“Well, it‘s been pretty jolly, everybody‘s being very nice. They say they like the cover. I won‘t know, of course, until it‘s really out there in the world.” Margaret Atwood discussing her new memoir with Matt Galloway on CBC radio‘s “The Current.” (This works much better if you‘ve heard Atwood speak and can imagine her wry voice saying it.)
It was late, my father was done work for the night. Because he was technically part of the tourism industry, and the Egyptian economy has for a very long time depended on tourism to ward off complete collapse, he was afforded special dispensation to be out during curfew hours. The soldiers on the corner did not know this./1
I've explained, politely, to deeply well-meaning people that I don't have a problem shaking hands with women— maybe other Muslims do, I couldn't tell you; we don't all know each other.
I've sat through a wildly uncomfortable book interview once after I joked that I write all my novels in Arabic and then run them through Google Translate and the interviewer believed me.
I've smiled and nodded. I was nice about it.
Which is to say, I was a coward.
One day it will be considered unacceptable in the polite liberal circles of the West not to acknowledge all the innocent people killed in that long ago unpleasantness. The truth and reconciliation committees are coming. The land acknowledgements are coming. The very sorry descendants are coming After all, grief in arrears is grief just the same./1
I know now there are people, some of them once very dear to me, whom I will never speak to again, so long as I can help it. It‘s the people who said nothing. The people who knew full well what was happening and said nothing because there was a personal risk of a chance of getting yelled at or, God forbid, a chance of professional ramifications. It‘s the people who dug deeply into the paramount importance of their own safety, their own convenience.
In the end, we will be asked to normalize not just unlimited extraction and unlimited suffering, but total absence: a hollow that will look an awful lot like the one we were asked to overlay onto the minimum wage workers and climate refugees and the victims of endless colonial wars, and yes, even those dead Palestinian children, who, had they been allowed to live, might have done something terrible. Just cease to believe these people were human.
Interviewing one of Uber‘s executives, who demonstrated the company‘s algorithms with the enthusiasm of a child at Christmas, I couldn‘t help but think that what this company really innovated was not some new solution to the travelling salesman problem, but the establishment of a new lower norm of employee treatment. Success, growth, and profit came from taking what at one time had been decent stable jobs and rebranding them as side hustles.
#Bookspin November:
1. Beyond Survival
2. Cobalt Red
3. The Underground Girls of Kabul
4. Flesh and Blood so Cheap
5. Waiting to be Arrested
6. Cesar Chavez
7. Trailblazer
8. The Deviants‘ War
9. Some People Need Killing
10. Four Shots
11. Small Acts of Courage
12. Necessary Trouble
13. Buses are a‘Coming
14. Generation Revolution
15. Dorothy Day
16. Call Him Jack
17. Give Us The Ballot
18. Kids These Days
19. Salt Thief
20. American Midnight
I believe that theft is punishable by law, and we need to elect leaders who believe in the rule of law. The fossil fuel economy is propelling mass extinctions in acidified oceans and disappearing forests, in deadly heat waves and untold human suffering. How far down the species-at-risk list are cedar waxwings? And serviceberries? I fear for the future of my sweet green valley and our small farmers. Already it is too quiet.
Where is the value of a butterfly whose species has prospered for millennia and lives nowhere else on the planet? There is no formula complex enough to hold the birthplace stories. It pains me to know that an old growth forest is worth far more as lumber as the lungs of the Earth. And yet, I‘m harnessed to this economy, in ways large and small, yoked to pervasive extraction. I‘m wondering how we fix that, and I‘m not alone.
When an economic system actively destroys what we love, isn‘t it time for a different one? Some powerful feminist thinkers call us to remember that gift-giving is among the most primal of human relationships. Each of us begins our life as the recipient in what Genevieve Vaughan has called “a maternal gift economy,” the flow of gifts and services from mother to newborn. When a mother nurses her child the common good is the only one that matters.
Our oldest teachings remind us that failure to show gratitude dishonours the gift and brings serious consequences. If you dishonor the beavers by taking too many, they will leave. If you waste the corn, you‘ll go hungry. The knowing that you already have what you need, is a radical act in an economy that that is always urging us to consume more. Data tells that there is enough food on the planet for all of us. And yet people are starving.
Stories keep the world intact. Storytelling predates the written word by about 3000 years. Fairytales specifically have always protested against societal constraints and commented on the human condition. Fairytales offer whimsy and truth. The whimsy makes us brave, and the truth points us in the right direction. I use fairytales from around the world because they remind me of hope and they show that no one is immune to sorrow.
Did you know that trees talk? Scientifically, another tree can send love to a sad one or a sick one. Baby trees hardly get any light, which means that a baby tree should die, but the roots of the vast trees feed it. Some forests are just fine. They are roots and joy and babbling brooks. Did you know if there‘s something that poisons one tree, the forest can suffer? That‘s how I think this happened. That‘s why it‘s all my fault.
pickThanks to @Chelsea.Poole for this excellent #AuldLangSpyne recommendation: a brief but deep book about six astro/cosmonauts from various countries circling the globe together in 24 hours. It‘s a wonderful exploration of bridging cultural differences, with awareness of how connected we are on this tiny planet. Harvey poetically explores big issues and personal pain, in the life of one astronaut and an incident on Earth that none were connected to.
Maybe we‘re the new dinosaurs and need to watch out, but then maybe against all the odds we‘ll migrate to Mars, we will start a colony of gentle preservers, people who want to keep the red planet red. We‘ll devise a Planetary flag, because that‘s something we lacked on Earth, and we wonder if that‘s why it all fell apart. And we‘ll look back at the faint dot of blue that is our old Earth and will say, “Do you remember?” “Have you heard the tales?”
pickTotally gripping: Jeju, an island with its distinct culture at the south end of the Korean Peninsula is the locus of a multigenerational narrative that starts just before World War II and goes on for several decades. Women-only divers who collect shells after intensive training and have their own Indigenous spirituality resist wave after wave of violence and enforced cultural change, with intimate personal and family stories at the core.
pickAnother IRL club book, this time from August. What for me is an old Canadian classic studied in university, with the main threads being childhood bullying, classism, and art. What I still remember from 35 years ago is the bullying descriptions, girl-on-girl: I can resonate now more with the descriptions of tense adult relationships with men, as well as with other women. Not the greatest fiction I‘ve ever read now, but still worth it.
pickAn excellent IRL read, facilitated by a Parsee member: about a Parsee man who returns to India in his 30s to adopt a child he and his white American wife can't have. He finds not only adoption challenges, but a greatly aged and weakened mother who reveals disturbing family secrets. Many layers of complexity around family structures, aging, class, gender, religion, and nationality, very movingly told.
Cathy had wanted adopt from India for the best of reasons, of course: so they could have a child that looked like Remy. But, he thought, would we have looked here if we could have found a white baby in America? He and Cathy had always prided themselves on their politics and supported progressive causes, so why have they not considered a Black adoption? Remi knew the answer: there was a caste system in America and he had successfully scaled it./1
Don't squander a life so miraculously given, since I, your mother, could just as easily have been with my mother that day at the market if any number of things had been different, one of the youngest victims of the atomic bomb and you would never have been born.
But here we are, and here are these men on the moon, so you are on the winning side, and perhaps can live a life that honours that? And Chie had said silently to her mother, yes, I see.
#Bookspin2025
1. One Day
2. Crossings
3. Cobalt Red
4. Cobalt Angus
5. One Day
6. Crossings
7. James
8. One Day
9. Cobalt Red
10. Ragtime
11. Future Is Disabled
12. Cobalt Red
13. Crossings
14. One Day
15. James
16. Ragtime
17. One Day
18. Crossings
19. Cobalt Red
20. Future Is Disabled
Maybe one day a robot could do your job…But what would it be to cast out into space creation that had no eyes to see it, and no hearts to feel or exult in it? For years an astronaut trains and prunes and caves and submarines and simulators every flaw or weakness located, tested, and winnowed away until what‘s left is a near-perfect unflappable triangulation of brain, limbs, and senses. For some it comes hard, for others more easily.
Nancy corrected me emphatically. “You must never think about rewards or punishments,”she said. “If you think in terms of rewards and punishments, you‘re not thinking partnership. They don‘t serve us, we serve them. …We are not giving them anything,” Nancy stressed, “ it‘s either theirs, or it‘s not. We are working with the bird. It‘s a partnership. And even after all these years, I‘m the junior partner, I am not the master.”
bailedThis was an IRL book club pick: I just couldn‘t get into the pop culture/humour, although I appreciated some of what Fey had to say about challenges she faces as a woman comedian and artist. Other club members really enjoyed it. I guess I‘m Just Too Serious.🧐
pickA powerful book about 19C Elizabeth Packard: forced into an “insane asylum” by her husband and separated from her five children with the collusion between her husband and the controlling institution director. It vividly portrays how she challenged the horrific institution staff, developed solidarity among the patients, fought back in the court system after discharge, and became an activist for mental health rights. #SheSaid #Nonfiction2025 #MeToo
#Bookspin August: the shortest books I can find anywhere in my list because I don‘t think I‘ll read the others I‘ve got already!
1. Liars
2. Orbital
3. Whale Fall
4. Be a Good Creature
5. The Details
6. Becoming Kin
7. Falling Back in Love
8. Shut Up You‘re Pretty
9. Troubles
10. A tranquil star
11. The Argonauts
12. Western
13. Manticore
14. Lot
15. Pure Colour
16. If An Egyptian
17. How not to drown
18. Cuba
19. Homesickness
20. Birdcatcher
In July 1998, the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics, INFN, decided to make its researchers start clocking in and out of the lab. They did not know the backlash this would inspire: not only at the institute but also across the world. Hundred of scientists around the world wrote in support of the INFN professor‘s complaints: saying that the book was needlessly bureaucratic, insulting, and out of step with how the researchers actually worked.
Even after a drastic rise in wage labour after the Civil War, it was compared to prostitution or slavery, sometimes by white workers wanting distance between sex workers and enslaved Black people. But Black free people too noticed the similarity of a hireling to a slave. Richard L. Davis, a miner, maintained that “none of us who toil for our daily bread are free.” “At one time we were chattel slaves, today we are, white and Black, wage slaves.”
Nanni notes the colonial missions tried to induce people not simply to work, but to work in a regular and uniform manner for a specific period of time per day. This view of abstract labour hours could not have been more alien to task-oriented communities, who recognized their activities based on different ecological and cultural cues, such as the flowering and rooting of certain plants, and where things took however much time they took. /1
Yet until Elizabeth spied Toffee‘s letter she had no idea what had happened. Even after that, encased in uneasy ignorance, she could not be fully sure what McFarland was doing: it was only one letter she‘d seen, she did not suspect the censorship was as extensive as it was. So, instead, she wrote bleakly of the fence of desolation which the total withdrawal of friends throws over a person‘s life. “It is hard to be forgotten,” she simply said. /1
#Bookspin June
1. Comfort of Crows
2. Saving Time
3. An Immense World
4. James
5. Some People Need Killing
6. An Immense World
7. An Immense World
8. Some People Need Killing
9. Some People Need Killing
10. Saving Time
11. James
12. Saving Time
13. Cobalt Red
14. One day
15. One Day
16. Crossings
17. We should not be afraid of the sky
18. We should not be afraid of the sky
19. Cobalt Red
20. Comfort of Crows
“Is there no man in this crowd to protect this woman?” Rebecca Blessing shouted, pacing the platform. “Is there no man? If I were a man, I would seize her!” But Rebecca was not a man, she had no power…[Elizabeth] was ushered to her seat, the train beginning to pull away, to bear her away from her home. But it was not just her home Elizabeth was leaving: her liberty lay shattered on the track, her reputation for sanity dead beside it. #SheSaid
pickThis was immensely powerful: I‘d like to listen to it again. Although it‘s long! Set in Mississippi during the enslavement era, with a few throwbacks to Africa in an earlier time, it tells the beautiful passionate heartbreaking story of two Black men in love, the supportive, and crushing responses of those around them. I love how it works different characters with each chapter, going into the White as well as the Black ones, /1
Hive mind: a friend who‘s having a hard time asked me to suggest some “light reading” (audiobook) for her time away. I know not this “light reading” of which she speaks. Any suggestions? Thanks!
“Black boys don‘t get to be sad and feel their feelings.”
#RiseupReads
He did think about the ways in which his body wasn‘t his own, and how that condition showed up uniquely for everyone whose personhood wasn‘t just disputed, but denied. Swirling beneath them were the ways in which not having lawful claim to yourself diminished you, yes, but in another way condemned those who invented the disconnection…. what other answer, was there than some kind of flexible, stretching further, so others couldn‘t pull you apart.
#Bookspin May
1. Saving Time
2. An Immense World
3. Swimming in the Dark
4. Some People Need Killing
5. An Immense World
6. An Immense World
7. Some People
8. One Day
9. Saving Time
10. Cobalt Red
11. One Day
12. Art of Gathering
13. Swimming in the Dark
14. Swimming in the Dark
15. Comfort
16. Crossings
17. Crossings
18. Crossings
19. We should not be afraid of the sky
20. We should not be afraid
still the same books because I‘m so far behind!
You do not yet know, you do not yet understand. We who are from the dark speaking in the seven voices, because seven is the only divine number, because that is who we are and that is who we always have been.
#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl
pickA Toronto-based story centered on four Anishnaabe characters (a professor, a grad student, a visiting hockey player, and a bush pilot), a Caribbean writer, and a white detective: all brought unexpectedly together by a series of abrupt and incredibly brutal murders. This is far more than a murder mystery, going into Indigenous culture, history and human rights; sports culture; and a bit of romance. Very well developed, but the ending is a bit neat.
#Bookspin April: on hold only!
1. Saving Time
2. An Immense World
3. Swimming
4. Some People Need Killing
5. An Immense World
6. An Immense World
7. Some People Need Killing
8. Some People Need Killing
9. Saving Time
10. Saving Time
11. Saving Time
12. Art of Gathering
13. Swimming in the Dark
14. Swimming in the Dark
15. Swimming in the Dark
16. Crossings
17. Crossings
18. Crossings
19. We should not be afraid
20. We should not be afraid
Another Story: I‘m so glad they moved it to my part of the city many years ago! Full of progressive books, with particular emphasis on kid lit for a whole spectrum of young readers. My go to spot for nibling shopping and my beloved annual Syracuse Women‘s Art datebook.
“I was trying to suggest a reconciliation, but…”
“What was the reason for the separation?”
A third coffee. He definitely needed a third coffee. Normally Trent would be drowning his sorrows with tea, but there were some things in this world that tea could not fix. It was definitely a coffee morning.
“We were having some personal problems.”
“Who had the affair, you or her?”
The way Birch asked disturbed Trent more than the question itself.
When he laced up and adjusted his gear, Paul sometimes felt like a gladiator going into battle, complete with his hockey stick of death. Other times he felt more like an overdressed clown, being paid to chase a piece of rubber across an artificial frozen surface in a bizarre outfit to amuse the masses. Still, it wasn‘t as bad as football. At least hockey had some connection to reality, evolving from the need to move on the frozen lakes of Canada.
1. Time with a good friend I haven‘t seen for a while, after watching “No Other Place”: not “joyful,”but powerful and worth seeing.
2. Early wildflower shoots peeping up in my pollinator garden.
3. Chocolate ice cream!
4. An excellent choir workshop on Saturday, practising our new songs that explore water, ecology, Indigenous tradition in Tkaronto.
5. Bubbling stories amidst the doom of different kinds of resistance people are taking.
#5JoysFriday
pickI *loved* these short stories from my IRL group: major bonus was the meeting was attended by the author sharing her lived experience as a Canadian (from my Mom‘s town) of Filipina descent that provided context. Some common characters thread the stories together, but they‘re still quite separate, showing many different facets of life as a new Canadian, especially doing low-income work, or as someone left behind in the Philippines.
bailedThe book description captured me, partly because of the ref to the #PussyRiots, which are part of the #Nonfiction2025 challenge, and mainly because of the idea of exploring the punk rock world behind the former Iron Curtain. However, while the writing is very good, I just couldn‘t stay with it. Too many deep dives into philosophy and theory, and not quite personal enough for me. Also, unless he loops back, the Pussy Riots are just peripheral.
