Published in October 2024

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Here’s a roundup of my articles that published in October 2024. I hope you find something to enjoy.

ParentMap

Exceptional Experiences for Families at Seattle-Area Art Museums

24 Fantastic Seattle-Area Performances to See Before 2024 Ends

The Benefits of Youth Sports Last Through the Years

A K-8 Learning Environment Can Help Students Thrive

Understanding Pediatric Environmental Allergies

Reprints

Sleepover Guidelines That All Parents Should Know

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Seattle Times

50 years on, Seattle Children’s Theatre offers new shows, more accessibility

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Western Washington Medical Group

Healthy Sources of Protein

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Reading Down a Crooked Road

I only finished 5 books in October, but two of them were absolute doorstoppers, or would have been if I read them in print instead of on Kindle. The first one, spilling over from September, was An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, which was one of the Atlantic’s picks for Great American Novel but I had never heard of it before. Published in the same year as The Great Gatsby (1925), it was ultimately telling the same story. Which is to say it was about the materialistic American Dream and how the pursuit of it isn’t likely to result in happiness. But while Gatsby epitomized the tight, minimalist modern writing style that emerged in the 1920s, Dreiser’s book was a hybrid of modern ideas and traditional writing styles. It was modern in the sense that it spoke surprisingly frankly about sex and other taboo topics, and it might have invented the true crime genre. But the writing style is practically Victorian, clocking in at a dense 800 pages upon publication. Although the Kindle version is listed as 364 pages on Goodreads, it took me nearly 40 hours to read even though I grew up on Victorian novels.

The other brick came from yet another recommended reading list with even less context. Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities clocking in at 400+ pages is a nonfiction social science book. I struggle with these books because they use a lot of academic jargon when simple words would do and use simple words in technically specific ways, often without defining their terms for the assumed academic specialist reader. But if you’ve ever thought to yourself, “The revolution was a long time ago,” when you heard people saying, “Decolonize this” or “Decolonize that” this is probably the best book you’re going to find to help you figure out what they’re talking about.

And that’s October in the books.