Susan

CHARLES RAFFERTY The Problem with Early Warnings People don't like to leave a party unless the house is actually on fire. Even then, if the flames are far enough away to be pretty, they'll finish their drink, take one more pass at the hors d'oeuvres. How things happen has always been unclear. Hurricanes begin in a place where no one lives. Agents of the government start to wear masks. Fascism is a word my neighbors won't use yet. They are following the law, they say, and the sirens are coming for someone else.

This hit so fucking hard today.

I think a lot of us get hope wrong. Hope, I do not believe, is an emotion. In fact, hope makes space for lots of emotions to exist alongside it. You can DO hope scared, angry, sad etc...

Hope doesn't find us. We make hope through action and struggle. It's a practice of living and is re-made daily.

This rug is so cute! I love the design and colour!

Childhood Triptych What I don't know about my childhood doesn't destroy me.

Today’s Feature:

“Childhood Triptych” by Billy-Ray Belcourt from The Idea of an Entire Life published by @carcanet.bsky.social

Read here:
poems.com/poem/childho...

It's difficult to read because the protagonist despairs so easily - he avoids action, for the most part, and easily loses himself in despair for what he's witnessing. But it's a timely story in our age of climate despair and ongoing extinctions. A beautiful, but very sad little book.

The Book*hug Press edition of The Last of Its Kind by Sibylle Grimbert sits on a woven blanket. The cover art features an 19th-century sketch of a great auk, which looks similar to a penguin in body with a larger beak and a white spot between its eyes and beak.

I recently read and recommend Sibylle Grimbert's The Last of Its Kind, translated by Aleshia Jensen. A reflective, tragic tale of an 1830s naturalist who captures a great auk, then bonds with it. As he realizes the species is going extinct, he loses faith in science, humanity, everything. #booksky

A large red amaryllis flower, one of four on the stalk. The petals are long and pointed, but overlapping so much that it looks like one solid flower. The stamens are hanging down in front, red and tipped with pollen.

One of my colleagues gave me an amaryllis bulb a few months ago, and it's finally come into full bloom. This is only the second amaryllis I've had, and the flowers are amazingly large and velvety. It's a treat to see something so beautiful when everything else is so dark and gloomy. #plantsky

Books don't tell readers who they personally are or who they are supposed to be. They do show readers a variety of characters. Implicit in that is this: "Here are some ways of being." Kids books aren't altering your kid to be someone new. They are simply showing them parts of humanity.

A sketchbook page of a cute, stylized little orange tabby cat sitting and looking smug/proud. Around them are various scribbles, doodles, other cat sketches, etc. It reads “just make something” amongst the doodles. All artwork is done in shades of orange, green, purple, and red with both paint pen and colored pencil.

Energy to take into 2026 ✏️✨

[ #cuteart #traditionalart #sketchbook ]

I wanted to see what came next: how do the separatists reintegrate with other humans? It's not going to be easy, and that conflict would be a fascinating story. The action-packed scenes were fun to read, but they were only the first step to resolving the story's problem. Still enjoyed it, though.

This novel deals with interesting moral quandaries and tries to dissect the impact of fascist indoctrination. Kyr is a genuinely unlikable protagonist, and the text highlights how no one really likes her - yet everything works out too neatly in the end. The story just needed to go a bit further.

A hardcover copy of Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh sits on a woven blanket. The dust jacket is shiny and features the novel's title in bright gold overlaying the image of three purple-coloured planets in space.

Couldn't finish This Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh before the year's end, but spent most of New Year's Day unable to put it down. The middle of the novel was thrilling with strong action scenes and plot-twisting time loops. Just wish the ending hadn't relied on so much deus ex machina. #booksky 💙📚

I read so much this year, and while quantity isn't significant, I'm still impressed by the number and range of books I managed. Memoirs were outside my scope, but I challenged myself to read some and rather liked them - with the right writer and voice, the genre can work, even for skeptics like me.

Then, for non-fiction and poetry:
- The Hollow Half by Sarah Aziza
- One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
- Son of Elsewhere by Elamin Abdelmahmoud
- a body more tolerable by jaye simpson
- I Cut My Tongue on a Broken Country by Kyu Lee

Some favourite fiction from 2025:
- The West Passage by Jared Pechaček
- The City in Glass by Nghi Vo
- Abigail by Magda Szabó
- The Cat Who Saved the Library by Sosuke Natsukawa
- The Teller of Small Fortunes by Julie Leong
- Snake-Eater by T. Kingfisher
- Other Worlds by André Alexis
#booksky 💙📚

There Will Be Bodies ebook by Lindsey Davis - Rakuten Kobo Read "There Will Be Bodies" by Lindsey Davis available from Rakuten Kobo. Ten years after the eruption of Vesuvius, the surrounding countryside lies buried and barren. But the destroyed cities a...

Book 70 of 2025 📚💙 There Will Be Bodies by Lindsey Davis, which I read in the summer, but forgot to post. The murder mystery fell flat for me, but the historical background of recovery and rebuilding efforts following the Vesuvius eruption was intricate and engrossing. #booksky

A hardcover, English translation copy of The Electric State by Simon Stålenhag rests on a woven blanket. The cover features an illustration of the protagonist leading her robot away from a much larger robot beneath the overhang of a building. Behind them is a parking lot and, more distantly desert and mountains.

Book 69 of 2025 📚💙 The Electric State by Simon Stålenhag, the story of a teenager on a quest to save her brother that's told as much by text as by the photo-realistic illustrations of an alternate 1990s haunted by rusting warships and addictive virtual reality tech. A fascinating book! #booksky

Usually, I only pick up a couple of Seth's Haunted Bookshelf each year because the quality of these 19th and 20th century stories can be patchy. This year, I grabbed all three without checking the reviews, and I was lucky that they're all strong stories, with solid plots and vivid writing.

Three small books are scattered on a Persian-style rug: The Mistress in Black, Lucky's Grove, and Lady Ferry. The covers feature pop-art style graphics with bold lines and colours that feature major scenes from each story: a woman's face, lit by a match she holds, a burning manor house, and a skeletal old woman in a gown.

Books 66-68 of 2025 📚💙 this year's additions to Seth's Haunted Bookshelf from Biblioasis: three short stories featuring a possibly-immortal lady, a teacher's ghost seeking redemption, and a Christmas tree cursed by a local tree spirit. All three had just enough chills and thrills. #booksky

It's a vicious cycle of knowing it needs doing but hating doing it and feeling stressed because it needs doing, which makes it even harder to do. Wish there was an easy fix.

a close up of a green and white sponge with purple spots Alt: A green and white sea sheep grazes on a green lawn of algae on a surface underwater.

This is the "SEA SHEEP" (Costasiella kuroshimae) & it took the old axiom: "you are what you eat" VERY literally.

It eats algae & rather than just digest them, it harvests the chloroplasts & becomes PHOTOSYNTHETIC. Solar slug!

Also, some of its cousins can rip their own heads off.

Life has thrown some horrible things at you, but that doesn't mean you're incapable or not cut out for academia. See what you can do and remember that perfect and "done" are sadly different things. (Still convincing myself of that, too.)

Congrats on the time you were able to spend on yourself today. It's so hard to do that and not be endlessly giving to others (the "endlessly" part being the problem, of course, not the giving in itself). Sending hugs!

Sorry for the typo in the first post - "moves into her aunt's house".

The main character was disturbingly relatable with her reliance on social scripts and constant second-guessing of her every action. It was refreshing to see social anxiety be depicted so realistically and - I can't think of a better word - kindly.

A library copy of Snake-Eater by T. Kingfisher sits on a blue fabric background. The cover illustration features a close-up of a road runner's face, its eye staring into the reader's soul while its beak holds a thrashing rattle snake.

Book 65 of 2025 📚💙 Snake-Eater by T. Kingfisher, about a woman who move into her aunt's house and inherits more than she bargained fors. Both cozy and chilling in turns, the story was so much fun to read. I had trouble putting it down! #booksky

Not as much as she should have! A few cute moments, but definitely underutilized.

A paperback copy of The Keeper of Magical Things rests on a decorative rug. The cover image features the protagonists - a tall blonde woman in blue robes and a shorter brunette in brown - standing together in a picturesque rural landscape.

Book 64 of 2025 📚💙 The Keeper of Magical Things by Julie Leong, a fluffy romantasy about the chances a novice mage takes to bring magic back to a village using unwanted magical artifacts. I enjoyed most of the story, but the villain was too flat and the climax too over-dramatic for me. #booksky

Seconding Notes on a Regicide! The West Passage and The City in Glass were also excellent.

A paperback copy of These Lifeless Things by Premee Mohamed is held up in front of a bookshelf. There is sadly a glare on the black cover, which features dotted-line circles surrounding a steam engine and rail cars.

Book 63 of 2025 📚💙 These Lifeless Things by Premee Mohamed, a novella with a split narrative: a woman who survived an invasion of eldritch beings and the anthropologist who fights to have her testimony valued in a pragmatic future world. A fascinating story that I highly recommend! #booksky