Spinning, Dyeing and Weaving by Penny Walsh

by Rebecca

Spinning, Dyeing and Weaving: Essential Guide for Beginners, from the Self-Sufficiency series
by Penny Walsh
2009, 2016

I’ve recently been delving into the basic fibre arts. I’ve taken classes in how to spin wool on a drop spindle, how to dye yarn with natural dyes, and how to “skirt” a fleece that’s been freshly sheered off a sheep. One of these days I’m hoping to learn how to sheer a sheep myself. I already had the basics of weaving, knitting, and crocheting (albeit at the most basic level) and I’m enjoying figuring out the precursory stages. This book seemed like it would be right up my alley.

And it is, sort of. However it’s also absolutely bonkers. It veers wildly between being an extremely basic overview to being an extremely detailed instructional manual, and then back again. Harvesting vegetable fibres such as flax, hemp, or nettle is given a half page summary that mentions the necessity of starting and then interrupting the rotting process; meanwhile, there are 18 pages of recipes for dyes, including ingredients, amounts, temperatures and durations. However, I knew from early on that this book wasn’t going to be particularly reliable when it starts with discussing how easy maintaining a couple of sheep is to have your own steady source of fleeces. That seemed to be the theme of this book: mentioning some elaborate and time-consuming endeavor while narrating that it’s actually very simple.

Overall, I found it inspiring to keep working on the projects I’m working on. In some places, it reinforces some of the things I’ve learned from other sources and while in others it provides alternatives to some of the things I’d previously learned. But I didn’t learned anything new from this book, and not because there wasn’t anything new in it, but because nothing entirely new was explained well enough for me to learn it.

Oddly, the book also tries really hard to be easily readable to both British and American readers, and does so by providing translations between British and American terms as well as between metric and imperial measurements, but every time it does that, it just makes the text that little bit more confusing. For example, writing “2 square metre (21.5 sq ft.)” looks both weird and weirdly specific when talking about a garden plot for raising dye plants. It seemed representative of the variable levels of respect for the reader: we are assumed to be able to understand tapestry weaving from a two page spread including three diagrams and an illustrated loom, but also need clarification about “furniture (slip) covers”.

Overall, I’m not quite sure who the intended audience for this actually is, but it’s really not for a beginner. And while I enjoy learning all of these skills as a fun hobby, it’s not easy, it’s not quick, and it’s not a replacement for store bought: this is not a guide for self-sufficiency. However, reading this did get me off my couch and preparing a fleece for spinning that I’d been procrastinating about. So that’s a win!

Martyr!

by Anna

By Kaveh Akbar

This is capital-L Literary novel about a depressed young poet searching for the meaning of life and death, and I should absolutely hate it, but I was riveted! I guess that’s a testimony to the writing. The protagonist is still quite annoying, the sort of drug-fueled tortured artist that intrigued me in my 20s and just exhausts me now. But even within the first few pages, I ran across lines that I knew would stick with me for a while.

I never would have even picked it up if it hadn’t been recommended by what is becoming one of my favorite e-newsletters, Death by Consumption.* The recommendation includes this quoted passage:

Everyone in America seemed to be afraid and hurting and angry, starving for a fight they could win. And more than that even, they seemed certain their natural state was to be happy, contented, and rich. The genesis of everyone’s pain had to be external, such was their certainty.

And I thought to myself, well, yes, of course we all want to be happy, contented, and rich; who doesn’t? So I felt like I needed to read the book to find the counter argument. I didn’t really get an answer, but instead got a lot to think about over the next few days and weeks. (Danny also calls it “short but expansive” and I believe his definition of short has been warped by the enormous tomes he usually reads, since this comes to a healthy 331 pages, but it was a quick read, with short chapters from rotating viewpoints that pull you in for ‘just one more.’)

Also, about halfway through the book, there’s a surprise twist that adds a significant mystery that I wasn’t expecting at all, but helped balance the tortured artist side of it all. That said, I found the ending both confusing and upsetting, which could have been intentional but I got the sense that I was getting caught up in details and missing the big point of it all. I was incredibly grateful to google for autofilling my search of “Martyr! Kaveh Akbar…” with “ending explained” and finding an hour-long lecture on youtube, as well as a decent sized reddit thread.

*Side recommendation: I first started following Danny Gottleib’s writing when he was doing a tongue-in-cheek Julie & Julia thing called Danny & Gweneth, where he tried to make all of Gweneth Paltrow’s recipes with ingredients he could find locally in the Midwest. He ended up moving to NYC and switched to a general media recommendation newsletter that I look forward to every week.

The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar

by Rebecca

The River Has Roots
by Amal El-Mohtar
2025

This author has a way of using language to create worlds like lucid dreams. She makes metaphors so strong and pervasive that they’re world-building. It lives in the space between poetry and prose, and reading it feels like a way to slow the frantic pace of my thoughts and set my brain to a reasonable rhythm. I’m in awe of her writing.

This story is a retelling/re-imagining of the classic folk song, The Two Sisters. And of all the versions I’ve read/heard, I like this one best. It’s not a long book, only 100 pages, and includes many beautiful black-and-white illustrations.

El-Mohtar is one of the co-authors of This Is How You Lose the Time War, which was extremely good but also complicated in a way that required more focused concentration than this book did. This story feels closer to Nghi Vo’s The Singing Hills Cycle books, which is also a high complement.

The Age of Magical Overthinking by Amanda Montell

by Rebecca

The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality
written by Amanda Montell
read by Amanda Montell
2024

It took me awhile to write up this review for an audiobook I finished a couple of weeks ago, which is helpful because I want to say that it stuck with me. Not constantly, but every day or every other day, I have the thought of: oh this reminds me of that section of The Age of Magical Overthinking! And that is quite impressive.

I can’t recall how I ran across this book but my library had it as a book-on-tape (ie, CDs) and I have a commute that goes faster if I’m listening to something interesting. This was definitely interesting and gave me plenty to think about. Montell has a bubbly upbeat voice and matching word choice, her book is filled with fun metaphors and sitcom-esque anecdotes, and that combination tried valiantly to keep the tone of this book cheerful as she discusses cognitive biases and how they impact people on both an individual and societal level, including some pretty grim scenarios.

Magical thinking is the idea that your thoughts alone can manifest changes in the world. Montell picked the title of this book with intention, because this isn’t a book about magical thinking, it’s a book about magical overthinking. And she does the same thing with each of these biases: acknowledge that they developed for a reason and have a reasonable place in our mental toolkit. They are not inherently wrong, but they can cause immense harm when they’re over-used or used inappropriately.

The table of contents lists the biases she covers and also gives you a sense of her conversational writing style:

  • Make it make sense : an intro to magical overthinking
  • Are you my mother, Taylor Swift? : a note on the halo effect
  • I swear I manifested this : a note on proportionality bias
  • A toxic relationship is just a cult of one : a note on the sunk cost fallacy
  • The shit-talking hypothesis : a note on zero-sum bias
  • What it’s like to die online : a note on survivorship bias
  • Time to spiral : a note on the recency illusion
  • The scammer within : a note on overconfidence bias
  • Haters are my motivators : a note on the illusory truth effect
  • Sorry I’m late, must be Mercury in retrograde : a note on confirmation bias
  • Nostalgia porn : a note on declinism
  • The life changing magic of becoming a mediocre crafter : a note on the IKEA effect.

Most of these I’ve long been aware, and none of them came as a shock, but some of them I hadn’t given much thought to before this book. And they’re all worth thinking about. This book does an excellent job of introducing the biases to the reader for further contemplation.

In cases where I had already spent a lot of time thinking about them, Montell’s discussion was still an introductory overview that didn’t cover some of the more complex aspects, which is fair given the kind of book it is. But for the biases where I hadn’t been thinking about them, this was a good jumping off point, to start the process of thinking about how I’m thinking.

The Hymn to Dionysus

by Anna

By Natasha Pulley

Ooh, Natasha Pulley just keeps getting better and better at her special talent, which is weaving truly brutal social commentary through a cover of fantasy action. I went into this one with less trepidation after The Mars House, and I’m sort of wondering if The Mars House was a setup. There are enough notably similar themes between the two novels that I began to think of them as a pairing of sorts, though very, very different in setting, character, and plot.

The Hymn To Dionysus has an even more light-hearted tone right off the bat. Our protagonist is a happy child soldier in ancient Thebes, and if it doesn’t exactly sound like a happy existence to a modern reader, well, sometimes that’s just the case with fantasy, especially historical fantasy. I mean, look at the majority of children’s and young adult media, right? The Hunger Games and Naruto, just to name a few right off the bat – full of deeply traumatizing events for young children who just sort of make do, and that’s what our protagonist does, too. His life has some downsides (murdering, enslaving, etc.) but there’s plenty of upsides, too (his military unit is like a family to him, he gets to travel and see all sorts of sights). He and everyone else in Thebes are just going along, until Dionysus, the god of madness, shows up and suddenly they can’t just go along, and the full awareness of it all starts crashing down on them, and it is devastating, for both the characters and the reader.

As if all that wasn’t enough, there are some striking comparisons to our current world. My ancient Greek history isn’t up to much, but I started getting the impression this was set toward the end of the Grecian empire, with a years-long drought devastating all levels of civil society. As field slaves run away, figuring capture and death is better than starvation on the stringent food rations, the military is charged with rounding up ‘criminals’ to work the fields for the necessary food for the city and given a quota to meet, which rang direly true.

It ends as satisfactorily as possible, more so than I’d imagined it being able to after a whole series of gasp-worthy twists, and left some scenes indelibly imprinted in my head, so I’d generally recommend this, though I am looking forward to returning to something a little more gentle next (spoiler: I didn’t do that).

Love, Death + Robots: The Official Anthology : Volume One

by Rebecca

Love, Death + Robots: The Official Anthology: Volume One
2021, audiobook 2025

I have not watched the animation series, but I’ve heard good things about it and I saw that this audiobook existed and so I got it and listened to it on my work commute. And I didn’t quit halfway through, though I was extremely tempted. It has some of the worst writing I’ve ever read/heard. Like, at least one story that’s right up there with Eye of Argon, and others that were close runners up. What’s also crazy is that, as I was listening, increasingly appalled with each new story, I realized that they were managing to cover a wide range of ways in which writing can be poorly written.

In retrospect, I realized that there were two entries that are explicitly screenplays and thus can be forgiven (I suppose) for going into details about exact camera angles, and scene changes, and repetitions of the exact time of day even though it didn’t change, but wow was it hard to get through on my commute. The fact that one of those screenplays (“The Witness” by Alberto Mielgo) literally opened with “a beautiful woman is naked in front of a mirror, applying make-up” felt like such a stereotype/cliche that I wondered if it was intended as a spoof. Sadly, if it was intended as satire, it never made any particular point.

A lot of the stories (“Suits” by Steve Lewis, “Sucker of Souls” by Kirsten Cross, “Shape-Shifters” by Marko Kloos, “Blind Spot” by Vitaliy Shushko, “The Secret War” by David W. Amendola) had men with overwrought machismo fighting slavering aliens, with the type of clinical descriptions of violence and gore that I might expect from an audio-description of a visual media, but not from even a book adaptation of a movie. (“Lucky Thirteen” by Marko Kloos, has a woman with machismo fighting human soldiers, but the rest remains the same.) Text and video are different types of media and text is better served trying to describe the impact of violence/gore on the characters rather than just a description of a picture. However, most of them couldn’t even make their violence impactful. Plus, a really eerie pattern I noticed was how in these stories, there was all this extreme violence between the “main characters “good guys” who feared for this lives but stayed strong through it all because they needed to protect their people, versus the “bad guy” alien others who were mindless killing monsters with no thought or culture of their own, only an endless desire to kill humans. But their actions were the same, extreme violence towards one another: just one side was good and one side was bad. It felt like video games for armchair warriors, who wanted to feel powerful and liked gun statistics and weren’t at all interested in the source of any given conflict.

Some of the stories (“Sonnie’s Edge” by Peter F. Hamilton, “The Witness” by Alberto Mielgo, “Beyond the Aquila Rift” by Alastair Reynolds) had an interesting concept and/or twist that I would have enjoyed seeing presented better and with less of a look at the authors’ sexual issues.

“Beyond the Aquila Rift” was actually the first story (ie, the seventh story) that I thought was genuinely well-written. And then it swerved into focusing on a middle-aged dude’s feelings about his extra-marital affair and it mostly stayed there for the rest of the story, pushing aside the interesting science fiction scenario and reminding me of the stereotypical English professor writing a novel about having an affair. The author tried his best to make the affair plot-significant and mostly managed to make the protagonist so self-centered he came across as a sociopath.

There were some decent stories. (“The Dump” by Joe R. Lansdale, “Fish Night” by Joe R. Lansdale, “Ice Age” by Michael Swanwick, “Alternate Histories” by John Scalzi.) It’s too easy to forget them when I think back on the book. But they were there. They were short, but interesting and fun and funny.

There were two genuinely good stories that I enjoyed a great deal and actually recommend. Luckily, I can even provide links to them (the written versions, not the audio):

“Good Hunting” by Ken Liu is excellent and heart-breaking and heart-warming and all that about China losing it’s magical culture during the British colonial period and then regaining it in a steampunk fashion.

“Zima Blue” by Alistair Reynolds is fascinating and thought-provoking and I have so many thoughts about it but also don’t want to provide any spoilers, because the story itself is so well laid out in the way it presents the situation and slowly makes the reveal, and then leaves the reader to continue to thinking about all the implications for days afterwards. It’s about an artist who went through extreme body modifications in order to have experiences no one else could, and the reporter who interviewed him about his final piece.

To Catch A Cat

by Anna

By Marian Babson

For such a charming cozy premise, this mystery is surprisingly grim and nasty, which is not necessarily a pan but definitely a surprise. Within the first ten pages, 11-year-old Robin has been dared to steal a neighbor’s prized cat but while in the house, witnesses the husband brutally beat his wife to death. I guess I’d expected more of a ‘closed door’ mystery, where all the violence is off-screen so to speak, but it’s really quite explicit. We continue to get intermittent chapters from the husband’s unhinged viewpoint, which are unpleasant and I imagine would be very triggering to anyone experienced in any sort of domestic abuse situation.

At the same time, Robin is staying with his aunt and her less violent, but still verbally abusive boyfriend, and honestly, this novel is not very generous to any sort of post-pubescent male characters. Individual scenes are darkly funny, but the overall situation is grim enough that it is hard to fully enjoy the mystery. Robin is, at best, severely neglected by the variety of self-centered adults around him, with his only real comfort and companion being this cat that he has successfully smuggled out of the murder house.

All the adults are fairly useless in general, with the only real support and help coming from other children and teens. The several divergent plot strands come together in a neat (and fairly quick, at less than 200 pages) ending, and like any decent cozy, it all concludes satisfactorily, though disconcertingly so, considering everything everyone has been through.

Manners and Monsters

by Anna

By Tilly Wallace

I’d run across a couple different recommendations for this book, and the premise is fascinating! Set in a fantasy England in the early 19th century, a biological weapon created in the Napoleanic wars has turned several hundred members of the English aristocracy, primarily women, into zombies of a sort. Honestly, the worldbuilding is so clever, this is more of what I would have liked to see in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies! The aristocracy, being the elite, have made it a whole song and dance, with a whole new set of ridiculous etiquette around their living-dead members.

When the etiquette is broken quite violently with a zombie-esque murder (missing brains, of course) at a grand ball, chief investigator Viscount Wycliff, on the fringe of haute ton himself, must pry into secrets of the various ‘unfortunates’ in attendance. In order to ruffle as few feathers as possible, he is accompanied by Spunky Heroine™ Hannah, the unassuming daughter of a surgeon specializing in undead ailments. And here’s where the novel lost me a little.

I generally liked Hannah, but both protagonists are fairly flatly written: Wycliff is brusque to the point of insulting, while Hannah pines for love at least half a dozen times throughout the book. The two are very clearly destined for each other, which wouldn’t bother me if they didn’t seem like an exceptionally bad match. I’d be reading along, enjoying the general zombification of the Regency era, and then their personal interactions would be a sour note. Romance really is trickier to write than people realize!

An additional big kudo to author Tilly Wallace, though: she sells all of her books directly through her website, tillywallace.com, where you can pay and promptly download an epub file. As someone trying to cut my very last tie to amazon (those pesky self-published ebooks), I very much appreciated this, and hope that more self-published authors follow suit!

The Mars House

by Anna

By Natasha Pulley

You know how there are rare authors that you as a reader just trust implicitly? Like, even if the story doesn’t seem to be making sense or clicking, you know they’ll pull it off in the end. Well, I don’t trust Natasha Pulley – in fact, I actively distrust her. This is not to say that her books aren’t consistently excellent. They are! She just has a real habit of throwing in some actual crime against humanity, and having all the characters shrug it off like no big deal.

I wouldn’t even read this one until Kinsey read it first and gave me the all clear, and even then, I read it in a sort of mental flinch state. This also made me very suspicious of the slightest hint of genocidal tendencies in characters, so I was extra judgmental of them all and not quite able to actually like them as much as perhaps I would have otherwise.

Our main character is a principal ballet dancer for the Royal Ballet who has to flee the climate crisis in London for a colony on Mars. There, he is consigned to manual labor until a conflict with an anti-immigration politician forces the two of them into a contractual marriage (it makes marginally more sense in the context). This would all be brutal to read if the protagonist wasn’t such an utter golden retriever, just overall cheerful (and a little egocentric) regardless of harrowing circumstances around him.

It seemed clear from the outset that the politics were not all that they seemed, but I stayed extremely wary of Pulley trying to trick me into rooting for a war criminal or some such. Instead, though, she wove a very satisfyingly complex mystery that pulls in geopolitics, gender and cultural identity, disability rights, and so much more. The core relationship is, of course, the draw, but I find myself continuing to think through the various linguistic and cultural extrapolations Pulley creates here.

The Little Book of Bees by Kearney and Holliday

by Rebecca

The Little Book of Bees: An illustrated guide to the extraordinary lives of bees
written by Hilary Kearney
illustrated by Amy Holliday
2019

This is a really nice, easy, nonfiction read about bees, with gorgeous illustrations and fun facts and the text broken into many short sections, which is good for my current level of concentration (which has been shot recently.) It felt like it was structured a bit like an elementary school textbook, with lots of side bars and large illustrations, but written for an audience with an adult reading comprehension.

A bit more than half of the book is a solid overview of what bees are, how many types of bees there are (hint: it’s a lot!), and what the differences are between the different types of bees.* The remaining sections talk about different kinds of honey (which led me down an extra online rabbit hole regarding the most expensive honeys), a brief overview of beekeeping (which I’m already thinking of trying), and how modern environmental issues are causing declines in bee populations (which is really depressing although this section does include some suggestions of things regular people can do to help, many of which I’m already doing, but I can try to do more).

Bees really are very cute and I enjoy seeing them in my garden and this book was lovely and interesting, written by someone who really loves bees. And the illustrations are gorgeous!

* I do have to call out one sub-section that discussed the differences between bees, wasps, and flies, though, because it is hilariously biased and told me a lot more about the author than it did about bees, wasps, or flies. According to this author bees are cute and adorable and elegant and lovely, while wasps and flies are simply not as wonderful. (Examples: A bee has elegantly curved eyes wrapping around its head, while a fly has ugly bulbous eyes protruding from its head. A bee has playfully curious antennae, while a wasp has restlessly jittery antennae.) HAHAHAHA! It was a single section that stood out as being uselessly subjective and that made it all the more hilarious.