boxofdelights

I hosted book group last Sunday and I'm only just feeling recovered today. We read How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community, by Mia Birdsong, which is a very timely book about weaving the web of connections that we all need to survive the current omnidisaster. Eight people showed up at my house!

I made broccoli & tofu with peanut sauce, a tomato-lentil dish, spiced nuts (sweet and not sweet), and served salad, bread, cheese and crackers. My friend Karen made mojitos.

I also had door prizes: a stack of books. Six of them went home with someone.

( pics )

My house is clean. Ish. Don't look in that one room though.

This is for bookgroup. I should schedule an event for spring, too, so my house gets clean at least twice a year. It'll have to be very early spring, though, because as soon as gardening season starts, the house is just a place to rest when it's too dark, wet, or cold to garden.

( a dining room )

It's my turn to host Tawanda book group this month. I picked the fourth Sunday, because one person said she would be busy on the third, and suggested that we meet at lunch time, so we could sit outside. Everyone who responded said lunch outside was a good idea, but two people can't make it, two people can, three said maybe (including the one who was busy on the third Sunday), and two haven't replied. I'm feeling a bit "guess I'll go eat worms."

I decided to have my house cleaned before letting people in it. So first I need to declutter. I had a whole month when I made the housecleaning appointment but somehow it has turned into two weeks. I also have to find space to put away my daughter's stuff; she moved out of the National Park Service housing in May, and has just gone back to New Mexico for a few months, living in a room in someone's house, so half her stuff is still here.

I made a mountain of clothes to take to the thrift store. I am embarrassed that I still had that many clothes that no longer fit me or anyone in my family, but soon I will not have them!


Do you want to watch a vulture hang out with some paragliders? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfMcrkOo-z4


If the housecleaning costs $275, how much would you tip?

Tawanda book group didn't meet last month, so Martha suggested last Sunday that we just get together, whoever was free. We couldn't agree on a movie but Sarah was doing Geeks Who Drink trivia with her friends and invited us along. Our team was Sarah, Martha, me, and Sarah's two friends, who turned out to be two guys she knows from the Sierra Club who play pub trivia a lot. Like, three times a week.

It was fun, so we went back this week, and Martha brought her husband. Martha and Rob are both really nice. Genuinely nice; that is who they are. I am nice at book group because that is what works at book group. I am gentle and diffident; I speak in support of others' points; I do not talk over people; I do not insist that I am right.

Sarah's friends are engineer-types. Guys I could have gone to school with. They know in their heads that even a soft-voiced woman may know things, but they don't really know it in their guts. I had to swing my weight around to get heard. "Rapunzel. Yes, the herb is called rapunzel. Yes, I'm sure. Do you have another idea? Then write it down. Solomon Islands. Dorothy Parker. Train in Vain. Yes I'm sure."

I'm not sure I like being like that in front of Martha and Rob though.

It's time for my SF book group to pick books again. Our fearless leader has chosen:

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin,
The Power by Naomi Alderman,
An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon,
Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse,
The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline, and
Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones.

She sorts her other picks into categories, and we get to vote for one from each category.

1. All of these books imagine an alteration in how our world works and people working within or without to change the system.

Walkaway by Cory Doctorow,
An Excess Male by Maggie Shen King,
Autonomous by Annalee Newitz,
Infomocracy by Malka Ann Older

I liked Walkaway, but more for the ideas than the story. I want to read Autonomous and Infomocracy. I think An Excess Male is on the Tiptree honors list.

2. These books take place on alien worlds that work very differently than ours does.

Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill,
Amatka by Karin Tidbeck,
Hunger Makes the Wolf by Alex Wells

Am leaning towards Hunger Makes the Wolf.

3. YA Asian American or Pacific Islander authors

The Girl from Everywhere by Heidi Heilig,
The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf by Ambelin Kwaymullina,
Warcross by Marie Lu,
The Epic Crush of Genie Lo by F.C. Yee

I don't think Australians are Pacific Islanders.

4. Urban Fairy Tales

The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert,
The Cruel Prince by Holly Black,
Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeannette Ng,
Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor

The Hazel Wood is really good. Strange the Dreamer is still on my to-read list.

5. The New Penny Dreadfuls

The Diabolical Miss Hyde by Viola Carr,
The Dark Days Club by Allison Goodman,
The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter by Theodora Goss,
Strange Practice by Vivian Shaw

Want to read all of these.

6. Here are some of our group’s favorite reads from last year.

Bird Box by Josh Malerman,
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller,
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders,
We Are Legion by Dennis E. Taylor

I don't want to read Lincoln in the Bardo. I have the impression that it is the kind of literary fiction that uses SF as a metaphor.

I love my SF book group! Have you read any of these? Thumbs up or down?

Tawanda book group has been going for 25 years. We don't actually discuss the book as much as we used to, but we have a book almost every month, and we get together to eat and talk. The host each month picks the book.

I feel like this book group doesn't really like my choices, but it also could be that I always want to discuss the book more than anyone else does. I try to pick short interesting books; I never pick SF any more; I do look at various "book group pick" lists. When I ask the other members to help me choose, they say, "You get to pick whatever you want! You are in control!"

I've got two ideas for my turn this year. I'd definitely pick The Mother Of All Questions except that I chose Solnit's Hope in the Dark last year. We do like talking about politics. We sometimes like to talk about death and grieving. One of our members just lost both her mother and her brother to the flu.

Library book group chose books last night. This group reads six books over nine months, and chooses books by voting. I persuaded the group to choose Kindred, by Octavia Butler. The other five books we chose are:

The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell
A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles
Crossing to Safety - Wallace Stegner
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
The Good Earth - Pearl Buck

A wide variety!

Classics book group meets every month during the school year. Each CSU grad student or instructor who volunteers to lead a discussion gets to choose the book. The first four books for that group are:

Beloved - Toni Morrison
The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories - H.P. Lovecraft
The Woman Warrior - Maxine Hong Kingston
The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway

Tawanda book group is the one that has been meeting for 26 years and doesn't really discuss books much any more. Terri hosted this month and asked us each to bring a poem to read. Amy recovered twelve of her steers since last month, but eleven are still lost in the forest so she couldn't afford to take a night off the search. Terri read "Your children are not your children," by Khalil Gibran. I read "Wild Geese". Jo read "Going to Walden," also by Mary Oliver. Kathleen brought something by Wendell Berry, but I don't remember what, because she asked me to read it, and apparently I do not have enough brain to speak in public and put things into longterm memory at the same time. Cate read "It's Time Somebody Told Me," which her mother had cut out from the newspaper, laminated, and carried around in her wallet until she died.

• What are you reading?

Arabella of Mars, by David Levine. It has a very old-fashioned feel. A sort of Golden Age of Science Fiction or Rudyard Kipling adventure. The setting is Age of Sail in spaaaace, because there is breathable atmosphere out past Mars, navigable by ships with balloons, sails, and oars.

Also a permaculture book.

• What did you recently finish reading?

Penric's Demon, by Lois McMaster Bujold. I liked it! I read the Five Gods novels when they came out; as I remember it, the first was good, the second was better, the third was kind of a mess. This novella is a good small story and satisfying look into what it is like to come into possession of one of the Bastard's demons. (Mostly satisfying; I really wanted to know how Penric is going to cope with his shyness and Desdemona's curiosity on sexual subjects, but all Bujold tells us is that it's awkward.)

• What do you think you’ll read next?

I belong to four book groups. In a perfect world, that would mean one meeting every week. In reality, two of them are slightly erratic and one meets only six times a year, so this month I have five book group meetings from 4-10 to 4-18, one of which I am hosting at someone else's house. (The fifth meeting is because someone in my SF book group is also in a graphic novel book group, which is reading Bitch Planet this month, so I'm going to visit.) The books are

A spool of blue thread, by Anne Tyler
Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert
The Traitor Baru Cormorant, by Seth Dickinson
Hope in the Dark, by Rebecca Solnit (I'm hosting this one)
Bitch Planet, by Kelly Sue DeConnick

Also I have to do our tax return somewhere in there.

So the book group that is hosted by the library meets in August to choose books for the year. Everyone who attends that meeting gets to propose a book; then everyone writes down their top six choices, and we read the ones that get the most votes. I did not attend last August, so I didn't witness the selection, but we are going to read a book that was written by a member of the book club. He is also going to facilitate the discussion, since it is the custom for the person who proposes the book to be the facilitator, although one can ask the librarian who runs the book group to facilitate in one's stead.

I think this is a terrible idea.

Also I have no idea how to talk about a book in front of its author, even if I don't care about the author, which is not the case here, even if I like the book, which hmmm. I have developed a little skill at beta-reading, but that is different: there, you are criticizing only what the author wants criticized, in order to improve the work before she publishes it. Here, I don't know what he wants from the discussion but I don't think he's going to get it.

This year, my SF book group's fearless leader has chosen the theme of diversity. Jacqie picks six, and lets us vote on the other six. Here's her list:

1. Sorcerer to the Crown, by Zen Cho
2. Ninefox Gambit, by Yoon Ha Lee
3. The Traitor Baru Cormorant, by Seth Dickinson
4. Signal to Noise, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
5. Shadowshaper, by Daniel José Older
6. The Library at Mount Char, by Scott Hawkins

and the groups we get to choose from:

7. The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, by Becky Chambers
Dark Orbit, by Carolyn Ives Gilman
Planetfall, by Emma Newman, or
Archangel, by Marguerite Reed

8. Wake of Vultures, by Lila Bowen
Vermilion, by Molly Tanzer, or
Orlando, by Virginia Woolf

9. Gene Mapper, by Taiyo Fujii, or
The Three-Body Problem, by Cixin Liu

10. The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Grace of Kings, by Ken Liu, or
The People in the Trees, by Hanya Yanagihara

11. Illuminae, by Amie Kaufman
Uprooted, by Naomi Novik, or
An Ember in the Ashes, by Sabaa Tahir

12. All the Birds in the Sky, by Charlie Jane Anders
Slade House, by David Mitchell
The Cloud Roads, by Martha Wells, or
The Affinites, by Robert Charles Wilson

Isn't that a good list? What would you choose? I'm going to be conflicted between All the Birds in the Sky, which I very much want to read, and The Cloud Roads, which I always want to make more people read.