My reading list for uh, next year

When I don't understand, when I'm confused or scared, I read.

After the Tuesday thing, I took myself on my favorite forest walk, to the witch’s house. As I walked, I stopped often to stare at tiny mushrooms and gooey slugs and funny mosses. I thought about Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing, which I just finished reading and which was written in the wake of the last Trump win. I was struck by how soothing it really was to stare at a mossy log long enough to stumble upon the first slime mold I’ve ever noticed. What else have I missed by not paying close enough attention? What else I might see if I looked at other things with a slime-mold level of attention? Odell’s book felt like a slog, TBH, when I was actively reading it, but its whole deal stayed with me, apparently. Sneaky, Jenny! Sneaky.

As I stood and stared and listened to the moving water of the little creek along the Macleay trail, my mind churned out a ticker tape list of books to read in the near-soon.

Heart was new since the last time I visited.

So far:

• We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood by Dani McClain

• Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estés

• Supervision: On Motherhood and Surveillance Edited by Sophie Hamacher and Jessica Hankey

• A Spell in the Wild: A Year (and Six Centuries) of Magic by Alice Tarbuck

• The Mother Wave: Theorizing, Enacting, and Representing Matricentric Feminism by Andrea O'Reilly and Fiona Joy Green

• The Art Of War

• A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit

• Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture by Niobe Way

• Wonderstruck: How Wonder and Awe Shape the Way We Think by Helen De Cruz

• Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino

• Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild by Lucy Jones

• Figuring by Maria Popova

• Light On Yoga by B.K.S. Iyengar

• The Uncontrollability of the World by Hartmut Rosa

• Ursula Le Guin’s translation of the Tao Te Ching

• In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose by Alice Walker

• What else?

Good luck out there. See you at the witch’s house.