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And while I'm wrapping up Hum 110 posting for the (academic) year, here are a bunch of topically-adjacent children's books we wandered into while reading the assigned curriculum. (To be clear, none of these were assigned: they're all things we found that are based on stuff we read in bookgroup, or drew upon art styles we studied, etc.)

Vivian Mansour (illus. Emmanuel Valtierra, trans. Carlos Rodriguez Cortez), Pilgrim Codex (2025)

Heroic account of a Mexican family who, driven from their homes by violence, cross the US-Mexico border to try to find a safer home. Re-imagined through the lens of Mesoamerican codices, the family's peril, sacrifices, and bravery are told with sympathy and pride. Alas, not everyone in the family makes it alive to the US, and some of the scenes are genuinely harrowing. Nevertheless, I'd still call this age-appropriate: given that some children have themselves survived similar events (or have classmates or playmates who did), this could be a useful text for helping children discuss and make sense of their world.

Duncan Tonatiuh, A Land of Books: Dreams of Young Mexihcah Word Painters (2022)

Story of young tlahcuiloqueh (scribes) in training, learning to paint amoxtin (books, aka codices). Illustrations draw heavily on Mesoamerican glyphs, and shows several example of completed codex-pages in progress. The more one knows about how to read Mesoamerican codices, the richer this book becomes. Glossary of Nahuatl in the back (used liberally in the text), but unfortunately does not include a guide to Mesoamerican glyphs, dating systems, or other conventions of the Mixteca writing system. I highly recommend pairing this with Gordon Whittaker's Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs (not a children's picture book) or similar, to get insight into everything Tonatiuh is doing here.

Duncan Tonatiuh, The Princess and the Warrior (2016)

Tonatiuh's version of the Mixteca origin story of the volcanoes Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepetl, which are visible from Tenochtitlan / Mexico City. As above, the illustrations are inspired by Mesoamerican codices, and the text is rich with Nahuatl vocabulary. As ever, I am caught by random side-characters: what became of the messenger who was bribed to betray Popoca? He lucked out that Popoca was too caught up in Itza's illness to hunt him down for revenge...

Duncan Tonatiuh, Feathered Serpent and the Five Suns (2020)

Another Mixteca origin story, this one for humanity itself. We read in bookgroup one of the sources Tonatiuh draws upon, but I didn't recognize the middle section of Tonatiuh's narrative--and the afterword suggests that the novel-to-me section was Tonatiuh's own creation, imaging that Quetzalcoatl faced the same challenges on the path to the underworld that the dead do.

Duncan Tonatiuh, Diego Rivera: His World and Ours (2011)

Introduction to the life and works of Diego Rivera, who was one of the principal artists of the Mexican government's muralism campaign of the 1920s and 30s. The art is a Mixtecan riff on Rivera's style, and alternates between Rivera's work, reimagined in Tonatiuh's style, and speculation about what archetypically Mexican subjects he might have immortalized had he been working today.

There may or may not be further posts of Hum-110-adjacent materials dribbling in as we go: there are a number of books I checked out from the library as potentially interesting, but which I didn't get to while we were reading related units. We'll see how it goes!

sanguinity

I've been in remiss in logging our Hum 110 reading/viewing for the second half of the year! As previously mentioned, we centered our studies on Mexico City this last year. The material blogged here runs from the seventeeth century through the near-present, and took us half of an academic year to cover.

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (trans. Margaret Sayers Peden), Poems, Protest, and a Dream, (late seventeenth century / 1997)

This was a fascinating collection of works. Sor Juana was both a courtier and a nun (at different times), and this collection samples both eras: at the one end we have secular diss poems and show-off pieces composed for competitions, while the other end includes a virtuoso defense of scholarship by female clerics and education for women. (The defense is the titular "Protest", which is a politically complex work in which Sor Juana responds to a rebuke by a church official who himself took on a female pseudonym for the purpose of chastising Sor Juana. Sor Juana then proceeded to play a "tee-hee, we're all just girls here" card while absolutely eviscerating the man -- while keeping up her own pretense of subjecting herself to church authority.) There's also a complex interplay between new world and old world symbols and signifiers in these works, which reflected tensions over whether New Spain or the Iberian Peninsula was the true center of the empire. Also, shoutout to the lesbian poem: we were very pleased to see it.

( III: One of Five Burlesque Sonnets )

Spanish and English on facing pages, for the convenience of the multilingual.

H.N. Branch (trans), The Mexican Constitution of 1917 compared with the Mexican Constitution of 1857

We leapt from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth and twentieth century, which was an unbelievable degree of whiplash: I had soooooooo many Britannica tabs open, trying to figure out what was going on with the century-plus of revolutions, counter-revolutions, deposings, assassinations, the Mexican-American war, and oh yes, the brief installation of an emperor again (by France, when the US was too busy with its own Civil War to meddle).

Discussion this month was mostly trying to get a grasp on the history and the problem of cultivating a stable government. But we also had a lot of admiration for the 1917 Mexican Constitution, which was extremely forward thinking in terms of labor rights, up to and including things like worker safety, union protections, and paid pregnancy leaves. (The seething envy in the room could be cut with a knife!) Surprisingly to us, the 1917 Constitution was also strongly anti-Catholic, seizing Church property and mandating secular (and universal!) education. (The weakening of the Church's power led to a few more years of revolution, of course, as pro-Catholic forces objected to that part of the Constitution.)

Mexican Murals: Diego, Orozco, and Sisquieros (1920s-30s) (online gallery)
David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and Xavier Guerrero, "Manifesto of the Syndication of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors," (1923-1924)

Cool art! Also, interesting things to discuss re auteur's vision vs. government propaganda; the radically ethno-nationalistic and peasant-centric vision of Mexico (vs. the context of European-trained artists who had been working in the U.S. for a living, and all painted on urban buildings, not so easily accessible to the rural peasantry); and murals as a public form of art (in contrast to easel painting).

Los Olvidados | The Forgotten Ones | The Young and the Damned (1950, dir. Luis Buñuel)
Cesare Zavattini, "Some ideas on the Cinema" (1953)

Realist film about life in the economic/criminal underclass of Mexico City. The original cut of the film depicts the inescapability of the circle of violence, but that ending played badly to test audiences, so a second, "happy" ending was filmed, in which the child protagonist slays his abuser (instead of being slayed by him), and returns to reform school. (Yay?)

( discussion )

All that said, I kinda enjoyed... maybe not watching the film, but having watched it? There was a lot of toothy chewy shit going on in and around the film, and it was satisfying to discuss, at a number of different levels.

Available on youtube with English subtitles, if you're interested.

José Emilio Pacheco (trans. Katharine Silver), Battles in the Desert (1980)

Novella of a man's remembrances of a specific year of his childhood, when he fell in love with his best friend's mother, and her ultimate erasure from (apparently) all memory and record but his own.

( A LOT going on )

We discussed this one to death and came to no agreement on it, but I can say it was one of the most enthusiastically discussed works of the unit.

Elena Poniatowska (trans. Helen R. Lane), Massacre in Mexico (1971 / trans. 1975)

( content warning for state violence, including massacre, imprisonment, and torture )

It's a powerhouse of the book, although most in my book group did not read it, or only read sections of it, because of the violence it relates. I found that frustrating, for in addition to discussion of the content, there's also ample opportunity to discuss the format of the book: how does one take reams of interviews and publicize their content, especially before one could dump a massive file of sources on the internet? How does one handle the vagaries of eyewitness accounts, the multiplicity of viewpoints, the uncertainty of memory, and conflicting testimonies? How does one do all this under a hostile government, that would much rather see your book suppressed than published? I'm a little reluctant to call this book my favorite of the course, given how challenging its content was, and yet it was definitely the one I found most rewarding, both to read and to discuss. Excellent choice for capstone of the Mexico City unit!

sanguinity

And with this installment, I have finally caught up on my library overdues -- things got a little hairy there, while I was trying to bull my way through our final Hum 110 book of the year. Happily, we don't get charged overdue fines, just a replacement fee when the library decides getting their book back has become a lost cause. Which hasn't happened yet, knock wood. *juggles books faster*

Kelley Armstrong, An Ordinary Sort of Evil (2026)

Fifth novel in the Rip Through Time series (not counting another four novellas under the author's private imprint), in which a police detective from 2016 Vancouver BC becomes displaced in time and solves crimes in 1860s Edinburgh, Scotland.

This was a particularly fun installment, but the big question I had going in was: do Duncan and Mallory finally kiss? The novel came out a month ago, and this is the first time in years when a Rip Through Time novel has come out and I haven't gotten a rash of comments on my Duncan/Mallory story (the only one on AO3!) from readers frustrated that they STILL weren't kissing in the novels. So I had my suspicions.

Spoiler:

They kiss. And a decent kiss it was, too! Although I flatter myself that I did it better. ;-)

I need to go back and pick up the most recent novella, which is sitting unread on my ereader, but all in all, I'm very pleased with this installment.

Lois McMaster Bujold, Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (2016)

Read-aloud with

grrlpup; first read for her and second read for me. Unlike nearly every other book in the Vorkosigan Saga, this one is neither mystery nor MilSF, instead being very domestic. (It is hilarious to me that every time I prepared to read the next section and asked Grrlpup for a "last time in Gentleman Jole" recap, she nailed it. She does not nail it with mysteries or MilSF, at least not without a ton of scaffolding on my part.) I still very much like this one for all the things it made canon, although as noted before, it is rather babies-forward. I've been holding off on finishing writing a couple of fic until I finished my re-read of this; I suppose it's time now to push those higher in the queue.

Btw, this finishes our planned reading of the Vorkosigan Saga (although we may go back and pick up Ethan of Athos at some point). Next up for cooking-and-picnics read-aloud time: the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik.

Grace Lin, The Year of the Dog, (2006 / 2018)

Middle-grade semi-autobiographical novel about a fifth grader deciding what she wants to be when she grows up, all while learning to navigate her second-generation Taiwanese-American identity. (Spoiler: she wants to grow up to be an author who writes books with Chinese people in them! Congratulations, Grace, on achieving your childhood dreams! So few of us do!)

Published for the 2006 Year of the Dog, then reiussued for the 2018 Year of the Dog, this new edition has more family stories at the end, as well as an interview between Grace Lin and Alvina Ling, Grace's childhood friend, present-day editor, and a character in the book, reminiscing on the development of the book and how Grace altered events from their childhood and for what narrative purpose.

(btw, Grace and Alvina host a children's lit podcast together: Book Friends Forever. Grrlpup is a regular listener -- I honestly thought the podcast was called "Grace and Alvina" until two minutes ago.)

Loved this book when I first read it, and I'm delighted to say it holds up on re-read. And the new bonus material at the back is a real treat!

Meredith Broussard, More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech (2023)

Exceptionally clear overview of technochauvanism (tech bros thinking they're smarter and better than anyone who has ever tried to solve a particular problem before) and algorithmic bias (when technology reproduces the same racist, sexist, cissexist, and ableist biases of society at large). Each chapter discusses specific algorithmic failures in a different domain: facial recognition, policing and courts, testing and academics, digital accessibility, gender, and medical diagnosis. She also has a chapter devoted to algorithmic auditing and a concluding chapter that highlights various efforts to check, correct, or regulate biased algorithms. (Alas, a lot of the U.S. efforts have since been set back, if not gutted, by the Trump Administration. Stay strong, E.U. -- we're counting on you!)

This book played havoc with my library holds list. It also wasn't great for my browser tabs. Let me share two:

Heat Listed. Chicago's predictive policing program told a man he would be involved with a shooting. But it couldn't determine which side of the gun he would be on. Instead, it made him the victim of a violent crime -- twice. (Person of Interest was ripped from the headlines -- this story even happened during 2013! But instead of "the Machine" saving Robert McDaniel's life, it got him shot instead. Twice.)
How Eugenics Shaped Statistics. Exposing the damned lies of three science pioneers. (Galton, Pearson, and Fisher, damned eugenicists, all, and one of them was in bed with Nazis. Basically, how the p-test was invented to give eugenics the veneer of objective truth. I am pissed that NOT A SINGLE ONE of my years of statistics classes mentioned any of this. Article has some good conclusions that statistics needs to relax its death grip on "objectivity" for ethics reasons, which my statistics classes have done, but it'd have been nice to have the ethics object lesson actually in class.)

sanguinity

When he thought along those lines he was overwhelmed by waves of despair and of self-contempt, and there was no one to comfort him. The day of his birthday, when he looked at himself at the vast age of eighteen, was the worst of all. Eighteen and a discredited prisoner in the hands of a French privateersman! His self-respect was at its lowest ebb.

—C.S. Forester, Mr Midshipman Hornblower

Happy 250th Birthday, Mr Hornblower! We know you won't enjoy it.

(Icon, of course, is the birthday boy in his birthday suit—his favorite way to celebrate every and any occasion.)

sanguinity

Nghi Vo, Mammoths at the Gates (2023)

Book four in the Singing Hills Cycle, an Asian-inspired fantasy series about an abbey of archivist clerics, who have dedicated themselves to collecting and preserving histories/stories. (They apparently do archaeology, too, according to a throwaway comment in this volume!)

This particular volume is a meditation on death and memory: how to best honor the fullness of a life, and too the fullness of the grief of the mourners. A quiet and meditative story, despite the threat of open violence over who has best claim to a recently deceased cleric's body: the abbey, or the granddaughters from the cleric's prior life. The granddaughters never knew him in life, but did know and do honor their grandmother's grief for the husband who left her. This installment also adds quite a bit to the lore of the neixin, the talking hoopoes/memory-spirits who serve as companions and advisors to the clerics.

I forgot how much I enjoyed this series, and am looking forward to catching up on the latest few installments.

Sarah Levine, Treasure Island!!! (2012)

Goddamn, but that was a wild ride. All three of those exclamation points are justified. Great swathes of this I read in sheer incredulity, then immediately turned around to read them aloud to

grrlpup, sometimes entire chapters at a time. (She giggled through each, and demanded regular updates between.)

I have no idea what to say about the plot, beyond: a twenty-something washed-up English major reads Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and promptly loses her mind. She decides to model her life on Jim Hawkins (whom she feels emulates the Core Values of BOLDNESS, RESOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, and HORN-BLOWING), but honestly, she's closer to that dagnab fool Squire Trelawney. Squire Trelawney, if he was viciously self-centered and felt himself compelled to bring everything around him to ruin in the name of boldness, etc.

Needless to say, this will be a more rewarding experience if you're familiar with Treasure Island, if only so you can fully appreciate her misreading of it.

Content warning for animal death.

Michael Nicoll Yahgulangaas, Carpe Fin: A Haida Manga (2019)

Prequel to Red, giving the backstory of "how the Carpenter was found alive on a rock in the middle of the ocean."

Twisty half-world story wherein Carpe, on returning to his home village in the present-day, finds all the local extractive businesses failing, the seashore poisoned by an oil spill, and his people hungry. He and his friends go hunting for sea lion on a mid-ocean rock where they are wintering, and through a twist of chance and weather, Carpe is left behind. What follows is a half-world story where Carpe is taken down to the bottom of the sea, is returned to his village as a spirit, and eventually comes to settle on the original sea-lion rock, unrooted from time.

I loved the art and humor and twistiness of this, with the shifting between the concrete present-day and the undersea world of the Lord of the Rock. As with Red, if you buy two copies of the book, unbind them, and reassemble the pages, they combine to make one giant black-line mural. Unlike in Red, this edition doesn't include an illustration of the all-in-one whole.

Michael Nicoll Yahgulangaas, Red: A Haida Manga (2009)

And because I'd just read the prequel, I came back to re-read the original...

Ancient-times story of an orphaned boy whose sister is stolen and enslaved by another people. As an adult, he goes on a quest for revenge, which has tragic outcomes across the board: as his people militarize, they becomes less trusted and more targeted by their neighbors; meanwhile, his quest to rescue his sister becomes the murder of her beloved husband, thereby orphaning his nephew. In his remorse, Red commits suicide, leaving the village elders to clean up the mess.

This one doesn't appeal as strongly to me as the prequel, but the inside jacket does unfold into the assembled mural.

Nora Nickum (illus. Elly McKay). Twelve Daring Grays: A While Migration Adventure (2026)

Children's picture book about a group of twelve gray whales that sometimes make a detour into the Puget Sound on their annual journey from Baja California to the Arctic. With an eye to the tides, these twelve specific whales come into shallow water at high tide and filter mouthfuls of mud for ghost shrimp. At low tide, when the feeding area becomes exposed mudflat, you can see the gouges in the mud left behind. Obviously they risk stranding in doing this! But there isn't always enough food in the open ocean on the migration from Mexico to the Arctic, and so this can be a life-saving strategy. (But obviously not one widely adopted! Some twenty-thousand whales don't make this detour into the Puget Sound.)

For more info about these whales, see Cascadia Research's page about the Puget Sound gray whales.

trobadora

Last seen at

graycardinal's: post the first lines of your last ten fics.

In reverse order, most recent first:

Outside the Snake Tribe leader's house, Ya Qing sits at a table with three hypocrites.

(Unwritten, Guardian, Ya Qing/Zhu Hong)

They were waiting for him at the spaceport.

(Zhentari's Choice, Original Sci-Fi, King/Knight)

The Black-Cloaked Envoy slammed down into the nondescript little flat like a thunderbolt from the heavens, not a moment too soon.

(Close the Distance, Lock Us In, Guardian, Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan)

Not for the first time, Zhao Yunlan woke to the smell of citrus, sweet and strong in the air.

(in the darkness with you, Guardian, Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan)

Da Qing glared at the Guardian Lantern.

(Dragon of Flowers, Dragon of the City, Crossover: Guardian/Thermos "Flower Series" Commercials, team gen)

Between all the worlds, there lay an ocean.

(Heart-Seed, Heart-Flower, Thermos "Flower Series" Commercials, Thermos Dragon/White Cat)

Nick wasn't the only one; they all kept looking at the door for long moments after Bélem Hoyos had left with her husband's body.

(Farewell to the Monsters, Grimm, Nick/Renard/Juliette)

Turmoil. Disruption. Zhao Yunlan.

(To Make a Dream, Guardian, Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan)

The banging on the gate was loud - far louder than it should be, echoing through the Valley.

(forgetting any other tie but this, Word of Honor, Luo Fumeng/Liu Qianqiao)

Ya Qing, half-transformed, had feathers down the side and back of her neck.

(scale to feather, skin to skin, Guardian, Ya Qing/Zhu Hong)

Ha, I was determined not to cheat, to strictly quote only the first sentence (well, except for the one that's just a single word), but some of these really are much stronger if you take the following bit into account! Especially these two:

Not for the first time, Zhao Yunlan woke to the smell of citrus, sweet and strong in the air. Ack, did I fall asleep on my orange peel again?

Da Qing glared at the Guardian Lantern. Bad Hallow! How dare it be missing its wick?

sanguinity

Over on tumblr, oldshrewsburyian tagged me to post the first lines of my last ten fics. Cross-posting here, because why not? Anyone who would like to play, please do!

(This is also an experiment in posting in markdown. Tumblr accepts markdown, so a lot of things I post over there, I compose in markdown in a text editor first. Which makes this an attempt to cross-post to DW without further markup-related editing.)

"So, Cousin," Richard drawled as he and Darcy shared a nightcap in the privacy of Darcy's room. —"An Evening at Rosings", Pride & Prejudice, Darcy/Fitzwilliam, Darcy/Lizzie
Dear Miss Bennet, Should you desire speech with me, I am at your instant disposal. —"Another Opinion to Set Beside One's Own", Pride & Prejudice, Darcy/Fitzwilliam, Darcy/Lizzie
"If it isn't passé to ask," Ekaterin said, "what do your earrings mean?" —"A Herm Without Earrings is Like a Cake Without Sugar", Vorkosigan Saga, Bel/Miles/Ekaterin/Nicol
"Do you see?" Hornblower asked. —"Gambler's Fallacy", Hornblower (books and TV), Bush & Hornblower
Joan lost the first several days of her hard-won privacy to a haze of grief and nothingness. —"Perseverance", Elementary x Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century
I roused in the half-dark to fingers exploring my stubble. —"Five Times They Didn't Share a Bed and One Time They Did", Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson (Whitehead & Pickering), Holmes/Watson
"Re our game where speech must be kept down to words of one sound…" Car said, erst the day's flight. —"'Sex' is a Word of One Sound", Cabin Pressure, Carolyn/Douglas
If those were not happy days, there was yet a sweetness to them, and a fullness that would have baffled the turnkeys of Château d'If. —"Better Than Tons of Gold and Cases of Diamonds", The Count of Monte Cristo, Edmond/Faria
I had not slept all that harrowing night, excepting that hour on horseback in the strong embrace of my young officer. —"A Kind of Kinship", Dracula's Guest, The Guest/The Young Officer
Captain Keith Windham, formerly Major, looked down on the mist-filled glen with distaste. —"There My Heart Forever Lies", The Flight of the Heron (Brigadoon AU), Keith/Ewen, Ewen/Alison

sanguinity

We've been watching Person of Interest over the last year or so, a season at a time. There are some things we find eye-rolly (Reese's dead girlfriend back story) and others we find boring (Root), but overall it's been solidly watchable. We've enjoyed Carter getting a larger part of the storyline, plus the addition of Shaw to the main cast. Also always happy to see Bear. "Lady Killer," when Zoe, Carter, and Shaw team up, was a great joy.

Last night we arrived at 3x09, "The Crossing". Under the cut for spoiler reasons, but nothing that wasn't said very loudly in the fandom at the time.

( The Crossing )

Like I said, nothing that wasn't said in fandom at the time. (I didn't go here then, but I dimly remember hearing the furor when it happened.) But they'd set themselves up for a really powerful episode, and then went with the cheapest possible choice, twice. Very disappointing.

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I thought the sun was going down, but the sun was coming up

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Hum 110 Adjacent Children's Books

Hum 110 Alumni Bookgroup: Mexico City, Part Two

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Many Happy Returns, Mr Hornblower!

Recent Reading: Rabbit, rabbit!

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First Lines Meme

Person of Interest: The Crossing

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