Stuff We Like :: 12.6. 19

It’s the most wonderful time of the year — and also the busiest, with holiday parties and final projects and gift-making and all the other wonderful and busy-making things that make the holidays so fun. We are pretty chill celebrants, but even we end up with overflowing to-do lists this time of year. Happily they are to-do lists mostly full of stuff we want to do — which also means that they are to-do lists we can set aside to go for a winter nature walk or watch a movie if we want to!

what’s happening at home/school/life

• on the blog: Suzanne gives us a special Library Chicken edition of her favorite graphic novels of 2019.

• on Patreon: Premium subscribers can download my three-week thesis writing boot camp, and there’s a new episode of Library Chicken going up today.

• on instagram: We really like Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky. (It’s definitely my favorite of the Rick Riordan imprint so far!)

• at the Academy: It’s project season in the junior high!

• in the archives: Our year-long mythology reading list, a gift guide for people who love Nancy Drew, and a little Ellis Island unit study

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links we liked

• I am interested in shaping a new canon, and I do see literary awards as an important piece of that process — as they celebrate more diversity in their honorees, the canon will benefit from that, too, I think. So I found this piece about African fiction awards and some of the problems they can run into kind of fascinating and a little disturbing, especially the idea that white literary organizations may be trying to tell African writers what “African fiction” should be. An interesting read if you have time!

• This is so cool: Humans invented writing four different times: around 3,200 BC in Mesopotamia and Egypt, around 1,200 BC in China and around 400 BC in Mesoamerica. 

• What do you do if you’re a Native American comedian invited to weigh in on a racist video game from the “Native American perspective” on Thanksgiving? If you’re Joey Clift, you bravely and awesomely confront the giant problematic elephants cavorting through the room and maybe make the world a little better place.

• Relevant to my interests: What if we called it the Flax Age instead of the Bronze Age?

• Do I think Gaudy Night is under-appreciated? I don’t, actually. (I bond with strangers who also love Harriet Vane every week.) But will I take any opportunity to read some excellent writing about one of my all-time favorite books? I think we all know the answer to that.

things that are making me happy

• My son’s awesome Deborah Sampson project for the junior high history fair

• The really delightful utopian community my daughter created for her philosophy final project

• My dog in his plaid flannel pajamas 

• Jason’s birthday!

(We’re Amazon affiliates, so if you purchase something through an Amazon link, we may receive a small percentage of the sale. Obviously this doesn’t influence what we recommend, and we link to places other than Amazon.)

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