Curious, Healing

Books about healing, business, and fun

“The Fortunate Fall” by Cameron Reed

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This book is a meditation on evil, and embodiment, and what it means to be human, and what it means to love. How can activists succeed against a totalitarian government when everything is networked and everyone is under surveillance.

It was published in 1996, and since then we have only stumbled (or been shoved and dragged) closer to the dystopian future it portrays.

It’s well written, swinging from immediate danger to philosophical conversations, from discussions of genocide to ordering takeout. The new technologies are well named and smoothly layered into the story with deft clues for the reader to follow along.

Recommended if you don’t mind horror mixed into your cyberpunk. I prefer to avoid dystopias for my fiction reading – I can read the news for that.

Coincidentally, Kate Nepveu post her notes on a ReaderCon 2025 panel  about this book.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Remarkably Bright Creatures” by Shelby Van Pelt

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Recommended to me by: ShadowKat on Dreamwidth

The book was theoretically on the “Lucky Day” (un-reservable) shelf of a nearby library branch for a week. I finally got in today not expecting to find it, and indeed it was no longer on the shelf. One librarian placed a hold for me, since other branches didn’t have it on their lucky day shelf, but the other librarian on duty dug around and found it in a cart on the back. Not sure how he knew to look or why it was there, but I was happy to spend a Saturday afternoon sitting on my porch in the sun reading it.

This is a delightful first novel set in the Pacific Northwest about a friendship between an old woman and a remarkably bright octopus in an aquarium. Also about family ties and relationships and responsibilities. Beautifully written, lots of great details about living in the PNW. Some manipulative behavior that made me skim a few pages, wincing. It all turns out well in the end.

There are people of color in this book, woven into the narrative and into the life of this seaside town as if they belong there, which of course they do. All featured relationships are heterosexual, but there is a brief mention of speculating if there had been a girl – or boy – partnered with a young man that at least acknowledges that same sex relationships exist.

Highly recommended!

Available at bookshop.org.

“Childhood’s End” by Arthur C. Clarke

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Recommended to me by: Seeing it in a Little Free Library and recognizing the title

I read this as a teen when I was inhaling all the science fiction and fantasy I could lay my hands on. Several decades later, I vaguely remembered the ouija board scene and the ending, but didn’t remember they went with this book.

The book is beautifully written in spare, expressive prose that pulls the reader forward without the need for extreme violence. The whole book is understated, “civilized,” to go with the calming, “civilizing” influence of the aliens. From a more experienced adult viewpoint, I can see some of the subtle manipulation that underlies the plot

The book is also entirely focused on men. Even the aliens go by “he” and mirror the men in business suits they’re interacting with. There are two women in the book, wives of more active characters, and they do not pass the Bechdel test.

There is a wholly unnecessary invention of some reverse racism so that it can be punished more severely than anything else. Reminded me of Heinlien’s “Farnham’s Freehold,” which even as a bored teen I only read once.

“Childhood’s End” was published in 1953. The world’s ills that it was trying to address feel very relevant 70 years later. Without aliens to put a stop to people gathering power and resources to misuse them, it has only gotten worse. And the aliens are in a hierarchy themselves.

Recommended if you don’t mind a book trying to address the harms of patriarchy with a very patriarchal gaze.

Available at bookshop.org.

“If the Buddha Married” by Charlotte Kasl, Ph.D.

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Subtitle: Creating Enduring Relationships on a Spiritual Path
Recommended to me by: Seeing it in a Little Free Library and liking If the Buddha Dated

I chose Love as my word for this year, so this book feels appropriate to pick up. I tried reading “How to Love” by Thich Nhat Hanh earlier, and got bogged down in the prescriptiveness and assumptions about gender roles, so I put it down halfway through. This book doesn’t have those problems, although all the couples appear to be heterosexual until one at the very end of the book.

Charlotte Karl writes with clarity, depth, and kindness. When I was getting toward the end of the book, I thought, “Surely that’s the end of the substantive material,” but there were several more important topics, all treated with the same thoughtfulness as the rest of the book – sexuality, monogamy, honesty, and affairs.

Other topics include working through tension and resistance, recognizing masks, keeping agreements with great care, living in an “us” place (rather than me vs. you), open communication, and offering appreciation. It also includes some of the things that get in the way of authentic relationships, such as reacting out of unprocessed trauma from a young self, projecting feelings onto the other person, taking the partner for granted, and trying to change them into someone else.

The book is grounded in Zen Buddhism, and tries to be inclusive of other religions, such as the Quakers. There is a clunker of a moment where Charlotte Karl refers to the Jewish philosophy of repentance and repair in connection with Rosh Hashanah (new year) instead of Yom Kippur (day of atonement). Where was her editor?! She summarizes in a few paragraphs what Danya Ruttenberg explores in depth in her book “On Repentance and Repair.” (I read half of that recently, but it was more academic than I wanted, and focused at the national rather than the personal level.)

It’s good to read stories of couples who are kind, committed, and most of all, successful at building happy lives together while being their authentic selves. I have wanted a relationship like that for a long time. I had more or less decided that what I want is a mirage. Now I’m reminded that maybe it is possible, although I still don’t know a path to bring it into my life.

Highly recommended if you also care about the how and why of authentic relationships.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Somebody I Used to Know” by Wendy Mitchell

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Subtitle: A Memoir
Recommended to me by: a friend

Wendy Mitchell is a vibrant, strong, smart woman, proud of her memory, her home renovations, and her two now-adult daughters whom she raised on her own. At age 57, she starts to feel fatigued and confused, and falls unexpectedly several times while running.

She has what appears to be a small stroke, and is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s soon afterward at age 58. She is determined to remain independent as long as possible and uses multiple alarms on her iPad throughout her day to remind her to do tasks like make food, and then eat the food she made.

After being forced to retire from her beloved NHS job for ill health, she becomes an activist for people with dementia, participating in research and giving talks on her experience. She has to write out her talks in advance, map out her travels by public transit, and print photos of where she’ll be staying.

The book is absorbing on the level of getting to know Wendy and her story, as well as on the level of learning more about the effects of Alzheimer’s and how to live well after being diagnosed.

Highly recommended.

She wrote two books after this one and kept a blog, Which Me Am I Today.

Available at bookshop.org.

“The Serviceberry” by Robin Wall Kimmerer

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Subtitle: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
Recommended to me by: Reading Kimmerer’s other books

Robin Wall Kimmerer is an Indigenous scientist, writer, and teacher. She shares the gathered wisdom of her Potawatomi tribe, along with her knowledge of the ins and outs of academia as a botanist.

She compares the Indigenous gift economy, which is in harmony with the natural world, to capitalist economics that try to extract maximum value, wrecking the natural world. The book is small and brief, 100 pages, illustrated with pen and ink drawings.

The serviceberry bush has many names because it is important to many communities and cultures. The berries are eaten fresh, and dried to make pemmican for travel and winter months. Birds also feast on the berries. Their abundant berries lead to gratitude, which leads to reciprocity and paying it forward, which feeds the cycle of life. A specific instance of picking serviceberries described in vivid detail provides a rich scaffold for considering how we can learn from plants and live better.

How can we grow gift economies within and alongside the capitalist system? There are already little free libraries, tool libraries, neighborhood food banks, trash nothing and buy nothing online groups, and neighborhood organizations for mutual aid.

This book is a joyful celebration of all of those, along with a careful, encouraging exploration of a positive direction to replace the negative of capitalism. The more we can each support our local gift economies, the more joy and sustainability we bring into our lives.

Highly recommended.

Available at bookshop.org.