Light and Momentary

Eighth time is the charm, maybe

I am determined to finish The Game of Kings. I keep hearing that it's amazing. Just give it time, people say. It's worth it, they tell me.

I am almost 200 pages in, feeling impatient.

There are spots where I can tell it's supposed to be funny, but I am not invested enough in the characters to be amused. It seems willfully esoteric in a way I find irritating.

I keep telling myself that it's probably like Master and Commander, which I also found a little irritating. I didn't even pick up the second book until a few years later. But then I galloped through the whole series, cheering and chortling.

Let's hope I'm enjoying it more a hundred pages from now.

Yet another book recommendation

I just finished Happiness Falls, and I need some friends to discuss it with me. There's a non-speaking teen at the center of the story, which is narrated by his young adult sister. She has her own neurodivergent stuff going on. The story is driven by the disappearance of their father.

It is right up a couple of my alleys, so perhaps it's not surprising that I found it memorable and thought-provoking. Read it and tell me what you think, please.

Also reading

I bought a copy of Happiness Falls when I read the NYT review earlier this fall, but it has just been sitting on my Kindle. I started it last night and I am enjoying it so far. I like the narrator's distinctive voice, and I'm intrigued by the portrayal of the disabled sibling. I'm only a half-dozen chapters in, but I'm looking forward to reading more.

Last week I finished Tom Lake, another book set in the summer of 2020. I went right down to the wire, scrambling to finish it before the library retrieved the Kindle version from my phone. The 2020 sections of the book take place on a Michigan cherry farm, and I enjoyed the sense of place. This one also features a female narrator with a distinctive voice, talking about memory and loss and the strange paths that lead us to the places where we wind up.

Not my usual genre

I don't read a lot of thrillers but I finished a good one today, called Just Another Missing Person. (Oh, hey, I think the Kindle edition is on sale!) It raises a bunch of interesting questions about moral ambiguity: who's a good guy and who's not, what happens when loyalty takes a person too far into dangerous territory. She set up the big twist in the middle skillfully, and then -- bam! -- nailed it with another big twist at the end. I didn't see either one coming but they both made sense. It's tough for an author to nail both the setup and the surprise, but I thought they both worked well.

The reason I don't read many thrillers is that I have kind of a delicate flower brain and disturbing imagery tends to stick, but I didn't find it overwhelming.

P.S. Don't read this spoiler-y question if you think you might enjoy the book. But if you have read it, I have one niggling quibble: why would the storage space show up in the location data? Seems unlikely to be a frequent destination.

A trip to Britannula

If I say, "I just finished a novel set in a dystopian future, where all adults get euthanized at age 68," do you have a guess as to the author?

Did you say Trollope? Probably not, huh?

Because it's a Trollope novel: The Fixed Period. This was Trollope novel #17 for me, and it was my least favorite by a wide margin. I guess if you publish 47 novels, something's got to fill out the bottom tier.

But it was still interesting. It's set in 1980, where ship-to-shore communications are enabled by "hair telephones," a more sophisticated version of a tin can on a string. In Trollope's 1980, bicycles can go -- wait for it -- twenty-four miles per hour! The game of cricket has been revolutionized by a steam-powered machine that does the bowling. Although steam-powered tricycles exist, horse-drawn carriages remain popular. Also, comically, breach of promise suits are still a thing for couples who once considered themselves engaged.

It was intriguing to see how much of the future was literally unimaginable, even for someone who had a remarkably fertile imagination. Airplanes? Gasoline? Women in the workplace? He didn't see any of it coming.

Maybe the weirdest thing about the book is that he seemed to get tired of writing it and just...stop. The book is written in first person, in the voice of the president of Britannula, a fictional island that has decided to eliminate old age and all its associated hassles. We know from the very beginning that he is being taken to England by sea, and most of the book tells us how he wound up on the ship. I found the ending so strange and abrupt that I wondered if the free Kindle edition was missing the actual ending. The Project Gutenberg version is equally strange and abrupt, though, so I guess that's just the way it ends. 

"Well," I imagine Trollope saying to himself in the middle of the last chapter, "this has been a wearying and unpleasant experiment. Time to be done and write more novels about class differences in the British Isles. Endings are overrated anyway." 

I'm still enthusiastic about my Trollope project despite the weirdness of this book. Seventeen down, thirty to go. I figure if I read about one per season I can finish by the time I'm 60. Unless there are a lot more like The Fixed Period, in which case some re-evaluation will be necessary.

In progress

I am in the middle of Julie Schumacher's The Shakespeare Requirement. I bought her earlier book Dear Committee Members back in 2016 and just learned a few days ago that it was the first in a trilogy. (The third book is coming out next month.)

Her books are bitingly hilarious. Every chapter makes me laugh, but I have to take breaks in between chapters because she is so hard on her characters. Her fictional university is a pretty bleak place. If you are a former English major or a current academic, you might also find it memorable.

Summer Reading

I finished two books today. The first was Dickens and Prince, which I mentioned to you when I checked it out of the library last week. I enjoyed it enough to finish it, but it is probably a better fit for someone who loves Prince a little more and Dickens a little less. At one point he mentions that he hasn't read a particular novel and I was like, "What do you MEAN, you haven't read Barnaby Rudge? [I think it was Barnaby Rudge. Maybe Old Curiosity Shop.] How can you write a WHOLE BOOK about DICKENS if you haven't even read Barnaby Rudge?" At the same time, I have not listened to nearly enough Prince to have opinions about his opinions. There's also a fair amount of Nick Hornby in the book, which I found a little distracting. Grumbles aside, the comparison works better than you might think, and it's an interesting window into the lives of two extraordinarily creative and prolific figures.

I also read The Eating Instinct this week. I snagged it when the author mentioned it was on sale -- currently available for only $2.99. I found it interesting and well written, compassionate and thought-provoking. Her older daughter was born with a complex cardiac anomaly that almost killed her, and she was tube-fed for a long time in consequence. It's partially about her family's story but more broadly about the pervasive food weirdness that is everywhere in this culture. She manages to weave ARFID (Avoidant-Restrictive Food Intake Disorder) and bariatric surgery into the same narrative: we've lost sight of how to feed ourselves.

Great Expectations

Who wants to talk about Great Expectations? Melanie left a comment talking about her kids' enjoyment of Mr. Pumblechook's "May I? May I?" My Alex also thought that was hilarious when we read it together. It struck me this time through that Magwitch does the same thing when he returns and Pip finds it equally unpleasant. He doesn't seem to want anyone to take credit for the making of him.

Melanie also commented on the ending, which I love and she does not. I am glad Dickens listened to Wilkie Collins. I am not a fan of the original ending but I find the revised version to be a hard-earned flavor of hopeful. [Caution, spoilers ahead for this 162-year-old book.] I don't want to believe that Miss Havisham's bitterness blighted Estella in a permanent way.

Did you finish? Are you still reading? Tell us all about it.

How's your mobility?

Last month I read Outlive, which I highly recommend. When I read Peter Attia's interview in the NYT, I found his message intriguing and his ego off-putting in almost equal measure. Not quite equal, though, because I decided to read the book. It is fascinating. He has quite the ego, to be sure, but he might almost deserve it.

The number one thing I don't like (besides (did I mention?) the ego that might require its own seat for airline travel), is the way he talks about men as the norm and women almost as an afterthought. But EVEN SO, I'm telling you: you should read this book.

Nutshell version: he talks about reducing your odds of developing what he calls the four horsemen (atherosclerotic disease, metabolic dysfunction, neurodegenerative disease, and cancer) with the goal of extending your healthspan-- the period of time in which you are healthy enough to enjoy your life and live it independently. He proposes a multi-pronged approach for keeping the four horsemen at bay, and its outlines will be familiar to you. (Again, though, he writes about them in a compelling way with a boatload of information that was new to me.) The thing that was most surprising to me was his emphasis on stability, on protecting your body's capacity to interact safely with the world around it.

I have been exploring some of the ideas in that chapter over the last month. For instance: he writes about how our toes should function, and mine are falling down on the job. I hypothesize that the years I spent wearing Patriarchy Shoes in the 1980s/1990s caused me to disregard enough sensory input from my sad squashed pinky toes that I'm having a hard time using them as intended here in middle age. Maybe it wasn't the shoes, but something caused me to need a month of consistent practice to make firm contact between my right pinky toe and the floor when I stand up. I'm still working on the left one.

Recently my Kindle suggested that I might like a book called Built To Move, and I've been working my way through that one. I'm doing their 21-day mobility challenge, and finding it a bite-sized way to address some of the effects of the passage of time. Each chapter has a simple test followed by practices for improving your performance on the test. It's fun, if a little humbling, and you might like it too.

In the balance chapter, for instance, there are two tests. Test #1: Stand on one foot. Close your eyes. Count the number of times you put your foot down in a 20-second period. I did so badly on this test, you guys! My balance is fine when my eyes are open. I can hold tree pose comfortably for a long time. But I am relying more heavily than I realized on visual feedback to keep myself in the pose. 

Test #2 is the Old Man Balance Test, a name that gave me hope initially. "I have better balance than an old man," said I to myself. I do not, however, have better balance than an old man who could pass this test. They tell you to stand on one foot with a pair of socks and lace-up shoes on the floor in front of you. Without touching your foot to the ground, bend down and pick up the sock. Put it on. Keeping your foot in the air, bend down again and pick up your shoe. Put it on and tie it, keeping your foot up the whole time. Switch feet and do it again.

I can do this task in segments. I can get a sock on without falling over, but then I need to touch my foot to the ground before I can lift it up again and put my shoe on. I might or might not be able to tie it without tapping my foot on the ground again. I'm having fun with the trying, though, after many years of reflexively sitting down to put on my socks and shoes.

Give it a whirl and tell me what you think!

Maybe we can have some TAMDRAL updates

I am way out of the blogging groove, but I intend to fix that. I have lots of things to tell you. Maybe it's a good time for a blogging streak, yeah?

I have totally neglected posting about Dickens in a year when more people than usual wanted to read along. So let's start there, shall we? Are you reading Great Expectations? Have you read it before? What part are you on and what do you think?

I had planned to finish the book by the end of the June but I have been flitting in fickle fashion from book to book instead. I am only on chapter 36, in which Pip has just returned from a funeral.

It's TAMDRAL time, friends

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

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

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

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

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

TAMDRAL Time

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

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

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

Book Notes

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

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

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

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

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

Enthusiasm tempered

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Books that reward persistence

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

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

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

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

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

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

Books I have been reading recently

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

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

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

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

Girl Cooties

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

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

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

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

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

Currently Reading

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

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

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

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

Tranquility by Tuesday, the follow-up post

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

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

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

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

via GIPHY

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

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