Syllabus #238

When I open up this blog editor on a Sunday, usually I find a mostly formed draft that I've dropped little bits into throughout the week.  Today I found a blank page.  I was not Very Online this week.  It was a very analog week, stuffed uncomfortably full with after-hours work obligations.  

We did manage to venture out of the house on a Saturday evening, for the first time since probably December.  We went to Parnassus Books to see Kiley Reid speak about her new book, Come & Get It.  We both thoroughly enjoyed her first novel, Such a Fun Age, and it turns out she's hilarious and brilliant.  The amount of research and scholarship that went into a book that, on the surface, promises to be a very fun read, is remarkable.  We bought a signed copy of the new book, adding a couple of highly anticipated inches to my TBR tower.

Turkey and the Wolf collard melt.  I ate this over two months ago and I'm still thinking about it.

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I'm not going to pretend here.  I have no links this week.  Some days I didn't even open my laptop.  

Analog Reading:

I finally finished Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.  It was stellar.  A highly engaging narrative about a deeply upsetting topic.

Speaking of deeply upsetting topics, then I moved on to the sunshine and roses of American Girls by Jessica Roy.  No, not the dolls.  The subtitle of this journalistic non-fiction is One woman's journey into the Islamic State and her sister's fight to bring her home.  It's about these two American women, about my age, who were raised by strict Jehovah's witnesses, and rebelled in their early adulthood.  One ends up married to a dude who eventually is like, sike, I'm not a regular guy, I'm actually gonna move us and our kids overseas and become an ISIS fighter.  And so she goes along with it at first, and then decides, mmm, not for me?  I assume that's where this is going, anyway.