About four and a half months ago, Berowne and I were watching something on Hulu and a Subaru ad came on, showing a man taking his fourteen-year-old dog on what was clearly a bucket list trip. I choked out (this is true), "SUBARU, WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO ME," before proceeding to sob until I couldn't breathe.
So the results of the pregnancy test I took the next morning were not an entire surprise.
I know I wasn't this tired during my first pregnancy, because I didn't have a two-year-old, but even with that taken into consideration it has been a hilariously emotional ride so far. Within the first week I started keeping track of things that made me cry. Below, a non-exhaustive list:
- A split-second shot of Mowgli with his forehead against that of a wolf in one of the Jungle Book trailers (oh, Bear)
- A picture sent from daycare in which I convinced myself that Perdita looked friendless and isolated (her actual expression was "face full of cupcake", but I know what I saw)
- The day that I was in Trader Joe's and someone dropped a jar of mayonnaise (there were things in that aisle I had wanted but I had to leave without them, and I had to drive home with the windows open because I could still smell it on my clothes, and tears of disgust and self-pity do, in fact, count)
- Berowne reminding me of the Subaru ad (WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS?)
- Cute names for kiddie options on Chinese takeout menus
- The moment when my mirror forced me to remember that, oh right, pregnancy doesn't result in any changes to the hair on the top of my head, but the hair on my face goes from "relatively normal peach fuzz" to "Wolfman" overnight
- PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING
I thoroughly enjoyed it when a nurse told me that a warning sign of me not doing okay would be, "You're just watching a movie and all of a sudden you're crying." I wanted to point out that at my house we call that "a weeknight". Sometimes even when I'm not pregnant.
But otherwise things are going okay! This one is going to be a boy (!), and with Perdita I fell down the rabbit hole of Cute Girly Clothes early, so if anyone has boy or gender-neutral baby clothes they're done with, we are shamelessly soliciting hand-me-downs over here.
Read lately:
From the Charred Remains, by Susanna Calkins. Non-compelling novel about a maidservant in 17th-century England who is smarter than everyone and pursued by every man she meets. Oh, and she solves mysteries. As I am sure many of them did.
A Trace of Smoke, by Rebecca Cantrell. Non-compelling novel about a reporter in 1930s Berlin who is smarter than everyone and pursued by every man she meets, and solves mysteries. Super-, super-bored with the impossibly perfect heroine, especially since when you make her the narrator and thus she has to be the one to tell the reader about her perfection, she becomes unbearable almost from the first page.
The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine, by Alexander McCall Smith. The latest in the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, and a fluffy little number indeed.
The Nature of the Beast, by Louise Penny. A known quantity and a good thing.
Push Back: Guilt in the Age of Natural Parenting, by Amy Tuteur. Ha! Dr. Tuteur is ANGRY, and in kind of a wonderful way. She is angry about the whole concept of "natural parenting", because (and I agree) it is actually "natural mothering" (when was the last time you heard of a man being told to wear his baby 24-7?) and it is designed to keep women at home and bound to / identifying through their children. It prioritizes, in her excellent phrase, the process over the outcome. It tells women, among other things, that they have failed if they don't have a non-medicated vaginal birth, and instructs them to suffer through needless, excruciating pain for the same reasons that the church was against using pain alleviation during childbirth: if you don't suffer, you don't deserve motherhood / you're not a proper woman. The current loud voices may call it "going against nature" instead of "going against God", but it is exactly the same damn thing. If you don't suffer, you can't bond with your child. If you don't suffer, you're an unnatural mother.
I had been thinking, and am still having to work very hard against thinking, that I have to get through this upcoming fellow's birth without medication. That that is my only chance to redeem myself, after failing so emphatically at Perdita's birth. Never mind that I know exactly how painful it is and have been through the experience of, despite NOT having a low pain threshold and NOT being a weak or cowardly person (and the fact that I have to be so defensive about it tells you all you need to know about natural-birth pressure and judgment), being so utterly destroyed by the pain that getting through it without medication was not an option.
("Well, if you'd had kids in the nineteenth century you would have had to get through it!"
If I'd lived in the nineteenth century I would have died at age three of croup, before I even got around to dying at age thirty-five of cancer [assuming cholera, the milk trembles, smallpox, gangrene, lead poisoning, crinoline fire, etc, didn't get me in between], so your argument is invalid.)
Tuteur also goes rabid about lactivism (yay!), and made me feel better about Perdita's formula days. Of course, I am also still guilting and pressuring myself about somehow magically doing better with this one in terms of milk supply, as if I were agreeing with all the jerks who tried to convince me it was a matter of having the right attitude. Interestingly, I just met with a high-risk OB doctor who, when talking about my genetic predisposition toward blood clots, was rather horrified to hear that the nurses and lactation consultants on my care team last time prioritized the sedentary process of literally non-stop nursing / pumping / nursing / pumping over how genuinely dangerous it is for someone in my situation to not get up and move around after childbirth. And that was a way I had never looked at it before, even though I had previously acknowledged that it was emotionally dangerous for me to be tied to the pumping machine, and the day I put that damn thing away was the first day I enjoyed motherhood. If you have safe water, formula is not going to harm your baby in any way. Period. (Its expense sucks, but as I once read somewhere else and agree with 100%, breastfeeding is only free if a woman's time is worth nothing.) And prioritizing the baby getting a few ounces of breastmilk a day over the mother's life is insane.
Anyway, I could go on, but Tuteur is awesome in her rage. Although, as a friend reading the book at the same time noted, "makes for great reading but I bet she's a nightmare at dinner parties". And I do have the major quibble that she claims all OB docs think like she does, when it was an OB doc giving me the f'ing Mt. Everest analogy and the "women have done this for centuries" lecture instead of the pain relief I was asking for. And yes, I am getting my OB care somewhere else this time around (though I don't blame my whole care team for the fact that Dr. and Nurse "We Make Your Birth Plan For You!" happened to be on shift when my labor started).
Good stuff, for me. It beggars belief that I can look at my healthy, happy, bright daughter and think that I failed, but guilt is a terrible thing.
The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap: A Memoir of Friendship, Community, and the Uncommon Pleasure of a Good Book, by Wendy Welch. Welch and her husband start a used bookstore in the Appalachians. It's okay, but that was a savvy editor who decided to put Welch's book recommendations and anti-recommendations at the very end. Would I have read the whole thing if I knew upfront that Welch hates both Anna Karenina and Moby-Dick? Hell no. That person cannot be trusted.
Well, the young miss is up from her nap, so I must dash. As much as dashing is possible at five months pregnant, which is: not much. Gaining enough weight the first trimester was NOT a problem this time around, and I am well on my way to outpacing my "over-the-line" weight gain of last time. So we can all look forward to posts about body image and doing that part of pregnancy wrong! Hooray!
It's Mother's Day, about which I have Opinions, but I have been ranting enough on my Facebook about that and will leave it out of here.
Perdita has turned two, and is a force of nature, in the same way that the Atlantic Ocean is. She's delightful and exciting and changing every day, and sometimes she is full of sharks. But I have always preferred my nature like that: it's one reason a vacation in a tropical clime sounds incredibly unappealing to me. Soft, perfectly-blue, warm water that doesn't want you dead? What's the point? I want my daughter to stay strong and opinionated and believing that her wants are valid. I also want her to have manners and consideration for other people - we're certainly not working in one of those "spirited child" models which teach that giving a toddler limits means crushing their creativity and soul - but a shark or two is a good thing, especially to have in reserve as she faces a world which will forever be telling her that girls don't get to do certain things or behave certain ways or study certain topics or have ownership over their bodies. Whenever anyone tells her those things, I want her to have teeth.
Read lately:
The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey, by Rinker Buck. Buck and his brother travel by mule-driven covered wagon along the Oregon Trail, in a Bill-Bryson-inspired travelogue / history primer / memoir. I liked the history sections best, though Buck at least loves and takes excellent care of his mules, unlike the excruciating saga of animal neglect that is Tim Moore's Travels With My Donkey. I wasn't terribly interested in how this trip was about Buck's father, but it was a decent read.
Sun and Shadow, by Ake Edwardson. Yet another Scandinavian police procedural to blend into the mental files. Often while I am reading one of them I forget which country it's set in.
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, by Atul Gawande. Blub. Written with profound intelligence and profound emotional awareness, as is the case with all Gawande's writing. Also about death and decline, and therefore utterly heartbreaking, for all the encouragement he offers.
The Janissary Tree, by Jason Goodwin. A eunuch in 19th-century Istanbul digs into a murder. It started out quite strong, with excellent period setting and an intriguing protagonist, but lost me by the end, when the coincidences and convolutions of the crime became too much.
A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon's Flight to Extinction, by Joel Greenburg. A little boring: after the first few chapters it just turned into a litany of ways people killed pigeons.
The Resurrectionist, by Matthew Guinn. Novel about the dark racial history of a Southern medical college (I know; who would have thunk it). Actually better than I expected, for a first novel available for free on Amazon. But our hero wasn't very sympathetic and the story stayed too much on the surface. Still definitely shows potential for Guinn's future work.
Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body, by Jo Marchant. I expected this book to be much more of an exposé, but Marchant does a really good job of reporting the ways in which placebo treatment, mental distraction, and emotional support effect health outcomes, without ever going along with any actual "mind-over-body" claims. And she has plenty of stories of people who blame themselves for their diseases and try to cure them with diet, homeopathic remedies, and "positive thinking", and how tragic the results inevitably are in such cases. The conclusion, with which I agree: pseudoscience is pseudoscience and hurts people. The science of integrated (emotional and physical) healthcare can help people.
Wine of Violence, by Priscilla Royal. Medieval nuns and monks solve a murder in their abbey. The murderer's identity is too obvious, but I thought this was fun nonetheless and will probably check out more in the series.
Happy Mother's Day if this holiday brings you joy. If it doesn't, remember that there are fifty-one Sundays of the year when going out for brunch doesn't feel like trying to get a lifeboat seat on the Titanic. Let us all be grateful for those.
I went on a trip for work last week, and was away from Perdita overnight for the first time. I missed her and Berowne terribly, but at the same time it would have been restful (able to sleep ten hours a night, nothing to do after the conference ended for the day but lie about in a hotel bathtub with a book) if not for the fact that on the flight back I came down with my usual Deathly Travel Bronchitis and have now been miserably sick for eight days. But at least I got a lot of reading done during the trip, and since then while sitting up at night unable to sleep for the cough.
(I also had travel-related gas so bad that I experienced the worst audible public fart of my life, right in the middle of Powell's bookstore. I had only acquired five books at that point but had to flee, and for the next three days it was a toss-up over whether social anxiety or bibliophilia would win out in terms of daring to return. Sadly the anxiety did, which seems a huge waste. There is always the internet, I suppose.)
What I did manage to read while not occupied with flatulence:
Prophet's Prey: My Seven-Year Investigation into Warren Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints, by Sam Brower. Rampant child abuse in the name of religion is always a good time. Clear and horrifying.
Hell at the Breech, by Tom Franklin. Novel about the rural South at the end of the nineteenth century; it begins with a sackful of puppies being drowned and goes downhill in terms of brutality from there. Amazingly written, but so violent and upsetting that I almost put it down many times.
The Distance, by Helen Giltrow. A really bad thriller, and I don't have the faintest idea why I finished it.
The Remedy: Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Quest to Cure Tuberculosis, by Thomas Goetz. Appropriate reading as I hacked my way through my return flight. Fun popular history.
No Man's Nightingale, by Ruth Rendell. Good engrossing mystery.
On the Move: A Life, by Oliver Sacks. Jumps all over the place, to an extent that sometimes makes it difficult to follow chronologically, but Sacks' voice is so endearing that I was willing to forgive that. In one of those fun book coincidences, I had just read Bill Hayes' The Anatomist but had no idea that his partner Oliver was actually Oliver Sacks, until reading this book.
In Harm's Way: The Sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors, by Doug Stanton. SHARKS SO MANY SHARKS. I wanted more at the end of this book, about what happened to the men we'd come to know, and instead it ended very abruptly. Otherwise solidly written history about terrible things happening to people.
Jane Austen: A Life, by Claire Tomalin. Just wonderful, as Tomalin's biographies are. I actually cried at the end, though the fact that Jane Austen dies isn't exactly a spoiler.
The Vicar of Bullhampton, by Anthony Trollope. When I started this, and the young lady is attempting to choose between her two suitors, one heroic and the other a rake, I actually felt for a moment that I couldn't read yet another Trollope book about that, and thought about putting it aside. But fortunately that turns out to not be the main plot, so I enjoyed this. (And the girl actually ends up with the rake, and the hero acts very non-heroically about it, so that was interesting.)
The Scold's Bridle, by Minette Walters. Mystery about disturbing people doing disturbing things. Oddly, more Ruth-Rendell-ish than the Ruth Rendell I read on the same trip.
A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design, by Frank Wilczek. This was very challenging for me. Wilczek makes physics as accessible as he can, I think, but my brain just doesn't process physics the way it is able to comprehend biology or chemistry, so I struggled with this.
And now I need more tea and cough drops. May you all be feeling better than this.
In today's installment, we will be returning to the topic of "Beatrice: Worst Mother Ever", in two parts.
Part 1: I am a member of a couple mom groups on Facebook, and I also have many friends on social media who are stay-at-home-moms. (I know some families who have stay-at-home dads, but I am not friends with the dads and therefore don't get their perspectives.) And while this is thankfully not the case for most of the SAHMs I know, I can sometimes be blindsided by the gender dynamic inequalities I see in these relationships (from a biased, one-sided, and on-social-media POV, I know), and am frequently blindsided by the assumption from both parties that the woman will give up her career (possibly temporarily, I know) the instant she has a baby, no matter how much investment or passion went into said career.
The most stunning example I ever saw of this was actually in person, when I attended a barbeque at a co-worker's house and met his pregnant wife. She was in her first year of working as a psychiatrist, after nearly a decade of the school and residency and internships associated with such a career. And, in the context of explaining why she and her husband had to give up their plans to either redecorate or move, she literally shrugged her career and its potential earnings off with, "But I'm a mom now." As if this should have been the most obvious thing ever to her female listener - that it doesn't matter how hard you've worked, how much passion for the subject you must have had, how far in student loan debt you might be, how badly you need the income... you're a mom now. That's your job now. Period.
For all I know she may be planning to go back to work once her kid is six, or ten, or whatever. But it continues to blow my mind. Like, was this pregnancy completely unplanned or unwanted? Or did you actually go to med school and do your residency and internship believing the whole time that this was just a backup plan in case you turned out to be barren? There have got to be easier backup plans! Geez!
More disclaimers, now:
Not everyone is passionate about the job they end up in. I know. The "excuse" to stay home which is a child is surely a huge relief to some women.
Childcare is so insanely expensive that many women have to stay home for a few years at least, because their incomes wouldn't cover the cost. Believe me, I know: I live in the state which has the most expensive daycare rates in the country. I know it's not always a choice.
If you do have the choice, and you like your job and love the feelings of independence and validation that come from earning your own living and having an identity outside of "wife and mother", it's still going to be gut-wrenching either way. Perdita is in daycare fifty hours a week. She has been in daycare since she was eleven weeks old (though when she started she was only there about half that time). And I don't take that lightly. I think about it a lot.
But neither do I take my own needs lightly, and I know that without my career and without my own income, I would fall to pieces emotionally and mentally. I knew that going into this; I was never under any illusion that I would be fulfilled as a SAHM, even if it were financially feasible for us, which it emphatically isn't. But if Berowne made four times what he does, I would still be working. Maybe not full-time? Maybe we'd have a nanny instead of a daycare that's a long drive from home? Who knows. But I do know I'd still want to go in on Monday morning and dive into my tables and fields and formulas, and get a paycheck all my own. I absolutely would.
This is my personal experience, and the part about needing my own income has a lot to do with control and trust issues. It's not a judgement on anyone else.
But I am judging (okay, questioning) situations in which one partner has a monopoly on the "I worked hard earning all day" argument, and it results in things like only one parent getting up at night every night for two straight years, or the working parent refusing to take the baby for ten minutes when he (usually he) gets home, or both partners just assuming that if it's financially feasible then of course the woman will stay home after the baby's born, no matter her relationship to her career. I judge the hell out of the idea that the only reason both parents should work is if they have to, financially. Like I said above, I have to, financially, but I also have to, emotionally. And that needs to count, because no one would ever question that it counts for a man.
The phrase "I don't feel like a real man" is used when a man loses his job and his income. The phrase "I don't feel like a real woman" is used when a woman is unable to have children. This is bullshit.
And so I am appalled when I see (through a social media filter, I know) couples - most of whom are younger than Berowne and me, for Christ's sake - treating the woman's education and career as a backup plan. As something she can and should just set aside for ten years, which if it's in an area like technology or medicine is not going to work out (and in any area a ten-year gap in the CV is a disaster).
Every family is allowed to have its own priorities. No one should have to wax defensive for eleven paragraphs about the fact that she values her career (I will not say I prioritize it, because that would imply that I would have gone back to work even if the only daycare we found for Perdita was the unaccredited one located in a car repair shop [this is actually a real thing near us]). No one should have to wax defensive over wanting to stay at home with her small children either (or needing to because the only available daycare was in a car repair shop). But the priorities need to be a) the family's priorities, not those of one partner; and b) not based on possibly-unconscious and usually-gendered assumptions that one partner's abilities outside of the home are less valuable or important than the other's; and c) even if those priorities are agreed upon totally equally and with the best of intentions, if they then lead to inequalities within the relationship, they need to be revised. I don't care who's earning money, who's working "harder" during the day (subjective as hell anyway): you are both equal parents to the child(ren) and equal partners to each other and you both need to F'ING ACT LIKE IT. If somebody is NOT f'ing acting like it, and his (usually his) excuse is that he is the breadwinner, that is a BULLSHIT EXCUSE and he is a BULLSHIT FELLOW.
This is why both partners working full-time is actually one of the things about my marriage for which I am really grateful: when we all get home, Berowne and I are both tired and hungry and have spent all day dealing with bosses and co-workers and projects we didn't design and responsibilities on which money or safety are riding, and no one gets to play the "well, I earned money today" card, and so the childcare (and cooking and cleaning) just gets divided in a very matter-of-fact way. Also we both had access to bathroom breaks and leisurely coffee-making of which stay-at-home parents can only dream, and no one's sick of dealing with Perdita. It works out very well.
Part 2: (remember, this is about me being a terrible mother?): home due to pink-eye on Friday, I managed to get locked out of the house by the toddler, who threw the deadbolt while I was out in the yard trying to convince the dog to poop. I didn't even have my phone with me. Thank God a neighbor was home, and the fire department found an unlocked upstairs window through which they could get in, and the cop who lectured me on my terrible parenting (not after the fact, but while we were still standing in the driveway while my terrified toddler screamed for me) probably had good reasons for being such a turd. In any event, everyone is all right and I have already been telling the story for laughs, but it was a horrifying twenty minutes.
The books I have read since last posting:
Broken Harbor, by Tana French. Not as good as her others, but I still stayed up until midnight three nights in a row to finish it, because "her others" set a high bar. Pretty disturbing, of course.
The Anatomist: A True Story of Gray's Anatomy, by Bill Hayes. Good popular science / history, of the type I greatly enjoy. Very reminiscent of Mary Roach.
Half Empty, by David Rakoff. More essays, these ostensibly about optimism but mostly just about Rakoff's personal experiences. I found him a more likeable voice in this one than I have in his other collections.
The Bones of Avalon, by Phil Rickman. Dr. John Dee, Elizabeth I's astrologer, goes looking for the remains of King Arthur. Overwrought prose and tedious plotting ensue. Not recommended.
Jackaby, by William Ritter. YA novel that's sort of a cross between Buffy and Libba Bray. Manages to have a spunky teenage heroine who is nonetheless sensible and good company, and some understatedly lovely writing. I will be reading the others in the series.
I sincerely hope no one felt attacked by this post. It wasn't meant at all in that spirit. I just want everyone I know (or even merely encounter through FB mom groups) to feel validated and equal in their relationships, and sometimes what pops up through the ether makes me deeply depressed.
Full disclaimer (or Part 3): Berowne's occupation involves stretches between paying jobs, and on (I hope no more than) two or three occasions during said stretches I have played the "well, I earned money today" card, and he called me on the fact that that is a BULLSHIT EXCUSE as well he should have. My point: if your partner does this, it doesn't mean they're an irredeemably power-hungry jerk. But if you call them on it and nothing changes, that may be a different story.
A quiet, happy Easter with a toddler alternating between utter sweetness and utter barbarity, as toddlers do. We've slept in and listened to Handel and gone out for breakfast, and maybe after her nap we'll take a walk. Nothing to complain of.
Read lately:
Prudence, by Gail Carriger. Her latest steampunk series, featuring the children of the characters in her previous series. A bit too much about our heroine's irresistibility and perfection - the older I get, the less patience I have for characters in their teens who are insufferably confident and skilled - but decently fun.
Dead Water, by Ann Cleeves. People continue to murder each other on the Shetland Islands, and I continue to want to move there and wear big sweaters. Except for the part where to get anywhere else you have to take a tiny little plane. I would not do well with that. Cleeves falls into the trap of "successful confident women are evil" thing here a little bit, but she manages to keep that in a few characters' heads, rather than expressing it herself as an author. The last one of hers I read crossed that line.
Death Wore White, by Jim Kelly. Police procedural the plot of which I have already forgotten; I will not be reading more by this author.
Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America, by Gilbert King. Amazing. Absolutely engrossing and terrible and infuriating (especially when you think how far we still are from that "New America"). I wanted to call out from work just so I could read this through in one sitting.
Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town, by John Krakauer. Well done reporting, simply brutal to read. I had to put it down a lot.
Boundary Waters, by William Kent Krueger. Decent thriller about a former sheriff in Minnesota. The body count gets absurdly high by the end, and the Native American characters are noble stereotypes, but it kept my attention.
If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O, by Sharyn McCrumb. Didn't like it as much of some of her other books; it's trying too hard to be important and political, instead of utilizing the Appalachians and their legends the way McCrumb does to great and effective creepiness in her other books. Plus the murderer's identity feels like a cop-out.
Blood of the Tiger: A Story of Conspiracy, Greed, and the Battle to Save a Magnificent Species, by J.A. Mills. My Early Reviewers book. Less about actually wandering through the habitats of the tiger than I expected, and more about legislation and international affairs. Still sufficiently heartbreaking.
The Angel Court Affair, by Anne Perry. Her books at this point, in both of her Victorian series, have become very slight and forgettable. This one was surprisingly passionate in its discussion of religious faith, which read like Perry trying to work out a lot of stuff about forgiveness and redemption for herself (but would I have thought that if I didn't know her history? dunno) and which I found quite interesting. The mystery itself? Less so.
The Last Camel Died at Noon, by Elizabeth Peters. Campy series about Victorian archaeologists, and while fun it has suffered immensely from Peters' decision to give her hero and heroine a revoltingly precocious child. In this one, not only is the child in fine form but at the same time I was equally revolted by his mother's (our narrator's) indifference to, literally, whether he lives or dies. I mean, I feel that way as the reader, but it makes it very difficult to like your narrator when she continually puts her whole family in danger of their lives and then her concern is, in this order, for her husband, and then herself, and then eventually her small child. Peters tries to tell us near the end of the book that she actually has Enormous Maternal Love for this kid, but the whole rest of the book has been showing us otherwise.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, by Jules Verne. Wow, super-boring! Infodumping is apparently not a new thing in literature.
Kraken: The Curious, Exciting, and Slightly Disturbing Science of Squid, by Wendy Williams. Brief but fairly interesting.
Happy Easter / We Like Sheep Day, if you celebrate. If not, enjoy your spring Sunday.
The winter is winding up quietly, especially compared to last year. I am sure we will still get a few bits and pieces of snow, but the weather is mild and the weeks passing quickly. Except for that drive home from daycare, when Perdita alternates between demanding to see a truck, complaining about the radio, and making fun of me if I yell at her: she often throws things in the backseat and, when she's done it once and I tell her not to do it again, and then of course she does, I say, "PERDITA!" and she replies with a mocking, "MEH MEH MEH!" That drive goes slowly.
Read since last posting:
Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West--One Meal at a Time, by Stephen Fried. Fascinating non-fiction about the transcontinental railroad and the setting up of restaurants along the way. It also goes into the beginning of the conservation movement and the aviation craze, and Santa Fe and "Indian tourism", and America in the world wars, and it's really interesting and covers a good deal more ground than I thought it would from the title. I liked it a lot.
The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins. I... Uh. Um. I guess I see why this was so popular? No, wait, I don't. I almost put it down after the first fifty pages or so, and though I stuck with it I don't feel rewarded at all. Everyone is awful. Every single person is just vile, and dull, to the point that I didn't care in the least what happened to them. You can write interesting anti-heroes, but Hawkins doesn't. The three female narrators are all nightmare stereotypes: the Drunk Stalker Ex, the Crazy Nymphomaniac, and the Motherhood is My Identity. None of them, crucially, have jobs or professional ambitions, and they are all completely obsessed with the men in (or previously in) their lives. This is one of the most anti-female books I have read in a long time. Also it was tedious, because you have to slog through pages and pages of self-destruction establishing that these women are, in fact, Men's Worst Nightmares, in between small snippets of the supposedly "thrilling" plot. Such a letdown, after all the praise.
A Burnable Book, by Bruce Holsinger. Gower and Chaucer solve a crime in the reign of Richard II (okay, mostly Gower; Chaucer is not entirely innocent, as it turns out). It's a really fun, if period-accurate-grim-at-times, novel, and one of the main characters is transgender and their gender identity is handled super-deftly (I thought so, anyway).
The Fifth Heart, by Dan Simmons. Simmons, master of cut-and-paste from Wikipedia to needlessly stretch 200 pages of story into a 700-page book. And yet I keep reading, if skimming a good deal. This one involves Sherlock Holmes and Henry James teaming up to prevent the assassination of the president at the Chicago World's Fair, and it's just about as dumb as it sounds.
Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, by Timothy Snyder. Hard, hard, brilliant, enlightening reading. Snyder's take on the Holocaust is that it was permitted by nation-states being nullified (Jews living in Germany throughout the war had a much, much better chance of surviving than Jews in occupied territories), and that the goal was chaos, so that when we think of Germany itself as the most dangerous place and the Germans of being coldly efficient, we're getting it wrong. Hitler said that Jews had ruined the natural order of things by being a civilizing force, which he claimed was unnatural. (Warning indeed, in these days of "political correctness is being shoved down my throat, so my candidate is the one who lets me believe that every white person hates non-white people as much as I do; the rest of them are just afraid to say so, and he's not".) Mercifully, Snyder ends with three chapters about people who protected Jews, which after the rest of the book is desperately needed. And provides some good ideas for the inevitable basement shelters some of us may need to start constructing for our immigrant and Muslim neighbors and friends.
God, I want to believe that humans are better than this. That in the intervening seventy years fewer people have been teaching their children to hate. But it's so hard to believe that right now.
The Ice House, by Minette Walters. A British author's first mystery, from back in the early 90's. Suffers from a lot of gender-stereotype silliness, including forced "punishing kisses" leading to relationships, but Walters does a nice gradual flip-flop in who we initially think is the hero and who is the boorish sidekick, and I liked her writing enough that I'm going to go back and find other stuff she's written.
May you all find ways to work towards love, these days.
Presidents' Day, and coming off the frigid temperatures that meant we couldn't safely go outside for the last two days. And Berowne was away working on a film all weekend, so it was just me with a stir-crazy toddler in a very small house, and I am not creative in those situations. Fortunately I was able to reach out to Facebook for suggestions, and we got through just fine. Well, the part of Saturday evening when she projectile vomited all over me was kind of rough, particularly since we have a dog, which means you can't just whisk the child into the bathtub and leave the puke to clean up later, if you get my drift. The whole kerfuffle was one of the most disgusting experiences of my life, and I have been seven weeks pregnant and trapped in a room with someone who was eating ranch dressing, so I know of what I speak.
But she's all right, which is what matters. Not much inclined to nap today, but hey, it can be Berowne's problem now!
Read since last posting:
Boy Made of Dawn, by R. Allen Chappell. Very slight book about the Navajo Nation; ostensibly a mystery but there is no doubt of the solution. A decent afternoon's read.
All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr. I resisted this one for a while, not just because of my knee-jerk aversion to bestselling books, but because the premise (from the blurbs) seemed SO excessive in its pathos. It can't just be a German boy and a French girl during WWII, no, she also has to be blind, OH GEEZ. Well, it does have the element of Everyone Dies which is inevitable in a book set in Europe during WWII, and the French characters are all two-dimensional (either noble members of the Résistance or plump, oily collaborators), but otherwise I was pretty unprepared for the experience of reading this book. So beautiful it is almost physically painful, and I couldn't put it down, and when I finished it I said HOLY SHIT out loud.
Despite the aforementioned knee-jerk reaction, I do actually like it when hyped books live up to the hype. When they don't, there's the sense of... "this is all we ask of a book now?" and I hate that. Not an issue here!
Wishful Drinking, by Carrie Fisher. Fisher seems like an awesome person, and I know this came out of her stage show, but I still wish that someone had edited the shit out of it. It's a very endearing mess, but it's still, structurally, a mess.
Spider Woman's Daughter, by Anne Hillerman. Hillerman took over her father's Leaphorn/Chee mystery series (set in New Mexico and Arizona and featuring Navajo policemen and culture) after he died, and this first of hers is tentative and formulaic, but certainly no worse than the last few that he wrote. The call-back to the events of a previous book meant that someone familiar with the series could figure the solution out about a third of the way through, but also made the whole thing feel more comforting and grounded in Tony Hillerman's characters and world. I think it was a good choice. Total hilarity at the end, with the villain explaining their nefarious plan at great length and in risible dialogue to the hero, but far more experienced writers than Hillerman fall into that trap all the time. I will happily read any others she writes in the series.
Moriarty: A Novel, by Anthony Horowitz. Bluh. Too cynical and self-satisfied for my tastes.
Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth, by Lee Jackson. Decent popular history, but got a bit tangled up in numbers and dates occasionally. I skimmed a whole chapter that seemed to be little other than a list of the years that particular slum areas were torn down.
Go Set a Watchman, by Harper Lee. Well written, and a very strange reading experience, as others have articulated better than I. I can easily see why an editor would have read it, come back to her, and said, "We want a book about this childhood she keeps referencing." And I found the casual killing-off of a major TKAM character to be a much harder blow than Atticus going all states'-rights.
The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy, by Seth Mnookin. Clear, intelligent, devastating, and angry. Should be required reading.
Don't Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never-Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems, by David Rakoff. Essays about, basically, being entitled (Rakoff is reporting on entitled people, not being [overly] entitled himself). Lightly amusing and, as I've said before, a decent afternoon's read.
I've actually discarded quite a few books over the past couple of months, without addressing them here. It's refreshing to let myself do that, but I still feel guilty enough that I'm currently struggling with whether I'm "allowed" to discard one of the books I'm reading. It's gorgeously written, but in the first two chapters I was already clubbed with both incest and dialect, and the rest of it has all been about a woman who is so beautiful that men literally cannot control themselves around her. Ugh, NOT A THING. Also there is more incest pending, and the fact that everyone but the two people involved knows that they are brother and sister, and the incredibly contrived plot mechanisms and the other characters' irrational actions created just to ensure that they don't find out they're brother and sister, are driving me crazy. Okay, talked myself into allowing it! (The book is Land of Love and Drowning, by Tiphanie Yanique, and I am super impressed by Yanique's talents and will definitely give future books of hers a try, but I just couldn't take the story of this one.)
May you all be warm, and free of stories which are not serving you well.
