E. A. Fredericks

@efredericks

West Coaster in exile, pining for sunshine & teaching literature to college kids in the Midwest. Books, baking, baseball (3rd generation Dodgers fan), film, #toastie.

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E. A. Fredericks@efredericks· 17d

I really enjoyed Katherine Arden's The Unicorn Hunters, a historical fantasy centered on Anne of Brittany and Breton faeries and a whiff of Arthurian legend. Anne, in Arden's hands, is a resourceful young woman desperately fighting for her land's sovereignty & some sovereignty of self, too. 📚💙

A dark wicker patio table with a tablet showing the cover of The Unicorn Hunters, next to a large stainless steel Dodgers travel cup.

E. A. Fredericks@efredericks· 18d

I have a backlog of finished books to post but today I finished Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness. It's a sort of magical realist fable about South Africa & how to chart a path forward out of the suffering of the past. ✒️📚💙

A copy of The Heart of Redness. The cover shows two faces superimposed on each other, one a stylized folk art rendering like a mask, and the other a detailed realistic painting.

E. A. Fredericks@efredericks· 18d

Made it home for porch and baseball time. The baseball was...okay. (That was some weird base running, lads, luckily it all worked out in the end.) The Mexican mule was delicious.

A tablet showing Dodger player Freddie Freeman, next to a copy of the book A Drop of Corruption and a person's hand holding a Moscow mule copper cup.

E. A. Fredericks@efredericks· 18d

In the interest of Doing Things, went to the botanical garden for their Fourth Friday after hours time, so I had a little picnic in the evergreen garden & went on the hydrangea tour. The flowers were very good.

A view from a gazebo of an open green space bordered by all kinds of evergreens and conifers. It's a beautiful sunny afternoon.

An oak leaf hydrangea with deep pink flowers.

E. A. Fredericks@efredericks· 23d

Pretty cluster of soapwort along the trail today.

Cluster of dainty little five petaled pinkish white flowers next to a fence post

E. A. Fredericks@efredericks· 26d

There was a power outage while I was gone, and my bedroom air purifier must have automatically turned on when power was restored because it was running when I got home. And given that Detroit looked like this when I landed, I am not mad about the purifier running a bit extra.

A view of the Detroit air traffic control tower through a profoundly smoky haze. The sky looks cloudy but it is probably all smoke.

E. A. Fredericks@efredericks· 26d

Waiting for a flight and the gate agent put on a rock/paper/scissors tournament, with the winner getting s voucher and the rest of the top 4 getting a candy bar and swag bag. Somehow I made it to the final?? I lost, but the candy bar and bag clip were definitely worth the 10 minutes of my time.

A blue polyester bag and some loot, including a Southwest branded water bottle and bag clip and luggage tags, a mini hand sanitizer, a king size Twix, a miji pack of Oreos.

E. A. Fredericks@efredericks· 28d

For my fellow Shel Silverstein kids out there: I found it.

A sign on a metal railing at a curb which says "SIDEWALK ENDS". There is indeed no sidewalk past that point.

E. A. Fredericks@efredericks· Jul 9

First thing finished: A. D. Sui's Iron Garden Sutra. A scifi novel in which a monk (Buddhist-flavored) comes aboard a long-lost ship to lay the dead to rest. The academics already there start dying, but who is killing them, etc. Fun, though definitely could see where it was going throughout. 🪐📚💙

A screenshot of the cover of Iron Garden Sutra. The cover yellow, the title and author in white. The illustration is circles orbiting around a stylized spaceship. Below is a skull in a black hat with red vines growing around it.

E. A. Fredericks@efredericks· Jul 9

It's July, I'm in California (for a bit longer anyway), and still reading books. Here are some of my beloved California poppies and also what I've been reading. 📚💙

A field with golden-orange California poppies blooming throughout.

E. A. Fredericks@efredericks· Jul 8

This bitch went to a Dodgers game on her birthday (several days ago) and they won and it was pretty great.

A baseball diamond, seen from upper level seats just left of home plate,.on a beautiful summer evening.

E. A. Fredericks@efredericks· Jun 30

The Remembered Soldier, by Anjet Daanje, is my final book for June, probably. A long novel about a Belgian soldier, post-WWI, who has lost his memory, & the wife who claims him, but may not really be his wife. Strange & sad & intense even though the action is mundane life. ✒️📚💙

A tablet showing the cover of The Remembered Soldier. The cover is green, and two hands are touching. One hand is a realistic photograph, and the other is a silhouette that is filled in by an image of a WWI soldier holding an old fashioned camera.

E. A. Fredericks@efredericks· Jun 27

I finished Yume Kitasei's The Stardust Grail a couple days ago. I love a heist, and this is a sci-fi heist, which Kitasei uses to suggest/consider issues of colonialism etc but with a degree of removal from our own context, as good SF can. Stronger, I think, than her debut Deep Sky. 🪐📚💙

A tablet propped up and showing the cover of The Stardust Grail, which has a reddish nebula cloud and some blue tentacles visible in a gap.

E. A. Fredericks@efredericks· Jun 23

I also finished listening to Kate Riley's Ruth, which follows the life of a woman in an Anabaptist community in America. It's a quiet novel reflecting on the tension between the desire for community vs individual happiness, & never really privileges one or the other. ✒️📚💙

E. A. Fredericks@efredericks· Jun 23

Finished reading King Leopold's Ghost today. Hochschild writes these kinds of histories well, & I appreciate how he foregrounds how the written record has precious few testimonies from indigenous Congolese, but includes as many as he's got. Brutal subject, deftly handled. 💡📚💙

A copy of King Leopold's Ghost on a wicker patio table with a glass of iced coffee and a tablet showing a Dodgers game next to it.

E. A. Fredericks@efredericks· Jun 21

Finished Rita Ann Higgins's poetry collection Ireland Is Changing Mother. Sometimes funny, often furious, a very post-Celtic Tiger collection with very interesting uses of Greek mythology and Irish folklore (sometimes in the same poem). 📚💙

The cover of Ireland Is Changing Mother. The illustration features a black and white cow standing on an assemblage of rocks.

Fahrenheit

A cloud drapes itself over Tuar Beag, nearly sending me under the table.

Last night the clocks went back an hour. I say obvious things like it will soon be dark at four and other mundanes.

We can hardly walk the bog now.

I feel like Iris of the Lost Rainbow spoiling for a storm.

I can hear you shouting at the horses on TV you don't hear what I'm saying but you reply anyway, 'yeah it was a rotten year for blackberries'.

When the summoned gusts blow down the bóithrin and rip the buttons off your shirt you'll care then, your wide-screen in the ditch

Aeolus comes without plámás loyal wind bag that he is. The squall gains strength galvanise roofs, loose teeth creaking jaw joints ice-sheets and whirlwind, a Connemara cyclone.

E. A. Fredericks@efredericks· Jun 17

Finished listening to Adrienne Mavor's Mythopedia: A Brief Compendium of Natural History Lore yesterday. Mavor defines this work as "geomythology," exploring geologic/natural phenomena of the past using myth & folklore to see how ancient people understood those events/what they observed. 💡📚💙

A screenshot of the finished audiobook of Mythopedia in the Libby app.

E. A. Fredericks@efredericks· Jun 14

Also finished reading Tana French's The Keeper, the third/final novel of the Cal Hooper trilogy. Very satisfying conclusion, & I liked it more than it's predecessor, The Hunter. French invokes the complex social web of small towns so well, both the grudges but also the deep affections. 📚💙

The cover of The Keeper, with the title and author's name in light blue over a black and white photo of a waterway and islands, a cloudy sky in the background.

E. A. Fredericks@efredericks· Jun 14

Finished Leigh Bardugo's The Familiar a couple days ago. A historical fantasy set in 16th century Spain, with a protagonist who is a Jewish converso with magic capabilities trying to dodge the Inquisition but also find a better life. A fun and interesting listen. 📚💙

A screenshot of the Libby app showing the completed audiobook of The Familiar.

E. A. Fredericks@efredericks· Jun 11

My bestie the Toledo Museum of Art is almost entirely shut down for renovations/reinstallations but she's still beautiful. And the one exhibition on curses and magic in the ancient world was cool. (But ughhhhh full reopening is a year away 😩)

A long, low building with a columned portico and a red brick courtyard in front with a red Calder sculpture. Blue sky with puffy clouds overhead.

An amulet carved out of white stone of a demon with an animalistic face

A green amulet of the Egyptian goddess Tawaret with her hippo head. She seems like a cool lady.

E. A. Fredericks@efredericks· Jun 9

This bitch got out on a lake today.

A woman kneeling on a paddle board in a lake

E. A. Fredericks@efredericks· Jun 8

Martin Aitken's translation reads quite fluidly and beautifully: it's a really compelling work overall. I see why it scored a place on the International Booker longlist. ✒️📚💙

Perhaps still one of the happiest moments was when I lay inside a room of Maren's house and could hear my mistress and her coven practicing a song in the kitchen below, their voices a babble of good-humored gossip and chat, at intervals coming together as one, a single voice in song, and there I lay, enraptured, in sunlight, listening to their voices ebbing and flowing, over and over, until I heard a step upon the stair and Christenze came in, beaming, elated, flushed and at her loveliest, and put her hands on my cheeks, this way, like this, and looked at me warmly, hugged me and spoke to me with sweet words she knew would delight me. There, in the safety of that room, with the reassuring sounds of the women down-stairs, everything was good, and I have since listened intently, searched with the ear, for something similar, but I've never found it, perhaps because of my own short-comings, my own absent inner ear, my lack of marrow.

E. A. Fredericks@efredericks· Jun 8

Finished Olga Ravn's The Wax Child this morning. Ravn uses Nordic folklore & the Jutland witch panic of the 1620s as her starting point, but this is quietly about the lives of women in company vs the ambitions of a king & country, narrated by a wax doll. Strange, melancholy, absorbing.

A copy of The Wax Child next to a glass of iced coffee. The cover of the book is black, with the image of a red wooden cradle with smoke coming out of it.

E. A. Fredericks@efredericks· Jun 6

Finished Charlotte Wood's The Submerged Cathedral last night. I really liked Stone Yard Devotional, so I wanted to try one of her earlier novels, and this was beautiful. Poignant, ultimately hopeful, such interesting considerations of faith and its many forms (religious & otherwise). 📚💙

A person's hand holding a copy of The Submerged Cathedral with a tablet showing a baseball game in the background, and a grassy yard.

E. A. Fredericks@efredericks· Jun 5

Been picking away at R. F. Foster's Vivid Faces: the Revolutionary Generation in Ireland for soooooo long, but also finished it today. It's a great historical work, despite my slowness (life, etc): he chooses his figures well & works from such interesting primary source material. 💡📚💙

A hardback copy of Vivid Faces on a coffeeshop table, a pencil on top, next to a cup of cold brew coffee.

E. A. Fredericks@efredericks· Jun 5

I finally finished Virginia Woolf's Night and Day yesterday. I see why this is a lesser Woolf. Magnificent moments but it drags on at times. She's finding her interests but hasn't arrived at her style yet. ✒️📚💙

A copy of night and day on the lap of a person wearing a flowery sundress, a swimming pool in the background.

E. A. Fredericks@efredericks· Jun 5

It's June, the peonies are blooming, and I am still reading books. 📚💙 I was also reading in April & May but too stressed & depressed to post about it. But semester is over, grades are in, and it's outside weather for real, so we're trying.

E. A. Fredericks@efredericks· Jun 4

Cleaned up the porch and behold! porch season has begun.

A dark wicker patio table with a copy of Woolf's Night and Day, a glass of iced coffee, and a tablet showing the Dodgers game on top of it. A grassy yard is visible in the background.

E. A. Fredericks@efredericks· Jun 3

Please yes, and here's my backyard rhododendrons in return

E. A. Fredericks@efredericks· May 17

I think that's about the best inning I've seen Roki pitch. Pretty solid command today overall so far. (The baseball is not totally conducive to reading these articles quickly but Sunday deserves to be leisurely.)