“Deep Wizardry” by Diane Duane

This is the second book in the Young Wizards series by Diane Duane. For my current readthrough, I wrote about the first book earlier. This book is one that I have always liked (on a certain level) because it functions really well as a sequel. It also always makes me so nervous and just feel raw afterwards because it is truly emotionally devastating.

In Deep Wizardry Nita and Kit are two teenage wizards that are on vacation at the beach together. All is calm and well until they run into a dolphin who introduces them to a whale wizard, S’ree. S’ree is a young whale and not ready for the responsibility of running a huge piece of wizardry, the Song of the Twelve. Nita and Kit agree to help out, with Nita even volunteering to take part as the Silent Lord. Turns out that the Silent Lord is a sacrifice, where the whale playing that part commits suicide in order to transform death into a gift. Nita wrestles with both this and how to tell her parents that she is a wizard since the secret is tearing her at the seams a little. By the end though, another sacrifice takes her place, her parents get used to her wizardry, and they are all able to return home emotionally wrung out if physically safe.

One plot point that I want to address specifically: I do remember having a disagreement with a friend over whether or not the shark that died in replace of Nita actually died or not. Because at the end of the book, Nita and Kit see him swimming through the water. Rereading it now, I think that’s the Heart of the Sea, or Timeheart as the human wizards call it, where everything that’s loved goes after death. There’s like a light, and Nita and Kit swim into it, and there they see the shark. Which is cool in that it does give them hope for future adventures, but it also has the same format as the first book. There’s the adventure, and they get a brief glimpse into the future, the adventure plays out, and they see the friends that they lost beyond the veil. Given that this is only the second book, it isn’t overly formulaic yet.

This book is so well-written that it is emotionally devastating watching Nita deal with the possibility of her death. You feel as though you are there with her and thinking about your own life, your own death, and what it would mean to give yours up. I read it so many times as I was growing up, so I know that it ends alright, but I was still on the verge of tears reading about her being angry, yet deciding to keep her word. I can’t remember what my experience was like the first time I read it, but I think that if I was to read something like this now the anxiety would likely destroy me, I don’t think I’d handle it well.

Emotional scars aside, this is an excellent follow up to the original So You Want to be a Wizard. There are many comments about how the events of the first book led to this adventure, including a blank check wizardry being the inciting factor for Nita’s required sacrifice. The result is that the book feel intimately connected, but you do not have to be familiar with the details if you did not pick up the first book. It also expands the world of wizardry from humans to other animals. In this case, whales. This is a really nice touch and makes it less human-centric. Which makes so much sense, if this is an ability that spans the universe, there have to be other species that are wizards as well.

Since this is the newer edition, I have to at least touch on the changes that I noticed. Most of this book was exactly the same, as far as I could tell, but there were a few differences. There was one exchange between Nita and her sister about Kit where Nita admits to liking him. Which I don’t think was in the original, although it is very possible that I didn’t pick up on it. There were also less phonetics used to convey the whale speech patterns. Nita’s name still gets changed to hNii’t, but I remembered in the original Kit was K!t. That didn’t happen here, although it might be a typographical error rather than an intentional one. Similar to the first book, seems like the changes emphasize Nita and Kit as potential romantic partners more so than anything else.

Going through this series again has been so much fun, I’m really looking forward to the next installments. Because it only gets better and more interesting from here!

This Is Beautiful: Dodging COVID

 It's been a bit of a rough week or so, last week my partner was feeling sick, but we both tested and didn't have COVID. Two days later, he wakes up in the middle of the night and tests positive. So he starts isolating, and I'm testing negative but still nervous about it all. It wasn't a great week to get sick, I had multiple band performances and also wanted to celebrate my birthday without being sick.

But as the title says, somehow I dodged it again! Tested negative throughout and it only took my partner a few days to test negative again. The latest variant sure is a doozy, and I really wish that we had actual protections still against it. Because while I got lucky here, there are a whole bunch of other people out there that weren't so lucky.

“So You Want to be a Wizard” by Diane Duane

You might remember that I wrote about this book not toolong ago on this blog. I ended up coming back to it because A. I finished Rick Riordan’s books and wanted to reread these next and B. I noticed that Duane put all of the Young Wizards ebooks on sale in her online store. Of course I bought them, and here we are.

It’s put me in an interesting position, because I went back and reread that post and I still do agree with it. Those are the points that I would highlight and that’s my basic thoughts on the book.

However, one thing is new though. This is the New Millennium edition of the books that Duane went and updated in the late 2010s. And that process right there is fascinating to me! You have all of these authors who write something and then just leave it, and there are defenders of the works saying that we need to excuse their mistakes because of the time they were written in. Or whatever. Not Duane though, she goes back and fixes her mistakes.

In this first book, there are a few notable things that got changed. In the original series, Kit is a year younger than Nita. In the new edition, they’re the same age. I’m not sure why that was altered, I have to imagine there’s a reason, so I think it’s of note. Possibly this has to do with the overall vibe I am getting of their relationship being more romantic. Or it’s because I am now reading this knowing that they eventually become a couple and my aroace ass picked up on none of this when I was a kid. Who can say.

Other change is actually mentioned in my previous post as well. In the original edition, the Twin Towers are mentioned (putting it pre-9/11). In this version, Nita and Kit see the Freedom Tower being built. Which is interesting because it also dates the work, again approximately the late 2010s. I find that so interesting, it’s the same site and it’s over 30 years difference between the editions. But it can still be used for the same purpose!

I’m excited to go through and read all of her works in one big swoop. These books are honestly written so well that I really enjoy and want to read all of the time again. I haven’t felt like that in years!

This Is Beautiful: Rabbit

 I originally found this YouTube series through an episode of The Ace Couple podcast. (You can find the episode at this link if you'd rather hear their discussion of it.) It is so good!

I first heard of the creator, Kyle Prue, through TikTok. My partner has an account and loves showing me videos and we both get a kick out of his series on "things you can say to piss off men." So when we saw this and that he made a short series on YouTube, we both knew that we had to watch it.

You can find the series over here on his YouTube channel. It takes less than an hour to go through all the way, but the characters are so lively and loveable that it really draws you in. And it's funny! Not to mention that the main character openly says that he's "asexual" (and uses that exact word) while also describing that he just "doesn't really think about it" when it comes to relationships. (Although it's also revealed that he had a girlfriend at one point.) 

It's a year old, but I'm hoping that there'll be more of this eventually as it ends with a screen saying "Rabbit will return." Until then, guess I can only hope!

“So You Want to be a Wizard” by Diane Duane

You might remember that I wrote about this book not toolong ago on this blog. I ended up coming back to it because A. I finished Rick Riordan’s books and wanted to reread these next and B. I noticed that Duane put all of the Young Wizards ebooks on sale in her online store. Of course I bought them, and here we are.

It’s put me in an interesting position, because I went back and reread that post and I still do agree with it. Those are the points that I would highlight and that’s my basic thoughts on the book.

However, one thing is new though. This is the New Millenium edition of the books that Duane went and updated in the late 2010s. And that process right there is fascinating to me! You have all of these authors who write something and then just leave it, and there are defenders of the works saying that we need to excuse their mistakes because of the time they were written in. Or whatever. Not Duane though, she goes back and fixes her mistakes.

In this first book, there are a few notable things that got changed. In the original series, Kit is a year younger than Nita. In the new edition, they’re the same age. I’m not sure why that was altered, I have to imagine there’s a reason, so I think it’s of note. Possibly this has to do with the overall vibe I am getting of their relationship being more romantic. Or it’s because I am now reading this knowing that they eventually become a couple and my aroace ass picked up on none of this when I was a kid. Who can say.

Other change is actually mentioned in my previous post as well. In the original edition, the Twin Towers are mentioned (putting it pre-9/11). In this version, Nita and Kit see the Freedom Tower being built. Which is interesting because it also dates the work, again approximately the late 2010s. I find that so interesting, it’s the same site and it’s over 30 years difference between the editions. But it can still be used for the same purpose!

I’m excited to go through and read all of her works in one big swoop. These books are honestly written so well that I really enjoy and want to read all of the time again. I haven’t felt like that in years!

This Is Beautiful: End of the Semester

 We are so close to the end and the holidays, but there's a really important time point being hit today. And that's the end of classes! Which is big for me as that means that I don't have to go to lecture anymore, teach recitation sessions, or grade homeworks. It is time to wind down and relax and sleep past 7 am finally.

“The Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You Love” by Andy Merrifield

This is another book that I’ve been meaning to pick up for a while, I swear I have had it on my list of things to read for literally years. It is a subject that is personally pretty important to me, I’m an amateur in a few different fields that I dabble in (music, dance, acting, etc).

The content of this book was not what I expected, it focuses primarily on amateurs in the realms of politics and policy. It does not actually touch on the arts at all. Which I found disappointing, but I will try to meet this book where it is at. Because it is still interesting, the book essentially talks about our ideas of the professional and the amateur. The amateur is a student of the world who does not want recognition or accolades but does it for the work that they do. And the author uses several different books that represent these ideas through their characters as well as pieces written about this.

My first issue I already mentioned, I think excluding the arts here in favor of exclusively discussing public policy seems limited. Sciences aren’t mentioned either, which I think would be really interesting with the rise of anti-vaxxers and flat-Earthers. Or if there was a way to make it clearer in the title that it is only talking about this one area of expertise.

Another thing is that it does discuss the experience of being an amateur a lot. There are mentions to how hard it can be to be looking up this information on your own and maintaining that knowledge base in your free time while having a job. But there is not much beyond that, nothing about if people like that work and if they actually do find it that rewarding on its own or want recognition. As an amateur myself I wanted to feel like this captured my experience, and in a sense it did in that I agree with what it writes about how amateurs are seen, but I didn’t see ME.

Having said all that, I really like books that take the approach of looking at a specific idea and how it is shown in literature and can change over time. I think those are really interesting in that you can get a sense of how an idea can change and grow over time. So the overall structure of the book I found really intriguing and fascinating.

So given the scope of the book, I would recommend this with a grain of salt. If you know what it is discussing going in then go for it! But I do wish that I personally knew a little more before I picked it up.

This Is Beautiful: Thanksgiving Food

 I know it's become like cool and trendy to dunk on Thanksgiving food, but I am honestly really into it. I think it's because I never get this food the rest of the year, and we always know what we're getting for Thanksgiving, so it really hypes it up. It is really just a ton of comfort food that you can eat so much of and then look forward to leftovers! This was also the first year in a while that I was with my grandparents and finally got Grandma's cooking again! There's really nothing like it.

“The Ship of the Dead” by Rick Riordan

This is the final book in Riordan’s series focusing on the gods of Asgard from Norse mythology. I wrote about the first two earlier (links to first book and second book). It is only a three book series, so relatively short.

The book starts with Magnus Chase learning how to jump off of the mast of a ship into the water from Percy Jackson (hey it’s a crossover!). From there Magnus has to get his friends together and sail off on a bright yellow boat to stop Loki and his ship of nails (as in like, fingernails). On the way they get almost eaten by a giant, end up in England fighting another giant, and steal some mead. The mead is to make Magnus more eloquent so that he can challenge and beat Loki in a flyting (like a battle of insults). Once they get to the land of ice, they find Loki, and Magnus wins the flyting by talking up his friends instead of talking down Loki. With him defeated, they rejoin the gods who reinstate Loki’s punishment since nothing can change. Meanwhile, Magnus and Alex face their feelings for each other and set up Magnus’ uncle’s old place as a homeless youth shelter. (It also alludes to Annabeth and Percy getting some bad news, I think Jason’s death?)

Anyways this book is fairly straightforward. They figure out early on what the plan is and go forward with it. I did like that there’s more adventures with Magnus’ hallmates who haven’t had a huge role to play so far. We get to hear about TJ’s backstory, and find out who Mallory’s mother is. It adds more depth to these characters who so far have been enjoyable but not super well defined.

It did strike me as I was reading that the romance is dealt with much more subtly than the Percy Jackson series. Magnus never addresses his feelings for Alex until practically the very end, but he’s thinking about him all the time and is always happy to see her. Which makes it clear what’s going on, but it doesn’t beat you over the head with it. Speaking of, there’s also a part at the end where Magnus is kissing Alex as a boy and bypasses the whole “I’m kissing a boy” to focus on “I’m kissing Alex” which I thought was a really nice way to handle it. Focuses less on labels and more on the individuals.

I was also intrigued by the way the story deals with fate. The whole idea is that your fate doesn’t change, but we can alter the details. We are all destined to die at Ragnarök, but we can take charge of what we can. What makes this interesting is the gods refusing to do anything else. They have to chain Loki back up in essentially the same manner. What fascinates me about this is that it’s a clear choice on their part. They know what is supposed to happen and what will happen and are ensuring that it stays that way. Versus the mortals don’t know their fate exactly, they are flying blind and trying to do what they can. It’s an interesting contrast between the two, but it makes me think that the gods could do other things if they wanted. The reason Loki gets mad is because of his punishment after all. But maybe this is a universe that abides by the rule that changing your fate only makes it approach faster. Hard to tell, since the mortals still don’t know.

This is the end of my readthrough of Riordan’s works, for now. He’s started a new series focusing on Percy Jackson characters, and I’ll likely pick that up eventually when it’s more accessible for me. On to the next book! I think I’ll keep the rereading going on and instead swap to the Young Wizards series. We’ll see!

This Is Beautiful: Sleeping

 Last week was rough, one of the online groups that I'm a part of totally blew up and people were fighting all over the place. I was trying to stay up and monitor things, and I was so stressed over the whole thing. On Sunday though, we closed the place to make some changes. It's just so nice to take a bit of a break and get some sleep, I honestly haven't had any in a bit.

“The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On” by Franny Choi

This is another book that I picked up from the Dark NoiseCollective slam poetry event. (I wrote about a different book from thatevent earlier.) Back for more poetry!

Again, to speak briefly about the event, I absolutely adored seeing Franny Choi read her poems. Since this was a group event, she selected poems that mentioned the other members of the Dark Noise Collective. Which was really sweet and cute. There was one poem where she mentions going to the funeral of a friend’s grandmother that made my partner cry (surprise, it’s even in this book).

This was a really incredible and insightful work. The poems relate to the end of the world, but the little ends of the worlds that surround you every day. Especially how the world ends all the time for women and racial/ethnic minorities and queer people. And we somehow find a way to go on. The poems span a huge time frame from comfort women used by armies during World War II up until the present day and even into the future. A lot of them are incredibly personal and are about a partner Choi lost a while ago.

The sum total is that the work is personal while expansive and encompasses many different identities and experiences. I think if I go back and read this years from now I’ll pick up on different aspects, and resonate with different poems. A really incredible work.

This Is Beautiful: DEI Session

 This past week I had colleagues and friends lead a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) session for my lab group. We were supposed to have it at the end of the summer, but it got postponed due to scheduling conflicts. We finally had it last Friday and it was awesome! I particularly enjoyed not being the presenter for once and could just enjoy the event. 

I wish we had more events like this in science! It's just so much better when people are aware of these issues and making a more welcoming environment.

“Homie” by Danez Smith

I got this book recently at a slam poetry event. The group Dark Noise Collective was invited to share their work. It was absolutely incredible and so much fun! I ended up buying two books afterwards, both this one and a different one that I’ll post about next week.

Homie is by Danez Smith. I can’t really separate the book from the performance, so I’ll just add that Smith is a Black queer man and super owns it. I can’t remember seeing that much confidence and just love for their fellow artists on stage before. They just exuded positivity and warmth and made you want to hang out with them.

Reading this book was really more of the same. So much of it is unapologetically Black and queer, and just filled with love for other humans. Even the poem about getting beat up is somehow about love! Smith also has a really beautiful way of writing, where they’ll never directly address what the poem is about but you feel it before you put two and two together.

This was a really lovely read, I’ve been trying to get back into reading poetry and I super enjoyed the energy coming from this one. Pick it up if you get the chance!

This Is Beautiful: Cities with Public Transit

 I'm SURE I've talked about this before but my week in DC still has me reeling. Cities with good public transit are amazing. It was incredible, we were able to get from the airport to the hotel and from the hotel to everywhere else. What a concept, I need to get away from all of these cars, they're destroying me slowly.

“Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers” by Mary Roach

I had this book on my list for a while, literally years, and I finally managed to get my hands on a copy. It’s a little older now, from the early 2000s, but since there’s so little writing on death and how we deal with it I think it holds up pretty well. The idea is that Roach follows up on what happens with dead bodies. This starts with anatomy medical school programs and goes to research on how bodies decompose or how morticians dress bodies or cremation or becoming compost.

Very clearly Roach has done her research. She frequently talks directly with the people doing this work and follows up for their thoughts on different topics. In one chapter she travels to China to follow up on an article alluding to a crematorium that apparently sliced off buttocks to make into food. (The article turned out to be bogus, but that’s one hell of a trip.) There’s so much work that went into this, it’s kind of incredible.

Roach also has a great sense of humor. She is frequently making jokes or sharing the silly questions that she’s asked people about bodies. In a way it is needed for this book, since it’s about death she has to find some way to lighten it up. It creates a very distinctive voice though that makes the whole experience very unique.

At the end of the book, Roach turns it back on herself and what she’ll do with her body after she dies. And she recognizes that it’s the living that have to carry out your wishes, and really they should only have to do what they are comfortable with. Of course, her husband doesn’t like to think about it, and as it turns out she has decided to only dedicate her body if he goes first. Which is a really just kind note to end on. It acknowledges how it impacts the people around you and who are affected by your choices.

This was a fascinating read, I would highly recommend it to anyone. It might seem depressing, but I thought it was uplifting by the end to see all of the ways we can give back after death. Try reading some of it if you are on the fence!

This Is Beautiful: Taking a Break

 Finally having a quick vacation while traveling for a conference! I didn't sleep much last week so this is very much needed. Anyways, not spending more time than necessary on this. Suffice to say that I'm trying to milk this break for all it's worth.

“Rat Queens, Vol. 1: Sass and Sorcery” by Kurtis Wiebe

This is a graphic novel that was recommended to me literally years ago by a friend, and I finally found it at the local public library. It’s pretty short, I was able to finish it in a day or so.

The Rat Queens are a gang of warrior ladies in a medieval town who love booze, drugs, candy, and killing people. It’s a pretty diverse group, one is a mage that uses goddess magic, another is a sword fighter, another is a healer, and the final member is a hobbit-like creature who steals things. The main plot is that someone is trying to kill them and they mostly fight stuff off and try to survive. They figure out by the end that it’s Bernadette, a woman in the town who hates them.

My main critique is that I didn’t have a great handle on the plot. I couldn’t keep track of names at all and there were so many fights and injuries that I didn’t know how got injured or if there were any consequences to that. I bet if I kept reading it would get more interesting, with more clues and intrigue. As a first installment though… It’s not doing much for me. Most of it is either fights or parties. That’s really it.

Anyways, I likely won’t check out volume 2, but if I happen upon it, I would give it a chance. I think graphic novels take a bit more time to suck me into the story, but I do tend to like them once I get going.

This Is Beautiful: Trip Coming Up

 This semester has been really hard, to be honest if you can't tell I've been really reaching with these "This Is Beautiful" posts. I can tell the burnout is coming up fast. But it's ok, I just need to get through the rest of this week and I'll be off to DC for a conference and also to see some friends! I'm very excited, I haven't seen these people since I moved out of DC to go to grad school back in 2019. And of course that city is absolutely amazing. I'm definitely looking forward to it!

“The Hammer of Thor” by Rick Riordan

This is the second book in the “Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard” series. I wrote about the first one a little while ago and was really eager to dive into this one.

The story picks up a little after it left off, by cleaning up the loose thread that was Thor losing his hammer. Again. The squad of Magnus the undead warrior, Sam the Valkyrie, Blitz the dwarf, and Hearth the elf all get together again. They’ve had time to train since the first book and it shows with Riordan telling us more about the runes. But their information was bad and they ended up finding a legendary sword. Loki shows up (conveniently) and demonstrates his power over his children by knocking Sam out, then drawing the sword and stabbing Blitz.

The only thing that can heal Blitz is the stone that goes with the sword. Conveniently, Hearth’s dad has it. Inconveniently, he’s a huge asshole. Hearth and Magnus head there to get the stone while Sam recovers. Meanwhile Loki has been making a mess of Sam’s private life, by telling her family that she’s going to marry a giant for him. Her fiancée takes this hard, understandably, and Sam ends up telling him all about her life as a Valkyrie. Magnus returns from getting the stone just in time to coax him into believing Sam.

They end up going to the wedding, with Sam’s half-sibling Alex (a gender-fluid character!) posing as her. Thor and some gods in theory have their back, but when it comes to the fighting they are too late. Magnus’ uncle takes the sword and severs Loki’s bonds, the god and man both escape. Sam learns that to recapture him they have to sail to Scandinavia. The book ends with Magnus getting advice from his cousin Annabeth, and she decides to introduce him to Percy.

Alright so there’s just so much going on in this book. I’ll admit that I was lost when following the plot for most of the time, there’s just a lot of giants and subterfuge and trickery when it comes to Loki. If I reread it I’ll probably pick up on more then that I missed this time!

Highlight of the book is definitely Alex. Alex is gender-fluid, sometimes uses he/him pronouns and sometimes uses she/her. There’s a conversation about this with Magnus where Alex says that he doesn’t want to use they/them pronouns because when they feel a gender, they FEEL a gender. They/them just doesn’t cut it. It’s really nice because it’s both a vehicle to explain gender fluidity to the audience, and it plays a role in the plot. Famously Loki is pretty genderqueer, he becomes pregnant and gives birth sometimes, and as a child of Loki Alex embraces change and uses that to recapture her independence from her father. I’m really excited to see where this character goes next.

Also there’s the ending. Annabeth has been in the series from the beginning, but she hasn’t played a very big role. Mostly she’s there in the background, more explicit than the other Riordan series, but still not doing much. Bringing in Percy would be a big step, especially if he’s advising on the upcoming adventure. Maybe this will bring some clarity into how all of these different gods can coexist? I’m not sure. There’s also more clarity for where in the Percy Jackson storyline we are. Earlier you couldn’t tell, but now Annabeth is telling Magnus about a god that came to earth (Apollo) and some Roman gods mucking things up. It’s pretty clearly The Trials of Apollo.

When Riordan first started doing crossover things and I was still in high school, I thought it was really cool. Now though with the MCU and all that it feels pretty… played out. I don’t really particularly want a huge crossover series with all of the gods and everything. But I trust Riordan a lot in how he’s grown as a writer. Quite possibly he’ll find a really interesting twist on it all. We will just have to wait and see.

This Is Beautiful: Fall Break

 I am writing this pre-fall break, but to be honest I do really need a few days to just have less going on. I do think to a certain extent I am putting too much reliance on a few days without classes, since I still have everything else going on, but I'm hoping I'll put some good boundaries up and manage alright. We shall see.

“Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma” by Claire Derderer

I first read a review of this book several months ago when it was first published. The whole premise made me excited to get my hands on it, but it was in such high demand that I didn’t manage to read it until recently. In a nutshell, this is a book about monstrous men and what to do with them. Or what to do with the art that they create.

Derderer is a memoirist and honestly it makes a lot of sense for this work. It is deeply personal, she continually asks what “we” should do or feel about these men, but then immediately corrects herself with “sorry I mean I.” As in, what should I do about it? The book opens with her relationship to Polanski’s work and movies, while still being disgusted by what he has done. In her journey to figure out what to do, she decides to write a kind of biography of the audience. How has the audience thought and reacted to these people?

Each chapter talks about a different monster, from Michael Jackson to Woody Allen. One of the most interesting parts is where she talks about monstrous women. As it turns out, women get labelled monstrous for simply abandoning their children. Men do all this and get away with it scot-free (men are monsters for murder or rape or what have you). Throughout all of this, Derderer is talking about her reactions to their art and to finding out about what they have done, and how that creates conflict within her. She talks about how art is how one biography (the artist) meet another biography (the audience) and it is continually defined by this subjective experience.

The ending is deeply moving. I didn’t think that the book would come to any conclusion, but Derderer does manage to wrap it up incredibly well. She talks about her alcoholism, and her realization that she is also, a monster. She is flawed. If she can get a redemption arc through recovery, should we allow for others to redeem themselves as well? The book finally wraps up with her talking to a friend who had a monstrous stepfather. The problem is, he loved him anyways. And that’s the real issue here, we find this art that impacts us deeply, but the person who made it is flawed, and despite that we love it anyways. There is no solution, there is no way to be a correct consumer of art. You can know the biography and chuck it or not, because this is all subjective and in the end comes down to how you respond to loving these people anyways.

This was so well done, I have been talking about it to many friends as I try to parse through the book. Because these monstrous men are everywhere, you cannot be an art fan without hitting at least five of them. And we so rarely see monstrous women talked about either, mostly because women rarely become celebrated artists. It’s a very nuanced discussion that gives space for the reader to dissect their own experiences by anchoring itself in Derderer’s.

I also really appreciated the focus of the work being on the audience. Yes she discusses the lives of these artists but the bulk of it is about what has been written by people about the artists or how she feels about them. As she mentions, that is the issue with cancel culture (if there is a “cancel culture”) is that it puts the focus on these monsters instead of on the people impacted by them. And she mentions that this puts the burden on the consumer to fix the system by not consuming their art or tossing it or whatever, but that doesn’t work either. That won’t eventually fix things or make it go away it just puts the burden in the wrong area.

And in the end, the issue is within ourselves and how we can still love this art and these artists. And there’s nothing wrong with that (unless you’re going around virtue signaling and making others feel bad about it, but that’s my addition here). Derderer’s gone through this whole journey and it comes down to the same place that it was in the beginning: it’s subjective and totally within you. Which ends up not being disappointing because you’ve gone through all of this work and considered all of these different angles and now you can finally feel settled with this conclusion. Anyways, if you think about art I would highly recommend this book, it is so informative and well done, I think I will be digesting it for many years to come.

This Is Beautiful: Really Good Breakfast Sandwich

 Alright so this is kind of a silly post but stay with me. This coffee shop that we frequent recently added a breakfast sandwich and it has been sold out every time I've been there. I finally got one last weekend and it was so amazing and worth the wait! The focaccia bread was amazing, with a kinda spicy sausage, egg, some sort of aioli, and caramelized onion. I was in heaven! Hopefully I get another one soon.

I think food can definitely be a form of art, more broadly. Taste is such an overlooked sense, and food can definitely create a strong impression and impact on participants. It also can carry a message depending on the ingredients used and how it's presented.

“The Sword of Summer” by Rick Riordan

I am finally continuing my journey through Riordan’s works and have finally arrived at his books about Norse mythology! Honestly I’ve been looking forward to this one for ages, I can’t believe I didn’t get to it earlier.

The story is about Magnus Chase, a homeless teen in Boston. He’s running from his uncle and cousin (Annabeth) and ends up in the house of his other uncle, Randolph. Randolph takes him to a bridge to find a sword, which Magnus ends up pulling from the water. Then a god appears and they fight, Magnus goes over the bridge into the water and then finds himself in Valhalla. Meaning that he is now dead.

Story doesn’t end there, Magnus makes some friends and realizes that his old homeless buddies are a dwarf (Blitz) and an elf (Hearth). His Valkyrie (Sam) is also a daughter of Loki. Hearth and Blitz come to Valhalla for Magnus and they escape together. Sam eventually finds them and all together they go looking for the sword. They get it back from an ocean goddess, and then learn from another god (a severed head) that they have to rebind Fenris Wolf, because if the wolf comes loose that brings about Ragnarok, or Norse doomsday. In the end though, of course they are successful and rebind the wolf and return to Valhalla as heroes!

There’s a lot of things I skipped over, but that’s the gist of it. Now a really interesting choice on Riordan’s part is to include Annabeth Chase (from the Percy Jackson series) as a prominent character from the beginning. So we know from the start that these aren’t the only gods at play here. I’m not sure if he’s building to a more dramatic crossover in this series or in a future one, but that’s definitely going to eventually manifest.

Then there’s the treatment of objects. Magnus learns about this from the dwarves who introduce each other to the objects around them as though they’re individuals. And of course that carries over into other objects too. Most obvious is Jack, Magnus’ sword. Jack talks, has a personality, and flies around on his own. He hates Magnus’ dad for giving him away, but is loyal to Magnus. It’s an interesting choice because I’m not sure how prominent this was in Norse culture and mythology. Is this something Riordan took and is running with? Not sure.

By far my favorite aspect of the Norse myths though is the fact that they are circular. Ragnarok supposedly happens again and again, and everyone is fated to do the same things, commit the same betrayals, until the world starts over. But the challenge then becomes crafting interesting characters that make choices in the face of destiny. Riordan takes this head on, early into the story Loki says that the details are how they undermine fate. The overall picture stays the same but the little things can still change. So you are able to still see Magnus take control of his destiny and make choices. I’ll be excited to see how this changes as the story progresses.

The ending of the book was very upbeat, everyone gets rewarded and goes home happy. Which is an interesting choice for the first installment of a series, it wrapped everything up. But there is an epilogue making it clear that Loki is still up to no good. Onwards to the next one!

This Is Beautiful: Cider Mills

 Had last weekend off so went to a cider mill to get apple cider and donuts! It just doesn't feel like fall until you do that. Sure the bees swarm you afterwards, but that's all part of the charm. And now donuts for breakfast for a little while!

“Happy Yoga: 7 Reasons Why There’s Nothing to Worry About” by Steve Ross

This is another book that my old housemate left in the house and I thought looked interesting. I used to be a Buddhist/yogi so I have read a lot of other texts about that stuff (it’s what got me into philosophy) but have fallen off of that more recently even though I still practice yoga for exercise. The argument behind this book though is that doing yoga has to be accompanied by mental exercises as well. And this mental exercise has to do with what he calls recognizing that there’s “nothing to worry about.”

Ross has six reasons why there’s nothing to worry about. They are: you can’t get happy, you can only be happy; you can have true love; you’re not fat; you’re not your daily grind; you can change your world; you will never die; and you can be yogic, and to the yogi, everything is bliss. That’s the book in a nutshell, plus every chapter comes with meditation prompts and exercises, yoga poses, supplements, and songs to listen to that are related.

Now there’s a lot that I like about this book. It’s very accessible, Ross does a great job of making jokes throughout which diffuses the serious tone that often comes with talking about enlightenment and the nature of reality blah blah. And the meditation exercises plus yoga poses make it possible for anyone who reads the book to do yoga.

Probably the best aspect of it is that the book tackles head on a common critique of mindfulness. Which is that it is used for complacency in order to make people accept their situation instead of trying to change it. According to Ross being able to accept your surroundings isn’t that at all. He uses the example of someone cutting the line in front of you, acceptance isn’t letting them cut. It could be acceptance of saying to them “hey the line’s back there” and continuing on without getting emotionally involved. I like this stance a lot, you are able to work towards change and making the world better (which is what being a yogi is about) while still maintaining a state of acceptance and bliss.

Now the main issue that I have with the book all has to do with the chapter called “You’re Not Fat.” And keep in mind that the book was written in 2003, in recent years the fat community has been reclaiming the term “fat,” but I will let that one slide here since that would have happened after this book was written. A lot of the chapter is about accepting your body as it is, since you are not your body, and that’s all well and good. But then Ross gets into how besides a few rare genetic disorders people who are “fat” look like that because of the way they eat. Which really isn’t true and honestly is a bit of a gendered issue. Plenty of women gain weight because of diseases like PCOS or because of medications like birth control or antidepressants (that last one is probably regardless of sex). And while I think that nutrition does a lot of good to address issues at their sources, you simply cannot say that the majority of people should eat better because for a lot of people their weight is out of their control and not due to diet. Those “rare genetic disorders” are not so rare at all. Not to mention that this all unfairly puts the blame on the individual rather than the situation that they’re in.

Then Ross gets into his tips about diet. And they can really be boiled down to recommending that everyone eat an all raw vegetarian diet. I have so very many issues with this section. First of all, he rarely cites his sources here. And I know that this is a book written for popular consumption, but if you are going to make health recommendations universally, you better start citing something beyond your own experiences here. Especially if you are an able-bodied white guy. Which leads into my next point which is that there is no evidence that an all raw diet does anything incredibly beneficial for you. Turns out that cooking your food is not a bad thing! So do not believe the hype, this just happens to be a diet that works for some people who are extremely loud. And finally there is the section on meat. His main point is that humans do not have the biology to be carnivores, our digestive system is too long and meat rots by the time it gets digested which makes meat-eaters smell bad. This has to be the most ridiculous thing I have heard, humans have been eating meat for hundreds of years! We have literally evolved to be omnivores! Saying that our digestive system is too long and we should have one the length of a dog’s is really just pointing out that humans are bigger than dogs! Plus the thing about meat-eaters smelling bad, I have never heard this before. On a personal note with regards to this, he keeps talking about how people these days eat too much protein. I have an iron deficiency, I have tried to go vegetarian and it simply has not worked for me, I feel low on energy and irritable. I know a person who has autism and is able to function better with more protein so they pound the protein powder to help their brain out. The bottom line is that none of this advice actually applies to everyone, it is all based on one man’s preferences and experiences. Do me a favor and start citing your sources, I am begging you.

Diatribe about the eating recommendations aside, I think I would recommend this book with a huge grain of salt. The rest of it is decent, and even the points about the yogi logic behind food is pretty sound. But also the food chapter is probably the longest one, so unless you just cut out those pages, you’d probably be better off finding a more recent yogi text that does not have questionable diet advice.

This Is Beautiful: Playing in a Jazz Band

 I've had such a hard road with music lately. Specifically since I moved to Michigan. I really didn't like playing with student groups, it was a combination of not having peers in the groups and not loving the pressure to do well. And I've had a hard time finding a decent community concert band that I vibe with. But I'm so happy that I joined this community jazz band! We've had multiple gigs and the rehearsals are always fun and respectful while getting things done. I'm really so happy that I'm here.

“The Ballerinas” by Rachel Kapelke-Dale

This book is the one that I picked up in Marquette, at Snowbound books (which I mentioned in my post about Marquette here). I wasn’t sure about this book, I mean it’s about ballet so I’m going to at least give it a glance. But a lot of ballet books that deal with “female violence” like the back of the book use ambition as the driving force and get more caught up in the aesthetic of ballet rather than what ballet is actually like (I never watched it but I think there was a season of like “Pretty Little Liars” or something that centered around a murder at a ballet school, that sort of thing). And since I actually am a dancer, I really just want something that resonates with my experiences. So I was hesitant about this book, until I picked it up, flipped through it, and saw the epigraph from “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.” Then I knew this was a book I had to read.

The plot follows Delphine, a dancer at the Paris Opera Ballet from her adolescent years into adulthood. The way the chapters are structured, we get a snippet of Delphine as a teenager, and a portion of her life as an adult, having just returned to Paris. Delphine as a teenager is at ballet school with her best friend Margeaux, they then meet Lindsay who joins the program late and rounds out their trio. As an adult, Delphine is trying to get her new ballet off the ground as a budding choreographer, while reconnecting with her friends and her surrogate mother Stella. Delphine quickly realizes how much things have changed, Margeaux now no longer wants to be a dancer forever. Lindsay still does but after an accident years ago has a hard time partnering with anyone. Both are married, Delphine missed both of their weddings. Stella is about to have her hip replaced, but Delphine struggles to see Stella as a person and not her mother or another caretaker. Eventually though, a few secrets some to light. Delphine finds out that her crush from her teen years is sleeping around the cast and filming it secretly. She leaks it to the press and has to deal with the possibility of revenge porn. The accident that caused Lindsay’s injury was Delphine and Margeaux tripping her into the street before an audition since Lindsay wanted to sleep with one of the judges. And finally, it gets revealed how Delphine decided to return to Paris after finding out that her boyfriend, the one who encouraged her to choreograph, was a serial cheater and preventing her career from getting started. This culminates in Lindsay’s birthday where her husband is devastated that she had an abortion so that she could continue dancing, and he accidentally drops a bust on her foot. Delphine then gives him a shove, and sends him out of a window. She gets off with it being to protect her friend, and continues to choreograph. Lindsay accepts that she cannot dance anymore, and starts to teach English. And Margeaux also quits to try and start a family of her own.

Apologies for the huge paragraph of a summary, but I really didn’t know how to cut that in half or cut it down. There is so much going on in this story, but lets start with the structure of the chapters. Having the narrative partly be from their teen years and partly as adults is a really interesting idea. Of course eventually the teen narrative catches up to where the adult one began, completing the circle. It also reinforces this idea that Delphine has that when she returns to Paris, everything will be exactly the same as before. None of the in between things will have made a difference. And here the reader is with a snapshot of what those before times really were like.

So much of the book is about stories. But in a surprisingly subtle way. The most overt part of this has to do with Delphine as a choreographer, using bodies and music to tell stories. She starts with telling the story of the last Tsar of Russia, a story that she wants to be about how you can get everything that you want, and all that can destroy you. It’s very clearly about her experiences with this relationship that has just fallen apart and how she feels it is tearing her apart as well. This gets scrapped though, when the artistic director tells her to do some feminist-y piece. So instead of that, Delphine creates a solo dance to Janis Joplin that is all about the cycle of grief, particularly female grief. And she gets Lindsay to do it, she has the life experience from constantly yearning to be a principal. This new piece is much more intimate, and it has this cyclical nature to it. You will eventually recover from grief, and experience it again.

There’s another layer to the commentary on stories though. The entire time Delphine was away, she was telling herself stories about the people that she left behind. And instead of keeping up with them and what they were like, she trapped them into this story that she told herself. This almost destroys multiple relationships that she has: Stella and Margeaux. Margeaux has developed a drinking problem, she’s drunk all the time but Delphine doesn’t let herself see it. Stella also is her own person and does not exist to help Delphine, but Delphine needs that so badly that she keeps expecting so much from her. In the end though, Delphine is able to talk to them about it, apologize, and accept them for who they are and not who she wants them to be.

In contrast to this are all the male characters in the story. Ballet is an interesting example of these gender dynamics as it is mostly women, but almost all of the positions of responsibility are held by men. Men set the standards for how the women need to look and the women bend over backwards to meet that. One example of this is Delphine’s ex keeping her career small. He wants someone to be his unpaid assistant, not to have a mind of her own. Another is Delphine’s old crush who films himself having sex with women in the company. He wants them to just be objects, submissive and always willing. And finally there’s Lindsay’s husband. He refuses to believe that she won’t want to have children and give in to his goals in life, as opposed to letting her be in control of her life and her body. After Delphine pushes him out a window, she describes it as his suicide in that he brought that on himself by treating his wife like that, taking pleasure in her not achieving her goals so that he could have his. All of the men want to keep the women trapped into their ideas of how they should act instead of letting them be real people.

Of course, the book also has a lot to say about the dance world. Clearly the author was involved in ballet at some point, or I don’t think she could write this. There are a lot of details about how ballet works, when dancers go en pointe, how white-washed the ballet world is, things like that which I don’t think outsiders typically know. Really my only nitpick is that Delphine, Margeaux, and Lindsay all get into the company at the same time. The odds of that are astronomically small, but it has to work that way for the plot so whatever. But truly, so much of this resonated with my experiences. Delphine talks about leaving dance for choreography, and it almost mirrors my own. How I didn’t want to serve in someone else’s vision but instead create my own. And how much I miss being a more serious dancer. She also doesn’t shy away from the messy parts, how dancers are constantly dancing on injuries and hurting themselves without allowing enough time to heal. But also how strong and powerful they are. You can’t make it to a professional level any other way. There’s one part that mentions how ballet typically has a pink colored screen over it that softens all of the hard parts. This book doesn’t do it, it shows ballerinas as powerful and underlines how strange it is that a symbol of femininity is made up of underweight, overworked individuals.

The final theme I want to address is the theme of watching within the story. It is present from that opening epigraph, the quote talking about how learning that there is no God and no one is watching is the greatest tragedy. Dance is all about feeling watched, that there could be audience and cameras anywhere. That dancers need to be ready at any point to get a correction from the teacher that is watching. And it runs all through this book, both on stage and off. Women need to constantly act as though someone is watching just in general as they apply makeup and other techniques to alter their appearance. This is contrasted with seeing someone. Delphine finally learns to see the people around her for who they are. When Lindsay’s husband is killed she yells at him “you don’t see me!” It is watching as observation versus seeing as understanding.

In case you can’t tell from the amount that I’ve written about this, I adored this book and this story. It has been so long since I dove into a story to this extent and found it so fruitful to think about. I’m so glad that this exists, I feel like I’ve been searching my whole life for relatable ballet content, and now I got two books in a single summer. (The first was Don’t Think, Dear which I wrote about in this post and goes really well as a companion to this book.) Here’s hoping that I’m able to find some more, and that I get back into the studio to dance myself really soon.

This Is Beautiful: Spoken Word Poetry

 All right, hold your boos. I went to an event last weekend where Dark Noise Collective came and read a bunch of their poems. And it was so good and energizing! The poems were great, but also all of their personalities really came through and it felt like you got to know them. Of course also the poems were about social justice and imagining a new world, and it really felt like a bunch of people came together to share their energy with each other. Such a cool event, I left with 2 of their books haha. I'm excited to read them!

“Calling on Dragons” by Patricia Wrede

This is the third book in the Enchanted Forest chronicles, I talked about the first book here and the second book here. This book keeps the pattern of going with a different narrator, and for this one we get the witch Morwen! Which is incredible because that means that we can understand her cats as well.

Morwen lives in the Enchanted Forest, and one day her cats discover a huge rabbit. The rabbit’s name is Killer, and he was eating some innocent-looking clover when he started growing. So they head over there and discover evidence of wizards using the clover to change their size, as well as a small wizard that Morwen promptly melts. They take this to the King and Queen of the Enchanted Forest, Mendelbar and Cimorene. Kazul the King of the Dragons is visiting as well, and their magician friend Telemain. While there, they discover that the wizards have stolen Mendelbar’s magic sword that maintains peace and prevents the wizards from draining the forest of magic. As a result, Morwen, Kazul, Cimorene (who we learn is pregnant), Telemain, and the increasingly cursed rabbit Killer (who ends up a blue donkey) all set out to find it. Mendelbar wants to come, but he has to stay in the forest to maintain peace in the absence of the sword.

On the way, the group runs into a fire witch who helps them find the wizards’ lair. Once there, they steal the sword back. However, they are too late. By the time they get back the wizards have attached the castle with Mendelbar inside. Now there’s a bubble preventing anyone who isn’t a wizard from entering. The sword could disperse it, if the King of the Enchanted Forest wields it. But he is trapped inside. The group resolves that their best course of action is to wait for Cimorene’s baby to grow up and wield the sword, finally releasing Mendelbar.

Alright so the ending. That’s a hell of an ending. And quite the lead up to the last book in the series. It almost feels like… a bit too much for the series. Up until now, things have been able to wrap up so neat and tidy, it feels ridiculous that their best course of action is to do nothing and wait for another sixteen years or so. Having said that, the book does say that Cimorene never gives up trying to get to Mendelbar. So at least she’s putting in the effort.

There is a subplot about the witches being accosted by some guy who wants the witches to look “traditional” and things like that. I really enjoyed how Morwen bucks those trends, she has nine cats and none of them are black and wears what she wants and in general does not look like a stereotypical witch. And even though this is just a side-plot, the entire series is about characters rejecting the stories that are set for them and doing what makes them happy. It’s a really sweet and important message to bring along with the upending of fairy tale tropes.

There are few ways to make these middle sequels stand out, but that ending really does nail this one. I think I’ll be thinking about that one for a while. And it does make me really excited to finally get to the last book of this series.

This Is Beautiful: Not Going Into Work

 This should be obvious but it is so nice when you can stay home and not go into work. Two weekends ago I had to go in over the holiday but last weekend I got to stay home while my undergrad took care of it. It was so nice, I mean I still had to do work but at least I didn't have to go anywhere.

Marquette and the Upper Peninsula

Over the summer my partner and I went on a short trip up to the upper peninsula of Michigan. We drove up to Marquette first, and spent most of our time there. There were a surprising number of good restaurants and breweries to check out!

One of the highlights was the bookstore, Snowbound Books. It has used books and new ones! Despite the fac that the store is tiny, the shelves everywhere pack in a lot of product. There’s also a really cool spice and tea store, Spice Merchants. They have these lovely packs of pre-mixed soup spices that we grabbed a bunch of. And there’s a bagel place! With decent bagels! Incredible.

The best part, to me, was the couple of hikes that we went on. First was Echo Lake and then Presque Isle. Both are gorgeous, with lovely views of nature. At Echo Lake we even found wild blueberries! Presque Isle also has Black Rocks, which are these rocks that people jump off of into the water. We didn’t do it, it was freezing and windy the day we went, but it’ll be fun to do later.

We also took a short trip to Negaunee as well. Not as much there, but we found some caving grounds from old mine shafts and got pasties! It is interesting seeing how the town is incorporating mining and its history into how it attracts tourists.

Finally on the way back we went to Mackinaw Island. I had never been before, but my partner used to go every summer so nothing new for him. It was cool, I love a walkable city and this whole island doesn’t allow cars! If you want to see the whole thing you have to rent a bike or a horse. Having said that though, it does feel a little like Disneyland, with how cute and clean it is. Most of the shops are within a few blocks of the harbor and are crowded as a result. Beyond that there’s the fort (which we didn’t go to) and the Grand Hotel which is huge and fancy and all that. So really our visit only took a couple hours, but it was fun for that period of time. Any longer would not have been worth it.

All in all, I thought it was a good visit. We got to see nature, I got to see where my partner grew up, and we had a sprinkling of history and tourist sites throughout. Next time we go up I really want to check out Pictured Rocks so maybe we will make a dedicated trip.

This Is Beautiful: Staged Season 3

 Alright I have been a big fan of Staged since it first came out, but I was really late to finding out about the third season. I might have written about it before, but to sum up I thought that the first season was great, the premise for the second was fine but poorly executed. And I thought the third season was amazing!

The season opens with the boys getting back together to do a radio play, very similar to the first season. But then at the end of the second episode Michael storms off and episodes three to five are actually documentary footage of them working on the season, trying to pull it together with everyone leaving. A lot of it is about how to do new things while still staying true to the original idea/concept of the show. And it culminates in a live show where they improvise "A Christmas Carol." And very sweetly, they decide to end the show.

This was so fun, the season gives plenty of time to Michael and David while still letting their wives (particularly Georgia) and other minor characters shine. It hits a really good balance where the banter is funny and the other characters actually play a role in the plot. It also doesn't rely on Michael and David fighting the way season two did, instead has them trying to work together to pull off one last season.

It's so good, highly recommend the whole show, but particularly this season. It's short, only 6 episodes, but they're all excellently crafted.

“You Can’t Touch My Hair: And Other Things I Still Have to Explain” by Phoebe Robinson

This was a book that I stumbled on somewhere within the house since my partner had a copy. What with all the free time I had while recovering from surgery, I decided that I would pick it up.

The book is a series of essays roughly surrounding being a Black woman in the entertainment industry. Robinson covers many things from her hair (in the title) to her guilty pleasures. It ends, really touchingly, with letters to her recently born niece about being a mixed race woman in the world.

Now I’ve read a bunch of books that, broadly, speak about race and this one is definitely the funniest that I’ve read so far. Robinson is a comedian, and damn, she is good at her job! The book is sprinkled with jokes and pop culture references. (Keep in mind that the book was written in 2016 so some of the references are dated.) And should you think that the jokes are a bit too far, she even has an essay on the trope of the “angry, Black woman” and how that often makes her feel as though she has to cut any criticisms she has with humor.

More broadly than that though, as someone in the entertainment industry she brings up issues that I hadn’t heard of before. Or issues that I knew existed, but I didn’t know the specifics, such as casting calls that weren’t written by people of color. Sure, I can imagine that would be an issue, but I don’t frequently see casting calls so I couldn’t tell you how they are discriminatory and poorly written.

Anyways this is a hilarious and entertaining book. Even if you don’t pick it up wanting to learn about race and racism in America, you will likely still have a good time reading it. And hopefully, learn a thing or two!

This Is Beautiful: Mindfulness

 Some backstory to introduce this: I used to be a meditation and Buddhism nut. When I was in high school it was not uncommon for me to be reading things like the Tibetan Book of the Dead and things like that. I also used to meditate for close to an hour a day at my peak. But I fell off of that in undergrad and haven't been able to get back on. These days I feel exercise serves as my mindfulness, like dancing and yoga. If there was a meditation group I would join, I had one pre-pandemic, but it has been a bit.

Then a few things happened this week. A weekly mindfulness group popped up! Only thirty minutes, but it is virtual and I am pleased it's back in my schedule. Plus I read a book about yoga, I'll have a post about that soon, but reading gives me the space to absorb these teachings and think about them so much better. And I haven't read a book about this for a while! It was really nice to get back into it.

I know there's issues with mindfulness but it's helped me so much over the years. I hope this is the start of me getting back into it.

“Searching for Dragons” by Patricia Wrede

This is the sequel to Dealing with Dragons which I wrote about in this earlier post. Again, this is a book that my partner is reading to me, so I very funnily do not know how to spell most things in the book. But, it is an excellent sequel that continues to play with fairy tale tropes in entertaining ways.

The story follows Mendanbar, the King of the Enchanted Forest. He finds a patch of the forest that is totally destroyed, along with some dragon scales. He takes these to the witch Morwen and she figures out that it’s the scales of one dragon and suggests he take them to the King of the Dragons, Kazul. However when Mendanbar gets there, Kazul is missing and Cimorene is about to go look for her. They figure out that the scales belong to one dragon who isn’t around anymore, and deduce that the wizards are likely behind this. They go looking for Kazul, and on the way meet up with a magician who can help them, a wicked uncle and crown prince, and a few cats. Of course the book ends with Mendanbar and Cimorene getting married, but that’s the only spoiler that I’ll give.

So the highlight of this book is finding all of the vague fairy tale allusions. There’s a dwarf who can spin straw into gold, but only for other people, and no one can guess his name so he’s become parent to many first-born children. Mendenbar and Cimorene suggest that he start a school, and spin gold as a scholarship which is very cute. The wicked uncle never thought he’d be an uncle when he joined this Wicked Society but now begrudgingly has to do something wicked. And the crown prince is in on it and really wants to go have adventures. But Mendenbar decides to send him off to the dwarf’s school, which counts as something wicked because the prince emphatically does not want to go to school. It’s things like that where the fairy tale gets upended, but it also serves the plot very nicely.

The book is clearly written for children though. Of course the villains are the same and of course they’re after the King of the Dragons again. The aspect that most bothered me though was Mendenbar and Cimorene getting married after absolutely no romantic interactions. The most intimate is Cimorene putting her hand on Mendenbar’s shoulder. Which is all fine, I get that kids aren’t looking for a huge relationship leading up to a marriage, but it goes against the first book. The first book really deconstructed the fairy tale trope of people getting married without knowing each other, and here we are falling into it!

Overall though, the book is good. It expands on the world from the first one and the change in perspective is a really nice way to do that. We are now halfway through the Enchanted Forest chronicles and I am excited to hear the rest of it!

This Is Beautiful: The Upper Peninsula of Michigan

 I will eventually write a full post on this, but my partner and I recently spent almost a week in the upper peninsula (UP) of Michigan. It's where my partner is from, his parents are still up there and a few friends as well. What was really beautiful though were the hikes outside. There are wildflowers everywhere, of all different colors! And there's gorgeous bodies of water, the Canadian mountains are in view, all that stuff. We only went on a couple hikes, but both of them were super pretty and very close to town. 

I'll be writing more later, but as a quick snapshot, the UP was so pretty!

“whiskey words & a shovel I” by r.h. Sin

This is another book that my housemate left when they moved out. It’s a small book of poetry about the author getting out of an abusive relationship and finding a new one. It’s really a book of grief poetry, you know the type that is just raw feelings on the page and not much else. I know when I’m going through grief it’s usually something that I need to read just to feel validated and seen, but I’m thankfully not in that state right now.

Other than that, I don’t really have many thoughts on it. Not much beyond that besides there’s also the occasional poem about sex or whatever. I also expected the book to be more linear, more of a one-to-one relationship with the author’s experiences. But that’s the way feelings work also, they go round and round.

I don’t have any real desire to pick up the second one of these, the author didn’t really write for me in my current emotional state. Maybe if I ever need to though, I’ll be able to pick it up again and more fully experience the intent of the work.

This Is Beautiful: Penny Larceny

 Recently a game team that I very much enjoy dropped their latest creation: "Penny Larceny: Gig Economy Supervillain" and I have to say that I am enjoying it so much! (You can check out the game on Steam or itch, here's the Steam link.) The characters are hilarious, the gameplay is engaging, and just social commentary all over the place! I feel like I need a notepad to keep track of the routes that I have played so far, because there is just so much content this game should be about 5x the price. Have a very satisfied feeling that this is going to be what I am focusing on until I head back into work next week!

“Me Talk Pretty One Day” by David Sedaris

My housemate left this behind when they moved out and I’ve never read any Sedaris so I figured I should check it out. It’s a book of essays, of course, and it spans throughout Sedaris’ lifetime but a lot of the later ones talk about him living in France with his boyfriend.

I thought it was entertaining, the essays are humorous enough. After awhile the self-deprecation gets to be a bit much though. Like this is all being written by some white guy, yes I know that you’re a piece of shit.

What I didn’t fully realize is that the book was published in 2000. That’s over 20 years ago now! I only bothered to check because there is an essay complaining about the existence of computers and e-mail while Sedaris wants to take his typewriter with him everywhere. You never see a typewriter anymore!

I doubt that I’ll actively seek out other books by Sedaris, but this was a good enough experience. It is incredible that Sedaris has been writing for so long and I guess in that sense it’s a neat little slice of history.

This Is Beautiful: Lupin

 While I've been at home recovering, I've been binging a few shows. The first one I tackled was "Lupin" on Netflix. I've been meaning to watch it for a while, I heard it was amazing back in 2021 but I just didn't have the time. It is just as good as everyone said it was!

The best episodes are ones where they show the heist or the trick or whatever, get you invested in it, and then go back and show how he pulls it off or does the trick or whatever. The writing and filming is amazing, I totally bought it every time even though after a few I could see it coming. And the lead, Omar Sy, is absolutely incredible. Watching a huge Black man pull the wool over everyone's eyes is just so fun anyways.

Just an incredible show, I'm so excited for it to come back with more episodes in the fall.

“Dealing with Dragons” by Patricia Wrede

This is the first book of the Enchanted Forest chronicles, and a favorite of my partner’s when he was growing up. He started reading the books to me while I was recovering from surgery, it’s really cute. The fun side effect of this is that I have no idea how to spell the characters’ names, so go easy on me if I make a mistake while Googling.

The book follows the Princess Cimerone who gets tired of her life as an ordinary princess. She tries to learn fencing and then magic and then Latin and every time is told that this just isn’t how a princess should behave. Enough is enough though when her family tries to marry her off to some prince, she decides to take the advice of a talking frog she met and runs off. She finds a cave full of dragons, and volunteers to become a dragon’s princess.

The dragon who takes her in is Kazul, a kind dragon who likes her cooking and has her sort her vast treasure rooms. While working for Kazul, Cimerone meets a number of fascinating characters such as a witch, some wizards, and other princesses who are also working for dragons. Of course, there’s a bunch of knights who come and try to rescue her, she has to shoo them away since she does not want to be rescued.

Eventually it is revealed that the wizards are up to no good. Cimerone meets a wizard collecting dragonsbane, a plant that is poisonous to dragons. Not long after, the king of the dragons dies and the trials to pick a successor go underway. Cimerone needs the help of her friends to foil their plot and ensure that the dragon working with the wizards isn’t unfairly crowned king.

This is an extremely fun book for a fan of fantasy and fairy tales! It is clearly written for a young audience, but Cimerone is such a fun and feisty protagonist you can’t help but love following her around. There are plenty of cute references to other stories too, such as how there’s a princes school that makes mention to a student named Art who pulls a sword out of a stone. And all of the princesses are said to be airheads who are happy to be kidnapped by giants and dragons to only get rescued by their future husbands. Making these allusions and purposefully taking tropes to ridiculous conclusions only to turn them on their head is what makes the book so fun, even for older readers.

Of course I think there are also a few plot holes as a result as well. And a few things that are a little too convenient for the sake of the plot. My only major gripe is that at the end the dragon colluding with the wizards is turned into a toad. Not by a wizard or anything, it’s just because he stopped acting dragon-like. Apparently all of the dragons have this emergency biological switch where they turn into toads and it only comes up at the very end of the story? It’s a little much for me to take.

All that aside, I’m excited for the rest of the series if it continues this interesting dialogue with existing folktales and fairy tales. It’s a cute way to pass the time while recovering.

This Is Beautiful: Top Surgery

 I'll probably write a longer thing on this eventually, but I'm really excited to say that I got top surgery back on the 21st! I'm still recovering but finally feeling better after the procedure. For about a week after surgery, you get 2 drains, one on either side of your chest. They feel horrible and itchy, plus you have to clean out all of the blood and pus multiple times a day. I finally had those taken out and everything felt soooo much better. Still in a compression vest and can't drive or lift anything, but it's feeling less like I'm home sick and more like I'm taking a break from work. Not that it ever was horrible, I was pretty much on Tylenol since the surgery and have pretty good arm mobility. 

I am still having some reservations about my body image with this, I feel like my stomach has swelled up and I look huge, but I'm pretty thrilled with my chest specifically. I'm excited for it to heal up and see how this develops!

“How Learning Works: 8 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching 2nd Edition” by Marsha Lovett, Michael Bridges, Michele DiPietro, Susan Ambrose, and Marie Norman

I got a free copy of this book from a course on teaching that I took earlier this summer. It is a really useful read, I found myself thinking of different things I could start implementing in my teaching as I read it.

The main idea with the book is they go through eight kinds of issues that you might run into with teaching and from there get into research on the problem, and strategies based on the research to help. There is even a whole appendix with examples of things that they mention in the text such as rubrics and learning outcomes so you have an example of the language.

When I first picked it up, I didn’t quite care for the introduction which is very “we are doing this right and no one else has any idea what they’re doing” but it drops the condescending tone after that. In fact for the rest of it there’s a refreshing stance taken where it emphasizes that we need to learn more about teaching in order to be good teachers.

I haven’t used any of the strategies to be fair, but it’s already got some ideas going in my head of changes that I could make to my pedagogy. I imagine that I’ll be referring back to it plenty of times as I think more and more about how I teach, and so far that’s enough for me!

This Is Beautiful: Giving a Seminar for Undergrads

 So this past week (a week from today actually) I went to a different school up north to give a short talk to their summer researchers that are in undergrad still. It was really cool! Quite a nice change of pace. I gave my talk, got maybe a question from a student about how I decided I wanted to do a PhD, but the professors were all so into it. Everyone was super nice and they chatted with me for a while about what it's like teaching at a school like this. I hope that I get to do more, it's a great confirmation that this is what I want to do and a great way to network!

“Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the Nobel Prize” by Sean B. Carroll

I don’t remember how this book got on my radar, but I am so glad that it did and that I finally was able to read it. This is a non-fiction book about Albert Camus and Jacques Monod, two friends that both participated in the French Resistance during World War II that went on to win the Nobel Prize.

The first half of the book talks about their experiences during the war. They didn’t know each other at the time, but Monod was in the middle of doing his PhD at the Sorbonne (which no one was interested in) and he went on to become a leader of the French Resistance. He coordinated messages, destroying train routes, and working with the Allies. Similarly Camus was working on his books dealing with the idea of the absurd (probably The Myth of Sisyphus is the most famous one) and writing for the Resistance newspaper Combat. Both of them had friends that were arrested by the Gestapo and killing, or sent off to concentration camps. It was dangerous work.

After the war ended, Monod finally graduated with his PhD and started a lab at the Pasteur Institute. It was during this time that he learned about the Soviet government essentially rewriting science so that it fit in with its ideology more easily, essentially throwing Darwin and Mendel out the window. Camus was also opposing the USSR, on the grounds that it was silencing its people and promoting ideology over liberty. The two became close friends through this, even though many other writers were abandoning Camus for his opinions. Camus eventually won the Nobel Prize for literature, and as a result started to become more active in politics. Unfortunately, he died in a car accident before he could finish his next book, which he thought would be his greatest. Meanwhile, Monod was trying to smuggle his friend and fellow scientist out of USSR-controlled Hungary. After succeeding, he did groundbreaking experiments in gene regulation that eventually won him the Nobel Prize. Similarly to Camus, this caused him to become more active in politics. When French students started protesting in the 60s, he was the only faculty member to protest with them. He repeatedly affirmed that science and scientists have a duty to society and to make their voices heard. He died while he was in his 70s of what’s thought to be leukemia.

This was such an informative read. I know so little about French history that hearing the story of WWII with the focus on France was extremely new to me. I did not know much about the Resistance, or the fights that were occurring on the streets of Paris with the Germans occupying the city. Even after the war, the occupation of Hungary and the student protest in France was all completely new to me. The single largest thing that I learned though was about Jacques Monod. I had no idea that he was part of the team that figured out how the lac operon worked, or that RNA is the material that goes between DNA and proteins, or how allosteric inhibition works. I’m not going to explain these ideas, but they are all present in intro to genetics courses, and I have taught those courses, but I never knew who the man behind them was!

Monod seems like such an amazing person and an amazing scientist. He was a conductor as well so he was very knowledgeable about music. He apparently had this quirk while writing where he would invent a quote that he needed and would attribute it to the imaginary philosophy McGregor (his mother’s maiden name). Eventually he would both introduce and eulogize Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I cannot believe that I never heard of him, scientists who are also decent people are so rare and here we have one!

Carroll put so much love and work into this book. He interviewed many participants such as the scientist that Monod smuggled out of Hungary, a colleague Monod worked with in the Resistance, and Monod’s two sons. Many of the letters being shown here were unpublished until this book, and the wealth of information about both men is incredible. I know I wrote a lot about Monod, but the extent of the detail about Camus and what he was writing about and how that influenced the rebuilding for France is also highly informative. We truly are so lucky to have this work.

I borrowed this copy from the library, but I honestly want to own my own copy and use it the next time I teach intro to genetics. It is so important to know the history of any discipline that you are a part of, regardless of whether that’s philosophy or science. I adored this book, I do not think I can recommend it highly enough.

This Is Beautiful: Ed Sheeran concert

 Last weekend I got to see Ed Sheeran perform in Detroit as part of his Mathematics tour and let me tell you. It was an amazing show. I forgot that he is such an amazing performer! Beyond just knowing how to work and control a crowd, he does all of the music himself (well almost all of it) and completely live. It is so cool hearing him create these elaborate layers with the loop pedal and build a song from scratch each time.

Not only that, but the concert had a few guests to it! Khalid was an opener, he came back on to do the song that he created with Ed Sheeran for the No. 6 Collaborations Project. And then the most amazing thing was that Eminem came on to do a song with him as well! It was nuts, I'm not even a big Eminem fan and I lost my damn mind. 

Just in general, such a fun concert and such a fun night. I'm so glad I was able to go.

“The Serpent’s Shadow” by Rick Riordan

This is the final installment in Riordan’s series, “The Kane Chronicles,” that focuses on Egyptian mythology and gods. I covered the first book here and the second book here. I do remember reading it when I was younger, although there was a lot that I did forget and rediscovered with this reading.

The book starts with the Kane siblings along with their trainees at another museum trying to get a scroll that details how to defeat Apophis, the giant Chaos snake that is about to rise and take over the world. The snake knows they and there though, and ends up destroying the whole place, including the scroll. However, they get a clue from that, a fragment of a shadow. That gives them the idea to use Apophis’ shadow to banish him from the world. What then follows is they head to the Egyptian afterlife to find a ghost who knows the magic of how to do this. They convince their father to hand him over, and then split up. Sadie and Walk go to test out the spell on Bes’ shadow. Bes was a dwarf god who gave up his spirit in the previous book, the idea is you use the shadow to do the opposite of a banishment, use that to call his spirit back. While they’re doing that, Walt learns that he’s about to die from his family curse that drains his magic. He has a plan though, he merges with the god Anubis, and together they really freak Sadie out. She runs out of there, and goes to help Carter and Zia who are in the middle of Chaos looking for Apophis’ shadow. Along the way the ghost they’re traveling with plays a few nasty tricks, and then runs for it. Sadie drops in just in time to capture the shadow, but then they are surrounded by demons who came to protect the shadow!

Just then Bes comes to the rescue, along with other forgotten Egyptian gods. They rescue the team, and they hitch a ride with the sun chariot. There, Zia merges with the sun god Ra. Similarly, this freaks out Carter. There isn’t a time to get into this though, as the final battle is upon them. First they save their uncle Amos, then they go to fight the serpent. Zia gets swallowed by the serpent, and Carter and Sadie finally do the banishment. This causes the serpent to spit Zia back up, and the serpent retreats. Unfortunately though, this means that the gods have to retreat as well, to maintain balance. In the aftermath, Zia/Carter make up, and Sadie learns to be ok with the boy she likes having merged with the god she likes. And she hears from her mother that there are other gods that soon will threaten the Egyptian ones. So while this is the end for now, the seeds for future stories are planted!

Alright so first thing that caught my eye, are there a ton of polyamorous relationships in this book? Walt and Anubis are more or less constantly sharing a body now. Zia and Ra are debatable as Zia ends up separating from Ra, same with Carter and Horus and Sadie and Isis. So those likely are not poly, but Sadie ends up with not one but two boys that she likes! And she is happy to not have to choose between them! That right there, sounds like a poly relationship. I imagine that Riordan did not intend to create a poly relationship, he likely just wanted to resolve this love triangle, but that is a fun ending that subverts a lot of tropes!

The book does have a lot of interesting things to say about shadows though. I did not know the history of the shadow being part of the soul in Ancient Egypt, but it makes sense. The shadow is a representation of the individual, following wherever you go. But it also represents a person’s impact, in that they “cast a long shadow.” If you get rid of that, you get rid of the whole person and their work. And we see shadows in other works as well, like Peter Pan trying to find his shadow and reattach it. It definitely is a figure that we see a lot of.

To be nitpicky though, I do not think it ever gets addressed that Zia hosts both Nephthys and Ra. In the first book, she is hidden away because she’s hosting the former. In the last book, it’s turned into the latter. Of course, this can easily be explained away by her being able to host different gods at different times. But we aren’t given any other instance of this, and no one even brings up that she hosted Nephthys. So might be a little loophole in the story.

Other thing I want to touch on is the ending, and the tidbit about other gods. I remember reading that in high school and being so excited for a crossover with Percy Jackson or something like that. As far as I know, there is just a short story overlapping the two series right now, but I do think Riordan is getting closer to a big series or something like that. The ending of “The Trials of Apollo” alludes to a meeting between different pantheons of gods, and a cat is there. Likely that is Bast, the cat goddess from this series. So who knows, there could be something cool on the horizon.

Anyways, another Riordan series knocked down. I think next I will be reading the series on the Norse gods? I have never read that one so I am excited to finally be tackling that!

This Is Beautiful: Work Slowing

 I'm very close to taking a month off later in July for medical reasons, and it's honestly really nice that I have starting having my whole life slow down as well. I have less rehearsals in the evenings now that most things are over, and even work has been nicer in that I still have to go in everyday, but I don't have as much to do. Having free time is proving to be really nice, I'm enjoying this for sure.

“Don’t Think, Dear: On Loving and Leaving Ballet” by Alice Robb

I initially found this book through a podcast from Articles of Interest on the design of pointe shoes (you can listen to it here as well). I immediately knew that I had to get my hands on this book, I have struggled for so long with media around dance and ballet in particular. Most stories and books about it typically glamorize the art form while when I was growing up in dance classes, I had a much more complicated relationship to dance. I loved dancing, but I could not wait to get out of class. I put so much pressure on myself to do well, and look good, and it made a lot of it miserable for me. I kept comparing myself to other girls in my class, learned to ignore the pain in my feet, and it was not until college that I unlearned a lot of this and just had fun dancing again.

This book was like a whole therapy session for me. Robb uses her experience dancing at the School of American Ballet for ten years as the backdrop to talk about ballet as a whole. She covers important aspects like how Balanchine is essentially worshipped as the ambassador of ballet to America, and how that legacy tends to overlook his sexual harassment or how he single handedly shortened more ballerinas careers by pushing their bodies to the limit. Similarly she talks about gender roles in ballet, how there’s always men in charge while the women are a dime a dozen. There’s a great chapter on control and how regimented each ballet class is, but how this can be an escape for the young dancers in that it is a constant. You always know how each dance class is going to go.

Another chapter talks about how using your body as an instrument makes you less likely to pick up on social cues like flirting. If you’re in physical contact with other people all the time, holding hands does not seem like much. Ballet also leads to a lot of unhealthy weight loss, pretty much all professional dancers are restricting their intake to keep their “ballet body.” And it is interesting that most other places the body positive movement has made an impact, but dancers can still get called “fat” all the time.

The pain chapter was hard for me to read. I don’t do well with body horror, and I know that dancers dance on broken toes and things like that all the time, but it’s so hard to hear about what people have put themselves through in the name of dance. She then broadens it to talk about masochism and how some dancers have gone on to write about their experiences with that as well. Dancers also have a different relationship to time in that most dance careers are over by the age of 30. You have to get a lot done early on in order to be successful. And finally one of the most interesting chapters was about how dancers have a full sense of their body and control over it. Robb talks about different studies looking at this, and it is really cool to see the science side of this training.

So many chapters resonated with me personally. I remember being in college and thinking about how the men could do much worse in class and not get half the corrections the women did. I know growing up I found the structure of ballet incredibly useful, it let me drop all of my worries about classes and friends and just be in the moment. (Sidenote: I tried to get a travel grant once claiming that dance was a form of mindfulness and was not taken seriously at the time.) I think I was really lucky that I never developed an eating disorder, as it is I mostly just think of myself as “chunky” even though I’m sure my friends would never describe me that way. And even though the pain chapter was hard, it does resonate. I remember being in other dance classes, sharing that I was in pain, and being told to sit down even though my ballet training told me to keep going. It teaches you that your pain does not matter, and I have had a really hard time unlearning that one.

The chapter I have the hardest time wrapping my mind around is the one on flirting and relationships. It makes me wonder, as an asexual dancer, did I have a better time with dance because of the sterile nature of ballet? There is not any sex or kissing in classical ballet, maybe that’s why I have been so drawn to this art form. Once I got older and hit the gyrating, swaying thing that is modern dance, that really put me off. I have writtenabout this elsewhere, but the dance world as a whole is not kind to asexuals since so much of dance is about sex. It is not something I have given much thought to, but maybe there is something there. Robb mostly focuses on straight ballerinas in this chapter, but I wonder if it would look different if she talked to some queer ones? Not even just asexuals, I figured at some point there would be a discussion of queer relationships among the female dancers, but that never came up.

At the same time though, I wonder how much of this is just being an artist or being raised female. Women are always minimizing their pain, most women underestimate the pain of their menstruation, and even when they voice their discomfort men tend to overlook it. And the sections that talk about competition amongst the dancers I think is ubiquitous to art. In music I am always comparing myself to others, as well as dance. Even though it has narrow considerations, I think there is a lot of weight to this in that most dancers are female and all dancers are artists, so still is an accurate description of the experience.

I truly cannot recommend this book enough, I think it gives a really accurate and honest portrayal of the ballet world. Both the good and the bad. We need more books like this that talk from personal experiences with the art form instead of what society at large perceives the dancers to be. I am so happy that I read it.

This Is Beautiful: Weekend Off

 This sounds so lame but I haven't had a weekend where I didn't need to go into lab and feed my cells in a while. But the stars aligned and this past holiday weekend I had to toss my cells and gave myself an actual break from going in. It was lovely, I slept late and got some real rest and spent time just doing nothing. Is this what it's like to have a real job and not be a grad student???

“Song of the Cell” by Siddhartha Mukherjee

I’m a big fan of Mukherjee’s writings, I read his first three books years ago and really enjoyed them. (Posts about those are here and here and here.) This work is a bit different from the others, but no less enjoyable.

I think this will be impossible to summarize, but to give a broad, sweeping overview, the book is about cell biology. He starts with how the concept of the cell came to be, then divulges down a few different paths. One is about cell growth, another about neurons, another about insulin. He takes different aspects of cells and goes through the history, figures that played major roles, and consequences of these concepts to science and medicine.

The biggest strength of this work is that Mukherjee is an expert at taking complicated processes and simplifying them so that any reader could understand. There are times where the structure of the book makes it difficult, some chapters are pages and pages of just the science. Which can be dull, but it never gets confusing or lost in the jargon. And the same things I loved about his other books are all present: the scientists and characters practically jump off of the page and have all of these personalities to them. Science history turns out to be full of really incredibly interesting people, I never knew that there was such a scuffle over who got the credit for isolating insulin that a murder was nearly committed!

There are elements of this structure that work a bit against it. I was initially very annoyed with the lack of chronological order in the work. The Emperor of all Maladies and The Gene are so clear in their history and how they track an idea over time, that gets lost here. But about halfway through you realize that there is no other way to do there, there would simply be too much information in too many different directions to line them all up chronologically. So I made my peace with that.

Another great strength is the care that Mukherjee takes with the people he highlights. Many of his friends and mentors are characters in the book where he’s describing their sickness or brilliance. There is practically a whole chapter dedicated to the nurses that cared for all of the early bone marrow transplant patients, which is so important and amazing as nurses are constantly overlooked in their contributions to the medical field. That they are credited so highly is a testament to their work and to the care Mukherjee has for the people he writes about.

One thing I felt odd about though is that towards the end Mukherjee writes about pending research happening in his lab. And the subject matter makes sense, it all flows logically, but for the one detail about how this work has not been peer reviewed and published yet. It feels like a move that would force a journal somewhere to publish it, as it’s already out in a book, instead of highlighting something that has already been established and reviewed. I don’t know, likely there is not an issue but as a scientist I felt weird about it.

Still a great science communicator, still a great writer. I don’t think there will ever be a time I don’t read and enjoy what Mukherjee writes and that definitely isn’t the case here either.