In 2015, when my friends were curating Spotify playlists to listen to on their smartphones, I still listened to CDs and the same three Pandora stations I created when I registered in 2009 and could only seed channels with musical concepts. One of my stations was exclusively for classical and modernist instrumentals--study music. One featured… Continue reading Pandora’s Music Box
Author: Sara Davis
Reading Roundup: October 2019
The Vine Witch by Luanne G. Smith. My free First Read of the previous month. This book opens unconventionally in a swamp, with our heroine a literal toad who eats bugs and sheds her skin. I buckled up for a wild ride at that point, but the story settles into a conventional enough historical romance… Continue reading Reading Roundup: October 2019
Failure Landscape
There's a story I sometimes tell about myself (or tell on myself, perhaps). I minored in art as an undergraduate. The long studio hours tried my patience, but I craved the repetitive tactile sensations of building or painting. In my first sculpture class, the instructor provided basic safety instructions for all the tools and machines… Continue reading Failure Landscape
Reading Roundup: September 2019
Exhalation by Ted Chiang. The short stories in this book are fascinated with how technology affects the human condition--but technology is very broadly defined, from sci-fi innovations (such as a device that records your memories as video) to the ancient technology of writing. I was delighted with the opening story, which--like my favorites in the… Continue reading Reading Roundup: September 2019
Reading Roundup: August 2019
Except for the first weekend in August, when I needed a gently used paperback to take to the beach, I pulled all of this month's reading from the stacks in my university's library. I've started a couple of books on my phone--The Poppy War, and Tor's free ebook of the month, The Necessary Beggar--but I've… Continue reading Reading Roundup: August 2019
The artichoke
Have you ever cooked an artichoke? They are a pain in the ass to prepare. If you want to steam a whole fresh artichoke, you first have to snip the spiny tips of every outer leaf so that they don't draw blood. You have to cut off the stem so that the vegetable sits upright… Continue reading The artichoke
Sara Davis 