NaPoWriMo 2025: Early-Bird Prompt

A portrait poem (https://www.napowrimo.net/na-glopowrimo-are-nearly-upon-us/)

She doesn’t look like someone who changed the world.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say she just looks tired.
Worn down, worn out, worn thin.

But I do know better, and what I see transforms:
Strength at last able to let go, wisdom earned in pain,
the hard-lined, stark beauty of righteousness.

I know that I will never know her.

I know history, what others say of her,
What little she said of herself,
the accumulation of facts.

I know what I see, how she seems,
an agglomeration of my assumptions,
who I need her to be.

To me, her eyes speak of trials witnessed and lived,
hard held principles tested and enduring.
Survival.

She is a potent symbol of hope.
She was a person who lived.

I will never know what’s missing.

NaPoWriMo 2025: Untitled 1

“If you could tell your younger self anything, what would it be?” she asks.

I ponder the passionate ignorance of my youth, and I know my answer:

“Nothing,” I tell her.

The most important lessons can’t be taught by the telling.
Experience must be lived, born witness to your own failures and successes.

Besides, younger me wouldn’t listen anyway, not even to myself.

“Old man! You surrendered your dreams too easily! I know I can do better than you!”

Saying Farewell to Booklist

I quit reviewing for Booklist. Or, more accurately, I let my editor know I need to take a break from reviewing for an unspecified amount of time.

I’ve been debating this move for a couple years, honestly. I’ve been really struggling to make myself read for a while now. I kept thinking I’d get back into it, that my reading mojo would come back, or at least that I could make myself do it, but it’s just been getting worse. I’ve been turning in my reviews later and later, and it stresses me out. I no longer feel that Booklist can rely on me for this task, which isn’t fair to them, and I no longer enjoy it because it feels like too much pressure.

I need a break. If I don’t feel like reading, I want to be able to just not read and not feel guilty about dropping the ball.

I hope I’ll want to read more if it’s just for fun and not an assignment. In truth, I’ve always had this issue: I didn’t read a single assigned text all through primary school. If you tell me I HAVE to, then I don’t want to! I have a powerful contrarian streak. Reading has always been an indulgent happy place for me. I don’t want it to be work. I’m a little surprised I was able to keep up these reviews successfully for as long as I did.

I’m clearly still coming to terms with this decision. But I feel like it’s the right decision for me right now.

There are a couple reviews I already submitted which haven’t been published yet, so I’ll post those when they are. But then I won’t be doing any new ones.

I’m curious: I used to write long-form book reviews of stuff I read just for fun. But I pretty much completely stopped writing just-for-fun book reviews once I started reviewing for Booklist. I wonder if I’ll go back to it. I prefer being able to analyze things in depth, so maybe this has also been part of my struggle. Working within the strict character limit of Booklist reviews was a fun challenge, it taught me a great deal and made me a better writer, but I’ve never been interested in brevity.

Anyway, that’s a thing I did. If you enjoy my reviews, I feel a bit bad that I’m ending them, but I think I need to. I may take them back up again in the future. We’ll see.

2024: My Year in Reading

My reading this year was pretty sporadic. I had some trouble concentrating off and on throughout the year, so I spent long stretches of time vegging out watching YouTube instead of sitting with a book. I’ve noticed, though, that I sleep better and I’m overall more content when I prioritize reading over watching TV. I need and benefit from both, but the balance was off this year. This seems to be a recurring theme for the past few years, honestly.

I still managed to get through a goodly number of titles, methinks: 46 total, 29 nonfiction (63%) and 17 fiction (37%). This continues my nonfiction-heavy habit of the past few years. I read 20 titles for Booklist this year, accounting for 43.5% of my total. Most of what I read this year was very good, so quality makes up for quantity.

Despite going long stretches without reading anything, I continued to impulsively check out books from the library as they caught my fancy. This resulted in very tall stacks of books sitting on my end table for months, as I renewed them over and over, or had to turn them back in and put them back on hold, because I just wasn’t reading them. By mid-November, I got sick of them sitting there, so I plowed through 12 titles all in the last month and half of the year (9 in less than two weeks, which I think is a personal record for me!)

I became shockingly lax about turning in my book reviews on time, trying the patience of my Booklist editor far more than she deserves. I should make a resolution for next year to be more on top of these.

I read several books about the development of artificial intelligence, which have made me both more and less concerned about this technology and how it’s evolving (see my list of Tech Books for People Who Don’t Trust Tech). I continued to seek out a diversity of perspectives and experiences of the world. I also read a handful of titles about professional leadership, and reassessing our culture’s deeply unhealthy and inhumane relationship to work.

I think next year I want to go back to mostly fiction. I’ll still get a decent amount of nonfic from Booklist, but I think it’s easier for me to want to read more if I’m reading fiction.

For a list of my favorite books I read this year, go here >

Continue reading →

The Core Conflict in Science Fiction

Most of my favorite science fiction authors were members of the literary science fiction movement. These are authors who grew up reading pulp, Golden, and Silver Age scifi. They loved the scope and potential of these types of speculative stories, but they were frustrated by the lack of artistry in the writing. A lot of classic scifi was, let’s be honest, pretty poorly written. Hugely imaginative but there wasn’t much style. When their turn came to become authors and storytellers, they wanted to play in this genre but they also wanted to innovate stylistically, to explore the potentials of language and storytelling structure in a way that matched the technological and scientific innovation that drove scifi from the beginning. They wanted to transform scifi into a literature with deeper artistic merit.

And that’s how most of us tend to understand literary scifi: it made scifi more artsy.

Continue reading →

2023: My Year in Reading

For a list of my favorite books I read this year, go here >

This was a very low-key year in reading for me. I read 46 books—less than most past years, but I think still a respectable amount—roughly 40% of which were for Booklist. That’s ok. I had a lot going on at work, so reading took a bit of a back seat. I finally got around to reading all of Becky Chambers’ stuff, she’s been on my To Read list for years!

I read 26 nonfiction titles and 20 fiction. I’ve been more interested in nonfic as I get further into middle age, which isn’t something I anticipated. I discovered a new favorite author and read one of the wisest books I’ve ever read.

Books Read in 2023

Continue reading “2023: My Year in Reading” →

2022: My Year in Reading

For a list of my favorite books I read this year, go here >

I read 54 books in 2022. It felt like a pretty normal year in reading, for the first time in a while. I read when I wanted to, didn’t when I didn’t, and didn’t overthink it either way, other than to reaffirm my intense dislike of Jack McDevitt. I didn’t watch much TV—my desire for visual storytelling has been subsumed by YouTube, where I follow many channels. I finally went back to a movie theater for the first time since the pandemic started. I missed seeing things on the big screen! I saw Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (so good, but it should have been so much better!)

I also purged half of my personal book collection this year, which still sometimes feels a bit like sacrilege, but I remain confident it was the right thing to do and I haven’t regretted it yet.

Continue reading “2022: My Year in Reading” →

There Are More Important Things than Being Right

There’s been an inordinate amount of ink spilled online about all the things that are wrong with online culture. Indeed, it’s one of the most popular subjects of online discourse. There are many ways the online culture we’ve created is toxic and amplifies the worst aspects of our nature. There are many factors which cause online toxicity, but the one I tend notice most is how so many people are obsessed with being right. And with making sure everyone knows it.

I keep seeing posts from the subreddit AITA. They show up on Twitter, Buzzfeed, lots of different places. They bother me. They’re emblematic of our need to prove ourselves right. Every AITA post is essentially someone asking for people to tell them they’re right. That doesn’t sound like such a bad thing, really, so why does it bother me?

Here’s a good example:

Continue reading “There Are More Important Things than Being Right” →

Assume Better

A Selfish Reason for Choosing Compassion

I was driving to work the other day, in typical morning rush hour traffic, and another driver was being far too fast and aggressive: weaving through traffic, riding bumpers, cutting people off. When they cut in front of me, causing me to slam on my brakes which almost caused me to be rear-ended, I got mad. This driver was being a jerk: selfish, road hog, inconsiderate, dangerous. Why do they think they have more right to the road than any of the rest of us?

This morning, the same thing: overly aggressive driver, going too fast, riding bumpers, cutting people off. But this time, I saw the look on the driver’s face as they passed me:

Weeping. Sadness. Panic.

They were clearly in the midst of some kind of emergency. This person had a reason they needed to get somewhere quickly. They weren’t just being selfish and inconsiderate. Their need for the road actually was more important than mine.

This doesn’t excuse the dangerous driving: that was still a problem for the rest of us. But instead of getting angry, I felt empathy. I had compassion for this driver. I wondered what they faced and hoped they could get where they needed to be on time, without causing an accident.

In my first example, when I got angry at the other driver, it left me in a bad mood. My hackles rose, I was geared up for conflict with no way to resolve it. I got to work feeling on edge, in a negative headspace. This was not a useful way for me to start my day. It didn’t help me do my work.

This morning, when I felt compassion and sympathy for the other driver, it left me in a much better headspace. Compassion is a far more useful emotion to bring into the public service work I do.

The reality is neither driver will ever know how I reacted to them, nor how my reactions affected my mood. My reactions have no impact on them whatsoever. But the ways I react in these circumstances has a profound effect on me. When I assumed the other driver was selfish and inconsiderate, it affected me in a very negative way. When I assumed more positively about the other driver, it made my day better.

This got me thinking about how we make assumptions.

Continue reading “Assume Better” →

Books Read in 2023

A Selfish Reason for Choosing Compassion

Or: Doing the Right and Decent Thing Has All Kinds of Benefits for Everyone, Including You