Light and Momentary

I have been reading a bunch of interesting books

Are you looking for some good books to read? I have been reading a bunch of good books. I am going to tell you about the best ones in reverse chronological order until this post gets too long.

The day before yesterday I finished Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake, which is fluffy but hilarious. It made me laugh out loud over and over again. It's the story of a single mom (mum, I should say, since she's English) who lands a spot on a thinly disguised Great British Bakeoff. WILL Rosaline find love and contentment? WILL she shake off the pressure of her parents' unreasonable expectations? WILL her cake rise? The suspense is not intense, but the dialogue is snappy and the laughs are abundant.

Two days before that I finished Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing. I tore through it compulsively, eager to see where the characters found themselves next. It's a book worth going back to. It tells the story of two Ghanaian half-sisters: one marries a slaver, and one becomes a slave. The author traces their descendants' lives across 200 years. It's a hard read. As soon as I finished it I wanted to find whatever other books the author had written. But I also wanted to take a little time before I started the next one, because she is writing about some tough truths.

After more than a year of being stuck in chapter 1, I finished Intuitive Eating. And I think? it might? change my entire attitude toward food, weight, and occupying a woman's body at midlife? I hesitate to make bold pronouncements only a week after reading a book, but it made me think a lot of Serious Thoughts. They're all tied up with the Thoughts I've been thinking about fitness: how did I absorb the message -- from elementary school onward -- that I would be better, somehow, if there were less of me? In the same way that there's a weird taboo about getting bulky at the gym, there's a weird taboo about enjoying food and responding to our appetite cues and accepting our current shapes. 

In most domains we accept that our bodies' cues exist for an important purpose, you know? If we're tired, we should try getting more sleep. If that doesn't fix the problem, maybe we should see the doctor and get some bloodwork drawn. Part of being a Catholic adult is learning about rightly ordered appetites: tending our bodies in a way that allows us to live life to the full. We can believe this is true with respect to our desires for sleep, work, sex, etc. But there are an awful lot of Catholic women out there -- an AWFUL LOT -- thinking it is somehow virtuous to disregard their bodies' hunger cues on a regular basis.

Huh, I suspect I will have more things to say about Intuitive Eating, but I am going to get up at 5:30 so I can go to the gym at 6. I may have been talking a big game here this summer about TAKING UP SPACE etc., but it still feels pretty weird to be the only middle-aged woman in the weight room at the student fitness center. Not quite weird enough for me to stop going, but weird enough for me to aim to be there when the concentration of 19-year-old males is lowest. Will Jamie bump it up to 35-pound dumbbells for shoulder press tomorrow? Stay tuned for more exciting weightlifting updates!

Periodic reminder: these are affiliate links; if you click through and purchase something, Amazon will pay me a small amount of money.

The Homeschooling Starter Guide

When I think back to the years when I was trying to figure out homeschooling, sifting through the options and worrying about whether I was covering all the bases, I wish I'd had a book exactly like Dr. Gina Riley's Homeschooling Starter Guide. Gina is on the faculty at Hunter College in NYC. Her academic work explores topics like why kids want to learn, and how unschooling works out in the long run. She brings a scholar's breadth of understanding to this book, but she does so carefully: it is accessible and jargon-free. She also brings many years of personal experience; she homeschooled her son Ben, who just finished his master's degree, all the way through high school. 

I should disclose that Gina has been my friend since our kids were small, and I received a complimentary copy of her book. I was delighted to get it in the mail because it sounds just like her: encouraging, thoughtful, creative. Some experienced homeschooling parents can be bossy about their own preferences; Gina offers a balanced perspective on a wide array of approaches.

If you are considering homeschooling or are just getting started, I think you'll find Gina's book informative and welcoming. If you know someone who is thinking about homeschooling, it would be a lovely gift. I learned a lot from Gina as a new homeschooling mom, and I am delighted that now other new homeschooling moms parents will have the same opportunity.

A few more thoughts about Little Dorrit

I found Little Dorrit unexpectedly painful to read, because the society scenes left me wincing every time. "Save yourselves!" I wanted to shout at the characters, but of course they could not hear me and would not have heeded me even if they could. It reminded me strongly of Our Mutual Friend -- I feel certain that the Veneerings would have frequented the Merdles' dinner parties.

In my last post about the book I said I must have skipped over a 5-page chunk of text inadvertently in my hugely pregnant state, but it was actually a bigger block than that. There are two chapters that I do not remember at all, not in the slightest. And they're important chapters. The good news is that I finished the book with far fewer questions this time around, but the bad news is that I'm still scratching my head about what happened in 2002. Maybe I moved the bookmark to my target page, nodded off in the first of the two forgotten chapters, and thought the next day that I should start reading at the bookmark? Maybe I was so tired at the end of one day that my eyes passed over the words but my oh-so-pregnant brain failed to comprehend them? I will never know, I guess. But! I'm glad I filled in those gaps! Sometimes Dickens is elliptical, but two chapters' worth of big revelations would be a lot to elide.

I found the book's portrayal of the costs of wealth to be unexpectedly timely. We still don't believe that the love of money is the root of all evil, right? Maybe we ask ourselves: who could help loving money? Money buys freedom! I still shudder a little, though, thinking about the the ways that money imprisons some of the Little Dorrit characters. After I finished the book I felt an urgent need to catch up on charitable giving for the year. I got everything all squared away through the end of May and still felt unsettled, so I proceeded with the June giving as well.

Generally I've found that I uncover more to enjoy in a Dickens novel the second time through. Even though I'm glad I read Little Dorrit last month, I wouldn't really say that I enjoyed it. Lots to think about, less to delight in. Not my favorite May Dickens Read-Along, but at least I know now what Mr. Clennam wanted to remember!

Just finished

I finished a book today that I found totally charming: Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts. A blogger recommended another of her books (can't remember who, unfortunately), but the library suggested Tuesday Mooney as an alternate when the recommended title was unavailable. "Why not?" I said to myself on page 495 or so of Little Dorrit, and in I dove once I was done with Dickens. It's an interesting book to read right after Little Dorrit, because they both raise some questions about family secrets and structural integrity in big old spooky houses. But in most ways it couldn't be more dissimilar. Tuesday Mooney is a very different flavor of heroine: whip-smart and funny and not at all little.

It's partially about a gimmicky treasure hunt and the associated media circus, but it's more about grief and loss and being left behind, and the soap-bubble fragility of life, and the way that our connections with others are both tenuous and durable.

The ending ties things up pretty neatly, but there are some loose ends that leave me wondering if a follow-up is planned. I would be happy to read a follow-up novel. Even though I just finished Tuesday Mooney this afternoon, I am jumping right into another book by the same author.

One mystery revealed

Near the end of Little Dorrit there is an unusually long chapter in which some of the secrets that have puzzled us from the beginning are uncovered. And you guys, I don't know exactly what happened when I read this book in 2002, but I seem to have skipped over a key 5-page section. I must have thought I was on p. 757 when I heaved my hugely pregnant self up to resolve that poorly-timed sibling squabble, but I was actually on p. 752. "This looks right," I must have said to myself when I sat back down later that day, but it was NOT RIGHT, not at all.

I remember finishing the book and thinking, "Huh, there are a lot of things that still seem unclear here," because I DIDN'T READ pp. 752-757!

The more Dickens I have read, the more I have seen that his books reward careful attention. I have been meticulous this time through -- when did Character A talk to Character B? How does Character C know Character D? I didn't want to get to the end and feel uncertain this time. But I didn't need to be taking notes on their offhand conversations in 2021 -- I just needed a bookmark in 2002!

To the list of tips I have shared in the past for enjoying Dickens, I can now add another: it's better if you read all of the pages. So helpful, I know.

Biting my nails on page 568

Do you ever re-read a book and ask yourself, "Did I notice that before?" This is happening to me with Little Dorrit.

Dickens is making a particular point, it seems to me, of saying that you don't have to be incarcerated to be imprisoned: age and debility are their own prison for Mrs. Clennam; unforgiveness, ditto, for Mrs. C and for Miss Wade. The "surfaces" that Mrs. General implores Little Dorrit to create will become a cage, if she succeeds in heeding her companion's advice; we see it in every society scene. Even Mr. Merdle looks in vain for a place in his home to be out of the butler-warden's view. But I am not sure I connected those dots last time.

I joked in my first post about the first chapter's warning regarding Blandois/Rigaud's villainy, but it seems to me this time through that Dickens is pulling out all of the stops: this guy is a really-for-real seriously bad dude, he says. Beware, gentle reader! I am certain I did not have as much sympathy for Gowan's dog on my first reading, but this time through I am making horrified faces even as I remember enough to write this post.

"Why are you making that face?" Joe asked me as I was reading earlier this evening, and it was another horrified sympathy face. I did not remember how many of our friends were drawn into the scam that will shortly be exposed. I am already anticipating the shock and the loss that they will experience. Perhaps this time it is more resonant because there is such a prominent real-world example in recent memory.

Little Dorrit is the Dickens novel which left me with the most questions, but I did not go searching for answers because I was 7,654,238 months pregnant when I finished it and greatly distracted by the sensation of having accidentally swallowed a hippopotamus bent on kicking his way out of my abdomen. I'm curious about whether this time through will leave me with a clearer sense of where he was trying to take us. I'll let you know if I have more insight this time around. Or if I accidentally swallow a hippopotamus.

Little Dorrit, Day 1

You know how you can tell Monsieur Rigaud is a villain and not an innocent wrongly imprisoned? His hair is streaked with red, that's how. Redheads in Dickens are nothing but trouble. Beware the redhead! [says the redhead]

I do not remember anything at all about Miss Ware from my first reading of Little Dorrit, but I will bet you twenty American dollars that we see her again. She's too tormented and angsty to fade into the background. (Now I'm wondering if I ought to have remembered her. Anything I missed on my first trip through Little Dorrit I will blame on sharing my body with an enormous baby the whole time I was reading it. Joe was 9#12 when he was born, so I'm fairly sure every part of me, including my brain, had to squish into less space than it was accustomed to in order to make room for him.)

We also meet Pet Meagles in chapter 2; she is the anti-Miss Ware. Dickens says of her: "there was in Pet an air of timidity and dependence which was the best weakness in the world, and gave her the only crowning charm a girl so pretty and pleasant could have been without." I'm thinking Dickens would not have voted for Elizabeth Warren in the Democratic primary -- how about you?

#EAMDRAL, the PLAN

All righty, friends, it's going to be fairly painful here for the next few days. The thing about grading big batches of student writing is that there's always plagiarism somewhere. I thought I had been SO careful about making sure I wouldn't be dealing with plagiarism in finals week, but it seems to be inevitable. So! When you are being walloped in the face with the very worst part of your job, do you say to yourself, "a nice fat Dickens novel would make me feel so much better right now"? Because I do.

Let's read Little Dorrit together!

We can go to the south of France in fiction, even if we can't go there in reality. We can discuss whether Little Dorrit is a believable character or not, and why Dickens was so determined that his female lead characters would be mostly meek. We can also talk about the least meek mother in all of Dickens, and the 19th-century fictional predecessor of a 21st-century criminal who just appeared in the obit pages. We can return to the Marshalsea debtors' prison, which we haven't visited since we read Pickwick a few years ago.

I am going to start on Monday and read about 40 pages a day. If you get a free Kindle version, take a careful look at the first paragraph before you dive in. It should say, "Thirty years ago, Marseilles lay burning in the sun, one day. A blazing sun upon a fierce August day was no greater rarity in southern France then, than at any other time, before or since." I am telling you this because I downloaded a free Kindle version of Oliver Twist last year and I wondered briefly if I had slid into Looking Glass World. I think someone must have plugged the Project Gutenberg version into some kind of translation software twice -- so that it was rendered automatically into Dutch (or something) and then back into English -- and uploaded the resulting bowl of not-quite-word-salad to the Kindle store. 

I have been reading Cal Newport's A World Without Email for weeks now, and the ratio of interesting to dull is less than favorable. It's partly that there's too much business-speak for my taste, and partly that the changes he is suggesting seem likely to meet with a lot of resistance and I'm tired right now. But I am going to FINISH IT, because Little Dorrit awaits. I have also been reading This is Happiness, which I am finding pleasant but not especially riveting. I am going to FINISH IT TOO, because Little Dorrit awaits.

Wouldn't you like to escape into Victorian England for a little while? Join me!

Bait and switch books, part 2

A few more thoughts for you about Brian King's The Art of Taking It Easy: the place where I have the most work to do, I think, is in shifting my optimism/pessimism balance. It's true that if you expect the worst you'll rarely be disappointed. There are costs to that approach, however. Optimistic people, King says, don't dwell on what might have been. Negative thoughts enter their minds and pass on through; they don't ruminate. I, my friends, ruminate all the dang time. This is a terrible habit! I could probably take up smoking or perhaps meth and be better off! (maybe not meth) 

If I experience something that could have been more dangerous than it was, I think about what could have happened even though it didn't happen. I think about what might happen in the future and I fall into the trap King describes of overestimating the likelihood of the worst-case scenario. I'm not sure he has a very clear sense of what it's like to live inside a worrier brain. At one point he's trying to think of the worst outcome you could experience as a result of being in heavy traffic, and he can't come up with anything. I'm like, "Brian, my dude, you could DIE -- that's the bad outcome and it happens every day." He suggests that I focus on actual less-bad outcomes instead of perseverating on other possibilities (For instance, remember the time that Stella wandered off and got stuck high up in a tree? She got down safely! no harm done! That is not the blog post I wrote, though.) He suggests that I allow possible bad outcomes less space in my head. This is sensible advice -- perhaps obvious advice to those of you who don't tend to worry. It is going to take practice for me.

Some of what he suggests to shift the landscape in one's brain is familiar-- cultivate gratitude, tell the people you love that you love them, laugh frequently. Here's an idea I hadn't encountered: write about a future in which a problem that is weighing on you is resolved exactly as you'd like it to be. Describe everything about that imagined outcome. Try it again the next week, focusing on a different outcome. King says there's some empirical evidence in support of this activity, which trains the brain to think optimistically about distressing situations.

I know exactly which situation I would write about it, and I know most of what I would say. Writing it down feels weirdly risky. Maybe I'll try it and report back.

Bait and switch books

I just finished two books in one day that did the same strange thing: switching directions on the reader in an unexpected way.

Our parish often gives parishioners a book on major feast days, and our Easter book was Matthew Kelly's I Heard God Laugh (affiliate link). People rave about Matthew Kelly, but I have never finished one of his books. This one, I decided, I would finish. He began, as he usually seems to begin, by talking about how prayer can change your life. Ten minutes a day, he says over and over, can transform everything. He has a formula for those ten minutes, and I thought the book was going to focus on applying the formula. But then he changes direction. He talks about his experiences as a teenager learning to pray, feeling drawn deeper and deeper into prayer. The title of the book comes from a mystical experience that occurred after he had spent hundreds and hundreds of hours of prayer, in a season of his life when prayer was his highest priority.

Is it just me, or is that a little odd? In my view a prayer life is a little like triathlon training. You can't get ready for a triathlon in ten minutes a day. It's better to run ten minutes per day than zero minutes per day, absolutely! It's 100% worth doing! But you can't go the distance if you don't build up the endurance beforehand. Would I have a mystical experience of God's presence if I used Kelly's formula faithfully for ten minutes every day? Maybe? I think I'll let someone else try it and tell me how it works out, though.

A few weeks ago I was checking out an e-book from my library when a different book caught my eye. A guy named Brian King, a standup comic with a PhD in psychology, wrote a book called The Art of Taking It Easy. Sure, I thought to myself, I'll see how it is.

The first chapter was really good! Smart, funny, polished! I was a fan! And then things got considerably less polished. My suspicion is that he smacked that first chapter around until it sparkled when he was in the proposal stage, and then he was like, "Wait, now I have to write a whole book??" There are insights and funny stories scattered all the way through, but I would not have been as enthusiastic if I had read, say, chapter 4 first.

These are some of the things I want to remember from the book:

1. He says stress is a reaction to a perceived threat, but most of the threats we perceive are not actual threats. If you live your life thinking that the unlikely bad outcome is worth losing sleep over, you will lose a lot of sleep. The thing that stresses us out most is...nothing. We stew and fret, we think of the worst outcome, and what happens is...nothing.
2. If you can learn to think differently about situations that are stressing you out, you can change your stress level. Does that sound obvious? I found his presentation of contrasting options here to be smart and funny, but it sounds pretty straightforward now that I have typed it out. I guess I thought that the stress level drove the thoughts, but apparently the thoughts drive the stress level. You guys know how much I tend to worry, and King thinks this is a terrible use of my brainpower. If you can't do anything about a situation, he says, then why worry about it?
3. I read that question and a stream of defensive thoughts flowed: I don't know; it does sound dumb when you put it that way; that's just the default mode for my brain. King says that people who have formed the habit of worrying tend to default to worry when their brains are not engaged in a task. Occupy your brain with something better than worry! Busy brains are likely to be happier brains!
4. I want to keep thinking about the relationship between resilience and happiness. Like, I wish that I could bellow, "I get knocked down, but I get up again; you're never gonna keep me down," but instead it's more like "I get knocked down; I lie on the ground briefly and contemplate the unfairness of the universe. I gingerly palpate the part that hit the ground first. It hurts, dernit! Who knocked me down? Can I speak to the manager? Also, in order to process this I need to write a blog post from my position on the ground -- could someone bring me my laptop?" Which (a) doesn't scan and (b) doesn't make for a very happy life. King says we need to reframe difficult situations by thinking about what actually happened instead of what could have happened. This is timely for me tonight, because I am still feeling some adrenaline residue from earlier. Stella came in shrieking in pain and disgust; a bird had pooped in her eye and she was really hurting. King would tell me to think about the actual outcome (eye flushed, good cheer restored) and not about the uncertainties.

I was going to write a quick paragraph about the things I highlighted in the book, but it turns out that I highlighted a whole bunch of stuff and this post is already pushing a thousand words. Maybe I'll write a little more about it tomorrow.

Gratitude journaling, the reboot

When I read One Thousand Gifts I took up gratitude journaling for a while. I thought it might transform me into a spiritual powerhouse but actually it just made me grumpy. Ann Voskamp wrote so enthusiastically about seeing the goodness of God in the curls of shredded cheese. And I mean, a person who says beets speak to her of the glory of God is not going to look askance at the spiritual potential of shredded cheese, but I really disliked writing in a regimented way about things I was grateful for. Oh, well, I said to myself, so much for spiritual powerhouse-ness.

I mentioned recently that I finished the book Burnout and liked it a lot (except for the surfeit of Disney princess references). The authors recommend a different take on gratitude journaling. They say most gratitude journaling focuses on being grateful for what you have, which isn't very effective as a mood-booster. They say that for a short-term mood boost, you can focus on whom you have (i.e., thinking specifically about your gratitude for the people in your life). For longer-term changes, they say, you can focus on being grateful for how things happen. Like so:

1. Think of an event or circumstance that sparks grateful feelings in you
2. Write about what happened
3. Write about how it made you feel then and how it makes you feel now
4. Explain how the event/circumstance came to be -- what caused it to happen?

One of the authors tried this for one event each day for three weeks, and she said it was amazing. (She shares my skepticism about gratitude journaling as described in women's magazine articles.) The Nagoski sisters are smart women and they tell me there is science in support of this strategy and not just personal experience. So I am going to give it a whirl for a month. I'll report back. 

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!