🎂 A birthday request: share what you like

Slightly belated, but even so: I'm asking for recommendations, to and from.

Last week was my birthday; I ended up busier than expected. December tends to be like that, around here. My husband’s birthday is usually Thanksgiving week and then it’s wham bam chaos until the second week of January — I’ve got three little-kid birthday parties to go to over the weekend after we ring in the new year.

This year, I’m getting a combined gift: we dropped a bundle painting some walls and getting a new shower put in to replace the tub that’s a pain to clean and has been giving my hips trouble since my first pregnancy. I’m absolutely stoked, but wrangling contractors always takes longer than I expect, especially for a project that is high in aesthetic concerns. It’s not just painting the walls, see: it’s getting an heirloom painting restored, properly framing some relief maps with sentimental value, that sort of thing.

All of which to say I meant to ask this last week, forgive me, but 37 has come with some unusual challenges to my calendar.

First things first: I need more fiction to read.

I have a big ole stack of nonfiction I’m working my way through, but I have been spinning my wheels lately when it comes to fiction. It seems like everything I pick up lately is either depressing, actively annoying, or deeply unrelatable. Most of my colleagues adore Brandon Sanderson, but I gave The Way of Kings another go and wow! is it an unrelenting slog of deeply depressing things, with no way to sink into a single point of view in the beginning. Certainly not one that has any hope of a happy ending. I know there are plenty of books out there with good worldbuilding that are not a constant march of disorienting suckitude; a year ago I gave my roundup of chill fiction I enjoyed, featuring folks like Nathan Lowell, Erin Ampersand, Seth Ring, Matt Dinniman, and David Petrie.

The trouble is, of course, finding more books like theirs. It feels like I’ve been putting down books a lot more often than I used to; not sure if I’ve changed or the market has. For example, I really enjoyed A Discovery of Witches (affiliate link, small commission, blah blah) — not least of which because so much of the book hinges on historical research and taking notes in a lovely old library. Unfortunately, I lost patience with the protagonist and her husband midway through the second book. It’s richly researched I’m sure, but time travel to and fro isn’t particularly my thing, and the trope where the old vampire teaches his spirited young wife how to live in the world is not my favorite. I’ve heard the third book is better; I kept trying to slog through book 2 to get there. But it’s slow going and if reading is going to feel like a chore I’d rather read something like Eat, Poop, Die: How Animals Make Our World (yep, still an affiliate link) by Joe Roman, which I recently finished. It was quite interesting but is hardly light bedtime reading for an exhausted night when I am just trying to recalibrate my mood after a tough day wrangling a whiny preschooler — we’re still working on equanimity with regard to “you win some, you lose some” here in Casa Konik.

So if you have any recommendations for fluffy fiction that is generally well-written, involves grown-ups with grown-up problems, reasonably fulfilling lives, relatively inspirational reading experience and lots of small, simple wins, please share. I do not want to get slapped in the face with a bitter rant about how unpleasant life is on page six; I know many authors are having tough times these days, but I am not in a stage where diatribes about unfairness are good for my mental health. The only way out is through; I don’t want to wallow in all the ways in which intolerant bureaucrats are evil. I get enough of that from r/aboringdystopia and my own experiences sitting on the phone with the bank.

I enjoy competent characters, and I really enjoy frontier and settlement stories where people have to pit their wits against the environment. Some of my favorite books include the Kate Daniels series by Ilona Andrews (particularly the Wilmington years when Kate and Curran move to Wilmington and start fresh), Fall of Angels by L. E. Modesitt (in which a spaceship full of high-tech military officers ends up eking out a settlement on an uninviting icy plateau), and Dragonsdawn by Anne McCaffrey (in which a spaceship full of colonists bioenginer dragons to help fight a threat from space). Yes, those are affiliate links.

If you know of anything like that, please don’t hold back, share the wealth.

Second things second: Please share an article with a friend

One of the side effects of being busy — and taking care with my mental health in terms of what I read — is that I’ve been spending a lot less time on social media. I’ve been spending a lot more time with analog notebooks; my bullet journal is back in action. I write quotes on future pages after my daily highlights review. Sometimes I work around them, sometimes they inspire reflection. Like so:

My kids ask to color in them sometimes. It’s nice. It is not, however, particularly social and I do like talking to people about nerdy things. People: not bots. Friends of friends. Not active users the algorithm hopes I’ll engage with to drive up key performance indicators.

So if you have a friend who might enjoy one of these articles, can you do me a favor and pass it along to them? They’re all free, I like to think they’re reasonably interesting, and it would mean a lot to me during this (belated) birthday and holiday season.

• My thoughts on how to take notes that actually matter, efficiency, optimization, and the value of passively learning ‘in advance’ of when you’ll need to know stuff. Ties in nicely with my reflections on Boydian-influenced business strategy and the value of building good intuition by staying aware of the changing landscape and building an intuitive feel for relevant knowledge.

• My most common anthropology take: religious ‘rituals’ are often quite practical, in a Chesterton’s fence sort of way. Take for example how ancient civilizations handled plagues, and how often priests filled the role of experts in ancient societies. Incidentally, princesses were often diplomats and religious leaders. But note:

  Jane Psmith
  is absolutely correct when she points out that some things traditional societies do are just bad and wrong and maladaptive.

• This book review of Tamed: Ten Species that Changed The World, by Alice Roberts. It’s got lots of neat tidbits about history and biology and domestication and humans.

• In the age of AI slop, my tips on how to evaluate stuff you learn on the internet are more relevant than ever. So’s this old paper I wrote about the difficulties of teaching critical thinking. I also still stand by every word of yet another hot take on Folders vs. Tags, though it’s been 3 years since I wrote it.

• And here’s a short story I still really like, about nomads milking enormous spiders and making cheese, with reflections on food storage, cultural norms around food, famine, and other things I write about pretty often.

Or — if there’s one I wrote that you like even better, or that you think of regularly, can you tell me about it? It really helps to know what resonates.

Last thing: thank you

It is sometimes hard to prioritize writing, but writing means a lot to me. Having a regular writing habit in which I write ~weekly essays is very rewarding. But as with physical exercise, it can be hard for me to prioritize unless other people care. Every comment, every kind email, every ping on social media, every ‘heart’ on every post, and yes every dollar y’all share with me means the world. I’m deeply thankful for each of the roughly five thousand folks who read this newsletter on a regular basis; I think of you often, especially the lovely folks who take the time to correspond regularly. I hope you all enjoy the wham-bam holiday season that is December(ish), and have many wonderful conversions in the coming weeks.