Reading

I’ll start out by saying that I’m not a big fan of any of the books read recording platforms. Setting a number of books to read for the year feels to me like a competitive activity, which…reading has never been that for me. Though I’ve tried. For a couple of years I set reading goals in Goodreads and…ick. I didn’t enjoy the process of needing to chronicle everything I read, especially since I am one of those voracious readers who prefers to curl up with a book rather than watch TV. It's just my thing.

But reading goals, reviewing everything I’ve read, just feels like a chore. That said, by not recording my thoughts about some of my reading, I somewhat miss out on dialogue about what people are reading, the impact of my reading on what I’m thinking, and the like. I end up scratching my head and going “I know I read that book, I know I found it impactful, but I can’t remember why.”

So what the heck. I’ll give talking about what I’m reading a try, but…unlike in past years, I’m not going to capture it all. Nor am I going to tie myself down to a mandatory, you must post about this schedule. That gets back into making posts about what I read into a chore. I’m also limiting these posts to Dreamwidth and Substack, because that’s where most of the dialogue about reading seems to be happening in my circles these days.

With that, here goes, a brief look at what I was reading in mid-January, 2026.

I finished Alix Harrow’s The Everlasting last night. It was one of those books that, once I started reading, I kept on going until I finished it. What also helped was that I started reading fairly early in the evening.

As for the book? What a ride. A mixture of Faerie and time travel, with commentary on power. But there were some interesting twists along the way, including how the two powerful women in the story interact and what their actual relationship is. Add in the male scholar who at first observes but then gets drawn into the story and that throws in some more power dynamics. Ultimately, though, this is a story about how national myths get made and twisted to serve the powerful. It’s well-written, with the voice of fairy tale.

I admire it—and yet. There’s something distancing about the voice. I can’t explain it, but perhaps that’s because it’s about deconstructing a national myth more than it is about the individual characters—at least that’s how it reads to me. I like it, but something about it niggles at me.

The night before, I read Desert Cabal, by Amy Irvine—a meditation on and dialogue with Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire. Irvine engages with Abbey’s problematic aspects and the fruit of his popularity—as shown by the hordes descending upon Moab and Arches National Park. Ironically, by writing as he did about the desert, Abbey inadvertently unleashed the very same national park industrial complex he rails against in his work. Irvine illustrates some of these tensions using the method of a very Abbey-esque dialogue.

I came across a recommendation for this work in a Substack post about unrecognized literary outdoorswomen which…echoed a feeling I had fifteen years ago that I was tired of just reading about the guys in the outdoors. The guy interaction with the outdoors. The guy experience. I’ve been seeing more outdoorswomen writing over on Substack and decided it was time to blow the dust off of my own attempts to write about the outdoors. Reading Irvine was just one start, enough that I might write about my own reflections on Abbey.

And, finally, I read Glen Cook’s latest Black Company book, Lies Weeping. I like Cook and I love the Black Company, but damn. Cook has this habit of ending books on cliffhangers and this one is no exception. That plus, along with Croaker, there are references to the origins and history of Lady and Soulcatcher that I know I’ve read before. I went digging through my Black Company books to discover that I’m missing one—and it appears that’s the one which may hold the sequence Cook describes repeatedly that gives us clues as to which Senjak sisters those two are. All the same, I’ll keep on reading each Black Company book as they come out.

I have some other books I’ve been reading slowly. I just finished rereading Anthony Trollope’s An Editor’s Tales and may pair it with Dorothy Parker in reflecting how in spite of computers, social media, and what-have-you, the more that publishing changes, the more it remains the same. I’ve also been wading through the revised and expanded Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien and, well, there’s some interesting stuff in there. No surprises that Tolkien was a rather conservative Catholic and it shows in his correspondence. But the other piece that shows up is the impact of health and the day job on his work. Interestingly, in responding to a request about Gollum, he expounds on inheritance and family dynamics in the Shire with some surprising egalitarian notions about heads of family (for example, the married heads are viewed as equal with equal authority, and if the man passes first, the title does not pass down to the next male heir but is assumed by his wife until her death).

I do have a winter tradition of rereading Discworld until I get sick of it (I like Discworld but can only take so much of it) and Earthsea in the big pretty book. I’ve finished Discworld and will be picking up Earthsea in the coming week. I just need to sort through the pile of to-be-read books so that I have a good place to put it.

Besides Earthsea, there are several other book-related blogs I want to write, and keep putting off because of perceived time constraints. I’m almost finished with a deep dive into the Mitford sisters, inspired by starting a reread of Jo Walton’s Small Changes trilogy because they play a role in those books, under a different name. I’ve read some primary work by Nancy and Jessica, a biography of all six sisters, and have a couple more books to go (all through library loan). And then there’s the book about the blending of French classical dressage with the vaquero tradition.

See why I don’t want to record what I’ve read? It becomes a chore, and these occasional blogs are not meant to be a chore. Rather, they are reflections on what I’ve been reading and thinking about, and might even want to…discuss.

The weight of the world grew too heavy yesterday. No one cause—between news, the demands of daily life, and, well, winter—even an unseasonable snowless January with plenty of sun strained the nerves. Too much. Too much.

Cabin fever.

Not even the daily pilgrimage to commune with the good Foxtrotter boy was enough to silence the dread in my gut. The field where he lives in winter and where we ride is mud over frozen ground. If I get out there soon enough in the day we might have time for a road excursion before the early sunset thanks to the mountains—it depends. But the only remedy for what I was feeling was getting further out. Away.

Time in the woods.

So we climbed into the truck, visited the good boy horse on the way to other adventures (while entertaining him and the herd by bringing in a kiddie pool that blew into the fence, then was dragged out to be played with by bored horses). The Good Boy was eager to the join the herd investigating the pool as the husband brought it out of the field while I grained and groomed him. But he stood, quietly, when I was done and took him back into the field, waiting with head high until I unhaltered him. Once free, he trotted off a few steps before bursting into a tail-flagging gallop to check out the excitement. Much of an improvement over our first winter together. Two years of consistent handling has paid off.

That settled, we headed out north to the prairie. To the woods. Out to look at mountains. Canyons. Just plain out. A pattern that’s held true for us over the years, whether it was the madcap brief half-year we spent here when we were young, followed by visits to these woods and other places when we could snatch time away from work and other obligations.

Out.

Memories whispered around us as we drove, not talking about anything other than what we saw. Remembering those younger days. Time spent cruising on breaks from work, accompanied by beer when we were younger, now just plain water in our senior years. Recalling political and business discussions conducted with others during those drives, when four of us were skinny enough to fit in a pickup’s bench seat. Days when the world seemed simpler and less filled with shadows. A time before cell phones and computers. Almost a different world.

More than memories, wisps of stories flowed around me. That prairie and the woods and canyons surrounding it have been the inspiration for so many of the places in my stories. A ranch house once busy, now only seasonally occupied, looking out at a bunchgrass meadow? One of the inspirations for the Andrews Ranch in the Netwalk Sequence stories. That first pine grove where the road drops into the other side of that meadow? A setting from the Goddess’s Honor books. Over to the west, another small canyon sparked the creation of the Double R Ranch in the Martiniere Multiverse Family Saga, not far from the spooky village of Wickmasa from Goddess’s Honor.

And more.

The land. The land.

Three young spike bull elk raced across a draw near what used to be the stage stop of Midway to cross the road fifty feet in front of us, behaving more like whitetail deer than reversing direction to run away, like we normally see elk do. Better get it figured out before next hunting season, boys. A couple of coyotes trotted warily away from the truck, cautious, unlike the spike bulls. Then a small, cautious band of mule deer.

The land. The land. Tensions melt away.

Midway itself is but a shadow. Once a small stage stop between the canyons and town, for years its only remnant was an old barn that leaned further and further until a prairie wind took it down one December, a few years after we moved here. Now, what remains is a small shelter over a picnic table. Last spring when we drove by with family, we spotted four four-point mule deer bucks resting in the shelter’s shade, chewing their cud.

No bucks today. Just the spike bulls.

Further on, a male snow bunting flew up from a fencepost, fluttering along in front of the pickup until he reached the edge of his territory and dove off into the dried bunchgrass.

When we finally reached snow, the tracks from other drivers reassured us that the way was still open. We negotiated past trees that had fallen across the road and had just enough cut away to allow a single vehicle through. We pressed on, hoping to get to the old fire lookout over the canyon. Which—doesn’t usually happen in January. When we reached the lookout’s turnoff, we carefully made our way until we encountered a drift deeper than we wanted to tackle. Thirty, even twenty years ago we might have continued, even though it was late afternoon. Not now. We’re old and we’ve had to walk back from unwise decisions too many times to trust our luck.

But we still got canyon views—what we could see of the fog-filled canyons, anyway. Ridgetops barely poke out of the sea of fog, rolling in waves like the ocean suddenly was moved to this inland area.

The land. The land. Soothing. Healing. Itself, uncompromising despite human influence. It’s hard to keep the dread going out here. Maybe that’s why so much of my fantasy writing involves land magic—it’s easy enough to feel that the land is still a living thing out here.

Back again, with fewer critters but now more mountain vistas. The snow bunting picks us up where he left us off, flitting along until we reach the other side of his territory.

Dusk fell as we reached town, and the dread had flown. It will pick up again soon enough, but for a day, at least, the dread weighed less heavy. The thrill of those bull elk crossing in front of us. The Good Boy. The snow bunting. The ghostly waves of fog crashing on the dry inland shores.

The land. The land. Here today and tomorrow. Still itself, now and forever.

The land.

Periodic Sunday Book Summaries--Installment One

A Winter Escape