Good Books and Good Dogs

What I’ve been reading and my pups are 5 years old this week!

Curiosa and Loki at about eight weeks

Hello Friends,

I’ve lost my voice, so I can’t record a voiceover today. It’s a week to take a break for some lighter fare anyway. I have a review of Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America by Jane Borden for next week, but right now I want to share some titles I’ve been reading and listening to. Just some quick news, and then some good dogs and recommendations of books you may enjoy.

Here’s a bit more on Meta’s use of pirated books to train its AI.

This Is How Meta AI Staffers Deemed More Than 7 Million Books to Have No “Economic Value” From Vanity Fair (thanks LitHub)

As more than a dozen lawsuits churn ahead, newly unsealed case files reveal the company’s stance: The pirated books Meta used to train its AI, including ones by Beverly Cleary, Jacqueline Woodson, and Andrew Sean Greer, are individually worthless.

My Pups are Five Years Old! ❤️

I mentioned a while ago that since there’s never time out for posts solely about dogs, I would sneak them in here and there. This is a good week to do so because my pups turned five. We don’t know exactly when their birthday is—we got them at a rescue in San Diego when they were about eight weeks old. Their mom and her four pups were scooped off the street in Tijuana. In my chapbook The Mortality of Dogs and Humans, I tell the story of how we were in a crazy space at the time—Covid lockdown inside my parents’ assisted living apartments as ‘self-employed caretakers’ so that we could get inside and have access to care for them; dealing with the grief of both parents and my husband’s sister dying and the recent deaths of our two old dogs (Fletcher and Zainy). And the decision to heal our hearts with new pups. We applied to get Loki and ended up coming home with his sister as well when her adopters decided against her.

That’s Zainy.

We don’t have big dog birthday celebrations, but the day is a reminder of how much they add to our lives, and how they helped us heal. I got some dog biscuits decorated like cookies (the only colors available: pink and blue).

Fun Stuff

I was interviewed on

Alyson Shelton

’s “Where I’m From” this week and it was a blast. I wrote the “I Am From” poem using the template, read my version, and then we discussed it. We also chatted a bit about my upcoming novel and about an upcoming anthology on sibling loss which includes an essay I wrote about my brother John. The interview was Instagram live, which I didn’t realize has to be at a certain angle (I had my iPad in the usual Zoom position). So—I had to turn things around. Short, fun, here it is:

Where I'm From #185 with Victoria Waddle

The books we discussed:

I have an essay about my younger brother John in The Loss of a Lifetime, which launches June 17. My novel on a patriarchal cult, Keep Sweet, launches on June 21.

LA Times Festival of Books

The LA Times Festival of Books at USC on April 26.

Last week, I attended the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books with two friends who live in the LA area. The night before, we had dinner out at a restaurant with a photo booth.

On Saturday, we attended three author sessions and strolled among the booths. Thankfully, one of the women had attended USC, so she knew her way around the campus. We had the chance to attend:

• Get in the Ring: Multiple Points of View in Fiction - Rita Bullwinkel, Justin Haynes, Jared Lemus, and Amy Wallen (who did a great job as moderator).

• The Terroir Memoir: Cooking, Culture, and Place - Sarah Ahn, Danielle Dorsey, Michelle T. King, Steve Hoffman

• And my favorite: In Her Shoes: Sisterhood in Contemporary Fiction. Moderator: Lorraine Berry. Panelists: Caoilinn Hughes, Lisa See, and Lynn Steger Strong.

Here’s the description of “In Her Shoes”:

They say that no one will love you more or hurt you more than a sister. In these moving and relatable stories, two sisters grapple with the effects of mental illness on their relationship; four adult orphans are forced to bond together when one of them goes missing; and two middle siblings must come to terms with the secret rift that ruined their once unbreakable bond.

As soon as I heard Caoilinn Hughes describe one of her characters as “Having a bit of a wobble” I knew that was a phrase I needed. And apparently everyone else did, too, because the other authors and the moderator used it. Bonus: As she talked about her book, The Alternatives, I realized that I had heard the audiobook. I really enjoyed it! A cast of smart female characters.

The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes

Here’s the publisher’s blurb:

The Flattery sisters were plunged prematurely into adulthood when their parents died in tragic circumstances. Now in their thirties—all single, all with PhDs—they are each attempting to do meaningful work in a rapidly foundering world. The four lead disparate, distanced lives, from classrooms in Connecticut to ritzy catering gigs in London’s Notting Hill, until one day their oldest sister, a geologist haunted by a terrible awareness of the earth’s future, abruptly vanishes from her work and home. Together for the first time in years, the Flatterys descend on the Irish countryside in search of a sister who doesn’t want to be found. Sheltered in a derelict bungalow, they reach into their common past, confronting both old wounds and a desperately uncertain future.

Some other books I’ve recently enjoyed

We Do Not Part by 2024 Nobel Laureate Han Kang

Another story told by female characters with a good bit of the surreal/mystery. The forgotten chapter of Korean history mentioned below is a pogrom on Jeju Island after the Korean War.

Publisher’s blurb: One winter morning, Kyungha receives an urgent message from her friend Inseon to visit her at a hospital in Seoul. Inseon has injured herself in an accident, and she begs Kyungha to return to Jeju Island, where she lives, to save her beloved pet—a white bird called Ama. A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon’s house at all costs, but the icy wind and squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save the animal—or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn’t yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into the darkness that awaits her at her friend’s house. Blurring the boundaries between dream and reality, We Do Not Part powerfully illuminates a forgotten chapter in Korean history, buried for decades—bringing to light the lost voices of the past to save them from oblivion. Both a hymn to an enduring friendship and an argument for remembering, it is the story of profound love in the face of unspeakable violence—and a celebration of life, however fragile it might be.

The Andidote by Karen Russell

I absolutely loved Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove (short fiction) and Swamplandia (novel). The Andidote is a bit of a departure. While it has some fantastical elements, it’s more centered in the real world of the Great Depression. I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t quite the experience that Russell’s other books were. In Slate, Laura Miller notes that The Andidote “isn’t as relentlessly quirky as Swamplandia!” While I did like The Antidote better than Miller did (actually she didn’t like it much at all—see the link above), I do agree with her that it feels like a YA novel. Lots of teen issues, teen girls' sports (basketball), growing up issues, learning empathy, etc. That said, there are multiple narrators of various ages and the 1930s Dust Bowl comes to life in some extraordinarily beautiful language.

Publisher’s blurb: The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a “Prairie Witch,” whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples’ memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.

Russell’s novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.

A bit of good news

This article is more than a year old, but it’s new to me—I love the news about sea turtle conservation. My sister is a big fan of sea turtles, so this will make her happy.

Meet the Mexican Family Who Gave Up Fishing To Monitor & Rescue Sea Turtles from Good Good Good

Thanks for being here! Have a good week.