What I Read

It’s been a slow reading month as I headed back to work, but I finally knocked out the first in what are three planned memoirs by Bill Gates, Source Code. Despite defaulting into the Apple ecosystem for the last 20 years, and despite Microsoft’s less than stellar legal history, I’ve long held a fascination with the early days of personal computers and Microsoft’s operating systems. I leapt at the chance to snag a pair of Microsoft themed Crocs for their 50th anniversary this year, and I have a Dell Dimension running MS-DOS and Windows 98 in my office, which I use for my writing and clipart creations, not to mention for playing dozens of old PC games like Putt Putt Goes to the Moon, Jump Start 3rd Grade, and Rockett’s New School. All that is to say that Bill Gates is my least disliked billionaire. Admiration isn’t the right word, but I do respect that he is one of the few billionaires who doesn’t consider his wealth a proxy for his intelligence.

Photograph by Deborah Feingold

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What I Read

It’s been a pretty productive reading month as I close in on 30 days of being furloughed from work. I hit my unofficial goal of reading 40 books for the year and knocked out a few that have been on my ‘to-read’ list for years, including Ray Bradbury’s classic dark fantasy, Something Wicked This Way Comes. I never knew Bradbury could be so lyrical. Everything about this book was aesthetic even in its ugliness and sensual even in its horror, and I think it’s going to become a yearly autumnal reread for me.

“No such place as Heck. But hell’s right here under ‘A’ for Alighieri.”
“Allegory’s beyond me,” said Jim.

I also read the first two books in Austin Kleon’s Artist trilogy, Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work. I’ve mentioned feeling creatively uninspired lately and these both helped push me to look for new creative inspirations and figure out how to come to grips with sharing my work online. I’m looking forward to keeping going next month with his final book in the series, Keep Going.

What I Watched

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I’ve been reading a lot of pieces lately on the virtue of unplugging. Of downgrading our devices and getting offline. A recent Washington Post article detailed a group of would-be neo-luddites experimenting with a Month Offline which included an oath, a makeshift lock box for your smartphone, and a TCL flip phone with a replacement phone number and T9 texting instructions. The irony wasn’t lost on me that I’d purchased the same phone last month in my own attempt to reshape my relationship with modern technology. The article in turn led me to August Lamm, an “anti-tech activist” who has almost 200,000 followers across Twitter, Instagram, and Substack. One of her most recent viral articles is about selling her laptop and committing to only using a computer at the public library.

These are all wonderful ideas. But they are also privileged and exclusionary.

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This one hurts.

15 years ago, when I was a student at the University of Washington in Seattle, I met Jane Goodall and she changed the trajectory of my career and my life. I had transferred to UW to study animal behavior and follow in her footsteps, but I struggled with the hard sciences. Especially chemistry. I was filled with doubt and anxiety about the future and Jane took the time to talk with me and give me some advice. She shared the realities of the field and asked what I was passionate about. I mentioned my love of books and reading and sharing information with others, and she set me on the path to changing my major to English and eventually becoming a librarian. She also taught me that passion and compensation do not need to go hand in hand, that you can volunteer for the causes that matter to you without making a career out of them. That’s why I plant coral or pick up trash when I go scuba diving and I participate in citizen science projects when I garden or hike. I will never forget how Jane took the time to sit patiently with me while I unloaded my worries onto her.

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What I Read

I officially started my graduate certificate program in science communication, so now that I’m back in school, most of my reading is for class. I'm reading Ian Boyd’s Science and Politics along with essays and articles about the politicization of science and the scientization of politics. It’s fascinating but also mentally tiring. As a brain break, my fun reading has been pretty light this month. I picked up R.L. Stine’s latest installment in the House of Shivers series, The Last Sleepover, at the Library of Congress National Book Festival. I haven’t read the other books in this series yet, but I really enjoyed this one! Siblings Rory and Lily move into an old rundown home that their parents have spent months renovating and outfitting with all the latest technology, including a smart device called Mastermind that controls everything. But what happens when something sinister takes over Mastermind? Several years ago, Stine spoke about the challenges of writing scary stories in a modern world:

"You have to get rid of the phone when you’re writing the book. Everyone has a phone now and everyone can just call for help."

My middle grade WIP is a Black Mirror meets The Baby-sitters Club series, and the first book centers around a cell phone, so I found this advice a little discouraging. If The Last Sleepover is any indication, Stine has changed his tune and has leaned into the spooky stories we can tell with modern technology.

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What I Read

I started the month with Neil Postman’s 40 year old classic Amusing Ourselves to Death. The book examines our relationship to television and the bleeding of entertainment into education, politics, journalism, and more. It’s scarily prescient for today’s algorithmically-driven media consumption. "People will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think." The month was bookended with Amanda Montell’s The Age of Magical Overthinking, written with such meticulously chosen turns of phrase that I laughed out loud at several points for just how clever she is and wore out my highlighter. Other highlights include a handful of the Who Was/What Is series as I do research for my own manuscript in the series, including What Do We Know About the Mystery of D.B. Cooper? and Who Is R.L. Stine?.


Stolen Sharpie Revolution gave me some insights into crafting my first zine and Rebel Girl had me deep diving into the Riot grrrl zines at the DC Punk Archive. My top read this month was the new middle grade novel The Anxious Exile of Sara Salt by Gabrielle Prendergast. It features a young protagonist, Sara, with selective mutism who moves in with her half-sister after her brother is born prematurely and has to stay in the ICU. Sara encounters an array of characters as her half-sister strives to build a community of shipping container homes for the city’s unhoused population. Sara is honest and introspective about her struggles and finds clever ways to use her voice to speak up for the things that matter most.

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