REVIEW: Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders (5-stars)

Lessons in Magic and Disaster is exactly the kind of book that makes you grateful Charlie Jane Anders exists. She writes people — their interiority, their relationships, their messy love for each other — better than almost anyone, and this novel is full of characters you root for and recognize yourself in.

The story follows Jamie, a trans woman navigating grad school, grief, a complicated relationship with her mother, and her secret life as a witch. Anders layers these threads beautifully: the parent-child dynamic, the push and pull of romantic partnership, and Jamie's academic research into 18th-century British women writers all speak to each other in ways that feel earned rather than clever. One of the book's real delights is the fictional novel-within-a-novel Anders constructs as the subject of Jamie's research — it's a fully realized piece of invented literature that illuminates Jamie's own struggles in ways that feel quietly devastating.

This is a warm, generous, deeply felt book. Highly recommended.

REVIEW: Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders

RATING: 5-stars

PROJECT COMPLETION: Stained Glass (Siamese) Cat

I was inspired by a neighbor friend's glass cat hanging in her front window.  She told me her mother brought it from Germany years ago.  I worked from a photograph and created my own version based on my seal point Siamese cat Valentino's coloring:

Here is the result:

This project was completed on April 6, 2025 at my friend's backyard glass studio in Sunol, CA:

REVIEW: AI Shepherds and Electric Sheep: Leading and Teaching in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Sean O'Callaghan (3-stars)

 The authors attempt to draw parallels between theological premises with AI -- landing squarely on the heart of Value Sensitive Design (VSD) and Human-Centered AI (HCAI).  They aim for their audience to learn to engage with AI in specific ways that contribute to human flourishing, countering dystopian fears of AI replacing humans.

This book serves as a sound primer on AI for non-technical readers. The authors provide extensive background on theological premises, the nature of intelligence, transhumanism, and basic concepts like fact-checking information online. It reminds me of annotated bibliographies from graduate-level history courses: over 30% of the ebook ARC consists of selected references and endnote annotations. While the author has clearly researched the topic and includes a wide array of older, secular references, he quotes Yuval Noah Harari—a figure known for misogynistic, bigoted, and anti-religious views. For less widely-read individuals, this may not be an issue, but it raises questions about why a theologian would include someone whose beliefs contradict the book's goals.

Ultimately, this book is akin to "Omnivore's Dilemma" but with guidelines like: be judicious in your use of AI due to its real-world consequences (e.g., resource consumption altering landscapes) and intellectual/social impacts (e.g., perpetuating biases, affecting attention spans). As they write, "Technology is not neutral. It is value-laden."

They encourage their readers to use AI wisely—such as for translating content—but don't rely on it for creating sermons or songs of praise. Creation of praise is a human act; machines cannot pray. "Worship is something done for God and by humans." Such praise should be "authentic, unassisted, and unsullied by technology." One cannot become a Christian simply through desire or reading—"Christian formation and discipleship require deep rootedness in a faith community."

The authors recommend the following: 

• "Lectio Divina" --  Deep reading and reflection, including private prayer and group discussion, to ensure information becomes part of one's inner self.
• Active Interaction with People --  Reclaiming the art of conversation, switching off AI (e.g., social media fasts), and setting routines so homes do not revolve around AI.
• Focal Practices -- Engaging in activities like reading actual books uninterrupted, practicing music, playing sports, creating arts or crafts, or walking in nature.

By seeking tangible, concrete practices, we recenter human experience on the immediate, material world and people—in other words: mindfulness.

Here's the plan that the authors recommend:

1. Embodied habits:  cooking meals, nature walking, fishing, birding, painting, pottery, knitting, visual arts and crafts at least once a week.
2. Place habits to "anchor humans into a particular terra firma" such as gardening and homemaking (which encompasses hospitality, creating a warm welcoming atmosphere).
3. Time-bound habits: silent listening, prayer, sitting by a window quietly without devices, planned breaks from devices/social media, and observing the liturgical calendar which "is a richly communal and ecclesial way of engaging in time-bound habits."
4. Social habits: taking communion, sharing meals with others (like potlucks), mentoring others. 

Overall, choosing intentionally those habits and activities which "rehumanize us against the dehumanizing effects of technology."  Even as a non-Christian, I fully support these kinds of recommendations.

"We need to have grown-up conversations in our seminaries and churches to prepare" and "to really understand the technology and to live Christian lives in this new world."   Finally - the authors affirm "we remain dedicated to a human-centered perspective, which emphasizes the materiality of creation and the creatureliness (the corporeality or embodiment) of humans."  Machines are not people and never will be.

REVIEW: AI Shepherds and Electric Sheep: Leading and Teaching in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Sean O'Callaghan

RATING: 3-stars

REVIEW: The Last Dream by Pedro Almodóvar (2-stars)

 Pedro Almodóvar's films are brilliant, so I came to The Last Dream hoping his creativity would translate to the page. It doesn't, really. The collection has a few bright moments, but overall it feels stilted and amateurish — and too often deliberately shocking in a way that seems calculated for a specific audience at a specific cultural moment rather than arising from any genuine necessity.

The Sleeping Beauty reworking has its funny passages but loses the thread by the end. The essay on Warhol and Basquiat is baffling — I'm still not sure what it was doing there or what point it was trying to make. Throughout, there's a sense that Almodóvar is coasting on the expectation that his name alone confers literary weight.

Honestly? These would work better as blog posts than as a book presented as serious short fiction. Stick to his films.

REVIEW: The Last Dream by Pedro Almodóvar 

RATING: 2-stars

REVIEW: The Lives of Bees: The Untold Story of the Honey Bee in the Wild by Thomas D. Seeley (5-stars)

 A wonderful listen on audio. Thomas Seeley brings genuine passion to his subject — the lives of wild bees, how they choose their homes, how they organize themselves, and practical wonders like setting up a "bee line" to track a colony back to its nest. I won't retain every detail, but this is exactly the kind of book I'll return to when I want a refresher or just need to be reminded that bees are extraordinary. Highly recommended for anyone curious about the natural world.

REVIEW: The Lives of Bees: The Untold Story of the Honey Bee in the Wild by Thomas D. Seeley 

RATING: 5-stars

REVIEW: The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters (4-stars)

 I tore through The Paying Guests in a single day — an actual paperback, in a clawfoot tub at Orr Hot Springs, hot mineral water and a waterfall nearby. If any book deserves to be read that way, it's this one.

That said, it earns its four stars with some caveats. Sarah Waters pulls you deep into Frances' world, but there are stretches of floral description, internal dialogue, and — I cannot stress this enough — cleaning, that test your patience. The love triangle is compelling, and the creepy straight man glomming onto the girl-girl energy is rendered with a horrible familiarity that will resonate with many readers. I found myself wondering, along with Frances, whether Lilian was ever fully innocent in how things unfolded — whether she didn't use the situation to engineer her own escape. The twist leading into the police investigation and court case is genuinely fun, but Waters lingers there for far, far too many pages.

Worth reading. Worth skimming in places. And refreshingly, Waters trusts her characters enough not to punish them simply for being who they are. Best enjoyed somewhere decadent.

REVIEW: The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters 

RATING: 4-stars

REVIEW: Surrounded by Narcissists: How to Effectively Recognize, Avoid, and Defend Yourself Against Toxic People (and Not Lose Your Mind) by Thomas Erikson (2-stars)

Thomas Erikson apparently wrote this reluctantly, pressured by fans riding the wave of Surrounded by Psychopaths — and it shows. The book meanders through an impressive range of tangents, including, memorably, a passage arguing that modern cars have resting bitch face compared to older models. Make of that what you will.

The recurring example of a spoiled college student — whose entire future Erikson confidently predicts — gives you a good sense of the tone: equal parts pop psychology and grumpy generational grievance. He has a lot to say about parents these days.

And yet I listened to the whole thing, which counts for something. It's consistently amusing, even if the amusement is mostly the "is this man serious?" variety. The problem is I still don't know whether Erikson is a very dry satirist sending up the self-help genre, or whether he genuinely means all of this. If it's the former, it's clever. If it's the latter, it's just unscientific and mean. Two stars either way, but for very different reasons depending on the answer.

REVIEW: Surrounded by Narcissists: How to Effectively Recognize, Avoid, and Defend Yourself Against Toxic People (and Not Lose Your Mind) by Thomas Erikson 

RATING: 2-stars

QUILT: Turquoise & Black Strip Pieced Quilt

I was looking up some strip quilting patterns and found this fun video The Three Dudes Quilt: Easy Quilting with Rob Appell of Man Sewing and Jenny Doan of MSQC - so decided to embark on my own version using some vintage fabrics (the white fabric with blue plums is still leftover from my grandmother's stash, origin unknown, could have been from her friend Ruth's house).  Here are some pictures from the steps:

STEP 1: Select Fabrics for Strip Quilt Project

Curated Strip Options for Quilt

STEP 2:  Two sets of strip trios sewn together

STEP 3: 9 Strips sewn together

View of work area:

STEP 4: Laying out the 9-strip squares to sew before cutting again

Blocks that will be 1/4 of each super block

View of 1/4 blocks laid together for 2 super blocks

All these blocks were done in June 2022 - and I didn't assemble them for a few months due to work:

April 2023 - laid out:

Finally in August 2023 - assembled the blocks together into the top (with Simón supervising):

December 2024: Quilting Completed on Turquoise & Black Strip Pieced Quilt

December 31, 2024:  Quilting Complete with Eclipse modeling

REVIEW:The Gods Time Forgot by Kelsie Sheridan Gonzalez (2-stars)

 I came to The Gods Time Forgot via NetGalley, lured by the promise of Irish war goddesses and warriors. The mythology is frustratingly thin on the ground.

What you get instead is a lot of Gilded Age New York social maneuvering — and to be fair, I can see what Gonzalez was going for, using the rigid constraints on wealthy women as a parallel to the shifting alliances and power struggles of the mythological source material. It's a reasonable idea. But the execution buries it. Roughly 20% of this novel is outfit description. Twenty percent. That's pages and pages that could have gone to actual plot, actual magic, actual Irish mythology.

The central romance is similarly elusive. By the end I was genuinely uncertain whether the main characters had sex or just got naked in a library together. The whole book has that quality — gesturing toward passion and danger without quite committing to either. Honestly, the Gilded Age setting and the watered-down stakes would have worked just as well with a schoolteacher and a construction worker as leads; the aristocratic trappings feel like decoration rather than necessity.

Read it as YA and you'll have a better time.

REVIEW:The Gods Time Forgot by Kelsie Sheridan Gonzalez 

RATING: 2-stars

REVIEW: The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami (2-stars)

Have you ever had a dream where you thought you woke up, but you were still dreaming, analyzing the previous part of the dream? This book feels like a giant dream journal, pieced together from leftover dreams and previous works. The result is confusing, dreary, depressing, and plotless—like a battleship grey, lifeless version of someone's dream life. It's just not fun or interesting.

All the typical Murakami elements are here: memory, loss, middle-aged men pining for teen love interests. I thought I liked Haruki Murakami as an author, but this book is making me reconsider. He may think he's a peer to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magical-realist style, quoting Love in the Time of Cholera in the last section, but The City and Its Uncertain Walls is definitely in the fantasy and surrealist genres.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part is the longest, a rambling and incoherent mess of time skips between the protagonist as a teenager and his first love, and his entry into nameless city which requires a hefty fee of separating from one's shadow and getting stabbed in the eyes (so he can "work" as a Dreamreader of old dreams). Both teens seem to suffer from major depressive disorder. This part could easily be halved. The second part represents the protagonist's transition after helping his shadow escape from the nameless town with sentient walls. He wakes up in his own life, quits his job, and moves to a rural town as the head librarian. The third part covers his interactions with the ghost, cafe owner, librarian, and an autistic boy at the library (aka M**** or Yellow Submarine Boy).  It's possible that Yellow Submarine boy doesn't actually exist -- and is yet another shadow of our primary protagonist but that's never fully fleshed out.

The protagonist's life is described as masking: interacting with people because that's what one does, but internally, he is deeply depressed. The writing is stilted and awkward at times. For example, the town is only referred to as Z***, and the cafe owner, who becomes the protagonist's love interest, doesn't even get a name but has a rock-hard body shaper acting as a chastity belt. This feels like a repeat of the teen romance—our protagonist will wait and wait. His lack of engagement and commitment seems to have destroyed his past relationships. He drifts along aimlessly, like a spineless sea creature.

The most interesting character is Mr. Koyasu, the scion of the local sake brewer who set up a private library and manages it for the town of Z*** until his death. He continues supporting the library as a ghost until they hire the protagonist as the head librarian. Mr. Koyasu could have been the primary subject of a much shorter version of this novel.

Overall, the book feels lifeless, colorless, and flavorless. The only foods mentioned are a few kinds of tea, apples and apple cake, coffee, blueberry muffins, and fried egg. Even the descriptions of sounds feel like throwaways, as if added at the editor's suggestion. Essentially, the protagonist is living his life inside a boring box, passing time and struggling to discern reality from dream.

Ultimately, The City and Its Uncertain Walls feels like a self-indulgent exercise that wastes the reader's time. Murakami's reliance on familiar themes and motifs, combined with a meandering and incoherent plot, results in a lifeless and colorless narrative. While some may find value in his introspective style, this novel fails to deliver the engaging and magical experience that many have come to expect from his work. For those seeking a captivating story, this book is likely to disappoint.

REVIEW: The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami 

RATING: 2-stars