The Boyertown Expression, a local publication, published my poem “The Wind” this morning. I’m sure you’re shocked it features a dog.
Gentle Gardening: A Low-Energy Guide for Uncooperative Bodies by Erin Alladin
I bought this book on a whim when someone on a chronic illness support board suggested it. I’ve been gardening for years, but both my physical ability to keep up and my time available have been flagging, leaving me with really horrible gardens.
This book supports bringing joy to having a garden, and having even a little slice of time to garden, instead of hitching your joy to the expectations of bounty.
It also offers a lot of suggestions for how to garden in ways that take some of the strain off. The author introduces many gardening methods, from square-foot gardening to “lasagna gardening” to straw bale gardening. Some of these I’ve tried and others I’ve heard of. She also suggests different tools and approaches to physical or neurological issues that might prevent us from gardening.
The book is short, illustrated, and well-researched, with a bibliography and a glossary.
You don’t want to know by James Felton
If you’ve listened to the podcast No Such Thing as a Fish or watched the tv show QI, well, You Don’t Want to Know by James Felton is their grosser cousin. Fortunately, that’s what I was looking for when I put this book on my wish list. Reading weird shit makes for better writing of weird shit.
Some of these stories you may know, especially if you’ve been around the internet for a number of years. Oregon’s experiment in blowing up a beached whale is here. Our buddy Ea-Nasir’s angry letter to Nanni regarding the quality of copper is here. And of course the emu war.
But also there are lots of amazingly gross facts about surgery, animals, masturbation, animal masturbation, ways to die, science, ways to die using science, and tons of situations that could have been easily solved by humans learning to communicate.
I don’t predict it will age incredibly well due to a running set of jokes and commentary referencing current events, but then again, Ea-Nasir probably didn’t think his letter of complaint in cuneiform would last almost two thousand years either.
Good collection of vignettes, some stories of animal and human cruelty, will definitely turn off some readers. Buyer beware, this may not be the book for you.
Once Upon a Tome by Oliver Darkshire
Like many people, I was attracted to Once Upon a Tome by Oliver Darkshire through the Sotheran’s twitter account. I’m a former (retail, not rare) bookseller, though, so even if I hadn’t found it through the tweets, I suspect it would’ve found me.
Selling retail books is not the same as selling rare books, and selling retail books before the internet was a thing (as I did) is certainly not the same as selling anything today. Still, I recognized the various kinds of customers Darkshire describes pretty much instantly, as well as what it was like trying to prevent a bookstore from turning into a death trap of obstacles and oddities.
(The best bookstores are death traps, but manageable so.)
Darkshire’s descriptions and explanations are both well-crafted imagery and tightly-written, two things as a writer I struggle to achieve simultaneously as he does. It made me simultaneously miss the book selling trade and grateful that I got out when I did.
Definitely recommended for fellow booksellers, and fellow book lovers.
Nettle and Bone by T. Kingfisher
I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone that Ursula Vernon (aka T. Kingfisher) tends to float to the top of my “to be read” pile.
Nettle and Bone, her latest book, is a one-off, but of a different sort than others. It’s not the retelling of an existing fairy tale like Bryony and Roses, The Seventh Bride,or The Raven and the Reindeer. It’s not a coming-of-age story like Minor Mage or A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking. And it isn’t set in the Clockwork universe of her Paladin books.
Oh, and it’s not one of her super-creepy horror novels, although it does have the occasional creepy point.
It’s a new fairy tale, a story of a woman who discovers her pregnant sister is being abused — and decides her sister’s husband has to go. This is complicated by the fact that he’s the prince of the neighboring country and, in multiple ways, significantly more powerful than she is.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way, even when it involves doing impossible things. One just needs to collect a hodgepodge of new friends, build a pet, and learn how politics work.
This book has cemented its place on my “favorite books” list.