is the fetus just rampaging aimlessly

I was hoping by now I'd be writing posts like, Well, now that I'm not exhausted and behind on literally everything ... Maybe in a few weeks. I don't even know why I'm taking the time to post about books, except maybe: normally I feel very aware that years from now my post will probably be all I'll remember of a given book, so I try to be careful to represent my actual opinion faithfully. Right now I'm too tired to give a shit, I'll write anything. I love winter and silverfish. I hate the smell of the ocean. I get plenty of sleep on the average night.

Probably the main reason is I don't want to get up and do more chores, though.

( At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, plus a lot of complaining about the Great Courses )

It was surprisingly hard to find a concise overview, so I ended up buying a used copy of ( The British Empire: Sunrise to Sunset )

( America, América: A New History of the New World )

I'm bored out of my mind all the time because I can't do anything, but I also feel like I'm hopelessly overwhelmed with everything I have to do and I'm never going to catch up. And I'm right! yay 💕

More happily, summer has brought with it something I call "the fruit madness" (the desire to stuff my face with fruit 24/7). This happens every summer, but it's stronger this year because I still can't make it around the whole grocery store and have been ordering for pickup, and toward the end of winter and then spring I was just getting rotten produce so often I had to stop trying to buy anything fresh. Then in June I tasted a fresh strawberry ... ! Then I found out about the weeks of diarrhea parasite outbreak. It hasn't actually stopped me from eating fresh fruit (I'm not even sure any of the outbreaks ever hit Massachusetts) but I have been grudgingly cooking more of my vegetables.

( Whatever else came to mind )

I don't think this was a good book, but I had fun reading most of it, and I'm not really mad about its popularity since the conceit ("a traditional American woman, a 'tradwife' influencer, suddenly awakens in the brutal reality of 1855") is great.

( Now to be a hater (with spoilers) )

I got really overwhelmed with life and forgot how to post. It will happen again, etc. I enjoy osprey_archer's Wednesday Reading Meme posts so I'm stealing the headers, even though it's now Thursday.

( Thursday Wednesday Reading Meme )

Normally I go silent on here for months because I randomly forgot how to write in full sentences, but this time it was just because things got too miserable -- politics, A/C breaking, work, health, other health, other health, health insurance, medical bills, other medical bills. I think I only ever demonstrate intellectual curiosity and a love of learning in response to illness and injury (perhaps a side effect of inflammation!), so like: --How's it going, Shati? --Well, I've been practicing a lot and my Spanish listening comprehension has gotten way better, I can watch almost all of the Latam A:TLA dub without having to pause or look words up. --Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that.

Things are still in multiple kinds of limbo on the health front, to the point where I basically can't leave my house again right now for more than short car errands, but I guess at least work is getting less busy and I have A/C again.

Back on my birthday I treated myself to the international shipping fees on a couple of books I'm not sure I'm ready to read yet, Los días del venado and Los días de la sombra by Liliana Bodoc. If I like them I'll probably be really mad at myself for not just buying the whole series, but the shipping was already more than I'd normally spend on my birthday, and I may never get around to reading them because they don't have library due dates. I was just excited to come across fantasy originally written in Argentinian Spanish; most of what I can find is either translated to Spanish or from Europe. If any of you have read them (in any language) I'm curious if you liked them! On the rest of the book front, I basically stopped reading while work was really busy and I was working hours late every day, so I'm halfway through a bunch of books that I'll have to return to the library and then borrow again on another trip.

( politics )

Thank you to whoever gave me paid time!! The only things I love more than going silent for months on end are the Network option and searching comments.

( Bullet points on no particular theme )

( Current events, but the only specific event I'm talking about here is good and the rest is just free-floating anxiety )

This isn't a list of favorite or even beloved books -- I decided to make a list of books I think back to often, realized that would include books I hate, and said so be it. I do love a lot of these, but the list also includes books I loved as a kid that I look back on and wince, books I read as a kid that were just so weird I bring them up a lot, books that other people's lists reminded me of, nonfiction I think back to because of the subject more than the execution, and nonfiction that I didn't like or hate but do like to remember now and then just to disagree with. I left out books I adored in the past if I decided I was bored by the thought of having a conversation about them now.

I tried to put them into some kind of order and then gave up, which is actually worse than just leaving them in the order they occurred to me, where at least you can kind of see where I gave up toward the end and added whatever I could think of. I also accidentally added 102 instead of 100. W after W!!

List here!

I've been really quiet here because I'm still recovering from surgery in December, and because the federal government of the country I live in is collapsing, or maybe exploding.

I went to the protest for Rumeysa Ozturk yesterday. For what it was -- a gathering with less than a day's notice in a not-at-all-central location without a huge org behind it -- it was large, enough so that I couldn't hear most of the speakers at all. (I've seen it described as "hundreds" and "thousands," but I have no idea which, because couldn't see everyone from where I was, and there were different waves of people coming in and out over the hour and a half.) She's apparently still in Louisiana, so it needs to be larger.

In case you're local or curious but you looked away from the news for ten seconds, Rumeysa is a Fulbright scholar and grad student at Tufts, who was surrounded on Tuesday outside her apartment by masked plainclothes officers and forced into an unmarked vehicle, apparently for the crime of co-authoring a moderate op-ed in a student newspaper. A judge ordered that she not be moved from Massachusetts; DHS sent her to detention in Louisiana. Her detention will probably involve inadequate-to-dangerous food, water, and climate control, among other things, which I'm mentioning not because it's unusual but because I want to make sure I remember that the price she's paying for a student op-ed isn't just terror or the fact of detention itself or the threat of deportation. (To Turkey, whose people are putting up more of a fight than we are here at the moment but which is hardly a safe place for activism right now either, except she's not even an activist.) I don't think anyone knows how long she'll be behind bars or under what circumstances she'll leave them.

( Read more... )

ETA: Posted this, was like "I'm going to think about something totally different for a little while," saw this.

The other day I found out I have Monday off and was like: great, a day to sit and feel pain. I really need it, but the days I have to cover instead are going to be days where I probably have a car again and have finished physical therapy.

car: I put down a deposit last week, and the salesman said, "It's in transit, it might be here like in a week." Yesterday I emailed to ask about an ETA. Today: "It's in New York, the system doesn't have an ETA." I'm very sulky about the amount of money I'm spending and moderately sulky about feeling responsible for a car again soon, but I also really want to drive to the river park near me since I still can't manage the walk and I've barely been outside since April. Of course I also want, like, groceries.

ankle: On week 2 of physical therapy, currently in what I hope is the "gets worse before it gets better" phase but could always be the much funnier "assassin disguised as physical therapist" phase. Last session the physical therapist and I spent a while gloomily discussing flooding and climate change.

You'd think that not being able to go places or do things would mean I'd be on Dreamwidth more, but I also strained my eyes, go figure. I am so fucking bored I've reverted to my months-long-ailment+eye-issue-combo roots (Youtube college lectures and Great Courses* on Kanopy).

* Some of the Great Courses, though ... "Foundations of Eastern Civilization" was the first one I watched and I spent a long time trying to figure out if the white Australian lecturer was really mispronouncing names from at least three different languages or if some kinds of topolect variants/strange Australia-specific Anglophone conventions were in play.

( Further ankle and car grousing )

Other life things:

( US election )

Various life things that came to mind in this exact moment:

After like two years unable to play DVDs or CDs, I got a USB drive and went on a whirlwind disk borrowing spree at the library. Who knows what strange effects the library selection is going to have on my taste in music. I'm trying to also buy songs again instead of just using Spotify -- it's funny, I've totally gotten in the habit of switching tracks right before the end so Spotify ads don't kick in. I'm even trying to manually replicate some of the Spotify algo's tendencies (via library search database keywords). While I've had much less opportunity to listen to music while walking or in transit, I do need to figure out if I want to eventually get an actual cheap MP3 player again, or just try to fit a reasonable amount of music on my phone.

I went on a whale watch with genarti and skygiants, somehow for the first time ever. I almost froze to death but it was incredible. The day was stormy, you couldn't see like twenty feet ahead of the boat for the mist (it was like 86F on shore when we left and on the water we were shivering in our layers and cuddling hot chocolates), but we saw so many massive whales rolling gently in and out of the water all around the boat and everyone just ran back and forth screaming "WOW" and "LOOK" and "QUÉ LINDA" inanely, as we should have. Imagine not reacting to a whale like an awed toddler! A baby whale breached, and later we saw a baby whale seeming to play around a group of dolphins. Early on Beth asked one of the staffers if they expected other species to make an appearance, like seals, and was apologetically told no, they don't usually see seals. A while later we saw a grey seal gazing at us from the water. Way toward the end, to my total bewilderment and mild alarm, a bee flew past me and straight out to sea. But anyway: the whales!! The whales!! There's nothing better I've seen in my life. I want to go again someday.

Despite grand plans, I haven't checked anything else off my waterfront bucket list this summer for the obvious reasons, but if the car ever comes not all of them need much walking. One of them I don't even necessarily need the car for, it's just a little more walking to the bus home than I've been able to manage consistently. Great job on missing the entire good weather season, though. I'm already so cold. :(

Sometimes I read actual book reviews and remember the concept of spoilers. These are posts I write so I remember what I thought of the books in the future, so they all technically have spoilers, but I dropped the most spoilery part (for The Familiar) behind a second cut.

( Counterweight, Djuna, transl. Anton Hur )

( The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Seth Dickinson )

( The Familiar, Leigh Bardugo )