#lydia kiesling

[an-onyx-void]

This is all I have to say about Saturday.

[thatwritererinoriordan]

Not to continue to sound like a communist, but:

"In 2021, as childcare costs soared by more than 40%, Congress provided a massive cash infusion to states to stabilize childcare and supplied parents with both cash and an additional tax refund to support their kids. Seemingly overnight, child poverty dropped by 40%."

Those measly little pandemic checks that gave us back a teeny bit of our own tax money DROPPED CHILD POVERTY BY 40%. "Among 38 leading Western nations, American kids account for 97% of child gun deaths." These same assjackets who disgustingly whine about "a domestic supply of babies" as if people with uteruses are a herd of things for them to breed also allow our children to be treated like they're disposable so they can keep collecting NRA handouts. I'm fed up with this oligarchy. I'm fed up with living in the fucking Hunger Games. Hey France, can we borrow your guillotine?

[kammartinez]

He threw his head back and laughed. “Oh my god,” he said. “Let me guess: oil propaganda videos with lady roughnecks.” “Laugh it up,” she said. “I know you used to make your sexist fucking newspaper and it’s all a joke to you, but it’s actually hard for women in this industry.” She felt unprepared to defend herself, weak and worn-out, but offended. “Why should women from oil-rich countries not have a role in supplying cheap and plentiful energy for their own benefit?” This could have been marketing copy she had written for the conference. “Jesus Christ, Bunny,” said Charlie. “You believe that?” “I believe that women should have educations and jobs and refrigerators to put their fucking food in and that they should be able to give birth in hospitals with incubators in the NICU,” she said, genuinely pissed. “That’s not a controversial statement.” This was what Francis had said to her on Phil Miles’s roof the first time they met, and it was such a just and tidy logic she had never really moved away from it. “Oil companies don’t care about incubators,” said Charlie. “They don’t give a fuck about you, or any woman in Kazakhstan, or any woman anywhere.” “Neither do you,” said Elizabeth. “You’re wearing a fucking wedding ring.” He stood up, picked up his clothes from the floor, and walked toward the bathroom. “There it fucking is,” he said. “Yes, I’m a bad person. Chevron or Tengizchevroil or whatever the fuck it is will boil you alive, and you’ll still be screaming that I’m a misogynist pig so you don’t have to care.”

from Mobility, by Lydia Kiesling

[kamreadsandrecs]

Title: Mobility: A Novel

Author: Lydia Kiesling

Genre: literary fiction

Content/Trigger Warning/s: discussions and mentions of major historical events and natural disasters, including but not limited to 9/11, the BP Oil Spill, Hurricane Harvey, and the COVID-19 pandemic

Summary (from author's webpage): The year is 1998, the End of History. The Soviet Union is dissolved, the Cold War is over, and Bunny Glenn is an American teenager in Azerbaijan with her Foreign Service family. Through Bunny’s eyes we watch global interests flock to the former Soviet Union during the rush for Caspian oil and pipeline access, hear rumbles of the expansion of the American security state and the buildup to the War on Terror. We follow Bunny from adolescence to middle age—from Azerbaijan to America—as the entwined idols of capitalism and ambition lead her to a career in the oil industry, and eventually back to the scene of her youth, where familiar figures reappear in an era of political and climate breakdown.

Both geopolitical exploration and domestic coming-of-age novel, Mobility is a propulsive and challenging story about class, power, politics, and desire told through the life of one woman—her social milieu, her romances, her unarticulated wants. Mobility deftly explores American forms of complicity and inertia, moving between the local and the global, the personal and the political, and using fiction’s power to illuminate the way a life is shaped by its context.

Buy Here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/mobility-lydia-kiesling/18547461

Spoiler-Free Review: Godsdamn but this book makes me FUCKING ANGRY! I mean this in a good way, by the way, as this is frankly speaking a pretty good read.

Look, it’s not every day that a book pisses me off, but this one pissed me off in the best possible way, with its focus on the sheer hypocrisy of white people - specifically privileged white women - when it comes to the much larger suffering that everyone else around them experiences. From the moment she is introduced all the way to the very end of this novel, Bunny/Elizabeth thinks of no one but herself. Her disinterest as a teenager can be forgiven, I suppose, because I think a majority of teenagers are self-centered little shits to varying degrees - and I say that as a teenager who was pretty self-centered myself. The few who aren’t are rare and far between.

But later on, as she grows more and more comfortable in her place in the oil industry, you can practically SEE her convincing herself that what she’s doing, what her industry is doing, is right and just and not as problematic as everyone thinks it is. Worse, one can also read how she twists her WILLFUL IGNORANCE into a VIRTUE because IT BENEFITS HER TO DO SO. It’s just so INFURIATING to see that happen, since she has the privilege and the opportunity to do better, and yet: SHE DOESN’T!

The funny thing is, SHE GETS CALLED OUT ON IT! There are several moments throughout the novel wherein she is forced to confront how she doesn’t take a stand on anything, for just sitting on a fence, for thinking only of her own comfort, and while she sometimes pauses to think about what the other person’s saying and wonder if maybe they’re right, you can almost FEEL her flinch away from anything that makes her uncomfortable. THEN she goes RIGHT back to thinking any line of thought that makes her feel “safe” and one gets to watch as she chooses the path that makes her feel better, even if it comes at the cost of other people’s lives. They’re not HER people after all, how can she consider the plight of some nebulous entity who lives half the world away and whom she’s never met? This takes a chillingly exploitative turn towards the end of the novel.

I’ll admit, for a few moments while reading this I wonder if there’s anything she could have realistically done to actually take a stand and do something. The size and complexity of the oil industry is mentioned repeatedly throughout the novel; at various points Bunny/Elizabeth herself says that she can’t understand all of it, no matter how hard she tries. And when one is faced with something THAT big, that has the capacity to mutate into a new form to avoid accountability and instead re-emerge stronger than ever— How does one fight against something like that? Seen from that perspective maybe Bunny/Elizabeth’s reticence can be understood, even sympathized with, but after a certain point even this sympathy evaporates because it becomes clear that she’s CHOOSING to remain complacent.

But the interesting thing is, all this rage at Bunny/Elizabeth and the life she’s chosen can easily be turned on oneself. You read this book and wind up asking yourself: “Am I actually doing anything about the way the world works? Am I doing enough?” These are important questions, in my opinion, and applies to a lot more issues than just the theme of climate crisis that this book’s built around. None of these questions are comfortable or soothing, and the potential answers are likely to be less so, but they’re questions we need to ask regardless, if we don’t want to face the same kind of future Bunny/Elizabeth faces at the end of the novel.

Overall, this is an infuriating read, but excellent precisely BECAUSE it’s infuriating. It reveals some very uncomfortable truths and make the reader as some very difficult questions, leading to answers that are probably even MORE uncomfortable and difficult than the questions themselves. But the novel also emphasizes the need to ask those questions and find those answers, because seeking only to live in a bubble of comfort, unbothered and undisturbed by the wider world’s troubles, means living a life devoid of compassion and empathy, and only leads to a future where the entire world suffers.

Rating: five oil tankers

[wellconstructedsentences]

Motherhood is not a house you live in but a warren of beautiful rooms, something like Topkapi... some well-trod but magnificent place you're only allowed to sit in for a minute and snap a photo before you are ushered out.

The Golden State by Lydia Kiesling

[thejaymo]

Listening to books was not the same as reading them. But whereas before, I had taken the value of written and audio books as mutually exclusive, I began to entertain the idea that maybe an audiobook was its own thing. I began to recognize the disparagement of audiobooks—whether open or implicit—as a certain kind of ableism. The written word is seen as a default, and any translation of it, as with my dyslexic students, was a mark of inferiority. But hadn’t we been telling stories long before we’d thought to make symbols to represent them? Maybe audiobooks still could not replicate, for me, the experience of seeing words on the page. Maybe they didn’t have to in order to earn their keep.

[chavalahh]

2024 Mid-Year Check-In/Freak-Out Tag

Video here: https://youtu.be/lmRFGLthWKY

Original Mid-Year Book Freak-Out Tag by Read Like Wildfire and Earl Grey Books Original Mid-Year Book Check-In Tag by Dane Reads and Harriet Rosie Favorite short story collection question cribbed from Russell at Ink and Paper Blog!

How many books read: 53

Best Book: --JOY COMES IN THE MORNING by Michael Rosen https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6549065581

Best Sequel: --BLADE OF DREAM by Daniel Abraham https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6195424759

Best Short Story Collection: --THE WITCH BLADE AND OTHER STORIES by Suzanne Feldman https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6272268096

Most-read genre: --Fiction

New release you want to read: --RELICS OF RUIN by Erin M. Evans https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/125208193-relics-of-ruin --THE FAMILIAR by Leigh Bardugo https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/133286777-the-familiar

Most anticipated release for second half of year: --LONG ISLAND COMPROMISE by Taffy Brodesser-Akner 7/9 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55777544-long-island-compromise --THE MERCY OF THE GODS by James S.A. Corey, 8/6 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/201930181-the-mercy-of-gods --THE GODS BELOW by Andrea Stewart, 9/3 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62969719-the-gods-below --SONGS FOR THE BROKEN-HEARTED by Ayelet Tsabari, 9/10 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/203956664-songs-for-the-brokenhearted --A DARK AND DROWNING TIDE by Alison Saft, 9/17 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/174146852-a-dark-and-drowning-tide ---NIGHT OWLS by A.R. Vishny, 9/17 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/134039882-night-owls --THE REPUBLIC OF SALT by Ariel Kaplan, 10/22 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/202470557-the-republic-of-salt --OUR DEADLY DESIGNS by Kalyn Josephson, 11/12 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/200502380-our-deadly-designs --THE LOTUS EMPIRE by Tasha Suri, 11/12 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59558627-the-lotus-empire

Biggest disappointment: --DAY by Michael Cunningham https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6443465762 --Honorable mention: THE VASTER WILDS by Lauren Groff: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6485699511

Biggest surprise: --THE HOUSE OF DOORS by Tan Twang Eng https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6540685143 --Honorable mention: BIRNAM WOOD by Eleanor Catton: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6484952237

Favorite new author: Jonathan Rosen --THE BEST MINDS https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/636636975 --THE TALMUD AND THE INTERNET https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6549063773

Newest fictional crush: adapted to Favorite Relationship in a book/series: --Gaunt and Ellwood from IN MEMORIAM by Alice Winn https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6327140524 --Honorable mention: Moishe and Chona from THE HEAVEN AND EARTH GROCERY STORE by James McBride https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6469414455

Newest favorite character: --Rabbi Deborah from JOY COMES IN THE MORNING https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6549065581 --Honorable Mention; Bunny from MOBILITY by Lydia Kiesling https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6243413203

Book that made you cry: --IN MEMORIAM by Alice Winn https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6327140524 --JUDGMENT AT TOKYO by Gary J. Bass https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6335747134

Book that made you happy: --BOOKISH PEOPLE by Susan Coll https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6441447848 --WELL MET by Rachel Lee Rubin https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6412374347

Favorite review/booktube video: --2024 Short Stories Reviews: Recent Publications! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3ia76cHVnU&t=1s

Best book to film adaptation you've seen this year: --"His Dark Materials" Season Three Rewatch: https://chavalah.wordpress.com/2023/01/17/his-dark-materials-season-three-when-innocence-turns-to-experience/ --Other 2024 adaptations I've enjoyed/been enjoying: "3 Body Problem" season one and "House of the Dragon" season two!

Most beautiful book cover bought/received this year: --RELICS OF RUIN by Erin M. Evans https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/125208193-relics-of-ruin

What is your next big priority for your reading? Hope to return to Elizabeth Gaskell for Victober, trying Israeli author Eyal Kless for SciFi September, and Italian writer Silvia Avallone for Women in Translation Month! In July, I'm debating some fiction and nonfiction about the Rothschild women. --My last Elizabeth Gaskell video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlRg6rq1CV8

What has been your bookish highlight?: Choosing my #MaybeMidrash2024 reading list thanks to my #BookTubePrize octofinals ballot! Honorable mention: re-reading THE BALLAD OF SONGBIRDS AND SNAKES last November: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3367418394 https://chavalah.wordpress.com/2023/11/22/the-ballad-of-songbirds-and-snakes-a-different-sort-of-hunger-games-experience/

What books do you need to read by the end of the year? --THE FAITHLESS by C.L. Clark https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59007314-the-faithless --ROMAN STORIES by Jhumpa Lahiri https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/125077431-roman-stories

[wildereader]

I just thought it’d be fun to make a cute little graphic with all the books I read in January! This isn’t including the One Piece volumes… they’re below the cut 🏴‍☠️

Here’s some stats!

Genres:

Romance x2 (D’Vaughn & Kris Plan a Wedding by Chencia C. Higgins, Heartstopper: Volume 5 by Alice Oseman)

Short stories, literary x2 (Company by Shannon Sanders, Holler, Child by LaToya Watkins)

Poetry (The Lumberjack’s Dove by GennaRose Nethercott)

Literary fiction (Mobility by Lydia Kiesling)

Historical fiction (Our Hideous Progeny by C. E. McGill)

Memoir (A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen)

Shortest book: The Lumberjack’s Dove by GennaRose Nethercott (96 pages)

Longest book: Our Hideous Progeny by C. E. McGill (390 pages)

Fun fact, I read Mobility, Company, Our Hideous Progeny, and Holler, Child via audiobook while following along with my physical copies of them! I’ve been doing that more and more lately, since it can help me focus more on the books.

It’s hard to pick just one of my three favorites from this month to highlight… so I’m just gonna talk about all three of them, in the order I read them 😎

The Lumberjack’s Dove by GennaRose Nethercott: I made a whole post featuring several of my favorite quotes from this book-length poem, but I’m still amazed at Nethercott’s gorgeous writing and the meditations on stories and storytelling all packed into such a short work

Our Hideous Progeny by C. E. McGill: I also made a post about how much I adored this novel, which introduces Victor Frankenstein’s great-niece and her efforts to replicate his work. I loved how Mary was depicted as a 19th century woman who was ambitious and driven, but didn’t feel like a 21st century character dropped into the Victorian Era. This book was written For Me, and I’m so happy I loved it as much as I did!

A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen: Whatever I say about this memoir will not sufficiently summarize all it is about and all that it made me feel and think on. At the most basic level, this is the story of Nguyen’s family’s life before, during, and after immigrating to the United States from Vietnam and his attempts at and ruminations on reconciling the Vietnamese and American halves of him. More than that, it is about America’s attitude towards race, colonization, propaganda, refugees, immigrants, and so much more. Truly a masterpiece, and something I can see myself returning to and coming away with different thoughts each time

Overall, a great month! I’m not pushing myself to read As Much As I Possibly Can like I did last year, and I’ve really enjoyed that so far 😅 and, as promised, my One Piece progress below the cut:

As for my progress here, shit’s gotten REAL, huh 🤧 I keep my friend who got me into OP updated on where I’m at, and he keeps saying it just gets even more intense… idk how I’m gonna handle it 🫠

[otherpplnation]

858. Lydia Kiesling

Lydia Kiesling is the author of the novel Mobility, available from Crooked Media Reads.

Kiesling is the author of The Golden State, a 2018 National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree, a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker online, and The Cut, among other outlets. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

***

Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers.

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[bookjubilee]

Lydia Kiesling on her new novel 'Mobility'

BookJubilee.Com http://dlvr.it/St62Lx

[inittowinit]

books read January - April 2023:

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, Hilary Mantel

Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel

Fiona and Jane, Jean Chen Ho

The Golden State, Lydia Kiesling

How to be A Tudor, Ruth Goodman

Tokyo Ueno Station, Miri Yu

[simplythetest]

Looking Back at 2022

If I had to rate every year of my life from best to worst, 2022 would be somewhere in the lower quartiles. This year was not easy, but not terrible. Here's my post on reflecting on what was 2022

General

It may seem trite, but "plan it, and execute it" is still awfully good life advice. I revisisted this advice several times this year with good results each time.

Similarly, "be proactive, not reactive" is much better advice when you're in a position of power more than weakness.

As a Canadian who has had a lot of interactions with US Americans and Europeans, let me say that US culture is exhausting.

There's a lot more to a kitchen renovation than picking out a countertop colour.

Weirdly, keeping a somewhat consistent blog for many years is actually a bit of a blessing these days.

To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, peculiar travel destinations are dancing lessions from God.

One of the best books I've readin a while is Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. It's definitely one of those "read it slow and let the thoughts sink in" kind of reads. Highly recommended.

Parenting

These two articles on the difficulty of parenting during COVID and other crises really hit home for me. One of the things that made this year difficult was simply managing parenting through illness, rotating school closures and ambiguous child care situations. This management was draining, slowly but surely, in ways that Amil Niazi and Lydia Kiesling capture perfectly.

Two year olds are a lot of fun, a lot of work, and just a lot overall.

Something wonderful about having a kid grow up is seeing how they get into the same kinds of things that you were into at their age. Video games and science are just as fun the second time around.

The notion of "bad parenting" is possibly an badly defined concept. I'm not exactly sure how to quantify how bad a parent is doing given the circumstances of the past few years.

Software Development

More and more I'm convinced that the next "big thing" in software development tooling (if it isn't the big thing already) is User/Developer Experience. There are many, many great software tools that are simply crappy to use.

GUI automation still remains one of the most difficult parts of software engineering, talking about mobile environments or otherwise.

Test automation is such a wonderful software speciality to me because it lets me play in a bunch of different discpline's backyards. For example, I would have never learned about automated cow brushes if it weren't for my test automation career.

Probably my favourite podcast as of late is Python Bytes hosted by Michael Kennedy and Brian Okken. What I truly love about it is the format: two prominent people in the Python world just talking about cool Python modules and tools. I feel like we need more of this in the software world.

This upcoming year might finally be when I dig into some genuinely new programming languages (for me). I'm cautiously optimistic.

I've thought about it, and articles and presentations with clickbait titles such as "Tool X vs Tool Y: Who will Win?" or somesuch are fine, actually.

When I'm old and grey and look back at my life and legacy, I probably will not be thinking of C++ software development.

Tech

To be blunt: there's a lot of shitty white men leaders in Silicon Valley. And it shows.

Related to the previous point: true diversity and inclusion on teams is a major, massive advantage.

One of the most interesting lessons I've learned over the past several years is that being a CEO is still a job. CEOs can be more junior or senior, have growth trajectories and learning goals, and still have day-to-day work to do.

I was a part of the great tech layoffs of '22 (my last day was during Burning Man, no less). It was a humbling experience, but it also taught me a lot about the nature of the tech industry. In a strange way, I'm grateful for this.

Once again, with some feeling: the decision to replace humans with automation is a managerial one, not a technological one.

Never underestimate the value of a good community.

Related to the previous point: just because something is difficult to quantify doesn't mean it has no value. And just because high up decision makers don't understand the value doesn't mean there isn't any.

Developers really, really hate being marketed to. Honestly, I think this is a good thing.

Something that may be missing from open source software and perhaps corporate software is the idea of helping. Having an expert or someone with experience in an area different from yours genuinely offer help can be very rewarding, but this isn't promoted too much. It's a bit of a shame.

Canadiana

This year was (in my opinion) a record low-point for Canadian politicians. They basically all decided to phone it in.

Queen Elizabeth passing finally provided two things that united most Canadians together: an elaborate royal funeral with all the commentary and commotion, and a distaste for the now King Charles III.

One of the podcasts I've listened to in the past year was Canadaland COMMONS on the Hudson's Bay Company. It was a really good introduction to a long and storied company that really influenced the development of "Canada" as a nation.

Canada really is, historically and culturally, about seven corporations dressed in a trenchcoat.

[kammartinez]

Sofie spoke again. “They say already by 2030 it will be too hot for the hajj to be in Mecca. Can you imagine this?” “Who cares?” said the Swede who wasn’t Konrad with what seemed like virulence. Bunny, John, and Sofie looked at him. Sofie sat forward. “Don’t tell me you’re a fucking SD Nazi man; I won’t have a drink with you,” she said, and Bunny admired her even as she felt upset by the directness of the confrontation. How did someone become like this, unambiguous, unassailable? Bunny held her breath to see whether the Swede would reveal himself, but he put his hands up and said, “Sorry. A joke. I don’t like religion.” Sofie turned away from him, still suspicious.

from Mobility, by Lydia Kiesling

[kamreadsandrecs]

Diversity was, to her, a word that meant that for every group of white people there had to be some proportional number of people of other races. At Stanhope, Martin Luther King Jr. Day was celebrated by a day of service, and then the dining hall served fried chicken and invited a white preacher and a Black gospel choir to the chapel service. Bunny knew that America had a bad past and a present racial problem, as evidenced by the reaction to Barack Hussein Obama and what had happened to Trayvon Martin, and that they had to heal from this. She also knew that she had no Black people in her life, save two of the Miles engineers, who were from Nigeria and who were no longer in her life now that she worked at Turnbridge and who had not in any case been in her life at all. Bunny’s mind wandered to this and wandered back to the woman in front of her, who exuded a friendly animation.

from Mobility, by Lydia Kiesling

[dk-thrive]

But improving the writing isn’t my goal, my goal is to make the writing go to new places

There is nothing I can do about it anyway—the book is already written, and I am working on the next. I don’t know how to make them better, it is never like my writing improves from one book to the next, it is more that the limits are set, and the limits are your personality, the person you are. But improving the writing isn’t my goal, my goal is to make the writing go to new places, to explore things, to search for meaning, to look for the world. It is not about trying to write the one great novel. To me, all writing is the same, be it essays, novels, nonfiction, diaries, or letters. They all have some of that search in them. Of course you can improve technically as a writer, but at the end of the day, who cares about technique? It is a tool, not something to admire in itself.

— Karl Ove Knausgaard, from “Being Reckless: An Interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard" by Lydia Kiesling, The Paris Review, January 13, 2021

[proustitute]

Home is so sad.

Philip Larkin, from “Home Is So Sad” (w/ thanks to @lydiakiesling’s The Golden State)