Scientist, Editor, Wife, Mommy of 3

I am not a sophisticated reader or news consumer, but I did become an adult at a time when people advised subscribing to the local paper as a way to settle into a new city. I had a Sunday NY Times subscription when I was in grad school, and I bought a Sunday Washington Post subscription once I had a steady income here. I kept that subscription for decades, even as the Sunday edition shrank to almost nothing. I didn't go digital-only until the Post stopped including Parade magazine a few years ago. 

I never read the OpEd section of any paper, so the immediate changes after Bezos bought the Post didn't bother me that much. The parts that justified the subscription were the Food section and a couple of columnists in the Business section (Michelle Singletary (personal finance), Karla Miller (workplace advice), Geoffrey Fowler (personal tech), and Andrew Van Dam (Department of Data)). In December, I got an email that the cost of a digital subscription was going up by almost 50%. That convinced me it was time to pull the plug. 

I already subscribe to The 51st State (a local news outlet), Defector (mostly sports), Discourse (mostly politics), and Flaming Hydra (everything from journalism to poetry). Note that this doesn't mean that I actually read all (or any) of their content. Nevertheless, I'd like to send my former Post subscription money somewhere. Wired, Pro Publica, Associated Press, and Texas Observer are at the top of the list, but I haven't made up my mind. 

We got about 5 inches of snow and 5 inches of sleet last weekend. Here's a view from our front door this past week:


We have been using metal shovels to break the layer of ice before clearing the snow. The town plowed our street around 4 a.m. last Sunday and then not again until Tuesday around 5 p.m. Temperatures have remained well below freezing, so it's been interesting (by which I mean infuriating) to see who typically doesn't clear their sidewalk and just waits for it to melt. Our next-door neighbors have a toddler and still left a sheet of ice on their sidewalk until Thursday. It took us half an hour to walk half a mile to the ramen restaurant Wednesday evening. Today we had to get groceries and dog treats. Main roads are mostly clear, but snow and ice are piled at corners, making turns largely blind. Temperatures might reach 32 degrees Fahrenheit briefly one day this week?

It's good weather to stay in and read, but I only managed to finish two books this month. Work has just been horribly busy. At least I'm more than halfway through performance reviews, and the difficult ones (for the people who aren't as great as they think they are) are done.

Song of Ancient Lovers, Laura Restrepo (translated from Spanish by Carolina de Robertis)
A sprawling, ambitious novel that I am not smart enough to read. The story of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon is told along with a modern story of a young graduate student who travels to Yemen to research historical traces of the Queen of Sheba. He winds up working for Doctors Without Borders, helping refugees in the camps and those lucky enough to make it to shore. Along the way are brief interludes about other scholars who were smitten with the Queen of Sheba and frequent quotations from philosophers, poets, and religious texts. There are also soul-crushing descriptions of migrant experiences; apparently the human traffickers dump them out of boats to evade authorities. The migrants have to swim to shore but they don't know where they are because the waters and shores are dark. One of the things the grad student does is sit for hours in a Jeep on a beach with the lights on. 

The Sentence, Louise Erdrich
This is the book with the binding error. It's different from her other books in that it is set in very recent times: from November 2019 to November 2020.  In that year, COVID-19 arrived in the U.S., and  George Floyd was murdered.  I think that one thing that must be hard about writing about contemporary events is that readers will likely have their own impressions and memories of those events. At least that's one possible explanation for why this book has a lower rating on Goodreads. The protagonist, Tookie, gets a job at a small, independent Native bookstore in Minneapolis after her prison sentence is commuted. Her husband was a tribal cop who arrested her but then quit shortly after she was convicted and sent to prison. Erdrich has a small, independent Native bookstore in Minneapolis, and I suspect that many of the details in this novel came from her bookstore (the owner of the bookstore in the book is also named Louise but is largely absent).