Light and Momentary

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.

Recommended

Over the weekend I read Anne Tyler's newest book, French Braid [affiliate link]. When I was in my 20s I loved Anne Tyler's writing, and then I came across a couple of books I didn't enjoy and stopped reading her for a long time. I can't remember why I decided to buy Vinegar Girl in 2016, but I loved it. In 2020 I gobbled up Redhead by the Side of the Road. French Braid reminds me more of the books I loved in the 90s, books like Accidental Tourist and Breathing Lessons. It's the story of a family, with all its complications and quirks and sadnesses. It made me tear up more than once, which is very unusual for me with fiction. I was sad when it was over, which is even more so. (I love finishing books and writing them down on my List of Books Read.) It made me laugh, too -- it's not a downer of a book. But in my memory the poignancy stands out more than the funny bits.

Last week I read Lessons in Chemistry, about a woman who wants to be a scientist and not the star of a cooking show. It is laugh-out-loud funny, salted liberally with zingy observations about life for women in the 1960s, but it is also painful to keep thinking about why that #2 pencil never leaves Elizabeth's bun. There are some fantastical elements -- mostly in the form of a genius dog, but also in the premise of the book. Would 1960s viewers really be all that excited about watching a TV show hosted by a woman who was obviously smarter than they were? I am not convinced about that, but I enjoyed the book anyway.

I am ten chapters from the end of the Palliser Chronicles, you guys. With all the other books in the series, I've read the first half or maybe the first two-thirds at the sedate pace of one chapter a night. By the middle of the other books, though, I've found myself zipping along happily, eager to see what happens to the characters. With The Duke's Children I have still not reached the zipping stage. Even so, I'm excited to be approaching the end of the series. It feels like an accomplishment. It's, like, 4000 pages of Trollope, you guys. I'm going to write it on my List of Books Read with an exclamation point! Or perhaps even two!!

#NAMDRAL, Day 24

The Hardcore Dickens Club decided they would be a leetle less hardcore. I am relieved, I have to say; I thought I was pretty far out there in terms of Dickens enthusiasm, but their initial reading schedule made me blanch. This is why I'm wrapping up Nicholas Nickleby just as they're starting it -- they decided to slow down and take a bit of a break between the end of Oliver Twist and the start of Nicholas Nickleby. I'm looking forward to reading their commentary on it now that they've begun. There's lots of good info in the intro post, and even more in this supplement (spoilers ahoy, though, at that second link).

I'm closing in on the end of our Ninth Annual May Dickens Read-ALong here, my friends.

WHAT will become of Madeline Bray, who is currently lying unconscious in the coach that is whisking her away from her father's home?
WHAT is Arthur Gride hiding?
WHAT does Brooker know?
WHY does Kate keep blushing and sighing?
WILL Ralph Nickleby get his comeuppance?

Who knew 800-page Victorian novels were so suspenseful?

NAMDRAL, Day 11

In Nicholas NIckleby Dickens gives many of his characters a trait that identifies them to the reader as they loop back in and out of the action. Mr. Mantalini enters the room saying "Demnition!" (and perhaps threatening to do away with himself), Lord Frederick Verisopht always finds a reason to invoke the devil, rendered "deyvle," and Mrs. Nickleby gets bogged down in the irrelevant details of her tangential and muddled stories.

In the section I read tonight, Mrs. Nickleby talks about her mother's run-in with a hairdresser who was escaping from a bear. Or was it a bear escaping from a hairdresser? 

I read this and thought, "Ah, yes, Mrs. Nickleby is being quirkier than usual." But then I checked the endnote.

Apparently, there was a late 18th-century English hairdresser named Gillingwater, who kept bears in the basement of his shop because bear grease was a popular hair tonic. Periodically he would post a sign out front saying that a bear had just been killed, so everyone would know that the bear grease was nice and fresh.

I suppose if a person keeps bears in the basement, it is entirely plausible that one's neighbors might have the occasional run-in with a proprietor being chased by a bear -- or a bear being chased by a proprietor.

Who knew the England of yore was such an exciting place to live?

#NAMDRAL, day 1

Today begins the Ninth Annual May Dickens Read-ALong, and you are cordially invited to snag yourself a copy of Nicholas Nickleby and join us. We'd be delighted to read with you if you are so inclined!

We've got your brothers with sharply divergent priorities, your death by broken heart, your villain pretending to care deeply about looking out for children's best interests, and of course we've got a naive young hero heading off for what he hopes will be a future full of promise. And that's just on Day 1!

Nicholas Nickleby is an early Dickens novel, and it is more lighthearted than some of his later offerings. It has the wit and zing of his early writing, but in it he's moving away from the episodic style of Sketches and Pickwick and beginning to demonstrate his flair for complex plot maneuvers. What awaits our hero in Yorkshire? You know you want to know!

More thoughts from Stolen Focus

I am nearing the end of Stolen Focus, and it is full of things to think about.

One thing Hari writes about is the cost of distraction in terms of brainpower. The idea that distractions make us dumber is pretty familiar by now, but the degree of the diminishment is startling. He cites research that suggests we perform 20 to 30% worse if we're working around smartphone interruptions. He says, in fact, that you'd be better off working stoned than working while toggling between texts and Facebook and work tasks.

His most scathing chapters are focused on the companies that are profiting from our fractured attention. He says there are six ways that they are causing damage to our capacity to focus and think hard about complex issues, and I found the breakdown especially interesting. The first one is familiar: you don't have to read much about social media to know that the slow drip of likes and favorites and retweets affects our brains. I have to think anybody who uses social media has used it in that particularly frustrating way: did anyone like my joke? how many people liked my joke? is there more engagement now? now? Creating a desire for unpredictable rewards is straight out of the B.F. Skinner playbook.

This behavior fosters (#2) more frequent task-switching, which makes it harder to do the actually important parts of your job, and data mining means that the Big Tech folks have access to (#3) surprisingly specific information about how to worm their way into your unique brain and lure you back in. He quotes a former Google engineer who calls it attention fracking -- an apt metaphor given the way that these sites can poison the well.

The fourth mechanism is very familiar but I had wondered if it was just me. Does Twitter make me mad because I'm an easily angered person? No, says Hari. Twitter makes me mad because making people mad is profitable. It keeps them consuming your content -- and the fact that anger is terrible for focused attention is secondary. On a related note (#5), they give you the sense that you're immersed in an angry world, which tends to send people into a vigilant state. Vigilance (the need to attend to the world around you) is bad for sustained attention (the attempt to focus on the thing right in front of you, to the exclusion of other stimuli). 

Hari is most concerned about the attention economy's effects on our collective attention (#6). "These sites," he says, "set society on fire." His section on the potential for Facebook and YouTube to enhance polarization and spread falsehoods rapidly is bleak and sobering. I don't want to believe it. And yet -- what is the proportion of Americans who believe the 2020 election was stolen? Hari says that if you are being fed a steady diet of nonsense and falsehood because it generates ad dollars, it becomes harder to know what is true and to think carefully about what is right.

Stolen Focus

I'm further into Stolen Focus (affiliate link) and finding it more consistently interesting. (And depressing-- awfully depressing.)

Johann Hari, the author, spent three unplugged months in Provincetown. He took a laptop that couldn't connect to the internet and an emergencies-only phone that couldn't text or browse. He read a lot of books; he took a lot of long walks and let his mind wander. He makes it sound pretty awesome, at least to this particular reader (who is currently fighting a losing battle against her Nonograms addiction).

One of the things he writes about is flow: how happy it makes us, and how fragile it is. This was the very best part of sabbatical, the way that on good days I could dive in deeply and think hard about hard things. It feels pretty hard to recapture that feeling in my ordinary working life. There are too many emails, too much reply-all nonsense, too many knocks on the door. You have heard this lament before but it is one of the most important factors in my job satisfaction: am I putting in enough research time? Generally the answer feels like no. And the less I do it, the more friction there is when I try to get back into it. 

I have some stuff coming up this summer that I hope will help. Gladlyville U sponsors a May writing camp and I just found out that my application was accepted. I'm also doing a well-regarded summer program focused on strengthening writing habits. We shall see how much of a difference that makes.

Hari also writes about the importance of what he calls mind-wandering time. It's a little strange to say I'm feeling a dearth of wool-gathering time, but there used to be more of it -- time on the treadmill, time walking alone to and from work. I haven't read any of the science that looks at what wool-gathering does for cognition, but I absolutely believe it matters. 

So I'm mostly on board with what Hari is saying. He talks a fair amount about the decline of reading, but that feels less relevant for me. I am more curious than convicted about those findings. Query #1: he says we do not read text on the screen with the same kind of focus that we use to read text on the printed page. But I'm pretty sure that I have multiple reading modes on a screen. I absolutely do that hopping-around-finding-the-key-facts thing that he deplores if I'm skimming an article to see whether it deserves my full attention, but I can and do give my full attention to text on a screen. I think over 12 years of heavy Kindle use I've learned to toggle between "book mode" and "link mode." A piece of evidence in support of this contention is that I shifted several years ago to peer-reviewing entirely on a screen. That's probably the most demanding kind of reading I ever do, and I do not feel the need to print out manuscripts to enhance my focus. I'm curious -- for those of you who are also regular Kindle users, do you notice a difference in the quality of your attention?

He also spends time talking about the research of Raymond Mar, who reportedly found that people who read more fiction tend to be more skilled at reading social situations than people who read non-fiction. Hari immediately makes a causal leap, saying the fiction drives the understanding of social skills, and I complained to my family over dinner about the hazards of causal inferencing in observational studies. "What if it's the other way around?" I asked them plaintively. "What if Mar is seeing this association because the people who are interested in relationship nuances are more motivated to read books that talk about something they already like?" (After dinner I finished the chapter and discovered that he does give a nod to the reverse-causality idea, but only a nod. Harrumph.)

One more minor quibble: Hari talks about the decline of reading in a world where it's easier to scroll, but I'm curious about the actual numbers. He says, for instance, that paperback book purchases plummeted by 26% in 2011. For me, that timing raises questions. Elwood gave me my first Kindle in 2010, and by 2011 I had made the leap to reading mostly e-books most of the time. I am sure I bought fewer paperback books that year, but I bought a BOATLOAD of Kindle titles. I am a little skeptical about how well stats on print books reflect actual reading behavior. But I guess if you think reading on a screen isn't really reading, the distinction doesn't matter much.

Tell me what you think: do you read less than you did ten years ago? Print books or e-books or a mix? Is it harder for you to read than it was ten years ago? What would you most want to read if you spent three months by the ocean with no job and no internet?

#NAMDRAL, the countdown

Okay, heads up! There are only four weeks -- 28 short days -- until the Ninth Annual May Dickens Read-Along commences. This year we are going to read Nicholas Nickleby. I am going to start on May 10, right after I submit grades. We will be overlapping with the Hardcore Dickens Club, which should be fun. (They are starting a week later and taking it more slowly, so the overlap is imperfect but will still mean lots of interesting conversations.)

If you haven't read Nicholas Nickleby, you should join us. It's a fun one -- lots of lighthearted bits, easy on the bathos. If you have already read Nicholas Nickleby -- well, OF COURSE you want to reread it, don't you? What better way to spend your leisure time in the merry month of May?

So if you have TBR lists that need adjusting or decks that need clearing or any of that kind of business to take care of, this is your cue to get rolling. If you might appreciate a little encouragement, I have two old posts on how to read Dickens and another on why.

Things I am reading that are not Trollope

No Cure for Being Human. Kate Bowler writes about the aftermath of her diagnosis with stage IV cancer. Smart, funny, memorable.

Reach. I am reading an advance copy of this one, written by one of my favorite people in all the world, and I will have more things to tell you about it next week.

Diary of a Provincial Lady. I usually find Nicole's book recommendations to be pretty reliable but I am not loving this one. 

Stolen Focus. Just got this one from the library and I am finding that it oscillates between engaging and dull. Maybe my attention span has become too compromised for me to read any more books about our collective attention problems.