I’ve been gently asked by the Universe to prod my feelings about fatness and fat people.
I’ve gradually added people on social media to make my feed more size inclusive. I’ve followed the movement in the sewing community to hold pattern makers accountable for providing inclusive sizing.
And I’ve been reading Lindy West.
I was in my early twenties and taking courses towards my nursing degree when I attended one Saturday Anatomy and Physiology class wearing a shirt that said “Chubs.” My professor asked me about it.
“Oh, it’s just an inside joke in my family,” I said carelessly. We’d been calling baby carrots “chubs,” and then it became something we called each other, with variations ad infinitum, including the plural “chubs and ubs,” and so on. We made shirts. We never thought too much about it.
The professor looked me in the eye. He said, “You can do that because you’re not fat.”
A while back, I said I planned to write more thoughtful posts and fewer sewing and book posts. That commitment might have happened on a Superwoman day, or sometime before the pandemic. It seems like it was too hard to manage, because despite my commitment, the blog hasn’t changed.
Now, I sit here with a collection of five books that from outward appearance have nearly nothing to do with one another, and I’m trying to figure out how to knit them together into one cohesive post.
By the time you read this, it will be February. Things might be better than they are now, or they might still be about the same.
Maybe you want to consume something other than news, to stretch yourself, or just escape into a good story, learn something new, or melt into a puddle… one of these books might just do it for you. I hope so.
Children of Blood and Bone, by Tomi Adeyemi, is a YA fantasy novel that combines magic and West African folklore into a lush, vibrant mythological world.
I want to introduce my kids to voices that historically haven’t been amplified.
I asked our children’s librarians for books about Indigenous people, and by Indigenous people, and they provided me with an big bag of books from board books all the way up to YA lit.
These are four of my favorites.
I have a pile of antiracism books on my bedside stand, and every month when my antiracism book club announces next month’s title, I hope that it will be one of those books. So far, it’s only happened once. Which means I keep being introduced to new books, but I haven’t made much progress on my bedside stand book pile.
