You’re gonna have to kill me when I finish this book: It’s that good.

That’s what I said to my partner.

L and I are both reading Craig Womack’s Drowning in Fire , and it’s That good!

I want to tattoo this book on my skin, I want to take a a bath in it, I want to breathe it in and out, I want to write my own book.

I know Beth Brant’s work from her anthology, A GATHERING OF SPIRIT. I’ve always been deeply impressed by “A Long Story,” and teach it almost every semester.

It was a real joy to have a chance to read other works by Brant in this great collection. It’s fabulous, it’s queer, it’s sovereign. Really great stories, really well put together. Several of the stories have an “oral history” quality, you know? when you read an oral history of a queer Chicana from New Mexico in the 1950s or Texas in the 1960s? Like that, but different: coal miners kids, exotic dancers, gay men, quilt patterns. All indigenous. A Fierce gem.

Okay, I tried reading this several times in several different ways. At first, I expected it to be a critical study, a scholarly book. That totally didn’t work. Then I tried to read it like I read Thich Nhat Hanh. That totally didn’t work either. Then I tried to read it like I read a book of meditations.

Now I’ve given up. I feel like it would be a better book if it were honestly an anthology of stories, because for every couple of paragraphs of discussion there’s at least one story. But it’s a lot like the stories that priests tell during the sermon. They’re out of context, all mishmash together, like it’s all one great tradition and you can just pull from here and there.

If you’re curious, check this one out for the library. It’s definitely not a “keeper.”

This book was a complete disappointment.

The author has little spiritual practice of her own. So as a reader if feels like she’s read some of the same books I have, and is making connections between them, but not particularly deep or significant ones.

The patterns are mostly for junk nobody wants or needs. As opposed to something useful or beautiful. I swear, I’d rather have one more pattern for a damn chemo cap than this ugly knitted spiral onto which you can sew charms from the craft store. (There is a really basic shawl included almost as an afterthought, and that may be the one thing I try to make.)

If you’re interested in knitting as a spiritual practice, look elsewhere. I’m going to give Mindful Knitting and Knitting the Mystery a try.

I think I first read this book about fifteen years ago. I didn’t really like it at the time. In fact, one my best friends had said Erdrich was her favorite author, but I couldn’t really appreciate the stories in this book. None of them were happy. I was haunted by the death of June Kashpaw. I identified with her too strongly, trying to cover the unravelled part of her best pink shell.

Now I read Eridrich and Alexie and find my New Mexican family in the Chippewa and Spokane people they depict.

This book is brilliant. Precious, magical, dreamy. As serious as commodity flour.

The title story is rare. The final story has left me with a foolish grin.

Every bit as good as Hector Tovar’s brilliant The Tattooed Soldier in the way that it shows you the inside of people you would describe as “inhuman,” and makes them real to you. Danticat is a powerful novelist, and this novel, with its flawed sculpture, will stay with you.

More of a novel-in-stories than Danticat’s other novels. (She’s a master of both the short story and the novel, which is why it works so well).

Also, just as a daughter, I have to admire the way she tells this story, showing how we can imagine the best and the worst of our fathers.

A Sunday in June is way more disturbing than Stigmata, which seems almost cheerful in contrast. Stepping back a generation, Perry depicts three sisters, Grace, Mary Nell, and Eva, who reach into time. Not the glowing model of sisterhood that we might hope for, but a painful accounting.

This brilliant novel my Phyllis Alesia Perry will have you muttering about who defines sanity how. A wonderful depiction of generations of women in a family, and the true meaning of a “memory quilt.”

Michelle Cliff’s third novel, Free Enterprise is an amazing narrative woven from the stray threads of footnotes. This is a novel I’ve had in my posession for several years but was “afraid” to read for some time. But bits of it turned up in my dreams, and today I read the whole thing in seven hours. I’ve got to let it steep for a while. I see the interconnectedness of Women of Color linking to the fiction of Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Graciela Limon. A Masterwork, truly.

This book is GREAT. Alexie is a genius. “The first time I heard Robert Johnson sing I knew he understood what it meant to be Indian on the edge of the twenty-first century, even if he was black at the beginning of the twentieth.” That’s what this book is like. The blues, full of beauty, poetry, sobriety, and injustice.