younger girl has withdrawn from the imaginary world to take on the practical challenges of keeping her dysfunctional family together (a task which is less hers than she imagines it to be). All of this is extremely relevant. The mother, who gave up her career for marriage, drinks to deal with her disappointment and her difficulty dealing with things. The father wants to do nothing but his research and hides as much as he is able from the problems of his family.

I could go on for hours about how the different pieces of the story interlock and move about in different directions, but a lot of you people care about spoilers and I don't really understand well what constitutes a spoiler and what doesn't, so I'm going to leave this here and say it's a yummy book.

Also I finished it in the wee hours of the morning the night before last because I couldn't sleep for reasons that escape me. And then I started a strange duck of a little story which I am now having trouble finishing. Although the story doesn't have any of the same elements except that language does a thing in it, I think the story is inspired by the book.

Next I will go back to the library and find something else to read, I don't know what.

I'm feeling a bit more cheerful today because I have apparently found my brain again. I spent a bit of time discouraged, and then a bit of time on a deliberate writing vacation, and then I had no thoughts whatever in my brain and that was frightening: I was actually empty. It was so weird. Anyway, I just chose a project at random and now I'm back to producing, slower, but a few hundred words a day is okay. The project I ended up working on is the amorous haunted nightstand one. I'm feeling tentatively optimistic on it.

( more about the last couple weeks than you want to know, probably )

Oh! It's Wednesday. I should talk about what I'm reading. Um, Growing Gournet and Medical Mushrooms by crazy man Paul Stamets. Today I'm picking up another of his books at the library. There's a lot of information in this tome, and it's superficially laid out in a sensible and accessible way, but in reality when you go to read it, the information is scattered around in all of the places you don't expect it and also there are a lot of frankly odd bits of hyperbole and strange claims. But I am figuring out some stuff from reading it, and the occasional blurry black and white photo of his cute kids holding mushrooms as big as themselves is amusing too.

All of my friends who never had dogs are getting them.