Christine Kelley

Woof. Things have been hectic around here. At The Statesman we've been trying new things, like my genealogy story and having a foreign correspondent in Manchester. Newspapers are a wild career path. The Moria pieces are coming alone. I'll get you another one this week. Soon enough Nowhere and Back A

Really need to start setting a reminder for these on my phone. In my defense, this is late because I'm working on two intensive stories for my internship, have had to scramble to find emergency housing, and am also working on the VALIS essay, which I will complete as soon as I find time. Recent read

Sorry for running late. There's been some difficult personal stuff going on behind the scenes, and reporting has kept me busy. Genealogy research has been productive. This has been my summer project, and I've cracked some decades-long mysteries that you may never hear about. Currently I'm entrenched

Today's not important, is it? Good, good. Don't have as much to go through this week because I've been quite busy. In terms of reading, I've been going through Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven, which rocks, and W. E. B. DuBois' biography of John Brown, which slaps just as hard. You don't need

I spent the past week in my home state of Virginia. Incredibly healing experience; I'm a country girl at heart, and I relished showing my friends Southern dishes and pointing out small Virginia towns that I'd visited once. We spent a day in Charlottesville. The city's lovely when you've kicked out a

Told you I could still write! We've gotten two Mirkwood pieces out! And we have another one about Dol Guldur coming on Friday! Then we have only two more Mirkwood essays (yes, there are five. Writing is complicated). Sometime in the interim I'll be working on a commissioned VALIS essay, and possibly

At last, a productive week. Nowhere and Back Again last week, Human Bondage yesterday, and a piece on Rhosgobel and Dol Guldur later this week. Turns out not second-guessing myself is good for writing. So enjoy the next three Mirkwood pieces this month. I've also been doing some reading during my st

CW: racism, mass shootings, SA, domestic violence Piece on the Woodland Realm should be up by tomorrow at the latest. I've had a busy week between starting my reporting internship and attending a friend's PhD defense, so no books to talk about this week. Let's jump right into the headlines: After th

Sorry for the delay this week. Yesterday involved a lot of writing. The first Mirkwood piece nearly has a complete draft, and I had to write some pitches for my internship. I expect to finish the Mirkwood draft today. When editing is done, you'll get the complete piece. Things have been exhausting l

Finals are over. Y'all have my full attention once again. Or at least most of it, as I'm taking a reporting internship with Shades of Long Island, a local outlet that covers minorities and young people in Nassau and Suffolk Counties. But I can finally get back to blogging everyday, including my five

Finals are trampling me like an oliphaunt that's looked into a palantír just a little bit too long. I haven't had time to read much news, but here's what I've caught lately. ProPublica says that Intuit is going to pay TurboTax users millions of dollars it finagled from them. The Democrats' only anti

Woof. Long overdue for an update. I haven't forgotten the Patreon or Nowhere and Back Again. In fact, the Mirkwood piece is shaping up better than previous iterations. Over the summer, I'll write a lot more. Classes, as well as becoming Opinions Editor for The Stony Brook Statesman, have kept me bus

Let's make this a weekly Monday feature. Seems like a good way to do it. Last week I visited family and friends in Connecticut and Rhode Island, a much-needed reprieve from months of college. As a result I didn't read much news or journalism, and mostly focused on leisure reading. A friend gave me a

Trying to turn these reading diaries into a more general review of current writing and reading. I'd like to make these biweekly (or even weekly), but February made that impossible. It's been a bad month both personally and globally. I would have liked to enjoy turning 23, but some years your birth m

Will try to cover articles and essays as well as books in these from now on. It'll help to get other people's work out there and let me keep track of what I've been reading. I'm also going to write these posts more like streams of consciousness rather than straight-up lists. That way you have someth

Still slowly working through Cryptonomicon and Black Water Sister. Loving both of them. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (C. L. R. James) - Fucking hell. Read this if you haven't already. If you have read it, read it again. It's one of the most important books

Still working through Cryptonomicon and the Summers Nixon biog. Started some other things too. Brought to Light (Alan Moore & Bill Sienkiewicz) - Forgot to include this in the last entry. This is great stuff: garish, ugly, and sprawling like the Agency it depicts. The most disturbing part is that I

Haven't read too many books lately. I'm still working through Cryptonomicon (260 pp in!), which I've come to enjoy the hell out of. Only one new entry here though. The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon (Anthony Summers w/ Robyn Swann) - I've been fascinated by Nixon since I was a

Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump (Spencer Ackerman) - Strong recap of the Forever War, although by Ackerman's own admission it's too soon to get a complete portrait of Trump's virulence. Ties together the nativism, natsec abuses, and political and cultural co

A popular tradition returns. Pattern Recognition (William Gibson) - Loving the hell out of this one. Gibson finds himself living in the world he created and commits to its unreality. A masterpiece of corporate espionage that treats the corporate world as an uncanny horror to rival any intelligence a