Categories
Romance

Read Her Big City Neighbor

Read Her Big City Neighbor (Cider Bar Sisters, #1) by Jackie Lau

When small-town engineer Amy Sharpe inherits a house in Toronto, she decides it’s the perfect opportunity to start over and go back to school. Away from the family that takes her for granted, away from the ex who expected so much and gave little in return.

The new Amy enjoys wandering around the city and frequenting bubble tea shops, German beer halls, dim sum restaurants, and coffee bars serving Japanese pastries. She has a roommate with the same name as her favorite fictional character, and a group of friends who meet at a cider bar every couple of weeks.

The new Amy is also in lust with her brooding, tattooed next-door neighbor, Victor Choi, who is far from friendly but looks really hot cutting the grass without a shirt. Too bad the grass doesn’t grow faster.

As she starts telling him about her daily adventures—and as a little kissing in the garden becomes a regular activity—Amy begins to feel more than lust. But she fears she’s falling into her old patterns in relationships and refuses to let herself be underappreciated again.

Is Victor really more than a hot fling? And what’s he hiding behind that grumpy exterior?

Light low-conflict read with adults acting like adults and having conversations they don’t want to have. Lots of food (honestly too much). I liked their relationships with their families. I didn’t 100% buy their connection, it seemed to start too quickly. Something about the lack of intense emotions made it feel like the volume was kinda dialed down. Somewhat unbelievable this woman was in a graduate program with the amount of time and money she had, and lack of stress 😂

Categories
Comics Fantasy

Read The Girl from the Sea

Read The Girl from the Sea by Molly Knox Ostertag

Fifteen-year-old Morgan has a secret: She can’t wait to escape the perfect little island where she lives. She’s desperate to finish high school and escape her sad divorced mom, her volatile little brother, and worst of all, her great group of friends…who don’t understand Morgan at all. Because really, Morgan’s biggest secret is that she has a lot of secrets, including the one about wanting to kiss another girl.Then one night, Morgan is saved from drowning by a mysterious girl named Keltie. The two become friends and suddenly life on the island doesn’t seem so stifling anymore. But Keltie has some secrets of her own. And as the girls start to fall in love, everything they’re each trying to hide will find its way to the surface…whether Morgan is ready or not.

Cute! I like the contrast in character design between Keltie and Morgan. Using group chats/ text conversations worked well. I liked the revelation of Kellie’s secret and how it resolved. The way her mom handled finding out she was queer was funny and sweet.

Categories
Art and Design Places

Read Uncommon Places

Read Stephen Shore: Uncommon Places

“Uncommon Places: The Complete Works” presented a definitive collection of the landmark series, and in the span of a decade has become a contemporary classic.

Beautiful photos of ugly places. The color and lighting are lovely. He lends a loving eye to the peeling storefront, the kitschy motel decor, the empty intersections crisscrossed with wires. It doesn’t feel like he is mocking the people or places he photographs, but accepts them for what they are. Some of the images are hard to separate from retroness, especially ones featuring a lot of old cars, but some of the places are as familiar today as they were fifty years ago. I’m always confused and enticed by the story of abandoned places and buildings. So much of the West still feels empty and worn down.

I’m not sold on the name Uncommon Places except as counterpoint: to me these places feel very commonplace, anyplace, everyplace. Americana in all its consumerist, sprawling, dingy glory and decay.

At least some of the collection is viewable on his website.

Categories
Music

Listened to No Cities Left

Listened No Cities Left from Tumblr

Initial Release Date: April 12, 2003

I was super into this album in 2004/5ish. I haven’t especially liked anything they put out in the past ten years, and haven’t listened to this album in its entirety since 2007, per last.fm. But, their email list is so infrequent I’m apparently still on it 😂 Got an email about the lead singer’s new solo project, didn’t like it, but got the inkling to give this a listen and I’m digging it tonight.

 

Liking Warm and Sunny Days but it doesn’t have a music video 😉

 

Categories
Food Travel

A contrast in food reviews

Watched 2020 US MRE Menu 20 Sausage Peppers & Onions Review & 2019 Hashbrowns w Bacon Taste Test Comparison from YouTube

The newest US MRE menu for 2020 is a hit – but is it better than the previous Menu #20, Hashbrowns with Bacon?

I enjoy this guy’s earnest, thoughtful, appreciative reviews of MREs.

 

This woman and her mom have a cute rapport. She especially seems to be good at describing flavors — I feel like she has more taste buds than I do 😂 Ok she’s just put more attention and thought into noticing and describing flavor. I like her mom’s fun ways of describing sensations as she eats.

We went to Granville Island once but it was cold and rainy and we weren’t hungry so we only wandered around for an hour 🤷‍♀️ But we did take one of the cute ferries to get there 😄

Categories
Comics Memoir

Read Ducks

Read Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands

Before there was Kate Beaton, New York Times bestselling cartoonist of Hark A Vagrant fame, there was Katie Beaton of the Cape Breton Beatons, specifically Mabou, a tight-knit seaside community where the lobster is as abundant as beaches, fiddles, and Gaelic folk songs. After university, Beaton heads out west to take advantage of Alberta’s oil rush, part of the long tradition of East Coasters who seek gainful employment elsewhere when they can’t find it in the homeland they love so much. With the singular goal of paying off her student loans, what the journey will actually cost Beaton will be far more than she anticipates.

Arriving in Fort McMurray, Beaton finds work in the lucrative camps owned and operated by the world’s largest oil companies. Being one of the few women among thousands of men, the culture shock is palpable. It does not hit home until she moves to a spartan, isolated worksite for higher pay. She encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet never discussed. Her wounds may never heal.

Beaton’s natural cartooning prowess is on full display as she draws colossal machinery and mammoth vehicles set against a sublime Albertan backdrop of wildlife, Northern Lights, and Rocky Mountains. Her first full-length graphic narrative, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is an untold story of Canada: a country that prides itself on its egalitarian ethos and natural beauty while simultaneously exploiting both the riches of its land and the humanity of its people.

A powerful memoir about a complex subject that she carries complicated feelings about. She handles the telling with compassion and sensitivity despite the terrible experiences she endured. I’m of an age with her and though I never went through anything remotely close to that bad, and I didn’t have the albatross of student loans, it pisses me off that the first years after college (at least in the mid-2000s) seem to be universally wearing and exploitative, yet we all know we have to put up with it. Why does our society have to work this way? There’s a cathartic moment towards the end where she tells truth to power even though it makes no real change; the companies care as little for the impact on their workers as they do the ducks and the First Nations people downstream. Everything is done in the name of deniability and preventing liability.

Categories
Romance

Read The Long Game

Read The Long Game (Game Changers, #6)

Ten years.

That’s how long Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov have been seeing each other. How long they’ve been keeping their relationship a secret. From friends, from family…from the league. If Shane wants to stay at the top of his game, what he and Ilya share has to remain secret. He loves Ilya, but what if going public ruins everything?

Ilya is sick of secrets. Shane has gotten so good at hiding his feelings, sometimes Ilya questions if they even exist. The closeness, the intimacy, even the risk that would come with being open about their relationship…Ilya wants it all.

It’s time for them to decide what’s most important—hockey or love.

It’s time to make a call.

Oops, despite being the first sentence on the Goodreads page, I missed that this was a sequel 😂 That explains why some things I thought should have been scenes were not 😅

One little piece that I thought got dropped at the end, but otherwise satisfying.

Categories
Comics Fantasy

Read Shadow Life

Read Shadow Life

When Kumiko’s well-meaning adult daughters place her in an assisted living home, the seventy-six-year-old widow gives it a try, but it’s not where she wants to be. She goes on the lam and finds a cozy bachelor apartment, keeping the location secret even while communicating online with her eldest daughter. Kumiko revels in the small, daily pleasures: decorating as she pleases, eating what she wants, and swimming in the community pool. But something has followed her from her former residence—Death’s shadow.

Kumiko’s sweet life is shattered when Death’s shadow swoops in to collect her. With her quick mind and sense of humor, Kumiko, with the help of friends new and old, is prepared for the fight of her life. But how long can an old woman thwart fate?

Not totally what I expected, especially the ending was a surprise.

Shadow Life works as a title on multiple levels — both Death’s Shadow, but also that at the beginning she’s withdrawn from all her friends and family and is living a shadow of her life, and succeeds in her quest when she rebuilds her connections.

Interesting presentation of an old woman as the heroine. She keeps pissing her pants accidentally ☹ She deals with her physical limitations throughout, but refuses to let her intellect be constrained by them, asserting her independence and self-determination.

Her children are obnoxious and controlling, and the way they’re drawn makes them look like they’re about 20, when they’ve got to be in their thirties at least given she’s supposed to be in her late seventies.

Categories
Comics Fantasy

Read Wayward Kindred

Read Wayward Kindred

They say that blood is thicker than water, but you may wish it weren’t, if your mom has to drink animal blood to survive. Home is where the heart is, even if your sister lives in another city–and is a shape-changing monster. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, so how can you know who you’re supposed to be if your parents are a human and a vampire?

Edited by Allison O’Toole (Wayward Sisters), Ashanti Fortson (Heartwood) and Kat Vendetti (Rolled & Told), Wayward Kindred looks at the different ways we can relate to our families, for better or for worse. Inside you’ll find stories of grief and loss, understanding and reconciliation, and telecom contracts, all featuring monsters ranging from the gruesome to the adorable.

A good collection of indie comics! I liked almost all of them. Diverse art styles and stories covering a wide range of “monsters” from authors of all gender identities.

Categories
Art and Design Nature

Geometric Landscapes of Lawren Harris

https://thegroupofseven.ca/lawren-harris/