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Books
I liked The Other Side of Mrs. Wood by Lucy Barker a great deal. Though I don't consider myself a fan of stories about spiritualism, I wanted to read some historical fiction that wasn't a mystery, and this fit the bill. So well done.
Then I had to give up reading a book by a pretty well-known science fiction writer. The second of her books I didn't like. She just does not work for me, and we must agree to move on.
Short Work
Yes, I was one of those people who read what is being called "that Vanity Fair article about Cormac McCarthy." The situation described is terrible, though it's not clear if the guy writing the article thinks so. I had to skim portions of the thing because of the lengthy asides in which the author intrudes himself into this woman's story. Does Vanity Fair not have editors? Opportunity cost is the value of what you're NOT doing while you're choosing to do something else. What you COULD be doing if you hadn't chosen to do this thing you're doing. I kept thinking about it yesterday while I was reading the Cormac McCarthy article. I'll never get that time back.
I read a number of flash fiction pieces at Fictive Dream. Here are some I particularly liked.
Rock, Paper, Scissors by Claudia McGill. I liked the frame on this.
A Friendly Confession by Lori Cramer. I'm not a fan of one-para flash, but I did enjoy this one.
The Goalless Draw by Gerard McKeown. There's something going on under the story for this narrator.
Then I read some microfiction at Centaur:
Mushrooms by Kathryn Kulpa. This is like a whole novel in a paragraph!
Manual for an Indian Novice in a Small Indian Town by Isabel Zambrano. It sounds as if somebody really needs this manual.
Food
I meant for this be a food reading week, because I'm already baking for Thanksgiving, but then I stumbled upon the flash and micro opportunities and only managed to read one food piece and that explains why this is a chaos reading week.
The "Bake Off" Guide to loaf cakes: Secrets from a pastry professional by Michael LaCorte at Salon. This is one of the best food articles I can recall in terms of the pastry professional having secrets a standard cook might really be able to use. I do have a question here if we're talking about loaf "breads" like banana bread (mentioned toward the end) or something else. I never liked loaf breads in the past, but became a fan the last few years, which was what attracted me to this article. The word "loaf."
Humor
Welcome to Bluesky, but Maybe Take it Down a Notch? by Miriam Jayraratna and Kathryn Baecht. Why, yes, I did jump ship to BlueSky, which could be a blog post one day. While I am getting benefit from the place, it's not as terrific as it's made out to be. But there doesn't appear to be any AI involved, which was the straw that broke the camel's back for me at Xitter.
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