"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."

― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

Reading List: Chlorine Gardens

I don’t have much time today (it was bound to happen) but I can still throw something out there as part of the reading list. We’re almost there. Tomorrow is Human Rights Day.

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Chlorine Gardens
by Keiler Roberts

Dealing with pregnancy, child-rearing, art-making, mental illness, and an MS diagnosis, the parts of Chlorine Gardens’ sum sound heavy, but Keiler Roberts’ gift is the deft drollness in which she presents life’s darker moments. She doesn’t whistle past graveyards, but rather finds the punch line in the pitiful.

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“If the Good Lord made me bipolar on purpose, it must be because he’s (she’s? they’re?) bipolar. That’s the only way to explain how consistently great and terrible His creations are. Now that I’ve figured that out, maybe I do believe in God. I can imagine creating cancer on my darkest day, and then the Grand Canyon to make up for it.”

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Hills Like White Elephants

I don’t think Ernest Hemingway needs any introduction, but his Death in the Afternoon maybe does: it’s a 1932 non-fiction book about Spanish bullfighting, and it’s part cultural study, part travel writing, and part reflection on courage, fear, death, and art. It’s not for the

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August 18, 2026 6:00 am
Summertime

Mapping the Furrow

Seamus Heaney was a major Irish poet, born in 1939 in County Derry, Northern Ireland, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. He’s especially known for writing about rural life, memory, language, and Irish history. Death of a Naturalist is both the

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August 17, 2026 6:00 am
books and literature

Keanu Reeves & China Miéville: The Book of Elsewhere

It would be a vast understatement to say that this book was a surprise. Not being familiar with the comics (so unfamiliar, in fact, that I didn’t even know they existed), the first impact with the main storyline was “ok, what the hell am I

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August 16, 2026 9:00 am
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Hills Like White Elephants

August 18, 2026

I don’t think Ernest Hemingway needs any introduction, but his Death in the Afternoon maybe does: it’s a 1932 non-fiction book about Spanish bullfighting, and it’s part cultural study, part travel writing, and part reflection on courage, fear, death, and art. It’s not for the

Read More

Mapping the Furrow

August 17, 2026

Seamus Heaney was a major Irish poet, born in 1939 in County Derry, Northern Ireland, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. He’s especially known for writing about rural life, memory, language, and Irish history. Death of a Naturalist is both the

Read More