Reading List: Chlorine Gardens

December 9, 2019

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.

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.

“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.”

architecture, engineering and construction

The Digital Ghosts

In Letters to Milena, Franz Kafka tries to name a specific distortion he believes is introduced by mediated communication, such as letters, then (already, in 1922) telecoms. Kafka writes this after a long, anguished correspondence in which he repeatedly doubts what writing letters is doing to him and

July 15, 2026 9:00 am

books and literature

The Bicentennial Man (and other stories)

If not for the single story where they cure depression by blasting jazz against brainwaves (not how depression works, I’m afraid), one of the best collections I’ve read so far. It has the sequel of “Marooned off Vesta”, one of Asimov’s the best stories of

July 12, 2026 9:00 am

books and literature

Rebecca Ferrier’s The Salt Bind

Rebecca Ferrier’s The Salt Bind is a historical fantasy novel, set on the storm-lashed Cornish coast and steeped in folklore, sea magic, and women’s lives on the edge of the sea. It follows Kensa — daughter of a smuggler and with a regularly-complicated relationship with

July 11, 2026 9:00 am