Sunday Links, Mostly

I wanted to check in this Sunday, even though I don’t have a whole lot to say that is of any real substance. I’ve been reading, slowly but excitedly, probably too many books at once. Last week Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby floored me; now I’m reading Jo Walton’s Necessity, and keep accidentally starting new non-fiction titles alongside it. I’m also reading Karen Brodine’s poetry collection Woman Sitting at the Machine, Thinking, about which I suspect I’ll have a lot more to say. Other than that, I’m mostly still thinking about this summer and all that it signified, and enjoying the last of the warm, golden evenings with stops at the park after work. My life has changed a lot in the past year or so; I want to make sense of it through books and then perhaps write about it, but it’s been a slow process.

Yesterday a friend and I went to a used bookshop I’d only been to once before, right after I moved here four years ago. It’s slightly out of the way from where I live and work, so I never happen to just wander past, and somehow I never made the effort to stop by again. I walked out with what just might be the greatest pile of used bookshop finds in my life, which leaves me wondering if visiting more often would be a terrible or an excellent idea. In all seriousness, I’m so excited that I found all these books. Then I came home and spotted a black squirrel in my garden as I was cooking dinner. It was a good day.

Things I’ve been reading:

Like so much of the rest of the world, I’ve been obsessed with Blonde these past few weeks. This NPR discussion has some interesting bits about how the album grapples with hegemonic masculinity.

V for Volunteer — a dystopian reality. No surprises here, but it’s still dire reading.

Dawn Foster’s piece on zero-hours contracts is not new, but it’s still a good antidote to all the rhetoric of context-free “choice” I keep seeing floating around.

Sandra Gilbert writes about Adrienne Rich for The American Scholar.

Laurie Penny on work:

Our cultural insistence that paid work is the surest route to well-being and dignity has little basis in fact. For many millions of people, the modern workplace is a blunt insult to both body and soul, but we are invited by our bosses and leaders to agree that exhaustion is a sign of weakness and that despair is a mark of moral deficiency. It should not take a spate of suicides for us to begin to question that logic.

Mine is fortunately a healthy work environment, for the most part, but still: yes.

I really enjoy Briallen Hopper’s writing, and can’t wait for her forthcoming essay collection. Here’s what she wrote about Girls on Fire.

This moved me: What Remains: Remembering Michelle Cliff, Beth Brant, and Stephania Byrd by Julie R. Enszer.

More words soon, I hope.