2024 Reading Challenge: The Seep by Chana Porter

A new year and a new goal for reading fiction and non-fiction. Although I did not reach my 2023 goal of 50 books, I did manage to read most of 17 books of fiction and 21 books of non-fiction (which included 3 audio books). Thirty-eight books isn’t bad given how busy my year was.

But now I’m starting fresh and my first book was The Seep by Chana Porter. I loved this little book mostly because I kept thinking that the aliens would turn out to be evil and the author did not fall for the tired old tropes. A fun and hopeful book about how some of us are too resistant to change for our own good.

Photos from the Half King Reading Series at the Salmagundi Club in New York

On Tuesday night, I had a wonderful time with Glenn Raucher and the Half King Reading Series. I did this event at the old Half King back in November 2018, and according to Glenn, I am the first author to have done this event in both places. We had a great crowd that asked fantastic questions. Thanks to Shannon Hennessey for organizing it all!

A starred review from Publishers Weekly →

I am just so happy. This is the first time I’ve gotten one of these precious little starred reviews!

Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life

Kristen R. Ghodsee. Simon & Schuster, $29.99 (352p) ISBN 978-1-982190-21-7

Ghodsee (Red Valkyries), a professor of Russian and Eastern European studies at the University of Pennsylvania, offers a spirited and thought-provoking survey of “social dreaming” and the thinkers and movements that have tried to reenvision home life to promote greater harmony and happiness. Focusing particularly on utopian experiments that treated women as equals and shared property among community members, Ghodsee examines the long history of non-family groups living together, from ancient Buddhist and medieval Christian monastics to contemporary communes in Maine and Denmark; income and property sharing models proposed and practiced by John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and the Hutterite, Shaker, and Bruderhof Christian enclaves of North America; and the centralized childcare arrangements of Israeli kibbutzim. In the book’s most moving sections, Ghodsee buttresses her argument that the nuclear family has historically divided women from their own familial care networks and made them and their children more vulnerable to intimate violence with the story of how her high school English teacher took her in for a crucial period after her parents’ abusive marriage split up. Clear-eyed yet exuberant, wide-ranging yet intimate, this is an inspiring call for imagining a better future. Agent: Melissa Flashman, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (May)