Hello frens, what a whirlwind these past few weeks have been. I'm a bit all over the place but that's okay.

Here I am, yapping again while the next blog entry is slowly getting ready in the oven and all dressed up for publication. To be fair, I’m genuinely excited about it, so I can’t really hide it.

You’ll get it soon in your inbox if you subscribe to my blog, don’t worry, I only send emails when I’ve actually published something. Here, on the other hand, I tend to share little thoughts and updates that don’t always make it into the blog itself. I find that a lot easier, since you can read them whenever you want without ending up buried in a pile of emails you’ll “read later” and never do. It’s exhausting, isn’t it?

So yes, hopefully you’ll peek in here from time to time and catch up on the little things I usually don’t include in my blog entries.

Last month I wrote about the books I read during winter, and in the meantime I’ve been reading a few more things I wanted to share.

I finally finished the Practical Magic series: The Rules of Magic, Magic Lessons, and The Book of Magic. They were so whimsical, and of course, so magical. Alice Hoffman says you can read them either in publication order or in chronological order, and I chose publication order, which I honestly don’t regret, because I love the way the story moves back and forth, even within the same book.

The Rules of Magic follows three siblings who are given a very peculiar set of rules to live by, and it slowly makes you ask the same question they do: why? As they grow up, they come to terms with the fact that they are not like everyone else, and maybe they were never meant to be. The book moves through the 1950s and 1960s and so forth in the United States, and I was completely emotionally invested the whole time: squinting, suffering, chuckling, and sighing all the way through.

Then comes Magic Lessons, and just when I thought Hoffman couldn’t hit quite as hard again, she does. It’s a story about the Owens family, their history, their losses, their loves, and the many ways people learn to survive being themselves in a world that doesn’t always welcome difference. There’s magic in it, of course, but what stayed with me most was the very human side of the story.

And then The Book of Magic, the final jewel in the crown. It ties everything together in such a satisfying way, following three generations of witches as they try to navigate their true selves in a world that keeps making authenticity harder and harder to hold onto. I really enjoyed it, even if I found the pacing a little slower at times.

It seems they'll be releasing a Practical Magic 2 movie. I didn't even know there was another one. Will you watch it? 

I also reread Fahrenheit 451. The first and only time I had read it before, I was a teenager who thought it was terribly sleek to say that it was some kind of dystopia we were slowly approaching. Sadly, my younger self was not completely wrong, and this time it hit me much harder. It’s a classic, but wow, it made me feel bleak.

That’s why, between heavier reads, I picked up Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture by Wouter J. Hanegraaff. As you probably know, Hanegraaff is one of those academics whose work has shown up in some of my blog entries before, from Gnosticism to Baphomet. I also really recommend Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed and the Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism, which he co-edited.

In this book, he explores how esoteric and occult knowledge has often been rejected, dismissed, or excluded from academic and cultural spaces, which I find endlessly interesting. If you want a complementary discussion, there’s also a conversation with Dr. Angela Puca that I found worth listening to.

And well, once the blog entry is published, you’ll see the other books I’ve had on rotation over the past few weeks.

So stay tuned, my frens. Take care of yourselves, read a little something,  maybe my blog, maybe a book of your choice, and if you’d like, recommend me some books to look into.

See you soon.

In the meantime, here’s a little red locust I painted, because they are so intricately beautiful.