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Hilarious & fun.

Second re-read. I enjoyed Kerouac's ramblings about Buddhism, hiking mountains, meditation, and train-hopping. I forgot how he talks about women though--they are mostly present to have sex with, which is pretty awful. (He definitely fails the Bechdel test).
So he's inspiring, but not in how he talks about women.

Hmm. I've been reading lots of hard-hitting novels by Angela Davis, Desmond Cole, and Assata Shakur. This book felt like skimming the surface of poking at one's privilege. For sure the essays are good in helping white folks feel less alone in this journey, but... I thought it would be deeper and more detailed.
For the record, the book does not follow Campbell's hero's journey, in case anyone else was misled by the book description.

A play about the life of Joan of Arc. I liked this quite a bit. It was funny. There was a good balance of Joan’s fervent belief and varying degrees of belief from other characters, offering skepticism, faith, and desperation. The ending was too religious for me, but then again, she is a saint. If you like Joan of Arc and want to know what famous authors have said about her, this is worth a read. I’d like to read Mark Twain’s book about her eventually.

Ebook. A short story set in the world of Earthsea, although you don’t need to know the world to follow the story. I have to be careful reading LeGuin’s work now, as she has passed on and there is a limit to how much work of hers there is left for me to read. Here, LeGuin returns to writing about women in Earthsea.

Some of you may know that this was a struggle for her: to move away from male characters and figure out women’s roles in her own work. In this story, there is a stone that has a spirit in it. A woman visits it every day to feed it. She speaks of vengeance.

Why?
You read on to find out.

This is another book of women disguising themselves as men to go fight their enemies BUT this one is hilarious because it’s Pratchett. It’s hard to put down. It’s also a great critique of the military complex. Spot on, as usual. If you’re familiar with Discworld, Vimes is in this one, and dear old Death makes an appearance.

This book was the biography of a Chinese poet unknown to me, Li Bai. He’s so well known that if I had asked my Chinese students about him, they would know who he is. It was a fun read, although his parenting and husband skills were awful which was rather frustrating.

I recently learned he's one of China's most famous poets, so clearly I need to go take a look at his work!

This is a book of poetry for the heathen liturgical year. If you are a heathen who likes poetry, you might enjoy this! There's lots of poems here you could use in ritual.

I like his poems well enough, but… there’s a lot of “I” statements in these poems. It threw me off sometimes, because I guess I expected the poetry to be more deity-centric? There's a strong thread between the devotee and the divine, certainly. That might work for some folks! I think the issue is that forcing myself to read the same poet every day is a bit intense--picking it up randomly for light reading might work better for me.

On the whole though, it’s nice to read heathen poetry and think about the deities I worship, rather than read Christian poetry and try to distantly sorta-kinda relate it to the deities I worship.

I've read this book twice and love it to pieces.

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A man labours in a dorayaki shop, making pastries for customers he doesn’t really care about. Then he meets an old, disabled woman who asks to work in his shop. I don’t want to give too much away, but mass illness features in this book in a way that reminds me of covid19 now. So I liked to read it, since it reminds me of these times we’re going through now. This is a very sweet, sad story.

Fantastic! I loved this so much. The joy, the love, the queerness. Wow! I look forward to reading more of her work.

Scifi you can't put down!