Month: January 2019

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Fangirling

Today is the release date for King of Scars, the next book in the Grishaverse by goddess and queen Leigh Bardugo.

She’s one of the only authors that I will ever preorder a book from as opposed to waiting for it to arrive at the library. The hardcover should be arriving today while I am at work.

This new release, on top of the Netflix news about Shadow and Bone and Six of Crows, has made my January one of my best book months yet.

If you need me I’ll be reading King of Scars.

Read. Be brave. Stay angry.

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Unf*ck Your Habitat

One of my 2019 goals was to find a way to slowly bring our current house into reasonable order. As it is with any partnership, I am the partner that becomes more unsettled when things are cluttered or untidy, and so I wanted to find a way to do everything I wanted to do without becoming resentful of the husband, who may not feel the need to clean/organize as often or as thoroughly as I do.

A book that kept popping up as a recommendation on Amazon as well as in Goodreads (thanks targeted marketing!) was Unfuck Your Habitat by Rachel Hoffman. I caught it on a Kindle deal and figured that just like any self help tome, it had to have at least three useful takeaways that would help me move forward. In this way, UYH did not disappoint.

TAKEAWAY #1: Stop Marathon Cleaning

I tend to want the entire house to be clean all at once. The dream is to walk through it as though it was a model home, marveling at all of my hard work and how good everything smells. This is not reality and more likely than not I see all the things I need to do (oh god the walk in shower tiles…) and then my mind simply gives up. But once in awhile, if someone is coming to visit or I’ve just had enough, I clean as much as I can all at once, which continues my bad relationship with housekeeping and tires me out, making it certain that it will be awhile before I get around to any of the maintenance type things again.

So I am taking Hoffman’s marathon cleaning suggestion to heart. I have slowly been cleaning in little ways every day. For example today I sprayed down half the shower with a bleach foam cleaner and then scrubbed and rinsed it away. Did it get up everything in the first try? No, but tomorrow I can spray it again and get a little more. Dusting is another culprit, one that I have started attacking with a single Lysol wipe. If I’m waiting for something or bored I get up and grab a Lysol wipe and start cleaning the tops of things I don’t think about. When the wipe is completely dirty or whatever I’ve been waiting on is ready, I stop. I don’t have to dust the entire house all at once.

I do a good job with doing the dishes, vacuuming, laundry, the regular type stuff, but the rest I am going to start tackling just a little bit each day. Counters, dusting, even power washing the pool deck – a little bit each week, each day and eventually it’ll all be a reasonable 2 minute chore I do and it’s done.

TAKEAWAY #2: Don’t Put It Down, Put It Away

Our house is very tiny, and the living room and kitchen are separated by a breakfast bar type countertop that also hosts the dishwasher and sink on the kitchen side. We don’t use the breakfast bar for eating, but we do use it for setting everything down. Right now there is a bag of bananas from the grocery delivery, a box of dog dental treats, a pint-sized personal ice cream maker, a dirty Nalgene bottle, and an empty seal-top container (the kind that pops up a thing that you push back down to seal it closed). All of those things have homes that are not on this counter, but there they sit because that’s where they were set. When I’m done typing this I’m going to get up and put them away.

I mentioned earlier I’m good about doing laundry. That’s true, until I have to put it away. I don’t usually put it away as well as I wash, dry, and get it into my laundry basket. Honestly I’m considering getting rid of the laundry basket because that would force me to put away my laundry right out of the dryer with no place else to put it. Putting the laundry down but not away is my worst habit, I think. I throw trash away, I put books back on shelves, I keep my side table clear…it’s the small knick knack stuff and that damn laundry.

My current mantra is “don’t put it down, put it away” or alternately “where is its home?” and my depression thanks me for keeping the clutter to a minimum.

TAKEAWAY #3: Do A Little Every Day

I am a completionist. This makes me at risk for marathon cleaning. I hate to do a job halfway. So what I’ve been trying to do is just clean part of something, and later clean the other part of it. Maybe today I just vacuum the livingroom rug, and tomorrow I vacuum down the hallway. Dusting just one room. Doing even one thing every day makes everything better.

I’m already starting to notice certain things becoming a routine. It’s nothing for me to grab a Lysol wipe and just walk around a room wiping off surfaces and picture frames. I run a Lysol wipe over the toilet surfaces every night and squirt in some cleaner before I go to bed. I’m vacuuming more often, doing the dishes faster, and noticing cleaner counters and cleaner air the longer I work on these life skills.

It’s ok to do a small bit every day as long as whatever you do gets finished. This viewpoint is really making cleaning and organizing much less intimidating for me, which means I’m more likely to do it.

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I’ve been putting many of the tips in this book into practice for the past 3 weeks or so, and I can report that I am noticing a big difference. Every little bit helps. Even on days when I am fighting a depressive episode, I find that simply dusting the picture frames in the hallway or throwing away a few pieces of trash makes me feel accomplished, like I am fighting the effects of depression with action. A great strength of this book is that it takes mental health into consideration when offering suggestions for regular housekeeping, and offers suggestions for those with both mental health struggles and physical disabilities.

My house isn’t as cluttered and the small cleaning tasks are ones I can keep up with as I move through the house square foot by square foot, day by day, bringing things back to square one so that I can maintain them in 5 minutes a day instead of hours all at one time once a month. Doing this in a better way has improved my moods and made me feel more productive and sane at home. I strongly recommend this book if you want to change how you approach housekeeping. Take what works for or applies to you and leave the rest, skip around and find ways to make your home more comfortable and clean.

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Happy 3rd Anniversary! (2019)

Three years ago on January 27, 2016 I registered my blog on WordPress. I was working from home, and had the time to consider a non-work activity, I believe they are called ‘hobbies.’ The more I thought about it, I kept returning to reading. Being in college studies (Bachelor’s, master’s, doctorate) for so long restricted the reading I could do for pleasure. Perhaps I could use a blog to hold me accountable for reading more, for making reading for pleasure a part of my life again.

I took a trip back to find my first post. I posted only this once in February 2016, and once in March 2016. I began to make an effort to post once a week in May 2016, and by the end of the year I was posting 1-2 times a week on a regular basis and had read enough to make my first Angel Picks: Best of List.

My first review was actually a movie review!

My first book review was for The Expatriates by Janice Y.K. Lee.

If you’d like to see some of my first posts please visit my Goodreads page and sort my Read shelf by Year Read, or you can use the calendar on the right side of the website to click back in time. Reading some of those first reviews really showed me how far I’ve come, not only with my writing style but with my goals for this site as a whole. As we head into year 4, I want to thank all of you for reading and supporting me. You are my online family and I am so grateful. Happy Anniversary!

screenshot 2019-01-27 at 9.32.44 am

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We Cast A Shadow

We Cast a Shadow by Maurice Carlos Ruffin was provided to me by Random House Publishing Group via NetGalley as a digital review copy in advance of publication in return for an honest review. We Cast a Shadow is scheduled to release on 1-29-19.

Ah yes, we have reached the first “did not finish” book of the year. We Cast a Shadow follows a young, black lawyer as he attempts to climb the corporate ladder while navigating the inherent racism in the system. While I recognize that these books bring important truths into the world and allow black voices to be heard, if I’m reading fiction I cannot immerse myself in the evils that I am already drowning in every day in the real world.

The very first chapter describes a party in which the four black junior associates are being asked to be as stereotypically black as they can in order to earn a promotion. The narrator arrives at the party dressed as a normal lawyer, and discovers he must perform or be fired. The host offers him an African garb costume from her in-house museum-esque collection, and through a silly African dance and subsequent nudity when the costume falls off, he runs out of the house and into a promotion to the head of the diversity committee for community outreach. There’s so much there to unpack that I was completely stunned but also not surprised when I read the scene.

And that’s just his work life. At home he is married to a white woman and they have a biracial son with a birthmark that gets bigger every day; the blackness that he has given him that grows to overtake the whiteness. The father/narrator uses creams, bleaches, and is pursuing this promotion at work to be able to afford an operation to have his son’s birthmark removed. He seems to be the only adult involved that is concerned about it, and the son goes along because he loves his dad and doesn’t completely understand what the problem is.

I see all the symbolism here that is relevant to the struggles with race and society that black people face every day. The idea that a father would become nervous the darker his son became resonates with me in a world where unarmed black men are killed so often we don’t even see them on the news anymore. Where I decided that it was enough was when drugs and squalor entered into the story, and suddenly everything became a hallucination that the narrator had to describe life through to me, the reader. I just…I don’t know. I don’t feel like I’m in a position to see this all presented in this way and be able to appreciate it. It is important to understand the difference between when something is not good and when something is not written for you.

We Cast a Shadow is well-written. The stories told present a plethora of black diasporic experience and struggle in a way that doesn’t preach, it shows you what it looks like in practice. I simply do not think that it was written for me, and that’s why I cringed my way through about 32% of it and then gave myself permission to put it down. Please do not see this review as a non-endorsement. This book is good and troubling. It was not boring and the story was very compelling. It just wasn’t for me.

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Truthwitch (Witchlands #1)

Windwitch (Witchlands #2)

Synopsis (Goodreads)

I don’t usually link to a synopsis, but I want to take my review time to talk to you about more intricate pieces of this book as opposed to “this happened! and then this happened!” because SO MUCH HAPPENS and I don’t want to get caught up in WHAT happens, I want to talk about FEELINGS caused by what happens.

I stand by my previous assessment of Dennard’s worldbuilding and character development. It is absolutely amazing that there is so much going on in the story and yet I remember all the characters, what they want, what they care about, AND I’m able to see how all of their separate stories are woven together into the larger plot. Windwitch focuses in primarily on Merik and his sister Vivia in their defense of their country Nubrevna, but both Safi’s and Iseult’s stories feed into the future of Nubrevna while letting us know that in the next books we’ll be taking the story in other directions.

You will learn more about what Iseult’s powers are all about in this book. It’s possible that she’s not a Threadwitch at all, but a Weaverwitch, a more advanced Threadwitch who can manipulate the threads and magic of other witches. Aeduan, the Bloodwitch hunting Iseult, is now working with her and believes she may be a true Voidwitch as well as one half of the mythical Cahr Awen. I find her situation compelling, but every time we get a small glimpse of what she’s really capable of, I wonder back to Safi. Is she only a Truthwitch? If she’s the other half of the Cahr Awen, destined to reawaken the Origin Wells and heal the land, what more is there that we need to learn about her magic that might be more than we think?

Dennard asks us to consider the sentiment of all for one, one for all in many different parts of our journey. Is it ever appropriate to sacrifice one person for the sake of all? Or can a single person be important enough to save at the expense of the suffering of many? Honestly Windwitch seems to show us that both are possible, that making the decision is next to impossible, and there are always consequences that you will have to live with either way. I am glad that the constant guilt machine I briefly bemoaned in my Truthwitch review seems to have ground to a halt here in Windwitch.

The way that Windwitch illustrates so many different kinds of relationships is also thoughtfully done. Parents and children, brother and sister, friendships, life-debts – all of these are played out so we can see that nothing is as simple as we think, and everything is connected. All witcheries, all people in this universe have threads that Threadwitches can see. Threads that bind, threads that break, threads that show all manner of emotion. It only makes sense that we should see how the characters that we care so much about might be working to bind themselves to one another to face an even greater foe that we have not yet even been introduced to. I can’t wait to find out what that will be.

I have preordered Bloodwitch, out in February 2019, and I caught the novella Sightwitch on a Kindle deal this past weekend. I’m into this series, and I think you should be too. Try it out and see what you think.

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