Angelfall (Penryn & the End of Days #1) by Susan Ee

I must have checked out Angelfall by Susan Ee at least three times from the library and I just kept sending it back unread, but I needed it for the "book by a self-published author" Pop Sugar Reading Challenge prompt and I told myself I would read it this time. 

And so I did on one cold November afternoon. 

Penryn is trying to keep her family together. Six weeks after the angels of the apocalypse arrived, it's tough out there for humans and Penryn's mom is battling with mental health issues and her seven-year-old sister is in a wheelchair. Penryn finds an allyship with an angel after her sister is kidnapped by other angels and they try to find her sister.

I don't know, friends. This was readable, but I suspect that there's going to be angel/human romance happening later in this series and I am not here for it. 

The writing was fine. The story was fine if a tiny bit predictable. Maybe I don't want to read about the apocalypse right now. Maybe I don't want to think about biological warfare. Maybe I don't want my fantasy to be so serious. It's me, not the book.

It was fine! Fine! 3.5/5 stars

Hat mentions (why hats?): 

I tip my bag of frozen peas at them like a hat as I try to step between them. (page 119)

Several of the angels going into the club are in old-fashioned gangster zoot suits complete with felt hats and jaunty feathers. (page 177)

Life Poem

Kari and Ally both wrote a life poem based on this template, so if it's good enough for them, it's good enough for me. I'm no poet, but I'm here to pretend. 

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Fifth grade photo. Love that laser background. 1990ish?

Where I'm From (Original poem by George Ella Lyon)

I am from overfilled ashtrays

From Marlboro Silvers and Pepsi bottles 

I am from the rundown farmhouse on a two-lane road

Cold, drafty, my sister and I huddled around the only heat register to get dressed on those winter mornings when we could see our breath 

I am from the cornfields

Knee-high by the fourth of July, creaking like old bones in the September wind

I'm from fighting and stubbornness

From Nancy and Catherine

I'm from the grudges and the family feuds

From "does money grow on trees?" and "get your nose out of that book and go outside"

I'm a heathen, never setting foot in a church until my grandmother died

I'm from Rhineland and County Clare and the Appalachian Mountains and the City of Chicago

Stuffed peppers and green bean casserole and sauerkraut (sometimes in the same meal)

From the man who raped my grandmother and the man who took in a pregnant woman and then gave her nine more children, blessings every one - pass the butter, honey child, he would say to me, not knowing exactly which of his dozens of grandchildren I was, only knowing that I belonged

The thoughtfulness of my Uncle Lenny, teaching me that you don't have to be good at something right away; you can practice and get better at anything

The way my Aunt Jackie drove me in a winter storm to buy cough medicine and Tylenol when I came to her house and immediately went to bed for two days

The hugs of my Aunt Debbie, who knew that summer was too short and that I'd have to go back to the home where she could not protect me

The photos on the wall by the staircase in that house on Sumner Street

The photos on the wall in my own home right now that I see every day

My sister and I. I loved that duck. It made a terrible quacking noise until my father figured out how to disable the noise mechanism. 

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How often did you hear "does money go on trees?" when you were a child?

Revolutions: How Women Changed the World on Two Wheels by Hannah Ross

Friends! Today is publication day for The Memory Palace: True Stories of the Past by the one and only Nate DiMeo. Just a reminder in case anyone wanted to get it from their library. 

My husband gave me Revolutions: How Women Changed the World on Two Wheels by Hannah Ross as a gift because he really wants me to become a cyclist, but the truth is that I mostly see riding my bicycle as a means of transportation and so I don't romanticize it the way he does. But I also really love that feeling when you haven't been on your bike in a while and then you get on it and you're super tall and you can go really fast and it makes you feel powerful, so maybe I'm a bit of a hypocrite. ANYWAY. It took me years to read this book and I don't know why.

This book chronicles the rise of the bicycle in the late 1800s and how it was linked to women's rights, particularly women's suffrage and how the bicycle continues to have immeasurable impact on the lives of women today. From suffragettes who used bicycles to flee from arson crimes to Victorian ladies who chronicled their cycling adventures in best-selling travelogues to women competing in races today, this book covers the entire gamut of cycling history through a feminist lens. 

And that's what is stopping this book from being amazing. It's trying to cover too much! It's a bit disorganized to my eyes. It's not chronological, but keeps flipping back and forth in time. I sort of wish it had just really focused on cycling in the late 1800s and early 1900s and then she should have written a second book with the modern issues of women in cycling. There's certainly plenty of material for two books.

But I learned so much from this book and I honestly had no idea how important an invention the bicycle was! 

4/5 stars

Lines of note:

Sociologists now credit the bicycle with a decrease in genetic faults associated with inbreeding in the U.K., and as early as the 1900s, the U.S. Census Office identified the invention as a game-changer: "Few articles ever used by man have created so great a revolution in social conditions as the bicycle." (page 18-19)

Egads!! I never even thought about it, but what an important step towards travel more than a few miles away from your home. 

She held up cycling as pivotal in helping the cause of dress reform...(page 49)

This is what I really thought was interesting. "Rational" dressing to make women's clothing safer and easier to wear was around before bicycles, but it didn't really take off until the impetus of dressing to ride became more widespread. 

In the 1850s, Amelia [Jenks Bloomer], alongside fellow feminists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Elizabeth Smith Miller, started wearing billowy Turkish-style trousers which came to the ankle and a knee-length skirt or dress over the top. it was named the "freedom dress," much as Susan B. Anthony later referred to the bicycle as a "freedom-machine" - both represented independence and autonomy through freedom of movement. (page 49)

I'm going to start calling my bike my "freedom-machine."

A 2019 survey carried out in San Francisco showed that only 13 percent of cyclists in the city are women of color, with Asian and Hispanic women the least represented - a low figure when you consider that 34 percent of the population of the city are women of color. Many of those interviewed said that "women like me" don't bike, that they saw it as a predominantly young, white, male activity. As ever, representation matters. The problem isn't isolated to San Francisco, but an issues across the county and elsewhere.*

* This is far from a problem just in the United States. In London, for instance, black, Asian and minority ethnic groups- across both genders - account for only around 15 percent of the city's cycle trips despite making up 41 percent of the city's population. (page 91)

Now that I read this, it makes so much sense. Most cyclists I see are white men. *sigh*

Freedom, mobility, autonomy and fearlessness are core the group's [the Ovarian Psycos Bicycle Brigade - a cycling group for "womxn" of color] ethos, something Xela [de la X, a musician and community activist] felt she was acutely lacking when she was growing up. While her brothers were free to roam, she was largely confined indoors - take up space in the streets with her cycling sisters is an act of defiance. Some of the other members say they also weren't encouraged to ride as children, because their parents' generations didn't' think it was something girls should do; others said that they rode as children but gave up when they got older due to harassment or disapproval. (page 94) 

Sad. Parents, let's try to keep those girls riding those bikes for as long as we can!

While she [Elizabeth Robins Pennell, cycling memoirist of the 1880s and 1890s] may be a bit of a snob, she's often witty and acerbic, such as her observation that the tour groups who had once "wept over the sublimities of nature which they could not see for their tears," now barely glance at the landscape and "let their feelings loose upon illustrated postcards" instead. I dread to think what she would have made of twenty-first-century selfie culture. (page 160)

This entire paragraph made me chortle. 

When I type "women solo travel" into Google, "Is solo female travel safe?" is one of the first things that comes up under the "People also ask" section. Yet the idea of men going it alone in the wilderness has always been accepted and celebrated as a masculine rite of passage, the rugged frozen-beard archetypes who resort to eating their dogs as they cross Antarctica or the intrepid adventurers getting lost in the Amazon and living with an undiscovered tribe. Their stories are embedded in our history, with accounts by women who've done similar journeys often forgotten and overlooked. The writer Kate Harris, who has cycled the length of the Silk Road, observed that women explorers are too often bracketed as making such journeys as a way to "find themselves," in response to an emotional crisis of some kind. Such an outlook restricts female adventuring to an Eat Pray Love self-discovery narrative, and a way of feminizing their experiencer. They aren't seen as exploring for the sake of adventure, but rather fleeing from something. 

It's also true that while men are free to be rugged, fearless and independent explorers, women who want to do the same regularly complain that they are subjected to interrogations about their plans, a list of risks they could encounters and moral judgments if they have children. (page 191-192)

Yeah, I have to admit that Ross spent a great deal of time chronicling Annie Londonderry's ride around the world in 1894-1895 and all I really wanted Ross to tell me was who was taking care of her children back home. I know full well it wasn't her husband, so who was sacrificing her life (you know it was a woman) so that Londonderry could ride around unencumbered for a year. 

And it felt shitty, but I was judging Londonderry hard-core throughout the entire story. I am 100% positive I would not have judged a man. 

Things I looked up:

fin-de-siècle (page 18) - a French term meaning 'end of century'; without context, the term is typically used to refer to the end of the 19th century

soigneur (page 223) - a non-riding member of a racing team whose role is to provide support (such as massages, supplies, and transportation) for the cyclists.

Hat mentions (why hats?):

Maria [Ward] is in the center wearing what looks like rationals, with the other women mostly in long skirts, puff-sleeved blouses and fancy hats, while the men wear knee-length breeches, long socks and straw boaters. (page 69)

Mary [Kingsley] wasn't so keen to be labeled a "New Woman," however, deeming the question of women's suffrage of minor importance and making her way through the jungle in the traditional nineteenth-century English attire of long dress, hat and umbrella. (page 161)

One pictures shows Elsa [von Blumen] wearing buttoned-up leather ankle boots, a peaked hat, and neatly fitting bloomers and jacket, with a little fringed skirt over the top; no female high-wheeler would have risked a long skirt. (page 228)

Maud Watson, winner of the first ever Wimbledon ladies' singles title, did so wearing an all-white ensemble of woolen ankle-length skirt complete with small bustle, long-sleeved silk blouse and sailor hat. (page 232)

In Search of a Habit Tracker Solution

Elisabeth recently had a giveaway on her blog for a Sprouted planner. I did not enter because I have officially moved away from bulky paper planners. I used to have paper planners and loved them, but it honestly was hard to keep track of our household's comings and goings with it. My husband and I have a shared Google calendar and everything goes in there. 

But I am looking for a simple physical journal that allows me to do two things:

1) Track goals
2) Create daily to-do lists

I don't want inspirational journal prompts. I don't want endless blank pages for bullet journaling that will stress me out. I don't want a daily/monthly/yearly/5-year/10-year plan. I want a clean design with daily goal tracking and maybe a sidebar for a to-do list. Is that so hard to find? 

Well, yes, yes it is. Apparently most people do want journal prompts, inspirational sayings, and blank pages.

Right now my system is that I hand create a goal tracker for each month in a journal. My to-do lists are scattered around the house in tiny papers and heaven forbid one item on the list doesn't get done because I will not throw that list away until it's done. Last year at this exact time, I wrote a very similar post to this one about how I wanted a simpler system, but guess who still doesn't have a simpler system? 

Here are some options I've come upon:

1) A tracking calendar (or this) that I fill out nightly AND a pocket journal with blank pages that I carry around with me for my to-do lists (a day for each page)

2) Suck it up and get a slightly bulkier planner that has what I want AND other extraneous things

3) Buy a digital tracker and create my own tracking journal with printouts

I suspect that most people who track as much as I do track things electronically on digital spreadsheets and that's why I'm running into this problem. I'll have to figure out something in the next month and a half.

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Does anyone have a magical solution for me? If you're a goal-setter, how do you track your goals?

Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen

Forget horror novels, forget the horror that is the parental abuse and incest of Flowers in the Attic, forget it all. Do you know what the most terrifying book I've ever read is? Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen.

Jacbosen, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, has spent years researching the threat of nuclear war, and her work is showcased in this terrifying but mesmerizing book in which she details a very plausible scenario of a retaliatory nuclear war that leads to a massive extinction event. Thanks, I hate every bit of it. I assure that you if I am alive during a nuclear war, I want to die in the initial attack. I don't want to be lingering with nuclear winter, radiation poisoning, or starvation afterwards. 

I don't want to scare anyone, but there are THOUSANDS, maybe tens of thousands, of nuclear weapons on the planet, some in the hands of unstable leaders (*ahem* - not casting stones here, January 20 is just around the corner). Also, the people who make decisions about using nuclear weapons will be making decisions with limited information with very little time to decide. 

There's just so much scary information in this book. Jacobsen used FOIA requests to unseal a lot of previously classified documents; interviewed politicians, military leaders, and scientists; and wrote a super scary write-up of what she learned. And what she learned is bad. In less than an hour and a half, hundreds of nuclear warheads could be released onto this planet. 

Should you read this? Probably not during the week of a huge national election in which a madman was elected to lead these United States of America. But maybe if you feel like you want to know how quickly you can die? 

I listened to the audiobook read by the author and man, Jacobsen's voice is calm and soothing and it was such a contrast between how she sounded and the words she was saying. It was bewitching.

I don't know, friends. Great book, but not the book for every reader. 5/5 stars

Lines of note:

...all it takes is one nihilistic madman with a nuclear arsenal to start a nuclear war no one can win. (timestamp 4:17:56)

Ahem.

They are accustomed to traveling deep underwater for 70 days at a time: no texts, no emails, no radio contact, no radar signature. US Ohio-class submariners pride themselves as being the ultimate nuclear deterrent. Only an insane person would want to be on the receiving end of its wrath. (timestamp 6:38:57)

Oh, dear. 

But executive branch people at Site R are fighting over line of succession protocols from Article II, section 1, clause 4 of The Constitution. At issue is the still unresolved, post-9/11 piece of congressional legislation about what to do after a mass decapacitation event. (timestamp 7:48:40)

Egads. Did anyone else watch Battlestar Gallactica? I keep thinking of the scene where Roslin is 43rd in line of succession...

In a time of nuclear crisis, a central question remains: Who will perform their job dutifully and who will ditch their post and run? Will those in the military chain of command choose country over family or family over country? Can anyone predict such things? Will fate and circumstance play a role? (timestamp 8:08:14)

I'm running. No question here. 

The consequences of a paranoid leader's fear of a preemptive decapitation strike are as real as the nuclear weapons themselves. True in this scenario, true in real life. (timestamp 8:25:36)

Ahem. 

...the only way nuclear war ends is in nuclear holocaust...(page 8:49:51)

Oh, dear AGAIN.

There will be no more fresh water, no more toilets to flush, no sanitation, no street lights, no tunnel lights, no lights at all, only candles until there are none left to burn, no gas pumps, no fuel, no ATMs, no cash withdrawals, no access to money, no cell phones, no landlines, no calling 911, no calls at all, no emergency communication systems, except some high frequency HF radios, no ambulance services, no hospital equipment that works. Sewage spills out everywhere. It takes less than 15 minutes for disease carrying insects to swarm, to feed on piles of human waste, on garbage, on the dead. America's complex system of systems comes to a sudden, apocalyptic halt. (timestamp 10:35:41)

Please let me dead before this comes to pass. 

Hat mentions: 

None

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Can we all admire that I have a tag labelled "apocalypse?" What's an interesting tag on your blog?

Advent Calendar Search

Last year I failed to do my advent calendar search until it was too late and everything was sold out and I did the exact thing this year. Here are my options, which are very limited because everything is sold out. *sigh*

1) Book Lovers ($30 from Uncommon Goods)

2) Jigsaw puzzle calendar ($28 from Uncommon Goods)

3) Different jigsaw puzzle ($19.99 from Amazon)

4) Popcorn ($36 from Wayfair)

5) Licorice ($59.99 from Amazon) - This, unlike the popcorn, is labelled gluten free!

6) Should I invest in an advent calendar that I can fill myself for my husband? This feels like a good idea RIGHT NOW, but is it just another holiday chore I will find myself responsible for in the coming years? ($59.95 from LL Bean)

7) I waited too long again this year and we're not getting an advent calendar once more? 

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What would you do, oh wise internet collective? 

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton

Ducks by Kate Beaton is a beloved graphic memoir. Beaton was a young college graduate from Nova Scotia when she decided to head out west to Alberta to earn some quick money in the oil sands to pay off her student loans. Once there, she discovers the loneliness of being one of the few women in the  camps and she suffers sexual harassment and sexual assault at the hands of her co-workers, while her other, mostly male co-workers, refuse to acknowledge there is a problem, or, worse, minimize it. 

The oil fields are also controversial because of the environmental impact - the title refers to ducks who get caught in the run-off and die - and because they are on stolen First Nations land and make many indigenous people sick. 

I read this just days after the election in the United States and I felt this is my soul. Many pundits are saying that the economy is responsible for the election results (do people really think a man whose businesses have declared bankruptcy half a dozen times is going to make grocery prices cheaper?) and this panel from the book (this character is based on Celina Harpe, a Cree woman) really resonated at that moment. 

But, as much as I admired this participant observation ethnography, and Beaton's bravery in telling her story, I didn't love this. I sometimes didn't know what happened/didn't know what the art was trying to tell me. I wish that this had been a narrative memoir. I know Kate Beaton is a cartoonist and this was used as a showcase for her art, but I legitimately couldn't tell a lot of the characters apart and I wanted more of an explanation of things. In the end, I am not as good at reading visuals as I am at just reading. 

I hesitate to tell you how long it took me to figure out what was going on here. 

But I think this is a me problem. Outside of Wake by Rebecca Hall, I have consistently rated graphic books as "meh." 

This one is meh, too. 3.5/5 stars

Hat mentions (why hats?):

Four hard hats, one "Needs a hat" (page 345), two white hats, and one white hard hat for a total of eight. 

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Do you enjoy reading graphic books?