Wishful Thinking (F/F Contemporary Friends-to-Lovers)

Wishful Thinking
by Yolande Kleinn
F/F, Contemporary, Friends-to-Lovers
[10 Pages / 2,200 Words]


Wishful Thinking is no longer available for individual purchase,
but can be found in the collection:
Hearts Right Here

Kimiko has powerful feelings about leaving her barista job to focus on school. Or maybe she just has powerful feelings for coffee shop owner Nyla Prince. Kimiko has spent years hiding her heart, confident her crush isn't returned. But Nyla isn't her boss anymore, and Kimiko's not sure how to navigate this unfamiliar terrain. Wishful thinking hasn't gotten her anywhere. It's time for a better strategy.

( Excerpt )

 

Three Nonfiction Recs

I've got some Harper Collins titles I'd love to be recommending this month, but until the company finally shows up to the bargaining table and agrees to pay their staff a fair wage... *helpless shrug*

If you want more information on how all of that is going, here are the HarperCollins Union's own links. Check out the available resources, and don't cross the picket line.

Meanwhile, here are some excellent books I read recently, all of them from other publishers:

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Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert).

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

Why you should read it: I knew going in that I was going to love this book. It came too highly recommended to go any other way, from several unrelated sources, ALL OF WHOM I trust in their judgment. And even so the writing on these pages blew me out of the water. There is so much heart, and so much wisdom, and so much joy and curiosity and sadness and truth here. I'm going to go buy six copies, because I keep thinking of people who need to read it. Absolutely beautiful.

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Beaten Down, Worked Up by Steven Greenhouse

We live in an era of soaring corporate profits and anemic wage gains, one in which low-paid jobs and blighted blue-collar communities have become a common feature of our nation’s landscape. Behind these trends lies a little-discussed problem: the decades-long decline in worker power. 

Award-winning journalist and author Steven Greenhouse guides us through the key episodes and trends in history that are essential to understanding some of our nation’s most pressing problems, including increased income inequality, declining social mobility, and the concentration of political power in the hands of the wealthy few. He exposes the modern labor landscape with the stories of dozens of American workers, from GM employees to Uber drivers to underpaid schoolteachers. Their fight to take power back is crucial for America’s future, and Greenhouse proposes concrete, feasible ways in which workers’ collective power can be—and is being—rekindled and reimagined in the twenty-first century.

Beaten Down, Worked Up is a stirring and essential look at labor in America, poised as it is between the tumultuous struggles of the past and the vital, hopeful struggles ahead.

Why you should read it: I'm not sure I can articulate all the ways in which this book is excellent. It's a really good resource if you want to learn the history of unions without drowning in more information than the brain can absorb at once. It's got a broad enough overview to paint a really clear picture, but goes into greater detail sometimes, with some pretty clear guides to how you can research elsewhere if you need to dig deeper. The situations spelled out in the book made me predictably very angry, but the message is all about forward momentum. A powerful read.

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Death of the Artist by William Deresiewicz

There are two stories you hear about earning a living as an artist in the digital age. One comes from Silicon Valley. There’s never been a better time to be an artist, it goes. If you’ve got a laptop, you’ve got a recording studio. If you’ve got an iPhone, you’ve got a movie camera. And if production is cheap, distribution is free: it’s called the Internet. Everyone’s an artist; just tap your creativity and put your stuff out there.

The other comes from artists themselves. Sure, it goes, you can put your stuff out there, but who’s going to pay you for it?

Everyone is not an artist. Making art takes years of dedication, and that requires a means of support. If things don’t change, a lot of art will cease to be sustainable.

So which account is true? Since people are still making a living as artists today, how are they managing to do it? William Deresiewicz, a leading critic of the arts and of contemporary culture, set out to answer those questions. Based on interviews with artists of all kinds, The Death of the Artist argues that we are in the midst of an epochal transformation. If artists were artisans in the Renaissance, bohemians in the nineteenth century, and professionals in the twentieth, a new paradigm is emerging in the digital age, one that is changing our fundamental ideas about the nature of art and the role of the artist in society.

Why you should read it: There are some small spots along the way in this book that I disagree or take a bit of umbrage with, but it's an excellent and eye-opening resource. The author did an incredible amount of research into damn near every niche of creative livelihood, and how those markets are constantly changing. There weren't any major surprises in the section about writing/publishing if you're already immersed in that world, but it was fascinating to see stacked alongside so many other creative industries I know nothing about. The outlook at the end of the book is somehow both galvanizing and bleak, since it really distills down a lot of what is fundamentally broken in both the wider economy and the arts themselves. Well written and powerfully informative, definitely worth a read.