Light and Momentary

Sara Crewe Revisited

A Little Princess was one of my very favorite books when I was a kid. I couldn't tell you how many times I read it-- enough that I can still recite parts of it. I never once read it to my sons, though, and so it's been a long time since I dove into that riches-rags-riches story.

Stella loves it, which is really fun. I am finding myself a little skeptical about Sara, which feels disloyal. Can we talk about Sara?

I'm having the same reaction to Sara that I did to Esther Summerson when we read Bleak House for one of those AMDRALs. Virtue takes practice and maturity, and young girls who leave shining trails of virtue behind them, like garden snails clad in gauzy Victorian-era frocks, arouse my ire. The idea of a 7-year-old who is unrelentingly patient, generous, polite, and unflappable seems less plausible to me in adulthood than it did when I was 7 myself. Why would Sara have needed to cultivate those virtues in her years of fabulous wealth and ease? How could Esther have cultivated those virtues in her years of deprivation? Why would anyone want to teach kids that virtues arise ex nihilo? 

I suspect my skepticism will intensify as Sara moves from the parlor boarder suite into the attic. If memory serves, she slides capably into a life of servitude.

One of the early chapters sparked an all-but-forgotten memory of a conflict at Girl Scout camp that I tried to resolve by channeling Sara Crewe. "We," I said imperiously to the doubtless puzzled ringleader, "are not little gutter children." 

It worked better in Sara's schoolroom.

It would be unfair to expect Frances Hodgson Burnett to write in a way that isn't quite so classist and colonialist; we're all products of our times. It doesn't seem unreasonable, though, to expect her to write in a way that has some connection to the actual moral development of actual children.

Thag you very buch

Remember when Bilbo celebrated his birthday in Laketown with a dreadful cold? Perhaps this cold of mine is a sign that the year ahead will be filled with memorable adventures with new friends. And treasure. It probably means I'm going to take possession of more treasure than I can carry, don't you think?

Here in my subdued state I have been reading and knitting. Do you have The Glitch on your radar? It's about Shelley Stone, the CEO of a company that produces a piece of wearable technology called the Conch-- a little gadget that sits behind the user's ear and offers input. It reads texts and emails so the user doesn't even have to glance at them; it offers advice about avoiding traffic and identifies other Conch wearers whose names the user can't quite retrieve. But all is not well in Conch-world. The novel describes the problems that unfurl for the CEO: at work, with the product and with her colleagues, and at home.

It reminded me of Sourdough, with its fantastical skewering of the tech world, but the writing and the plotting are both better in The Glitch. I kept highlighting sentences because they struck me as so zingily perfect. The last chunk of the book raises some intriguing ethical questions that the author doesn't really grapple with, but I'm not done chewing on them.

If you read it, tell me what you think. Also: does Shelley have autism? (How about her daughter?) She's relentlessly explicit with herself about managing social interactions, perpetually talking about sensory challenges, repeatedly engaging in a painful self-soothing ritual. I found her to be a really interesting character-- more sympathetic than I expected based on Laura Vanderkam's summary. I'm still thinking about whether or not I buy the final scene.

I am also reading Educated, the memoir of a woman raised by Idaho survivalists. It's like a Rocky Mountain version of The Glass Castle, which I read and loved last summer. In both books, the younger kids in big families are hit harder when parents won't deal with their mental health issues. I'm only a quarter of the way through Educated, but I'm finding it gripping and thought-provoking. Some of the questions it raises are ones I've thought about before as a homebirther and former homeschooler-- what are the boundaries of parents' rights to make decisions that will influence a child's well-being? Some of the questions it raises are especially timely in our increasingly polarized culture: how should one respond to people who think that their political opponents are necessarily blind and foolish, or that education outside the home is a force for evil? The author's father has some choice words about college professors, for instance.

My fever-addled brain just barfed up "boundary's" as an acceptable substitute for "boundaries," which suggests to me that I should put it to bed pronto. Good night, friends! Let me know if you spot my Arkenstone.

Summer reading

I do not know why I am finding Pickwick Papers slow going this time around. Maybe I'm missing the May magic this year-- the June 1 deadline zoomed on by while I was still on about page 45. I've been stuck on page 284 for a week. But dernit, I am going to get into the Pickwick groove here. Really. 

I have another "ought-to" book in the swim bag: I'm halfway through Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I am not sure how I got an English degree without ever reading Sir Gawain. Don't alert my alma mater, please. 

There's a library book on the coffee table that's been awaiting my attention for most of the summer. I pulled Code Girls from the shelf impulsively: it's about the American women who helped to break German codes during WW2. I thought it would be right up my alley but it has mostly been collecting dust. I either have to read it or return it in the next couple of weeks here, though, since I can't renew it again.

My Kindle right now looks like my good intentions and my mediocre time management skills got together one night and made an ugly baby. I'm a quarter of the way through NeuroTribes, which is fascinating and horrifying in equal measure. I'm not quite a quarter of the way through The Ambition Decisions, which is more annoying than anything else right now: privileged sorority women attempt to ease their first-world angst by classifying their friends while also observing that their classifications are fairly inconsistent. Let's hope it gets better.

I bought Laura Vanderkam's Off the Clock, because I always find her books thought-provoking even though she is another privileged woman talking to privileged women about their first-world angst. The writing in this one is strong and the ideas are worth thinking about.

Inspired might be the best Rachel Held Evans book I've read yet. It's about coming back to the Bible after an evangelical childhood and an uncertain young adulthood. Thumbs up so far, although Kindle tells me I'm basing that judgment on 18% of the book. I've also read 18% of The Shallows, about the cognitive costs of internet addiction. I probably stopped in the middle of reading it to tell Twitter what I thought about it, and never returned.

OH YOU GUYS, I kept swiping across the Kindle screen and I am feeling a moment of frugal-person guilt at the number of unfinished titles. This would be a long (and embarrassing) post if I kept telling you about them. I am going to do some catching up here, by gum, before I buy any more books. But hey, if enough of you click these affiliate links, Amazon will send me a gift card with which to buy more titles to recommend to you. We can have a perma-spiral of frugal-person guilt. How's that for a blog mission statement? 

Ambition Decisions

I bought The Ambition Decisions after reading Laura Vanderkam’s WSJ review. It’s by two Northwestern alumnae, a hair younger than me, who interviewed their sorority sisters about their career trajectories. So far I am finding it pretty navel-gaze-y. Anybody else reading it? I think I need a nice palate-cleansing chapter of Pickwick. 

FAMDRAL --> FAJDRAL

I sailed into Pickwick Papers right after the spring semester ended, but almost immediately I hit a long stretch of summer semester doldrums. I'm thinking about that pot of mental energy that equips me to do anything requiring perseverance and estimating that 80% of it was going toward my summer class. Then there was the 15% that has been in constant use since November 2016, attempting to cope with our new political reality, leaving only a dinky little sliver to get to grips with the meandering beginning of The Pickwick Papers.

But now! Sam Weller has arrived upon the scene, and Mr. Jingle is about to show his nature more plainly, and meanwhile Mr. Pickwick is in hot pursuit. Will the bamboozled spinster aunt escape unscathed?

When I first decided to reread Pickwick this year for the Fifth Annual May Dickens Read-Along, I thought I'd do a fun little series of posts about it. Instead I told you all to read it and then disappeared on you. If you started reading and bogged down, this is an invitation to get yourself unbogged. Hilarity awaits!

#FAMDRAL returns

TraLAAAAA, it's May. This means it's time for the Fifth Annual May Dickens Read-ALong. This year's book is Pickwick Papers, which might be my favorite Dickens novel. (I know I keep telling you this. It's hard to pick my favorite-favorite, okay?) It is his most lighthearted, least sententious novel. Be advised, though: you have to give it a hundred pages' worth of benefit of the doubt, and thereafter it will richly reward the investment. I plan to start tomorrow. My goal is always to finish in about 3 weeks, which requires me to read 40-45 pages per day. No pressure to do it my way, of course. Join me -- I'd love some company!

Recommended

I can't remember now how I wound up reading the Kindle sample of Start Without Me, but I devoured the book. It is the second novel written by Joshua Max Feldman, and it made such an impression on me that I read the first one too -- The Book of Jonah.

Start Without Me begins inside the head of a man trying to maintain a fragile hold on sobriety. We also meet a flight attendant with troubles of her own; the two of them, improbably, spend most of a day together. The thing that simultaneously hooked me and squashed me was Feldman's depiction of the impact of disordered alcohol use: the all-but-unquellable yearning, the slow erosion of the will (seen especially in the brutal rendering of a character we meet late in the book), the costs of sobriety. One of the things Hollywood gets wrong about substance abuse is the relentlessness of it, the way that continuing to choose freedom over enslavement is painful for a long time. Feldman writes about it so persuasively that I thought he must have been describing his own experiences. (That doesn't seem to be the case, based on the acknowledgments.) This is a hopeful book, but it's not a cheap or easy kind of hope. Having just made it sound like an Anti-Festival of Bleakness and Despair, I hasten to add that it's unexpectedly funny and full of surprises.

The Book of Jonah has a similar structure, in that we're mostly alternating between the perspectives of the two main characters, one male and one female. I suggest that you not read the reviews, some of which give away too much about the female character's story -- the element of surprise was exactly right. The title character is a corporate lawyer in NYC, whose world is upended when he begins getting intermittent glimpses of the divine.

I have read a lot of books in which non-believers have attempted to describe religious experience, and a lot of books in which believers have attempted to describe secular perspectives, and often they are pretty eye-roll-inducing. Feldman does something remarkable here: he captures the satisfactions of Jonah's secular life and then also offers a persuasive glimpse of the eternal. (Huh, that sentence sounds implausible now that I have written it, but read the book and tell me what you think.) Most unexpectedly of all, he intersperses hilarious slapstick-y moments. Somehow, both the divine visions and the slapstick work together. Maybe it's because their propinquity reflects a fundamental truth: life is both preposterous and sublime, sometimes in whiplash-o-genic succession. 

Some of you need to read it so we can chat about it afterward, okay? Even though it's called The Book of Jonah, there are echoes of the book of Judith as well-- the Judith character strikes an unexpected blow against a Holofernes-esque character. I want to talk more about that, and about the climax that teeters on the very brink of absurd but pulls it off. I want to talk about the idea of watching (unwelcome surveillance plays a role in both books) versus seeing. I am still thinking about the tenderness with which Jonah comes to regard human vulnerability -- tenderness with its connotations of pain as well as of compassion. 

Recommended

Yesterday I finished a memoir that I really enjoyed: Maggie O'Farrell's I Am I Am I Am. I first encountered O'Farrell in the fall, when I fell headlong into This Must Be The Place. I inhaled it over Thanksgiving weekend, and I loved both the fragile badass heroine and the rueful linguist hero (who is not actually very heroic but you know what I mean). More books, in my view, should have linguist heroes. I wanted to know more about O'Farrell when I finished it -- I was curious about how much personal experience infused the book. There's a character with vicious eczema whose experiences she captures expertly, and I wanted to know more about where that had come from.

I Am I Am I Am describes seventeen brushes with death. The first chapter is the scariest (oh my goodness, so creepy), but a number of them are hard to read. In the last chapter she describes her daughter in anaphylaxis, and that's where we learn about her experiences with a child suffering -- no, really: suffering -- from eczema.

Another chapter describes O'Farrell's childhood case of encephalitis, which left her with cerebellar damage. It's this damage that drives a number of the other brushes with death: your cerebellum is important for determining your position in space so you don't get (for instance) run over by a truck, and for determining which way is up so you don't get (say) disoriented while underwater.

The more I learn about brains, the more an intact one seems like a marvel. I can close my eyes and my fingers will find their way to the keyboard and type this sentence, free of errors. (Oh, hey, look at that. I wasn't 100% sure that I could produce an error-free sentence with my eyes closed, but it turns out I totally can.) I can string together the words that attempt to tell you how much the book moved me: how it made me grateful for my beating heart and my breathing lungs, and aware, too, that the day is coming when the beats and the breath will be stilled. O'Farrell is no longer Catholic but her book is a good Lenten read regardless.

Here I go, engaging my prefrontal cortex to send myself to bed earlier than I might like to. I was up repeatedly last night with a sick child. But that's another thought I want to take with me from this book: she writes about how readily minor annoyances roll off her back in view of the gravity of her daughter's allergies.  Which is a good perspective for a person who still needs to deal with a little patch of residual puke in the upstairs carpet.

Books, the early years

Nicole asked if I would write about my current thoughts on books that influenced me when I was a kid. I would love to write that post. 

My earliest memory of a book comes from reading A Wrinkle in Time at a ridiculously early age. A lot of it went over my head but I loved it anyway, and I went back to it again and again along with the other books from the Murry-Austin universe. (Team Austin all the way, baby. I wanted to slip inside that family and stay there -- a family where grownups re-read Anna Karenina for fun (Vicky's mom, a fellow homebirther) and didn't mind living in unorthodox quarters as long as they had room for their books (Vicky's grandfather).) As an adult I read an article critical of Madeleine L'Engle -- New Yorker, maybe? -- and it did dampen my enthusiasm for her books. But the idea that the geeky girl can find understanding despite her glasses grabbed my attention early on, and the image of Earth struggling under a palpable shadow dispelled by the likes of Jesus and Copernicus is one that continues to resonate.

When I was a little bit bigger I started reading the Little House books, and I spent the next five years or so reading and re-reading them. Oh my, did those books capture my imagination. I had my own sunbonnet. I yearned to be named Mary. I even read the parts about the workings of homemade hinges and latches over and over, because I wanted to understand them. Things I still love about LIW: fictional-Laura's absolute trust in her parents, the persistent idea of happiness that transcends circumstances, the theme of small-but-mighty girl doing her duty even when she doesn't super-want to. Things I don't love about LIW: racism, un-subtle political messages, and 19th-century parenting. Like, come on, Pa, why does Mary get off scot-free when she insults Laura? The sting of Laura's slap was sure to fade quickly; the smart of Mary's words lingered for years. Even years later, after Mary was dead, Laura was able to write compellingly about how they hurt her. I shake my head at Pa for a number of reasons (don't borrow money to build that house on Plum Creek, Pa! don't do it!), but that one looms large.

And then came junior high! Junior high was dismal in many ways, but I had the run of the library. My locker, which I shared with occasional commenter Angela, was right across from the library entrance and I think I must have been in there all the time. In my mind's eye the Hogwarts library is in just the same spot: at the top of a staircase, watched over by someone who looks a lot like Mrs. Swecker. That's where I discovered Watership Down and To Kill A Mockingbird. Junior high is when my dad got me started reading Mark Twain; he also gave me the Chronicles of Narnia when I was in sixth or seventh grade. And! Oh! In sixth grade a friend of mine told me about Anne Shirley. If I start talking about those books I'll be writing for a long time. I'll have to write another installment.

I am off to bed but tell me about you-- what are THE books of your childhood? How have they held up across the years?

On my Kindle

Recently I was scrolling back through my Kindle purchases when I discovered that at some point I'd purchased a pair of L.M. Montgomery novels in a single volume. I'm reading The Story Girl at the moment and it is...not my favorite. Did she write anything else with a male narrator? I'm not sure his voice works very well.

I am also reading Beyond Addiction. Do you have any substance abusers in your life, whose follies reduce you to despairing facepalms? This book is about responding with kindness and science. And really, if I had a life motto it would be "Kindness + science for the greater glory of God." It's so hopeful. I've read a bunch of books on substance abuse and this one is especially good.

I finished Trollope's Barsetshire Chronicles recently and immediately bought the 99-cent version of The Way We Live Now. (At the same time I bought Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine and read it in about a day. It will take me a fairly large number of days to read TWWLN.) (Did anybody else read Eleanor O? I have some thoughts about Eleanor O.)

Also in my current-ish reading stack: The Signature of All Things. I bought it back in February, when it was on sale and Lissa Wiley recommended it, but I keep bogging down. I've read the first chapter about five times. It's unusual for me to bog down in a Lissa Wiley recommendation, though, so I keep thinking I should keep plugging.

Almost all of my reading is e-books these days, but I am also reading a physical book, another Lissa recommendation. Her mention of 84 Charing Cross Road spurred me to read that one, and now I'm in the middle of Q's Legacy. Hanff's voice is a delight.

NaBloPoMo plus the roommate fitness challenge = too many late nights for me. (And! I was third in the challenge at the last reckoning. What is up with that, I ask you?! Let's hope my evening Zumba class restored me to my rightful place at the top of the heap.) I'll see you tomorrow, friends.

The only book I'll ever buy from Amazon's "Wine" category

I would read pretty much anything Anne Fadiman wrote. Your Flossing Guide, a thousand-page lipogram? Sign me right up.

She is best known as the author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, which you should go and buy right now if you happen not to have read it. I'm serious: stop reading this post and go buy that book. Oh, man, I am trying to tell you why you should buy it and sounding like a 22-year-old marketing assistant unleashed on the backlist with inadequate supervision. Keenly observed. Beautifully written. Both sympathetic and unapologetic. And ooohhhh, it has the most gorgeous haunting ending.

She is also the author of two slim books of essays, and I love them both as well. Ex Libris is about books and reading; At Large and At Small is more wide-ranging. They are on the short list of books I pull down from the shelf when I am feeling unsettled or unhappy because I know they will calm me down. (Oh, that would be a fun comments discussion! What's on your personal list of books you return to when you need a little comfort? Mine also includes the C.S. Lewis space trilogy and...I'm trying to think what else. These days I probably refresh Twitter instead of flipping through a favorite book. Modern life, man.)

Anyway: I was thrilled when I saw that Anne Fadiman had a new book coming out this fall. You might have seen it too -- her essay on taste and taste buds, excerpted from her forthcoming memoir, was all over my social media feeds for a few days. I pre-ordered the book about twelve seconds after I heard of its existence. Today's the launch day, and I am launching myself into bed with my Kindle and my shiny new copy of The Wine Lover's Daughter. I'll report back.

Colossus of Roasts. And Cheesecake.

Remember when Col, my giant Instant Pot, arrived in July? He and I have slowly been getting acquainted. I signed up to review the occasional book here, and the first one that arrived in my mail was Coco Morante's The Essential Instant Pot Cookbook.

I have Thoughts about cookbooks. I want them to have a distinctive voice and to be carefully edited. I want them to tell me some things I wouldn't have figured out on my own, and to push my boundaries a little bit but not too much. I have exactly 2.5 feet of cookbook space, which means I am choosy about which cookbooks get to stay.

The short version of this review is that this book makes the cut.

There's an accessible introduction to using the Instant Pot, and there are reliable step-by-step instructions in all of the recipes. My husband is very skeptical about the Instant Pot. "It beeps," he says. (He has fond memories of a world in which appliances didn't beep.) Even so, he was able to follow Morante's directions with no fuss.

For the most part, the recipes are interesting but also straightforward. I read an Amazon review complaining about her reliance on weird ingredients, but that's (literally) a de gustibus kind of thing. I am excited, not annoyed, about the idea of mail-order sumac and ras el hanout. There are some funky recipes (honey-turmeric tonic, anyone?) and some plain-vanilla recipes (macaroni and cheese), but mostly they inhabit the space in between. In a few cases, I think she was stretching to demonstrate that a recipe could be adapted for the IP when really it would have been easier to fire up the stove already.

Instant Pot cooking works best with foods that should be nice and tender. My husband likes his green beans still firm enough to be used as bludgeons (very small bludgeons. elf bludgeons), but I am a child of the South. I thought Morante's recipe for Italian stewed green bean recipe was perfect, as was her kale with apple and onion. (I was less enthusiastic about the Indian-spiced okra, but in fairness I should add that I was missing two of the spices.)

After I made a couple of the meat recipes, I felt ready to riff on them. She has no recipe for tongue, but I dove in and made tacos de lengua in the Instant Pot because I felt comfortable with the settings and the beeping. Making broth isn't complicated, but it was nice to have clear instructions for how to do it in a pressure cooker.

I was most curious about the desserts. Poached pears, sure (thumbs up from the kids on that one), but cheesecake? in a pressure cooker? for real? I was so intrigued that I bought a 7-inch springform. Turns out that pressure cooker cheesecake works really nicely. I made her New York cheesecake, to which you add a topping of sweetened sour cream after it emerges from the steam. Adding a topping is probably a good idea, because condensation from the top of the IP can mar the top of the finished cheesecake. Well worth the hassle for cheesecake with a 30-minute cooking time and no need to rig up a bain-marie. After this success with steaming a dessert I am going to see if I can manage a steamed suet pudding in the Instant Pot. That's not a recipe anyone sensible would include in a book for an American audience, but I bet you can get around that crazy 4-hour cooking time and wind up with the same lovely texture.

In addition to the experiments I want to try, there are a number of recipes I still want to cook as written. That's a little unusual for me. The FTC wants me to spell out for you that I received a complimentary copy of this book from Blogging for Books in exchange for writing a review, but I assure you I'd let you know if I didn't like it. If you have an Instant Pot that's a little dustier than you might like, or a little more intimidating than you expected, this book is a fun way to figure it out.

Tendencies

I bought Gretchen Rubin's The Four Tendencies as soon as it came out and I'm about three-quarters of the way through it. I am finding it more insightful than I expected, with things I want to remember in each chapter. 

We had a chat about the Four Tendencies in the not-very-distant past, remember? Rubin's quiz told me that I was an Upholder, but I'm definitely an Upholder with some Obliger inclinations. I could take on a ten-year Dickens project happily, but I am more consistent about reading x amount of Dickens every single day if I am hosting a Dickens read-along than if I am just doing it on my own. Rubin writes about the Upholder tendency to be rigid and I was like, "Oh, hi, have you been spying on me?" I remember once when I was following FlyLady pretty closely and Christmas fell on a Monday, I felt genuinely flummoxed. I was supposed to clean my house on Monday, because Weekly Home Blessing Hour is always on Monday, and yet I was supposed to avoid unnecessary work because it was a holy day of obligation. There are many solutions to this difficulty, I can see in hindsight, but at the time I thought I might short-circuit something inside my brain deciding what to do.

I wish I had known about this framework earlier. My oldest son is a Questioner, probably with Rebel leanings, and it took me far too long to figure out that talking to him about the importance of rules was not an effective strategy. My second son is an Upholder with Questioner leanings, and I remember how distressed he would get when he was small about learning that he had violated some unfamiliar expectation -- weeping by the side of the pool, resolving never to return, when the lifeguard said he wasn't allowed to wear his floaty vest in the water.

My husband is also a Questioner with Rebel leanings, and he is completely unconvinced about Rubin's divisions. This is a response she expects from Questioners, but my husband finds her assertion that Questioners gonna question to be utterly unpersuasive. Somehow our conversation took a turn in which we were speculating about the roads we might have traveled if we hadn't married each other. "You'd probably be living in a big city and have a tattooed hipster girlfriend," I said. You would have thought I'd been speaking Urdu. "Tattooed? hipster? girlfriend?" he queried. "Um, what are you talking about?" I tried to imagine my alternate Elwood-less life and came up empty. Would I even be Catholic? What if I'd settled down with another rule-follower and never learned to push back against my own worst tendencies? I'm glad he loosens me up; he's glad I make the trains run on time around here (though I like to think I am more pleasant than Mussolini). I had my planner open and he was teasing me gently as he read over my shoulder. "EARLY BEDTIME in all caps, I see," he commented. "That's because it's like today's MASS and RUN entries," I told him. "It's something that will make me feel better if I do it for myself but that's easy to push aside."

Obliger tendencies in action, you see. Can I get myself to bed in five minutes? Probably not, but off I go to see how close I can come.

In which I discover that I need a candy thermometer. Like, NEED a candy thermometer.

I finished Make the Bread, Buy the Butter on the way back to Gladlyville, and if you like books in which people get a little compulsive in the kitchen and tell you about the results with good humor and charm, this is a book that belongs on your shelf. I found it thorough but unpretentious, inviting but realistic. It made me want to go forth and can some jam.

I must have flagged a dozen pages with recipes I want to try. I do not expect that I will be curing my own prosciutto in the near future, or brewing my own bitters, but this book has reminded me that the world is wide and full of possibilities.

The author has a blog as well. I expect I'll spend some time prowling through her archives over the next few weeks.

Blame it on the novels

I am reading a novel that I am really enjoying: Falling Together by Marisa de los Santos. I thought it was going to be about two characters I already knew, but it turns out to be a different book altogether. No matter. I love her voice; I love these characters. It is making me laugh out loud and making me think. I'm halfway in, eager to find out what happens.

I have told you before, shyly, that I am slowly writing a novel. I have been working on it in small bites this month, and today I got some accidental reader feedback. I'm doing a fantastically helpful writing challenge, in which I write 400 words 5 days per week for the month of June. This is not an onerous amount of writing for any one day, but it adds up to 8000 words by the end of the month. That's two short articles, in my world, or a couple of IRB protocols, or a big chunk of a longer article. Or, because I am free to do whatever I want with those 400 words, some pieces of my dormant novel. 

Each day I send off my word count and my text to the person running the challenge, who usually just glances at the first few words and marks me down in her spreadsheet for the day. But she sent me the nicest email about my most recent novel chunk. It makes me want to write more. More novel! All the novel! So if things seem a little cursory around here, you'll know what I'm up to.

Summer Reading

Books I have read or am reading since I finished Martin Chuzzlewit:

Fix the World

I am currently reading How Cycling Can Save the World, which I picked up on a whim at the library. It is SO interesting and motivating despite its overly earnest title. My university has a wellness office and I want to send the director a copy. And my mayor is into bicycles -- I wonder if he's read it yet.

I am also reading Searching for Sunday by Rachel Held Evans. I read Year of Biblical Womanhood a couple of years ago and found it pleasant but mostly unmemorable. This one is much better: appealing writing in a distinctive voice. I am still battling post-election angst (60! percent! of! white! Catholics! voted! for! Trump!), and her perspective is helpful. The author and I have some theological disagreements but I'm enjoying her book anyway.

Science and Recreation

I've told you before about how much I enjoy Matt Fitzgerald's books. I bought How Bad Do You Want It? last year, and then it languished on the shelf because almost all of my reading is on Kindle these days. I finally finished it last week. It's about the role of mental toughness in sports. Fitzgerald has a knack for describing scholarly papers clearly and illustrating their findings with well-chosen stories. 

It's a little funny that I already wrote about theological differences in a post that also talks about Come As You Are, also finished last week. Emily Nagoski and I appear to be poles apart theologically, but I'll be thinking about her book for a long time. Lots of interesting material on how women differ from men -- not in a squishy Mars/Venus way, but based on parameters like responsive desire and non-concordance. She spends a big (and absolutely fascinating) chunk of the book talking about neuroscience, the ways that eagerness, expectation, and enjoyment interconnect in our heads.

Escapist Kids' Fiction

How had I never read Swallows and Amazons? Loved it. Pure delight. Could be an instruction manual for free-range parents. (Well, free-range parents who are willing to be investigated by CPS for negligence. Hard to fathom the changes we've seen in cultural perceptions of kids' abilities over the past 90 years. I bow to the Swallows & Amazons moms.)

Another library pick: The Lotterys Plus One. My La Leche League friends and I used to email each other about the commune we would found someday. This is a book written by someone who has clearly had similar email conversations. It's written by Emma Donoghue, author of Room, which is why it caught my eye. It's an earthy-crunchy fantasy, and it made me roll my eyes about eleventy-zillion times. OH PLEASE, I said when I learned that all of the kids were named after trees. SPARE ME, I said in its many heavy-handed moments.  But then...I finished it in an evening.

A few more thoughts about this year's Dickens novel

I've mentioned before that one of the things I love about my long-haul read-the-complete-works projects is the way they acquaint me with an author's habits of thought. I still think about Shakespeare when I encounter snails easing their way through the world. One of the fun things about rereading Dickens is seeing the connections I couldn't have seen the first time through. For instance: I first read Martin Chuzzlewit before I read Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend and Little Dorrit. I didn't know, when I first read about spontaneous combustion as a possible fate for the Misses Pecksniff in 2001, that Dickens would revisit the idea nine years later to glorious effect. I hadn't met Sloppy back then, so I couldn't appreciate Mr. Nadgett's buttons, gleaming like eyes. I couldn't see the similarities between Mr. Bucket and Mr. Nadgett (ferreting out the truth is good work, says Dickens, but also lonely work), or between Mr. Montague/Tigg and Mr. Merdle (moving other people's money around is a parasitic way to make a living, says Dickens, and leads to (spoiler alert!) gory death).

For all my fan-girling, there are aspects of Dickens' writing that consistently annoy me. He seems, on the one hand, to say that we are who we are: we can smooth off some of our rough edges and get clearer on what matters, but we don't change in our essentials. But both this year and last year, I read books in which central characters spend big chunks of the plot engaged in an elaborate charade. Here I am, looking skeptically over the tops of my glasses at that idea. Which is it, Mr. Dickens? Are we destined to be the people we are, or can we pretend persuasively to be very different sorts of people? I am also permanently irked by his female characters, for whom timidity and meekness seem to be the cardinal virtues.

These are small annoyances, though, and they are more than offset by the pleasures of the big novels. There are the thematic delights-- he writes about a world in which justice prevails and capital-T Truth, too potent to be hidden, works through multiple characters to make itself known. There are the fingerprints of craftsmanship-- I'm thinking especially about the opening and closing family gatherings in Martin Chuzzlewit, in which we can see plainly the perils of pettiness.

My 14yo is reading Tale of Two Cities (a decision that made me say "My work here is done"), and I told him a couple of weeks ago that I'd read it along with him when I finished Martin Chuzzlewit. "I'm going to be sad when it ends," I said. A Dickens chapter a day might not keep the doctor away, but perhaps it keeps away tolerance of injustice and sub-par writing.

#FAMDRAL, completed

I just finished Martin Chuzzlewit. I have to re-evaluate my whole ranking scheme for Dickens novels, because Martin Chuzzlewit used to be tied with Dombey and Son for last place. I was so wrong, friends-- so wrong! It is hilarious and savage and skillfully written. Highly recommended.

#FAMDRAL, the midpoint

I crossed the halfway mark in Martin Chuzzlewit today, right on schedule. You guys, it's SO GOOD. I will have to go back and add asterisked updates to the posts in which I complained about it.

The particular reason I wanted to read it this year was its American chapters, which I found unexpectedly resonant in 2001. It had been less than a year since we returned to the US after two years in the UK, and I kept laughing at his impatient descriptions of American mores. I wondered if those chapters would still be as engaging this time around, almost 17 years after our return home, but I am finding them so relevant. I think in 2001 I underestimated the degree to which racism remained a problem in the US: I just did not have any idea how hard it is to be black in this country. Dickens is flat-out savage about American racism in Martin Chuzzlewit. He wouldn't be so angry if it were just that people kept inserting themselves boastfully into conversations on this side of the pond, or Yank-splaining England to Englishmen. It's the part where racists keep spouting off about freedom and equality for all that causes him to incandesce. And nobody incandesces about injustice quite like Dickens.

I think it was last year, when I was reflecting on Our Mutual Friend, that I mentioned how much clearer Dickens' mastery of the craft of novel-writing had become to me over time. I'm seeing it here too, with his interleaving stories. Skillful and fun and thought-provoking, all in one free package.

So. My initial recommendation to read this book was pretty tepid -- tepid enough that I think there were only two takers -- but I am surprised every day by how much I'm enjoying it. Join me!

#FAMDRAL day 7

You guys, I was so wrong about Martin Chuzzlewit. It's really good. Really good as in I am reluctant to put it down. Really good as in briskly paced* and bitingly funny.

*Just so we're all clear: "briskly paced" for a Dickens novel doesn't mean the same thing as "briskly paced" for, say, a Stieg Larsson novel. There's no escaping the lengthy and metaphorical landscape descriptions; you just have to roll with them.

It's possible that the wheels will fall off entirely as I enter the middle third of the novel, but so far it has been a delight. I am wondering if it seemed slow and draggy to me in 2001 because I'd only read one other fat Dickens novel at that point, or if there's some other reason I can't recall. At this point our guys are just about to set sail for the land of the forward and the home of the brash.

If you join me in the #FAMDRAL fun you'll be able to weigh in. You know you want to!