The book is an experience that allows you to witness your feelings without having to surrender to them, to succumb to them, or to be battered by them. It gives you access to a deep knowledge of how you would respond to things you would never, thank goodness, have been required to experience. ~Micheal Silverblatt

Learning about the passing of Michael Silverblatt prompted me to finish my book project. Ha! Not the book I’ve been writing, but rather my project of sorting out my reflections of other peoples’ books in the digital space. Thanks to Austin Kleon’s weekly list, I learned of Silverblatt’s death. I cried instantly because I loved Silverblatt’s radio show about books with meaningful conversations with people who care about writing and reading. Think James Lipton and Actor’s Studio but for books.

Pure joy.

Michael Silverblatt saved me during a bleak era of living in California when I was working full time as a waitress while trying to be a good student. I would listen to his show on the radio while driving to my restaurant job.

All of the horrors of life would melt away.

I loved listening to somebody who enjoyed books and storytelling the same way I did.

AND he got to talk to the authors and ask them questions. Swoon!

I loved when he read to the authors their own work. Writers who were used to being asked to read their work in intereviews, would listen to Silverblatt reading TO them their own words with such emotion. Kinda awkward. Dreamy. Very lovely.

Then he’d drop a zinger of a question that was well-researched and something I wished I was smart enough to think of myself. A professional interviewer, that Silverblatt.

Like so many others, I had time on my hands during the lockdown quarantine days of our recent plague, and I discovered his show had become a podcast. His voice, albeit shakier than I remember, and maybe not for everyone, made me feel instant joy. Tears.

The podcast brought me back to the young woman I was in the mid-90s. One of the Matryosha dolls I carry within this current version of me.

In the obituary for Micheal Silverblatt in the Los Angeles Times, they sum up why I loved him:

The voracious reader said that the best books, those that brought him happiness, were not the ones that ease our way in this strange and difficult world.

“The books I love the most made it harder for me to live,” he said.

Like so many readers who care deeply about art made by humans, you know this feeling he describes.

A few weeks ago, without knowing of Silverblatt’s passing, I rearranged our library after purchasing additional shelves for our home. Finally, I had all of our best books in our main living space.

When I woke up in the morning and looked at the new shelves, and I loved this book experience.

I could easily see which books are mine, I (somewhat) remember when I bought them, when I read them, and why keep them.

I felt like Michael Silverblatt would approve. Thanks, rest in peace, beloved Bookworm.

What else is new?

Not a lot and everything. The image above helps me process the relentless chatter about how “AI is a new technology.” Sigh. Also can we pause to admire the bitchin’ use of hot roller curls, wings on gloves, metallic silver boots, dry ice, and her being down in the hooks?

I’ve quit BookReads after 13 years of using the app to manage my To Read and Read shelves. Like most of the dumpster fire we call the Internet these days, I am fatigued by the late capitalism algorithm, the hot takes, and the robot-generated content. I’m also tired of connecting to a bald man’s empire that killed your local bookstore. I also need a way to make this blog worth the money I pay to keep the lights on in an era where I’m not that interested in social media.

So, I will heretofore post the books I’ve read, a few quotes that I loved, and the author’s name. That’s it.

If I post a lot of quotes, I probably really loved the book or I learned a lot. If I post one quote, then it was a good use of my time because I was reading, but I may not have loved the book.

No stars. No Likert scale. No hot takes. And I’ll also be able to post the things that are keeping me sane-ish from the interwebz which also counts as reading. We’ll see how it goes.

Here are the books I’ve read from January 2026 to the present:

1] Elegy, Southwest by Madeline Watts

I loved it for its beauty and its strangeness and its perseverance despite the sheer impossibility of its continued existence.

…their radio childhoods and their Alexa-aided old age…

2] All the Way To the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation by Elizabeth Gilbert

I mean, check yourself out. ‘You’re a pathetic mess, unrecognizable to your own eyes. You have now reached infatuation’s final destination—the complete and merciless devaluation of self.’ I wrote those words in the early autumn of 2004, but I could just as easily have written them in the early winter of 2018. 

Like so many eminent residents before me, I made her an offer she couldn’t refuse.

Because secrecy is the greenhouse in which addiction blooms, flourishes, metastasis. 

Does an avalanche happen suddenly, or does it begin with the first flake of snow that sticks to the edge of the mountain? 

3] To Kill A Queen by Amie McNee

He shifted uncomfortably in the dirt. 

I felt, the strange period, as though I was caught like a feather on a draught.

He kissed me in that way he favoured most: dead centre of my forehead, the first spot I had been thought to reach when I blessed myself in the church.

*Which led me to Amie McNee’s TedTalk and the Transcript of “The Case For Making Art.” Not a book, mind you, but a rabbit hole worth one’s time.

I figured out that if you spend three hours a day on your phone, from the age of, I think it was 15, to the average age of death, 79, you will have spent 10 years straight on your phone, no sleeping, just 10 years straight on your phone, and three hours a day is, I’m going to say, a fair amount of us are using those numbers. I want you to reclaim the attention that has been robbed of you, and I want you to use it to make something. We are a culture of consumption, and we’ve forgotten how to make. We need less consumption, more creation. Bring back your attention, reclaim it, it is yours to do with whatever you want to do. You have so much to make, there are so many things that you have to give this world. I want you to take some of those 10 years back from Zuckerberg and give it to a project you want to work on.

4] Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich

We’re all peddlers of the apocalypse. Big and small. 

What do we have under democracy? They send us Snickers and some old margarine, old jeans, like we’re savages who just climbed out of the trees.

In Afghanistan death was a normal thing, you could understand it.

I don’t what I should talk about–about despair or about love? Or are they the same? 

(Okay, maybe one hot take: This is the book I want to press in your hand when you talk about nuclear energy as a viable solution to fuel the never-ending Robot slop. Discuss.)

5] The Undressed Art: Why We Draw by Peter Steinhart

All I have to show for the time is the exercise in patience.

6] Patchwork: A Sewist’s Diary by Maddie Ballard

I spend a whole afternoon wondering if the words tactile and textile are both works of weaving.

I feel for the first time in years that I’m bringing my whole brain and heart to each day’s work.

These pants will be the work of the three or four sittings; I’m in no rush. Outside, December unfurls bright and blue in a mass of sea storms and coastal runs.

7] There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak

Arthur has never left London but he had read a bit about other lands, distance shores, and it occurs to him now that this what it must like when you hold a seashell to your ears and hear the roar. 

Because with all of the others, the stamps or the pretty, shiny paper you can only use once, then they are gone, but books, it seems to me, do not even die when we have finished reading them.

…soothsayers, necromancers and interpreters of dreams…Their stories pile up on one another, like pebbles meeting at the bottom of a creek tossed about by stronger currents.

I wish to be like the River Thames: I want to tend to what has been discarded, damaged, and forgotten.

*Side Note: King Arthur of the Sewers is my favorite character.

8] Seascraper Benjamin Wood 

In his grandpa’s day, the shankers all rode out in a procession: twelve carts clopping down the promenade, their horses making such a din it could be heard above the ring of church bells working under lanternlight, There’s a low-lying hump of clouds whose edges are still visible against the purpling darkness, crawling eastwards, snuffing out the moon. cheques, but he’ll forgive a bloke his flaws if there’s no malice to them. 

In his life so far, he’s come across two reasons for a good man’s failings: either he’s a drinker on the quiet, like Pop was, trying to numb the bruises on his heart to get him through the week, or else he’s trying to cope without a remedy at all. 

And even if these reasons ‘If he’s so rich and famous, what’s he doing here? Arse end of nowhere, this.’

Additional Thought: I loved this book so much. His “drinker on the quiet” and “purpling darkness” are perfect words. I checked this book out from the library because I loved the watercolor painting on the cover, no joke. And then I fell in love with the book. I plan to buy it and read it again soon. I learned the word “lanternlight” from this author. Magic.

9] Heart The Lover by Lily King 

I’ve noticed that about people who had stable childhoods. They like to create their own problems.

10] Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams

I think its hard for people to remember how radically new that felt, seeing powerful people, celebrities, athletes, writers, and all the rest of us side by side in this new digital common ground. Like a database of everyone in the world.

Her team races to be the first to craft complimentary comments on her Facebook posts even after we’ve drafted them ourselves, to share any positive feedback from “important people” after a public appearance, and to be as obsequious as possible about her events. It creates a strange reality around her.

In April 2017, a confidential document is leaked that reveals Facebook is offering advertisers the opportunity to target thirteen to-seventeen year-olds across its platforms, including Instagram, during moments of psychological vulnerability when they feel “worthless” Insecure,” “stressed,” “defeated,” “anxious,” “stupid.” “useless,” and like a failure,” Or to target them when they’re worried about their bodies and thinking of losing weight. Basically, when a teen is in a fragile emotional state.

11] Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong

“We’ll make a good team, right? We’ll make do with what the Lord gives us.” She exhaled and lit her last two cigarettes, handing him one.

“You believe in God, boy?” He took a long drag and considered this. “He’s probably around sometimes.”

“Clearly not as much as the devil,” she cackled, her missing front tooth winking behind the smoke. 

 At what point does childhood sadness become adult sadness anyway? 

Does the tsunami get larger as the figure grows? Was his wave already twice the size of the one in the poster? It’s the majority of who we are, what everybody is.

Look, being fucked up is actually what’s most common. Fucked up is the most normal thing in the world. 

12] Erosion: Essays of Undoing Terry Tempest Williams [spacing of quotes mine]

What lawmakers fear most, especially those financed by the energy industry, is the art of independent thinking

the arc

of creative thinking. 

I thought I would continue this work in my home state until I died. My soul had other plans.

What we experience as heartbreak, the loss of a job or a marriage, or illness, or another disruption in the life we had planned for ourselves, may be our liberation-an open door to growth. I couldn’t see it at the time, but I certainly realize it now. There were solitary steps I had to take along the way, alongside the support from my family and the community that embraced me outside the university. 

We are surrounded by hundreds of thousands of acres of public lands, lands that belong to all of us in this country we call America. These lands are a varied palette of color and geography from sagebrush seas ubiquitous in the West; to petrified sand dunes now monuments of stone; to buttes and mesas, hoodoos and spires; to arches and windows blown open by wind, water, and time.

This is an erosional landscape where geology reveals the open history of Earth. 

Dan’s ashes weighed eight pounds seven ounces, the same weight as when he was born. It is also the weight of a gallon of water one carries into the desert.

13] Vessel: The Shape of Absent Bodies by Dani Netherclift

US researcher Dr. Pauline Boss has pioneered a theory for what she calls ambiguous loss, or unresolved grieving. Boss claims that you must see for yourself that a person is dead—that breath has stopped—at the time of death or even when only bones are left.

Death was openly acknowledged as a final rite of passage. Life and the dead were interleaves of the same story. Emptiness colonised that space where once a big strong man had stood. Towards the end, to look upon his body, especially in sleep, felt like looking upon him after his death.

These archives are elegies.

In the 1800s, a well-preserved body was uncovered in Denmark. The body had long, glossy brown hair and was believed to be that of a woman. The body had been held down in the bog by means of many forked branches. The local people understood the idea of restricting the movement of the dead. A related article from that time describes the recognition of the woman’s body as someone who had been considered a witch in their own time, and that measures had been taken to stop her rising from her grave after death. Bodies were recovered from Danish bogs for hundreds of years. These bodies retain a certain poetic grace. Nothing is known about the identities of the dead, and so they are deemed not to be individually significant in a historical sense.

How are their bodies archives? I rewrite, I rewrite, I rewrite. Is not the corpse itself the elegy for the body that preceded it?

The places they were each found—Cairn/ bank. Net/ bridge. These are tangible end points, periods.

14] How to Be Alone: An 800 Mile Hike on the Arizona Trail by Nicole Antoinette

Marginally cleaner, I climb into my tent, checking for cell reception and feeling disappointed that once again I’m camped in a no-service area.

15] Into Thin Ice: The Northwest Passage, the Polar Sun, and a 175-Year-Old Mystery by Mark Synnott

Fitzjames’s match was made thanks to a Dutch academic named Ebienne Tetteroo, who became interested in Fitzjames’s story after watching the 2018 AMC miniseries The Terror, which is based on the Dan Simmons novel of the same name. While working on a Fitzjames biography, Tetteroo came across a book published in 1924 entitled The Story of the Gambiers. In it, she found a family tree that led her to Nigel Gambier. Like some of the other fragments collected from the Boat Place, Fizjames’s jawbone is etched with cut marks consistent with posthumous dismemberment. Thus, the logical conclusion is that after his death he was cannabalized by some of the other sailor. “This shows that…neither rank nor status was the governing principle in the final desperate days of the expedition as they strove to save themselves, ” says Stenton. “

Many vessels had come to grief in these waters…

And now I found myself in the confusing place of wanting it all to be over while at the same time feeling totally content where I lay.

I think I should make up in perseverance what I might want in sense.

***

Here are the three best OL reads for my sanity as the world burns with injustice, war, ecocide, fascism, and The Robot.

I’m Interested in Being a Person by Ella Sanders

Made With Artistic Intelligence by Anna Brones

EdTech Criticism. AI Refusal. Everything, always, by Audrey Watters

The first 15 books & 3 Brilliant Writers: A Memoir of 2026 Thus Far

If you made it here, thank you. May you find joy on this day. Thank all the gods for public libraries, early morning reading sessions fueled by menopausal insomnia, coffee, tea, yoga, bicycles, watercolor paint, my sewing machine, this glorious life with my little dog sleeping by the fire while my husband plays “Cortez The Killer” on the guitar.