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2026 52 Card Project: Week 11: Hurkle Durkling

There is an archaic Scottish term that I have become rather fond of as of late: "hurkle durkling," which refers to the practice of lingering in bed, long past the hour that one should be getting up and busy with daily affairs.

This past weekend, the Twin Cities experienced a snowstorm. I ran errands and went to the grocery store (what a madhouse) on Saturday.

On Sunday, everything was cancelled. The newspaper was cancelled. Church was cancelled. All the stores were closed. The day involved some serious lounging about. I did eventually get out and shovel the front and back walk. I had a kind neighbor who took his snowblower to my driveway and the sidewalk in front of the house, however, so I managed to avoid the worst of the chore.

The snow wasn't as deep as some of the weather predictions had speculated it might be, but it was enough to grind the city to a halt. And it turned out that I didn't mind. A quiet descended over everything: call it winter's last hurrah.

Yes, indeed: I found that I really didn't mind a bit.

Image description: background: a city street where the road and all the parked cars are covered with snow. Lower third: rumpled bed covers with a tray holding a teapot and cookies resting on top. A woman's feet in red and white striped socks are stretched out beside the tray.

Hurkle Durkling

11 Hurkle Durkling

Click on the links to see the 2026, 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

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bookses precious

Seasons of Glass and Iron, by Amal El-Mohtar

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is a friend.

This morning I wrote to another friend, "I've finished reading Amal's new collection, and now the only problem is how to write a review that's laudatory enough." "A good problem to have," my friend correctly noted.

Seriously, though. I've read most of these stories before, but when I came to each one, it was a matter of, "Oh, I loved this one!" rather than "Oh yeah, this one." There is a stylistic and thematic inclination to the stories that never rises to sameness. It's such a distillation of why I have been consistently happy to see these stories (and a few poems!) in the venues where they've appeared, for the years they've been appearing.

If you were hoping that this would be a source of new Amal stories, you'll have to keep waiting, this is the kind of collection that's a culmination of previous work rather than a revelation of new. But it's a beautiful slim volume, I'm thrilled to have it, I will press it upon my friends and relations, hurrah. Hurrah.

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Books read, early March

Ruth Awad, Set to Music a Wildfire. A poetry collection that is very directly about her experiences as a daughter of a Lebanese immigrant and her father's experiences in Lebanon. Interesting but not particularly subtle; I'm not sure it's fair to demand subtlety on these topics.

M.H. Ayinde, A Song of Legends Lost. A thumping big fantasy. Did I read this because one of the characters is eating plantains very early on and I love plantains? Well. That wasn't the only reason. But the things it said about the worldbuilding drew me in and kept me going for many hundred pages.

Shane Bobrycki, The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages. Bobrycki noticed a gaping hole between the Roman Empire and the Renaissance when it came to the influence of large group behavior in Europe, and this book is him examining what we know about that, what crowds there actually were, what impact they had on the life of their cultures and why. He manages to remember that Europe does not just mean Italy at first and later France and England, which is always nice.

Eliane Boey, Club Contango. I really like Boey's prose, and this started out well for me, but as the narrative bore inexorably down on the plot twist and I could no longer pretend it would not be that particular plot twist--which I had foreseen at the very beginning and really hoped it would not be--I grew more and more frustrated. Here's hoping her next thing doesn't lean on a twist of that particular sort.

Sarah E. Bond, Strike: Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire. Bond is clear and explicit about where she's drawing parallels between modern unions and ancient groups that have similar traits, and she's willing to make her arguments about them specific rather than handwavey. A corrective for too much of the assumption that the people of the past were not like us, and an angle on the ancient world more interesting to me than most.

Michael Brown, The Wars of Scotland, 1214-1371. Definitely what it says on the tin, from the top-down perspective rather than anything about what these wars were like for the rank and file. Did you know the Scots were not a restful people in this era? welp.

Steph Cherrywell, The Ink Witch. I loved this so much. It's MG fantasy that's actually funny rather than adult-trying-too-hard, it's got ink magic and a tarantula familiar and a lovely fierce trans heroine whose plot is not about being trans, it's about magic quests and family politics and mermaids and yeti and running a little motel. It's so great, I'm so happy about this book.

P.F. Chisholm, A Taste of Witchcraft. At this point in this series (this is book 10, don't start here), we are no longer talking about an historical murder mystery series but more generally an historical adventure series. This one goes very, very vividly into the tortures accused witches suffered, so if you're not feeling up for that, maybe not this one. It also features quite a bit of my favorite characters in the series, though.

Sunyi Dean, The Girl With a Thousand Faces. Discussed elsewhere.

Nicola Griffith, She Is Here. A short collection of essays, poems, and short stories. Most of the essays were familiar to me from previous sources, but they go well here thematically. I love Griffith's novels, but her shorter work does not feel as strong or essential to me. For me this is a nice-to-have, not a must-have.

Bassem Khandaqji, A Mask the Color of the Sky. A novel about a young Palestinian man who has aspirations in both archaeology and fiction--who is writing a novel about Mary Magdalen, or trying to--who looks at the wider world and wants a wider life. And then he finds an ID that will allow him, with his particular appearance, to readily pass as a Jewish Israeli, and he does that for a while, and it's the sort of book where the complications are primarily internal, emotional, mental, about his place in the world and his identity, rather than thriller novel shooty-shoot complications. It's short and fairly straightforward.

Margrit Pernau, Emotions and Temporalities. Kindle. This is one of a series of short monographs that I downloaded a while ago, and it's the first where I've really felt that the format limited content beyond what was useful. I wanted a lot more context on emotionality and assessments of past/present/future in the cultures Pernau was discussing; I felt like more and longer examples would have strongly benefitted her argument. Ah well, I'm told you can't win them all.

Dana Simpson, Unicorn Secrets. This is the latest of a collection of daily strips of the comic Phoebe & Her Unicorn, which I don't read daily, I read them in collection form. It is nice and fun and nice. Is this the best of them, no, but it does what I wanted it to do, it is a pleasant diversion.

Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle. Reread. So one of the things I didn't fully notice when I read this the first time, 25 years ago on a friend's futon waiting for another friend's wedding, is that this is an almost perfect balance of Victorian and modern novel. Specifically: money is allowed to be the main concern. Money is discussed in detail, what food you can get for it and what clothes and what marriage will do about it and how we feel about that. Marriage is still considered to be the main way that women handle money, but no longer the only way (and the ending makes that matter rather than blurring to a romantic "isn't it lovely that the marrying couple just happens to have enough funds after all?" that some of the other books both Victorian and modern fall back on). It is very matter-of-fact about sex and sexuality for its publication date, but not in a smarmy or overbalanced way. This is also one of fiction's non-evil stepmothers, and bless her for that.

D.E. Stevenson, Miss Buncle's Book. Kindle. A very gentle comedy about a spinster in a small village who writes a novel with keen observations of all her neighbors and sets the whole town on its ear. I'm fascinated by the line Stevenson manages to walk between letting the Great Depression feel real (Miss Buncle needs her book to make her money! it's not quite as money-focused as I Capture the Castle but still) and still keeping it upbeat for the people who were reading the book as an escape from that very same Great Depression. Not terribly deep, fairly predictable in its larger plot though not necessarily in its scene incidentals, fun all the same.

Ethan Tapper, How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World. I was a bit disappointed in this, which aims at being a lyrical memoir of a life in forestry. The lyricism is repetitive (which is harder to forgive considering how short this volume is) and in places twee (writing some sections about himself in the third person as "the man" did not work for me), and in general there was a great deal less how than I hoped for. He talked about what he was doing, he even talked in general terms about those who might not understand how killing plants could help a forest ecosystem. But as it was memoir rather than science essay, he felt no need to go into the evidence behind his positions--and, crucially, actions.

Jo Walton and Ada Palmer, Trace Elements: Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Discussed elsewhere.

Current Mood: accomplished

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2026 52 Card Project: Week 10: Manager

As I have referred to obliquely before, I am Doing Something with regard to the events in Minneapolis/St. Paul.

Signal

I was pulled in as a volunteer, oh, perhaps a month and a half ago. I was asked to set up the project, and despite my genuine nervousness at the responsibility I was handed, I did. I analyzed what needed to get done, wrote documentation to describe the process, and handled it alone for three days. Then more volunteers were added, and I was asked to train them. Then the team was doubled again, and I had to train them, too, and incorporate them into the team. Then I had to set up a couple of subteams, hold standup meetings, and start thinking about process, team building, donor relations, technological security, resource sharing, and budget.

Rather to my astonishment, now that I have retired, I have become for the first time in my career, no kidding, an actual manager, overseeing a team of ten people.

Over the last week, things have ratcheted up, and the phrase "It's like herding cats" has definitely floated across my mind.

I've been told I'm rather good at it. But it's a bit daunting. I'm definitely spending more hours at it than I spent at my job at the Synod.

Wow. I'm an actual manager. Who knew?

Image description: Lower third: a double monitor showing a world map, and a hand holding a phone, also showing a map. Center: a hand holds a marker writing the words "Project Planning" in red letters. Just below stands a row of cats, lurching forward in an uneven line. Upper right: a partial view of a woman with the word "Manager" superimposed over her. Upper left: Signal icon.

Manager

10 Manager

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The Girl With a Thousand Faces, by Sunyi Dean

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is such a fresh and vivid fantasy, it is achingly sad and exciting and wry by turns. I am so glad I got to read this. It tangles two timelines, the "past" of the 1940s and the "present" of the 1970s, both in Hong Kong's Kowloon Walled City slum and then reaching out to the areas around it. Mercy Chan doesn't have any memories when she washes up on the shores of Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation--a terrible time to be friendless and unprotected. But she isn't quite either thing, because she has Bao, her maogui (cat ghost)--not a type of spirit known to be friendly, but Bao has apparently made an exception for Mercy.

Bao won't be the last of the local ghosts, spirits, and gods we meet in the course of this book (although he is my favorite). Mercy's talent at communicating with ghosts has given her steady work with the triads for decades. Now her past is catching up to her, and if she can't remember what it was, her future looks imperiled--and so does the future of Hong Kong itself. This is a book that seeks kindness in a world that doesn't always think it has room to be kind, and I found it to be a very satisfying read indeed.

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Trace Elements: Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction and Fantasy, by Walton & Palmer

(This silly site would not let me fit both of their whole names in the title. It's Jo Walton and Ada Palmer.)

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also I've been friends with both authors for a good long while.

Which makes this a very weird book for me to read, honestly, because I met both Jo and Ada through SFF fandom and conventions, through all writing and talking and thinking about genres, and so a lot of the first third of this book is, for me, "the obvious stuff people talk about all the time." Well, sure. Because Jo and Ada are people, and I am around them talking about this kind of thing all the time (or at least intermittently for more than twenty years in one case and more than fifteen in the other, so it adds up), so naturally their points of view on genre theory are in the general category of "stuff I would logically have been exposed to by now." It's a bit "Hamlet is just a string of famous quotes strung together," as reactions go: kind of the cart before the horse. And it means that there are a few things that are in the category of "oh right, there's the thing I always disagree with Jo about; look, she still has her own idea about it rather than mine, go figure." This is to be expected given the long and winding discussion it's been, but it makes it a bit harder for me to say useful things about what it will look like to most readers.

So the first third of the book is the part that most obviously fits the title--it's the section that has the largest-scale thoughts about the nature of genre qua genre. The second third was the most satisfying to me: it was thoughts on disability and pain. I think a too-casual reader might mistake it for random padding to make this book book-length without requiring Jo and/or Ada (some of the sections are co-written and some are written solo by each author) to write more entirely new material. But no. Absolutely not. The way that Jo and Ada process disability is strongly shaped by each of their perspectives as SFF writers and readers, and the way they process SFF is--sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly--shaped by their lived experiences as disabled people. Some of our personal stories are about the project of science fiction and fantasy. Jo's and Ada's are. And they're useful--powerful--to see on the page like this. This is where knowing people for a quite long time doesn't give me a "yes I have already been here" reaction, because three disabled friends do not talk about disability and personal history and its place in the speculative project in the same way as two of them would write about it for a general audience. It's a view from a very different angle, which is great to have. The last section is more miscellany, still related to the title but more specifics, less sweeping theory. It's labeled craft, and this is true, but in a broad sense--there are pieces about The Princess Bride and optimism and censorship as well as about protagonists and empathy in a structural sense.

I wonder if people who come to this book from reading mostly Ada rather than both but by the numbers more Jo would see how Jo has influenced Ada's prose voice in the joint pieces. For me, the stylistic commonalities with Inventing the Renaissance were really striking, but if you'd come directly from reading that I wonder how much you'd be saying, oh, that's got to be Jo Walton because it's not really what I'm used to from Ada Palmer solo! Co-authorship is an interesting beast, and I feel like there's a difficult balance here that's partially achieved by having pieces by each person solo as well as the two together. I'm not sure I can immediately come up with another thing like it that way.