Eleanor Barraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age. Material goods/archaeological evidence in the study of this period. It's slightly awkwardly balanced in terms of who the audience is--I have a hard time that people who need this much exposition about the era will pick up a book this specifically materially detailed--but not upsetting in that regard.

Elizabeth Bear, Hell and Earth. Reread. Returning to my reread of this series in time to still have all the memories of what's been going on with Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare and their connections to faerie realms; as the second half of a larger story, it goes hard toward consequence and ramification from the very start of the volume.

Jerome Blum, In the Beginning: The Advent of the Modern Age: Europe in the 1840s. I feel like this is trying for more than it achieves. It goes into chapters about Romanticism and the advent of science and some other things, and then there's a second section with chapters about major empires. But what it doesn't do is actually talk about Europe in this period--it's fairly easy to find material about England, about France, even about Russia, but there's nothing here about Portugal or Greece or Sweden. It's not a volume I'm going to keep on the shelves for the delightful tidbits, because it's not a tidbit-rich book. Also some of the language is '90s standard rather than contemporary. So: fine if this is what you have but I think you can do better.

Ashley Dawson, Environmentalism From Below: How Global People's Movements Are Leading the Fight for Our Planet. Good ground-up Third World environmentalism thoughts.

Victoria Dickenson, Berries. One of my friends said, "a book about berries, Marissa would love that!" and she was absolutely right. It is lushly illustrated, it is random facts about berries, I am here for it.

Emily Falk, What We Value: The Neuroscience of Choice and Change. Interesting thoughts on working around one's particular brain processes--the third "c" that did not make the title is "connection," and there's a lot about how that can be used to live lives closer to our own values.

Margaret Frazer, Heretical Murder. Kindle. One of the short stories, and possibly the least satisfying one of hers I've read so far: there's just not room for questions, uncertainty, or even a very human take on the life experiences of heretics in this milieu. Oh well, can't win them all.

Jonathan Healey, The Blood in Winter: England on the Brink of Civil War, 1642. If you're an English Civil War nerd, this book on the lead-up to it will be useful to you. I am. It is.

T. Kingfisher, Snake-Eater. A near-future desert fantasy that was creepy and exciting and warm in all the right spots. This is one of Kingfisher's really good ones. Also Copper dog is a really good dog--I mean of course a good dog but also a well-written dog, a dog written by someone who has observed dogs acutely.

Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise. Lyrical writing about gardening in the face of more than one apocalypse at the same time. Laing loves many of the same reference points as I do, in life, in literature, and in botany, so I found this a warmly congenial book.

L.R. Lam, Pantomime. This is very much the first volume in a series; its ending is a midpoint rather than an ending per se. It's a circus fantasy with an intersex and nonbinary protagonist, and it was written just over a decade ago--this is one of the books that had to exist for people to be doing the things with intersex and/or nonbinary characters that they're able to not only write but get published now.

Ada Limón, Startlement: New and Selected Poems. Glorious. Some favorites from past collections and some searing new work, absolutely a good combination, would make a good present especially for someone who doesn't have the prior collections.

Daniel Little, Confronting Evil in History. Kindle. This is a short monograph about philosophy of history/historiography, and why history/historians have to grapple with the problem of evil. I feel like if you're really interested in this topic there are longer, more thorough handlings of it, but it was fine.

Robert MacFarlane, Is a River Alive? Really good analysis of how we parse things as alive and having rights, and also how riverine biology, ecology, social issues are being handled. Personal to the right degree, balanced with broader information, highly recommended.

Lars Mytting, The Bell in the Lake and The Reindeer Hunters. The first two in a series of Norwegian historical fiction, not more cheerful than that genre generally is but more...active? relentless? I really like this, they're gorgeous, but people will die sad deaths, that's how this stuff does, it's just as well that I'm taking a break before reading the next one because too much of it can make me gloomy but just the right amount is delightful. The symbolism of the stave church and its bells and weaving and all the weight of rural Norway hits in all the right ways for me.

A.E. Osworth, Awakened. This queer millennial contemporary fantasy is not rep of me, it's rep of the people I'm standing next to a lot of the time, and that's powerful in its own way. Many of you are that person. This does things with magic/witch community that feel very true and solid, and it's a fun read.

Lev A.C. Rosen, Mirage City. The latest in the Evander Mills mysteries. This one takes Andy to Los Angeles and his childhood home, in pursuit of missing (queer) persons. Some of them turn out to be perfectly well, some of them...a great deal less so...but the B-plot was focused on Andy's relationship with his mother, whose job turns out to be something he didn't know about--and will have trouble living with. The last line of the book made me burst into tears in a good way, but in general this is a series that has a lot of historical queer peril, and if that's something that's going to make you more unhappy than otherwise, maybe wait until you're in a different place to try them. I think they continue to stand reasonably well alone.

William Shakespeare, King Lear. Reread. Okay, so at some point in early October I earnestly wrote "reread King Lear" on my to-do list for reasons that seemed tolerably clear to me at the time. Things on the list tend to get done. Somewhere in the last two months I forgot why this was supposed to get done. If there's a project it's supposed to inform, reading it has not helped me figure out which project that is. I'm not mad that I reread it, it still has the bits that are appalling in the most interesting ways, but...well. A mystery forever I suppose.

Martha Wells, Platform Decay. Discussed elsewhere.

We've all heard it a million times: baking is precise and cooking is loose. Cooking is jazz, baking is classical. Cooking has room to improvise, but with baking you have to follow the recipe to the letter.

This is, of course, nonsense. For one thing, you can't control every variable every time. If baking required everything to be utterly precise, it would never work, because air temperature, pressure, and humidity all vary; you have to be able to work around those major variables. If it was true, you'd never see experienced bread bakers frown and throw another handful (or three) into the recipe. And most importantly, if this was true......how would we ever get new baked goods?

I think this is a mistake we make too often when we're thinking about bringing light into dark times for each other. We think of it has having to be precise and perfect for it to work. If we're not winning every struggle, we must be doing something wrong and should just quit. If we can't come up with the perfect phrasing to offer comfort to worried or grieving friends and neighbors, why even try? Maybe tomorrow we'll be warm and witty and precisely right. Or someone else can do it. Surely someone else has the right answer, and we can just use that.

So yeah, the lussekatter--you know what day it is--rose despite the plummeting temperature (and with it the plummeting humidity, oh physics why do you do us like this). They rose and rose and rose. Friends, they are mammoths. They are lusselejon this year. I forgot the egg glaze--I told you last year that I shouldn't mention that remembering it was unusual, and ope, it was an omen, I did not put egg wash on. They are still great. They are still amazing. What they are not--what they don't have to be--is perfect.

Last week one of my friends wrote to me to say that she'd made calzones but they'd turned out denser than usual. And you know what I thought? I thought, "Ooh, her family got calzones, I should make calzones one of these days!" And not in the "I'd do it better than that loser" way, either. Just: yay homemade calzones, what a treat. I watched her doing it. I remembered that I can do it too. Dense or not. Egg washed or not. Perfect or--let's be real, perfect isn't available, what we have is imperfect, and it turns out that's what we need. Lighting one imperfect candle from another, all down the chain of us, until the light returns.

2024: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=4078

2023: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=3875

2022: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=3654

2021: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=3366

2020: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=2953

2019: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=2654

2018: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=2376

2017: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=1995

2016: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=1566

2015: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=1141

2014: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=659

2013: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=260

2012: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/840172.html

2011: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/796053.html

2010: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/749157.html

2009: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/686911.html

2008: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/594595.html

2007: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/2007/12/12/ and https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/502729.html

2006: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/380798.html — the post that started it all! Lots more about the process and my own personal lussekatt philosophy here!...oh hey, this is the twentieth year I've posted about this. Huh. Huh. Well, isn't that a thing.