2023 Reading Challenge: Four Thousand Weeks: Times Management for Mortals
Absolutely loved this book, and basically read it cover to cover in less than a day. Lots of food for thought and great advice on the value of not being productive and the “right to be lazy.” I have a complex relationship to time and am what the author calls a “productivity geek,” but since becoming the chair of my department, I have come to realize that there will always be more tasks than I can ever actually accomplish. What’s worse, the more efficient I get at doing tasks, the more people give me new tasks to complete. Burkeman advises “strategic underachievement.” I have lots of great quotes underlined, but I am not going to type them up because Burkeman has convinced me to take the rest of the evening off.
Fake wine for dry January
This is my fifth or sixth dry January, but it is the first time that I decided to try non-alcoholic wine because I really felt like having a glass of pink stuff this evening. Needless to say, it was crap. Basically, it tasted like overpriced grape juice. Not a fan.
Blurbs for Everyday Utopia: Thomas Piketty, Rebecca Traister, Ada Calhoun, Robert Waldinger, and Yanis Varoufakis
“My god, this book is what I need right now! Exhilarating, good humored, and forward looking, it’s blown open my brain. What a powerful reminder that dreaming of better worlds is not just some fantastical project, but also a very serious political one.”
—REBECCA TRAISTER, New York Times bestselling author of Good and Mad
“More could be possible than we imagine—that’s the liberating and inspirational message of Kristen Ghodsee’s sweeping feminist history of society at its most creative. What a gift she’s given us with this mind-broadening investigation into how for millennia our fellow human beings have reckoned with the toughest questions of fidelity, family, and love.”
—ADA CALHOUN, New York Times bestselling author of Why We Can't Sleep
“Kristen Ghodsee has boldly gone where few would dare to tread. In this warm, intelligent, and lucid book, she takes us on a deep dive into how people have created better systems for living—systems that actually work. With clear-eyed views of how utopian communities can promote human thriving, she offers hope in a time when we desperately need new ways of imagining the future.”
—ROBERT WALDINGER, Director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development and author of The Good Life
“Utopia is back! And it ought to be taken seriously, as history is made by the dreamers. If you want to open up new futures for our private lives, please have a look at this refreshing book. A must-read.”
—THOMAS PIKETTY, New York Times bestselling author of A Brief History of Equality
“Invigorating writing for a cheerless era. Having explained to us Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, Kristen Ghodsee is back with another splendid insight: utopia can, and ought to, be an everyday thing, in every home.”
—YANIS VAROUFAKIS, former Greek Minister of Finance and author of Talking to My Daughter About the Economy
Everyday Utopia!
In loving memory of Horace Henriques
I received the very sad news yesterday that one of my dear professors and mentors, Dr. Horace Henriques, passed away. I have so many fond memories of him from the many meetings of the Caribbean Studies Association that I attended throughout the late 1990s and the aughts. Originally from Guyana, he taught for many years at the University of Toronto and was one of the most thoughtful people I know. Horace threw me a softball question when I gave my very first academic paper presentation in Barranquilla, Colombia in 1997. He will be dearly missed.
2023 reading challenge
I’m not usually a big fan of new year’s resolutions, but this year I have one that I am really going to stick to. I’ve decided that I need my brain to focus on one thing for long periods of time, and so I am committing to reading 25 fiction and 25 non-fiction books in 2023. That’s about a book a week and I am very excited to delve into the ever growing pile on my nightstand. This week I finished Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts, a dystopian vision of a possible near-future USA. This book was chosen for one of the two book clubs I’ve joined to help keep me on track with my reading.
The Adirondacks
A winter wonderland in upstate New York. A perfect day for a hike near Upper Saranac Lake.
So happy to be included in this end of year list of "Top Reads" →
A winter solstice newsletter →
Today is the official end of autumn in the Northern Hemisphere.
The sun hangs low in the sky and casts long shadows across a nearby church parking lot. On these shortest of days and longest of nights around the winter solstice, the faithful seem to congregate more frequently. In their crisp suits and colorful dresses, the parishioners exchange smiles and call out greetings over the slamming of car doors and the bleeping of key fobs.
I survey the automobiles: the newest models of Mercedes, Audi, BMW, and Lexus sedans. This is an affluent community of believers. Soon, they will sit and stand and kneel together to celebrate the birth of a baby boy, a baby born among beasts over two thousand years ago, who would grow up to champion of the poor and downtrodden. His followers would live as communards, dwelling together and sharing their property. Continue reading…
Winter Reading: The Marriage Portrait
So it’s been a while since I’ve posted any of my reading recommendations, and it’s not because I have stopped reading. It’s because all of my previous book posts featured my old hound dog, Daisy, who died last year. I simply could not bring my self to take a photo of a book without her. Now I have a nice big stuffed animal Basset Hound and I’ve decided to let it be a very poor substitute for Daisy, but to honor her memory. This month I devoured Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait for one of my two book clubs. It was a lusciously-written page-turner, and although I guessed the ending halfway through the book, it was still a satisfyingly fun read.
More empirical evidence! →
Having way too much fun with the DALL-E image generator
I decided to create an account on the open AI website and play around with the DALL-E image generator. My first generation was “a Bassett hound in a Wonder Woman costume in a Classical Greek mosaic” and my second generation was prompted with “an impressionist painting of a Bassett hound writing on a typewriter on a tropical island.” Below are some of my results.
Just posted some of my newer acquisitions to my typewriter gallery
I’m not so good at cataloging my typewriters, but I finally decided to update my typewriter page with some of my newest acquisitions.
Profile in OMNIA magazine
Duyên Nguyen, “Ordinary Lives, Extraordinary Times.” OMNIA, November 22, 2022
Audio book of Red Valkyries is now available →
It’s available on Audible, Spotify, and wherever you get your audiobooks. I am extremely grateful to Tantor Media and to Esther Wane for their amazing work on the project.
The beautiful coast of Maine
Today was a beautiful day on the Maine coast and I was very sorry to be leaving the state.
A new newsletter posted
It’s Thanksgiving weekend, an annual American festival of absurd overindulgences and hyper-concentrated family time.
This late Autumn finds me back in Maine where I lived for fifteen years between 2002 and 2017. The crispness of the salty morning fog transports me back twenty years. I recall myself as a new mother and a freshly minted Ph.D. arriving on campus as a young assistant professor, suddenly transported from California to what seemed back then like the northernmost tundra of the contiguous United States.
I grew up in San Diego. Snow was only something you saw on TV or visited for a few hours around the winter holidays, either up in the nearby Julian mountains or at Sea World where they hauled it in refrigerated trucks and refreshed it with artificial precipitation machines. My parents, like the other locals with season passes, brought their kids to experience the sorry simulacra of sledding and snowball fights. I was one of those tweens wearing a bikini under my winter clothes so we could head straight to the beach after drinking our overpriced hot cocoa with little marshmallows in the faux Christmas village. Continue reading…
