wednesday reading meme: finally on wednesday for once!
Jun. 25th, 2025 11:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thevagabondexpresswhat i just finished: the last hours books 1 and 2 (chain of gold and chain of iron). i hate the third book so i refuse to reread it but the first two in the series are darlings of my heart. also the rest of perilous courts. i've never been a big fan of prince of agony, i like it just fine but its ending and its smut scenes both feel . . . unsatisfying compared to the rest of the series? i understand why she made the choices that she made but it felt like it needed to be longer, and personally i would've liked it to be a little less closed door.
what i'm reading now: the mortal instruments book one (city of bones). i'm going back slowly through all my favorite shadowhunters books :)
what's next: the rest of the mortal instruments, and the infernal devices. i miss those books so bad so i need to reread them again. after that? dracula. i need to catch up with dracula daily and besides, it's just a good book in its own right. i've never been able to finish it but i shall keep trying if it kills me. and then i shall finish elizabeth kostova's the historian, even if i have to do it as a ghost.
what i'm reading now: the mortal instruments book one (city of bones). i'm going back slowly through all my favorite shadowhunters books :)
what's next: the rest of the mortal instruments, and the infernal devices. i miss those books so bad so i need to reread them again. after that? dracula. i need to catch up with dracula daily and besides, it's just a good book in its own right. i've never been able to finish it but i shall keep trying if it kills me. and then i shall finish elizabeth kostova's the historian, even if i have to do it as a ghost.
witch moment :)
Jun. 23rd, 2025 02:34 pmthevagabondexpressi don't know if that nightmare i had yesterday was a heat-induced stress dream or a warning so i'm getting out *both* the liquid iv and the spellbook
science brain says even if the latter eventually turns out to be an irrational impossibility, placebo effect is still a wonderful thing
speaking of, there is no better feeling than asking the goddesses about your situation and basically being told "girl (gn), you're fucking badass and you have it handled and we have your back"
That art show thing I mentioned last post
Jun. 22nd, 2025 07:55 pmgenartiI posted a while ago about how I'd been really getting into pottery this year. That remains true, and shows no signs of stopping. It's just so fun! I still take a 3-hour class once a week at a member-owned studio near me; I think wistfully about spending more time on it too, but for various reasons including but not limited to the busyness of my life in general, that dedicated weekly slot is what works right now.
Back in late February, I spotted a flyer that someone had hung up on the studio bulletin board. It was a call for Boston-area artists to submit art inspired by Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, as part of an art show and book circle event co-organized by two local stores, The Local Hand and JustBook-ish.
I'd been meaning to read Parable of the Sower for ages, and the idea of doing a pottery piece inspired by a book seemed really fun -- like a Yuletide prompt, but for physical objects. Also, if your piece was accepted, you got a $500 stipend and 75% of the sale price if your piece sold, and let's be real, that was also extremely motivating.
And motivation was useful! Because the deadline was just over a month away. Pottery has a lot of built-in wait time while things dry, get fired, etc, so on a once-a-week schedule that was going to be pretty tight.
So I read the book, and loved it -- I'd been told that it was brilliant, which it is, and that it's brutal, which it is, but all of the (accurate!) discussions of its brutality hadn't conveyed the fierce pragmatism and focus of how Butler writes hope and community, and that's what I loved most -- and by the next week, I had a plan.
( About my piece, and the process, and also noodling about pottery and art -- this got very long )
Back in late February, I spotted a flyer that someone had hung up on the studio bulletin board. It was a call for Boston-area artists to submit art inspired by Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, as part of an art show and book circle event co-organized by two local stores, The Local Hand and JustBook-ish.
I'd been meaning to read Parable of the Sower for ages, and the idea of doing a pottery piece inspired by a book seemed really fun -- like a Yuletide prompt, but for physical objects. Also, if your piece was accepted, you got a $500 stipend and 75% of the sale price if your piece sold, and let's be real, that was also extremely motivating.
And motivation was useful! Because the deadline was just over a month away. Pottery has a lot of built-in wait time while things dry, get fired, etc, so on a once-a-week schedule that was going to be pretty tight.
So I read the book, and loved it -- I'd been told that it was brilliant, which it is, and that it's brutal, which it is, but all of the (accurate!) discussions of its brutality hadn't conveyed the fierce pragmatism and focus of how Butler writes hope and community, and that's what I loved most -- and by the next week, I had a plan.
( About my piece, and the process, and also noodling about pottery and art -- this got very long )