Light and Momentary

It's TAMDRAL time, friends

Today marks the beginning of the Tenth Annual May Dickens Read-ALong, in which we will wind our way through Great Expectations at a leisurely pace. Join us! Great Expectations is short (for a Dickens novel) and it will draw you in from the get-go.

We meet our hero not long after he was still too small to say his own name properly, and we see right away that he is smart, timid, and lonely. When I first read this book in 1989 I was thoroughly creeped out by the escaped convict lurking in a graveyard, demanding a file (a metal one, for removing his leg-iron, not a paper one for contesting a will or what have you) and threatening Pip with a cannibal's revenge.

In chapter 2 we meet Pip's older sister and brother-in-law, along with Tickler, whose existence tells you most of what you need to know about Mrs. Joe Gargery. And even though it might seem a little early for Dickens to start talking about social ills, it's there if you've got your eyes open: prison overcrowding is bad, kids, and convicts deserve more humane treatment than the Hulks.

If you are looking for a free version, I suggest that you avoid Project Gutenberg, which inserts a seriously spoiler-y image with a seriously spoiler-y caption right before chapter 1. When I first read Anna Karenina, the back cover copy had apparently been written by an over-eager new grad: it connected the dots between the opening and closing railway safety incidents. They described the climax of the novel on the back cover! Who does that?! This image/caption combo is just as bad, so maybe find yourself a free Kindle version instead.

Next up, pork pie at dawn! This is the slowest-paced AMDRAL we've ever done, so maybe it's your year to jump on in.

TAMDRAL Time

This will be the tenth year in which I have hosted a Dickens read-along in this space after the end of the spring semester. Here's what we've read so far:

2022 Nicholas Nickleby
2021 Little Dorrit
2020 Oliver Twist
2019 Tale of Two Cities
2018 Pickwick Papers
2017 Martin Chuzzlewit
2016 David Copperfield
2015 Our Mutual Friend
2014 Bleak House

For the Tenth Annual May Dickens Read-ALong this year I am thinking about reading either Great Expectations or The Old Curiosity Shop, starting on May 15 after grades are submitted. Want to join me? Any preference?

Book Notes

Have we had a book post recently? I don't think so. I've finished eight books over the past month and some of them were marvelous. Maybe I will write about them in appreciation order rather than chronological order.

1. Romantic Comedy. I love Curtis Sittenfeld; she is on the short list of authors whose books I will always pre-order. This one is hilarious and tender and also thought-provoking. I persuaded the roommates that they should read it too so we can have Zoom book club again like we did when Rodham came out. I am still not quite sure that I buy the premise but I WISH I bought the premise. How likely is it for a famously handsome male celebrity to date someone less attractive and more intelligent? Color me skeptical, but I loved the book anyway.
2. The Latecomer. My friend Becky recommended this one to me and I gobbled it right up. It's about a family of triplets who are followed much later by a singleton sibling, and I enjoyed it immensely. This is the second Jean Hanff Korelitz book I've read; I am a fan of her characters and her plotting and her writing style. Here too I am not entirely sure that I buy the premise but I was willing to suspend disbelief.
3. The Great Divorce. And now for something completely different! Stella was telling me recently how strange she'd found the beginning of this book, and I was agreeing with her. I couldn't remember if I'd ever finished it, but I decided I'd pick it up again. I finished it tonight and I might start it over tomorrow morning.
4.  The Sweet Spot. I think this was an Ask A Manager recommendation, maybe? Funny, engaging, full of endearing characters. Yet again I am a leetle dubious about the premise, but whatever. I enjoyed it enough to give it to my mother for her birthday, and she gave it a happy thumbs-up.
5. I Have Some Questions For You. I pre-ordered this one because I loved The Great Believers so much when I read it last summer. And I liked this one-- I like her writing and she did a good job with the plotting and the pacing. But it was also hard to read because it's about violence against women and about who gets away with what in this country. I would not call it a hopeful book.
6. Dr. Wortle's School. I picked this one as my next Trollope novel pretty much randomly after I finished Miss Mackenzie. They both feel a little lightweight after The Way We Live Now, but I guess most books are going to seem less hefty than TWWLN. Both books have a lot to say about marriage. Will Miss Mackenzie choose a husband? (It's a more interesting question than it sounds.) What does a choice to violate marriage law say about a person's moral state? What should we make of a person who does a bad thing for a good reason? 
7. Run Like A Pro. I've recommended a bunch of Matt Fitzgerald books here over the years; I'm lukewarm about this one. He pushes high-volume running, which I am not really cut out for. He also says bench presses will slow you down, because they add useless mass to your upper body. You'll tear that barbell from my cold dead hands, Matt. Bench presses are awesome.
8. Honor. Included for completeness; not a fan. More violence against women; more failures of the legal system.

Today I started The Three Clerks, because I got an email from the UK Trollope Society. They'll be meeting in Cambridge this month to discuss it. It's an in-person meeting; I will not be putting my passport-less self on a plane to talk about obscure Trollope novels. But I love the idea of reading Trollope with other people, so I downloaded the free Kindle version. (Amazon said, "Did you mean the Kevin Smith movie 'Clerks III,' Jamie?" No, Amazon, I did not. Those two things could hardly be more different.) I was trying to tell Elwood about how witty it is. "He's joking about the Board of Commissioners for Regulating Weights and Measures! AND decimalization of English currency!" I told him, with all the enthusiasm at the command of someone whose middle name might be Enthusiastic if it weren't Patricia.

He does not find my fondness for Trollope persuasive, alas. But here's my plan, friends: I am going to crank through The Three Clerks, which promises to be a rip-roaring* tale of love and bureaucracy. And then! It will be TAMDRAL time! I have not given much thought at all to this year's Dickens Read-Along. Maybe we can chat about that tomorrow. If you can stand the suspense, that is.

(*Okay, okay, it's possible that "rip-roaring" is a mild exaggeration. How about "gently and consistently funny, with charming characters and a delicious authorial voice"?)

Enthusiasm tempered

I finished Unraveling today and I am less enthusiastic than I was in my last post. I think it's largely an editing issue. In one chapter there were spots where she used very similar phrases close together on the same page, in a way that I would absolutely understand in a second draft but found grating in a published book. The diversity of topics that seemed pleasingly eclectic early on seemed a little more scattershot toward the end of the book -- I'm still not clear how the section on Fibonacci numbers was supposed to fit. 

Maybe because I know more about planning and knitting sweaters than I do about shearing and spinning fleece, I had less patience with her uncertainties in those chapters; maybe a non-knitter would like those better than I did. Or maybe it's just hard to write a whole book about making a sweater and hold the reader's interest all the way through. I had a similar experience with Adrienne Martini's book Sweater Quest -- the first half was more fun than the second half. Final verdict: glad I finished it, would still recommend it, but the recommendation is a little more measured now.

A couple of interesting books about women that might be niche recommendations

I am reading Peggy Orenstein's pandemic memoir, Unraveling, and I am really enjoying it. She'd always been a knitter, but during the pandemic she decided to learn how to shear a sheep, process and card the fleece, and spin her own yarn. But I don't think -- I'm not sure, but I really don't think -- it's too fiber-artsy for the non-fiber-arts-inclined among us. And you guys, there is SO much interesting stuff woven in (ha! see what I did there!) among the spinning bits. For instance, she discusses:

• research quantifying the amount of labor required of Viking women to produce sails in a time before spinning wheels
• textile millworkers as key drivers of both organized labor and the women's movement
• the face recognition abilities of sheep (better than mine!)

She has a lot to say about the fashion industry, and it's well timed for me given my recent forays into more sustainable clothing. The writing is zippy and engaging, and it's such an evocative book. That was a wild time to be alive, and lament and uncertainty are beautifully interleaved with fabric factoids and anti-fast-fashion segments. Enthusiastically recommended, with the caveat that I might have more patience for passages about sheep breeds than the average reader.

Yesterday I finished Trollope novel #14, Miss Mackenzie. On one of my recent-ish book posts, Nicole-the-Victorian-lit-professor (as distinct from Canadian Nicole, whose teaching interests lie more in the yoga-ward direction) asked me what I thought about Trollope's female characters, and the answer is that I am generally a fan. In contrast to Dickens, who has approximately five female characters to whom he assigns different names across all of his books, Trollope usually does a nice job creating interesting characters who also happen to be women. I had low expectations for this book because of its obscurity, but I'm glad I read it.

I wish I knew of a Trollope-loving corner of the internet. There are UK and US Trollope societies, but they seem to be a little too academic for my taste. I want a 1990s-ish bulletin board, or something like Pemberley, only Trollope-flavored. Lady Glencora Palliser makes an appearance late in Miss Mackenzie and I was so pleased to see her there-- alive and well, not yet a duchess, presumably rolling her eyes affectionately at Plantagenet's plans to decimalize English currency. Alas, the number of people to whom I can say, "You guys, you guys, it's Lady Glencora Palliser!" is approximately zero.

Well, I did say it to my husband, who nodded patiently if bemusedly, but you know what I mean.

Books that reward persistence

Nicole posted today about abandoning books, and it made me think about books that I've kept reading when I wasn't enthusiastic about them. Sometimes it's a great decision, and sometimes it means throwing away additional hours of my life on something that wasn't worth the time.

When we were living in Scotland an older friend from church gave me a copy of Far from the Madding Crowd. I did not enjoy the first three-quarters of that book, you guys. I was pushing myself to finish it because it had been a gift from this kind and helpful person, but I was forcing myself to read it. And then! to my amazement! the last quarter of the book was really, really good.

A friend's recommendation is not always sufficient. I kept waiting for the part when I would like Middlemarch, because a different friend said, "You will absolutely love it!" I did not love it: not at the beginning, not in the middle, and not even at the end. That was a LOT of waiting fruitlessly for things to improve.

It's pretty common for me to start a book, set it aside, and then come back to it. Two of the best books I read in 2022 were Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait, and I had to start them both more than once before they caught my interest.

But it's also pretty common for me to buy a book, read part of it, and then feel that I ought to finish it because of some blend of stubbornness and enduring susceptibility to the sunk cost fallacy.

You must have books in both categories, too. What's something that you were glad you put in the effort to finish? What's something that wasn't actually worth the time it required?

Books I have been reading recently

I forgot that I pre-ordered Lauren Fleshman's Good for a Girl until it showed up in my Kindle library yesterday. I devoured it. I loved Fleshman's voice when she was writing for Runner's World and so the book was an easy sell. But it was a hard read. It was an extended reminder that we live in a world where people just keep looking at women's bodies and saying, "Hm, you know what would improve this situation? If there were less of you, that's what." In competitive running as in the rest of women's lives, weight loss might offer a small short-term improvement but it does so with enormous medium-term and long-term costs. Fleshman does a nice job juxtaposing the joy of running against the train-wreck-itude of vast swaths of women's sports. I found it both sobering and encouraging, reading about all the damage that has been done to female athletes, and her determination to put future coaches on a better path.

I also forgot that I pre-ordered Catherine Newman's We All Want Impossible Things until it showed up in my Kindle library, but I did not devour it right away. I read the first half of the first chapter a few times and then got distracted. But once I got out of the first chapter I couldn't put it down. It is riotously funny -- the kind of snort-laugh funny that I can't read in bed because I might accidentally shake my husband awake giggling -- which is a little weird for a book about a woman losing her best friend to cancer. It is also hauntingly sad. In hindsight there are some implausible parts (like the hospice doctor's on-the-clock extracurricular activities, excuse me? and also the whole setup of the book -- would this character really leave her kid to go to an out-of-state hospice facility?), but I enjoyed the heck out of it anyway.

On the last day of 2022 I finished Four Thousand Weeks, which I had seen recommended in a zillion different places and started a few times. I found the first two-thirds of it every bit as thought-provoking as promised, but then he kinda lost me in the last chunk. I'm curious about whether you've read it and what you thought. Biggest takeaways: I would like to travel more, and I would like to dedicate more time to creative pursuits (specifically, music and fiction-writing). This book was a factor in my decision to finish the recording I posted on Monday. In the sections where I am singing harmony with myself I just could not find the F♯ in the alto part. I got it wrong an exasperating number of times, but I stuck it out because it's too easy for me to say to myself, "I don't have time to become a better musician." This is a less vulnerable way to live, but it is not a true statement. 

One more recommendation: it has been a month since I finished Demon Copperhead, and I keep meaning to tell you how much I loved it. It's one of the best books I read in 2022, my favorite of the Barbara Kingsolver novels I've read, and a really well-done homage to David Copperfield. If you had told me up front that the Dora character would be an opioid addict I would have given the book some serious side-eye, but it works amazingly well. I'd love to chat about it with somebody else who loves Copperfield, so say the word if that's you.

Girl Cooties

As a kid my husband read plenty of Hardy Boys and no Nancy Drew. He read voraciously, but he never made the acquaintance of the female characters whose stories filled my childhood: no Anne Shirley, no Rebecca Rowena Randall, no Caddie Woodlawn, no Laura Ingalls, no Sara Crewe, no Mary Lennox, no Heidi (whose last name I have forgotten if ever I knew it). No Ramona Quimby or Ellen Tebbits, no Harriet the Spy, no Judy Blume.

I have known this for years, but for some reason we were just talking about it at dinner. "What would have happened if you'd read a Nancy Drew book?" I asked him. He shrugged. "I would have been a sissy?" he suggested, struggling to remember the logic of late 70s/early 80s playgrounds and classrooms.

This morning I read Nicole's recent post (HI NICOLE) in which she mentioned The Mists of Avalon, and it sparked a memory for me of a high school friend who loved that book. I asked Elwood, who read boatloads of science fiction/fantasy as a kid, if he had ever read it. "Nope," he said, "girl book." "ELWOOD," I said with a certain emphasis, "do you hear how ridiculous that is? It would not have caused your penis to shrivel up and wither away if you had read a book about women!" He agreed with me, because that particular piece of logic is inarguable, but I do not expect that he will hasten to rectify the imbalance.

I have known about this asymmetry for years; I perpetuated this asymmetry with the books I gave my own boys to read. But it struck me forcefully this morning: this is patriarchy propagating itself. If girls are expected to read books about boys, but a boy's masculinity is threatened by reading books about girls, we are going to live in a lopsided world. Things get better more quickly when we understand each other's perspectives more thoroughly.

So! Here is my suggestion for anyone who is in gift-buying mode: buy a man you love one of your favorite childhood books, written by a woman for an audience of girls. Ask him to measure the number of girl cooties visible on his body before and after he reads it. Tell him it's for science. 

Currently Reading

Demon Copperhead. I might be the ideal audience for this book, as someone who loves David Copperfield and enjoys Barbara Kingsolver and grew up not far from the pocket of Appalachia in which it is set. It's good; it's tough to read. You can know what happened to David Copperfield's mom and still find the analogous section of this book pretty painful. I need to finish it before Libby takes it back.

How the Word is Passed. "You must read this," said my college roommate Amy, and so I am reading it. It is also both worth reading and hard to read. It also has an upcoming due date that I am trying to beat.

The Way We Live Now. Excellent. Very long. Finally into the part where I am invested. Aiming to finish by the end of the year.

How about you? What's on your bedside table these days?

Tranquility by Tuesday, the follow-up post

When I participated in Laura Vanderkam's Tranquility by Tuesday project, I was tired by the end. I've told you before about what a brutal semester that was, and by rules 8 and 9 I was like, "Really, Laura, you want me to do MORE THINGS? I have done a lot of things for you already."

I bought the book last month and got bogged down after rule 7, but yesterday I picked it back up and finished it off. The last two rules tell you to batch the little things and put effortful fun before effortless fun, and I am going to make an effort to implement both of them.

She says, very sensibly, that if you have a place in your calendar to do small tasks in short bursts, they won't take up as much space in your head and they won't take up as much time in your day. She advises readers to set aside an afternoon block -- that's when your energy level is lower but you can still do the piddly things on your list, like calling to schedule the annual maintenance for your furnace. This is good advice. Perhaps I will implement it today, even.

When I first read the phrase "effortful fun" I gave it some side-eye, because Laura Vanderkam has some hardcore ideas about effortful fun. It would be too much work for me to take young children to the Netherlands to see the tulips bloom; it does not sound pleasant to me no matter how much she seemed to enjoy it. I would rather sit on my couch and knit than go to Disney; I have never been to a Disney theme park and I do not plan to go. So when she (a regular Disney-goer) told me to emphasize effortful fun in a semester when my life felt like an unrelenting outlay of effort, I pretty much said: 

via GIPHY

But! Then I read a little more closely, and realized that she is not telling me to pop over to the Netherlands on an ordinary weeknight. Instead, she is saying to think about what I want to do instead of scrolling. Reading counts as effortful fun. Sitting on the couch and knitting counts as effortful fun, because crafting requires some effort and results in a creative product. She's telling me not to let my life get eaten by social media and passive consumption of TV shows, and I am totally on board with that advice.

So this is my plan: a daily 3:00 block for processing email and small tasks, and an Advent social media break. Care to join me?

This is a pretty niche book recommendation

I can't remember now how I ran across Tony Ginocchio's writing, but it was probably somewhere on Twitter. He has an intermittently updated Substack called Grift of the Holy Spirit, which is mostly hilarious takedowns of the Church's more takedown-worthy elements. Here's an example from August, about right-wing Catholic responses to that Atlantic article about the weaponization of the rosary. (You guys, I recently met a woman who talked enthusiastically about how the rosary is Our Lady's AK-47, and I am still trying to get my mind around the idea of the Blessed Mother asking all her children to use Russian assault rifles every day, please and thank you. What even, I ask you.)  He also has another Substack where he writes about Newbery-award-winning children's literature.

Earlier this week he posted about his novel, Anybody But Us, and I enjoy his writing enough that I downloaded it immediately and read it over the next few days. It's about a fictional master's program at a fictional Catholic college, where grad students live in community and teach in archdiocesan schools, and I really enjoyed it.

I appreciated its sense of place. There's a scene where a character takes the bus south after a job interview on the north side, and I found it surprisingly evocative in its descriptions of Chicago's divisions between rich and poor. I loved the characters' blend of idealism and cynicism. There's one hilarious character who rants endlessly about justice, and I love the glimpses we get into what he's really thinking. As the book goes on we see the characters making decisions about what comes next; the process is poignant and believable.

I am probably 15 years older than his target audience and I did not get all of his jokes, but I laughed and laughed at this book. I would love to sit down and have a chat with the author sometime. I have questions for him. (For instance, when the ranting character attributes Evangelium Vitae to Paul VI, is that the author showing us the character's error, to indicate that he's not as smart as he thinks he is, or was that an authorial oversight?)

Among the people who read this blog, I know there are some who love Chicago and some who have thoughts about Catholic education and some who are wrangling with questions about how the Church can/should do its work in the world, and some who wonder sometimes how much any of us can make a difference. I feel like you probably need to fit into a couple of those categories to enjoy this book. But if you do tick any of those boxes, you might really like it.

The Marriage Portrait

When I finished Hamnet I pre-ordered Maggie O'Farrell's next book, The Marriage Portrait. When it came out, though, I had some trouble getting into it. I read the beginning; I frowned. I read the beginning again. I stopped reading. 

But then six weeks later I went back to it. And you guys, it was SO good. I loved it. I'm still thinking about it. I loved the world she describes, and its characters, and the way she wove together the strands of her plot. I was not expecting suspense and yet my heart was in my mouth toward the end. I loved the ending even though the sadness of it still tugs at me. I even loved the author's note -- I did not know what those Medici husbands got up to. Highly recommended.

Still another Tuesday book release

I cannot remember the last time I bought this many books on release day in a one-month period, but I did it again today. This time the occasion was the publication of Laura Vanderkam's Tranquility by Tuesday. 

You might remember that I was one of her participants when she tested out the nine principles in the book. I wrote about it in March of 2021. That was one of the least tranquil periods of my adult life. HOOOOOO BOY, I started to explain briefly why it was such a stressful time and YOWZA, I do not especially want to dredge up the memories. (But here's the nutshell version: figuring out online teaching with a dreadful new prep on top of everything else, dealing with an administrative error that left me unable to hold any synchronous meetings for two of my classes, adjusting to post-sabbatical re-entry while also dealing with piles of lingering revisions necessitated by the COVID academic publishing slowdowns, all in the context of our first pandemic winter when hardly anyone was vaccinated yet.)

The scientist in me is very curious, actually: is it easier to boost tranquility in someone whose baseline level is "so far below normal that you'd need a hydraulic drilling rig to dig that far down," or in someone who is feeling more normal?

We shall see, I suppose. As I mentioned at the time, the rules about building productivity were easy for me to get on board with. I am good about maintaining a consistent bedtime; I agree at least in theory about weekly planning sessions even if I sometimes think longingly about skipping them. (OOOHH, MAN, I just got a figurative wallop in the face from another memory: I knew that I needed to be planning my weeks carefully in early 2021, that it was my only hope of staying on top of things. I would look at my massive to-do lists and I would just want to cry. So many tasks, hardly any of which I wanted to do. My current workload is SO MUCH more manageable and rewarding. I have so much fun in the classroom -- time flies, and people ask questions and laugh and stay engaged. It is slightly weird that people laughed as much as they did today when the subject was phonatory physiology, but life is full of surprises.)

As I said at the time, I am better at the work rules than the fun rules. Planning adventures, taking a night just for me-- I know those are good ideas in the abstract and yet I struggle with them. 

I'm not very far into the book, since it just came out today (I've already spotted a quote from 2021 Jamie, though). I'll keep reading and report back. If you undertake a tranquility project of your own, tell me how it goes.

Another Tuesday, another high-body-count novel release

I've been looking forward to the 27th of September, you guys, because it is release day for the third book in the Scholomance series. I always enjoy Naomi Novik's writing, and the second book ended with an almost unforgivable cliffhanger. In contrast to last Tuesday's Kindle notification, which took me by surprise (wait, I pre-ordered that book?), this one was in big purple letters on my mental calendar of Fun Things To Anticipate Cheerfully.

Cheerful is perhaps a weird state of mind in which to approach the Scholomance books, because there is a fair amount of gory death in them. Cheerful is exactly where I find myself, though, pajama-ed and ready to hop into bed with my Kindle.

It took me a couple of chapters to get into the first Scholomance book despite my fondness for Naomi Novik's other books, so if you jump in and find it off-putting, give it a little time. I think Mrs. Darwin posted recently about disliking the second book, so they're not for everybody. But if you tend to enjoy books with prickly female characters figuring out where they're heading, you might like El and her friends.

Murder most jolly

Past Jamie pre-ordered the third book in the Thursday Murder Club series, and Present Jamie had a moment of annoyance when the Kindle delivery notification came in today. It feels a little extravagant to pay $15 for a Kindle book instead of hopping into the library queue. There are a few authors whose books I always buy on release day, but the list is short and they are all women. I was a little surprised that I had clicked the pre-order button.

But then I started reading it at the optometrist's office, and I was laughing out loud from the first chapter. 

This week I am feeling the difference between teaching 100- and 200-level students and teaching 300- and 400-level students. It's not totally out of the question that a grad student would email me on a Friday evening and say, "Hey, I forgot to take quiz before the deadline and I need you to open it back up for me so I can do it tomorrow [i.e., Saturday -- I bet you told your professors all the time about the things they needed to do for you on a Saturday, right?]." But if that were ever to happen, the grad student and I would be having a capital-C Conversation about professionalism. With the first- and second-year students it's a different set of expectations. 

This week I am giving two exams and a substantial quiz, which might not have been optimal planning on my part. It means that I have three sets of students in various stages of stressed-out-ness, and the less experienced ones have a lot of thoughts for me about how I could make their lives easier. "You're not even making us a study guide," said one unhappy student today. Which is true: I am not. 

I got so much email today -- so much vexing email, specifically -- that I did not finish my afternoon tasks before I needed to pick up Stella and take her to the optometrist. And I thought about pulling out my laptop to hack and slash a little further through the pile, but I did not know how long we would be sitting there. I decided instead to read my book, and it was so much fun that I forgot how grumpy I was. That, my friends, is a RINGING endorsement.

The characters are so delightful. I love them all. The narrative voice is a riot. The plots of the first two strained credulity at times, but here at the home of the AMDRALs we do not mind a wee bit of implausibility in our plots. Will #3 be as pleasant as #1 and #2? (Maybe pleasant is a strange descriptor for books that are in fact about murder.) I do not know, but it's off to a great start. I am going to put my pajamas on, even though it is still very early, and read in bed. I might even skip my nightly Trollope chapter so I can read more of The Bullet That Missed.

OOOOHHH, say all the people who read this blog, who could ask for a more enthusiastic recommendation than THAT?

13% of #13, or In Bed With Trollope

I have read thirteen of the 100 chapters in The Way We Live Now, which is my thirteenth Trollope novel. 

I think, though I am not fully committed to the idea, that the novels of Trollope will be my next long-haul reading project. It's just -- phew, that man wrote a lot of novels. He wrote f-o-r-t-y-s-e-v-e-n novels. FORTY-SEVEN. This is a lot of reading and I am already 52 years old. That's, like, the equivalent of three Dickens projects. It's a lot.

Even so, I am going to take a stab at it and see if it brings me joy. I've told you before about how much I enjoy his voice-- he had clearly been thinking for a long time about what makes people tick, and why they do the goofy things they do. The Way We Live Now involves some of the same characters and places I already know from the Palliser Chronicles, and that appeals to me as well. I do NOT love Mr. Melmotte. Have I read somewhere else that he is going to be exposed as a shameless fraud? Or is he just enough like Mr. Merdle from Little Dorrit that I know he's like a nineteenth-century Bernie Madoff? Or maybe I don't actually know that, and he is going to turn out to be a perfectly reputable businessman. I would be preeeetty surprised if that were the case, but life is full of unexpected happenings.

I am finding that it works well for me to read a chapter a night in bed. Reading faster-paced books in bed sometimes keeps me awake longer than is good for me, but Trollope is a very pleasant way to end the day: interesting but never heart-stopping, amusing but not hilarious. I never wake my husband up snort-laughing because I am reading Trollope, but his books often make me smile.

I am not making him sound particularly compelling, am I? If I were trying to start a Trollope club I'd have to rethink my approach entirely. Maybe I'd post some Instagram pictures of me making serious and interested faces at a Trollope novel while reading it over my açai bowl. Maybe I'd make a reel highlighting the funniest parts, except I'd have to learn how to make a reel first. I am pretty sure #Trollope is not going to be making the rounds among the hashtagging mom-fluencers, but luckily this has never been a mom-fluencer kind of blog. 

You will just have to imagine me in my pajamas, smiling and nodding and then nodding off. Probably not the next big TikTok trend, but maybe, if you're looking for a way to ease into both sleep and Victorian literature, you would enjoy it too.

Surprisingly prescient

When I finished Hamnet I was looking for something similarly satisfying. There is a lot of sadness in Hamnet, because it is about a child dying of bubonic plague, but the sadness is embedded in so much goodness. I loved the sense of place, and the illustration of a family grieving together, and the reminder that doing what you are made to do requires time and perseverance (and may never seem reasonable to your parents), and its ideas about how we remember the people we have loved and lost. It was definitely going to be hard to follow. Something deep in my brain said, "Hmm, feel-good books about the Black Death..." (Probably a short list, huh?) Its workings whirred and clicked and spat out...Doomsday Book.

I posted about Doomsday Book when I read it six years ago, but it hits differently in 2022. I had only the vaguest memory that the residents of the Oxford time-travel universe had lived through a capital-P Pandemic in the mid-2010s. Theirs killed 65 million people, which probably earns it the capital P. (Globally COVID-19 deaths are at about 10% of that number right now.)

I was amused (and also impressed!) when I read that the early stages of quarantine in Oxford caused a toilet paper shortage. And one line in particular lands more forcefully this time around. There's a group of American tourists who get pretty shirty (do we say that in American English? or is a British expression springing to my fingertips because I'm writing about Oxford?) about the quarantine restrictions. "In America," one of them huffs, "nobody would dream of telling you where you can or can't go." Mr. Dunworthy says to himself, "And over thirty million Americans died in the Pandemic as a result of that sort of thinking."

I suppose anytime you read a book set in a future to which you are much closer than the author was, you're going to bump up against oversights. When she wrote in 1992 about a flurry of unsuccessful attempts to reach a university administrator on holiday, Willis did not foresee the world in which I keep muting group texts from my colleagues in a futile attempt to be marginally less reachable. ("Email!" I want to tell them. "This is why we have email! Do not text me about fall syllabi when I am not under contract!") Willis is surprisingly perceptive, though, when she writes about our collective reactions to an unknown and dangerous disease-- the way that fear and uncertainty bring out both the best and the worst in us.

Things that make me happy

1. Hamnet. You guys, this book is so good. I downloaded a sample when it first came out, but I found that I did not want to read about children dying of plague in July of 2020. The sample sat on my Kindle for a long time, causing my thoughts to run in a loop: you loved those other Maggie O'Farrell books -> maybe you should give this one another try -> but children, dying of plague -> but you loved those other Maggie O'Farrell books, etc. Recently Overdrive suggested it to me when I was looking for a different library book, and I thought, "Sure, why not?" I want to find out what happens next and also I do not want it to end. I love the writing, I love the characters, I love the world they inhabit. So so good.
   
   
2. This may seem unrelated to item #1, but there is actually a direct link: I love weightlifting. I was thinking back to the other two Maggie O'Farrell books I've read: I Am I Am I Am and This Must Be the Place [affiliate links]. I have a tactile memory of reading This Must Be the Place. I very much wanted to know what the characters would do next, but I was sitting very still, purposefully still, while I turned the pages to find out. I joked about it at the time, even though I did not feel much like joking: I had sustained a mayonnaise injury, and my back kept shooting out fiery tendrils of pain when I moved the wrong way. 
   
   Since I started lifting heavy things I have been (knock wood!) completely free of the random back and neck pains, from twinges all the way to immobilizing fiery tendrils, that had plagued me at unpredictable intervals for my whole adult life. I would have thought I was reasonably strong in 2017; I had completed a 10K and a triathlon earlier that year and I was doing yoga with some regularity. I cannot say with certainty that the disappearance of cricks in my neck and pains in my back is causally related to lifting weights, but the timing is definitely suggestive.
   
   
3. Does anyone remember hearing about the Slaw of Happiness? It was a gentle little joke, right? Haha, slaw can't really make you happy. But! You guys! In that Next Level book I was just telling you about, the authors say that women at midlife need to be eating cruciferous vegetables every day. They feed your gut microbiome, which is adversely affected by perimenopausal changes, and which is linked to mental health in ways we are just starting to figure out. The authors also assert that cruciferous veggies are rich in a compound that is important for optimizing the hormonal milieu, but I have to admit that I am a little vague on the differences between estrone and estradiol and all of their cousins.
   
   The authors say you should put frozen cauliflower in smoothies, an idea that causes me to retch a little if I even think about it for too long, so I'm not saying that I'm going to run with all of their advice. I do, however, think it might be smart to whip up a nice big batch of the Slaw of Happiness. Or maybe another batch of Speckled Slaw, which I made for the first time on the Fourth of July. I was not sure what our guests would think about raw beets in slaw but they scarfed it right down.
   
   
4. Item #4 may also seem disconnected from its predecessor, because German sock yarn and funky beet cole slaw do not appear to have a lot in common. But I got them both from the Modern Daily Knitting site, and they are both bringing me joy. I cast on a new pair of socks for Marie today, after finishing up Stella's newest pair over the weekend. The picture does not do justice to the yummy saturated colors. If I could only knit one thing with one yarn for the rest of my life, it would be Zauberball socks. I also bought a Zauberball in fiery gorgeous shades of orange to make a pair for myself. Mmmm, I can't wait.

How about you? Reading anything good? Are you tearing off to put cauliflower in a smoothie? Do tell.

Things I read while mostly holed up in my bedroom

Today is the tenth day since I developed COVID symptoms, and even though I am only 75% of the way through it I am eating dinner with the family like a rebel. 

I have been thinking so many thoughts about Friday's decision and the reactions to it, but none of those thoughts are ready to be aired at this point. So instead I am going to tell you about the books I read in isolation. (As usual, these are affiliate links.)

COVID book #1: Under Heaven. One summer when Joe was looking around for something to read, I suggested Tigana. He loved it, and then he and Pete got way, way into Guy Gavriel Kay. They've both been telling me for a while that I should read more Kay. I had bought Under Heaven during a Kindle sale, and last Sunday after my positive COVID test I was grateful for a different world in which to immerse myself. I enjoyed it -- enjoyed the characters and their relationships and following the imperial machinations. Last Sunday I was chatting about it with Joe via text and I said: "It's probably hard to write about women in that era in a way that’s rooted in history but also doesn’t come across as 'she’s pretty smart for a girl!' The powerlessness of the women was difficult to read about." 

I had no idea just how much I was about to be reading about women and power.

COVID book #2: Crazy to Leave You. I can't remember the last time a book left such a bad taste in my mouth. I'm not linking to it; don't buy it. Don't even borrow it. It's ostensibly about a woman who gets left at the altar, but it is actually about the way that a lifetime of immersion in diet culture will break your brain. I am not amused these days by humor that hinges on the reality that when grown women restrict themselves to a daily caloric intake more suitable for small children, their bodies push back. It could have been funny. It tried really hard to be funny. But these days I am firmly of the opinion that no one else gets a vote on how my body ought to look, and too much of this book smacked of self-loathing rooted in impossible expectations.

Huh, I also had no idea just how much I was about to be reading about women and their bodies.

COVID book #3: The Great Believers. Best book I've read this year. It had some personal resonance for me, because it is set in Chicago and Evanston during the very years when I was living and working in those same parts of Chicago and Evanston. You will probably not read it and say, "I bet that's the laundromat on Halsted where I used to wash my clothes!" (unless we used to be neighbors), but I think that if you read it you will be gripped by the characters and their stories of living in Boystown between the mid-80s and the early 90s, when AIDS was widespread and almost uniformly deadly. This is the thing I kept thinking: where was the Church? If we really believe we are called to go to the margins and serve the vulnerable, it seems in hindsight like a clarion call to serve people with AIDS. There is nobody more vulnerable than a person whose immune system has failed him: his own body ceases to fight on his behalf and the whole world teems with threats against which he no longer has functioning defenses. And yet when this particular disease hit that particular marginalized community, the US Church as a whole did not say, "Christ has no body but ours; let's go! Unto the least of these; let's move!" The characters in this book do not say to themselves, "You know who is sure to offer me compassionate assistance? The Catholics, that's who." Unsurprising, and yet...

Wow, I ALSO had no idea just how much I was going to be thinking about strategies for protecting the vulnerable and marginalized.

COVID book #4: Wish You Were Here. I borrowed this one because my mom recommended it enthusiastically. There's a twist in the middle that I didn't like, and I spent the second half of the book feeling annoyed about it. The descriptions of the early days of the pandemic were evocative, but I am lukewarm about this one. And if I think too much about the ending, my bibliothermostat dips below the lukewarm range. Gotta say, though, I'm glad I got COVID in year 3 of the pandemic and not in year 1.

COVID book #5: What We Wish Were True. As soon as I finished the library's copy, I bought my own copy and a copy to give away to a friend. Tallu Schuyler Quinn died in February of an aggressive form of brain cancer, leaving two young children. She was the founder of the Nashville Food Project. She wrote at length about the gifts and limitations of life in a body, as she was watching hers come undone, and she wrote too about her own movement from an emphasis on charity (doing for the poor and marginalized) to an emphasis on justice (doing with them). Even if this were not a particularly critical time to be thinking about charity and justice, and the gifts and limitations of life in a woman's body, this would be a book to come back to.

And done!

Today I completed one of my new year's resolutions: I finished the Palliser Chronicles. Turns out that if you just keep reading them, even big books come to an end.

In the end I didn't like it quite as much the Barsetshire Chronicles, but it was well worth doing.

This is the 169th day of the year, and I have read at least a chapter of Trollope on all 169 of them. I think tomorrow I'll start The Way We Live Now.