early spring flowers

I planted some crocuses last fall, very haphazardly, and two of them are now in bloom, with the possibility of a few more.

That's a week or two behind some of our neighbors' gardens; they have better soil, or are luckier or more skillful. But even two little golden crocuses please me. The landlord pays a landscaper to mow the lawn, such as it is, and clean the gutters, so any bits I do are extra, and anything serious would mean getting his permission.

Elsewhere in the neighborhood there are daffodils, forsythia, and periwinkles. If I had to choose, the forsythia is my favorite, but fortunately we can have all of these, and many others beside.

Catch-up reading post

Mostly this is rereads and things I didn't get to finish because the ebook loan expired.

So:

The Only Harmless Great Thing, by Brooke Bollander. My notes on this are "I liked this, despite not being sure of what happened at the end of the story. History/mythology of a somewhat alternate future--its past includes radium girls and then elephants put into the same horrible job (elephants intelligent enough to communicate in gesture-translated English), and then ihow do we warn people to avoid the nuclear waste dump?i Make the elephants glow in the dark. The farther-future part of this is elephant viewpoint, older elephant(s) addressing a 'shining mooncalf,' and what are the overtones of 'mooncalf' when everyone glows?"

I will probably reread this at some point. I have seen a lot of people recommend this, so assume most of you have heard about it already.

Rejected Princesses, by Jason Porath, is a collection of short entries about not-very-well-known women, from the definitely real (e.g. Annie Jump Cannon, who I learned about from The Glass Universe) through historical-but-nobody-is-sure-of-the-details to flat-out myth. Porath says this started from a lunchtime conversation about "who would be a really unlikely Disney princess," which led to a website, and then this book. It was fun, and good for reading in small bits at bedtime.

Tremontaine, season 2, by Ellen Kushner et al. Another set of the shared-authorship short story prequels to Kushner's novel Swordspoint. adrian_turtle is reading these to me, in a drawn-out sort of way. I especially liked the math student Mica, who is delighted by the discovery of pizza. Good, but don't start here: start either with Swordspoint or at least "season 1."

Rereads: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, by Becky Chambers, The Cartoon History of the United States, vol. 1 by Larry Gonick, and A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, by Ursula Le Guin.

I'm most of the way through How to Hide an Empire: a history of the Greater United States, which is good, informative--I probably know more of the details of US imperialism than the average educated American, but a lot here was new to me. Including, ironically, how thoroughly Americans were unaware that US territories were in fact American possessions rather than foreign countries, including American troops sent to liberate the Philippines from Japan. I'll finish reading this when I get to the top of the library's waiting list.

Currently reading: Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island and T. Kingfisher, Paladin's Grace.