Susan Cushing

@sdcushing.bsky.social

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#EastCoastKin Arts Collective member #BlueBrew Coffeehouse Host, founder #BlueBrewBooks Host, founder Relentless arts and photography advocate. Eclectic and inveterate sharer. Retired arts administrator. Former dancer. Bookish. 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ LGBTQIA+ friendly

Portrait painted by Jane Mulvaney of LokitheKat
Moo is a novel about an imaginary university in America’s Midwest. It’s also about a lovely but ever-becoming-much-larger hog named Earl, who is being raised in the finest of laboratory conditions to achieve his maximum hog-weight. Earl serves as a metaphor for the ever-expanding university itself, and does so well. Smiley has a wonderful time trotting through the many layers of academia, student life, and the fundraising mechanisms that allow for the university’s expansion. It’s an easy read albeit somewhat dated. Still, Smiley’s dexterity with the literary form is evident and must be celebrated. I’ve not finished the book so I can’t give it a rating yet, but I think it’s safe to say that it will not go down as one of my all-time favorites as her novel “A Thousand Acres” did. Perhaps I’m just not that good with satire. It has failed me before, so we’ll see. 😉
I love this book. I began reading “Orwell’s Roses” because it was highly recommended in David George Haskell’s new book, “How Flowers Made Our World” and also discussed here briefly in BlueBrewBooks with Trina Carter. I was in search of Solnit’s writing about Columbia’s industry supplying roses to the United States. I continued because of the sheer delight of reading her essays, and then because of my increasing fascination with the similarities between Orwell and Solnit as they were committed to the wonders of nature and good writing. From there, as NPR notes in their review of the book, “‘clarity, precision, accuracy, honesty and truthfulness are values to him, and pleasures,’ (Solnit) writes about Orwell. But she might as well have been describing her own, or this book’s aesthetic values and pleasures as well.” So far, I’m pretty blown away. I’ve been reading the seven sections in any order according to my whim, and it has worked well for me. I’m about halfway through, and I’ve already touched on trees, roses, lilies, the writing of “1984”, and Orwell’s life in the Spanish Civil War and the London Blitz. It all circles round, again and again, to Orwell’s roses. I’m there for it.
Tiny Loki chasing a string.
Bright orange monarch butterfly is surrounded by the purple of a butterfly bush and a rust red plank on our deck.
Swallowtail butterfly on a Buddleja, the plant commonly known as the “Butterfly Bush”
A fun diversion for me. This book is a fantasy of an “academic” novel, complete with footnotes! A curmudgeonly professor is ostensibly writing notes in a journal for her planned book, but the result is simply wonderful storytelling. As you’ll see on the cover, this book was one of the New York Times’ Notable Books of the Year for 2023. A great book to put on your list for when you want a break, but are still willing to be caught up in another world. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and thank the several others here in BlueBrewBooks who recommended it.
I was married once, in my twenties, for less than seven years. Less time than I have spent in most relationships since. Yet there is still an entire drawer full of photographs from that life in my home. As I look back at this picture, I am reminded of what went wrong. We were supposed to be the perfect couple, right? I guess many people think that when they begin. Supportive family. Laughed a lot. Fun at parties. Shared values. He was an aspiring journalist who played in a rock band. I was an aspiring dancer and arts administrator. Just one thing ruined my fairytale. I was desperate to have a baby. He was - not so much. We had plans to move to NYC, and he had landed a job offer there. He felt that babies were not compatible. Not just then. It felt to me like - not ever. We moved to New York. The glue of the idea of family had fallen apart. Shortly thereafter, I suggested two apartments. I launched myself into graduate school and then into my career and we divorced. Now, finding this picture, I remember how lost and conflicted I felt back then. I never had children, and for the most part, I don’t regret it. I had a great career, surpassed my own goals, walked proud. And once upon a time, I held a baby.
•Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett •Moo by Jane Smiley •The Testaments by Margaret Atwood •Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit •The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan •The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh •The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green •Underland by Robert Macfarlane
I am a big fan of David Haskell, and was able to see his Zoom release of this book earlier this week. That reading should be up on YouTube very soon. Apparently, 90% of all plant species on the planet are flowering plants, so Haskell does not underestimate the fact that we are living on a floral planet. Flowers appeared about 200 million years ago, and “by 100 million years they were the foundation of most habitats on land.” Quite simply, we humans would not be here without them. In chapters as diverse as the Magnolia, Goatsbeard, the Orchid, Grass, Seagrass, Rose, Tea, and Pansy, Haskell dives into such subjects as plant sexuality and motherhood, fragrance and color, evolution and roles in gardens, agriculture, perfume and ceremony. The book so far is a fascinating and engaging read. It even includes a segment at the back on Flower Play, inviting the reader to engage directly with flowers to discover more about them. The illustrations are beautiful, but limited to chapter breaks. I wanted more. I’ve read about half the book so far, and I’d definitely recommend it.
If you’re even remotely interested in fungi, lichens, the mycorrhizal networks among trees and other plants, the ‘WoodWideWeb’ or even psychedelic psilocybin mushrooms, here’s a brilliant and very readable book for you. I loved the writing itself, which is wonderful and lyrical, and have become somewhat devoted to its amazing author. (Among other things, Sheldrake fed his manuscript to the pleurotus fungus with the goal of producing edible oyster mushrooms, making his book into an actual edible object.) I hope you’ll enjoy this book. It’s simply dazzling. There’s now an illustrated version as well, though I don’t know how my little book could have been any better. It’s peppered with lovely illustrations, has color plates, extensive notes, and a great index.
Lily King is, as Janet suggested, “good, fun, and easy to read, so she’s a good cleanser between more complicated writing…”. In ‘Writers & Lovers’ the main character’s determination to finish writing her novel as she waits tables and tries on a couple relationships is, as the cover indicates, “heartfelt”. 4 out of 5 ⭐️ for me, as it was for Janet. ‘Water Moon’ is an amazing fantasy novel set initially in a Japanese pawnshop that collects peoples’ regrets. When a physicist happens upon an apparent ransacking of the shop, things propel him into a world far beyond his imagination, with the proprietress of the shop co-navigating the mystery. It is, so far, a mind bending story that seems destined to be a future film. I’m guessing I’ll finish this book (I’m close!) at 4 out of 5 ⭐️ as well.
As I write this on Saturday night, I have just finished this book, and I am pretty blown away. I now admit I should not have read this in a week. I should have read it as more of a meditation. It contains many extraordinary passages I should have lingered over much longer. But it had been highly recommended by several good friends, and I was curious, so I charged through. I must admit it wasn’t the book for me, though it is a nearly flawless work. This is a book that starts out with a missing cat and goes on to plumb the darkest depths of the Japanese-Russian conflicts of WWII. It dances through the highs and lows of a marriage, and up and down the alleys of realities. I appreciated the quality of the writing, but as with the one other Murakami book I’d read (“Norwegian Wood”), I found it all to be a bit removed from feeling and passion. I am prepared to believe that is my own culture gap with the author’s style. “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” has become a classic in literature. I’ll be looking at it more over this next week as I decompress from this reading. 4 ⭐️ ©️ 1997 607 p.
I was in my early 30’s, traveling with my sister and mother, just finished with a divorce and a job in New York. I was ready, clearly, for something new. I saw him, in passing at the hotel, and he gave a smile. He was so dark, with a perfect gap between his front teeth. As I boarded a craft to shuttle me into town, he went to a roof to paint, a handyman, I now realized. We waved through the distance. It would be months before I would discover that he was not allowed to mix with the guests. Yet by that night we were together in every spare moment - on the beaches, in the bars, at restaurants, in the discotheques. Three months later, I packed my belongings in the states and moved to Mykonos. I took my books and my dog and got a small room for the winter. Did he speak English? Not exactly, but we stumbled through. Time passed, and we learned each others’ languages. We took endless walks with my dog Homer on the beach, where he tossed spiky sea urchin shells in the air. We went to the few restaurants that were open in winter, watched Greeks dance in their tradition. Listener, it was not to be. By the time I got my orientation there, I was already sick with an infection. The doctor asked me out on a date as he passed me my medications. He asked me for my address in New York. I suddenly understood why I was the only non-islander I could find that winter. I was a target. When Grigoris asked me to walk a few steps behind him when with his friends, I was startled. We fought, argued not for long, and I packed my bags back to Athens. He followed me, pleaded. But he would not give up his ways. There is no happy ending here. As quickly as it had begun, it was over. I was heartbroken, enraged, alone, and it was entirely my fault for being so shortsighted about the culture shock I would experience. I never returned to Mykonos, a place that will always be a spiky creature, full of sharp, spiny lessons for me. I will always remember it fondly and with reverence.
Apologies for having spent three weeks here focused on The Luminaries, but for me, it was worth every minute I spent. A novel about a New Zealand gold rush in the late 19th century, and written in the Victorian style of that period, it is enormously clever. Astrological charts run throughout (though I admit they can be skipped without too much damage). Each section runs half the number of words of the previous section. The Luminaries revolves around characters as diverse as a prostitute, a tycoon, a Māori man, a shipmaster, a banker, a chemist, an opium den-keeper, a goldsmith, a chaplain, a newspaperman, and a widow. As they, and others, tell their tales, bits and pieces of a story emerge, congeal, and surprise. Numerous contracts and letters also emerge and run their way throughout. If you’ve read this far, you’ll probably want to devote some of your time to this extraordinary accomplishment. I loved how things wove together, and how many things fell apart. And I will no doubt read it again. 830 p. ©️ 2013 4.5 ⭐️ out of 5
Copyright ©️ ToriStevens.art
Though I tried, I did not fall in love with The Correspondent, as so many of my dearly respected friends have done. I found the main character to be very unlikable, and though I whizzed through the books within great curiosity, I never came around to her. I further found the writing styles used to be unnecessarily stilted and awkward. Perhaps I saw too much of myself reflected in her, as we have a great many similar characteristics. I have to state again that this brief report goes very much against the feelings of almost all other readers. I urge you to try the book yourself and draw your own conclusions. Two ⭐️ ©️ 2025 281 p. The Luminaries, by contrast, has quickly swept me into its story about the New Zealand Gold Rush. Its dense, nineteenth century-style writing is fascinating. Eleanor Catton won the Booker Prize for this, and I can already see why. I’ll let you know more next week. ©️ 2013 830 p.
Laser cut wooden ornament decorates a vintage white holiday tree
©️ ToriStevens.art
©️ ToriStevens.art
©️ ToriStevens.art
The first two volumes of this septology deal with human relationships, with solitude and estrangement. They deal with repetition and monotony with an attractive quirkiness. They deal with the vessel that is time and space. I found them to be flabbergasting and astonishing. I will read the third, the latest to be translated into English, with curiosity and a great deal of expectation. (A fourth volume comes out in English in April.) Volume I 176 p. 4 ⭐️ from me Volume II 192 p. 3 ⭐️
Here we stand, with our fifteen year difference. Me, totally, awkward in bell bottoms, cat eye glasses, and of course, a floral parka. At this age, I would have just started dancing. She appears confident as always, just visiting from her master’s degree studies in Hawaii. That fifteen year gap made me, in some ways, an only child. And although I never admitted it until she passed, it made her sort of a mother figure for me. She would be the one who walked me through that first horrifying flow of blood. Who explained things to me I could never ask my mother. It wasn’t obvious until I graduated from college, married, and my sister began to settle into her position at the World Bank, just how much of an influence she would be. I moved to NYC for a time, and when my marriage failed there, it was to my sister’s basement apartment in DC that I flew. After being mugged in New York, she was my safe haven. She then pointed me to a place there that presented dance, where I would soon become an interim executive director. It was Gloria (what a perfect name, right?) who first saw that opportunity, not me. When I moved to California with a new love and a new job, we became distant for a time, weekly calls becoming increasingly sporadic. But when I got sick and had to we leave work, it was Gloria who paid off my Miata and put me up for a year in her summer house on the Chesapeake Bay. (You’d think from earlier stories I’ve written here, I had a pretty independent life. I thought so too.) You might remember from an earlier story posted here a rug hooking of two ballerinas playing with tiny mice. That was Gloria too. When my sister died from metastatic breast cancer at 63, I thought surely my life was over as well. But she left me a legacy. I cannot say I used it wisely, and I cannot say I have ever fully recovered. But I am still here. I am still her sister. I am still grateful. And we are still making angels in the snow.
‘The Rarest Fruit’ is an elegant novel that reads almost like a biography. Its subject, Edmond Albius, was a slave who “revolutionized the vanilla industry with his method for hand-pollinating orchids” (from inside cover). By turns expectant and extraordinary, then destitute and melancholy, I found it fascinating and heartbreaking. Passages dealing with post-abolition struggles were perhaps predictably hard to bear and very insightful, while sections devoted to the history of vanilla were simply delightful. 4 ⭐️ from me ©️ 2023, English translation ©️ 2025 189 pages ‘Anima Rising’ is a humorous, irreverent novel in which Klimt, Freud, and Jung meet the bride of Frankenstein in early 20th century Vienna. I read it based on that character listing and enjoyed it because of them (if occasionally rolling my eyes at the humor). Wonderful plot. I’ve already ordered another of his books set in Paris around a yet another “genius cluster” at the end of the 19th century called ‘Sacré Bleu’. 4 ⭐️ ©️ 2025 384 pages
©️ ToriStevens.art “stop and smell the roses”
©️ ToriStevens.art, “let your magic surface”
Superbly written and deftly plotted, The Blind Assassin is a “sweeping saga”, much of which is laid out right in the first two defining pages. It moves between a story of two sisters, and a wild novel written by one of them with dark, seamy landscapes and a good dose of science fiction. I liked the book’s subtle commentary on the various roles of women in society over time, but the plot did not surprise me as much as I anticipated. Still, I definitely recommend it to any Atwood fans who may have missed it, and I’m sure I’ll read it again. ###
“Still Life” - beautiful, joyful. A book for art lovers and those who love historical fiction built around characters. Idiosyncratic but lovely prose. Revolves loosely around the story of those who rescued art from the Nazis. ©️ 2021 450 pages, 5 ⭐️ “Atlantis Travelers” - complex, yet fun and engaging sci-fi storytelling. Reads like a thriller and simultaneously includes great world-building. I particularly loved the arts worlds humming along within the plot. Very entertaining. ©️ 2025 347 pages, 5 ⭐️
Black cat face with yellowish-green eyes and white whiskers, focused on camera from a very short distance.
Photograph of Oracle card by ToriStevens.art , let intuition guide
Oracle card reads Trust Yourself ©️ ToriStevens.art
“House Of Day, House Of Night” was a difficult book for me. It is an agglomeration of stories revolving around a remote Polish Village. [I read “Drive Your Plough Over The Bones Of The Dead” by the same author a couple years ago and loved it. (Highly recommended!) A quirky mystery, it captured my imagination. It’s one of my top ten books of the past years. 5 ⭐️ ] “House Of Day, House of Night” was tougher. The stories are partially folktale, part religious fantasy, part small town life. If this sounds like your cup of tea, by all means, dig in. 3.5 out of 5 ⭐️ (It is worth noting that Tokarczuk is a Nobel Prize Winner, and both books carry her gentle power.) — Greatly anticipated, “The True, True Story Of Raja The Gullible (and His Mother)” is the tale of a charming homosexual teacher in Lebanon and his experiences in the war-torn country. I found some of his adventures to be more traumatizing than I had expected, and his relationship with his Mother to be initially grating. This National Book Award winner rallies as it develops, and is well worth the read. 4 out of 5 ⭐️
• Cutting For Stone is an epic, compelling, fictional story. It is primarily about developing surgeons in Ethiopia in the second half of the 20th century. I was a bit overwhelmed by the anatomical and medical detail, but that is in part its point. The story held together beautifully from beginning to end. I’d rate it 4 out of 5 stars. (On a personal note, the story revolved around two identical twins. I dated an identical twin in college. The story had some appropriately squirmy moments for me. 🤦🏼‍♀️ ) • Flesh is also fiction, the story of one man’s rise from a childhood in Hungary through the trajectory of his life to riches in an “ever globalizing Europe”. Its cadence is spare to the point of bare; another quick read Booker Award 🥇 winner. I’d skip this, but I would rate it 3 out of 5 stars. It’s not a book you’ll quickly forget, though it can easily be read in a day. •The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and his Mother) is supposed to be charming. We’ll see. It did win the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the National Book Award. (50 pages in, it has yet to win me over…. 🤷🏼‍♀️ ) P.S. I’m looking for uplifting literature these days! Please let me know what you find out there! 🤩
An ornament with a hippopotamus head sits on an unfinished bookcase. She has the torso, arms, and legs of a lady and wears a red and black sequined dress with crinoline underneath it - and on the back of her silly head.
The Life Impossible was a bit of a stretch, but a fun, easy read. A modern tale about life-enhancing waters and their effect on the people they attract and environments they impact. I rated it 3 out of 5 stars. The Time Traveler’s Wife was just that: an enjoyable time- traveling story with the twist of having a solid, life-long love story as plot. I was way behind at picking this delightful book up - I rated it 5 out of 5!stars. A must read!
Favorite Books for 2025 included: •There Are Rivers In The Sky by Elif Shafak •Amsterdam by Ian McEwan •10 Minutes 42 Seconds In This Strange World by Elif Shafak •Still Life by Sarah Winman •Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn •Atlantis Travelers by Bonnie Books •Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr •Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel •The Ministry Of Time by Kaliane Bradley •The MaddAddam Series by Margaret Atwood •What We Can Know by Ian McEwan •Dancer by Colum McCann
Photo is of two ceramic ornaments, a boy and a girl, with bright red kissy mouths - both completely round and covered in pink, green, and gold glitter and ribbons. The girl has her hands at her heart, while the boy’s arms are outstretched for an embrace. Both have their eyes closed tightly.
A handmade angel tops a Christmas tree. It has white wings, and a white costume dotted with pine trees. Image is lit from behind and underneath with small white Christmas tree lights. The very vintage tree under it is also white.