In Memory of February 5, 2016

You couldn’t stay:

It’s not in the nature of airy things.

You felt too light on my hip

Like downy dandelion seeds

That blow away in a puff of breath.

Like dry leaves scattering

On a breeze from nowhere.

I cannot see who blows the breath.

I cannot see whence comes the wind.

I can only feel

The soft weight of your lightening body

As it comes to a rest on my foot.

Books of 2020 and 2021

Oof. It has been a while, hasn't it? As with many things in the past few years, both this blog and my pleasure reading have fallen by the wayside. But as I poke my head out from the rock I've been living under since August of 2019 (Smeagol is FREEEE!), I'm trying to catch up on a few of those things I've been missing. As the following list, compiled from the past two years, indicates, I have not been reading much. But I've already finished 3 books in 2022, and we're only 5 days in, so I think that bodes well. I am looking forward to visiting with old friends, making new ones, and hopefully diversifying my topics of conversation a little bit, for everyone who has been bored with hearing me refer to the same few things every time we talk (but also, that's unlikely to change: the impression made by certain books can be measured in decades, not months or years).

So without further rambling...

2020

The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter
The Evolution of Cooperation - Robert Axelrod
Endurance - Alfred Lansing
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead - Olga Tokarczuk
City of Brass - S.A. Chakraborty
Underland - Robert MacFarlane
Weather - Jenny Offill
Gathering Mosses - Robin Wall Kimmerer
In the Dream House - Carmen Maria Machado
How to Be Anti-Racist - Ibram X. Kendi
So You Want to Talk About Race - Ijeoma Oluo
The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century - Maria Sachiko Cecire
The Parable of the Sower - Octavia Butler
The Fellowship of the Ring - J.R.R. Tolkien
The Two Towers - J.R.R. Tolkien
The Return of the King - J.R.R. Tolkien
Prairie Fires - Caroline Fraser
The Oracle Code - Marieke Nijkamp
Walter Benjamin’s Archive - eds. Marx, Schwarz, Schwarz, & Wizisla
Year of Wonders - Geraldine Brooks
Nightwood - Djuna Barnes
Jitterbug Perfume - Tom Robbins
On Trails - Robert Moor

2021

The Voyage of St. Brendan
The House of the Spirits - Isabel Allende
Caste - Isabel Wilkerson
Howard’s End - E.M. Forster
The Vanishing Half - Brit Bennett
The Home Place - J. Drew Lanham
Preserving Archives & Manuscripts - Mary Lynn Ritzenthaler
Death and the King’s Horseman - Wole Soyinka
The Painted Veil - W. Somerset Maugham
Push - Sapphire
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists - Nikki Kendall
The Golden Thread - Kassia St. Clair
The Fabric of Civilization - Virginia Postrel
Christy - Catherine Marshall