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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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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