This certainly made up for "City of Illusions". I admit that the end lost me, but then again, dreams are not supposed to make sense all the way.

There is a persistent feeling of urgency about this story. Haber's conceit and grandiosity is apparent soon enough, and the more the book advances, the more anxiety how beholden to Haber Orr is it caused me. It almost tips into impatience about how passive Orr is.

And that might be part of how genius the book is. Because for all intents and purposes, Orr is a god. THE god and creator of the world inside those pages. And the story itself shows us what Orr himself puts in words: that an unbalanced god that is not part of his own world and tries to meddle with prejudice ultimately destroys everything.

There is much more. A recursiveness that gets reeeeally tangled and confusing at the end. Either a god that dreams himself and more gods into existence (a little help from my friends), or maybe that other dreamers already existed, and even, maybe, that the dreamer was not the one we thought (specially from halfway in). The way we keep coming back to the importance of human connection (the one thing Haber maybe had right, even if he denied it in his own dealings), the fact that "the end justifies the means" implies that there is and end, as if history, or mankind, or the world wouldn't then march on, and as that is not truth, then there are only means.

24 Festive Task challenge have goosed up my reading this month, plus the English winter weather has set in (darkness at 4:30pm kills any desire for going outside). 

Read:

1. Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine 3.5 stars

2. Feminasty by Erin Gibson 4 stars

3. Princess Elizabeth's Spy (Maggie Hope #2) by Susan Ella MacNeal 4 stars

4. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway 3.5 stars

5. The End of Epidemics by Jonathan D. Quick, MD 3.5 stars

6. Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America by Michael Eric Dyson 5 stars

7. Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance 3.5 stars

8. Amelia: An Autumn Bride (Brides for All Seasons #7) by Hildie McQueen 3 stars

9. Love's Unfading Light (Eagle Harbor #1) by Naomi Rawlings 2.5 stars

This has been on my to read wish list for a while. I was doing a volunteer shift at the library, shelf reading from the 800s to the end. I found this shoved in, almost hidden by other volumes. I rescued it and took it home. 

A slim volume of poetry that says a lot, sometimes saying it in too esoteric/poetic writing that lost me. However, the author would then describe events that explained the more esoteric parts. Towards the last part of the book I felt the poetry didn't work for me on paper and that it was more suited to spoken word to feel the full effects. A sobering account of just how much microaggressions one person goes through in a day and how microaggressions can snowball into big altercations. 

And so begins No School November, a loving name the parents of the students who go to DoDEA schools (American schools on base run by the DoD). Between the holidays, the parent-teacher conferences, the mandatory teacher training the kids are out of school more than they attend. Today is the first of those days off, so I am making my kids get their annual flu shot (mandatory to attend DoDEA schools) so they don't get too comfy being at home.

This weekend we are attending our town's Bonfire Night. I can't wait but right now all my hopes are on it NOT raining on our party. Old man winter has definitely arrived and set up shop here in East Anglia. Then on Monday starts my town's Remembrance Day activities - each day will have something going on (poetry session at Tilly's Tea Room and Shop, Darren Norton giving a monologue at the Heritage Center for example). I am hoping to make it to a couple of these events.

In between refereeing my kids and going to Great War events, I plan to read:

1. Feminasty by Erin Gibson (library borrow)

2. Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine (library borrow)

3. Let the Circle Be Unbroken (Logans #5) by Mildred D. Taylor (24 Festive Tasks)

Have a happy reading weekend!

I'm cognizant of the fact that I don't read enough books by women of color and that I read very few works of poetry. I decided to kill two birds with one stone by reading Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric. (Also, it's National Poetry Month so it was a no-brainer.) This book is especially relevant right now with the state of our world being what it is: a shambles. Citizen is essentially Claudia's exploration of what it is to be a black woman living in America as told through poetic verse. It is beautiful, tender, terrible, tragic, and real. She doesn't shy away from such topics as police brutality or the prevalence of feeling like an outsider. This book is a personal revelation and a public admonishment all rolled into one neat package Coupled with her verses are historical quotes and pencil drawn (I think?) artwork. What better way to begin your foray into poetry than by reading a book that challenges the status quo and speaks from the heart? If you'd like to maybe see the world through a different set of eyes Citizen is your golden ticket with many stops along the way. 9/10

I made a note of this quote on page 89 to give you an idea of just how powerful her words are:

Those years of and before me and my brothers, the years of passage, plantation, migration, of Jim Crow segregation, of poverty, inner cities, profiling, of one in three, two jobs, boy, hey boy, each a felony, accumulate into the hours inside our lives where we are all caught hanging, the rope inside us, the tree inside us, its roots our limbs, a throat sliced through and where we open our mouth to speak, blossoms, o blossoms, no place coming out, brother, dear brother, that kind of blue.

What I'm Currently Reading: The American Way of Death Revisited by Jessica Mitford