nonfiction winners

I just finished two more books worth checking out.

The Miracle & Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets by Sarah Miller (Teen or Adult nonfiction)

I enjoyed Miss Spitfire, Caroline, and most recently Hick by Sarah Miller. All three of these books were about women who interested me. After reading Hick I looked through Sarah Miller's remaining books to pick out the next book and nothing really stood out to me. I said the heck with it and went ahead and put one on my to-read list any way. And I'm glad I did. Sarah Miller has this way of completely capturing your attention and writing about characters in such a way that you end up caring immensely about them whether you want to or not.

Prior to reading this I hadn't heard anything about the Dionne Quintuplets. This book is heartbreaking. The entire family ends up being messed up in one way or another (though there are a few characters I think were messed up before the quintuplets were born). The whole thing is appalling. The parents were put in an impossible situation. Nobody knew how to handle five babies being born at the same time (totally fair) and everyone's dark side came out. It was a complete train wreck. I couldn't stop reading and was once again ensnared in Sarah Miller's wealth of research and narrative nonfiction prowess.

There's nothing new to read here - families are messed up, humans are flawed, and emotions rule us despite our best efforts. But Sarah Miller will have you on the edge of your seat wanting desperately for not just the Dionne quintuplets to thrive, but for all the Dionne children to get the hell away from their childhoods and parents and have a fighting chance.

This is Orange by Rachel Poliquin & illustrated by Julie Morstad (nonfiction picture book)

A celebration of the color Orange. The cover is immediately arresting, both delicious and powerful. With marbled, creamsicle end papers, an otherworldly, scribbly cantaloupe, monarchs flying from the pages carrying the souls of loved ones, and a colored pencil spread that deserves to be framed, the illustrations alone carry the celebration, history, and importance of the color orange. There's nothing special about the text, but this tiny book delivers a punch. From the linguistic journey of the word Orange to the roles Orange has played in defining itself, art, culture, history, literature, architecture, religion etc. There's nothing untouched by Orange. I'm ready for Poliquin and Morstad to write about the rest of the colors!

2025 Music

Music is fuel for me, so when Spotify and Apple share my end-of-the-year stats, I get pretty jazzed about it.  I listen to both.  I have my monthly playlists in Spotify.  Each month has whatever floats my boat.  The first song I like each month begins the new playlist, and I delete that month from last year.  Apple has all of my longer playlists, and also all the music I've ever owned from records I've converted to discs I imported to spoken word albums I also imported.  None of the hard-to-find stuff ever shows up in my stats.  I will forever be gobsmacked by how much music is out there that Apple and Spotify do not have.  It's one of the reasons I still look at cds when I see them in the wild.  

Here are just a few of my favorite moments from this year:

Needtobreathe is always in my top five.  This year they were my top artist in both this year.  They have some incredibly profound moments in their lyrics.  I'm excited they're at the top, but I'm ready for a new album from them!    

  

I love most kinds of trap.  It's the genre I listen to the most.  I never heard of it until about fifteen years ago, so I feel like I'm making up for all the time it didn't exist in my life.  At first I had to buy these trap cds that weren't sold in our country.  Thankfully, it's a lot more common right now, and there are gobs of sub genres.  The past couple years I've been listening to quite a bit of Hanzo, who is a music producer from Germany.  It's about as intense and imaginative as trap gets.  The best example of this is their song, Invasion, which is about aliens taking over.  Other than the PSA announcement at the beginning, there are only a few words sprinkled throughout, but Hanzo uses the music to tell us exactly how the invasion is going down.  

I listened to a lot of Latin music last year.  I wondered how that was going to show up in my genres.  Spotify has some crazy genres!  Last year our neighbors tore down their house and have been building a new house.  This is a common thing in my city.  On my street right now we currently have four tear downs/rebuilds in various stages of destruction/completion.  As the walls were going up at the neighbor's house in October of last year the framing crew listened to El Alfa nonstop.  The sound of it blaring from the cavernous shell of the home is something I'll never forget.  Every spare minute I had was spent on the porch listening to El Alfa blast from that shell.  Even though nothing could come close to that same quality of sound, I started listening to El Alfa even when I wasn't on the porch, and this opened the doors to all kinds of Latino and Brazilian music thanks to both Spotify and Apple doing such a great job recommending similar music.

  

I always get a huge kick out of seeing my stats at the end of the year, and I really enjoy seeing others.  My Arizona brother's top song was a Bluey song!  There have been some interesting posts and articles about parents and how their kids have taken over their Spotify Wrapped.  There are ways to fix this of course, but it's always a delight to see my Arizona brother's top songs of the year peppered with the music his kids listen to.  I hope he doesn't fix it! 

enjoying the calm

I feel like I'm in the eye of of the end-of-year tornado.  Mostly caught up at work.  We're managing to stay just barely on top of things, but that will do for the moment.  Yesterday was the first day I didn't work past the point of what I had to give, and we got home at a decent hour.  I've been managing to still take Sundays off, which have been devoted to school work.  Robert hasn't been so lucky.  He's working today.

Next week we meet the other side of the storm.  Teetering piles of things to do at work.  I also have PT twice, a dentist appointment, a doctor's appointment, a get together with my poetry friends, a holiday party, and a special concert Robert and I are traveling to St. Paul to see.  Mostly good things.   But today it's like my brain and body know about what's to come.  Though I didn't finish as strongly as I hoped, school is done.  It's my first Sunday with nothing on the schedule.  I have decided to hunker down and start a new embroidery project.

I just wrapped up this piece, which feels like a meadow reprieve from the gray and cold of December.

I like to include progress pics, but there aren't that many for this piece.  It came together quickly and was easy to get lost in.