Recent reading
Aug. 2nd, 2025 02:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
troisoiseauxRead Books & Islands in Ojibwe Country: Traveling Through the Land of My Ancestors by Louise Erdrich, which I picked up on my recent trip to Minneapolis* because of course I had to stop by Birchbark Books, the bookstore Erdrich owns and thinly fictionalized as the setting for her 2021 novel The Sentence. This is a 2003 memoir about a road(/boat) trip Erdrich took with her then-just shy of two-year-old youngest daughter, to visit the "painted islands" - with Anishinaabe rock paintings - of the Lake of the Woods and Mallard Island, former home of conservationist/writer Ernest Oberholtzer turned educational retreat under the Oberholtzer Foundation, which maintains - among other things - his vast book collection. Slim, lovely book with a smattering of charcoal illustrations, and interesting to notice that more than a few of Erdrich's musings/memories recounted here later made it into The Sentence: the idea of a dictionary being the book you'd want to bring to a desert island, a beloved elm tree in front of her house lost to a storm, etc.
Read And Then There Were (N-One) by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny Magazine, 2017), which is more what I had expected from Ángel Bonomini's The Novices of Lerna (also premised on a gathering of dopplegangers) than that novella had turned out to be. The Book of Love by Kelly Link has gone in some deeply creepy directions and continues to be very, very good. I've also started listening to Babel by R.F. Kuang as an audiobook, which I'm enjoying so far, although the sanctimonious footnotes are getting really annoying really fast— like, yeah, no, I can figure out for myself that imperialism is bad and many 19th century attitudes have aged badly, thanks!
* I was in town for a music festival and saw Hozier AND Motion City Soundtrack (with Patrick Stump of Fall Out Boy (!) filling in for frontman Justin Pierre, who couldn't perform for health reasons) AND Fall Out Boy AND Green Day (third time total, and just under the wire for twice in one year (July 29, 2024 and July 20, 2025)) in the space of three days and I had a great time!!!
Read And Then There Were (N-One) by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny Magazine, 2017), which is more what I had expected from Ángel Bonomini's The Novices of Lerna (also premised on a gathering of dopplegangers) than that novella had turned out to be. The Book of Love by Kelly Link has gone in some deeply creepy directions and continues to be very, very good. I've also started listening to Babel by R.F. Kuang as an audiobook, which I'm enjoying so far, although the sanctimonious footnotes are getting really annoying really fast— like, yeah, no, I can figure out for myself that imperialism is bad and many 19th century attitudes have aged badly, thanks!
* I was in town for a music festival and saw Hozier AND Motion City Soundtrack (with Patrick Stump of Fall Out Boy (!) filling in for frontman Justin Pierre, who couldn't perform for health reasons) AND Fall Out Boy AND Green Day (third time total, and just under the wire for twice in one year (July 29, 2024 and July 20, 2025)) in the space of three days and I had a great time!!!
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Date: 2025-08-02 11:00 pm (UTC)That is a lot of music and sounds great.
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Date: 2025-08-03 02:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-03 03:00 am (UTC)I don't think I know either of them! I look forward to your findings.
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Date: 2025-08-02 11:54 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2025-08-04 12:39 pm (UTC)I'm also introducing her to music. So far Bare Naked Ladies has been a solid EW, Nirvana and Soundgarden and Stone Temple Pilots pretty solid wins.
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Date: 2025-08-04 01:11 pm (UTC)ETA: and as a treat, there's video of Patrick Stump singing for/with MCS at the aforementioned music festival!
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Date: 2025-08-13 10:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-05 12:54 am (UTC)I also enjoyed Books and Islands and finding the connections between it and The Sentence. What good books. I should reread them both!
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Date: 2025-08-05 01:11 am (UTC)