Moving towards something

We live a somewhat charmed life “so far south in Indiana that we can see Kentucky out our front door”. The results of the recent election aren’t likely to have an outsized impact on the lifestyle we’ve grown accustomed to (and may even be financially beneficial for our investment portfolio and tax burden)

BUT… within single digit miles of our house, an unhoused man froze to death on the steps of a church after being rejected from their shelter. Just last year, there was a mass shooting that we heard from our living room. It killed 5 and injured 8. The police extra judiciously murdered EMT Breonna Taylor in her own bed and no one was held accountable for it. Inmates regularly die in our jail for nonviolent offenses because they're not receiving adequate medical care while incarcerated. This year, our neighboring school district has lost over 30 children to murder and suicide, and in the span of two weeks there were over 500 instances of violence on the busses alone. Just a few weeks ago, there was a mass casualty threat at my son’s school that prompted a lockdown.

And I haven’t even mentioned the insidious political corruption locally within our county with the former sheriff and his family embezzling millions of dollars of public funds (fortunately, he has now been punished for these crimes, but it went on in plain view for years) and a county judge who was put back on the ballot running unopposed after being suspended and censured by the state supreme court for getting into an altercation in the parking lot of a strip club on a taxpayer-funded mandatory judicial conference where he was sent to learn and not get up to shenanigans. My local Democratic party “kicked me out” after I expressed outrage over this.

Additionally, even with good insurance and no current shortage of funds, I have struggled to access adequate medical care. My son stayed on a waitlist for ADHD counseling and medication for two years due to psychiatrist shortages, and I waited over a year to see an endocrinologist in a city with a teaching hospital where there is a lot more access than in other areas of the country, saying nothing about 20 full years of medical gaslighting and putting myself into crushing medical debt that forced me to drop out of college trying to get my chronic conditions correctly diagnosed. They’re not mysterious or terribly uncommon, as it turns out, and it should never have taken 20 years of seeing specialists to get to the bottom of what was going on.

It shouldn't be this way, and there are places in the world where this hasn’t been normalized.

It's bad here now, and I'm sorry to say I believe it's going to get worse. The problems we have will require generational solutions, and we’re not currently making any progress towards solving them.

We are, evidently, fully willing to elect unqualified, incompetent criminals who seek to enrich themselves and the special interests that support them instead of serve the public good. And I’m not okay with that. I never have been.

I’ve put in the work. I’ve voted in every election since I became eligible, making sure to register with every move and research local candidates for midterms, etc. I watch debates. I've signed petitions. I’ve marched in protests. I’ve reached across metaphorical aisles and sat in on meetings at the local level. I’ve donated to campaigns. I’ve phone banked. I’ve knocked on doors. I’ve volunteered professional services for campaigns and nonprofits working on solving quality of life issues at the local level and dedicated a lot of my professional life to working for local, national, and international nonprofits. For a number of years, I ran a political discussion group to help people stay connected and informed about politics. In fact, that’s where I met my husband.

Those who know us are probably already aware that we’ve always been filthy socialists, so we’ve decided we might as well go live in a socialist country where we don’t feel like we have an adversarial relationship with our government. There's an opportunity for our family to move towards a more stable situation with governance that invests in things that align with our values better - like public health, transportation infrastructure, ecological conservation, sustainability, gender equality, and education for all - and where rights aren't being eroded by a corrupted judiciary and legislatures owned by special interests.

We are incredibly grateful to announce that we will be permanently relocating to the Netherlands.

(Yes, I buried the lede. Not even sorry. If people don't care enough to read this far, they likely also don't care about this news.)

No place is perfect, and we would never expect perfection or for immigration to be an easy path, but we’re interested in moving forward in a place where there will be more stability for our son and whatever generation comes after him.

Somewhere on the streets of Amsterdam, March 2023.

Addendum:

Taking other people’s judgements onboard about this decision has been almost as stressful as making the initial decision. Currently, the only person whose feedback on this choice that rises to the level of importance that I need to concern myself with it is my son’s, so I’m trying not to let the stony silence of family and friends weigh me down. Some have wished a sarcastic “good luck” and left it at that, and a few have expressed disappointment in our unwillingness to “stay and fight”. But those who’ve had a strong negative reaction are really showing how much they care, and that is at least preferable to the silence.

The majority have expressed jealousy, asked us to take them with us, said they were thinking of doing the same. I’m feeling every bit of my luck that we have the ability to make this transition with the support and sponsorship of my husband’s company. We’ve felt out of step with American culture our entire adult lives, and we keep saying we’d be stupid not to take advantage of this opportunity when so many don’t have anything like it available to them. So we’re going for it.

My Top 10 Books of 2023

I plowed my way through 75 books in 2023. The thought of drafting a comprehensive roundup of all of those titles like I’d done in past years felt overwhelming, so I thought a good alternative would be to decide on a top 10 list.

I chose my top 5 fiction books, and top 5 non-fiction books. They are presented in no particular order in terms of ranking.

Non-fiction

  • To Dye For: How Toxic Fashion Is Making Us Sick and How We Can Fight Back by Alden Wicker

  • Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener

  • Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause by Ty Seidule

  • The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century by Kirk Wallace Johnson

  • Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

To Dye For: How Toxic Fashion Is Making Us Sick and How We Can Fight Back by Alden Wicker

I’ve had a decades-long interest in historical fashion and textiles, so I occasionally like to get really deep in the weeds with texts on fibers. When an acquaintance I’m in a sewing group with recommended To Dye For to me, I instantly put it at the top of my TBR. It broke my brain in the best way. It’s a must-read, really. I’ve been recommending it to people like crazy, particularly all of my fellow fibromyalgia sufferers with multiple chemical sensitivities. Only truly top tier non-fiction leaves a lasting impact on my daily habits, and this one did. I have fully stopped buying synthetic fabrics for my son to wear after reading this and am feeling quite smug about my dedication to this specific brand of organic cotton dresses. This was very well organized nonfiction that presented cutting edge research and included the voices of many industry experts who you aren’t likely to have heard from anywhere else. The way the case study of the Alaska Airlines flight crews experience with their new uniforms bookends the chapters in this makes it a really satisfying read even when there are still so many open questions the science has yet to provide answers to.

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener

I picked up Uncanny Valley as research for a new fiction project I’m working on. I was expecting it to be a bit of a chore I had to get through, but I ended up enjoying it far more than I thought I would. I’ve been finding a lot of schadenfreude in the recent spate of documentaries about things like the founding of Über, the downfall of WeWork, the Fyre Festival, etc, and this tale of a young woman being an early hire at GitHub (which I’m familiar with due to my husband’s contributions to open-source code repositories) was such an intriguing window into a world that feels simultaneously far removed from my life and yet all-too-familiar. I liked the way the light, tongue-in-cheek tone ground up against the serious topics like sexism that Weiner engages with, and I especially connected with the treatment of the setting as its own character. This one is full of witty observations and fully relatable scenarios. The way that Weiner chose not to pin down the corporate entities that populate the story by naming them lent a universality to her ultimately very personal tale.

Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause by Ty Seidule

I had some great conversations about this book with my friend who is a professor in the Humanities. It was an interesting perspective that I appreciated more and more the further I got into the text. I learned a lot about both US military history and the politics of the contemporary US military that I hadn’t been aware of previously. I’d never had much insight into how and why things like ships and military bases were named, and this book had so much to say about how mediocre Confederate service members were so honored while many other deserving historical figures have been neglected. This book does not pull any punches when addressing the universal truths it lays bare, and the personal stories the author relates from his own life are no less unflinching.

The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century by Kirk Wallace Johnson

This is the “true crime” book we deserve! It’s got all the elements of a blockbuster true crime podcast without the glorification of murderers and re-victimization of families that make that genre so unpalatable to me. It’s got money, an obsessive subculture, shady backroom deals, a heist, a young classical musician who breaks bad, a globe-spanning manhunt… it is wild and riveting! And I want more!

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

This book made me furious in the best way. I picked it up expecting a first-hand account of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and got that and so, so much more. I’d never made the connection before between the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the ways in which we instituted martial law in Gulf states after Katrina. I knew there had been multiple breakdowns and failures, but this book took on the difficult task of drawing connections between the complicated societal and historical contexts and what actually happened on the ground to one family in the days before, during, and immediately after the disaster. The things that happened were appalling and should be so much more well known. This book makes you feel the very personal heartbreak and trauma of the Zeitoun family as if it were your own. I don’t think I can adequately praise how well it’s reported and how delicately it is structured to carry the reader through heavy topics with a light touch. I don’t care how much time and effort went into the creation of this book. Whatever the cost, it was worth it. We need to do whatever we can to make sure there will be dozens more just like it. Stick David Eggers into a cloning machine right now. I will take 20 more books like Zeitoun and 20 less profiles on Elon Musk, please.

fiction

  • Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

  • Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

  • The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary

  • Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan

  • Nothing Sung and Nothing Spoken by Nita Tyndall

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Project Hail Mary had been on my TBR since it released. I had enjoyed The Martian by the same author, despite not preferring first person point of view, so I thought I’d give this newer title of his a chance as well. I’m glad I did. It was inventive hard science fiction with a similar tone and structure as Weir’s previous work without feeling like there were any regurgitated themes. It takes similar themes and finds something fresh to explore in them. I felt like what The Martian did for biology, Project Hail Mary did for materials science. And Weir’s habit of limiting the cast of characters allows him to do so much exploration of the rich interior life of the narrator which I enjoy. I think I can confidently say now that Weird is one of those authors I will instantly buy when I see they have a new title out.

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

Yellowface. Where do I even start to unpack the complicated feelings I had on this one? When an acquaintance asked my opinion on it recently, I simply said, “It’s a lot.”

I work in a publishing-adjacent space and found myself nodding along at a lot of the criticisms, but some of the more pointed criticisms felt so overwhelming that I had to take a break from the book midway through. It was challenging in ways I both expected given the thematic elements and in ways that totally blindsided me.

I went into this one with no expectations. I’d just heard there was a lot of buzz and some people whose opinions I really respect and trust were holding it up in stunned silence which got me curious. And of course the story took several turns I was not prepared for, but that’s not what I liked best about it. It rides the line of being unreadable with unlikeable protagonists and exploration of problematic themes, but the prose is so beautiful that it kept me turning the pages. I did have to dust off my Triple Constrain Rule for Books, though, because this book had two of the three criteria checked, and it was a tough read!

The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary

This was the February ‘23 read for Fat Girls in Fiction Book Club discussion group, and it kept my mind churning on all the layers for weeks. I wrote two full pages of notes to take to the club meeting and I think we talked for something like 4 hours that night about the book!

I remember when I read the back cover copy thinking that the concept of two people hot-bunking in a flat in London sounded cheesy and that it could either be terribly contrived and not really work… OR it was going to be brilliant because it would have to be in order to pull off that concept.

It was brilliant. There were several individual lines that I bookmarked because of the gorgeous language and insight into the human condition. Like this one:

There are a few people out here. Mainly smokers. They have that hunched look that smokers get, like the world is against them.” –Beth O’Leary in The Flatshare

It felt like a really solid story both structurally, and in terms of the concept being something I’ve never seen done before. Everything clicks together so nicely, the pacing and character arcs were brilliantly handled. And the writing style felt fresh. There are two POV characters, and each voice is very distinct. The way that the male main character uses unconventional sentence structure in his internal dialog makes it really apparent whose POV you’re reading.

This is definitely not one of those contemporary novels where the entire conflict could have been resolved if the main characters had had a simple conversation, and the queer subplot is a rare one that actually cannot be removed and have the story still work in any way, which is refreshing. So often with subplots added in as a diversity checkbox, if you take them away, nothing in the story actually changes. This subplot doesn’t need to justify its existence in the book, and I really liked that.

I liked how Tiffy discovered a lot about herself and her past relationships over the course of the book. We weren’t introduced to her as “damaged and traumatized from being emotionally abused”. She’s just someone who had gone through a breakup and slowly discovers how toxic and damaging that relationship was, and I’ve both seen friends come to that slow realization and come upon that slow realization myself.

On first reading, I thought the part where Leo climbed the balcony was abrupt, seemed out-of-character, was maybe just another way to emphasize his physicality, and felt a bit melodramatic, but I the more I thought about it, I eventually how symbolic the scene was. Putting himself at physical risk was a concrete way of showing his growth as a character, becoming willing to risk himself emotionally by opening tup to Tiffy. Looking at it from a symbolic perspective made a lot more sense than just viewing the scene literally. It’s actually a brilliant piece of writing to allow the reader to infer all of that internal growth through external action. 

Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan

I’m often a movie-before-book person (gasp!) so I knew I would eventually get around to reading Crazy Rich Asians before the China Rich Girlfriend movie comes out. I also knew I would love it. And I did. Having re-watched the movie at least half a dozen times already, there weren’t any huge surprises, and I don’t want to spend too much time doing a book-vs-movie comparison as there were things I liked about each storytelling approach.

But learning that there are chapters in the book that developed from a poem inspired by the author’s fathers’ deathbed reminiscences that was then adapted into a short story years later for a creative writing class which was ultimately included as a chapter in the novel, I will say you can feel all of it on the page - all of the development, and craft, and the literal years of work, and generations of experience that went into the story. It’s a story with depth that doesn’t feel like it drowns you in too much detail. You get just enough to deepen your appreciate of a scene and you get it at just the right moment. You’re not bogged down in backstory, but it’s all there. I will definitely be reading the rest of the trilogy

Nothing Sung and Nothing Spoken by Nita Tyndall

Whenever I can, I try to read books written by the clients of the agency I do contract work for. This one happened to be on my library’s streaming service, happened to be set in Berlin, and I happened to be traveling to Berlin last spring, so of course I had to grab it! A quick read of the back cover copy made me anxious that this story might fall into that WWII narrative tradition of “Nazi apologists” tales, but I know and trust the agent who represents this author enough to know he wouldn’t have anything to do with a story that didn’t deal with history in a balanced and factual way, so I went ahead and jumped into it. It was fascinating to be able to be rooted in the locations while reading, and I felt like it treated what could be some tricky historical topics delicately while keeping the very personal story of the characters moving forward. The sapphic subplot and ongoing concerns about the political climate the characters were growing up in were central to the story without overwhelming it, and the ending was so unsatisfying, but in the best way.

I really wish I had posted my thoughts on this as I was reading because I can’t remember now all the nuances I enjoyed about this book, but I don’t post public reviews much anymore and I only take notes on what I’m reading for book club picks.

Perhaps for next years’ top 10 list, I’ll keep better notes throughout the year so I can do a better job at my year-end roundup post!

The Bookworm Tag Challenge

I’ve been tagged by Beth Overmeyer to participate in the Bookworm Tag challenge.

How is your bookshelf organized? By color, author, genre, size, etc.?

Non-fiction is organized by subject and then by size within subject. Fiction is alphabetical by genre, then author’s last name, and then chronologically if I own more than one book by the same author.

What’s the last MG book you read and did you like it?

Daughter of the Deep by Rick Riordan and I did like it. It’s a fun modernization/continuation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and I really like the sibling dynamics, it’s approach to tackling nuanced topics like betrayal, and its frank discussion of the main character’s menstruation.

Pirates or street thieves (or both)?

I’m a big Patrick O’Brian fan, so any sort of seafaring is right up my alley. Thievery I have less sympathy for. I grew up in poverty but integrity was always reinforced in my morality.

What’s one of the most fictional things you’ve ever done (went skydiving, played a character at a Renaissance faire, set fire to something, tamed a dragon, had high tea with the queen)?

I make historical costumes and attended costumed events. For one event, I wrote letters for the mail packet being delivered to sailing ship re-enactors with a quill and ink. With my handwriting skills, I’m sure the re-enactor who received my letter struggled to even read it! It was a mess!

Bookmarks! Do you use them? Do you memorize the page number? Do you have ticket stubs and old receipts you use instead? Or do you swallow a book whole in one sitting so nothing’s left to mark?

I use paper bookmarks in my planner and will use a receipt or post it note in my fiction books. The library return slip is always handy to use to mark my place in borrowed books. I also put bookmarks in audiobooks when I want to “highlight” a phrase I like, but I don’t use them to mark my place as playback just resumes from the last point.

The Mysterious Thrift Shop: What’s the weirdest/creepiest place you bought a book, and what was it? The better the find and the weirder the shop, the better.

I once bought a deck of tarot cards (with an instructional booklet) form a Wiccan gift shop in Salem, Massachusetts on a full moon Halloween. That night, the bedframe in my house in South Boston kept rocking like someone was pushing it rhythmically. It had never happened before and it never happened again after that. It was an unusually windy night and I later found out that the door in the closet that led to attic storage had been blown open, so … maybe it was “just the wind” after all, but it didn’t feel like it at the time.

What fictional world would you want to vacation in?

I just want the future that Star Trek has envisioned for us. It would be nice to chill in The Shire, too, though.

Do your librarians know you by name?

The children’s librarian knows me and my son. And the librarian who runs our library’s Makerspace knows me. He trained me on how to use the Glowforge and helped me fight with the Cricut machine a few times. I LOVE having a Makerspace at the library where you can use 3D printers, borrow a sewing machine, or a large format printer, laminator, and plotter cutter for occasional DIY projects. We have some people in the community who have started their own small businesses making and selling things that they produce solely at the library!

Hardcover, paperback, eBook, or audiobook, and why?

All of the above. I mostly consume audiobooks, but will pick up a paperback for a deeper study of a text so I don’t feel guilty about marking in the margins. I also buy collector’s edition hardbacks of my favorite books just to put on a “brag shelf” (as my husband calls it). They’re solely there to look at and I own paperback or ebooks of all of them that I actually read.

What’s one of the first books you ever read/the book that made you fall in love with reading (and the story behind it)?

I picked up Black Beauty when I was just a bit too young to really understand it all, but the challenge of piecing together the context of a world without electricity or motorized transportation was fascinating. I liked imaging that conveyances had feelings, too! I devoured it over a weekend trip to a motorcycle rally that my mom dragged me to. We would camp in our conversion van and the kids would hang out at camp while the adults rode during the day. I remember there was a dance in a pavilion at the camp site that night and there was dancing and a campfire. It was COLD, and there was a bright full moon, so I walked around a field and the woods behind the pavilion where the adults were drinking and dancing (and probably doing a lot of drugs). All day long I’d just read, and read, and read, and I’d finally come up for air when the sun went down. I can’t remember how old I was, but probably about 8 or 9. I think it was before I broke my arm in 3rd grade, and before we read A Wrinkle in Time as a class.