Light and Momentary

Also Recommended

Months ago I requested Code Name Verity from one of my library's e-reader apps, after a smart friend raved about it on Facebook. It finally became available last night, and I tore through it. As soon as I had finished I looked up all of the author's other books so I could request them from the library too. So if you need a diversion, it's a good one.

Recommended

I have been having troubling focusing on books lately. I flit from one to another but I can't seem to settle down and finish anything. But today I got further than the first two chapters in Naomi Novik's newest book, and it's a page-turner.

(This is your periodic reminder that my links to Amazon products are affiliate links, and if you buy yourself a copy of a Naomi Novik novel based on this recommendation, Amazon will send me a few cents with which I will buy more books.)

Books: Currently Reading and Recently Finished

On my Kindle right now: White Fragility, by Robin DiAngelo. I bought it last September and got bogged down, but I have pulled it back up to the top of the queue.

I am also reading Sun Slower, Sun Faster on Melanie's recommendation. It is unexpectedly timely, as the event that brings the cousins together is a polio outbreak that closes one of their schools.

Also in my current reading pile: Under the Gaze of the Bible. I am finding it difficult but worth the effort. It is unexpectedly rich and thoughtful. It is bringing home for me how complex the study of theology is, and how much I have to learn.

I finished Oliver Twist, this year's #SAMDRAL book, on May 29, which seemed like a terrible time for an enthusiastic middle-aged white lady to post about her favorite Victorian novels. Things that stood out to me on this reading: the shadow cast by capital punishment in an era when theft was punishable by death (I did not remember how many noose references there are in that book); the pointedness with which Dickens reminds us that it's easy to spout off about personal responsibility when you're not the person in question (Mr. Bumble, A One-Man Cautionary Tale); the distinctively Dickensian certainty that life is a messy complicated tapestry when you can only see the underside, but occasionally we are granted hopeful glimpses of the front. (Also: I always thought Nancy was a prostitute, but apparently this is disputed.)

If you find yourself in need of a quick and amusing read, Sorry I Missed You made me laugh out loud. I thought it was going to be diverting fluff, but the author does a nice job, I think, sketching the relationships among the characters.

My pal Becky recommended Writers and Lovers, which I devoured. I am still thinking about whether I like the ending. Have you read it? Tell me your thoughts on the ending, please.

I am also still thinking about the ending of Rodham, which might be my favorite of the books I've read this year. I persuaded my college roommates to read it with me; we are going to have a Zoom book club meeting after they finish it. Curtis Sittenfeld is one of my favorite contemporary authors. She has an unparalleled knack for writing scenes that make me squirm even as they keep me reading. If you've read anything about Rodham, you know it's an alternate history: what if Hillary hadn't married Bill Clinton? Criticism of Rodham has focused heavily on Sittenfeld's choice to write about sex in a book focused on a woman so many people found "unlikable." A lot of the book is about what it was like for Hillary to be a smart woman in a world that was (and sometimes still is) deeply skeptical of smart women. Some of that skepticism is expressed with regard to competence: it used to be commonplace for the world to tell smart women that they couldn't do a job because they were women, and then, when it turned out they could in fact do the job, to tell them that their competence was un-feminine. It was a frustratingly tautological flavor of misogyny. Some of that skepticism is also expressed in the idea that too much intelligence renders a woman unattractive. For this reason I have to wonder if Sittenfeld is nodding to herself at the people saying "eeewww!" about the sex scenes. "Yep," she is saying to herself, "saw that coming from a mile away." Anyway, I want to talk about the ending with people who have read the book, but I don't want to spoil it for people who haven't read the book. Tell me if you've read it and want to chat!

May 16

Who else is reading Oliver Twist with me, or planning to start it? I am a little past the one-third mark. Oliver and Bill Sykes have just set out on their mysterious expedition. Bill has a loaded pistol in his pocket, and Oliver has been warned that he faces death at Bill's hands if he speaks a word.

The relationship between Bill and Nancy is striking me this time through the book. Nancy is an interesting character: more intelligent and more perceptive than a lot of Dickens women, but also thoroughly mired in her underworld life. How did she wind up with Bill? Was he less repulsive, once upon a time? Maybe human trafficking hasn't changed much across the last 150 years.

If Nicole the Victorian literature scholar is reading this, maybe she'll chime in: I'm intrigued but also annoyed by Dickens' apparent conviction that good blood trumps good breeding. I posted a bit about this when we read Bleak House -- I just don't find Esther's goodness persuasive. How could she be such a sunshiny kid after such a terrible upbringing? The same thing is true for Oliver. How would he know what's right? Why would he be motivated to do the right thing in these circumstances? Dickens seems to be saying "We must have pity on the poor! Let's send them some kids from rich families to show them how to be better."

Tell me what you're enjoying, or what you're annoyed by! If you haven't started, jump on in. Oliver Twist is shorter and faster-paced than the other AMDRAL novels have been, so there's plenty of time to finish it before June. Or if you're reading something else because Dickens isn't your cup of tea (I'm looking at you, Tracy!), tell me what's on your bedside table these days.

May 11

I did not remember the overtness of the anti-Semitism in Oliver Twist. Oliver has made his way to London and is living with Fagin and company, and Dickens is wielding the word "Jew" like a blunt instrument. I didn't remember it from reading Oliver Twist in the mid-90s, and I wasn't expecting it to be so blatant.

The last Jewish character who appeared in a May Dickens Read-Along was Mr. Riah in Our Mutual Friend. And Mr. Riah is so gentle that this treatment of Fagin's Jewishness is unexpected. I also didn't remember that his red hair was like a greasy pennant announcing his allegiance to Team Bad Guy. Off to Google I went.

Courtesy of Wikipedia I encountered a story I'd never read before. When Oliver Twist was being printed in a single volume, 15 years after it appeared in serial form, Dickens received a letter from a woman named Eliza Davis. Mrs. Davis was married to the man to whom Dickens had sold his house, a Jewish man. Mrs. Davis exhorted Dickens not to foment ugly prejudice, and he responded with conviction. He halted the printing and toned down the anti-Semitism in the chapters that hadn't yet been typeset. He changed his presentation of Fagin at public readings. And he created the character of Mr. Riah for Our Mutual Friend. How's that for "know better, do better" in action?

Dickens appears not to have had a redheaded correspondent to encourage him to lay down his unwarranted bias against that particular tribe. I also hit Google up for examples of redheaded Dickens characters. The three I found: Fagin, a sleazy lawyer in Old Curiosity Shop named Brass, and...Uriah Heep. 

This post was only 282 words long at the end of that last paragraph, but it has taken me a ridiculously long time to write. While I was drafting it our refrigerator door handle broke, prompting a lengthy and frustrating search for a replacement. The online parts people very helpfully turned up the right part in about 60 seconds, but then told me it would cost $114 shipped. "Is it gold-plated?" I asked in the chat window, but apparently $114 doesn't even get you any gold-plating these days. We are crossing our fingers and hoping that the $13 substitute does the job. It would be very first-world-problemated of me to tell you that my robot vacuum cleaner has also been giving me trouble, so I will say instead that the number of times I have hopped up from the couch to deal with a frustrating event is in the double digits. But for you, my friends, I have persevered. I declare victory over the first-world problems! (Or at least an end to the post.)

May 8

It's #SAMDRAL time, friends! Today is the beginning of the Seventh Annual May Dickens Read-Along, and this year's book is Oliver Twist. Start your engines!

I couldn't find our physical copy of the book. I have a Kindle Dickens compendium, but I don't love using it. It's just so big that the navigation is clunky and the mileposts are meaningless. You are at location 116738 of 11167934, it tells me. So I downloaded a free version of Oliver Twist in the Kindle store, and I dove in.

First the author bio raised my eyebrows. It said, "Charles John Huffam Dickens pen-call 'Boz,' become the foremost English novelist of the Victorian technology, as well as a full of life social campaigner."

"Huh," I thought to myself as I turned to chapter 1, "those are not words that usually go in a row."

"...Wait a minute," I said to myself approximately one paragraph into Chapter 1, "this is not right." On page 2 the physician attending Oliver's birth is alleged to have said to his mother, "Oh, you should not now talk approximately dying but." It gets worse from there.

I'm trying to figure this out. Did someone take a translation of Oliver Twist, run it through Google Translate to put it back into an approximation of English, and then post it in the Kindle store? Is it Oliver Twist for denizens of the Uncanny Valley? It has that same sort of almost-but-not-quite feel.

Luckily there is more than one free Kindle edition, and the next one I found appears to be have been written by Dickens himself and not his AI counterpart.

So! To the workhouse we go! Maternal mortality and child labor and food insecurity -- how's that for a cheerful beginning? The next time my children complain that the WiFi is too slow for them, I'll say, "Hey, at least you're not an ORPHAN picking OAKUM in the WORKHOUSE." 

I'm sure that will fill them with a spirit of gratitude, aren't you?

#SAMDRAL

Every year in May I host a Dickens read-along. This will be its seventh year, if you can believe it -- thus the hashtag, Seventh Annual May Dickens Read-ALong. Here's what we've read so far.

2019: Tale of Two Cities
2018: Pickwick Papers
2017: Martin Chuzzlewit
2016: David Copperfield
2015: Our Mutual Friend
2014: Bleak House

I'm thinking about maybe reading The Old Curiosity Shop this year. But I'm also thinking about Oliver Twist, which is shorter with less bathos. Little Nell is not my favorite heroine, and this is not the year in which I want to haul myself through a book I don't really like. But Mr. Quilp! He might be the best Dickens villain of them all. So tell me: want to read a Dickens novel with me in May this year? Do you have a preference between Old Curiosity Shop and Oliver Twist? I will start after finals, on approximately May 8, and read about 30 pages a day. You are of course welcome to start whenever you'd like and read at a pace that works for you. Every year I aim to be done by the beginning of June, but it doesn't always work out that way.

Between now and then I have a little deck-clearing to do. I have one more chapter in Anne Tyler's newest book, Redhead by the Side of the Road. I borrowed Dear Edward from the e-library based on a friend's recommendation. I was rereading Blackout/All Clear but I got bogged down about a hundred pages from the end -- I'd like to finish instead of just re-shelving it, even though I know what happens. And I bought Jen Fulwiler's new book. I started to say, "I can get those read between now and the 8th of May, don't you think?" -- but probably three out of four is more realistic. If my lone leisure-time activity right now were reading, I could finish them all, no problem. But the kids and I are doing lots of logic puzzles together and I am back in the Duolingo groove and also I am hoping to finish knitting a blanket before the weather gets too hot. So let's say three out of four.

And then! To London! Squalor and heartbreak and poverty and hopeful glimpses of the countryside and pollution and uncertainty and mysterious death but always, always redemption in the end. Whenever I am tempted to get impatient with Dickens over his implausible plot twists and one-dimensional female characters, I remember the redemption in the end and sigh a happy sigh.

These are some good books I have been reading

Right now I am reading High Risk, written by a maternal-fetal medicine specialist. Do you want to read about totally different varieties of looming catastrophe? This is just the book for you! I am finding it engaging and well-written enough to persist when one might think some non-catastrophic reading material would be more appealing.

Earlier this month I finished Oona Out of Order and This Won't End Well. Oona has a really interesting premise, executed competently. What if you didn't live the years of your life in sequence? What would that be like? This Won't End Well is fluffy but pleasantly so. I also finished Forgiving God, which I really liked. Hilary Yancey's first child was diagnosed prenatally with significant congenital anomalies, and she writes beautifully about the things she has learned about disability.

I had this grand idea that I was going to finish the Palliser Chronicles in time for my fiftieth birthday in July, one per month for six months. The first one went really well. I was super-disciplined about reading my three chapters every day, and I remembered why I had enjoyed the Barsetshire Chronicles so much. But then I finished the first one and thought, "Huh, do I want to spend the next six months reading nothing but Trollope? Perhaps not." I am very fond of Trollope. He is like the insightful uncle who keeps nudging you at the family get-together to murmur insightful and witty comments about your relatives in your ear. I have been trying to read Phineas Finn (the second Palliser book) this month, but there are an awful lot of opportunities for my brain to say "oooh! shiny!" just now. Phineas Finn will doubtless be skillfully drawn and gently funny once I am fifty chapters in. Fifty chapters feels like a lot of chapters right now.

Stella and I are inching our way through Two Towers. We've said farewell to the crew on the west side of Anduin, and we just encountered Gollum. I suppose it's a good time to be reading a book about an ultimately successful war against a seemingly implacable enemy.

If you like the idea of a deep dive into a different world, I can also recommend Against Walls. Rachel-who-needs-a-blog suggested it to me -- hm, maybe a couple of years ago now. It sat on my Kindle for a long time, but I finished it up earlier this year. These days I don't read a lot of fiction that requires me to pay close attention, and so it took me a couple of tries to get through this one. Well worth the effort.

As always, these are Amazon affiliate links. If you click through and buy a book, Amazon will give me a few cents to spend on my next book purchases.

It's #SAMDRAL time

Every year that I have been on the tenure track, I have celebrated the end of the spring semester with a deep dive into a fat Dickens novel. That means this is the Sixth Annual May Dickens Read-Along (#SAMDRAL for all you hashtaggers), and this year I am mixing it up a little. I am planning to reread two of the short novels instead of one of the fat novels: Tale of Two Cities and Oliver Twist.

Usually I start after final grades are submitted, but do you know, I am ready to leave the cruellest month behind and plunge right in. I plan to read ToTC across about ten days, posting intermittently about it as I go. Join me! 

Ideas from Digital Minimalism

Hi, you guys, I have been meaning to tell you about finishing Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism over spring break. I was expecting it to cover well-trodden ground: phones are bad for concentration, smartphones are unhelpful at least as often as they are helpful, your attention is a valuable resource. We know all this, right? (Maybe you all will disagree on assertion #2. I am not convinced that smartphones are a net gain for the world.) It turned out to be a book that was more thought-provoking than guilt-inducing, so maybe you will want to read it too.

He seems to have mellowed somewhat on social media since he published Deep Work. He recommends a 30-day digital detox, in which you avoid all the sites that steer you toward immoderation, but he isn't asking readers to live austere lives in sparely appointed houses with only tin-can-and-string phones connecting them to the outside world. He suggests that if you want to have Facebook or Twitter or Instagram in your life after your detox, you should eliminate use on mobile devices; the mobile versions of these tools are specifically designed to elicit more compulsive use. He says that you can probably get what you're looking for on Facebook (i.e., actual updates from the people you actually care about) in 20 or 30 minutes per week; he acknowledges that this will vary.

If you are an average social media user, eliminating it entirely for a month will free up a lot of hours in your day. Newport invites readers to be purposeful about what they're going to do with that time. Perhaps the single most memorable piece of the book is his recommendation to engage in active leisure. Some of what he means by active leisure is familiar -- walk outside, play board games if that's your thing. Here's the thing I'm still thinking about: he challenges readers to improve or repair something once a week as a leisure activity. Use YouTube judiciously, to learn how to tile your backsplash or replace your light fixture or fix that hole in the drywall. And then -- get in there with your own hands and make your environment a little more homey.

(My backsplash remains untiled. But I'm THINKING TILE THOUGHTS, friends.)

The other idea that made me say "...whoa, that's really smart" was his suggestion that do-not-disturb mode should be the default. It's not hard to configure a phone so that calls and/or texts from your loved ones can get through while everybody else waits for you to finish what you're doing. "Treat texts like email," he says, which I think is excellent advice. As I was reading the book I was imagining a table:

Level	Required Response Time	Adverse Outcome If Disregarded
1	<1 minute	Harm to someone I love
2	<10 minutes	Irreparable property damage
3	<1 hour	Avoidable distress and worry
4	<4 hours	Annoyance
5	<12 hours	None

Contemporary phone culture makes it easy to treat every buzz of the phone like it's a Level 1-1 emergency: if I don't check this immediately, harm might come to someone I love. In reality, most of my texts from non-family members -- and many of the texts from family members -- can wait with no ill effects. Most of my texts probably fall in 4-4 or 4-5 territory: it would be good to respond before I eat my next meal, but I certainly don't need to respond before I finish my next sentence. It's not like I'm a realtor, whose income depends on prompt responses to inquiries from strangers, or a physician on call.

I am curious about your reactions. Are you intrigued by the active leisure idea? It might just be a natural fit for me as a person who finds joy in creating to-do lists. I'm also curious about where other people's texts tend to fall on my made-up urgency scale.

Pillow Talk

One of the unexpected advantages of having bigger kids is the return of lazy morning conversations with my husband. I have fond memories from the early days of our marriage of unscheduled weekend mornings, when we would just chat in bed until we were ready to get up. I remember one long conversation about epicycles in particular, which is maybe not the topic that a post title like "Pillow Talk" calls to mind.

For years we were rousted out of bed early on weekend mornings by kids and kids' events, but these days all of our kids can entertain themselves for a while if we need to hammer out the particulars of planetary orbital mechanics. This morning the topic was Robert Heinlein.

When I was a teenager I read a lot of Robert Heinlein, as did Elwood. We had both pretty much moved on from science fiction by the time we met in college, so we never dissected his books together. Today he was trying to remember the plot of Glory Road, which I read and re-read in high school. 

It hasn't aged well. FOR INSTANCE: can we talk about the handsome yet self-deprecating hero who is hand-picked by the EMPRESS OF TWENTY UNIVERSES for an intergalactic mission? Oh, and can we talk about how said empress had to have her lady parts decommissioned before taking office because they made her too irrational to function? AND ALSO about the part where their host gets mad because our hero declines to dally with the host's wife and/or daughters, one of whom is 13 YEARS OLD? 

Glory Road is pretty innocuous Heinlein, too. I was strangely relieved when I learned that Heinlein had experienced a neurological event in advanced age, because it seemed to me to explain a lot of the weird sloppy self-referential nonsense he spewed out and slapped between two covers at the end of his career. As a high school student I thought perhaps I needed to be better-read or smarter to connect all of his dots. There was also stuff happening between the lines that I couldn't quite puzzle out. And what do you know? It wasn't that I failed to follow the plot -- he just didn't get around to writing it!

I still have a soft spot for The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, as does Elwood. There will be no Lazarus Long on our shelves, though.

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?