Light and Momentary

One more post about Dickens

Sarah and Lissa and Lilian asked for a little more information about my Dickens project, so here's an outline of how I did it with some notes on the books. As I mentioned in my first post, I had already read Great Expectations, Tale of Two Cities, and Oliver Twist before I decided to read them all. If you've never read any Dickens, start with those.

2000: I started with David Copperfield, and it remains one of my very favorites. It's a great way to start on the longer novels, because the characters are so engaging.

2001: I picked Martin Chuzzlewit because it was the only Dickens novel on the shelf at the branch library, and I spent nine long weeks battling through it. It was fun to see Dickens' perceptions of America and Americans since we had just returned from two years in the UK. I also remember being struck by Dickens' emphasis on illness as transformative (for both patient and nurse), and by the glimpses of 19th-century midwifery. It was mostly a slog, though.

2002: Little Dorrit had been on my shelf for years, and I decided to finish it before the arrival of our third son. (Lesson learned from 2001: don't drag it out.) This one taught me to pay close attention, because I was still puzzled about Mrs. Clennam's prevarications when I finished the book.

2003: OH! Bleak House! Love love love puffy heart love. Might be my favorite. This year I also read Great Expectations to my oldest son, which took some determination. Well worth it -- I'll always remember sharing that beautiful ending with him. "Mom," he said quietly, "that gives me a funny feeling inside." Me too, sweetheart.

2004: The Old Curiosity Shop was hugely popular in its day. I am not a fan. I wished Little Nell would hurry up and die already.

2005: Pickwick Papers is most likely my favorite, but it arrived at the top spot by a circuitous route. I tried to read it in college and gave up after 20 pages. I tried to read it in the winter of '05 and gave up after 60 pages. I set my teeth and dove back in at the beginning that summer. About 150 pages in I was completely hooked. Of all his books, this one is the most fun: whimsical and deliciously preposterous in places, with the bathos confined to stories told by the characters. I knew it had to get better, because why else would the March sisters have loved it so? It did -- oh, did it ever. Persevere, Lissa! I promise you'll be glad you did. (Note to any Dickens newbies: I do think it's helpful to have read some of his other stuff first.)

2006: Our Mutual Friend is in the Little Dorrit class -- not one of his very finest but a good read anyway.

2007: Same for Barnaby Rudge. Remembering the eerie feel of this one still gives me a pleasant shiver.

2008: Dombey and Son is obscure for a reason. Evanescence of riches, fragility of life, importance of family, all presented in a way that made me say "blah blah blah" instead of nodding in recognition.

2009: Hard Times must be his shortest novel. It's a quick read that hits on a lot of familiar themes.

and 2010: Nicholas Nickleby, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

I'd love to hear about your Dickens adventures!

In which Jamie completes a task begun ten years before

I finished my Dickens project Friday night. It was SO satisfying.

For a long time I didn't talk about the project because it's kind of pretentious-sounding. The thing is, once you get into his groove, Dickens is really fun and not drudgery at all. Some of my favorite things about this project:

1. The earnest young men, like Pip, David Copperfield, and Nicholas Nickleby. They mean well, they try hard, they make a hash of things, they rue the hash-making, they learn some things, they make more hash, they [insert plot meanderings here], and then they find true love as wiser and more prudent men. I love watching them grow out of callow youth and into honorable manhood.


2. The crazy plot twists. Sometimes they are wildly implausible, but I eat them up anyway. When Dickens takes those dangling threads and wraps them up neatly, it speaks to the part of me that hopes this messy life is a tapestry and not just a tangle. Dashed hopes, lost loved ones, unrighted wrongs -- when you read Dickens you remember that injustices can be made right in unexpected ways. It's not over until the fat lady sings, or perhaps until she finds a suppressed will that allows the heroine to live in comfort the rest of her days.


3. The antidote to internet-induced-rabid-gerbil-brain syndrome. You know how Google is making us stupid and all that? Dickens is a great remedy. I have turned into an inveterate skimmer and it frustrates me. This project compelled me to read every word on every page for 800 pages at a time, a welcome and rewarding discipline. If you skim a Dickens novel you'll wind up badly confused, and I hate being confused.

I am delighted that I finished up with Nicholas Nickleby, because I am especially fond of the whimsy that surfaces more in early Dickens novels. Parts of it are laugh-out-loud funny. I saw the big revelation coming, which also delighted me because I can't usually predict his plot twists. It made me think to myself, "I get it! I can anticipate where he's going with an idea now!"

My supervisor in my first job out of college talked about being really sad when she finished all of George Eliot. I wondered if I might feel that way when I closed Nicholas Nickleby, but I didn't. I have spent hours and hours wandering the streets of London and the English countryside with Mr. Dickens as my guide. We have passed through woods and fields and slums and palatial estates, with stops abroad as well. I am not sorry to have visited all the places he has to show me. I am looking forward to passing through again someday, and saying to the people there, "It's good to see you again!"

The Deathly Hallows (Spoilers Galore)

So I loved HP7 -- loved it.  And I am going to write all about what I loved in this post, so don't click if you haven't read it and want to be surprised.

Spring Tide and Charlotte's Web

There's an ebb and flow to mothering -- sometimes it's not so hard and sometimes it kicks my butt.  Right now it's high tide, as Pete moves into toddlerhood.  He is so busy:  there are carpets to write on and magnets to eat and giant dump trucks to propel down the stairs.  There are also three erupting molars to kvetch about, and much clinging to Mom that needs to happen in between adventures.

When my oldest was this age I remember being so discouraged.  Didn't he know he was supposed to get easier after he turned one?  When was I going to be able to get something done?  I know, this time, that the tide goes out again.  Eventually.

I am working on another birth post, but I am only able to write in five-minute snatches.  (So far in this post, Pete has nursed, dumped all the diapers out of their bag, and wandered into the bathroom.  Must make sure the toilet brush is not being used for oral hygiene.  Back in a minute.)  Today here's a quickie instead.

Marty and I just read Charlotte's Web, a book I like better as an adult than I did as a kid.  This time through I was musing about its title -- the book's not as much about the web, I thought, as it is about the friendship between Charlotte and Wilbur. 

But then White describes the way Wilbur tries to be "some pig," and "terrific," and "radiant," even though he doesn't think he's really any of those things, because Charlotte says that's how she sees him.  That's one of the beauties of a good friendship:  your friend sees things in you that you can't see yourself.  You stretch yourself to be the person your friend sees, and you grow in the process.  The web that was woven to trick the humans became something more.

Something else I'd never noticed until this reading is the contrast between Charlotte and Templeton at the fair.  She empties herself for her babies and for Wilbur; Templeton stuffs himself.  It made me think of Christ's kenosis, and of the generosity that's a hallmark of genuine love.

In the end Charlotte says, "By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle.  Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that."

Indeed.

Books '06: 4, 5, and 6

The Great Divorce. I am planning to read a bunch of C.S. Lewis this year; I started with this one because it was on our shelf. Short, intriguing, and timely in view of book #7 of '06 (which will get its own post one of these days). The narrator describes a bus trip from hell to the outskirts of heaven, in which any interested residents of hell are invited to stay.  They decline -- an artist because he cannot see that "if you are interested in the country [heaven] only for the sake of painting it, you'll never learn to see the country," a mother because she will not subjugate love of her son to love of her Father. Good stuff.  I liked the quote Lewis put in George Macdonald's mouth: "There is always something they insist on keeping, even at the price of misery.  There is always something they prefer to joy -- that is, to reality."

Henry IV, Part 2.  Every year I read a Shakespeare play, in hopes of getting the complete works read by menopause.  In the beginning I loved this plan, but for the past few years I had been enjoying the plays less.  I do a lot of reading, but it's mostly in fits and starts -- five minutes while the water is boiling for the mac and cheese (oh, wait, I mean for the organic brown rice with tahini-miso sauce), ten interrupted minutes while I am supervising the Lego pickup, a few pages at the park.  And it doesn't work very well for me to read Shakespeare like that.

I took the first part of Henry IV with me in December when I went to visit my brother and his wife and baby.  Because of a travel snag I ended up spending a whole day in the city, arriving at my brother's house in the small hours of the next morning.  That day I read Shakespeare whenever Pete slept and loved it.  I couldn't wait for part two, and I resolved to carve out some time for uninterrupted reading since it made such a difference.  But uninterrupted time is in short supply (isn't it ironic that I stopped in the middle of this very sentence to save in draft form and deal with a sibling blow-up?) around here.

Now I wonder:  did I like Part One more because I read it away from the usual clamor for band-aids, snacks, and justice, or is it a better play?  I enjoyed the Hal/Hotspur contrast in Part One, with its reminder that parents need to love their own children and not pine for somebody else's.  (In my head I was calling their opposite trajectories "chiasmus," but apparently chiasmus is only a smaller-scale kind of crisscrossing. Is there a word for it when one character triumphs and another character tanks?)  I'm not a fan of Falstaff on the page (too many obsolete puns about booze and unfaithful wives) -- does he play a bigger role in Part Two or did it just seem that way?

Anyway, resolved:  Shakespeare is best read in larger chunks with fewer distractions.  Maybe that means I'll be past menopause before I finish the complete works after all.

gods in Alabama.  Joshilyn Jackson's blog makes me laugh out loud consistently, and her book is even funnier.  It is also a well-plotted mystery and I stayed up late galloping through it.  Interesting stuff about love, family, and race, and the battleaxe aunt brought to mind my own tough-as-nails Aunt Mary Bob.  I'll be reading her next one when it comes out.

Books 1, 2, and 3 of 2006

I am going to borrow an idea from MamaT and do quick reviews of the books I read this year, instead of planning longer posts in my head and then never writing them.  One of my resolutions for this year was to be more purposeful in my book selections.  Not so many random grabs from the shelves by the library checkout desk -- instead I would have a Plan!  Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time! Galsworthy! Proust! In French!

Yeah, well.

Random selection #1:  I grabbed Patrick Madrid's Surprised by Truth 2 while we were visiting friends over New Year's and brought it home to finish.  It's another volume of conversion stories, and it shares the strengths and weaknesses of the first Surprised by Truth.  There's a lot of good apologetics information but there's also a lot of repetition, since the same questions come up again and again.  My favorite story came from a woman who went to Latin America as a missionary and found herself with big questions.  Chief among them: how to foster discipleship among people who can't read if your emphasis is on personal scripture study.  I'd never thought of the importance of the liturgy's proclamation of the word in that light before.

Random selection #2:  SAHM I Am, a pleasant piece of fluff from the library's new books display.  It's a 21st-century epistolary novel, composed entirely of emails from a fictional loop for Christian mothers.  I suppose it's obligatory for a novel featuring email to have an episode in which the wrong name is typed in the TO: field and disaster ensues, but Allison Pearson did it better.  Still, the ending made me laugh and it was a quick read, so I won't complain.

And random selection #3:  Loud and Clear.  My husband snagged this one for me from the sale rack at the used bookstore.  Anna Quindlen writes so gracefully that-- that-- that I am all hung up trying to find a graceful ending to my own sentence.  This is a collection of essays and speeches from roughly 1993-2004, a mix of thoughts on motherhood and calls to political action.  I disagree with Anna Quindlen in predictable ways but I always enjoy her writing.

The three books I am reading now are all Purposeful Selections.  We'll have to see if the purposeful wins out over the random for the year or not.

That Post About CCL

The most important thing I want to say about CCL is that I'm glad it's there.  An international organization helping couples use the sympto-thermal method -- there's such a need for the work they do.  I have met some lovely couples who teach for CCL.  My own practice of NFP would have been far more difficult without them.

However.

I also have reservations about CCL.  The lovely teaching couples far outnumber the scary teaching couples, but there are some scary ones out there announcing that sterilized couples are going to hell.  For a long time I could not read "Family Foundations" without some aaaggghh moments, when I turned a page and felt ambushed by legalism and more-Catholic-than-thou-ness.   

Before we go any further I have to tell you my theory of personality, which is that there are two kinds of people in the world: people who like rules, and people who don't.  Me, I am a rules person from a rules family.  When I read Newton's laws for the first time at age 12, I was suddenly suffused with a joy that lasted all afternoon (this is where you channel Rick James and sing, "Supergeek! Supergeek! She's supergeeky!") because they spoke to me of a universe that was orderly and comprehensible.  To this day rules please me:  the phonological rule that explained why one of my sons said "geese" instead of "ski" and "dice" instead of "sty," the culinary rule that tells me I can make meringues using a quarter-cup of sugar for each egg white.

There is an ugly side to loving rules, though, a tendency toward intolerance and a habit of assuming that other people's troubles are their own fault.  I can rely on my parents to sniff acerbically, "I guess the rules do not apply to him," within three minutes of reading about a celebrity who has found himself in hot water -- as if following the rules were the key to problem-free living.  Three things (in addition to Einstein's demonstration that Newton's laws don't tell the whole story) compel me to keep my love of rules in check.

The first:  as a miserable 16yo senior in high school, desperately trying to perform and achieve and fit my parents' mold for me, I went on a retreat during which I read the letter to the Galatians for the first time.  I got to the fifth chapter and read those beautiful words -- "You were called to be free" -- and the Holy Spirit blew the roof off my life.  It sounds overdramatic  but it's true:  in that moment the Voice of the living God spoke to my 16yo heart.  What it said was something like this:  "Hey, Jamie, it's awfully crowded in that box where you've been living.  Would you like to come out and dance with me?"

I am not eager to get back in that box.

The second:  it is impossible for me to read the Gospels without an inward shudder at Jesus' dealings with the Pharisees.  The Pharisees meant well, as far as I can tell -- they were trying to safeguard the truth they had been given, and lead lives that pleased God.  At great cost to himself, Jesus told them they were going about it all wrong. As much as I would like to tell myself that the blind guides and whited sepulchres business just meant they were following the wrong rules, and I'm okay as long as I follow the right ones, I cannot.  Jesus could not have said it any more clearly:  He is bigger than the rules.  It's not about the rules.

The third:  the man I fell in love with and married is a supreme Un-Rules Person (it shows you the extent of my rulesiness that I cannot think of a better acronym than URP, though I do find the title ur-URP quite appealing -- don't you think he will too?) and one of the chief tasks of our marriage has been coming to terms with this difference in our personalities.  It's ironic that I took some flak here and elsewhere for sounding self-righteous in that post about breastfeeding last month, because I am married to my very own S4 (Super-Sensitive Sanctimony Sniffer-outer).  On the notorious problem issues for married couples -- sex, money, kids, in-laws -- we can talk harmoniously.  We may not be singing the same note, but usually the blend is pleasant.  But if he thinks I'm being self-righteous on any topic -- well, that's a lit match in the powder keg, folks.

In the early years of our marriage I used to find myself frustrated by his unwillingness to listen to my helpful little pointers.  "You know," I would tell him as we were leaving for Mass, "if you finish your cup of coffee in the car you won't be able to observe the communion fast."  I was perplexed by the irritated eye-rolling that inevitably followed such pronouncements.  Our marriage became much happier when I got a handle on two basic truths:  first, my husband is responsible for his own choices; second, my rules-focused bad habits, like anxious watch-checking instead of praying in the communion line (It's only been 58 minutes since I finished breakfast!  I hope the line moves slowly!), did not honor God any more than M's bad habits did. 

In my dozen years of hanging out with NFP users, I have observed that many of them are rules people.  It makes sense:  when good info on NFP is so hard to find, a person has to be motivated to seek it out. It was my determination to live in accord with Humanae Vitae that led me to keep searching for a way to make NFP work.  As it happened, I discovered a highly effective, marriage-enhancing, side-effect-free method of family planning in my quest to Follow The Rules.  I think, though, that communication breakdowns are not uncommon when rules people talk to URPs about NFP.

"It's great!" say the rules people. "You can live in faithfulness to Church teaching!"

"I could," think the URPs, "if I wanted to be a hidebound pompous pharisee like you!"

John and Sheila Kippley have written books to help Catholics offer their bodies as living sacrifices to God, and for that I am grateful. But they have also written books (the very same books) chock-a-block with rulesy directives.  I have to admit, reading them makes me a little crazy.  Catholics do not have a moral obligation to sleep with their infants in king-sized beds free of headboards and footboards. And yet from the emphasis this choice receives in The Art of NFP, you'd almost think there was a little-known encyclical on bedroom furniture.  I will never, ever take a daily nap with my baby as directed by Sheila Kippley's "natural mothering" schema -- naptime is too valuable for me to spend it sleeping.  I do not think this makes me an unnatural mother.

Perhaps many rules people share my antipathy toward change; I can't say for certain.  But I also see in the Kippleys' books a reluctance to move forward with the times.  They dispense outdated breastfeeding advice (about which more below).  More seriously, I think they hinder their own effectiveness by consistently speaking in pre-sexual-revolution terms. 

For instance:  one chapter of John Kippley's Sex and the Marriage Covenant, a book I am so glad to have read while I was engaged, addresses oral and anal sex.  He calls them "kinky sex," saying he expects some of his readers won't have known that people actually engaged in such behavior.  And yet for today's twenty-something reader, who was in high school when Bill Clinton was debating the meaning of "is," John Kippley's "kinky sex" is more often regarded as "the presidential treatment."  How far out of step can an author be with his younger readers before they stop listening?

This is not, let me be absolutely clear, a defense of post-sexual-revolution mores.  It is instead an observation that the Holy Spirit did not say at Pentecost, "Those Pamphylians ought to be speaking Aramaic if they want to be saved."  Instead He gave the apostles the ability to speak the truth in new languages.  I believe that when Catholics talk about HV to twenty-something engaged couples, we need to meet them where they are.

It is inaccurate for me to keep talking about the Kippleys as if they were Mr. and Mrs. CCL now that they have retired and CCL seems to be moving in a slightly different direction.  I'm intrigued to see where the new executive director will take the organization.  But as long as CCL uses The Art of NFP and Breastfeeding and Natural Child Spacing, the Kippleys' voices will come through loud and clear.  As I mentioned in a recent post, I've been thinking about this stuff because I just read Sheila Kippley's new book, Breastfeeding and Catholic Motherhood. 

One frustration for me in Sheila Kippley's writing on breastfeeding is her reliance on dated information.  She talks, for instance, about how soothing it was for her to blow air from a hairdryer on a traumatized nipple.  While I'm glad it worked for her, it's not evidence-based:  these days the focus is on moist wound healing.  I am troubled by her book's inclusion of a "solution" which may well slow the healing process for a mother in pain.

A second frustration is her reductivism.  Breastfeed your child or he could be a serial killer.  Be with your child full-time for the first three years or he might commit suicide as a teenager.

But I think my biggest frustration is the insistence (at least to my ear it is insistent) on good Catholic mothering as a package deal. Remember the scene in The Once and Future King where Wart becomes an ant?  There's a sign at the entrance to the ant colony: Everything not forbidden is compulsory.  Sometimes I feel that I have stumbled into that ant colony when I read the Kippleys' books.  This latest one makes much of Fr. William Virtue's contention that women have a serious moral obligation to breastfeed.  It's a theme I have noticed in the Kippleys' writing:  if it's a good thing, you ought to do it.

I am thinking of the Catholic Church as a great banquet where the main dish is, say, a fabulous curry -- rich and steaming and perfectly spiced.  The tables are groaning, filled with things you can choose to sprinkle on top or try on the side.  You don't like coconut garnishing your curry?  No problem.  No spicy eggplant for you?  Hey, it's your plate.  We're here for the curry; the rest is just trimmings.

I am re-reading that paragraph and thinking it sounds like an enthusiastic argument for cafeteria Catholicism.  Regular readers will know, I hope, that I am faithful to the magisterium.  I believe everybody who chooses to come to this banquet table needs a heaping helping of curry.

But it is my hope that faithful Catholics can eliminate the competitiveness ("I'll see your mantilla and raise you one green scapular") and the cookie-cutter-ness ("All Catholics should boycott goods made in China because of Chinese human rights violations") that mar the joyousness of the banquet we share.  And joy is a key idea for me here:  I was surprised to find so much joy in the service of the Lord Jesus.  Ditto for breastfeeding.

Of course it's not just about the joy.  There are days when Christian service feels like drudgery, days when breastfeeding is a pain in the neck ("in the nipple" would be more apt, I suppose).  But I would love to see less emphasis, in future Kippley books and in CCL publications, on shoulds and oughts, and more on the many-faceted delights of the feast we're called to share.

Quickly

While I was away I finished Holly Pierlot's book, A Mother's Rule of Life. It's the best book for Christian women I've read in a while  -- each chapter had at least one insight that made me say, "Wow, I never looked at it that way."  I have been trying to implement some of her ideas, with some success, but the hours of free time she describes are proving elusive.

There are all these things I want to blog about but I have been too busy folding laundry and going to bed early to get them written down.  And I was just going to take a minute to tell you that our priest friend is coming tonight for dinner and to hear Alex's first confession, and why I'm so excited about it, but the baby is fussing and the 3yo is calling for help and the 5yo crumpled his older brother's picture again.  Argh.  Oh, wait, I'm supposed to be cultivating serenity.  Picture me smiling beatifically, with a hint (or several) of frazzledness around the edges.  I'll try again later.

The Vegetable Project

Item:  I just finished Morgan Spurlock's Don't Eat This Book, which is full of stories about his "Super Size Me" adventure and the latest antics of Big Food. 

Item:  I have twenty pounds (eek) of pregnancy weight to lose.

Ergo: the Vegetable Project.  For the month of June, I'm going to eat five servings of vegetables a day and cut out refined sugar.  And, of course, I'm going to blog about it.

Don't Eat This Book is flawed.  It reads like a blog in hardcover; a little more editing would have made it a much better book.  There is a "let them eat cake" tone in some places -- too many encomia to organic veggies and not enough focus on the problems of cost and availability, especially in poor neighborhoods.  It's not in the same league as Fast Food Nation, which caused me to call all my friends and family saying "Read this book!" and tell my children I would only take them for fast food once a year.  I read DETB compulsively, though, sloppy editing notwithstanding.

So this is my super-size-me-in-reverse project.  ("Minimize me" doesn't sound quite right.)  I had visions of a nifty calendar in the sidebar with links to recipes, but I'm going to have to keep working on that one.  Here's a recipe to start:

Garlicky Pasta Sauce with Kid-Friendly Greens

Peel a head of garlic (do you know the trick where you smash each clove hard with the flat of your knife and the peel slides off easily? also useful when pitting olives) and chop it roughly.  Saute in oil, along with red pepper flakes to taste, until tender.  Add a 28-oz. can of chopped tomatoes and two 15-oz. cans of garbanzos.  Simmer 20 minutes or so.  Stir in a thawed 10-oz. package of frozen spinach.  (You can substitute other greens here if you like -- I used beet greens.  Chop them finely and add them at the beginning along with the garlic.)  Serve over pasta with grated Parmesan cheese. 

I used whole-wheat pasta for that extra-virtuous feeling, but ended up with a virtue deficit when I waited too long to start cooking and snapped at my children as my blood sugar plummeted.  Here's to better planning by month's end.

In Which I Am Eminently Reasonable and Mature in the Face of Anxiety

I am back, pie in hand (also mouth), to tell you about my reasonable and mature approach to the stress induced by Christmas preparations, miscarriage muck, my husband's job search, and the winter Gloom (so murky it demands a capital G).

Ready?  Breath bated?  Here it is:

Avoidance!  You can sing it to the tune of "O Come, All Ye Faithful" if you're looking for a little Christmas cheer:  "Avoidance! Avoidance! Avoidance, O Avoidance!"  (&c.  Catchy lyrics, I know.)

Did you notice this is my fifth post this week, after my earnest resolve in late October to back off on posting during the holiday season?  That's part one of the Definitively Reasonable And Mature Approach in motion, my friends.  And just in case you'd like a little DRAMA of your own, I am sharing part two with you.  I have an enormous pile of fun books beside my brown chair, right there ready to help me out when I have a wayward thought like, "You know, you could knock out the last of the Christmas cards right now if you just buckled down and did it." 

At the top of the pile is Girl Meets God, by Lauren Winner.  My high school best friend (who needs a name -- I think I'll call her Fairy May because we became best friends when she was Fairy May and I was Ethel P. Savage in our high school's production of "The Curious Savage") recommended it and I'm so glad she did.  I love Winner's voice -- fresh and articulate, candid and thoughtful.  I am forcing myself to read it slowly because I will be sad when it ends.  I can't remember the last time I felt this drawn to an author. 

Eric Brende wrote a book called Better Off about living with a community he calls (pseudonymously, to protect their privacy) the Minimites -- they're an offshoot of the Amish with stronger convictions about avoiding technology.  Brende was in graduate school studying the social impact of technology when he took 18 months to learn hands-on about low-tech life.  His "research" involved farming (sans machinery) to pay the bills and the birth of his first child at home with a lay midwife.  I sympathize with Brende's ideals and his experience is intriguing.  The writing is uneven, though, and I've been stalled at two-thirds of the way through the book for a couple of weeks now.

I'm reading Ina May's Guide to Childbirth.  Spiritual Midwifery makes me laugh -- the "get tantric with your lady" approach to labor is a little too 1974 for me.  I'm really enjoying this newer book, though.  I love Gaskin's confidence in women's bodies, the way she expects most women to be able to birth their babies without techno-operatics.

I'm less enthusiastic about Naomi Wolf's Misconceptions.  Sometime last year I heard Naomi Wolf and Ina May Gaskin interviewed together for a radio show on childbirth in America.  Gaskin was so calm and reasonable; Wolf was more strident.  I'm hearing that in her book as well.  I don't know that I'll read it cover to cover (unless I discover additional stresses to flee from), but I'll keep dipping into it.

I'm also hearing voices in Michel Odent's book The Farmer and the Obstetrician.  I saw Odent speak at a European breastfeeding conference in 2000, right after his book The Scientification of Love came out and right before we moved back to the States.  He was speaking in English, but with a serious French accent.  He was talking about the pulsatility of oxytocin release and I spent the entire talk going, "Huh?  Pool-sa-teal-ee-t[non-English vowel sound here]?  What word could that possibly be?"  I have no idea what else the talk was about, but I had quite an aha! moment when I figured out the mystery word.  This book has some provocative ideas -- Odent is opposed to cameras at birth and ambivalent about fathers being present -- but there are just enough quirks in the English that I hear his accent as I read.  Talk about distracting.  (Since distraction is the goal here, perhaps I shouldn't complain.)

Barchester Towers has been on my reading pile for a while now, along with Adam Bede.  I took them both down to my parents' house, forgetting that an abalone can't turn pages very well.  Adam Bede is the one book in my stack I want to finish by year's end.  (New Year's resolution.)  Given my current completion stats for things that need to be done by December 25, I don't know if I'm going to make my self-imposed deadline:  I always find George Eliot hard slogging.  I keep thinking it ought to get easier as I read more of her work, but it hasn't happened yet.

Friday night I pulled St. Francis de Sales' Introduction to the Devout Life off the shelf for Advent reading.  I decided to do so because of a memory lapse -- I thought it was St. Francis Xavier's book -- but it's been so highly recommended that I think I'll stick with the plan anyway.

Fairy May also recommended Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies, which I have just barely begun because a person can only procrastinate in so many directions at one time.  And at the bottom of my pile is Having Faith, by Sandra Steingraber, a favorite of mine which I am re-reading in hopes of providing a more informed response to Brooke's question about breastmilk contamination.

Dishes are calling, and I have stockings to stuff for the feast of St. Nicholas.  FlyLady (yes, I am so pathetic that I resubbed) has a "Please Go to Bed" email sitting reproachfully in my inbox, so I should wrap things up here.  Further ideas for avoidance strategies -- I mean Definitively Reasonable And Mature Approaches -- are most welcome.

Huh?

--said my husband, when he thought I asked him what he knew about the sex lives of cannibals.

I had actually asked him what he knew about The Sex Lives of Cannibals, a newish book by J. Maarten Troost describing his two years in Kiribati, in the Equatorial Pacific.  The miscommunication caused me to wish briefly for a set of handheld HTML flags -- like the ones a runway signalman uses, only mine would say <i> (for the right hand) and </i> (for the left).  But then I rolled my eyes and said to myself, "You have been spending way too much time on that computer."

The Sex Lives of Cannibals caught my eye recently in a bookstore, where I flipped through the first chapter and found it funny and well-written.  I got it from the library and dug in enthusiastically.  It is a riotously funny book:  I read a lot of it while I was nursing Joe to sleep in the evenings and I was afraid I would wake him up laughing.  Troost writes perceptively about his gradual acclimation to life in the developing world and his subsequent re-entry into the US.

Soon, though, I found myself checking each chapter to see how long it was.  I kept flipping to the back -- how many pages in this book again?  That's never a good sign.  Troost's writing reminds me a bit of David Foster Wallace's, which might be part of the trouble.  I enjoy the first few thousand words of a David Foster Wallace piece, but then I begin to find it laborious.  The copy editing in SLOC is sloppy -- many typos and scattered solecisms -- and perhaps Troost needed more big-picture blue pencil too.

Oddly (since I read very little travel writing), this was the second book I had read this year about the region; the first was The Island of the Colorblind, in which Oliver Sacks writes about his journeys to Pingelap and Guam to see islanders with unusual neurological disorders.  Sacks and Troost seem like very different men and it shows in their books:  Sacks writes careful narratives with extensive footnotes; Troost is more haphazard and uproariously funny.  Sacks is unmistakably an outsider, but Troost begins to shuck off some of his Western-ness and think like an islander.

So I guess my verdict on SLOC is that it's flawed but worth reading.  I'm glad I read about Troost's changing perspective:  his initial dismay at the squalor on the island, his ultimate dismay at US consumer culture on their return home.  And his description of the colors and pleasures of life on a tropical atoll -- well, it makes me wonder, now and again, what's in the "help wanted" ads from Fiji.

Another Marvelous Thing and Good Brownies Too

Last week I pulled Laurie Colwin's Another Marvelous Thing off the shelf, a little hesitantly.  I had never heard of Laurie Colwin until I got my copy of How to Be a Domestic Goddess, which includes her recipe for Black Cake.  (Parenthetically, Nigella Lawson says she changed the recipe only slightly but she actually extended the cooking time from one hour to four.  Four hours!  I'm intrigued by the recipe but a little scared to try either of them with such a big discrepancy in cooking times.)

I got Home Cooking and More Home Cooking out of my library and enjoyed them both.  They're my kind of cooking -- mostly nutritious but with a killer brownie recipe*, mostly easy but not a can of condensed soup in sight.  Colwin talks with such enthusiasm about feeding her daughter that I felt an immediate connection with her.

So I moved on to her fiction, and found myself well and truly shocked by a book for the first time in years.  Family Happiness is about a woman named Polly who falls in love with a painter named Lincoln.  The catch is Polly is married with two children. 

I'm going to give away the ending here, so skip to the next paragraph if you might want to read the book, okay? They have an affair which leaves Polly terribly ambivalent.  When Lincoln leaves the country for a time, she resolves to end things.  Good plan, Polly!  When he returns, though, she changes her mind.  What's more, she seems to let go of her ambivalence at the same time, and in the last paragraph of the book she's feeling joyful as she contemplates her life.  Embrace duplicity! it seems to say.  You can have both the cool artsy lover and the reliable husband who brings home lots of bacon!

I think it shocked me in part because I was expecting Polly to be like Laurie Colwin.  I should have known better than that -- a character's use of the author's brownie recipe does not make her into a clone of the author (and how do I know whether Laurie Colwin was faithful to her husband anyway?).  I was also expecting that an author who mail-ordered organic apple juice for her daughter would write moral books.  Not soporifically moral, just principled.  Isn't perfidy worse than pesticides?

Maybe I was also shocked because I've read too many nineteenth-century novels.  Polly reminded me of Anna Karenina at first, and adultery emphatically did not agree with Anna.  Or with Emma Bovary.  I wondered if the book's ending might be a feminist response to novels by men about women having affairs, but I couldn't think of happy male adulterers either.  (I thought of Agamemnon.  Adultery for sure didn't agree with him.  Who am I missing?)  Maybe I need to read more twentieth-century fiction.  Or maybe I don't, if it's going to be like Family Happiness.

Anyway, I liked her writing and her characters enough to read a couple of her other books, Happy All the Time and A Big Storm Knocked It Over.  The characters are pleasantly quirky and the dialogue pleasantly snappy, and they do not end with anyone saying, "Yes!  I will lie to my husband every day and embrace the lying!"  Another Marvelous Thing, though, is another book about a woman who is uneasily embroiled in an affair.  I had almost reached the end.  I got to the part where she told the lover that it was over.  And then I put the book in the stroller basket as we were going to the park and it disappeared.

Aargh! I said.  Does the library have it?  How soon can I track it down?  I have to know what happens next!

I am happy to report that a few days later it turned up mysteriously in the library crate with the kids' books.  It is naptime here and as soon as I take care of the naptime necessities (one big basket of laundry to be folded, dusty furniture to be un-dusted, and two books on elephants to be read to one 4yo boy) I am going to finish my book with a glass of iced coffee at hand.

*Because no one should talk about killer brownie recipes without sharing--
Melt 1 stick of butter with 2 squares of unsweetened chocolate.  Stir in 1 c. sugar; add 2 eggs and 1/2 t. vanilla.  Beat well.  Stir in 1/4 c. all-purpose flour and 1/2 t. salt.  If you like, add 1 c. chopped walnuts.  Bake in a buttered and floured 8-inch square pan for about 40 minutes at 325.  Laurie Colwin says this is Katharine Hepburn's recipe.  I had hunted high and low for a good brownie recipe, and this is it.

The Rain in Jane Falls Mainly on the Plain

I had a plan.  I was going to finish Sense and Sensibility, the one Austen novel I hadn't read yet, and then I would be at the top of the library hold list for The Jane Austen Book Club.  I had read a couple of delighted reviews and I was so looking forward to reading it myself.

I needed my ORM in a big way, though.  I wanted to say, "Hey, I would have the Bertrams over for dinner, thank you very much."   Kingsley Amis notwithstanding, I would make them trifle (so they'd feel at home, being in the wrong century and on the wrong continent), and we could talk about whether Maria had learned her "duty to the lessons of affliction" yet.

Plus I wanted to talk about Sense and Sensibility with someone and Austen is just too girly for my husband.  At least he thinks she is.  Elinor personifies sense, right, and Marianne sensibility?  Austen seems to be holding Elinor up as the ideal, but doesn't she strike you as rather a cold fish?  Wouldn't they both be nicer if they hybridized themselves?  Or am I too much a product of my let-it-all-hang-out times and culture?  That was my burning question about S&S and no one in the book club touched on it.  That's the trouble with listening in on other people's imaginary conversations.

Stop here if you're planning to read The Jane Austen Book Club, but how about that ending?  You can usually tell Austen's estimate of a character's merit by the match she makes in the end.  The rain of this entry's silly title is not meteorological, since England has an equal-opportunity lousy climate, but figurative, as in the kind that falls on the just and the unjust.  Difficult marriages, in Austen's universe, are for plain, spiteful girls who think too much about money.  Why, then, does Allegra end up reunited with Corinne?  And how about Bernadette and Senor Obando? Where did that come from?

Maybe I should reread Pride and Prejudice instead of looking for Austen in somebody else's book.

Curious About George

The party went off well.  It's always good to see the roommates and their families (at least once the planning stress is out of the way) and they made happy noises about the food.  I am eating the remnants of the trifle.  It didn't turn out quite as planned.  For fear of its being rubbery, I cut the amount of gelatin and the result was a bit soupy.  Such are the perils of inventing recipes for food you plan to serve to guests the next day.  When I put it away, though, I poked a few more ladyfingers into the soupy layer and now it's perfect.  Here I sit, listening to fireworks at the high school and enjoying my leftover red white and blue trifle.

But my point here tonight is that I'm curious about George.  Actually, I'm curious about the man with the yellow hat.  When will he realize that Curious George cannot be left alone?

In case you haven't read the Curious George books lately, the plots run like this:  the man with the yellow hat tells George to stay out of trouble.  MWYH leaves.  George makes trouble.  Big trouble.  But he also does something useful, and everyone decides that the useful thing mitigates the awfulness of the troublesome things.

It makes me want to scream.  It makes me want to take my ORM (Over-involved Reader's Megaphone, a handy gadget I will invent someday which will allow me and my fellow over-involved readers to shout warnings and advice to book characters.  Like:  "Hey, Anna K!  That guy is Trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with V and that stands for Vronsky the Villainous!"  The deluxe model will have a translation chip so I won't have to learn Russian.) and bellow into the pages:  "Nooo!  He cannot stay out of trouble!  He is constitutionally incapable of staying out of trouble!  Supervise him or take him home to the jungle!"

Alas, MWYH never listens, and none of his neighbors seem overly troubled by George's shenanigans.  Me, though, I'm troubled.  Maybe I should get a life.  Or a better ORM.

MWYH makes me think about mothers on the playground and the range of mother involvement you can see there.  I've moved on the spectrum, from breathing down my firstborn's neck to giving my three sons lots more room to be on their own.  Always, always, I've second-guessed my choices.  I suppose it's because there's something to be said for wherever you land on the continuum.  My oldest had astounding language skills in part because he spent hours every day engaged in conversations with me.  He also had a lot of trouble realizing that I did not exist to entertain him, and that sometimes he needed to wait for my attention.  My youngest plays beautifully by himself and with his brothers (usually -- he succumbs to the occasional urge to beat the 4yo about the head with a Lego structure), but I am afraid I'm so accustomed to his independence that I respond too slowly to him when he honestly does need me.

In contrast to Curious George, however, my youngest has neither flooded the house nor completed a solo space flight.  So I'll worry about that another day.

Notes in closing:
1) Moderation in most things, including attention paid to children.
2) Do not purchase or even check out of the library those vapid CG books based on the TV series.
3) Must keep plugging away at ORM.  Imagine the possibilities!