2024 Reading Challenge: Psalm for the Wild-Built

I loved this little novella so much, that I actually wrote a good old fashioned piece of fan mail to the author:

Dear Becky Chambers,

I'm a cultural anthropologist and a 53-year-old professor of Russian and East European Studies at Penn that never has time to read for leisure. It was snowing in Philadelphia today so I stayed in bed and did something I almost never do: I read your wonderful little book, Psalm for the Wild-Built, cover-to-cover on my stomach and under my covers in my pajamas like a teenager. It was the most luxurious thing in the world and it so suited the message of your book.

Anyway, as I fellow author, I always love it when readers reach out to tell me how much they were moved by my words. So I just wanted to do the same.

No expectation of a reply here; just know that your writing reached out on a cold winter's day in Philadelphia and made this sometimes cynical intellectual smile.

In solidarity,

Kristen R. Ghodsee

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.