Friday, April 12, 2024

a post that will make no sense if you haven't read the last two posts

I've got two half-written posts I could subject you to, and another half-dozen in my head, but I am feeling singularly unmotivated to post anything this week, so I will just leave you with a couple of addenda to past posts and maybe I will do better next week.

I did go back and add the recipe for Garden Minestrone in the first comment to my last post. But I did it in a hurry, and I didn't remember until I found half of a bag of frozen peas in my freezer that I only used half of the bag of peas. Apologies if you already tried it. An entire 14-ounce bag would have been a lot of peas.

Also, I was so excited to tell you about reading cookbooks that I neglected to mention a book that I meant to pass along to any other dark fantasy fans. You probably know me well enough to know that I don't like my dark fantasy very dark, but I don't know what else to call a book about a school whose students die regularly-- as in, one in four students will die before they graduate. A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik is a about a school of magic so of course it gets called a dark Harry Potter, but really it has much more in common with The Hunger Games than Hogwarts. I loved the main character El, who is doggedly determined to do the right thing in spite of being shunned by her fellow students. There has been some controversy about veiled, unintended racism-- Novik has apologized for one particular comment, but there was nothing in the book that rose to the level of boycott this book for me.

Honestly, I am so tired of hair-trigger reactions to the smallest things leading to books being canceled or boycotted. I know, I KNOW, that's a sign of my own privilege. I get that, but I'm still tired of it. This book is actually one of the best illustrations I've read of how privilege works so at least it has that going for it. You could hand it to a teenager who doesn't believe privilege exists and let them learn. It's the first book in a trilogy. The other two were good, but I think this one is the best of the three.

And finally, it occurred to me that a conservative who read my mini-rant in this post (see #5 and 6) about the agenda-driven takeover of local libraries might think that the way my parents raised me is obviously wrong because I turned out to be a liberal or progressive or whatever we're calling me. So I thought I should clarify that my parents have three daughters (I'm the middle), and I'm the only one that is no longer evangelical. The other two are still firmly within the fold, so to speak, and they are the reason that I so often say that there are conservatives I deeply love and respect, because I do love and respect my sisters who are amazing people.

And after that bunch of nonsense, I'm done. Have a good weekend. I know this was a pretty boring post but believe me, the half-written posts I didn't finish were way more boring so really I did you a favor.

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