whilereadingandwalking

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We can spend hours in a museum, easy. Days even. Legs get tired? Museums are some of the very best places to read…

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A young woman sees a sign in a plant shop window: "Help needed." Shell wants, very much, to be needed, and so she quickly signs on to be an assistant florist to the alluring Neve. The problem is that Neve has a secret: the strange orchid in the mall's terrarium is very alive, and it's been feeding for years...and it wants more.

Eat the Ones You Love by Sarah Maria Griffin was lush, creepy, and strange. At its best, it was intensely visceral, whether describing the feel of a bouquet in the hand or tiny shoots growing out of a palm. Eerie, evoking the green glow of Little Shop of Horrors and a plant shop employee who can't walk away from a plant who wants more. Shell and Neve's attraction only helps Baby—a POV narrator in this tale—take hold of the newest arrival, as its plans unfold in this dying mall.

The novel had pacing troubles. It's intensely slow at the beginning, only to rush the climax and ending. As a result, some of the reveals don't have the impact they deserved, and the ending-ending feels more puzzling than satisfying. Shell is an amusingly self-centered protagonist, and Neve is convincing, but some of the side characters felt shoehorned into larger than necessary roles (hint: a secondary love triangle was definitely not necessary). Overall, I enjoyed this much-anticipated fantasy, but did find myself trying to hurry through the middle.

Content warnings for body horror, manipulative relationship, death.

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Today’s the day! I usually do a full 10-15 bookstores as part of Chicago’s IBD crawl, but I have plans so had to shorten it to 5 this year…Thanks and love to all my South Side indies!

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Where to begin? One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad puts into words what so many of us have been going through: the break with the liberalism we believed in, the jarring loss of faith in the most basic of Western promises. In under 200 pages, he expertly unpacks the various hypocrises of the United States; what’s wrong with the current state of journalism; of how colonialism necessarily demands that history begins with the colony’s formation, making every future work of violence an act of self-defense; of how language and fear are leveraged only in one direction in the conflict.

He also gives guidance on why and how to keep resisting. First, “every derailment of normalcy matters when what’s becoming normal is a genocide.” Second, “every small act of resistance trains the muscle used to do it.” And the most effective protest, he argues, is a walking away. “Negative resistance” is the most frightening thing to those in power in our capitalist system that survives on participation and consumerism. A boycott or refusal to vote, to countenance, to allow order to continue, and the choice to put solidarity with a people that we do not “stand to gain” by standing beside over our own “self-interest”, fundamentally disrupts a culture that is willing to sacrifice others in order to get a never-ending more.

“You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice,” El-Akkad writes. “You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience.... Forget pity, forget even the dead if you must, but at least fight against the theft of your soul.” This book is part analysis, part call-to-action, enlightening and one of those books that everyone who knows me will have to hear about for the rest of the year in every other conversation.

Content warnings for descriptions of violence, genocide, Islamophobia, xenophobia.

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Recently, someone I love passed away. He was an English teacher, fought for green space in Long Island, and was instrumental to protecting Walt Whitman's birthplace. When he passed, I picked up this volume at the airport bookstore. And I started Leaves of Grass at the beginning.

This isn't a proper review in any which way, because I didn't read this book as I usually would. Reading a book beloved by someone else is an intimate form of getting to know them, or in this case, of mourning them. Reading these poems about self-assurance, about courage. About the visceral pleasures of nature. About the entire world and its wonders captured in one bloom of lilac. Whitman lists places, visions, moments, specifics cast as universals. I could see my uncle hiking through these pages, see his wide smile as he pointed out a bald eagle far above us. Thought about his joy when we got him a hat when we were kids for Christmas, and we proudly said that he hikes outside a lot, and this would keep his head warm. In Whitman's verses, I could see him painting, woodworking, drinking, enjoying this world as Whitman says we should. I spent time with Whitman, and it was the right memorial.

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It's been a minute since a novel felt genuinely scary to me, but The Only Good Indians manages it. Stephen Graham Jones marshals all the right things to make his moments simmer with the kind of heat that will explode the thermometer, any minute. And it all starts with four young men who killed an elk they weren't supposed to kill: that act of injustice, ten years later, is coming back to haunt them with a single-minded rush of vengeance.

One of the successes of this book is how quickly and richly Jones builds out his characters, particularly as perspectives shift, and how committed you remain to following this story to its bitter end. At times you feel like you're on a rollercoaster that you'd much rather jump off of—but this haunting is determined to carry you through to its end. It took me a solid minute to get into this book, a solid chapter I'd say. But once you settle into Jones's style, it will be difficult to put this one back down. And its images will refuse to leave you alone (I keep thinking about the glimpse of something that shouldn't be there through a spinning ceiling fan).

Alongside the momentum, Jones does one of my favorite horror tropes exceedingly well: uncertainty. Did you see what you think you saw? Who wore the boots that trampled, a monster or your wife or you? The unsettling crawl that results from not being certain, of not being sure, builds the suspense and the shivering feeling of increasing desperation. Is it the monster or your guilt haunting you? If you had lived a more careful life, would a monster be able to unravel it so quickly, so easily? Every time one storyline wrapped, I wasn't sure I'd be drawn back in well enough to the next one, but each time, I was wrong. Just a superbly frightening and poignant novel.

Major content warnings for animal death/cruelty, body horror. Also for grief, parental death, substance abuse, suicide.

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Naomi Novik's short story collection, Buried Deep and Other Stories, features short stories that range from Greek myth retellings to Pride and Prejudice (but with dragons)—yes, literally, and I was surprised by just how good it was—to fairytale-like tales that only Novik could create.

This book is the collection of a serial novelist. Many of these tales are set in previous or future novel's worlds. That's not a complaint—"Spinning Silver" works on its own as well as a jumping off point for her later novel, and I loved our dips into Schlomance, Temeraire, and even an upcoming world. But it's worth mentioning as there are often two kinds of SFF story collections—a collection of tales from an author who's written many a tale here and many a tale there, and now they're all finally in the same place, and a collection of individual stories that all stand on their own and are written for their own sake. This is the former.

My favorite stories were the ones I hadn't read before, or that felt most divorced from their inspirations. "Buried Deep," the title story, is an astoundingly new and vivid take on the tale of the Minotaur and Ariadne that I will remember for quite some time. "Seven" is a tale of artisans and the guild of potters, of what constitutes art, of pale white clay rumored to be poisonous to its users. The eerie "Castle Coeurlieu" is a Borges-like tale of a mysterious tower and a game of cards and a princess trying to survive a plague. These stories are rich, compelling, and beautiful, and show Novik's brain at its finest.

Content warnings for violence, body horror, xenophobia, classism, anti-Semitism.

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“Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby.” ― Langston Hughes

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Yes, it did snow in Chicago today. But the forsytha and crocuses and daffodils are blooming. Don’t let winter’s final throes fool you—it’s spring out there!

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A birthday is a tricky thing, especially when still getting over bronchitis. But every year I am grateful for surviving another year. Another year of books. Another year of writing. Another year of coffee, and another year of love. Bless.

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“For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.”—Rebecca Solnit in A Field Guide to Getting Lost

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The Antidote by Karen Russell is a compelling book about what it means to willingly forget. The prairie witch of Uz is a vault: people place memories in her when they don't want to hold them anymore. But when a dust storm to rival all others rolls through, she's left bankrupt. And in the wake of lost memories, the town will have to face all the pasts they tried to turn away from. As a young basketball player tries to find her way, a farmer notices a strange light over his field, and a photographer arrives in town to document strange happenings, a plot driven by magic unfolds into a story of the American West and what people are willing to do—or become—to thrive.

This was such a rich read. Like Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant, this book grapples with how communities can weaponize forgetting. How forgetting can be a tool for cruelty, for violence. People came to Uz to escape oppression, but to live with themselves, they had to look past and forget who lived here first. Russell unpacks this with intricate and delicate braiding, unpacks the cruelty of "better you than me," unpacks the fury of remembrance, of hearing what you wanted or needed to forget. Of photography as vehicle for memory, and of art as vehicle for imagining. A luscious historical fantasy filled with gritty dust, eerie wheatfields, the chemical smell of darkroom, the threat of an arrogant sheriff. Russell's newest continued to reinforce my love for everything she writes: it is compelling, well-researched, metafictional (real photos illustrate the book), and visual. Certainly a best of the year.

Content warnings for animal cruelty/death, suicidal ideation/suicide, sexual assault, anti-indigenous violence.

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I started While Reading and Walking 10 years ago today. I didn’t know if anyone wanted to read my book musings. I just knew I wanted to write them, and I decided I would start, and see where it went.

I had dreams of being a mega influencer with 100ks of followers. I never expected to have a community some of whom got to know me better honestly than people I know in real life. I didn’t know I’d one day be sharing a chronic illness journey, baring my soul about body image, or raging about politics with my followers. I didn’t know I’d make real, genuine friendships from it. And frankly, I didn’t know that the whole thing would work: people, lots of them, would actually want to read what I wrote about books. Enough that I’d get hired to write more of it.

I am such a transformed person since I began in 2015. If you’ve been on my book blog since the early days, thank you so much for every comment, every share, every message. There were times early on that I didn’t think the work was worth it, but every interaction made me think maybe it was. And it was.

Here are some favorite photos from some of the many journeys you’ve followed me on. And one sincere photo of currently very-tired, bronchitis-ridden me, thanking you, sincerely, before I go back, naturally, to my reading.

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“I rewind the tape but all it does is pause / On the very moment all was lost”—t.s. evermore

photos from spain, march 9, 2020

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Day-dreaming.

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We met beluga, dolphins, otters, and many more glorious water creatures at the Shedd on Saturday!

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It was a joy to get to see Mary Robinette Kowal in her home environment: Volumes Bookcafé, a bookstore that she helped to start, and where she wrote much of The Calculating Stars, which opened the Lady Astronaut series. We were gathered to celebrate the launch of the 4th and possibly (for now) final in the series, The Martin Contingency. She gave out space mission “patches” to those who bought book(s) from Volumes. And many of us had our Lady Astronaut Club cards at hand.

Kowal’s books are intricately researched, and she entertained us with the story of trying to match up the historical Earth calendar with a plotted-out Martian calendar, and the number of times that early readers caught errors that forced the entire chronology to change. (“Significant parts of my writing process…around this book were based on crying. There was also cursing. And angry walking.”) She read a deleted scene from the book, and told us about how she uses brackets often for details—”She used a tissue to wipe clean her [spacesuit thingie].” To replicate this process, we did a space-themed Mad Libs as a group.

She gave us writing advice (she has a superb podcast, and her voice is mesmerizing, since she is also a talented voice actor). She talked the intricacies of writing mystery novels and her hopes for writing more in the Spare Man universe. And she answered questions, which ranges from her southern accent (she actually didn’t have one due to needing speech therapy as a kid, and then resisting it as a teen, internalizing stereotypes that those accents signified that you weren’t smart, which is part of why she made her whipsmart mathematician and pilot protagonist southern).

The event featured voiceover demonstrations, stories about Kowal’s demanding cats (and how they helped plot one of her books), and much more. I’m a huge fan of the Lady Astronaut series, and it was so wonderful to finish getting the series signed!