sarie15

scruloose and I did make it to the little farmers' market down the road for its opening day of the season, and even managed to get there earlier than later! (I think it's open from 8 to 1, and we probably were there...a bit after 10?)

We made it home with two quarts of strawberries and one of cherries, new potatoes, a dozen eggs, and boneless chicken thighs, plus a bee balm for the garden, which we quickly tucked into a fairly open space in our little garden bed yesterday evening. (What was there before? UNKNOWN. Will I manage to reconstruct it from old posts or something? Also unknown. But hey, a plant!)

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Reading: I finished Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi), which was fantastic. On the fiction front, I followed it up with Tamsyn Muir's novella Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower (not really my thing--I continue to rarely bond with novellas, I guess--but interestingly done), Sacha Lamb's When the Angels Left the Old Country (marvelous), and Sofia Samatar's The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain (again, didn't really bond emotionally, but it executed what it was doing beautifully).

Non-fiction: David Chang and Priya Krishna's Cooking at Home: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Recipes (And Love My Microwave), which is, like...primarily actually a David Chang book that Priya Krishna did a ton of heavy-lifting assisting on (which may be very normal for co-written cookbooks, but in this case she was interjecting and clarifying in her own voice as well as doing a fair bit of the actual writing in his voice, and it was all very transparent that it was being done that way, but also a little odd to read). I think I bought this as a sale ebook before hearing that Chang (the Momofuku guy) is something of an asshole, but then when I was reading it, it felt really promising as a book that might be genuinely useful for me (and even by cookbook standards, its ebook is terribly formatted), so I was pleasantly surprised to readily find a used half-price hard copy available on line, which is winging its way to me now. I've also made sure that Krishna's own Indian-Ish: Recipes and Antics from a Modern American Family is now on the wishlist where I keep an eye out for ebook sales.

And now I'm reading An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace by Tamar Adler, which is a cookbook mostly in the form of essays on cooking as a thoughtful/mindful practice.

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Watching: One more Murderbot episode to go in this season, and oh, I hope we get a second one. I'm going to miss this little show.

We finished watching the second season of Kingdom (the historical zombies k-drama), which I found very satisfying. The ending very much sets up a subsequent season, and there's a movie out that fills in the backstory of the person/people we glimpse at the end of season 2 who would presumably be extremely central in any further season, but I don't think we feel inspired to watch said backstory movie unless a third season of the show is ever announced and it becomes relevant in that way.

A weekend post never happened last weekend, but here's what I'm been reading over the last couple of weeks. (Watching has been basically unchanged: we're up to date on Murderbot and continuing to slowly work through Leverage season 4.)

I finished reading Tchaikovsky's Service Model, which I thought was...fine? It was interesting enough, but if it had been my first exposure to his work it wouldn't have made me rush out and try more right away.

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I read and liked Margaret Owen's Little Thieves in April, and Jenny Hamilton on Bluesky was recently talking about the trilogy as a whole (and this reminds me that now I can go read her "How to Break a Heart: Subverting the Hero’s Breakup Trope"), so when I decided a week or so ago to finally burn through all of my Kobo points and clear at least a bit of my wishlist, I included the second book, Painted Devils, which I enjoyed enough to want to read the third (Holy Terrors) right away. I try not to buy many ebooks at full price, though, given how many more I buy overall than I'm ever going to manage to read, and thankfully my library not only has it but had it available right away.

Consider that a recommendation, but beyond it I'm just going to quote the non-spoilery part of Jenny's essay that describes the series (and the essay then details how things stood at the end of book 2, so consider that the spoiler warning):

This year brought us Margaret Owen’s Holy Terrors. It’s the third in a trilogy about an angry, selfish girl named Vanja who made it through a lifetime of neglect and abuse with a crop of emotional and physical scars, a talent for picking pockets, the favor of the gods (sometimes), and a healthy hostility for rich people. Against both their better judgment, she falls in love with prefect Emeric Conrad, whom she variously describes as a “human civics primer,” an “accounting ledger made flesh,” and an “intolerable filing cabinet.”

(Here the author of this piece has been compelled to delete a ten thousand–word manifesto about the greatness of the Little Thieves series. If you like the TV show Leverage, or you enjoy digging your teeth into solid character development, or you just hate rich people, you should read it. The first book is Little Thieves. Thank me later.)

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For a dramatic change of pace, I'm now reading Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 by M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi (also a with-points acquisition), which I keep wanting to file under non-fiction, although the title will clearly tell you that it's speculative fiction. (IIRC I learned about it from skygiants' post.) Its fictional interviews build a distressingly plausible picture of global collapse through this decade and the couple to come, but also offer glimpses into how we could come out on the other side, if we're willing to largely raze and rebuild ~human society~ in a way that actually takes care of people. (The book came out in...2022?...so it in no way accounts for the most recent and current forms of the political hellscape.)

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On the non-fiction side, I read Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen, a book of essays and corresponding recipes that I'd previously read maybe ten years ago. Colwin died in 1992 (I think I've got that right), and this book (and the follow-up, More Home Cooking) is a food-writing classic for good reason, although also very much of its place and time--very American, very '80s.

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(The rest of my using-all-my-Kobo-points haul: The Hands of the Emperor, We Are All Completely Fine, Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower, All Under Heaven: Recipes from the 35 Cuisines of China, and Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World. Did this put a visible dent in my Kobo wishlist [which is a relatively curated list of books I keep an eye on for preorder purposes and sighting sales]? Yes. Has the dent since been filled in? Also yes.)