Q: Any big milestones?
A: The other night she took four shuffling unassisted steps. But the important thing is that she took them to get to her bookshelf, after we had tried bribing her with food, toys, and the long-suffering dog. "She walked for books!" I shrieked. "SHE WALKED FOR BOOKS!" Never mind that her primary goal in reaching said bookshelf is to take all the books off the shelf and throw them on the floor. SHE WALKED FOR BOOKS.
Q: How many of her books are you ready to take outside and throw on the grill because you have already had to read them 6,000 times?
A: There are three primary contenders. I can only imagine how much worse this is going to get.
Q: How's the mommy guilt?
A: Berowne starts a new job tomorrow, about which we're very excited and happy. But it does mean Perdita will now be in day care five (long) days a week instead of three. And my guilt and anxiety are so extreme that you'd think she's starting day care for the first time, instead of thriving there for over seven months. I should probably keep reminding myself that if I were home with her all day, within a week I might be deliberately feeding certain books to the dog. (Not to mention the minor point that we would no longer be able to pay the mortgage or have health insurance. We need both incomes, which means my guilt is less about the fact that I genuinely enjoy and derive self-worth from my job and more about a conviction that I should have accepted I had no right to be a mother as long as I had to keep working full-time. In other words, my guilt is stupid.)
Q: Are you feeling guilt about having so few FAQ about her in this post?
A: Absolutely, although I am trying to blog with her sleeping on me and that is challenging, hence the brevity.
Q: Does she still sense a great disturbance in the Force when you want to eat?
A: Yup. The quickest way to make her either wake up or throw a tantrum where she was previously happy as a clam is for me to think about eating something.
Q: What have you read lately?
A: London Under: The Secret History Beneath the Streets, by Peter Ackroyd. Mildly interesting, though I think you need to know London to appreciate it.
A Lady by Midnight, by Tessa Dare. Very cute romance novel, although it does ask us to believe that a malnourished street urchin grows up to be your standard Stud McHugeLarge. But that was my only quibble, and an adorable dog features prominently. I am a woman of simple tastes, really.
The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World, by A. J. Jacobs. Jacobs decides to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. It's an entertaining and rather cute book.
Company of Liars, by Karen Maitland. A really really good novel set during the plague in England, although the Evil Child character is way too over-the-top for only one other character to realize that she's evil. Everyone else is all, "Awww, sweet little thing, we must protect her!" while she's casting runes and killing small animals and intoning, "You're all going to die," (seriously), and even if you're running from the plague and really starved for cuteness in your life, I think there is a limit.
John Saturnall's Feast, by Lawrence Norfolk. Novel set during the English Civil War and about a cook. Our hero is the only character with more than two dimensions - his love interest is never anything but sort of snobbishly crabby for the entire book - but I really liked Norfolk's writing style and the descriptions of food and the manor house's kitchen were great.
Stone's Fall, by Iain Pears. Huge novel in three parts with three different narrators. The parts diminish in interest and sympathy as they go on, unfortunately; I liked the first section, the second was okay, and the third was a slog.
The Mummy Case, by Elizabeth Peters. This series of period mysteries continues to be adorable, though the precocious child character is wearying.
Unfamiliar Fishes, by Sarah Vowell. A brief history of New England missionaries in Hawaii. I enjoyed it, even if it's a subject I'm not passionate about.
Q: How's the snow?
A: Still here, in plenty. We've had several days of bright sun when it's too cold for anything to melt, which is kind of grim. However, we can see the clothesline again, so that has to be a good sign, right?
Sunday, March 1, 2015
Sunday, February 15, 2015
dispatch from Donner Lake
Week three of snow. This morning's storm is bringing the total to around eight feet. Work has been canceled one day a week for each of those three, but because my current project involves working with a company in Oregon, all my conference calls and webexes are still on, meaning I have to make them from the kitchen table with a squirmy almost-ten-month-old on my lap (or a screaming almost-ten-month-old banished to the play pen). Which wouldn't be so bad except that I am expected to make crucial decisions for the entire workplace under those circumstances. It's enough to make you envy those who merely had to decide which neighbor to eat.
And on the days we do work, my normally-half-hour commute takes up to two hours and there's not a hope in hell of finding parking once I get there. Possibly not as comparable to starvation and cannibalism as I make it out to be, but it sucks and I would like it to stop. And I'm not even the one digging us out: Berowne averages eight hours of shoveling per day for two straight days every time we get a storm. Yesterday he had to shovel all day just to move snow so he'd have a place to put today's snow. It's a good thing he's excessively manly.
What I've read lately:
The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women, by Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels. I wish books of this sort didn't get dated so fast, because the dated information created jarring notes in what was otherwise a very good discussion of a topic in which I'm currently very invested. Still it was a funny and interesting (and, of course, infuriating) read.
The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder, by Charles Graeber. It's always "a true story of [something], madness, and [something which is often murder]", isn't it? In any case, this is about Charles Cullen, possibly the most prolific serial murderer in American history, who just killed people all the damn time in his work as a nurse. An ugly and disturbing story.
From the Forest: A Search for the Hidden Roots of Our Fairy Tales, by Sara Maitland. Maitland talks about the relationship of Northern European folklore to the natural environments in which that folklore developed, and though the result is some occasionally very overwrought writing (and the reworked fairy tales that she inserts throughout aren't always successful), I found this fascinating and informative.
Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism, by Jennifer Percy. Percy follows a soldier who has returned home from Iraq and fallen in with a truly wild cult who claims to exorcise demons. She gets - I think - really inappropriately close to both the soldier and the cult, undergoing an exorcism herself and dropping major hints that she might have slept with her subject. The subject matter is hard to read, and the book's writing very overwrought on all occasions, but when it ended (abruptly) I wanted to know more.
The Curse of the Pharaohs, by Elizabeth Peters. Adorable period mystery, which I needed badly after all this grim non-fiction.
Radio On: A Listener's Diary, by Sarah Vowell. Her first book, in which she listens to the radio for a year and details what she hears. Of course any such premise will be largely driven by the year in which one does it, and she did it in 1995, but even in 1995 I could not give the tiniest crap about Nirvana, and so Vowell's endless extolling of them was really, really boring to me. Especially since everything else she heard on the radio that year she apparently loathed, with a grudging exception made for Ira Glass. But she was twenty-six when she wrote this, and hyperbolic dislike is a pretty standard way to define yourself at that age. She's probably embarrassed by this book now, so I forgive it. It had its good moments despite itself.
Well, I have been informed by a small creature with big lungs that my blogging time has expired. May you all, as a Donner survivor said, never take no cut-offs (which is what I tell my GPS when it tries to convince me that an unplowed, untreated side street will get me to work faster) and hurry along as fast as you can. Barring the necessity for cut-offs, may you have good hot chocolate and warm socks.
And on the days we do work, my normally-half-hour commute takes up to two hours and there's not a hope in hell of finding parking once I get there. Possibly not as comparable to starvation and cannibalism as I make it out to be, but it sucks and I would like it to stop. And I'm not even the one digging us out: Berowne averages eight hours of shoveling per day for two straight days every time we get a storm. Yesterday he had to shovel all day just to move snow so he'd have a place to put today's snow. It's a good thing he's excessively manly.
What I've read lately:
The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women, by Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels. I wish books of this sort didn't get dated so fast, because the dated information created jarring notes in what was otherwise a very good discussion of a topic in which I'm currently very invested. Still it was a funny and interesting (and, of course, infuriating) read.
The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder, by Charles Graeber. It's always "a true story of [something], madness, and [something which is often murder]", isn't it? In any case, this is about Charles Cullen, possibly the most prolific serial murderer in American history, who just killed people all the damn time in his work as a nurse. An ugly and disturbing story.
From the Forest: A Search for the Hidden Roots of Our Fairy Tales, by Sara Maitland. Maitland talks about the relationship of Northern European folklore to the natural environments in which that folklore developed, and though the result is some occasionally very overwrought writing (and the reworked fairy tales that she inserts throughout aren't always successful), I found this fascinating and informative.
Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism, by Jennifer Percy. Percy follows a soldier who has returned home from Iraq and fallen in with a truly wild cult who claims to exorcise demons. She gets - I think - really inappropriately close to both the soldier and the cult, undergoing an exorcism herself and dropping major hints that she might have slept with her subject. The subject matter is hard to read, and the book's writing very overwrought on all occasions, but when it ended (abruptly) I wanted to know more.
The Curse of the Pharaohs, by Elizabeth Peters. Adorable period mystery, which I needed badly after all this grim non-fiction.
Radio On: A Listener's Diary, by Sarah Vowell. Her first book, in which she listens to the radio for a year and details what she hears. Of course any such premise will be largely driven by the year in which one does it, and she did it in 1995, but even in 1995 I could not give the tiniest crap about Nirvana, and so Vowell's endless extolling of them was really, really boring to me. Especially since everything else she heard on the radio that year she apparently loathed, with a grudging exception made for Ira Glass. But she was twenty-six when she wrote this, and hyperbolic dislike is a pretty standard way to define yourself at that age. She's probably embarrassed by this book now, so I forgive it. It had its good moments despite itself.
Well, I have been informed by a small creature with big lungs that my blogging time has expired. May you all, as a Donner survivor said, never take no cut-offs (which is what I tell my GPS when it tries to convince me that an unplowed, untreated side street will get me to work faster) and hurry along as fast as you can. Barring the necessity for cut-offs, may you have good hot chocolate and warm socks.
Sunday, February 1, 2015
quiet snowy days
And another couple weeks fly by, full of things that are only interesting and/or amusing to other parents. My Facebook is exhibiting total Perdita-fatigue: pictures of her get about a fourth of the likes they used to, and I know everyone's bored with Beatrice-the-mother, but I used to post about my dogs just as constantly and obsessively; it's just easier to roll one's eyes about it when it's a baby. It's not like I turned my professional landscape photography studio into a nursery and my thousand art-school followers were blindsided by the onslaught of baby candids. This is not a sea change in my personality here.
Anyway. She's standing on her own for up to seven seconds at a time, though she has no interest in assisted walking yet. Lots of signing for food. Lots of food in general - she's growing like a weed, including her hair, and it shows you how long I've had a pixie cut that the idea of letting my little girl's hair grow out honestly never crossed my mind. As soon as her hair started getting shaggy over the ears I complained that she needed a haircut, and couldn't figure out why people kept looking at me like I was insane, and finally I remembered that girls are supposed to have long hair. Fortunately Berowne, like a good sailor, knows how to braid, so that will be his responsibility. (And as soon as she's old enough to make her own decisions about her hair, she at least won't need to worry that her mother objects to cutting it off.)
We've had, as you've heard, some weather around here. The drifts are three feet high in the yard and there's another foot predicted for tomorrow. A lot of work and stress goes into dealing with this, but it's also good reading weather.
The latest books:
In the Kingdom of the Sick: A Social History of Chronic Illness in America, by Laurie Edwards. Not as interesting as I wanted it to be. There's too little exploration of the history of "imaginary" (and usually feminine) ailments, and too much personal-interview defensiveness. I just kept feeling that there was probably a more historical-context-centered, more scholarly, way for Edwards to handle each topic she brought up, and that was what I wanted to be reading.
The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science, by Richard Holmes. This was a fascinating and wonderful book. It started a little slowly, but Holmes is great at a clear narrative which transmits enormous amounts of historical and scientific information in a completely accessible way, and I genuinely didn't want this book to end with the Romantic era: I wanted him to keep going well into the twentieth century. Great stuff.
Cold Cruel Winter, by Chris Nickson. The second in a mystery series set in eighteenth-century Leeds. I like them very much, and this one was especially fun to be reading on bitter cold nights with the wind howling outside. Fun because I am not in the eighteenth century in Leeds.
Calico Captive, by Elizabeth George Speare. I'd thought that I didn't read this one as a young 'un, but as soon as I opened it I realized that in fact I had. A quick re-read, with some astonishment at how incredibly and deliberately unlikable our heroine is - the other main characters are constantly appalled by her bigotry and shallowness - but general enjoyment.
And now we are home from a delightful morning expedition which included our favorite breakfast place, our favorite museum, the chocolate shop, and a knitting store so that Berowne could obtain equipment and instructions to repair a favorite sweater of his. He's working on said project now, with Perdita pulling herself up on his knees and making her happy Balrog noises, and I'm going to make another cup of tea and read some more. Whether it will be the folksy eloquence of "I Can Share" or the heart-stopping thriller that is "Peekaboo Forest" remains to be seen.
May you all have a warm shelter against the season, and tea whenever you wish it.
Anyway. She's standing on her own for up to seven seconds at a time, though she has no interest in assisted walking yet. Lots of signing for food. Lots of food in general - she's growing like a weed, including her hair, and it shows you how long I've had a pixie cut that the idea of letting my little girl's hair grow out honestly never crossed my mind. As soon as her hair started getting shaggy over the ears I complained that she needed a haircut, and couldn't figure out why people kept looking at me like I was insane, and finally I remembered that girls are supposed to have long hair. Fortunately Berowne, like a good sailor, knows how to braid, so that will be his responsibility. (And as soon as she's old enough to make her own decisions about her hair, she at least won't need to worry that her mother objects to cutting it off.)
We've had, as you've heard, some weather around here. The drifts are three feet high in the yard and there's another foot predicted for tomorrow. A lot of work and stress goes into dealing with this, but it's also good reading weather.
The latest books:
In the Kingdom of the Sick: A Social History of Chronic Illness in America, by Laurie Edwards. Not as interesting as I wanted it to be. There's too little exploration of the history of "imaginary" (and usually feminine) ailments, and too much personal-interview defensiveness. I just kept feeling that there was probably a more historical-context-centered, more scholarly, way for Edwards to handle each topic she brought up, and that was what I wanted to be reading.
The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science, by Richard Holmes. This was a fascinating and wonderful book. It started a little slowly, but Holmes is great at a clear narrative which transmits enormous amounts of historical and scientific information in a completely accessible way, and I genuinely didn't want this book to end with the Romantic era: I wanted him to keep going well into the twentieth century. Great stuff.
Cold Cruel Winter, by Chris Nickson. The second in a mystery series set in eighteenth-century Leeds. I like them very much, and this one was especially fun to be reading on bitter cold nights with the wind howling outside. Fun because I am not in the eighteenth century in Leeds.
Calico Captive, by Elizabeth George Speare. I'd thought that I didn't read this one as a young 'un, but as soon as I opened it I realized that in fact I had. A quick re-read, with some astonishment at how incredibly and deliberately unlikable our heroine is - the other main characters are constantly appalled by her bigotry and shallowness - but general enjoyment.
And now we are home from a delightful morning expedition which included our favorite breakfast place, our favorite museum, the chocolate shop, and a knitting store so that Berowne could obtain equipment and instructions to repair a favorite sweater of his. He's working on said project now, with Perdita pulling herself up on his knees and making her happy Balrog noises, and I'm going to make another cup of tea and read some more. Whether it will be the folksy eloquence of "I Can Share" or the heart-stopping thriller that is "Peekaboo Forest" remains to be seen.
May you all have a warm shelter against the season, and tea whenever you wish it.
Saturday, January 24, 2015
baby FAQ, month 9
Q: How is the health of your household?
A: Positively pioneer-worthy! I have just about gotten over my consumption and now Berowne has dysentery. Okay, so technically we were diagnosed with other things, but when you're coughing so badly that you have to be prescribed an inhaler, then you are clearly somebody's huckleberry; and if we were on the Oregon Trail it would be bad news for Berowne. Fortunately the baby is okay so far.
Q: How excited were you when you heard that January would be "Arctic Month" at Perdita's daycare?
A: Way too excited. I've had to temper that excitement somewhat; it's now January 24 and she has yet to learn how to hunt a seal or skin a polar bear. Instead it turns out they do "sensory activities", meaning the babies play with ice cubes. The older kids do get to draw penguins and arctic wolves, so their room is papered with what looks like pictures of Darcy-Bear, which makes me happy. But I feel that our suburban daycare is really letting me down when it comes to preparing my child for the six-month winter night and the possible eating of shoes to survive (she does eat her shoes, but purely recreationally).
Q: What's the best thing about her crawling?
A: When I arrive to pick her up at daycare, and she sees me, and just zooms across the floor to me with a huge smile on her face. I tear up a little, every time, and am storing up the sensation for the days when I have to pick her up two blocks from her school because the fact of my existence is too humiliating for words.
Q: What does the dog think about the crawling?
A: He finds a determined baby zooming towards him less endearing than I do. But now that she is eating solid foods and dropping them from her high chair, he acknowledges that she has some value.
Q: Eating real food?
A: Like a champ. Although we are not following the anti-baby-food rule of "Just give her some of what you're having!" that all the cool organic parents follow. Especially not in winter, when virtually all we eat are stews full of green chile. Need to wait a little longer for that.
Q: What have you read since last posting?
A: The Sound of Broken Glass, by Deborah Crombie. Yet another serviceable mystery. Pretty slight.
Finished re-reading Robin McKinley's The Blue Sword, which holds up better than The Hero and the Crown. I like Harry better than Aerin, and the romance is less obtrusive (albeit more Stockholm Syndrome-ish, but hey).
The Partly Cloudy Patriot, by Sarah Vowell. I don't know why it took a British male novelist to bring this writer to my attention; it seems that liking Molly Ivins should have inevitably brought me into contact with Vowell's hilarious and incisive essays about American politics and history. Regardless, I have all her books lined up in my library pile now.
Q: Bonus question: if someone (possibly an angel harboring deep resentment at what passes for an annunciation these days) had told eighteen-year-old you that you would, in fact, get married to the loveliest man you've ever known, and have an astonishing baby, and live by the sea, and wear a size two most of the time, and have figured out your hair and skin, but you would have to wait twenty years for all of this: would you have then been able to bear the intervening time more stoically, or would the concept of TWENTY YEARS have been so huge a hurdle that it would actually have made you less able to carry on?
A: Hmmm. At eighteen, all I might have heard is, "You will be denied this until an age when you are past everything but gruel and flannel waistcoats," which would kind of be missing the point. (When I was eighteen, I was totally dedicated to missing the point whenever possible.) So in this case I do not think the knowledge would have done me any real good. Now if they'd added, "At the fifteen-year mark you get a wolf!" that might have registered. Somehow it's less abstract.
Q: You don't think angels have better things to do than announce the eventual arrival of a big white wolfy dog?
A: Not any angels I want to believe in.
Enjoy the winter days, and may all your stews be rich in chile.
A: Positively pioneer-worthy! I have just about gotten over my consumption and now Berowne has dysentery. Okay, so technically we were diagnosed with other things, but when you're coughing so badly that you have to be prescribed an inhaler, then you are clearly somebody's huckleberry; and if we were on the Oregon Trail it would be bad news for Berowne. Fortunately the baby is okay so far.
Q: How excited were you when you heard that January would be "Arctic Month" at Perdita's daycare?
A: Way too excited. I've had to temper that excitement somewhat; it's now January 24 and she has yet to learn how to hunt a seal or skin a polar bear. Instead it turns out they do "sensory activities", meaning the babies play with ice cubes. The older kids do get to draw penguins and arctic wolves, so their room is papered with what looks like pictures of Darcy-Bear, which makes me happy. But I feel that our suburban daycare is really letting me down when it comes to preparing my child for the six-month winter night and the possible eating of shoes to survive (she does eat her shoes, but purely recreationally).
Q: What's the best thing about her crawling?
A: When I arrive to pick her up at daycare, and she sees me, and just zooms across the floor to me with a huge smile on her face. I tear up a little, every time, and am storing up the sensation for the days when I have to pick her up two blocks from her school because the fact of my existence is too humiliating for words.
Q: What does the dog think about the crawling?
A: He finds a determined baby zooming towards him less endearing than I do. But now that she is eating solid foods and dropping them from her high chair, he acknowledges that she has some value.
Q: Eating real food?
A: Like a champ. Although we are not following the anti-baby-food rule of "Just give her some of what you're having!" that all the cool organic parents follow. Especially not in winter, when virtually all we eat are stews full of green chile. Need to wait a little longer for that.
Q: What have you read since last posting?
A: The Sound of Broken Glass, by Deborah Crombie. Yet another serviceable mystery. Pretty slight.
Finished re-reading Robin McKinley's The Blue Sword, which holds up better than The Hero and the Crown. I like Harry better than Aerin, and the romance is less obtrusive (albeit more Stockholm Syndrome-ish, but hey).
The Partly Cloudy Patriot, by Sarah Vowell. I don't know why it took a British male novelist to bring this writer to my attention; it seems that liking Molly Ivins should have inevitably brought me into contact with Vowell's hilarious and incisive essays about American politics and history. Regardless, I have all her books lined up in my library pile now.
Q: Bonus question: if someone (possibly an angel harboring deep resentment at what passes for an annunciation these days) had told eighteen-year-old you that you would, in fact, get married to the loveliest man you've ever known, and have an astonishing baby, and live by the sea, and wear a size two most of the time, and have figured out your hair and skin, but you would have to wait twenty years for all of this: would you have then been able to bear the intervening time more stoically, or would the concept of TWENTY YEARS have been so huge a hurdle that it would actually have made you less able to carry on?
A: Hmmm. At eighteen, all I might have heard is, "You will be denied this until an age when you are past everything but gruel and flannel waistcoats," which would kind of be missing the point. (When I was eighteen, I was totally dedicated to missing the point whenever possible.) So in this case I do not think the knowledge would have done me any real good. Now if they'd added, "At the fifteen-year mark you get a wolf!" that might have registered. Somehow it's less abstract.
Q: You don't think angels have better things to do than announce the eventual arrival of a big white wolfy dog?
A: Not any angels I want to believe in.
Enjoy the winter days, and may all your stews be rich in chile.
Monday, January 19, 2015
a quick update on the reading
Ah, January. That month when you can't decide whether you would rather sleep all day or load your entire family into the car before dawn and be a hundred miles away by the time the sun rises. Hardly even matters which direction you're driving (although we only have a choice of three; driving east would take us precisely half a block before the trip ended in damp fashion). And sometimes, this month, you wonder if the road trip urges are just so you would have an excuse to eat junk food. Winter pudge! Get on my butt!
So, am I going to update this blog more than twice a month going forward? We can hope so, but life has been utterly crazy lately. The upcoming "Baby FAQ, Month 9" post may be nothing but SHE'S BUSY ALL THE TIME. NO, ALL THE TIME.
This month's reading:
Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins. Trundling my way through this series years behind everyone else. It's fine; I've seen the movies; like everyone else, I get bored with our heroine's dithering over boys.
To Dwell in Darkness, by Deborah Crombie. Minor and efficient entry in a series. Man, lady police officers will fall in bed with sexy suspects at the slightest opportunity, if the literature is to be believed.
The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime, by Judith Flanders. This book was awesome! I expected it to just be sort of sensationalist and maybe a bit interesting, but Flanders is crazy-smart, crazy-accessible, and hilariously funny. She inserts deadpan comments throughout that made me laugh out loud, and assumes her readers know all the Victorian literature, which I appreciate even when I missed a reference (I just looked it up, which is what good books assume the reader will do, instead of dumbing everything down).
War of the Whales, by Joshua Horwitz. I wanted to like this, in that environmental law is interesting to me, and a book about the legal battles to protect whales from the US Navy's sonar testing seemed like a good fit. But it just never quite grabbed my interest.
The Tooth Tattoo, by Peter Lovesey. Talk of not grabbing my interest. Terribly dull mystery.
Re-read The Hero and the Crown, by Robin McKinley. It doesn't age as well as I wanted it to: something's odd about the pacing, Aerin's success relies too much on being the chosen one instead of her own efforts, and I remembered all too well how, as a pre-teen, I was jarred out of the book's world and back into the real one when we get into the love interest bit. I'd been thinking, Yes, I can identify with this woman, maybe I can be a warrior in my own little way; and then, boom, immortal wizard is swearing literally eternal love for her once she is done living a mortal life with the king who is also ready to die for her, and I remember SO clearly the coming-down-to-earth thump of Oh. Warriors have to be worthy of male desire too, just like every other woman.
Somebody tell me, please, that there is a book out there for young readers in which the story does not give the tiniest shit how universally-desired the heroine is or which dude she ends up with. There must be one! Somewhere! I don't have time to write one!
The Divorce Papers, by Susan Rieger. I only borrowed this book because a main character has a last name you do not often see in literature - in fact, I have only seen it once before, in Rob Roy. This last name being, well, mine, I could not resist. But Rieger is no Sir Walter Scott, and though she might have gotten away with a non-epistolary novel, she does not at all get away with her attempts at Doesn't Everyone Lay Out Their Character Development in E-Mails to Their Bosses? and when my Kindle made a command decision to keep crashing whenever I opened this, I took it as being let off the hook.
The Abbott's Agreement, by Mel Starr. My Early Reviewers book. A medieval surgeon solves crime, as they surely did. The research is unobtrusive and comprehensive, and this was a nice book to read in the bath, and that is not to be sneezed at.
The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt. I have more incoherent noises to utter about this book than I do words, but in a good way. So mash up David Copperfield and Great Expectations, set the story in modern times with lots of drug use and illegal activity, make it kind of about a piece of art, have nothing likable about our hero, and stir for 900 pages and I should have HATED this book and instead it kind of blew my mind. It struck me as a book worthy of Tartt's talent - no one could ever deny she has talent, but the absurd story and suffocating pretension of The Secret History overwhelmed everything else, and while The Goldfinch did occasionally fall into the same trap of, erm, Donna, people don't actually talk like that, reading it was - apart from the story's momentum - the very satisfying experience of a writer living up to her abilities.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. No, I had not read it before. It's... well, sigh, I can see all the Clever Satire, yada yada, but it's boys doing boy stuff, and that induces despair in me these days.
The Dark Vineyard, by Martin Walker. Mystery set in rural France. I like this series, but this one was all about wine, and wine is a topic I have always found duller than a great thaw. So I glazed over a fair amount.
The Family Fang, by Kevin Wilson. A novel about performance artists who decide to use their kids in their art, and how those kids deal with growing up. Painful to read at times, but very good.
Stay warm, everyone.
So, am I going to update this blog more than twice a month going forward? We can hope so, but life has been utterly crazy lately. The upcoming "Baby FAQ, Month 9" post may be nothing but SHE'S BUSY ALL THE TIME. NO, ALL THE TIME.
This month's reading:
Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins. Trundling my way through this series years behind everyone else. It's fine; I've seen the movies; like everyone else, I get bored with our heroine's dithering over boys.
To Dwell in Darkness, by Deborah Crombie. Minor and efficient entry in a series. Man, lady police officers will fall in bed with sexy suspects at the slightest opportunity, if the literature is to be believed.
The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime, by Judith Flanders. This book was awesome! I expected it to just be sort of sensationalist and maybe a bit interesting, but Flanders is crazy-smart, crazy-accessible, and hilariously funny. She inserts deadpan comments throughout that made me laugh out loud, and assumes her readers know all the Victorian literature, which I appreciate even when I missed a reference (I just looked it up, which is what good books assume the reader will do, instead of dumbing everything down).
War of the Whales, by Joshua Horwitz. I wanted to like this, in that environmental law is interesting to me, and a book about the legal battles to protect whales from the US Navy's sonar testing seemed like a good fit. But it just never quite grabbed my interest.
The Tooth Tattoo, by Peter Lovesey. Talk of not grabbing my interest. Terribly dull mystery.
Re-read The Hero and the Crown, by Robin McKinley. It doesn't age as well as I wanted it to: something's odd about the pacing, Aerin's success relies too much on being the chosen one instead of her own efforts, and I remembered all too well how, as a pre-teen, I was jarred out of the book's world and back into the real one when we get into the love interest bit. I'd been thinking, Yes, I can identify with this woman, maybe I can be a warrior in my own little way; and then, boom, immortal wizard is swearing literally eternal love for her once she is done living a mortal life with the king who is also ready to die for her, and I remember SO clearly the coming-down-to-earth thump of Oh. Warriors have to be worthy of male desire too, just like every other woman.
Somebody tell me, please, that there is a book out there for young readers in which the story does not give the tiniest shit how universally-desired the heroine is or which dude she ends up with. There must be one! Somewhere! I don't have time to write one!
The Divorce Papers, by Susan Rieger. I only borrowed this book because a main character has a last name you do not often see in literature - in fact, I have only seen it once before, in Rob Roy. This last name being, well, mine, I could not resist. But Rieger is no Sir Walter Scott, and though she might have gotten away with a non-epistolary novel, she does not at all get away with her attempts at Doesn't Everyone Lay Out Their Character Development in E-Mails to Their Bosses? and when my Kindle made a command decision to keep crashing whenever I opened this, I took it as being let off the hook.
The Abbott's Agreement, by Mel Starr. My Early Reviewers book. A medieval surgeon solves crime, as they surely did. The research is unobtrusive and comprehensive, and this was a nice book to read in the bath, and that is not to be sneezed at.
The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt. I have more incoherent noises to utter about this book than I do words, but in a good way. So mash up David Copperfield and Great Expectations, set the story in modern times with lots of drug use and illegal activity, make it kind of about a piece of art, have nothing likable about our hero, and stir for 900 pages and I should have HATED this book and instead it kind of blew my mind. It struck me as a book worthy of Tartt's talent - no one could ever deny she has talent, but the absurd story and suffocating pretension of The Secret History overwhelmed everything else, and while The Goldfinch did occasionally fall into the same trap of, erm, Donna, people don't actually talk like that, reading it was - apart from the story's momentum - the very satisfying experience of a writer living up to her abilities.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. No, I had not read it before. It's... well, sigh, I can see all the Clever Satire, yada yada, but it's boys doing boy stuff, and that induces despair in me these days.
The Dark Vineyard, by Martin Walker. Mystery set in rural France. I like this series, but this one was all about wine, and wine is a topic I have always found duller than a great thaw. So I glazed over a fair amount.
The Family Fang, by Kevin Wilson. A novel about performance artists who decide to use their kids in their art, and how those kids deal with growing up. Painful to read at times, but very good.
Stay warm, everyone.
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
end-of-year review
(This is a majorly rambling and disjointed post, for which I and my head cold apologize. I also apologize for the stupid things Blogger is doing re: comments; either making sure you're logged into your Google account before commenting, or commenting anonymously, seems to work, but upgrading the comments section is on my 2015 to-do list for sure.)
To say 2014 was intense would be putting it very mildly.
The first three months were a blur of worry, spending, and heartbreak around Darcy's paw, and then saying good-bye far too soon. The next month passed like a year; I was numb with grief, physically miserable, monstrously overworked, and not sleeping (I averaged three or four hours a night, and every two a.m. found me downstairs crying hysterically), while the baby took her sweet time until I had to be induced. The birth was kind of dreadful and the ensuing breast-feeding debacle totally dreadful, but from her arrival this really has been one of the most cheerful and easy-going babies you could imagine.
The rest of the year was about Perdita, naturally. Not about being a "mommy" - I've decided, in my own personal lexicon, that "motherhood" means a woman who is just as much herself as before, with ambitions and intelligence and bodily autonomy, who also has a child, while "mommyhood" is the infantilized and minimized version of that woman who is no longer allowed to have any interests or focus beyond her baby - but about living as myself with this new amazing person in my life.
Parenting an eight-month-old, by the way, is incredibly fun. The learning happens practically faster than real time - you can watch her master using a toy, or pulling herself up to standing, or pointing to a body part when it is named, in the space of an afternoon. It blows my mind.
We had a lovely Christmas vacation with my family, including all three of 2014's babies and a five-year-old whose energy could power a small city, and the red-eye flight back was absolutely great for the baby but the sleep deficit I have been running on since then is not my favorite thing ever, especially when combined with a nasty cold. Nothing to make you feel all kinds of dim like a head full of snot and exhaustion.
The last books of the year:
Goddess of Light, by P.C. Cast. She writes trashy romance novels about modern women falling in love with Greek gods, and this one was very trashy and pretty stupid. Neither our heroine nor Apollo is interesting or sympathetic, there's a whole section which is solely an advertisement for a Cirque de Soleil production, and the casual homophobia is a nightmare. I finished it just because I wanted to see how Cast was going to get these two together, and it turned out she does so by killing off our heroine and then reincarnating her (and having Apollo have a mortal incarnation for one lifetime). Because for a grown independent woman with a career (and a lot of time is given to that career and how good at it she is) to know true love, she has to DIE and then in her next life meet her soul mate at THIRTEEN, presumably so she won't waste any time with a career or possibly even an education before having his babies. Good thing she got a second chance at correcting her priorities, huh, ladies? OH MY GOD.
Navajo Autumn, by R. Allen Chappell. A slight mystery and very much a first novel, with all the attendant flaws, but I found it comforting.
Blue Lightning, by Ann Cleeves. The next in her Shetland mysteries. Pretty dark, and you can guess the murderer almost immediately, even if you don't know the motive. But I do like reading her stuff.
Re-read The Dark is Rising series, by Susan Cooper, as seemed appropriate for the season. I've always known Greenwitch is the best, but now I think it's the best by a larger margin than I wish was the case. In all the others, female characters only exist to be helpless and rescued, or evil (or stupid enough to be easily possessed by evil), and it gets really old really fast. Also I had TOTALLY forgotten the horrible dog fatality in The Grey King! WHAT. And I barely made it through Silver on the Tree - the middle section with Will and Bran wandering around the Lost City of Celtic Symbolism is dull beyond words, and only knowing that we eventually get back to Jane kept me reading. Disappointing.
(Since having a daughter, I have become hyper-aware of how many children's / young adult books are All About the Boys. Talk about disappointing.)
Ragtime in Simla, by Barbara Cleverly. Mystery set in post-WWI India. I quite liked it, even if it was heavy on the exclamation points and the femmes fatales. Very enjoyable on a long plane trip.
The Coffin Trail, by Martin Edwards. I read this? Obviously not as useful for wiling away travel time.
Your Voice in My Head, by Emma Forrest. So, I would never suggest that grief and mental illness are somehow easier to bear if everything you write gets optioned by Hollywood and you only date celebrities, but I am saying that you clearly get plenty of attention without needing mine.
Crocodile on the Sandbank, by Elizabeth Peters. Oh, the utter delight of discovering a shamelessly old-fashioned and charming series of which I had never before heard. Especially at the beginning of winter, so that you may devour all the others the library has over the coming cold months! Delicious.
True Grit, by Charles Portis. I'd seen the recent movie remake, which is awesome, and have no intention of bothering with the John Wayne version. I had no idea what I expected from the book, but it was great fun.
What I have been thinking about / hoping for regarding 2015:
2014 lacked music. When I lived alone, I had music on in the background any time I was home, but since Berowne moved in I've been self-conscious about that. Much of my music is, well, in lieu of an adjective let's just say that I sometimes still listen to mix tapes I made in high school, and I like to sing along even though I cannot sing at all, and living with a musician makes it hard to not become a little shy about these things. So the house stays quiet, and in the car we listen to NPR, and there was a whole tech snafu around my Christmas music come December, and so when I started thinking about what I want more of in 2015 music was the first thing that came to mind.
I also want more ritual, and more time in and for my body. Things like exercising and meditating every day fell by the wayside once I went back to work and the limits of twenty-four hours and my own strength became very apparent. (Do I know mothers whose answer to chronological limits is to just not sleep? Of course I do. They have high-powered careers and spotless houses and sixteen crafty hobbies, and they are frequently also lovely people [which is the most annoying part], but I cannot be one of them. Beatrice not function sleep well without.) I know that I have to remain willing to adapt, but I do want to make time for myself, even if it's a different time each day. The real trick will be in finding that time but then not using it to do the dishes.
I want less envy, less interior competition, less judgement; more walks, more writing. Less guilt. More trust. More stars.
Fewer colds would be ideal, but given the realities of daycare crud, that's probably beyond my control. Getting back into some kind of shape will help with my overall health, though.
It's not just the new baby schedule that has thrown me, this past year. I feel lost in myself in many ways since Darcy's death, reduced to my own strength and it very faint indeed. Embarking on your first year of parenting when you have just had your loved ones' mortality, and your inability to make them immortal by sheer force of will, thrown in your face, is a thorn-tangled road indeed. And who can imagine the fairy-tale forest without the wolf? Where in the story are we now?
We'll never stop missing him, but our lives certainly don't lack for love, and that's what matters. And the aforementioned rituals will help get my feet back under me, I think: just for starters, if Bingley and I bundle up and stubbornly take the frigid walks that Darcy would have loved, we will both feel better for it. (There has not been a good long walk in ages, just quick jaunts up to the nearest hill and back.)
We may be in the forest without a wolf, but we have a little bear and an always-determined brindle hound, and a love that, unlike that of most fairy tales, has been accumulating far longer than summers seventeen. With enough sunrises, enough laughter, and enough patience, I think we will be all right. At any rate I'll toast to that, in a mug of honeyed tea, and toast to all of you as well. Much love and hope for the coming year.
To say 2014 was intense would be putting it very mildly.
The first three months were a blur of worry, spending, and heartbreak around Darcy's paw, and then saying good-bye far too soon. The next month passed like a year; I was numb with grief, physically miserable, monstrously overworked, and not sleeping (I averaged three or four hours a night, and every two a.m. found me downstairs crying hysterically), while the baby took her sweet time until I had to be induced. The birth was kind of dreadful and the ensuing breast-feeding debacle totally dreadful, but from her arrival this really has been one of the most cheerful and easy-going babies you could imagine.
The rest of the year was about Perdita, naturally. Not about being a "mommy" - I've decided, in my own personal lexicon, that "motherhood" means a woman who is just as much herself as before, with ambitions and intelligence and bodily autonomy, who also has a child, while "mommyhood" is the infantilized and minimized version of that woman who is no longer allowed to have any interests or focus beyond her baby - but about living as myself with this new amazing person in my life.
Parenting an eight-month-old, by the way, is incredibly fun. The learning happens practically faster than real time - you can watch her master using a toy, or pulling herself up to standing, or pointing to a body part when it is named, in the space of an afternoon. It blows my mind.
We had a lovely Christmas vacation with my family, including all three of 2014's babies and a five-year-old whose energy could power a small city, and the red-eye flight back was absolutely great for the baby but the sleep deficit I have been running on since then is not my favorite thing ever, especially when combined with a nasty cold. Nothing to make you feel all kinds of dim like a head full of snot and exhaustion.
The last books of the year:
Goddess of Light, by P.C. Cast. She writes trashy romance novels about modern women falling in love with Greek gods, and this one was very trashy and pretty stupid. Neither our heroine nor Apollo is interesting or sympathetic, there's a whole section which is solely an advertisement for a Cirque de Soleil production, and the casual homophobia is a nightmare. I finished it just because I wanted to see how Cast was going to get these two together, and it turned out she does so by killing off our heroine and then reincarnating her (and having Apollo have a mortal incarnation for one lifetime). Because for a grown independent woman with a career (and a lot of time is given to that career and how good at it she is) to know true love, she has to DIE and then in her next life meet her soul mate at THIRTEEN, presumably so she won't waste any time with a career or possibly even an education before having his babies. Good thing she got a second chance at correcting her priorities, huh, ladies? OH MY GOD.
Navajo Autumn, by R. Allen Chappell. A slight mystery and very much a first novel, with all the attendant flaws, but I found it comforting.
Blue Lightning, by Ann Cleeves. The next in her Shetland mysteries. Pretty dark, and you can guess the murderer almost immediately, even if you don't know the motive. But I do like reading her stuff.
Re-read The Dark is Rising series, by Susan Cooper, as seemed appropriate for the season. I've always known Greenwitch is the best, but now I think it's the best by a larger margin than I wish was the case. In all the others, female characters only exist to be helpless and rescued, or evil (or stupid enough to be easily possessed by evil), and it gets really old really fast. Also I had TOTALLY forgotten the horrible dog fatality in The Grey King! WHAT. And I barely made it through Silver on the Tree - the middle section with Will and Bran wandering around the Lost City of Celtic Symbolism is dull beyond words, and only knowing that we eventually get back to Jane kept me reading. Disappointing.
(Since having a daughter, I have become hyper-aware of how many children's / young adult books are All About the Boys. Talk about disappointing.)
Ragtime in Simla, by Barbara Cleverly. Mystery set in post-WWI India. I quite liked it, even if it was heavy on the exclamation points and the femmes fatales. Very enjoyable on a long plane trip.
The Coffin Trail, by Martin Edwards. I read this? Obviously not as useful for wiling away travel time.
Your Voice in My Head, by Emma Forrest. So, I would never suggest that grief and mental illness are somehow easier to bear if everything you write gets optioned by Hollywood and you only date celebrities, but I am saying that you clearly get plenty of attention without needing mine.
Crocodile on the Sandbank, by Elizabeth Peters. Oh, the utter delight of discovering a shamelessly old-fashioned and charming series of which I had never before heard. Especially at the beginning of winter, so that you may devour all the others the library has over the coming cold months! Delicious.
True Grit, by Charles Portis. I'd seen the recent movie remake, which is awesome, and have no intention of bothering with the John Wayne version. I had no idea what I expected from the book, but it was great fun.
What I have been thinking about / hoping for regarding 2015:
2014 lacked music. When I lived alone, I had music on in the background any time I was home, but since Berowne moved in I've been self-conscious about that. Much of my music is, well, in lieu of an adjective let's just say that I sometimes still listen to mix tapes I made in high school, and I like to sing along even though I cannot sing at all, and living with a musician makes it hard to not become a little shy about these things. So the house stays quiet, and in the car we listen to NPR, and there was a whole tech snafu around my Christmas music come December, and so when I started thinking about what I want more of in 2015 music was the first thing that came to mind.
I also want more ritual, and more time in and for my body. Things like exercising and meditating every day fell by the wayside once I went back to work and the limits of twenty-four hours and my own strength became very apparent. (Do I know mothers whose answer to chronological limits is to just not sleep? Of course I do. They have high-powered careers and spotless houses and sixteen crafty hobbies, and they are frequently also lovely people [which is the most annoying part], but I cannot be one of them. Beatrice not function sleep well without.) I know that I have to remain willing to adapt, but I do want to make time for myself, even if it's a different time each day. The real trick will be in finding that time but then not using it to do the dishes.
I want less envy, less interior competition, less judgement; more walks, more writing. Less guilt. More trust. More stars.
Fewer colds would be ideal, but given the realities of daycare crud, that's probably beyond my control. Getting back into some kind of shape will help with my overall health, though.
It's not just the new baby schedule that has thrown me, this past year. I feel lost in myself in many ways since Darcy's death, reduced to my own strength and it very faint indeed. Embarking on your first year of parenting when you have just had your loved ones' mortality, and your inability to make them immortal by sheer force of will, thrown in your face, is a thorn-tangled road indeed. And who can imagine the fairy-tale forest without the wolf? Where in the story are we now?
We'll never stop missing him, but our lives certainly don't lack for love, and that's what matters. And the aforementioned rituals will help get my feet back under me, I think: just for starters, if Bingley and I bundle up and stubbornly take the frigid walks that Darcy would have loved, we will both feel better for it. (There has not been a good long walk in ages, just quick jaunts up to the nearest hill and back.)
We may be in the forest without a wolf, but we have a little bear and an always-determined brindle hound, and a love that, unlike that of most fairy tales, has been accumulating far longer than summers seventeen. With enough sunrises, enough laughter, and enough patience, I think we will be all right. At any rate I'll toast to that, in a mug of honeyed tea, and toast to all of you as well. Much love and hope for the coming year.
Sunday, December 14, 2014
a little post
So this week the family all had an astonishing stomach bug (Berowne suggested I title this post "Love in the Time of Cholera"). Berowne and I took our turns staying home from work rapidly becoming dehydrated, while Perdita's diapers overflowed like a slightly smaller but far more pungent Vesuvius. One morning she also projectile vomited. While sitting on Berowne's lap, facing him. He did have his mouth shut at the time but the poor man has a beard, which took the brunt of the explosion. Good times.
Read lately:
Bury Me Deep, by Megan Abbott. A Nick Hornby recommendation (well, the author; the book of hers he actually recommends in his column is, according to him, all about how universally lust-worthy teenage girls are, and having been a teenage girl once upon a time I have no patience with that middle-aged male fantasy). Anyway, this book is pretty amazing, with its dialogue that no one would ever really speak but that somehow works and its creepy depiction of people descending to scary places.
A Death in Summer, by Benjamin Black. It would seem John Banville writes mysteries set in 1950's Dublin. It would also seem that I don't like them any more than I like his novels under his own name.
The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut's Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt, by Kara Cooney. My Early Reviewers book, and pretty good. I feel like I learned a good deal, and Cooney is quite interesting on the topic of Hatshepsut's iconography becoming male, as opposed to portraying herself as a female king, which is what she was doing at first.
Re-read Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier. Reading it as an adult was fascinating. As a preteen I remember thinking that while I myself would not have been perfectly happy with Max de Winter, this was probably due to some failing on my part. As an adult of course I can see that the man is an abusive douchebag, and thoroughly intended to be so (though du Maurier might not have used quite that word), and that we have only his account of Rebecca's "depravities" and death to go on. (The scene he relates in which she tells him how utterly perverse she really is and laughs about how she fooled him, after which she presumably flies back on her broom to her den of iniquity in London where Black Masses and women discussing politics take place, is so, so unlikely that only someone as inexperienced and desperate for love as our narrator could ever believe it.) It's a very different book now, and deeply disturbing, and still incredibly good.
Without a Summer, by Mary Robinette Kowal. I was told to avoid the second book in this series, and did, but perversely thought the third might be okay. It wasn't.
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Fascinating and comprehensive and, for me, as terrifying as any late-night Google-symptom foray. I need to just not read about cancer.
The Five Red Herrings, by Dorothy L. Sayers. I thought that I would indulge in some winter comfort reading with old British mysteries. Unfortunately, this book was not only completely dull and confusing but contained a casual use of the n-word that had me reeling. And at first I thought, "Oh jeez, completely unnecessary, if I were an editor of the modern version of this book I would take that RIGHT the hell out," and then I started thinking that it's important that modern readers see just how acceptable the word's usage was. I mean, throughout the rest of the book, "bloody" and "bastard" are written as "b_____"; at the time you couldn't print those words, but you could print the n-word in its entirety and with no apology. And that's important, because from my perspective of white privilege it's too easy for me to think that racism is always violent and overtly hateful, that the only use of that word would be from shouting ignorant mobs, even back then. To be reminded that it was a matter-of-fact thing for an educated upper-class hero to say, "We've been working like n*gg*rs," is something I needed. Especially now, when I was recently asking Berowne, "Where are they FINDING the people for these grand juries??" What a privilege it is to not know where they found those people.
I don't write about current events here, because that's not the purpose of this blog and because often (as now) I am too sputtering and helpless to articulate anything well. I will make editorial comments about abortion rights and such, sure, but generally I leave the news alone. And I am very self-conscious about how badly I'm expressing myself here. Also a bit defensive: it's not like I just wasn't thinking about the news until Dorothy Sayers reminded me, heaven knows. And it is perhaps the whitest most privileged thing ever to have one's white privilege checked by a passage in a British 1930's mystery novel. I guess I'm just saying that this book did check my privilege, and these are the thoughts I had about that.
So today we end on a sad and frustrated note, because we live in a sad and frustrating world. But it's also an exquisitely beautiful world, which I will try to keep in mind.
Read lately:
Bury Me Deep, by Megan Abbott. A Nick Hornby recommendation (well, the author; the book of hers he actually recommends in his column is, according to him, all about how universally lust-worthy teenage girls are, and having been a teenage girl once upon a time I have no patience with that middle-aged male fantasy). Anyway, this book is pretty amazing, with its dialogue that no one would ever really speak but that somehow works and its creepy depiction of people descending to scary places.
A Death in Summer, by Benjamin Black. It would seem John Banville writes mysteries set in 1950's Dublin. It would also seem that I don't like them any more than I like his novels under his own name.
The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut's Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt, by Kara Cooney. My Early Reviewers book, and pretty good. I feel like I learned a good deal, and Cooney is quite interesting on the topic of Hatshepsut's iconography becoming male, as opposed to portraying herself as a female king, which is what she was doing at first.
Re-read Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier. Reading it as an adult was fascinating. As a preteen I remember thinking that while I myself would not have been perfectly happy with Max de Winter, this was probably due to some failing on my part. As an adult of course I can see that the man is an abusive douchebag, and thoroughly intended to be so (though du Maurier might not have used quite that word), and that we have only his account of Rebecca's "depravities" and death to go on. (The scene he relates in which she tells him how utterly perverse she really is and laughs about how she fooled him, after which she presumably flies back on her broom to her den of iniquity in London where Black Masses and women discussing politics take place, is so, so unlikely that only someone as inexperienced and desperate for love as our narrator could ever believe it.) It's a very different book now, and deeply disturbing, and still incredibly good.
Without a Summer, by Mary Robinette Kowal. I was told to avoid the second book in this series, and did, but perversely thought the third might be okay. It wasn't.
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Fascinating and comprehensive and, for me, as terrifying as any late-night Google-symptom foray. I need to just not read about cancer.
The Five Red Herrings, by Dorothy L. Sayers. I thought that I would indulge in some winter comfort reading with old British mysteries. Unfortunately, this book was not only completely dull and confusing but contained a casual use of the n-word that had me reeling. And at first I thought, "Oh jeez, completely unnecessary, if I were an editor of the modern version of this book I would take that RIGHT the hell out," and then I started thinking that it's important that modern readers see just how acceptable the word's usage was. I mean, throughout the rest of the book, "bloody" and "bastard" are written as "b_____"; at the time you couldn't print those words, but you could print the n-word in its entirety and with no apology. And that's important, because from my perspective of white privilege it's too easy for me to think that racism is always violent and overtly hateful, that the only use of that word would be from shouting ignorant mobs, even back then. To be reminded that it was a matter-of-fact thing for an educated upper-class hero to say, "We've been working like n*gg*rs," is something I needed. Especially now, when I was recently asking Berowne, "Where are they FINDING the people for these grand juries??" What a privilege it is to not know where they found those people.
I don't write about current events here, because that's not the purpose of this blog and because often (as now) I am too sputtering and helpless to articulate anything well. I will make editorial comments about abortion rights and such, sure, but generally I leave the news alone. And I am very self-conscious about how badly I'm expressing myself here. Also a bit defensive: it's not like I just wasn't thinking about the news until Dorothy Sayers reminded me, heaven knows. And it is perhaps the whitest most privileged thing ever to have one's white privilege checked by a passage in a British 1930's mystery novel. I guess I'm just saying that this book did check my privilege, and these are the thoughts I had about that.
So today we end on a sad and frustrated note, because we live in a sad and frustrating world. But it's also an exquisitely beautiful world, which I will try to keep in mind.
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