Sunday Coffee – Taking Some Time Off

Posted on July 17, 2022 by Thistle

I know I haven’t been on here very much anyway, not since April – posting less, rarely getting on my feedly to see others’ posts, etc. I’m not reading much, I’m not writing much, and I’m in a personal funk (a “it’s so damn hot outside that I’m boiling and even typing brings my body temp up too much” funk). I’m not going on a full-on blog break, but I’m not going to be around much in the next few months. About a decade ago, I decided that I wasn’t going to force myself to blog if I wasn’t feeling it, and that’s how I’ve been able to keep on with it for so long. So there may continue to be an odd book review here or there, or maybe a post about cats, or a Sunday Coffee, or whatever. But I also may not post for a week or two at a time, and I’m not going to stress about that. It is what it is. I’m too hot to care too much.

But speaking of cats (aren’t I always?), I can’t end this without mentioning my next batch of fosters, because they’re pretty great. I’ll pick them up in a few hours, and have them for the next two weeks or so. Mama is named Olive Oyl, and her three babies, born June 8, are Popeye, Bluto, and Brutus. (I’m amused that the shelter gave two of them names for the same character – at least it was the two almost-identical white kittens!) So what makes these guys particularly special? They were born on my mom’s enclosed porch. Olive was a friendly community cat that my mom coaxed inside when she saw she was pregnant, and a few days later, these three babies entered the world. She meant to sign up as a foster through the shelter, the way J and I did for Shai and Hulud, but she must’ve set up to surrender instead, and she turned them in this week. I knew they were going in sometime this week, and I was looking for them to show up on the foster-needed list due to their age. Turned out, my mom turned them in at 11 yesterday morning, and an hour later, they were on the daily email! Two minutes after that, I’d requested to be their foster mama and got approved. I’m excited to keep them in the family for a few more weeks.

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You’re Invited, by Amanda Jayatissa

Posted on July 15, 2022 by Thistle

Amaya hasn’t spoken to her ex-boyfriend or ex-best-friend in five years, but when she sees they’ve suddenly gotten engaged, she knows she must stop the wedding at all costs.

Book TW (contains spoilers so highlight to read): fatphobia, self-harm, BDSM, domestic violence, pedophilia (end spoilers)

This book was my Book of the Month selection for July. I rarely choose thrillers from BotM because as any longtime blog-reader can tell you, while I enjoy the process of reading thrillers, I tend to dislike about 90% of them. (Yeah, I have no idea why I enjoy reading them if I dislike them so much, it’s weird and irrational, but there you go.) It’s better to get thrillers through the library, so I’m not spending money on books I might not enjoy. But the other BotM selections this month weren’t great, and this one’s Sri Lankan setting intrigued me. Still. I should have just put this one on my to-investigate list and gotten it from the library. I really didn’t find anything redeeming about this one, and if I hadn’t bought it, I wouldn’t have read it all the way through.

Apologies in advance for a review of nothing but negatives (for me, anyway). Feel free to skip.

My main problem with the book is the primary narrator, Amaya. She has no personality. Instead, she has a few quirks – self-harm, OCD-like obsession with numbers, constantly visualizing gruesome deaths of those around her. The quirks didn’t make up a personality, though – they felt like checkmarks on a list, attached to a fictional character with no other defining features. The rest of the cast is fairly flat as well, but none as much as Amaya.

Unfortunately, the reason I chose the book – the setting – seemed equally flat and ethereal. I never got the sense of actually experiencing Sri Lanka, which was a disappointment. The last thriller I read, Breathless, took place in the Himalayans, and it was enormously evocative, using all senses to really put the reader right into that world. That’s what I was hoping for here, but instead, it felt as immersive as watching a TV show about the area, skewed for American audiences. It was over the top, with all the cliches and tropes you’d expect, when I wanted a vicarious experience of the true life and culture, from an author who grew up there.

Now add to all that the fat-shaming, the predictable plot, the weird obsession with Instagram in an age-group that generally feels like Instagram is fake (and are leaving it in droves), and the lack of any decent human beings anywhere? Like I said before, I never would have read this book to the end had I got it from the library. (Probably the whole fat-shaming ride of Amaya’s with her cousin when she gets to Sri Lanka would have been the end for me.) I always try to find something to recommend a book, and there’s no doubt that many people would probably love it and find it engaging – just not me. Take that with a grain of salt, though. I did start this review by saying that I dislike 90% of the thrillers I read…

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Updated Goals for 2022

Posted on July 13, 2022 by Thistle

With my current 2022 goals mostly in shambles, I’ve decided to update them for the second half of 2022.

Physical Health
Complications, side effects, and new medical conditions made former goals unachievable in the time remaining, so I’ve scrapped them entirely and replaced them with:

  • Catch up on backlogged medical appointments – dermatologist, ob/gyn, potentially a new dietition, potentially a new endocrinologist
  • do an elimination test for dairy per GI instructions
  • finish Yoga With Adriene’s Move program from January 2022, plus any new videos/backlog from 2021 and the first half of 2022
  • find a way to incorporate a strength and/or mobility program to improve joint management
  • drop coffee back to 1 cup per day, or at very least, nothing caffeinated after noon

From my 50×50 Goals
I completed 3 of 5 goals from the original 2022 list, plus one additional off the 50×50 list. I’m keeping the remaining two (shop at a farmer’s market, play badminton) on here, and adding a Paint Your Pet night for both Jojo and Atticus (hoping Jason and I can do this together).

Books
This is one goal-set that I’ve done well on and don’t need to change.

House
A few things from the original list got done, but now that we’ve changed focus to work toward an eventual out of state move, the old list is no longer valid and a new list takes priority:

  • Make a list of all the house-related jobs that must be completed before selling
  • Prioritize the above list
  • Complete the front yard
  • Plan on the backyard, and complete if possible

Note: any further tasks done off that list would be a bonus, but since it’s not made, I can’t add them to my goals specifically. The yards, on the other hand, will have to be one of the first things completed because they take time to grow and fill in, however we create them, in order to look nice by the time we sell.

Photography
This is another goal that needs no changes, but it’s been back-burnered for months, so I need to bring it to the foreground again – especially digital editing, about which I’ve learned very little.

Other
These were my miscellaneous goals, and a good number of them have either been completed or nullified. Others have changed with personal priorities. I’ve incorporated the remaining to a new list, with a few new goals that have now become relevant:

  • If possible, take a trip to Albuquerque for move-potential
  • Update the cats’ microchips
  • Organize photo books for eventual Shutterfly/Chatbooks/etc
  • Attend Hopscotch
  • Attempt to find a good therapist (again)
  • Watch the rest of my backdated movie list

Hopefully this list is more achievable in 2022 than the original list turned out to be!

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Books on My Rest-of-2022 TBR Pile

Posted on July 11, 2022 by Thistle

Every year, I make a list of books to read or cull throughout that year, a list of book priorities, so to speak. They consist both of books that will be published during the year that I’m really looking forward to, books that have been sitting on my TBR (virtual, physical, or audio queue) for longer than they should, or books categorized under my “to investigate” list. In 2022, I had 24 books on that list, and currently have three remaining. Of the other 21, there were 13 read, 7 culled, and 1 abandoned book – a much higher success rate than most years! In the meantime, I’ve grown a small but not overwhelming new TBR list for the second half of 2022, which is also a better positive result compared to most years (where I’ve had 40+ to go through by this time, and feel entirely overwhelmed.

Remaining on my original list are Miss Moriarty, I Presume (saving for RIP season), The Gifts That Bind Us (just released, I’m first on the hold list), and The Lost Metal (publishes in November). To add to that, I have:

Physical Owned Books

  • You’re Invited – Amanda Jayatissa: BotM book, currently reading
  • The Stardust Thief – Chelsea Abdullah: BotM book
  • Darling Girl – Liz Michalski: BotM book
  • Community Cats – Anne Beall: nonfiction, a gift from J
  • Cain’s Jawbone (?) – Torquemada: a puzzle book that may not be readable in the traditional sense, hence the ?
  • Haunted History of Old San Antonio – Swartz & Swartz: nonfiction, saving for RIP

Audible Queue

  • The Groves – JV Lyon: honestly don’t even know how this got into my queue, must’ve been free at some point?

Library Books/Holds

  • Air Plants – Zenaida Sengo: nonfiction, currently at my home
  • Ride With Me – Lucy Keating: to investigate
  • The Clackity – Lora Senf: might keep for RIP if it doesn’t come for awhile (still on order)
  • Ordinary Monsters – JM Miro: probably should keep for RIP but we’ll see
  • The It Girl – Ruth Ware: same
  • The House Across the Lake – Riley Sager: same

Other Virtual TBR/To-Investigate

  • The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning – Margareta Magnusson: nonfiction, saving for RIP
  • Suddenly Psychic – Elizabeth Hunter: to investigate
  • Teeth in the Mist – Dawn Kurtagich: to investigate, might save for RIP
  • A Turn of the Tide – Kelley Armstrong: publishes in October, pre-ordered audio
  • The Ink Black Heart – Robert Galbraith (?): I hated the last book and I despise the author and I’m very, very conflicted about this book so I don’t really know…

Altogether, that’s 21 books – 3 from the original list and 18 new. And as you can tell, a lot of these have been percolating for the RIP season, so I’ve purposely kept from reading (or even trying) them before now.

Have you read any of these? Any thoughts on good/bad/not worth it?

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Sunday Coffee – To Move or Not to Move

Posted on July 10, 2022 by Thistle

This is a decision that’s been weighing on my mind. The last time we moved back to Texas, I swore we would never leave again, but so much has changed and I’m struggling to determine the best course of action.

When we first moved to San Antonio in late 2005, there were a few reasons. 1) My cousins were all having kids, and I had a toddler half-sister who I wanted to be closer to. I’m very close to my family and I missed that community aspect. 2) The job market in the rural area where we lived didn’t offer a lot of opportunities. In 2005, there weren’t the same remote-work options available now, that rumors of whole departments being eliminated made us uneasy. We needed to be somewhere with better opportunities. 3) If we did move for the job situation, we wanted to do it proactively – before either of us lost our jobs, and before the kids were old enough to be in school. The plan was to save money, move, find employment, find a place to live, and lay permanent roots.

And that’s what we did, until the whole Boston fiasco and wildly bouncing around the country four times in three years between 2014 and 2017. If we’d skipped those years and stayed in the same place according to our original plans, we’d all be in a far better place these days, in health, in finances, in my potential career, in mental health, etc. But this post isn’t about the way we kicked our lives off balance in 2014. It’s an evaluation of the reasons we chose to move here, the reasons we kept choosing to move back here, whether or not those reasons still apply, and if newer factors have changed anything.

Old Factors

  • Family: All those former young kids are now grown up, and much of my family lives farther away now. Most of those who live close are part of the core group of anti-vaxxers in my family, and there’s been a large cultural schism due to the pandemic. This is no longer a factor to stay, and honestly might be a factor in favor of leaving – more distance might be better at this point.
  • Jobs: Nearly 20 years of experience and technology has made this factor virtually nonexistent.
  • Kids and School: Our last kid graduated from high school this spring. Another no-long-relevant factor.

So our reasons for moving here originally in 2005 are no longer valid. I next want to look at the reasons we kept returning, the additional factors that arose between 2005 and our last move to San Antonio in 2017.

New Factors

  • Friends and Family: I already discussed family factors above. In friends, I had writing groups, book clubs, and health-related groups. Each time we moved away, I struggled to find similar groups for one reason or another. I always wanted to come back to where my people were.
  • Familiarity: We always moved back to the same area, both because of the school situation, but also the library, my favorite hiking park, my chiropractor, Half Price Books, our specific HEB, Salsalitos, and so many other restaurants, businesses, neighborhoods, parks, etc that made up the fabric of so many of our years. This area felt like home.

But of course, things don’t always stay the same, and this is where I need to focus on both the positive and negative changes over the last five years since moving back to SA for the final time, as well as the potential risks and implications of relocating again.

Recent Factors

  • Cats: With seven cats, our options for housing will be limited to buying a house. Buying in a new area without prior firsthand knowledge is a potentially disastrous proposition. No matter how much research you do beforehand, you can never tell if you’re making the right decision. Making the wrong decision puts you in an even more financially vulnerable position, and we aren’t young anymore. We can’t make another disastrous decision like we did with Boston.
  • Hiking: More recently, I’ve made an amazing circle of friends through my hiking group, and I love being part of this. I would really miss this if I were to leave, and I don’t know if I could find something similar, or how long it would take me to do so, if I moved.
  • Pandemic/Business Changes: Covid really changed the landscape of familiarity, with shops going out of business, hours shortening, and generally making my family more homebound (including WFH for Jason a big chunk of the time).
  • Paving the Park: My favorite hiking park mentioned above has been 90% paved over, which makes it much harder for me to use. (Degraded joints don’t like concrete.) It feels like an entirely different place, and I don’t go there nearly as often as I used to.
  • Doctors/Health: I finally found a good primary care doctor here, which is something I’ve struggled with no matter where I live. I’d hate to give that up. On the flip side, San Antonio is one of the worst cities in the country in terms of health, especially with the allergens being so high that even people who aren’t allergic react to them.
  • Weather/Climate: It’s burning hot six months of the year, which makes consistent exercise difficult, and takes a toll on my mental health. With climate change, the heat is getting progressively worse each year. I would love to live in a place with a more moderate climate year round.
  • Family Changes: My kids are all moving away to different parts of the world. The pandemic has caused a rift in my extended family. My siblings all live at least five hours away. Family is no longer a factor in staying, and might be a factor in leaving.
  • Politics: Uuuugh Texas is the worst and I don’t feel even remotely safe here. This was the catalyst that kicked all this from idle wondering to actively making potential plans.
  • Finances/Cost of Moving: As I said above, we’re not young. If we move, we need to be absolutely sure this is the right decision. Moving is expensive – often upwards of $20k goes toward moving expenses, and that’s doing it all yourself – and unfortunately, San Antonio remains one of the cheapest metro areas to live in. Other metro areas around the country range from double to ten times our housing market. Even if our current mortgage was paid off and we sold our house at the height of the most recent bubble, the amount we’d earn (all toward down payment) still wouldn’t make an affordable mortgage in many places. So places we could move would be limited to higher crime cities, small towns, or deep red state areas – none of which are acceptable.

This last factor is the biggest impediment to moving. Regardless of whether or not we want to move, or should move, it’s whether we can move that has to be answered. And honestly, with the current housing market, the answer to that is no except in a few locations (and even these require some sacrifices in our criteria). Of course, housing markets and political landscape can change any second, but in the meantime, we’ve been looking at two places we could potentially afford to move to in the next 5-10 years: Albuquerque and Pittsburgh. They are vastly different areas, both with pros and cons, neither or which either of us have been to. I’ve been gathering info both from internet searches and from friends who have visited and lived in those places, and the perspectives, the better. So if you have anything to add to that, I’d love to hear your experience! (Or if you have other location ideas, I’d open to hearing them!)

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The Locked Room, by Elly Griffiths (audio)

Posted on July 7, 2022 by Thistle

As the UK enters its first lockdown in 2020, Ruth Galloway tries to unravel a mystery from her mother’s past while simultaneously teaching, homeschooling, and running a university department. DCI Nelson, meanwhile, finds his investigation into a string of suspicious suicides hampered by covid-related issues. This 14th book of the series is less focused on mystery, and more on the confusion, uncertainty, and fear brought on by the early days of the pandemic.

Let me give three warnings before I start in with my thoughts on this book. First, don’t read any of the online book descriptions. I’m not sure why, but they’re all different from each other and all inaccurate in some way. Weird things, like they each have a different name for Ruth’s neighbor. Second, this book is written in a way to make that first wave of lockdown and the unknown feel very, very close. Yes, the pandemic is still ongoing, but we have more information now, more protocols, more protection. This book deals with everything from toilet paper shortages to the increase in domestic violence during lockdown to conspiracy theorists. If the pandemic hit very close to home for you, particularly if you had a family member pass away in those early days, this book might cause some re-traumatization. Third is a content warning for covid death, domestic violence, and eating disorders (including general disordered eating, extreme weight loss, fad dieting, and body image issues).

Now that that’s out of the way, I loved this book. It’s a very chaotic book, with a couple different mysteries going on, but unlike previous volumes of this series, the mystery is almost superfluous. The real focus of the book is covid. Griffiths does an incredible job of bringing those early days back to life, with all the uncertainty and unknowns. Everything changed so quickly from it’s just a flu, it’ll pass quickly, it won’t really affect us; to shut downs and lockdowns and shortages and confusion. I’ve said it before, but again: On March 8th, 2020, I went on a long hike with friends and at the mid-point, we had a snack break. One woman offered around hand sanitizer, and most of us declined. We briefly discussed covid, and 90% of us weren’t really concerned. Three days later, our local NBA basketball team canceled the rest of the season. On the 13th, we had our first local covid case and went into the closest San Antonio ever had to a lockdown. Five days. That’s how quickly things changed.

Mixed in with all the covid stuff is a lot of development in Ruth’s personal life. She learns a lot more about her family, both positive and negative, though I can’t say more without giving away spoilers. The complicated relationship between her and DCI Nelson is fairly well back-burnered for a big chunk of the book, though it’s always an undercurrent, and there are some large changes there, too.

There is more, there are actually some moments of extreme acute tension, of don’t you dare, that I can’t discuss without giving away some emotionally valuable parts of the story. I’ll just say that my heart was racing and I brought my audiobook to a place where I could get uninterrupted listening time, because I was not going to stop listening until that particular situation was resolved!

Anyway. I usually don’t spend this much time on a later volume of a series, but this one felt noteworthy for a lot of reasons. In general, I continue to love this series and eagerly anticipate each new volume. This one, just like the previous, was particularly good. I feel like they’re getting better over time, and I’m so happy that I found these books a few years ago. I have no idea how long Ruth Galloway will have her adventures – book 15 is slated for publishing next year – but I’ll keep reading as long as she does!

Performance: As usual, Jane McDowell narrates this book. I’ve complained in the past about some of the sound effects of the production (like the echoing distance voice on phone calls) and those still aren’t my favorite (though I’ve gotten used to them), but a new sound effect was used for other portions of the novel that I really did appreciate. I mostly enjoyed the performance, and I generally prefer listening to this series. The audio really brings them to life.

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June 2022 in Review

Posted on July 4, 2022 by Thistle

Ugh June. Usually a fairly good month, after the oppression of May, but the unrelenting heat, stressful goodbyes, re-rise of covid, and horrific politics has made June probably the worst month of 2022. Oy. It’s been a monotonous haze of tv, puzzles, cats, heat, and cabin fever. Unlikely to change any time soon, but I’m glad to put June behind me!

Reading and Watching
Reading hasn’t been my top priority this month, with only three books finished. I’ve mostly been watching Murdoch reruns to occupy my brain when I get too angry or depressed or stressed (and all the rest), though I did take a break from reruns to finally watch SpiderMan: Far From Home. It was pretty good. I’m sad I missed it on the big screen (re: covid).

Goals
It’s the time of year when I evaluate my yearly goals and either decide to scrap them or continue. This year, it seems as if my goals have either been completed – or will be soon – or have been canceled due to circumstances beyond my control. There’s not much left to look at, and I think I’m just going to say f*ck it. Perhaps I’ll start again. I guess I did cross the bowling goal off my 50×50-goals this month.

House
What to do, what to do…if we plan to move out of Texas at some point in a few years, plans on the house must change, so new evaluation begins…

(June’s only hike)

Health/Fitness
More doctor visits. More stuff ruled out. More procedures suggested. More hopelessness. I did finally see a therapist this month. It was an evaluation visit, and it turned out that this office was just a newer location for a practice that I went to in 2015. I left that practice because they were suggesting ridiculous, costly procedures my insurance wouldn’t cover, plus they were selling weight loss products at the front desk. Red flags all around. The search begins anew.

In other news, the second quarter comes in with 23 medical visits/procedures, for a total of 46 in 2021 so far. If things continue this way, I’m looking at not-quite-100 for 2022, down from the 120+ in 2021. Still, I’m no closer to answers. This is exhausting.

Quarantine Diaries
San Antonio is back at it again, next round. So many of my friends are falling to covid. We got our first letter from Ambrose, dated 6/25, and he’d been diagnosed with covid that day, and moved to a special covid dorm. I have no idea how he’ll finish boot camp with covid symptoms (apparently the symptoms that got him sent to the hospital were trouble breathing and fever/chills) but hopefully they have protocols in place. The same day we got that letter, we heard that Morrigan and his fiancé also had covid. Technically, that’s part of July’s Quarantine Diaries, but I might as well include it here. Hopefully they come through it okay, too. We’ll see when/if our house-family falls this time. I need to get my second booster shot soon.

Favorite Photos
I took very few photos this month, and even those that I took, none really stood out as strong favorites. These six are the ones that best represented specific emotions of the month, instead.

Top: Angus and Gherkin cuddling; Hulud’s last photo before surrender; Shai’s last photo before surrender. Bottom: Ambrose and Laurence laughing right before Ambrose left for the AF; deconstructing a puzzle (this is more satisfying than bubble wrap); Tillie and Penny cuddling.

Highlights of June
I’m glad I kept track, because the end of this month has been angry, angry, angry…

  • mindset shift towards daily movement
  • baby armadillos in my yard!
  • cuddling with my permanent cats, who were so excited to be let back into my bedroom for the first time in two weeks
  • J and I accidentally sending each other the same TT vid at the same time
  • silly bowling challenges
  • the absolute ridiculousness of playing Pictionary with my family (and laughing so hard at times that I couldn’t breathe)
  • baby skunks, possums, and foxes showed up this month too!
  • finally going out with friends again after a long time being confined at home
  • getting to see Tipsy (now named Mojito) settle into his new home
  • this amazing article and news segment about my hiking group!
  • fostering Sunflower –>
  • we finally got a tree guy out and it turns out we don’t have oak wilt after all!
  • RAIN!!!!! We finally got much-needed rain near the end of the month, in the form of thunderstorms, too!

Coming up in July
Ambrose’s birthday, though he won’t be here with us to celebrate for the first time. Actually, lots of birthdays, as July is the second biggest birthday month of my family. But given the covid situation, I doubt there’ll be much celebration. There also likely won’t be any kind of mini-vacation like I talked about in a previous post. So maybe more short-term foster cats like Sunflower. Something useful to bring light to the tiny corner of the world I can control.

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Sunday Coffee – Stalker

Posted on July 3, 2022 by Thistle

Note: For the purposes of this post, I am lumping myself into the category of “woman” as I am afab and was socialized female.

Women are gaslit from early childhood. We’re told that boys hurt you or make fun of you because they like you. We’re told that it’s our job to nurture, to be nice, to be responsible for everything from others’ feelings to day-to-day management. We’re denied healthcare procedures because we’re not considered competent enough to make those decisions alone, and we’re often dismissed as a modern-day version of hysteria if we complain of pain, abuse, manipulation, fear, or disrespect. We’re taught that if our instincts are screaming at us, telling us danger is near, we should dismiss those instincts as paranoia, and “just be nice.”

TW for the rest of this post: stalking, gaslighting. This is also a VERY long story/post.

Continue reading →

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Tell Me Everything, by Erika Krouse (audio)

Posted on July 1, 2022 by Thistle

Subtitled: The Story of a Private Investigation

Part memoir, part legal/true crime, Krouse details the work she did as a private detective on a landmark case involving sexual assault in the collegiate football arena. Over the course of several years, her work uncovered survivors, witnesses, and documentation needed to tackle not just the inappropriate behavior of students and the administration that hushed it all up, but the issue of women’s safety as a civil right. Mixed throughout her work on the case is her own personal history of child abuse.

I’m in two minds about this book, because it’s essentially two books mixed together. First, I thought the legal case aspects and the investigation was interesting. That’s what I chose the book for. Second, I wish the memoir portions had been left out. I know they were subject-related, and of course part of the author’s own mental health while investigating the case, but I’m not a fan of memoirs and this one was no exception. If the memoir had had some bearing on the legal case, it would have been different, but making this book part memoir instead made the case part of Krouse’s story, and honestly, that felt a little distasteful for me. In the end, those two pieces of the book really canceled each other out, making the book just okay.

A few things stuck out for me by the end: This was another extremely timely read, and it was especially ironic because Neil f*cking Gorsuch was one member of the panel of judges that finally got this case off the ground. There’s this discussion in the book about how everyone was surprised that Gorsuch would actually stick up for women’s rights, and it’s obviously now that him doing so was an absolute fluke, since he – along with other parts of SCOTUS – just sent women back into the realm of chattel last week. Those football players raping and abusing women at the center of this book’s case? They can now force their victims to have their babies. Yay.

(Can you tell that I’m still really angry? Good. Fellow warriors, stay angry! And if you don’t like it, no one says you have to read my blog.)

TW: all manner of abuse, assault, and sexual violence, as you might imagine from the book description

Performance: This audiobook was narrated by Gabra Zackman, my first experience with her. Personally, I thought she read the book well enough that I kept forgetting that it wasn’t her firsthand account. I’m not a fan of authors reading their own books about 90% of the time, but occasionally, I come across a narrator that sounds as if they’re the author reading their book well, and this was one of those cases. I enjoyed it. On the other hand, you might give the audio a preview listen before purchasing, because at one point, Jason overheard me listening, and while he wasn’t close enough to hear the words, he thought I was listening to a Tiktok vid with text-to-speech. A sort of robotic almost-human voice. I didn’t feel that way myself, but again, just preview before buying!

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Curfew, by Jayne Cowie

Posted on June 29, 2022 by Thistle

For fifteen years, women in Great Britain have been safe. Ever since the reforms of 2023, women have had equal pay, domestic work compensation, free and easy access to healthcare such as birth control and abortion, strict laws re: violence against women, and best of all, a period of curfew for men between 7pm and 7am. Men are electronically monitored, and breaking curfew immediately alerts police and requires a mandatory jail sentence. Women can walk the streets safely, be out after dark, get away from abusive partners, and control decisions about their lives. Even something as simple as cohabitating with a man requires counseling and evaluation to make sure any potential red flags for partner abuse are seen beforehand.

But domestic violence, and violence against women in general, have been engrained in western culture for so many centuries Can fifteen years of laws and curfew really overcome toxic masculinity? No system is foolproof, and when a woman ends up murdered, face pounded beyond recognition, and left in a park overnight, the police are baffled. The culprit has to be a woman, if no man broke curfew. Or is there something more at play here?

I learned about this book from a friend, and began reading it a few days before the recent SCOTUS decisions. The timing was a coincidence, but couldn’t have been better. This is one of the most pertinent books I could have been reading at a time when women were getting their rights stripped away from them. To be honest, when I heard about the book, I worried about several things – that it would present this idea of curfew as a dangerous precedent, an anti-feminist treatise or something similar; or that the book would be so heavy-handed that it wouldn’t feel realistic at all. It was neither of those. There were heavy-handed techniques employed, but honestly, it felt like the right way to present the situation. Were all the guys in the book awful? Pretty much, yeah. Are all guys in real life awful? Of course not…but enough of them are that women are in constant danger from them. And it felt so nice, so idealistic, to read about women jogging in the morning, or going out for drinks with friends in the evening, without worrying about catcalls, groping, unwanted compliments, or danger. I’d take that any day!

The reaction of the men in this book was very telling, too. Men attempting to get free from their electronic bonds. Men who beat up spouses and talked about their partners negatively. Men who lied to have affairs. Men who spoke ill of exes to their shared children. Men who feigned loyalty to improve their living conditions, but kept their dating profiles around. What was really telling – and all too realistic – was the descriptions of the protests over the years: Women protested by going on strike and marching in the street. Men protested by killing their spouses to show that curfew won’t stop the violence. Yeah…

Cowie thought about a lot of different aspects on the subject. The PR aspects from the police point of view. The naivety of children raised in this very different society. The shared living spaces for women seeking refuge from past relationships. Etc. The whole book was well-crafted and planned, and like I said before, an extremely timely read.

Posted in 2022, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , | 2 Comments