Light and Momentary

Adventuring with Allingham

Part of the Kate Davies summer knitting community involves reading novels by Margery Allingham, ranked alongside Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers as one of the UK's Queens of Crime. I've read all of the Lord Peter Wimsey books and short stories, and I devoured Agatha Christie as a kid. So it seemed likely that I'd enjoy the Allingham books as well. I finished the third one today. 

I'm enjoying them enough to keep going. Our hero Albert Campion reminds me in some ways of Lord Peter Wimsey. The books are pleasantly diverting and they do not overwhelm a sensitive reader* with gore or tautly suspenseful plot lines.

*(It's me; I'm the sensitive reader. When I was a preschooler I found Scooby-Doo too frightening to watch, and so I would cover my eyes until the scary parts were over. That probably gives you a sense of my capacity for gore and suspense. I can only tolerate murder mysteries written for the delicate flower.)

It's interesting to be reading Allingham at the same time as my Trollope novel, though. In Trollope's world we can know that a person is inexcusably vulgar if he wears yellow gloves, a sartorial mishap that occurs in both Miss Mackenzie and Marion Fay. In Allingham's novel Flowers for the Judge, I lingered over the description of a natty dresser who disappeared mysteriously. His elegant ensemble included -- can you guess? -- yellow gloves. Were yellow gloves still vulgar, and their presence was supposed to tell us something about either the disappearing man or the tobacconist describing his disappearance? Or had yellow gloves been plucked from the Trash Heap of Bad Fashion Choices and placed in the Catalog of Snazzy Choices by the 1930s? Who can say? 

In Trollope's novels, "making love" means "wooing." Obviously it acquired a very different meaning at some point between the 1870s and the 1970s, but when? When an unhappily married Allingham character tells a rival to go ahead and make love to his wife, is he inviting the rival to flirt with her or to pursue carnal knowledge of her? The internet tells me that the current meaning took hold in the 1920s, beginning in the US. So had it traveled across the Atlantic by the 1930s? Who can say? 

I'm a little behind the reading schedule for the Kate Davies group (perhaps because I'm trying to finish another fat Trollope novel at the same time), but I am going to keep plugging along. Next up: Dancers in Mourning.

The Bad Place

I'm reading Trollope novel #22, which has the improbable title Is He Popenjoy?, and we are just about to meet two characters whose advent has been the subject of exclamation-point-filled dread for many chapters. These characters come from the Bad Place: Italy.

Perhaps you have never thought of Italy as a bad place. Perhaps you even like Italy; perhaps you plan to visit Italy someday. But Trollope would like you to re-evaluate. Any time you encounter the label "Italian," know that it actually means "under a permanent cloud of suspicion." 

It took me a while to figure this out. In Marion Fay, a character is discovered to be an Italian nobleman, and I failed to grasp the full implications of this discovery at the time. Would you want to be a nobleman under a permanent cloud of suspicion? I thought not. You'd probably renounce your title too.

I didn't tell you about Lady Anna aside from my introduction to it via the Trollope Society (I figure there are probably limits on the number of Trollope posts you are willing to read), but Lady Anna's father was a nasty piece of work. We know this in part because of his romantic involvement -- in Italy. (Parenthetically, to the few of you who are intrigued by Trollope, Trollope's treatment of Lady Anna reminds me of the ending he wrote for John Eames. Both of them surprised me.)

Oh! Also! I'd never thought about this before, but there's a character in Barchester Towers whom we're supposed to regard as indolent -- a sketchy guy with a sketchy family -- and guess where he just spent twelve years? Italy, that's where!

Italy seems like a strange place to vilify, but Trollope apparently had very firm ideas about it. I guess I'll have to wait and see what these characters get up to. It seems unlikely to bring happiness to our heroine.

The funniest book I've read this year

Catherine Newman's new book, Sandwich, came out last week, and you should probably read it. If you're a woman in the 45-55 age range, it will make you laugh until you weep with its devastatingly hilarious takes on the indignities of midlife. If you're married to a woman in that age range, it will make you say, "Weeeellllll, things could definitely be worse around here." If you are outside those age ranges, it will give you some insight into the goings-on inside the aging brains of your middle-aged loved ones.

It is uproariously funny. I was reading it in public over my lunchtime sandwich and I snort-laughed helplessly. I thought maybe I would just get a quick coffee and squeeze in another chapter (or two) before I went back to my office, and I laughed until I had actual tears running down my face right there in the coffeehouse.

It reminds me very much of her first novel, We All Want Impossible Things, which I blogged about in early 2023. It intertwines heartbreakingly sad parts with the laugh-so-hard-you-inhale-your-beverage parts in a way that I find memorable and effective. This one is more about marriage than the earlier book, and it combines the moments of "I don't know who I would be without you" and the moments of "I might kill you in your sleep" in a way that might -- just possibly -- resonate with some of the folks I know navigating marriage at midlife.

Although the main character's kids are grown, the book talks a lot about pregnancy and miscarriage and abortion. It does so in ways that left me pretty uncomfortable, but maybe that's the point. I am guessing that even if your views on abortion diverge from mine, parts of the book will make you squirm.

Across both books there are things that struck me as implausible, but not in a way that torpedoed my enjoyment of the book. (Although, just in case the magic of Google alerts ever brings this post to the author's attention: next time you're writing about early speech development, shoot me an email. I'll happily volunteer as your subject matter expert.) Mostly what I will remember is the distinctive voice: smart, aching, acerbic, riotously funny.

A meringue book

I pre-ordered Katherine Center's new book because I've read and enjoyed a few of her others. i read it in a day and laughed out loud a double-digit number of times. If you're looking for something sweet and fluffy and funny, this might be your book.

Her books are a little formulaic: improbable heroes falling for heroines who have faced down some flavor of struggle or tragedy. This one is about writing a screenplay for a romantic comedy, so she spends time talking appreciatively about the conventions of the genre.

Thomas Pynchon writes Mustard Green Books-- probably good for your brain but not especially easy or delightful to consume. Katherine Center writes Meringue Books: light, sweet, fluffy, easy to gobble up.

Hard Times, come again no more

I finished Hard Times today. I'm glad I reread it; I'd still put it in the bottom tier of Dickens novels. 

I think my favorite thing about Dickens is his ability to spin up a complicated plot and tie up the loose ends in improbable but generally agreeable ways. Do I find the plot of Our Mutual Friend plausible? Absolutely not. Do I love it anyway? Yes, I do.

Hard Times offers a smaller canvas, and the ending feels hasty and forced to me. Dickens is the king of the useful coincidence, but the discovery of the missing person is just a leetle too much for me. I might be more tolerant if it contained more likable or amusing characters.

We have now AMDRAL-ed our way through 11 of the 14 completed Dickens novels. The three remaining are all doorstop-sized: Barnaby Rudge, Dombey & Son, and The Old Curiosity Shop. If you have a vote for next May, let me know.

Deceivers, the deceived, agency, helplessness

As I've been reading Hard Times I've been observing the relationship between Louisa and James Harthouse with some dissatisfaction. Dashing deceivers are a thing for Dickens (and in plenty of other 19th-century fiction), but I was musing to myself about the contrast between Louisa and Lydia Bennet. Lydia seems to me to have more agency. Is it a terrible idea to elope with Wickham? Obviously. Is it a freely chosen terrible idea? I think so. Louisa, though, seems to be on a descending escalator rather than a staircase -- not so much choosing her own path as being pulled along it.

So I was already grumbling to myself about female Dickens characters at the moment of crisis for Louisa. You should skip the last sentence in this paragraph if you haven't finished Part Two yet, but what does she do? (Here, I will turn the text yellow because it is an unexpected development. Just highlight it with your mouse if you want to read it.) She throws herself helplessly at the feet of a different man, that's what.

Harrumph, I say. Harrumph!

It's the Eleventh Annual May Dickens Read-Along!

Welcome to EAMDRAL, the Eleventh Annual May Dickens Read-ALong. AMDRALing is a spring tradition in these parts, and this will be the quickest one we've ever had. So far we are a small but mighty crew of 3 or 4, but this is the easiest-ever AMDRAL to catch up on if you need a little more Dickens in your life.

In the book's early chapters we meet Mr. Gradgrind, the fact-loving fancy-fearing father of offspring whose numbers include Adam Smith Gradgrind and Malthus Gradgrind. We are more focused on his daughter Louisa, though, whose first appearance in the story makes it clear to the reader that she finds her day-in-day-out diet of just-the-facts-ma'am to be a wearying existence.

We also meet Mr. Bounderby, who reminds me of my most difficult relative. He boasts the most and infers the worst, and he seems determined to keep it that way. When Mr. Gradgrind asks Sissy Jupe, "What's in the bottle you are carrying?" Mr. Bounderby answers immediately and falsely: gin. (Sissy is actually bringing a blend of soothing oils to her father, about whom more soon.)

Jump in and join us! 

It's AMDRAL season again

Finals week starts tomorrow, which means it's the time of year when a middle-aged mom's fancy lightly turns to nice fat Dickens novels. The first AMDRAL was in 2014, believe it or not. That means this year is the Eleventh Annual May Dickens Read-ALong, and we are going to read Hard Times.

Hard Times is the shortest Dickens novel, clocking in at just over 100K words. If you want a nice little snacklet of a Dickens novel, this is your year. I haven't read it since 2009, but in my recollection he has a lot of Emphatic Thoughts about education. As I wind down a semester I'll remember for its student submissions bristling with AI-generated text, I am also having some Emphatic Thoughts about education. I guess I'll see how well our thoughts align.

I am going to dive in on May 15, which will give me time to get all the grades submitted and respond to the inevitable emails complaining about the grades. I'll aim to read two or three chapters a day and finish up in early June. Join me for the quickest-ever AMDRAL!

The Trollope Project Continues

You might remember that I am working my way through the 47 novels of Anthony Trollope, with the goal of reading them all by the time I'm 60. I had planned to read one per season, but I'm on Trollope novel #4 for 2024 and it's only March. Today I attended a virtual meeting of the Trollope Society, and my husband laughed out loud when I told him about it afterward. So maybe I'll tell you all a little bit about it too.

After I read Marion Fay, I turned right around and started reading Cousin Henry. It's about an old man who is torn about where to leave his property, and it has a deeply unlikeable title character. It seems like a pretty bold authorial choice, actually, to name your book after the character whose downfall your readers will all be hoping to see -- as if Dickens had gone with "The Adventures of Fagin" instead of "Oliver Twist." It's only about 200 pages long, which is practically a short story in Trollope's world, and as soon as I finished it I plunged right into Orley Farm.

I loved Orley Farm. It might be the book I'd recommend to someone who wanted to read a standalone Trollope novel. It's much heftier than either Cousin Henry or Marion Fay, but I found that it moved briskly. At one point I texted my family to tell them about an exciting plot development. (They found it less riveting than I did; go figure.) It asks a bunch of interesting questions: how do we balance justice and mercy? What's our reaction when an extraordinarily unsympathetic character demands justice? How much of a court case is about truth, and how much is about lawyerly skill? 

When I finished I thought to myself, "I wish I could talk to a pal about Trollope." And LO, the Trollope Society exists specifically for people who want to talk about Trollope. Their spring book is Lady Anna, and I decided to jump in and read the first chunk of it in preparation for their initial online discussion.

A retired American chemistry teacher spoke for about 25 minutes to a surprising number of attendees (5 screens of them! 5! for a conversation about this totally obscure novel!). She had clearly put a lot of effort into investigating this book's background, and she had also prepped discussion questions for people to chat about in breakout rooms.

This is the part that made my husband burst out laughing: I told him that she said, "Now I know that this book is quite a page-turner, and many of you will have already read ahead. Be sure you don't share any spoilers in your breakout room!"

"A page-turner," he repeated to himself, chortling helplessly. "A page-turner!" 

I had started to think I was being a little nutty about Trollope, as I embarked on novel #21. But after this meeting today it's clear to me that I know nothing -- nothing -- about real Trollope fandom. 

The Readers Have Spoken

Well, okay, one reader has spoken. Probably she does not represent an eager horde of Trollope lovers, jostling each other impatiently as they await my thoughts on Marion Fay. But let's talk about Marion Fay anyway.

It's a late Trollope novel, published in the year he died. Some of its elements are memorably thoughtful and mature. He does a marvelous job showing us how an ordinarily ambitious stepmother might become a wicked stepmother, at least temporarily. He builds on questions he first raised at the end of the Palliser Chronicles; here, too, two children of a widowed nobleman want to marry outside their class. But for the most part the young people are more skillfully drawn here, and we understand more of what they are thinking. 

I say "for the most part" because I'm not sold on the characterization of Marion Fay herself. She's like a refugee from a Dickens novel -- a little too perfect for plausibility. And her strand of the plot is a little too Old-Curiosity-Shop for me; I thought it veered into mawkishness, which is not a flaw I have observed in other Trollope novels. 

Another flaw I'd never noticed in Trollope's other books: I wasn't a fan of the pacing. It seemed to me that perhaps he decided in advance to write it in three parts, but when he got to part 3 he realized he'd painted himself into a corner, with too many chapters and not enough plot remaining. Chapter 45: Lord Hampstead Experiences Angst. Chapter 47: Lord Hampstead Writes Letters About His Angst. Chapter 49: Lord Hampstead, Now With More Angst. It's not as if each one of the 900+ pages in The Last Chronicle of Barset is awash in richly plotted excitement, but at least the reader never has to pause and think very hard about whether she already read this chapter because it's so much like the one that came before.

Despite its shortcomings, I'm glad I read Marion Fay. Lots of interesting contrasts: the post office clerk's strength of character versus the nobleman's weakness, the machinations of the loathsome and lazy CoE clergyman versus the straight shooting of the dutiful Quaker characters. Trollope sends up the nobility, showing us their enthusiastic reactions to a newly conferred title; he sends up civil service workers in his snapshots of office life. It wouldn't be at the top of my list of favorite Trollope novels, but overall I enjoyed the time I spent with Lady Amaldina Persiflage's friends and relations.

The Trollope Project

Anthony Trollope wrote a staggering 47 novels, and I am going to take a crack at reading all of them. I started with the six Barsetshire Chronicles, and then read the six Palliser Chronicles followed by The Way We Live Now. Last year I took a deep breath and plunged into the obscurer corners of his oeuvre.

I kicked it off with Miss Mackenzie (spinster begins anew; contemplates marriage proposals), followed it up with Dr. Wortle's School (how should we assess the moral weight of making an unacceptable decision for a compelling reason?), moved on to The Three Clerks (don't judge your books by their covers, and don't underestimate the Department of Internal Navigation), and then read The Fixed Period (a comically weird book set in a dystopian future). Last month I also read one of his pieces of short Christmas fiction, Christmas Day at Kirkby Cottage.

For those of you counting along at home, this means I have 30 Trollope novels to go. If I aim for one per season, I'll be done when I'm 60 (pushing 61, but let's go with the round number). I do love a good long-haul reading project. 

This year I am going to begin with Marion Fay, a book chosen randomly from my Kindle version of the complete works. (Parenthetically, isn't it astonishing that I can fit the complete works of Trollope in my pocket? Let's hear it for living in the future!) Later this year I will probably read The American Senator and Orley Farm, but we'll see which way my fickle impulses steer me. I also think I'll read one more Christmas story before the Christmas season ends, even though Christmas Day at Kirkby Cottage was a little disappointing.

The trouble with an obscure hobby is that it doesn't usually make for very compelling blogging. If I tell you that the first chapter of Marion Fay reminds me of the beginning of The Duke's Children, it's unlikely to make you say "oooh! tell us more!" But perhaps we'll hear again from the hypothetical Aspasia. In any event, I continue to find that a daily Trollope chapter is a pleasant peaceful way to end the day. And if a person reads enough chapters for enough nights, eventually she will read all of Trollope.

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!