Second Birth, Same as the First?

Here’s the thing about my second daughter’s birth. Nearly four months have passed and I still feel this sadness sometimes, this guilt that has no foundation. I still feel terror and uncertainty. I don’t know how to get it out. When I wrote my first daughter’s birth story, the word I used was “amazingsauce.” I can’t say the same for her little sister.

It was 2:30 a.m and four days past my due date. I woke and wasn’t sure if what I was feeling was the real thing, as my first experience with labor had begun with my water breaking. I retrieved my phone, timed contractions alone in the dark before retreating to our back porch to call my midwife and my best friend, who was going to be with us for the birth.

I woke my husband. We’d agreed not to wait before heading to the hospital this time, given our first had arrived less than seven hours after my water had broken. It was safe to assume this labor would be faster, and I had no desire to give birth in a car.

We had to wait in the family lounge area for nearly an hour while they made room for me in triage, and then nearly again as long in triage while they tried to get enough time on the monitor out of a very wiggly baby. I breathed and breathed and chatted with my husband and my best friend in between. With my first daughter, I was already 8 centimeters by the time I got to the hospital, and they didn’t mess around. When I was finally checked this time, I was 5 centimeters, which was more than respectable, but still felt like a bit of a letdown.

Once in the delivery room, the midwife said something to me that I feel relatively certain is responsible for some of my bad feelings about my labor. She didn’t mean to, I’m sure, but she really psyched me out.

“You’re still able to talk normally between contractions. Telling jokes isn’t something I expect a woman in active labor to be able to do, so I think maybe you’re not quite there yet."

I told myself for the next few hours that I wasn’t “quite there yet.” I felt lucid and focused in between contractions that grew increasingly longer, closer together, and more intense. I didn’t let my support people support me because I kept telling myself that I didn’t need them. But I did.

A new midwife, my favorite in the practice, came on duty and rubbed my back. My husband let me squeeze his hands while I swayed from side-to-side on the birth ball. I was afraid to be checked for fear I wasn’t making progress, because instead of listening to my body, I was listening to the voice in my head that said it couldn’t possibly be that serious. I still felt completely in control. I still thought streaming some Star Trek might not be a bad idea.

My favorite midwife finally checked me. I was nearly 8 centimeters.

“Anything you need, just tell me,” she said.

“I don’t know what I need. I don’t know what I should do.”

“Well, either you’re going to tell me you need to push or your water’s going to break. And then you’re going to tell me you need to push.”

I had a shower then. The hot water drummed against my back and I pressed my forehead into the wall with each contraction, picturing a tide in my mind that swelled and retreated with each shuddering wave I felt in my body. I remember thinking to myself in the shower that I wanted someone with me just in case, that I just wanted someone with me, that it was strange to be laboring alone like an animal, kneeling on the ceramic tile like a bear or a cat on a slab of stone. I remember thinking that I was an animal, so maybe it wasn’t strange at all. I remember wondering how I’d write about this part of my labor.

I wonder now if I didn’t go through transition alone. That makes me feel like a boss but mostly just makes me sad.

I wriggled back into my labor gown in between contractions, my skin lurid from the too-hot water. I climbed into bed, the edges of the world blurring a little with each contraction now. The sun was up and fully, and I remembering thinking that this didn’t seem like the work of daytime. I thought that because I was still having thoughts I had some time yet, I was on top of this, it wasn’t nearly over.

But then it was and I wasn't. I was suddenly howling, and the midwife told me I needed to lie down and quickly. She felt the baby’s head. She said I could feel the baby’s head, too, but I didn’t believe her. With my first daughter, I pushed for two-and-a-half-hours. With my second, it was more like two minutes.

Likely this, too, is responsible for my strange and mixed feelings about her birth. I moved so quickly from masterfully breathing my way though every contraction to absolutely losing my shit to holding a baby that I can’t even process what really happened.

And I didn’t get to hold her straightaway. With my first daughter, those intense final few moments were followed by this beautiful calm, her serene little body placed on my belly, her cord ceremoniously cut by my husband, our doula smiling at my shoulder. I relaxed almost immediately.

My second daughter had the cord wrapped so tightly around her neck the midwife told me to stop pushing. I remember looking at her, panting, “I can’t, I can’t.” I felt like every part of me was stretched and ready to snap. My eyes and mouth felt as tight as my belly. She said I had to. She cut the cord as soon as my daughter's head was free, and only after could she finish delivering her.

There was lots of shouting, then, and I saw the slick little body in my favorite midwife’s hands as she rushed into the adjacent room. I looked at my husband. Our eyes had followed the baby who wasn’t crying. My legs were shaking and my hands, too, where I held his and the rail of the hospital bed.

“Is it okay?”

“It’s okay.”

He didn’t know but he said it anyway. We didn’t know then, either, if our baby was a boy or a girl. With our first daughter, that announcement had been special, it had been his. Now it didn’t seem to matter. I was burning up to hold that baby in the next room, the baby that wasn’t crying.

It felt a lot longer than thirty seconds but it can’t have been more than that before she was. There were tears in my husband’s eyes. Even as he released my hand to move around the bed to go and see what we’d made, a nurse who’d rushed in and hadn’t been there for the delivery turned to look at us.

“She’s really mad now,” she said, and laughed.

We laughed, too.

I was holding her within a minute and I couldn’t get a good look at her, could only hear her damp little breath against my chest. She was gray and purple and red and I still felt like a maniac. I’d torn with my first daughter and I tore with her, too, but this time my husband had to gently remove my hand from her back as I was tightening my grip with every stitch. I was shaken and I shook.

Sobbing to my favorite midwife weeks later, she told me she’d left the birth thinking it had been beautiful, that I’d done a wonderful job. She said she’d been impressed with my ability to cope, that she wouldn’t have guessed I was ever as far along as I was, and that I’d performed as any other mother would have during a natural labor with such a swift conclusion. I couldn’t articulate to her then and I barely can now why I am still upset by my second daughter’s labor. I told her I’d felt like a crazy person. I was ashamed of unraveling the way I did, even though I know that unraveling is part of the process.

The first time I hadn’t known what to expect and so I hadn’t had any control. I’d surrendered to what was happening because there didn’t seem to be any other way to do it. This time, I was afraid because I knew just what to expect, and I thought I could stay on top of it because I’d done it before. And I did, for a really long time. And then I couldn’t, and it terrified me.

I had two natural childbirth experiences. Two short labors. I had no reason to expect they would be similar but they were more different than I could have imagined.

On the day my second daughter was born, I don’t believe I really settled as her mama until we were in the room that would shelter us during our hospital stay. After I’d had a shower and she’d had a bath, our skins were similarly flushed and pink. We both ate, and heartily. She drifted off to sleep and it finally seemed safe for me to sleep, too.

Five Favorite Reads of 2014

I'm embarrassed by how little I've managed to read this year. But I really ought to be kinder to myself, given I was enormously pregnant during a long summer in a vigorous teaching program, and then, you know, I had a baby. But I'm no good at taking it easy on myself, which is why I've already finished two books this month and am working on a third. You're likely to hear about both when I share my favorite reads of 2015, because, so good.

Yet, there were a few gems among my too-few reads of 2014.

The standout favorite for the year was easily The Girl With All the Gifts, which I can't hardly say a thing about without spoiling the early reveal. Needless to say, it takes a genre that I thought didn't have much more to offer in a brilliant direction. It's gruesome and fantastically imagined and heart-achingly lovely. If you read anything I read this past year, read this. Because I want to talk to you about it.

I have a love-hate relationship with The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic, because while I am utterly enamored with the premise and the world Emily Croy Barker so painstakingly creates, she needed an editor. Badly. Possibly a machete. And as much as I was willing to float along when the narrative slowed, there was very little payoff at the book's end. I was as livid to learn there would be more after reading for so long assuming I'd get some closure as I was salivating at the prospect of more. I guess that means it's a winner?

Where'd You Go, Bernadette was a bizarre, clever romp I would never have picked up for myself and that's why I'm so glad I read with some gals who have such good taste. The fact that the author wrote for Arrested Development isn't surprising, but unlike many - and possibly all - of the Bluths, the quirky characters that populate this novel have real heart, in addition to being delightfully off-kilter. It's like Portlandia meets Gilmore Girls.

Gidion's Hunt is The Lost Boys film I actually wanted. Bill Blume's narrator is genuine and genuinely likeable, not even just for a teenage boy, and there's some real bite to this vampire yarn. He tells me he's editing the sequel, and I'm trying to be the polite writerly friend and not say, Gimme.

While I was a little fearful of reading Longbourn and sullying forever my love of Pride & Prejudice, I can now heartily recommend it to anyone who wants more from their Austen-inspired work than just more shirtless Darcy (though that's cool, too). The intimacy in Longbourn is of a different kind, but no less tantalizing. I was fascinated from a historical perspective as well as a literary one. I also liked getting more reasons to despise Wickham.

So, there you have it. What did you read this year, and how many nights of good sleep did you miss reading it?

(Book) Skeletons in my Closet

I am not one of those people who feels they must finish every book they begin reading. I'm not even the sort of person who dutifully finishes every book they're assigned to read, if my college career is any indication. Shame on me, right? The thing is, there are just too many books I want to read that I know I'll never have the time for that sticking with something just because I've given it a chance seems silly. My to-read shelf on Goodreads is embarrassingly stuffed full of stories just waiting for a library loan or a Kindle sale. And I'm adding to it all the time, begging book recommendations from friends and stalking places like Epic Reads (and not just because their Instagram is delicious).

I've also given up books I'd wager some of you absolutely loved. I submit myself to your judgment and soon-to-be lower opinion of me.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

I think I tried to read this one three times, given the heaps of praise dumped upon it by so many trusted reader friends. But there was something about the prose that was so off-putting I just could never get very far. I tend to have trouble with period fantasy - is that a genre? - that takes itself too seriously, if only because all of my ungracious eye-rolling makes it difficult to follow the lines of text. I'm a bad person. I know.

The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch

I can't even tell you how excited I was to read this after a recommendation from one of the coolest reader-types that I know, and how I slogged my way through about forty pages before drifting shamefully away. Is there such a thing as dude bro fantasy? Because, yeah. This one was not for me.

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

See above. Same feels.

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker

Ninety pages in and yet another character's perspective introduced, I returned this one to the library. Maybe I lack the focus for such a graceful novel right now, but I wanted more of a linear narrative given how rich the world Wecker had already established. I'm still intensely interested in what's to become of the golem and the jinni, but it felt like I was more willing to follow them to find out than Wecker was. I feel so dirty admitting what an impatient reader I am.

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

My devotion to Atwood is serious business, such that failing to finish reading the MaddAddam trilogy - among a scant handful of books of hers I haven't read - haunts me. Especially now that I know I'm going to be dead or a head in a jar when her latest work becomes available for public consumption. But I've started and stopped this one several times to no avail. Oryx and Crake left me in a place I guess I'm not quite willing to leave.

So, please, alleviate my guilt. What book skeletons have you got in your closet?

I Don't Write in Costume, But if I Did...

I love costuming and cosplay, which is actually not the nerdiest thing there is to know about me, but still.

I am especially fond of book cosplay, which is perhaps why, though I rail against descriptions of mundane clothes in books - who cares how distressed your boyfriend's jeans are, YA heroine? - I love, love, love when a character's garb is unusual or symbolic in some way and the author takes some time to describe it in detail. Because these things make great costumes; specifically, great costumes I wish I had the time and resources to make, and the opportunity to squeal in delight when recognized at a con.

I've had a dream of cosplaying Sabriel from Garth Nix's Abhorsen trilogy for years and may yet, if I can connive a method of embroidering dozens of silver keys on a great swathe of surcoat fabric. And, you know, find seven bells of graduating sizes, because this cosplayer has not yet ventured into the realm of mold making, and probably should resist dumping money into yet another hobby.

What I love about Nix's descriptions isn't just that the clothes are beautiful, but that they have meaning in the world the characters occupy, that they're instantly recognizable, that their weight is both physical and figurative. I felt the same way when reading Leigh Bardugo's Grisha series, with the keftas. How freakin' cool are the keftas?! Likewise the stillsuits in Dune.

As a writer, I've had characters glancing in mirrors beaten out of me, so sneaking in the opportunity to dress somebody requires a bit of creativity. There was one passage, in particular, where I allowed myself to linger describing a garment that Eiren wears late in the book:

"Embroidered along the hood and sleeves were... detailed renderings, scenes and figures playing out the details of their lives.

But it was not any life, it was mine. My mother carried me as an infant from the birthing chair to my father’s arms, Jurnus and I raced through the streets and the sand. I bent my head in prayer, I burned ritual herbs, I braided Esbat’s hair and soothed Lista’s vanity. I went into exile with my parents, brother, and sisters. The figures were tiny and but a handful of knots each, but I recognized them all, and could see when Morainn and Gannet entered my life, crawling dark and glinting with gilded thread in the capitol tower.

We looked like figures of myth, all splashes of color and fine, spidery features. It was breathtaking, and I could hardly imagine wearing such a life for all I had lived it."

While I would never cosplay one of my own characters, it is perhaps a not-so-secret and ridiculously vain writerly hope of mine that somebody else someday might want to. I've got some very particular notions about Gannet's mask that defy description, if anyone's interested.

My Writing Process: Like the Borg, I Adapt

The delightful Bill Blume was kind enough to think of me to join him in participating in a chain letter blog tour where writers have the opportunity to discuss their writing process. I think it says quite a lot about mine that I was supposed to post this yesterday, but am only just getting to it now because I put off packing for a trip to San Francisco to watch Knights of Badassdom, and thus arrived in the other windy city on four hours sleep, contemplating a hilariously terrible - or a terribly hilarious, I haven't decided yet - film. So, writing. Sleep deprivation. Life.

There are some questions I'm meant to answer, firstly, what am I working on? Presently, I'm slogging through a draft of the sequel to - and likely conclusion of the series begun in The Hidden Icon. While I wrote the first book without an outline, and then rewrote it without an outline, and then finally decided that whole chapters full of people doing nothing but talking really needed addressing... I have major plot points for this one appropriately plotted out, and lots of really useful notes that say things like, "Do this!" and "Don't do that!" I'm halfway through the writing, which is to say, I haven't even gotten to the hard stuff yet.

Am I supposed to be honest, too? I should probably lie. Real writers lie.

Secondly, I'm to consider how my work differs from others writing in the genre. One of the things that I feel really sets The Hidden Icon apart from other high fantasy novels is the richness of the mythology of the world, and the double-and-sometimes-triple storytelling that goes on when Eiren, or occasionally other characters, spin a tale. It's part of the charm of writing in her world, for me, and I hope part of the charm of reading, too.

Which segues rather nicely into why I write what I do. As a girl I remember visiting the library in my grade school and meticulously working my way through the two shelves of fairy tales - and let's be real, I checked out Princess Furball loads of times; someday I need to write something with moonbeam dresses folded neatly into nutshells - because there's just something about folklore and fairy stories that appeals immensely to me. Fairy tales can be dark and delightful, as we can be dark and delightful. I've got lots of ideas for lots of things, but little tales that blossom into big ones, stories with whimsy but gravity, too, are where I'm living now.

And now I must tell you how my writing process works, which suggests, perhaps unfairly, that it does (or at least, always does). Perhaps it was something she said when I swooned over her at Kenyon a few years ago or something that I read, but Margaret Atwood, apparently, used to and maybe still does write lying down on the floor on her belly. No desk for the prolific. That's the first thing I always think about when I think of writing processes, and how specific a detail I feel like I need to provide when considering mine. But I can't.

I've touched on this before, but my process is all about adaptation. I do what I can, when I can, where I can, and I don't let myself think too much about it. Doing is what's important, not how or how much. In the past Cory Doctorow's recommendations to write for twenty minutes a day, and especially leaving off mid-sentence, have been tremendously fruitful for me, and when I adhere to anything like a process, it's to that. It's not always easy, but it's certainly easier than pinning myself to a word count and berating myself when I don't meet it - or worse still, not starting writing because I know I can't. It's writing, every day, that I can feel good about.

Next week be sure to pop in and see what Melissa Long (also writing as Missy Lynn Ryan) has to say on the subject, and hound her for her supernatural match maker novel I've been dying to read for years. The inimitable Laura Bickle of salamander and Amish vampire fame will also be writing next week, and Megan Orsini of The Great Noveling Adventure is sure to have some sassy and sage-like things to describe her process.

Charisma is a Class Skill

I've leveled up as a writer.

Or, if you're more of a classic console type, I've punched my head into a brick, blinking with promise, and stumbled over the great fungal accolade that is an invitation to a writer's conference.

I was recently accepted to the Ohioana Book Festival, and I've been haunting their website in hopes of seeing whose company I won't be worthy of keeping (not to mention the many readers of my forever-home state). There will be books. There will be food trucks. There will be many readers licking greasy fingers before lovingly turning the pages of their latest acquisitions from the book fair. Who knows, maybe I'll even sign a book or two and my chicken scratch will seem enigmatic rather than the academic handicap it has been since high school. At the very least, all festival authors are asked to participate in at least one panel, and as I expect lame video game references won't be welcome, I'll keep you posted about my schedule on the events page.

And there will be ZenCha. Because a visit to Columbus without a visit to the Short North to guzzle tea would be unheard of. Don't make me drink alone?

The festival is on 10 May, which also seems like rather a good deadline to finish the draft of book two. It hounds me day and night as relentlessly as my toddler daughter but would, if books had the equivalent of child protective services, be seized for neglect. I suppose it's a good thing books don't have rights.

Yet.

Five Favorite Reads of 2013

I've not done too shabby of a job reading this year, even with a demanding little person to care for and, whenever possible, read in front of. Ironically enough, I also have my daughter to thank for some of the gems I've read this year, and my mom's group book club whose members believe as heartily as I do that reading > housekeeping. Julianna Baggott's Pure was weird and thrilling and unexpectedly brilliant. I remember her name bandied about when I was in graduate school, so I hardly expected to love a speculative novel from her (not because she's not awesome, but because my graduate school experience was not what I would call genre-fiction friendly). But I totally did. If you like your post-apocalyptic futures a little, okay, a lot on the creepy side, your heroines complex and vulnerable, read this book. You will not be disappointed.

I don't need to tell you why Veronica Roth's Divergent was amazing, because you've probably read it already. I don't know why I didn't read it sooner and wish I had, especially since the reaction I've gathered from the internet in regards to Allegiant has scared me off of continuing the series (for now). Also, I have so many feels, none of them good, about the upcoming film adaptation.

Alif the Unseen was hands-down the most imaginative book I read all year, possibly in years, a novel so rich in imagination I was left wanting for fanfiction at the end. But really good, depthy fanfiction full of capricious djinn. The characters are dynamic and a few of them unexpectedly endearing, and Wilson's hackers look nothing like this. Thank goodness. (I do love Jonny Lee Miller and Fisher Stevens, though; have you heard Fisher Stevens read Christopher Moore? Fantastic.)

You may want to throw Eli Brown's Cinnamon and Gunpowder against the wall when you get to the end, but don't let that stop you from devouring it anyway. Because with pirates and food porn what else, really, can you do? It's probably the most literary of these, but only in the best of ways. Except for that damned ending.

While the rest of these really aren't in any sort of order, my favorite novel of the year is the one I finished most recently, and literally lost days of my life daydreaming over once I had done. Yangsze Choo's The Ghost Bride was likened in a couple of reviews to a grown-up version of Spirited Away, and it's so, so true (though I've always immensely enjoyed Spirited Away as a grown-up, and I think the themes are timeless). The world of the dead was more vivid and compelling than the narrator's reality, the romance surprising, and the unexpected humor! I just can't even get into all of the things that I loved without giving some of the best bits away. Just read it.

And an honorable mention because I was so pleased with this little gem and would not have picked it up were it not for the fact that it's from my publisher, but Winona Kent's Persistence of Memory is a really delightful little romp into Regency England. Accidental time travel and intrigue and romance? Yes, please. I only wish the cover did it better justice. Get a girl and a clock and a frock on there, already.

Have Yourself a Bookish Little Christmas

Free stories on Christmas? Yes, please. While the only book I've had the opportunity to cuddle up with today features more talking animals than I care for, for you I have something completely different. My distrust of talking animals is another blog alltogether. The Two Sisters is an itty bitty companion piece to The Hidden Icon, and it is, I hope, a treat for folks who've already read the novel and those who haven't yet. It's relatively spoiler-free - if you've read the back cover you're safe, seriously - and offers a vignette-like introduction to two of the novel's main characters. Step (just a little) outside the narrative of The Hidden Icon for a story within a story, a tale of sisters in spirit and flesh, of haunts and unexpected sacrifices.

I wasted I don't want to tell you how much time formatting it for the Kindle, only to find I can't offer it for free in that format, so, I've only got a .pdf for you. You can download it here. The .pdf also includes the first two chapters of The Hidden Icon because, as my most excellent publisher recommended, why not? If you spend half as much time salivating over the cover as I did - Mara Stokke does absolutely beautiful work - and maybe half as much time over again reading, I'll consider this venture a win.

Enjoy and happiest of holidays!

I Love (Fictional) People

Of all the times to come to a realization about one’s own reading and writing preferences, today it was a Facebook meme that just stumbled me.

You know the one going around, about the nine books you’ve read that’ve just stuck with you for whatever reason. They’re not necessarily books you’d recommend for the Pulitzer or the Nebula or the Newberry, but they might be. Mostly they’re the stories that work their way into your bloodstream and your muscles and your bones. No matter how many Great Works of Literature you’ve read, these books are the books that really flipped your switch, as my pal Patrick Donovan would say.

In thinking on my nine, I recalled a book my best friend and I each acquired at a school book fair. (How those were the greatest thing in the universe, next perhaps to the school days where we got to wear our pajamas and read in the library all day, is another blog post.) The book was Sherryl Jordan’s Winter of Fire. It consumed us. We read it multiple times that year and the year after, and at least once a year every year until we’d graduated high school, I’d wager. Now I’m wondering how it is that twelve, thirteen, fourteen years have gone by and I haven’t read it again, and how in thinking on what it was I loved so much about it, I’m realizing something about the other books I’ve chosen to love, the sorts of books I’ve chosen to write.

Despite being a science fiction/fantasy novel, Winter of Fire was character-driven. The protagonists’ feelings, her relationships with the other characters in the novel, these are the things that I remember. The scenes that are most vivid in my mind are the quiet, contemplative ones, where Jordan isn’t exploring the curious world she’s created but instead the curiouser world of the human heart.

I love unicorns and magic and the surreal, spectacular realms created by many a beloved speculative fiction writer, but what really keeps me in these worlds are the people who populate them. This is why I struggled with The Lord of the Rings and can’t read most books with overtly complicated space travel mechanisms. Unless you’re Mrs. Whatsit I probably don’t care as much about how you get from point A to point B in your starship as I do about the crew, the captain, the conflict. I want the thrill of familiar emotions in an unfamiliar environment. I want those places to be believable and rich, mind, but they’re not the whole of why I’m reading.

What about you?

Coffee and Books: BFFs

A few weeks ago I thought of the best New Year's resolution ever, and also one I am actually like to follow through on. Don't ask me how my year of not complaining about insignificant things went, because the answer is badly. And it was also more like two weeks instead of twelve months. But it seems silly to wait for 2014 to start doing something that makes so much sense to me now, so, I'm not going to.

I was privy to a writer's rant a few weeks ago over the cost of eBooks, and while I certainly felt for the fella, I've also benefited tremendously as a reader from having access to such a bounty of fiction at such a low cost. I've purchased books I might never have read otherwise because they were a buck or two instead of twenty, and gone on to rave over those books and recommend them to friends (when they've been good). Most of my life I've only ever bought books for class, or after checking them out from the library enough times that I've paid for the book already in late fines. A book is an investment, something I'm going to be adding to a carefully curated library, and not something I've ever considered buying on a whim.

Until I got my Kindle.

And now I can read so much more, occupy so many more worlds, and frankly, it's dirt cheap. Criminally so. Do I think this is a bad thing? Sometimes. But the sheer amount of published material available to the contemporary reader is staggering. Finding something you can really connect with is even more of a challenge. It only makes sense that with greater supply, there is diminished demand. I've enjoyed taking advantage of a system that allows me to take a risk on an unknown author, or follow up on a recommendation from a friend before I have the chance to forget about it.

So here's where the resolution comes in. There's often the joke that a cup of coffee costs more than an eBook. And given my complete lack of hesitation in dropping four bucks on the good stuff (a friend has accused me of rubbing ground coffee on my gums; I really do have a problem), I'm going to promise myself that every time I do I'll commit to buying a book, too. I'm not in the habit of issuing challenges, but I feel like this is a good one. So consider yourself challenged to do the same. Wouldn't you rather be reading when you're drinking liquid creativity, anyway?

This week it was an iced dark roast and Winona Kent's Persistence of Memory. What'll yours be?