The Bookening: New Reads in the Palace of Pandemics
More books have arrived in my pandemic apartment of doom! Honestly, this is going to be endless because I buy books faster than I can organize them. After all, I am a book dork. Today’s lot features a few new novels and two academic works that might be of interest to some of you. Not that we’ll get to read everything given how utterly wonky the world is right now. But I’m certainly going to try! Here’s what I got:
Dreaming of Uncle Hugo’s
Bookstores bookstores bookstores! All book dorks love them, and yet not enough of us have easy access to them. Up here in Bemidji, the closest thing we have to a bookstore is the used games and DVD store, which has a fairly meh book collection and a business name that doesn’t really fit what it is, and the comic book store, which, as you’d guess, mostly carries comics and has a fairly small but reasonably OK book collection (the comics collection is awesome, though). Beyond that, the next best thing is a trip to Park Rapids for Beagle & Wolf or to Brainerd for Emily’s or CatTale’s, all decent small bookstores. Otherwise, you gotta go to Duluth or Minneapolis for a really big bookstore experience! Since I’m stuck up here in Bemidji during a pandemic, I’ve started reminiscing about some of my favorite bookstores in Minnesota — of which they are many. When it comes right down to it, though, there is one bookstore that stands above them all: Uncle Hugo’s!
The Bookening: New Reads in the Chamber of Serpents
Shortly before the world went into full lockdown, I did what any book dork would do: ordered a bunch of books. Today’s book haul mostly contains books in the “things I want to read” category with a smidge of “books I bought to support authors.” On the list:
The Arts are the Glue that Holds Civilization Together
Something I have been thinking about a lot since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic and its profound impact on American (and global) society is the place of the arts in our everyday lives. So many of us are binge watching Netflix or other services, reading far more than we used to, downloading comics or writing our own stories, perusing fine art or setting up easels of our own, or doing all manner of creative and artsy things, both for amusement and to keep ourselves busy. I’ve been cramming in a metric ton (officially weight) of Star Trek across four decades of the franchise, blogging (as I am here), and cataloguing my books (not so artsy, but still nice). For myself, this has been part of an effort to keep me from the more destructive behaviors I might engage in (ranting on Twitter, for example) and to help me adjust to what will surely be 2 or 3 months (at least) of near total physical isolation for others. And in doing all of this and seeing all of what is happening around me, I’ve started to answer a crucial question out loud to myself: why do the arts matter yesterday, today, and tomorrow? And I think I’ve got a decent answer to that. I’d argue that the arts are the glue that holds civilization together on both the personal, national, and global scale. It’s the thing that allow us to express ourselves, to find joy and relief, to be human and explore what that even means. The arts are everything.
The Blog Challenge Project Begins!
Yesterday, I put some feelers out to see if folks would be interested in a collective of bloggers and booktubers to support and encourage one another to create new content. And if the existence of this post is any indication, a lot of folks responded! So, I’m officially announcing this here: The Blog Challenge Project begins! What is the Blog Challenge Project? In short, the project aims to create a community of bloggers and booktubers who will encourage one another to create content, support one another in their blogging ventures, and provide a giant list of prompts and ideas for posts that folks can complete on their own time or challenge one another to explore. The idea is to provide some positivity and community in a time of immense stress. You can click the link to read the full info page and see our current list of prompts! Anyone may join the project, either by tagging along or requesting to be part of the official pages, which comes with access to a special Discord server! So who is going to get involved?
I Have A Mouth, and I Want to Scream
If there’s one thing that I’ve been trying to do in the last three weeks of self-isolation, it’s doing almost anything to distract myself from the nightmare timeline that we’re living in. While everything has been chaos in the United States since at least 2010 (probably as early as 2000), the alternate timeline in which all reason has been purged from U.S. society began in earnest in 2016 and has reached astronomical proportions of absolute batshittery since the emergence of COVID-19 as a major threat to our way of life. Everything from the administration refusing to take it seriously, failing over and over again to get the ball rolling on creating more supply to meet medical demand, the absolutely mind-boggling audacity of the admin telling state governors they shouldn’t get aid because they weren’t nice enough to the Orange Mussolini, to states outright declaring the need for inter-state collaboration because the fed refuses to do its job, and on and on and on. It’s honestly impossible to keep up with the absolute shitshow that is this administration and its response to the pandemic.