juushika

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Lo these many years ago, after my grandma died, I helped sort out her bookshelves, which held books all the way back from her book-loving aunts and uncles in the early 1900s. As I was at the time in a graduate program, staring down a Ph.D. thesis set roughly in that era, I took a few books that seemed representative, including George Barr McCutcheon’s The Alternative, as McCutcheon was a famous Hoosier humorist of the time period.

So was Booth Tarkington, whose work is still very funny, so I approached McCutcheon’s book with high hopes. However, this is perhaps not the place to start with McCutcheon, as it’s a bit of weightless romantic Christmas fluff that barely cracks one hundred pages despite largish type and beautiful green leafy borders around each page.

Beautifully printed, though. I might keep it just as a lovely example of the printer’s trade.

I’m not usually a bit audiobook person, but when troisoiseaux told me that Michael Schur (showrunner for, among other things, The Good Place) read his own audiobook WITH THE CAST OF THE GOOD PLACE, of course I had to listen to it. A fun romp through the history of moral philosophy, focusing most heavily on Aristotelian virtue ethics, utilitarianism, and Kant.

Schur is good at amusing descriptions of different moral approaches to problems, but less strong when he wanders off the beaten path to discuss, say, what moral philosophy has to say about engaging with the art of terrible people (or chicken sandwiches made by chicken sandwich companies with politics you abhor, etc.). He ultimately comes down on the side of “I guess you gotta decide for yourself,” which isn’t really guidance, especially after he’s just run through why he thinks virtue ethics, utilitarianism, and Kant’s Categorical Imperative suggest that you should give up that literal or metaphorical chicken sandwich. Have some guts, man! Either stand by your moral reasoning, or offer a counterargument why actually it’s FINE if we all chow down on some Chik-Fil-A.

What I’m Reading Now

Padraic Colum’s The Big Tree of Bunlahy: Stories of My Own Countryside. Colum won a couple of other Newbery Honors, both of which I felt were dry and dull, but apparently all Colum needed was the inspiration of writing about his very own corner of Ireland to blossom into a fascinating storyteller. I’m doling the book out one tale a night and it’s still going to end far too soon.

What I Plan to Read Next

Evelina has arrived!

I wrapped up the Newbery Honor books of 2025 with Andrea L. Rogers’ Chooch Helped, which also won the Caldecott Medal this year for Rebecca Lee Kunz’s rich sunset-colored illustrations. It’s a picture book about a long-suffering older sister who watches as her two-year-old brother “helps” various family members complete their tasks, usually by accidentally making more tasks by spilling the flour, pulling up the newly planted garden vegetables, tearing out the stitches in a freshly sewn pucker-toe moccasin, etc.

The sister, standing in for older siblings everywhere, is exasperated. Although of course in the book she moves past that exasperation, once her parents point out that she’s one of her little brother’s most important teachers, I suspect that this book may not be a hit with older siblings. Why does no one ever validate their feeling that their younger siblings are so annoying!!!!

As a youngest sibling, however, I was enchanted, especially because this is exactly the stage my niece is in, although (knock on wood!) unlike Chooch, she’s usually not actively destructive when she “helps.” It just takes twice as long to get anything done when she’s “helping” water the plants or mix the pancake batter. But to an adult, it’s totally worth it to see her attempting to haul around a gallon or water or measure a teaspoon of baking soda.

(A side story: last week, as I was washing up the pancake dishes, she was trying to get a slice of orange onto her spoon. At last she announced, “I’m frustrated.” There is nothing cuter than a two-year-old using a ten-cent word, so of course I stopped to help her get that orange onto her spoon.)

The illustrations are just lovely, too. I love the sunset-hewed pallet, the way that the patterns on the characters’ clothes splash a little past their outlines, the Cherokee motifs that Kunz wove into the illustrations. There’s a particularly gorgeous illustration of Chooch gigging for crawdads with the friend of the family, both of them dark silhouettes against the orange water, and a pale gold moon with a glowing aureole of fireflies.

Recently I finished Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, and have not yet been able to write about it, because I need time to digest it. But Kimmerer recently released a shorter companion book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, which is a distillation of certain ideas from Braiding Sweetgrass, and also easier to digest simply by virtue of being much shorter.

The Serviceberry’s basic idea is this: our current extractive industrial economies are rattling down the road straight toward ecological catastrophe. What other economic models could we follow instead?

And as a model, Kimmerer offers the serviceberry itself. As she notes, Western economics is founded on the idea of scarcity. But while scarcity is a condition that occurs in nature, it’s not a constant. In the natural world, abundance is just as common as scarcity. A serviceberry tree after a rainy spring has more than enough berries for birds and squirrels and humans.

Serviceberries are thus one model of a gift economy. They invite humans to understand “natural resources” not as a source to be exploited but as a gift from the earth, which like all gifts creates a reciprocal relationship between the giver and the receiver. We take, but also give. (In the case of the serviceberries, by spreading the seeds.)

And, furthermore, Kimmerer suggests, modern society could use traditional gift economies as a model for one possible way forward out of our current economic race toward climate catastrophe. There are already small-scale attempts in Little Free Libraries and free farm stands and Freecycle and the Buy Nothing movement, everything from the traditional mutual aid in churches to the new forms of digital gift economy exemplified in, for instance, fandom.

This last is not something Kimmerer discusses, but fandom is my own most extensive experience with a gift economy, where people write fic or draw fanart and post it with no expectation of direct payment behind perhaps a few comments - but also the more diffuse payment of helping create an environment where other people also post their fan creations for everyone to enjoy.

Now, at this point in my life, I’ve mostly moved over to selling stories for regular old money, because we have not (yet) learned how to leverage the gift economy so that it can pay for, let’s say, a two-month road trip. But, on the other hand, so many of the friends that I stayed with on that road trip were people I met through fandom, or through book reviews or nature photos on Dreamwidth or Livejournal. The road trip would not have been possible without the money, but it also would not have been possible without the web of relationships created by the gift economy.

***

While I was reading The Serviceberry, I discovered a couple of serviceberry trees on a street near my house, in a location that made it clear they had been planted by the city. Visions of serviceberry muffins dancing in my head, I went out to pick some berries - keeping a weather eye on the road, as picking berries from a public tree felt vaguely illicit.

But berry-picking is an absorbing occupation, and I didn’t notice the man walking his dog until he was almost upon me. “What are you doing?” he asked, curious, with some slight accent I didn’t recognize.

“Picking serviceberries,” I explained. “Would you like to try one?”

He would and he did. “It’s good,” he said, a little surprised. “Better than blueberries.”

And we said good evening, and I went back to picking serviceberries as he and his dog walked on.