Homebound by Portia Elan

I read Homebound by Portia Elan because a guest on Sarah's Bookshelves recommended it. I was swayed to her side when she discussed Yesteryear as a book she didn't love, so that earned her cred in my world. 

In Homebound, we follow multiple timelines: Becks in 1983 as she grapples with her uncle's death; Yesiko in 2586 as she tries to pay off the debt she owes while taking care of the crew of her ship; and Tamar Portman in the 2070s as she opens a lab researching cutting age technology. 

The first part of this novel was immersive and I was all in. Becks is a great character, dealing with her emerging sexuality and the loss of her uncle to AIDS (or GRID as it was known then). Yesiko's storyline was so interesting. She is desperate to get rid of her debt and care for her crew, but she's not sure how to do any of it. 

But then. Hm. There are ENDLESS passages about videogames and robotic technology. ENDLESS. I really really really don't like that.  I was invested in these two characters and suddenly we're taken away from them and thrown into nonsense. I also was not entirely convinced by how the storylines were all connected in the end. 

I have hopes for this author, though. The writing and the character development were strong. I'll go back for more, hopefully with less emphasis on text-based videogames. 3/5 stars 

Lines of note:

Generation on generation of skinny ship cats, but now only Panim, the opinionated tortie who slept curled against Yeshiko's chest, chirruping even in her dreams. (page 9)

I just love it when author's actually give pets personality. Panim is a lovely character. 

I understand that this is the natural order: our teachers, our mentors die, and we become the teachers, the mentors. The mantle passes. But what is "natural" is still painful and heavy, and I sometimes want to stomp my foot and tell time to just go back. (page 66)

I'm really struggling right now with some difficult, non-bloggable things, and this line really resonated. 

Things I looked up:

Pesach plate (page 9) - a special plate containing symbolic foods eaten or displayed at the Passover Seder (seriously, my ignorance of world religions is legion)

Eugene Cernan (page 167) - an American astronaut who traveled into space three times and to the Moon twice: as pilot of Gemini 9A in June 1966, as Lunar Module pilot of Apollo 10 in May 1969, and as commander of Apollo 17 in December 1972, the final Apollo lunar landing. During the Apollo 17 mission, he became the 11th person to walk on the Moon as well as the astronaut with the longest time spent walking on the Moon; he is also the last person to walk on the Moon as of 2026. (Doesn't it feel like I should know this person?)

Hat mentions (why hats?):

matching fur hats (page 114)

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Did you know who Gene Cernan was? Do you like books with multiple timelines told hundreds of years apart? 

Five for Friday, Edition #48

I've been working on this post for weeks. Some of this is now outdated, but I'm not editing anything. You get it all.

1) The deer were back! I would really like it if they ate all the greenery in our yard. 

Hey, is that a jungle? No, it's our backyard and our algae-stained siding!

2) Do you know what Michelle sent me? A dragon the size of a teacup!! I nearly died with the cuteness. Thank you so much, Michelle. She holds a pride of place in my office.

3) Last weekend was my birthday weekend! I was a lady who lunched! On Sunday, my actual birthday, I lunched with some friends in town. On Monday, I met with Sarah, Birchie, and Kyria in Madison for a quick brunch. There was cake and presents! What a life. 

The water bottle is a thing. So, I'm sort of a picky witch about water bottles. I hate plastic ones. I don't want a straw (impossible to clean - FIGHT ME ON THIS). I have been using a dented old metal Nathan one (Nathan doesn't even make metal bottles anymore) that wobbles because of all the dents, but earlier in the summer, the carabiner clip BROKE on the lid and my husband had less and less patience for me and my busted, wobbly water bottle. USE ANOTHER ONE, he implored. 

He bought me this one. Here's the sssshhhh secret. I don't like it. I hate the mint green color. This can be fixed with a judicious use of stickers.  But more than that. The lid is plastic. I don't want my lips to touch plastic (this is a sensory thing - plastic has a *smell* and apparently no one else gets it, but I DO). Okay, I can take off the lid. Well, that's all well and good, but then I have to put the top down and IT DOESN'T LAY FLAT. 

It was a thoughtful gift, but there's a reason I was still using the busted Nathan one. 

(Also, I really am grateful he bought it for me. You know I'm going to use it until it, too, is busted. And then I'll find an old Nathan water bottle on eBay.)

4) I'm going to Indianapolis this weekend to see Garth Brooks in concert with TJC!! Woot woot! We saw him in Rockford, IL in 2014, Detroit in 2015 (we went with my mom, sister, and BIL, and they were SUCH DOWNERS - don't go to concerts with people who don't share your concert vibe), and Columbus in 2016. Having a blog with all these details is AMAZING. Anyway, I'm going to have so so so so much fun.  

5) It wouldn't be a Five by Friday post if I didn't tell you a little bit about how disappointed I am with my fellow humans. I was driving home Wednesday night after a very long workday in which I ran a training for all the faculty advisors in my college. I was looking forward to yoga and convincing my husband that a frozen pizza is a healthy dinner option. As I drove along the river, a woman was literally LYING ON THE SIDE OF THE ROAD trying to stand up and she kept falling over. A man was with her, but he seemed unable to help her up. I watched THREE CARS in front of me pass by her. I pulled over as soon as it was safe to stop and ran back to help her.

I watched ANOTHER THREE CARS drive by as I ran towards her. 

Anyway, the man and I helped her up and walked her to her car. She was shaking and her knee was terribly scraped. I asked if they wanted me to call an ambulance or run to my house (like three blocks away) to get first aid stuff. They declined and drove away. 

WHY DIDN'T ANYONE ELSE STOP? 

I honestly thought the boys on the roof situation was the last time I would deal with this. WHAT IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE? I don't think of myself as the kindest/most helpful person in the world, but I was literally crying as I drove the three blocks home. Why are we not helping people who need help? Is this just my town? I love my town. I'm a big booster for it. But maybe my town doesn't have anyone's back? I apologize for the all caps but WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK? 

The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden

Shoutout to Diane who recommended The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden when I asked for audiobook recommendations.

It is 1917. Laura Iven is a war nurse who has returned home to Halifax after she was injured. Her mother and father are killed in a terrible explosion in the port. Meanwhile, she has received confusing messages about the death of her brother Freddie at the front in Belgium. She arranges to go back to Europe in order to find out what happened to her brother.

Once there, though, Laura starts to hear rumors of a hotelier who plays violin and creates a space for men to forget about their pain and what happened to Freddie becomes less and less clear. 

Listen, I am not  usually a Great War kind of girl. I actually find most war books too repetitive and dark for me. But this one, with its faint whiff of magical realism, female bonds, and the power of family, both found and natural, hit just the right spot for me. Also, the narrators, Michael Crouch, and January LaVoy, had such lyrical voices that I never found myself drifting off, which has become quite a problem for me with audiobooks recently.

Anyway, this was a great rec. Thanks, Diane! 4/5 stars

Line of note:

"Maybe this is hell," he said, only half joking. He supposed in hell it didn't matter if you were Canadian or German. That put the war in perspective... (chapter 4)

There's a lot of foreshadowing in this line. Super interesting. 

Thing I looked up:

Halifax explosion - I linked to it up above because it's such a crucial plot point. With both of her parents killed in this explosion, Laura had nothing left in Halifax, so heading back to the warfront made sense. Without this explosion, would Laura have stayed in Halifax to recuperate from her war injury and care for her parents?

On December 6, 1917, the French cargo ship SS Mont-Blanc and the Norwegian vessel SS Imo collided in the harbor of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Laden with high explosives, Mont-Blanc caught fire and detonated, devastating the Richmond district of Halifax. At least 1,782 people, largely in Halifax and Dartmouth, were killed by the blast, debris, fires, or collapsed buildings, and an estimated 9,000 others were injured. The blast was the largest human-made explosion at the time. CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE?

WWI pillbox - a type of blockhouse, or concrete dug-in guard-post, often camouflaged, normally equipped with loopholes through which defenders can fire weapons. It is in effect a trench firing step, hardened to protect against small-arms fire and grenades, and raised to improve the field of fire. The modern concrete pillbox originated on the Western Front of World War I by the German army. 

Hat mentions (why hats?):

top hat (chapter 2)

tin hat (chapter 4, chapter 12x2)

larger hat (chapter 7)

pass the hat (chapter 7 x2)

flowered hat (chapter 11)

under her hat (chapter 13)

tipping his hat (chapter 15)

covered his face with his hat (chapter 19)

funny hats (author's note)

Do you read a lot of WWI books? Is there another one I should be reading? 

Pop Sugar Reading Challenge Update

2018
2019
2020
2021

2022 

2023

2024

2025

As many of you know, I have completed the Pop Sugar Reading Challenge every year since 2018 and this year I am making pretty good progress! However, I am now at the point in the year when I have tackled all the "easy" prompts and now I'm left with the ones I don't know exactly what my approach should be. The good news is that I have completed about 80% of the challenge! The bad news is that...well, you know. I haven't done the other 20%. 

Here is what I need help with. Do you have ideas for me?

1) A book that features a book with a platonic relationship between a man and a woman. Honestly, I had two books on my maybe list and I DNFed one and I can't find the other one in my library systems. 

2) A book about postpartum - I honestly can think of nothing less interesting to me personally, so it would have to be pretty compelling.

3) A book with a character who navigates infertility - Okay, maybe this is the something that's less interesting to me. 

4) A book about birding - I have TRIED SO HARD in this category. I have DNFed the Christian Cooper memoir, The Comfort of Crows, and The Ornithologist's Field Guide to Love. I need a romance novel where the meet cute is when they run into each other because they're both using binoculars to watch a rare bird (if that's not in a romance novel, I give that idea away for free).  WHAT IS LEFT TO READ?

5) A sapphic graphic novel - Surely there's one out there I haven't already read? The problem with this one is that the ladies on the Books Unbound podcast always recommend these and when I look at the lists of sapphic graphic novels, I've already read so many of them based on their recommendations. I don't count rereads for the challenge unless it's a requirement for a prompt. 

6) A book that will make me want to travel to Italy - Look, if there's a book that makes me even remotely consider international travel, it would have to be pretty great. Do you know any great books set in Italy? 

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All right, friends. What are your recommendations for me? 

Cleanup on Aisle Five by Ann Larson

Would it surprise anyone to learn that Sarah and I met up at the pool to discuss Cleanup on Aisle Five: Essential Work, Poverty Wages, and the View from Behind the Supermarket Register by Ann Larson last weekend?

Ann Larson needed a job during the pandemic and she was hired on at a grocery store in Utah during the pandemic as a front end manager. Then she wrote all about it. 

It was interesting and well done. But, let's be honest, Nickel and Dimed already did this (and did it better). The most revealing parts of Nickel and Dimed were the passages in which Ehrenreich talked about how the work she did impacted her life - how she couldn't eat if she had to buy medicine, how her feet and legs hurt after working, how she was existing on non-perishable foods because the only place she could afford to stay didn't have a kitchen, etc. 

I think Larson tried to do that by telling the stories of her fellow workers, but since we never really saw anything outside of the store, it was hard to tell how their working conditions really influence decisions they made in their non-working hours. 

But! This is interesting because she worked through the pandemic, so there are some glimmers about that. Also, the rise in self-checkout and how disastrous that is for the workers. All of that was new to me since I worked in a grocery store in the late 1990s/early 2000s.  There's so much in here about poverty, the precariousness of working a job that relies on a body that isn't insured, and how the lack of training leads to poor outcomes for workers and customers. There's also a weird passage where Larson suggests being a vegetarian is worse for the environment than eating meat, which made me stare in the middle distance and wonder if I was living in an alternate universe. 

This is important and I think you should read it, but I also think you should read Nickel and Dimed. 4/5 stars

Lines of note:

Many grocery workers are food insecure. A 2022 report by the Economic Roundtable showed that about three-quarters of workers at Kroger, the second-largest grocery company in the country, struggled to afford regular meals Kroger could not claim that it didn't know. Years earlier, an internal company report showed that hundred of thousands of its employees relied on food aid and other public benefits. It's not surprising perhaps that federal food aid programs are acting as a subsidy to low-wage employers. The nation's largest retailer, Walmart, for example, took in more than $26 billion in its customers' food aid in 2024 alone. (page 22)

It feels like a scam, doesn't it? Why aren't we paying people living wages? 

Another cashier suffered from a toothache so painful that she could barely eat. "I need a root canal," the twenty-five-year-old told me. Since she did not have dental insurance, she was waiting for a spot to open up a dental school...A week later, I asked her if she had seen a dentist. She was still waiting for an appointment. "The good new is, I eat ice cream for dinner. It's the only food that doesn't hurt." (page 26)

As someone with my own dental woes, I hate this. Why isn't dental insurance just health insurance? Hell, even if someone doesn't have health insurance, shouldn't they have a pain free mouth? (I just sat for a minute and wondered what a pain free mouth would be like.)

In Work, Retire, Repeat, the labor economist [Teresa Ghilarducci] described a "tale of two retirements." While the affluent are living longer, healthier lives, and retiring with a nest egg and their dignity, low-income workers are facing destitution. Since almost half of families have no retirement savings, millions must work until they die. Many would-be retirees are punching clocks in warehouses or toiling as home health aides. (page 61-62)

Is anyone else realllly sad when their cashier is past retirement age? On one hand, maybe they are doing it because they want to stay busy. On the other hand, how are we, as a society, not taking care of our most vulnerable?

Most shoppers took delays in stride and laughed when I joked that "this machine has been grumpy today!" But the few that did not could ruin a shift. (page 96)

I'm preaching to the choir because all my blog readers are awesome, but can we all agree to be nice to service workers?

...wage theft also implicates those of us who do not work in supermarkets. TGS shoppers benefited from Whitney's unpaid labor. Everyone who came into the store had a better experience when she worked off the clock to ensure that employees got their schedules on time or when she worked from home. Customer service was propped up by exploitation. (page 184-185)

I hate this. 

Hat mentions (why hats?):

pull a rabbit out of a hat (page 92)

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Have you ever worked in a grocery store? Do you use the self-check machines? Have you read Nickel and Dimed? 

Five for Friday, Edition #47

1) Last weekend we went to the Wisconsin Dells with my husband's family. There were twelve adults and eleven children in one VRBO. It was an eight bedroom, four bath building with a kitchen that was smaller than it probably should have been, but there was an arcade with old-fashioned game cabinets in the basement. If you aren't from the upper Midwest, you might not have heard of the Dells, so let me describe it to you. It's a weird tourist-y area with lots of theme parks, especially water parks, and duck boat rides. There's also anything your childlike wonder would like to do - go-karts, ziplining, mini golf, whatever. 

VRBO decor

Our niblings are aged nine to nineteen and every single one of them had a fabulous time. 

If anyone wants to know, we went to Noah's Ark on a Thursday. It was a typical water park with long lines, but the kids had a good time. We rented a cabana and there was always an adult there for the kids to check in with. On Friday, we went to Land of Natura, which is not a typical water park. It's a man-made salt lake with huge inflatables that you climb on and because the lake is deep (up to 25 feet in places), our boys spent most of the day practicing dives, backflips, and somersaults. It was also COLD AND RAINY when went (what do I mean by cold? mid-60s! in July!), so that kept down the crowds. I swear our party made up about a third of the people there. Regardless, most kids said Land of Natura was their favorite part of the weekend, so if you're in the Dells and you have confident swimmers, this is a good option. 

2) Dells Escape Rooms - We had two big groups do different escape rooms. One group was a bunch of the kids with their grandfather and his wife. The rest was our oldest niece (19) and people of my generation. Both teams managed to escape, although I have to admit our room only had like twenty seconds to spare. LOL. If you like escape rooms, these ones are pretty fun. (You might note that I'm wearing a hoodie and my husband is wearing pants. WE WERE ALL VERY COLD. None of us were prepared for how cold it was that weekend.) 

3) Where were the girls when we were in the Dells? I'm glad you asked. Zelda stayed at home and our neighbor came by every day to give her wet food and clean her box. ALSO! SHE READS TO THE CAT. No wonder Zelda ignored us completely when we came home.

Hannah? Hannah was at the swank boarding place just outside Chicago where they take 80 pictures of her doing nothing every day.  Maybe I should have put all these photos in some sort of collage, BUT NO, you have to scroll by each one. 

Nicole talks about how Rex comes back from boarding like he was at a frat party with messed up fur and fleas or whatever. Hannah came back with a powerful thirst, a smell like she has never had a bath in her life, and refusing to eat food. So, that's something, I guess. 

4) Our side and backyard recently became deer daycare. I cannot stress enough to you how crazy this is because WE LIVE IN TOWN. ON A BUSY ROAD. The deer overpopulation here is nuts. 

5) Anniversaries - Earlier this week was the one year anniversary of my mother's death. I am, in a very healthy fashion, ignoring this fact.

6) Giveaway winners - The giveaway winners are Lisa and Jenny! Congratulations! I'll send those packages out in the mail sometime in the next week or so. 

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Have you ever done an escape room? Had a fawn bed down in your yard? Been to Wisconsin Dells? 

What I Spent: July 2026

As a reminder, my husband pays the "big bills" like mortgage, phone, car, and electricity. I pay for groceries and the pets and that somehow evens things out. We recently switched so that he pays for Costco trips. Here's how things shook out last month.

Cars ($36.36, 1.4%) - I bought gas once.

Donation ($40, 1.6%) - I won an item at a silent auction at a fundraiser. *shrug*

Clothing ($45.90, 1.8%) - Look, I bought a shirt at the Grown Up Book Fair. I COULDN'T RESIST.

Eating out ($51, 2%) - I bought coffee FIVE times, went to lunch once, and got an appetizer at a happy hour once. Also, there was food at trivia at the book fair. #noregrets

Entertainment ($59, 2.3%) - This is my Spotify subscription, a book I bought, some craft supplies I bought to make friendship bracelets with my nieces when we were on vacation, and giant dice. 

Fitness ($70.60, 2.8%) - Fitness classes. 

Savings ($300, 11.9%) - Sometimes you think you'll do better at savings and YOU NEVER DO. 

Bills ($306.91, 12.2%) - Water/sewer and insurance for the house and cars.

Pets ($325.20, 12.9%) - This is food for both of them and some steroids for the cat. Don't worry, though, if you thought "that seems low for NGS's girls" because I had to pick up Hannah from boarding where she was for six days which means I've already spent more than this in August. 

Personal care ($356.92, 14.2%) - I got a hair cut, a pedicure, and had to buy things like toothbrush heads and sunscreen, which is stupidly expensive. I also got manicures for me and my husband and a pedicure for my niece when we were on vacation. YOLO, you know? 

Gifts ($396.29, 15.7%) - This was crazy even for me, but blame the book fair, me buying more than $180 worth of stamps to avoid a price hike, birthday, and graduation gifts. When I write it out, it actually seems more than reasonable. 

Groceries ($533.70, 21.2%) - People in this house continue to eat EVERY SINGLE DAY.

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Did you buy new clothing last month? Have to buy something boring like toothbrush heads that upset you by being stupid expensive?