2026: Saturday October 3: Third Quarter Reading Roundup

 Here we go: 

Broome County Public Library

Richard Powers, Playground, (2024). In which Powers tries to do for oceans what he did for forests in The Overstory. He's a master of interweaving multiple characters back and forth in time. There's a lot of blow-your-mind stuff about the amount and variety of life in the oceans. I don't think I loved it as much as The Overstory, I felt the themes leaned closer to the preachy and it wasn't as shockingly different now, in the era of Ocean Fiction, that The Overstory was back in 2018. This feels like a petty review, because this is an imaginative and beautiful book. 

One of my writing group members was giving away a box of books and I pulled this out because I remember reading some Willis years ago and enjoying it. 

Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog, 1998. Connie Willis, if I remember correctly, does a lot of time travel. The cover blurb comps John Irving and John Kennedy Toole, but I'd say it is more of a Douglas Adams P.G. Wodehouse mashup. It is entertaining, very meta about the cosy mystery genre, but I would not say it is deep in any way that I felt in my bones. I took this book on vacation, and it was perfect for that. 

From our own bookshelves. 

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day, (1989). Hard to believe I'd never read this, but I guess I had other things on my mind in 1989. I chose my writing class this fall based on the fact that the instructor assigned it because I have wanted to read it for a while. It is, indeed, genius. Although, if, like that one person in my class, you claim to find anything "British" to be pretentious, well, I can see how the Downton Abbification and Bridgertonization of everything might lead you to feel that way, but this book is worth sticking with because it goes so much further and deeper.

Autumn Leaves Used Books, Ithaca

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time, 2015. I've had mixed experiences with Tchaikovsky but I'd seen more that one person say this was one of their favorites, so I gave it a go. It was good. Not brilliant, but good. I kept reading. I was curious how it would end. I just learned this very minute that it is the first in a trilogy and maybe I'll read the others, but I won't go out of my way to search them out. 

Broome County Public Library

Sarah Cypher, The Skin and its Girl, 2024. I wanted to like this but I didn't and I didn't finish it. 

These were all instructor desk copies.

Now we get to the heavy stuff. Next week is mid-term break, and my class has read five books so far this semester. I picked them by identifying unit topics in the New York State Social Studies curriculum framework, then looking for prize-winning academic histories written in the past 10 (or so) years. Some of them I assigned when I taught this class back in 2024, some are new. As in 2024, the best most recent books are getting at stories that haven't been traditionally centered in tellings of American history. 

Elizabeth Fenn, Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People, 2014. I taught this before and thought it was impressive. My students this semester, though, seemed to want more of an argument from her. And I get it, there was a lot of one-thing-after-another, but it did layer towards a story of cultural resilience in the face of invasion by Europeans, rats, and smallpox. 

Jennifer Morgan, Reckoning With Slavery, Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic, 2021. This was a challenging read, very theoretical and dense. It had an argument that made sense, but which was based on very deliberately reading a lot more into the sources than perhaps they can hold. 

Robert Parkinson, Thirteen Clocks: How Race United the Colonies and Made the Declaration of Independence, 2021. I taught this before, remembered thinking it was good. It had some fascinating moments, and I buy the overall point that patriot unity had to be manufactured by revolutionary leaders. It was a little single minded though.  

Michael Hattem, Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution, 2020. Last time I taught this my students didn't like it, but they kept referencing it through the entire rest of the semester, so I figured it might be worth reading again. It is dense intellectual history that didn't have to be as boring as it was. I wouldn't teach it again. 

My desk copy never arrived and the university only had this in an e-edition (boo!), but somehow the Broome County Public Library had a copy. 

Christina Snyder, Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson, 2019. This was a superb book, a fascinating story, told in an accessible style, and with an argument that feels very relevant. It centers around a school called Choctaw Academy in Kentucky in the 1820s and 1830s and I can't even begin to tell you all the things it touches on.  Although, one thing I am reminded about by this and nearly all these books: rivers are important. 

Phew, that was a lot. More than I realized. I'm going to need second breakfast to refuel. 

2026: Sunday September 27: Twenty Three

Twenty Three is a great prime number. Eleven is interesting enough, Seventeen is a cliche, but Twenty Three, you don't see Twenty Three as often. 

Today is our Twenty Third wedding anniversary. It's a rainy fall day and I'm making two kinds of soup (pumpkin and chicken vegetable), one of which we will eat later with cheese date scones (a la my father).

I went looking for photos, one from each year, and that is harder than you'd imagine, or maybe you know exactly how hard it is because you also understand that one person generally holds the camera while the other poses. Also, I got as far as 2016 and then it was time to go for our walk, and while I was walking I decided that twenty three photos was too many to share. So here, instead, are seven. Which is a good prime number itself. 

On the day itself. I did love that dress. Purple sequins! 

2004, apparently. Gosh, we were young. 

2005. This has Ella and Dutchess in it also, but they're part of the family too. 

2010. Off for a winter walk. 

2012. Oregon. Ella again! And some sort of stag in the distance.

2013. Oregon again. I think the rest of the family were being dragged around the lake on inner tubes, but we are both more sit-in-the-shade-and-read people. It does help to have this in common. 

2026: The most recent selfie of us in my camera reel. San Diego Airport. It was over-airconditioned, and so Michael bought this hoodie in the terminal, and we both think he can carry pink pretty well. 

Sunday September 20: Teaching

 I am teaching two classes this semester. One is easy - it's a graduate seminar in American history for students in the Masters in Teaching program. I mean, it is a lot of reading, but once I picked the books, I set it up so they lead the discussions. As one of them said last week, "this is like book club!" and they sounded happy about that. The most annoying thing is that half of them bought e-books and so want to have their laptops open during class which is a distraction to them and everyone around them. 

I took this selfie very quickly a couple of weeks ago when I realized I was outside the room where I had taken my very first class in Binghamton, way back when. It wasn't called "HarpurEdge," (whatever that is) then and there was no cute mascot and I looked, well, a lot younger. Every now and then I think about the variety of iterations of me on this campus in the intervening thirty-seven years and go "huh."

The other course is more work. It is the seminar that the students currently doing their student teaching take, and there's a substantial multi-part state-mandated assessment that I have to get them through. So class is me saying things like "what does the reading say about developing transferable understandings and designing strong inquiry questions?" while my students say things like "yesterday a seventh grader punched the assistant principal in the face."

2026: Saturday September 12: Science

Science is weird, or, as my plumber put it, "different metals don't like to touch." I googled his exact phrase and after I scrolled past a lot of the crap that passes for results these days, I found a metal fabricator's site that explained galvanic corrosion, which is what has been happening quietly in the wall behind my bathroom sink for the past 50 years or so as a steel drain pipe nestled snuggly next to a copper supply pipe until making their antagonistic relationship known to us via the water pouring down through our kitchen light fixtures that I showed you last week. 

The plumber was very happy to pause so I could take photos to send to the insurance company. I think he liked that I was interested. 

Insurance won't pay for the plumbing work, but we are expecting they'll pay to fix most of the holes the plumber (Derek) had to make to find and fix the issue. There's all this smashed tile behind the vanity, and a ragged gaping maw in the kitchen ceiling down below, where Derek began his search for the offending pipe. He felt better about smashing tile when I said I thought the previous owners had kept a box of the tile and he followed me out to the garage to make sure, and yes, twenty three years after we moved in and I never threw it out, so we have a couple of dozen replacements that will do nicely. (And also a box of the kitchen floor tiles and the downstairs bathroom tiles. Never tidy the garage, people, it's a treasure trove in there). 

Ella did politely ask if that 1990s decor was what we still wanted to live with, and sure, if this was our forever house, this would be the time to remodel the entire bathroom into something way cooler. But I don't have it in me right now to pick out a new color scheme and decide how wide of a bathtub we'd like and monitor the quality of the work. Some people love that stuff, but I just want it all put back tidy and functional so we can move on with our lives. 

God knows what it must be like to have a real disaster hit your house. The bureaucracy alone would do me in. 

Now I'm off to buy a new clothes dryer because the old one has stopped working since it is gas-powered, we're just going to replace it with electric rather than get it fixed. 

2026: Saturday September 5: Things break.

It's a privilege to own things but that doesn't make it any less of a pain when they break. Some valve in the car's transmission that means I'm without a car for a long weekend? A pipe in the upstairs bathroom that will require tearing out the kitchen ceiling and force me to project manage four different tradespeople and the insurance company? None of it is the end of the world, but it takes up time, emotions, decision-making-energy, interacting-with-other-people-energy, not to mention money, all of which I'd rather be spending elsewhere. 

Alfie was also rather put out by the kitchen situation.

It is nice, though, when the co-owner of the plumbing company remembers that I taught her daughter and we have a nice chat about how Emily is teaching elementary school down in Delaware and just got moved from a first grade classroom to third grade, and that might not seem like much of a difference, but first graders and third graders are in fact very different animals. 

Honestly, it just feels like it's been an odd few weeks all round. Here is our street during a torrential downpour on Wednesday. Michael was on a bus on his way to campus at this exact moment, and live-texted his situation to me, including the drama of residents a few streets up from us who stood in the street blocking the bus because they thought its wake as it pushed through the water would flood into their houses. 

2026: Sunday August 30: Lightning.

I don't really remember lightning growing up. Plenty of misty damp rain and cool sunshine and cutting breezes off the southern oceans. But none of the drama of a thunderstorm pushing in from the west, built up from a days worth of continental weather pressures. Lightning was one of the exciting things about moving to New York State, even if the storms it came from forced me to become a morning exerciser. (That, and the muggy heat).

We had a massive storm on Thursday night. Lightning so close and thunder so loud it shook the house and woke us up. And then something hit the pole across the street and sparks literally flew everywhere and then it all went dark, and I reported our outage to the utility and they came at about 4 in the morning in loud bright trucks and fixed it all and who know how any of it works, it's a miracle of electrons and organizational communications. 

This might not look like much but at midnight it was pretty dramatic. 

Then I went for a walk the next morning like usual, and was surprised there wasn't more tree carnage. But what carnage I did find was pretty dramatic. 

Tree down in the park, next to the statue of George F. Johnson. Not visible is the guy with the off leash and very loud beagle who is in the park every morning and is honestly the reason I tend to avoid it. 

2026: Monday August 24: Someone is eating my tomatoes

Yesterday there was a half eaten tomato by my front steps, which answered a lot of questions about why my tomatoes weren't producing as well as they should. It isn't just the oddly cooler-than-usual summer, it's also the critters. Probably the squirrels, since the tomatoes are too big for a chipmunk to lug around to the front of the house.

My over-the-back neighbor trimmed some of her bushes and now my hosta is getting too much sun. Oh well.

This dude isn't helping the situation the way I'd expect. We're calling him Ginger, and he's been a regular backyard visitor since early summer. He looks like he's hunting, but he's clearly not worrying whoever is taking my tomatoes too much.