Isla McKetta, MFA, Author at A Geography of Reading

5 Books to Change Your Career (and Life)

October 19, 2026 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

The job market is… a lot right now. It has been for at least a couple of years and if the latest round of layoffs has you feeling like you’re ready for a change you can control, there are five books I recommend you check out. Not every one will be right for every person, but I hope this post can point you in the direction of at least one book that’s right for you right now. Each of these books has helped me on my journey to become a freelance editor.

Get Your Priorities Straight with Your Money or Your Life

Got that “things just don’t feel right” itch but can’t put a name to it? Vicki Robin’s Your Money or Your Life will help you look deep into areas that you might be struggling against your own values. There’s good stuff in here, too, about finding your real salary and secret energy drains. Whether this book leaves you wanting to change your career or not, it will change your relationship with money, which should give you more freedom in the long run.

Favorite quote: “Frugality is the balance we seek.”

Figure Out What You Even Want to Do with Making a Living Without a Job

Once you know you need a change, you can think of Barbara J. Winter as your personal cheerleader in Making a Living Without a Job. She has a million ideas of what you could be doing and a million questions you can ask yourself to find an answer that sparks for you. Some of the information in the edition I read was very dated (as it was published in 1993 and the internet…), but the human stuff endures. You may get tired of the words “self-bosser” and “profit center” but the concepts are concrete and the book is accessible.

Highlights include thinking about your passions and personal assets you may not have considered, a frank look at obstacles you might run into (and how to overcome them), and ideas like the $100 hour for brainstorming and a list of things that keep you thinking creatively.

Rethink Your Definition of Success with Rich Dad, Poor Dad

Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki feels like a bootcamp for challenging you to go deep on your relationship with money. If you’ve always thought you were on the right path, saving and living lean, he has some advice to put the energy into your investing and get you thinking about the true nature of wealth (hint, it’s a lot more fluid than you might guess). The writing is folksy and friendly and the cash flow diagrams are elegant and informative. It’s instructive to see how risk taking and studied intelligence can be antithetical.

Read this if you think you know which direction you want to go and are ready to kick yourself into gear.

Fine Tune Everything with Tiny Experiments

This book by Anne-Laure Le Cunff flipped my lid when I read it shortly after resigning from my corporate job. It was such a relief to have someone champion non-linear and creative thinking (for scientific reasons, even). The approach is very manageable and I think many of us would be a lot more content if we gave ourselves this kind of space to think about what we really want.

This book will help you make incremental and positive changes that are meaningful to you, even if you aren’t rethinking your career. There’s also a newsletter that shares bite-sized versions of these ideas, but the whole book is worth it, I promise (and it’s good to support authors).

Prepare for Creativity with Living and Sustaining a Creative Life

If all your exploration leads you to understand that the only way you can live is by following your creative pursuits, Living and Sustaining a Creative Life by Sharon Louden is filled with essays that will help you understand what you’re really in for. You’ll get a sneak peek at what success really looks like, how non-creative work fits into your plan, and the importance of building a community.

If there’s a book that really helped you on your path to creating the life you want to live, please share. I’m always up to read another book.

One way I’m getting creative about my income streams is through affiliate income. That means if you pick up your copies of Your Money or Your Life, Making a Living Without a Job, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Tiny Experiments, or Living and Sustaining a Creative Life through these links, I’ll get a commission.

Survival in The Incomer, Year of Wonders, and Below

October 14, 2026 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Fall is a time of nestling in and this fall has given me the gift of three different stories, all about survival in the sometimes very small worlds we call home: Louis Paxton’s film The Incomer, Geraldine Brooks’ novel Year of Wonders, and Jesse McKeown’s limited series Below on Netflix. They’re dramatically different—The Incomer focuses on two siblings who have grown up alone on a Scottish island and are now being asked to leave, Year of Wonders tells the story of an English town that closed itself off when it was infected with plague in the 17th century, and Below centers on a small Newfoundland town that’s being tormented by a giant squid—but there’s something to be gleaned from experiencing them together.

The Wrench of Relocation

The first obvious tie between The Incomer and Below is that both are stories of relocations from beloved homes. In The Incomer, Isla (yes, it was both amazing and weird to hear my name called over and over in this movie) and Sandy have been alone on their island since their father died when they were small. Now the council wants them moved off the island so it can be turned into a bird sanctuary, so Daniel (the brilliant Domhnall Gleeson) is sent to try and roust them. Below begins with a flashback of the Penney family towing their home across a bay because they have been relocated, and in the present, the remaining family members and their new community are faced with voting whether to accept a second relocation.

Both of these projects feature gorgeous, windswept terrain that looks inhospitable. They are also filled with characters whose quirks have not been worn away by the larger world. I don’t know what lesson to take from this except that most of them love their lives the way they are, hard as they might be.

Isla and Sandy, beautifully played by Gayle Rankin and Grant O’Rourke, are wrapped in a childlike dynamic that is both endearing and sad (though their creativity in making bird costumes is truly wonderful). We’re left to wonder exactly how they learned to subsist on bits of grain, fish, gulls, and whatever else they can scavenge from the island, but you get the sense they could live on there together forever.

In Below, Calvin Penney (played with a deep humanity by Josh Hartnett), was once a fisherman but now struggles to make do by fishing ice for the local distillery. He, too, loves his home and the people around him, and you can see how each member of the community (including Mackenzie Davis as a scientist from away but who is living there) is an important part of the whole of survival.

Community as Survival

Only one family relocates in Year of Wonders, the one with the most means, and as such they don’t take up much of the story. Instead, as with Below, there’s a complex web that arises where people take on new and varied roles in the community as their neighbors die off, because mines still need to be mined, births attended, and graves dug. I was truly captivated by the flexibility with which this was undertaken. They did receive some sustenance from the outside world, but were otherwise alone, and they rose to the challenge. Not that there weren’t awful moments and people who did regrettable things, but that’s what makes for a meaty story anyway. Brooks weaves tastes of the language of the era with careful attention to detail for a truly immersive experience.

In The Incomer, the community of Isla and Sandy is obviously more limited, but they’ve developed specific roles as well, and when Daniel comes, it’s interesting to see where and how they open to his presence (and how they don’t).

The Specter of the Beast

Each of these stories has its own looming darkness, whether the plague, a gigantic cephalopod, or a tyrannical member of the local bureaucracy (there’s also a mythical beast), and I enjoyed seeing how the characters played against these forces. Year of Wonders held a historical weight where characters grasp for human connections to fight the disease. Below is built as a thriller, so there’s more action to trying to understand and survive the squid, but the web of tender relationships is a big part of both. Probably my favorite of the three, The Incomer is filled with a dark and loving humor that plays well against the outrageous antics spurred by the antagonist. I might also love it most because my husband and I stole away one afternoon to watch it in one of the very few local showtimes offered, something we used to do when we were much younger than we are now.

In my own life we’re knuckling down for the winter, trying to harvest what needs to be harvested, finish the outside tasks that need to be done, and getting supplies in for the season. All of that makes it sound like we’re living on an island rather than in suburban Seattle, but I’ve seen this drive to prepare echo across several friend groups. Maybe it’s the election, maybe it’s the economy, but I hope whatever antagonist arises, we and our community will come together to fight the good fight. At least we’ll have stories to sustain us.

If you want to read Year of Wonders pick up a copy from Bookshop.org using that link and I’ll get a commission.

The Serpent’s Longing by Namita Kumari and What Myths Teach Us

October 6, 2026 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

When Dr. Namita Kumari of the University of Delhi wrote to me to ask me to review her novel The Serpent’s Longing, she said, the “novel is rooted in the founding legend of Funan — one of the earliest kingdoms of Southeast Asia, preserved in 3rd-century Chinese chronicles and Cambodian oral tradition,” and I was hooked. I love mythology in any culture, which is part of why, in college, I took every course in non-western art history and architecture that I could. I also had the pleasure of visiting Angkor Wat with my brother in 2005 (or was it 2006? God, I need to get on a plane again), but I knew nothing of the Funan Empire. What I didn’t realize is that I was about to read a gorgeously written love story that would teach me something I still need to learn about grief.

carving of a naga from angkor wat — The only good picture I took of the Naga carvings at the Angkor complex

The Power of Choice in Loving Across Lines

The story begins with Kaundinya, a holy man who’s lived in solitude but who feels drawn out of that solitude to cross the eastern seas. There he meets Soma, a Naga princess. She, as the blade of the kingdom, has been sent to investigate the rumors of this man, but they are immediately drawn to one another. The way I’ve written it could be the beginning of any tawdry romance novel. The way Kumari writes it is lush and incantatory as she uses phrases like “stone that outlasted dynasties” and “a place where growing and dying happened so fast and so close together that they had stopped being opposites” to describe the environment.

Soma’s mother, the queen, advises her that “To love one of them, a human, is to become one,” explaining from experience that she who had been “three shapes before the sun was up” would be giving up her power of shape shifting if she chooses to love Kaundinya. She is afraid of becoming singular, but returns to meet him in the forest again and again.

Kaundinya also has something to lose by loving Soma as the powers he has spent a lifetime perfecting drain from him the closer they get.

“He was tired in a way he had not been in years. Not in the body; the body had been trained past ordinary fatigue long ago. This was the tiredness of return, of a mind shaped by the great silence of the heights now taking in the low constant noise of people. He moved through it as he had moved through every hardship of his practice: feeling it fully, holding to it not at all.” – The Serpent’s Longing, Namita Kumari

He waits as she continues to visit and they experience dreams that don’t imagine, they remember. Soma allows Kaundinya to see her many faces and all the while the potential cost of their love hangs over the choice they must make about whether to be together. But it’s not all about costs because it’s clear from the prose that there is beauty in allowing themselves to be seen, too.

“The woman did not vanish. That was the first wrong thing he had believed, that the serpent would replace her, that one would be a mask over the other. Instead she opened.” – The Serpent’s Longing, Namita Kumari

Soma’s sister, Takshaki, plots against the couple as she seeks the eventual throne, setting into motion the rest of the plot. And all the while something is changing in the water that used to be fresh and free of darkness.

I could have told you all of the above without finishing the book, but I kept reading because the writer’s enchantment pulled me forward with triumphant prose that belongs alongside that of Rebecca Roanhorse and Sabaa Tahir.

“[T]he great prices of a life get paid either way, chosen or unchosen, and… the only freedom anywhere in any of the roads was to choose” – The Serpent’s Longing, Namita Kumari

Exploring Grief and Shared Burdens

The potential to lose the ones you love is my kryptonite, a fear formed when I was very young and one I let stunt me still. It’s also inevitable and I’m grateful for the ways Kumari helped me reexamine grief in The Serpent’s Longing. Soma and Kaundinya have to deal with her potential grief over losing him, because he is mortal and she will certainly outlive him. But they also have to deal with the queen’s grief.

“[L]ives are rich because they are short, that the shortness is the whole of it, that a thing you will lose is the only kind of thing you can hold this way” – The Serpent’s Longing, Namita Kumari

Without going into too much detail, Soma and Kaundinya discover by going into the deep dark together the beauty of sharing a burden and that “the absence of the weight is not rest. It is only absence.” They also embrace the fact that “loving means losing and choose it anyway.”

I totally wept while reading this book. But I also felt restored. Because there is a lot more power in opening yourself to love than there is to sitting inside your fear of what could be lost. This may be a book I need to read again someday. For now I am grateful for the huge hug it made me bestow on my husband, a hug that he returned with equal intensity.

I have no affiliate link to offer for this book, but I hope you’ll find a copy and read it. It was a genuine pleasure to read.

Gajarah and Writing Trauma with Somia Sadiq

October 1, 2026 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

I love a dark story, I think because I’m always trying to understand the worst of what humans can do so I can think about what to do about it. The danger for me in a dark story, though, is that too few writers are writing from a place I can learn from. Some are putting forth unprocessed material (okay if you want to be there to process it with them) and some are titillated by the dark events (not my bag either). Enter Somia Sadiq and her novel Gajarah, which has become my textbook on how to write about the darkest parts of human behavior with humanity, respect, and foresight.

Honoring Our Stories

The novel centers on Emahn, a Punjabi girl being raised in the U.A.E. with her family who has deep roots in Lahore. Most of the book is in Emahn’s delightful and precocious first-person voice. Poems and myths are also woven in, and from all of this we get a full, rich, and loving picture of Emahn’s family’s life in both countries. This makes us care for her and for them. In life, I also hope that raising a child with this much love builds resilience.

Emahn needs resilience too young, as she is attacked by a stranger one evening very close to her home. We see the before and the after, but Sadiq does not force us to walk through the during. This artistic choice puts a very important focus on Emahn’s experience of the aftermath. Her family reacts in a variety of believable (and sometimes humanly imperfect) ways, but we never doubt their love for her. It’s a family I’d wish for everyone.

There is more to come in Emahn’s life, the trigger warning at the beginning of the book includes rape, sexual abuse, domestic violence, racism, and more. But the book is never about victimhood. It’s about life and love and survival.

“Pain is pain…The how and what is not important. It’s what we do with it that is more important.” – Emahn’s Naano jahn in Gajarah by Somia Sadiq

When not writing, Sadiq is a peace negotiator and conflict readiness strategist and I’m certain that’s where the holistic look at experience and healing in this book comes from. There are many characters who experience tragedy and pain, but each is presented as a whole human and their story is honored. They are also portrayed as more than the things that happened to them and we are reminded to keep our hearts open.

“The strongest way to fight back is to be.

To be in our languages, in our customs, our ways of being. To be comfortable in our own skin. To know inherently in every cell of our bodies that we deserve to be treated with kindness, compassion, fairness, equality.” – Gajarah by Somia Sadiq

Ceremonies of Life

One of the other things I loved about Gajarah was the focus on daily rituals and life in Lahore and in Canada among the Anishinaabeg community. Moments as simple as making burfi on a rooftop and brushing fingers over cedar become meaningful when the proper attention is paid, just as with the rest of life, and I found myself wanting to slow down and look while reading this book (and now, again, just thinking about it). Such is the attention to details that the advance copy of this book that I received came beautifully packaged in materials that recall some of the gorgeous text.

My only regret was that I spent a lot of time wondering whether the words presented in the text were Punjabi or Urdu (such is my imperfect understanding of the region) and I let this curiosity (read: obsession with linguistics) take me out of the sumptuous text sometimes.

Make no mistake, Gajarah deals with some heavy subjects, but I don’t know that I’ve ever read something that felt so alive. I’d tell you more, but I want you to experience it for yourself.

For a gorgeously written book that will make you think more deeply about the beauty of the world and how we survive it, pick up copy of Gajarah. If you use that link, I earn a commission.

Family Secrets in All the Things We Don’t Say and Buckeye

September 24, 2026 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Secrets. Every family’s got them, and no matter how garden variety the categories may be, each one can cause its own exquisite pain. Two books I read this week delve into those secrets, the costs of keeping them, and what happens when they come out in the open: All the Things We Don’t Say by Nuria López and Buckeye by Patrick Ryan.

All the Things We Don’t Say by Nuria López

This slim collection of short stories from Spain contains six sharp looks at different kinds of family secrets: abuse, sexual assault, pregnancy, sexual orientation, adultery, and the process of dying. As most successful short story writers do, López has centered these narratives around key moments so that we’re immediately in the mix.

The story I most connected to, for personal reasons, was “The Week of Goodbye,” where the narrator recounts the process of watching their father die in the hospital on a day-by-day basis. It sounds bleak, but what López captures is instead the incredible variety of what happens: relatives who need something, a visit from an old friend, an improvement, a decline, and always, the background of the hospital itself which continues long after any one patient’s stay. This story reminded me of what can be so glorious in a short story—that finding of all of life as represented in one small set of moments.

This is the kind of book where you can read one story, close the book, and then think about the ramifications of those few pages all day long.

Buckeye by Patrick Ryan

On the other side of the brevity spectrum is Patrick Ryan’s Buckeye which chronicles life in a small Ohio town over the period of an entire life. The story centers on the Jenkins and Salt families and the way their lives entwine over time. As with All the Things We Don’t Say, there are secrets here, including adultery, sexual orientation, and abandonment, and those secrets shape the destinies of everyone involved. Because it’s such a sweeping book, Ryan can linger on the social events that background (and shape) their lives as well, including wars and the Civil Rights movement.

I happened to be watching War Sailor, a show about Norwegian merchant marines who were effectively drafted into permanent, deadly service delivering supplies during World War II, on Netflix at the same time as reading this book, which made the descriptions of Felix Salt’s time in the Navy feel especially visceral and harrowing.

Buckeye also deals with death, both sudden and prolonged, and I think the thing I will carry longest out of this reading is the way one virtual stranger aids a couple in the depth of their grief. It is simple and pure and perfect.

Both books are reserved, though, and while characters’ actions make sense, there’s a level of pulling back from their emotions that made me long for them to explore what was happening underneath. Easier in a novel than a short story, of course, but if everyone had said what they were feeling in Buckeye the actions of the characters would have had to have been different and the overall feeling would have been very different, too. And sometimes, when the conversation is had, we see how very little it would have changed anyway. In that way, Buckeye simultaneously begs you to have the conversations you’ve never had and also reminds you that you probably already know what you’re going to learn.

If you’re interested in reading about other people’s secrets, pick up a copy of All the Things We Don’t Say or Buckeye from Bookshop.org. If you use either of those links, I earn a commission.