So, had an MRI. It found something that merited further investigation. A targeted ultrasound found two cysts: one that was definitely benign, and one that contains "debris", which could be harmless calcifications or could be Total Death Cancer (may not have been the doctor's actual words). So they want to do another MRI in three months.
Not. Reassuring.
Adding to the lack-of-fun was the fact that because the ultrasound was performed in the mammography suite, Berowne was forbidden entry, and so I was alone back there, and without the crucial second person asking questions and able to, later, confirm what was said. This is absolutely vital at these types of appointments, and I was really pissed off that they wouldn't let my support person come into the room just because he was male. Especially considering that if the ultrasound had been done down the hall, in Imaging, he would have been expected to accompany me. Grrr.
I am also being transferred between oncologists at the moment, so scheduling even the follow-up appointment is needlessly complicated. Bitch bitch bitch, I know. But this periodic panic has been a thing for four years now, and it gets exhausting.
I have been reading, rather desperately and without patience, as tends to be the case in times of needing-distraction. And in times of "eh, I figure the toddler can roam the downstairs area unattended now", which means keeping a sharp ear peeled. Especially for silence. (She can now reach things near the edge of the kitchen counters. Oh boy.) And in times of feeling the clammy hand of mortality, not just because of the screenings but because this month marks TWENTY YEARS since I arrived at college as a freshman. TWENTY YEARS. Plain and awkward and sure that I was going to be finally appreciated and loved for my brains, instead of having to be "popular" or "outgoing" or "a nice person", only to find that compared to everyone else in that freshman class I had the brains of a mildly advanced sheep. But that is a story for another day. Suffice it to say: I feel old.
The books:
As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust, by Alan Bradley. The Flavia De Luce series is getting kind of weird, but I suppose any premise for keeping an eleven-year-old girl constantly involved in murder investigations would become strained sooner rather than later. In this one Flavia goes to Canada, in an attempt to prevent the per capita murder rate in her tiny English village from surpassing that of Compton, but by the end she is sent home again, and I don't know what Bradley's going to do from here. I'll keep reading them, though, most likely.
The Wench is Dead, by Colin Dexter. An Inspector Morse mystery: the first I've read. Since this one is about said Inspector being bedridden and trying to figure out a centuries-old crime, I don't know if it was at all typical of the series. And the resolution mostly depended on women being naturally vicious and conniving, which didn't sit well. It mostly made me want to re-read The Daughter of Time.
Murder 101, by Faye Kellerman. Unfortunately, this series has crossed a line from "mindless indulgence" to "so badly done it makes me cranky". The supporting characters just get more and more bizarrely self-aware, and talk in sentences no human has ever uttered, and this one had the added unnecessary silliness of having a murder take place in the Massachusetts town described as being next to Medford, but naming said town "Summer Village". (The locals call it "Slummer Village"! Oh ho, so clever, Kellerman!) I mean... really? Why on earth would you bother? Also, if I can remember that ten books ago your heroine had a hysterectomy, then why are you writing a scene in which she theorizes that she might be going through menopause? Eeeesh. What a hot mess.
With Fire and Sword: The Battle of Bunker Hill and the Beginning of the American Revolution, by James L. Nelson. Quite good popular history for where I was at mentally these last few weeks, by which I mean it was probably a little bit dumbed down. I enjoyed it.
Unnatural Death, by Dorothy L. Sayers. I cannot even any more with the early Lord Peter Whimseys, and I'm afraid to re-read the later ones, which I loved as a tween (though that wasn't a word then, because as we've established I'm ancient). They are the most racist things I've ever read this side of a Post-Colonial Literature seminar.
Cleopatra: A Life, by Stacey Schiff. Solid popular history; Schiff does a good job sorting out the probable from the mass of legends around Cleopatra, and presents her conclusions intelligently and interestingly.
And now, as I'm rocking the beginnings of a cold (my usual reaction to a week of living off adrenalin and fretting), I'm going to eat some chicken chili and take a nap. And then treat myself to a Louise Penny even though it's not next in the queue. The decadence! May you all enjoy such luxury.
Sunday, August 30, 2015
Sunday, August 16, 2015
very brief recap
A quick post, trying not to fall behind, and trying to do things that involve as little movement as possible because it is 90 degrees and so humid that the diapers which have been on the clothesline in full sunlight and the aforementioned 90 degrees for almost eight hours are still not dry. Gross.
Anyway, what I have read lately:
Bad Feminist: Essays, by Roxane Gay. Essays about feminism, politics, pop culture, race, and Gay's personal life. So smart and incisive. I can be honest enough to say that sometimes I was made uncomfortable, and I was made uncomfortable because I am white, and I was being called out on the enormous privilege I have because of that. One of the most insidious things about privilege is that I think it is literally impossible, no matter your liberalism or effort, to be constantly or fully aware of how much the world is designed for your comfort and not for someone else's. And it is very possible to get complacent in your outrage on behalf of the someone else, because your outrage comes from a safe place, which is in itself a privilege. Being reminded of that is a good thing, and I hope I can keep it in mind when that complacency starts to creep in again.
The New World, by Andrew Motion. The sequel to a fun book in which the children of Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver go hunting for treasure. This book was not fun, nor did it even make much sense. Racist as balls, and our attractive early-twenties protagonists are so weirdly asexual and occasionally irrational that after a bit they stopped being characters at all to me. I barely finished it.
Revelation, by C. J. Sansom. Another in the series featuring a lawyer during the reign of Henry VIII solving crimes. Very well-written, very disturbing, totally kept me up reading at night.
The Mad Sculptor, by Harold Schechter. 1930's murder in New York. Decently-written and interesting. Will fall into the seemingly limitless category of "has 'trial of the century' somewhere in the title" books that I read, which all blend together after a while.
The Belton Estate, by Anthony Trollope. Young woman must choose between two men. That is the entire plot, as is not unusual with Trollope, and in his hands that's really all you need. Especially if one man is a cerebral scholar and the other is a bluff, hearty, broad-shouldered farmer, and you deeply enjoy reading about a lady who can only imagine herself marrying the first type and slowly comes around to the other point of view. Broad shoulders and vegetable gardens and getting up early in the morning? I can't imagine many happier things, myself.
Stay cool, everyone.
Anyway, what I have read lately:
Bad Feminist: Essays, by Roxane Gay. Essays about feminism, politics, pop culture, race, and Gay's personal life. So smart and incisive. I can be honest enough to say that sometimes I was made uncomfortable, and I was made uncomfortable because I am white, and I was being called out on the enormous privilege I have because of that. One of the most insidious things about privilege is that I think it is literally impossible, no matter your liberalism or effort, to be constantly or fully aware of how much the world is designed for your comfort and not for someone else's. And it is very possible to get complacent in your outrage on behalf of the someone else, because your outrage comes from a safe place, which is in itself a privilege. Being reminded of that is a good thing, and I hope I can keep it in mind when that complacency starts to creep in again.
The New World, by Andrew Motion. The sequel to a fun book in which the children of Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver go hunting for treasure. This book was not fun, nor did it even make much sense. Racist as balls, and our attractive early-twenties protagonists are so weirdly asexual and occasionally irrational that after a bit they stopped being characters at all to me. I barely finished it.
Revelation, by C. J. Sansom. Another in the series featuring a lawyer during the reign of Henry VIII solving crimes. Very well-written, very disturbing, totally kept me up reading at night.
The Mad Sculptor, by Harold Schechter. 1930's murder in New York. Decently-written and interesting. Will fall into the seemingly limitless category of "has 'trial of the century' somewhere in the title" books that I read, which all blend together after a while.
The Belton Estate, by Anthony Trollope. Young woman must choose between two men. That is the entire plot, as is not unusual with Trollope, and in his hands that's really all you need. Especially if one man is a cerebral scholar and the other is a bluff, hearty, broad-shouldered farmer, and you deeply enjoy reading about a lady who can only imagine herself marrying the first type and slowly comes around to the other point of view. Broad shoulders and vegetable gardens and getting up early in the morning? I can't imagine many happier things, myself.
Stay cool, everyone.
Tuesday, August 4, 2015
summer books
Heavens, I have been remiss here. Things have been very busy, and then very relaxing albeit buggy (five days in Vermont), and then very busy again. Plus it's been 95 degrees and airless, so the diaper pail is a living beast in the corner of the room and the kitchen ants have stopped even pretending to give a fuck ("oh, you're washing dishes? I'll just march my enormous self over your arm to get to these crumbs on the other side of the counter, no problem"). The less said about the earwigs living in our mailbox the better, but if we don't get mail delivery again until October I would not blame our carrier one bit. I tend to get a little hamstrung by my own sullenness under such circumstances.
But I have been reading! Perdita was magnificent about the newly-instituted "quiet time" that I tried in Vermont, which meant informing her it was quiet time, putting her in the play pen with a stuffed animal and some board books, and settling down myself to read. I tended to get about forty-five minutes to an hour of her happily looking at her books or marching the stuffed animal around the play pen while chatting to herself, presumably about his adventures. Amazing.
The books:
On Immunity: An Inoculation, by Eula Bliss. I almost put this book down two minutes in, when Bliss says that she was undecided about vaccinating her child, but I'm very glad I didn't. Bliss writes elegantly and compassionately about her journey from "meh, vaccines" (although it ultimately sounds like she was never as "meh" as she initially states) through the history and science of vaccinations, and her arrival at being a passionate advocate. Should be required reading for anyone similarly undecided.
The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World's Most Perplexing Cold Cases, by Michael Capuzzo. I hated this. It's ostensibly about the Vidocq Club, a group of people from various law-related arenas who get together and work on cold cases, but it's really only about three of them, and they are all incredibly sexist and homophobic. Capuzzo cheerfully recounts their dialogue about homosexuality being a perversion and how sexually-active women should have known that they were inevitably going to be murdered, and expects us to find these three guys just as charming and fascinating as he does, and I have no idea why I finished this.
Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Quest, by Carl Hoffman. I am not sure that Hoffman convinced either me or himself that Rockefeller's collecting of "primitive art" because of daddy issues was actually a Tragic Quest, but getting eaten is still not a good way to go. I enjoyed this book, though pop anthropology is so hard to do without paternalistically othering hard-core. Hoffman acknowledges his urge to do so, which is maybe all we can ask. And he writes well.
The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver. This took me a long time to read - kept putting it down for a while and picking it back up. It's astonishing in some ways, but the four impossibly-different sisters felt like a gimmick to me, especially since for the first two-thirds of the book we have to get every plot point retold four times in their different voices, meaning this book really didn't have to be the length it was. Also the fact that one kid is going to die (not a spoiler: we're told this at the very beginning) made it hard for me to keep going. (I am such a wuss about this now that I have a kid.) Once that fatality was out of the way (it's horrible, but the anticipation of it was worse) and the three remaining sisters all go their separate ways and start having separate adventures, I enjoyed it much more.
Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three, by Mara Leveritt. Meh. This was redundant for me since I've seen all the documentaries, and not that great.
The Day of Atonement, by David Liss. Revenge Monte-Cristo-style, except that our hero is a pugilistic Jew who returns to eighteenth-century Portugal and beats up everyone he encounters on his way to defeat the Inquisition, and then there is an earthquake. Utterly silly and fun.
Sovereign, by C. J. Sansom. A lawyer during the reign of Henry VIII must solve mysteries (this is a series, apparently). The period detail is glorious and the infodumping as painless as possible. I liked it a lot.
Dead Run: The Murder of a Lawman and the Greatest Manhunt of the Modern American West, by Dan Schultz. Interesting at the time but I can already feel it fading from memory.
The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters. Rather engaging, rather beautifully written, but you can see what's coming a mile off and the supporting characters are broad-stroke stock.
Speak Now: Marriage Equality on Trial, by Kenji Yoshino. A wonderfully clear, compassionate, and wise description of the legal challenge to Prop 8. Very timely read right now.
May you all avoid earwigs and have whatever adventures, or quiet time, or adventures during quiet time, that you desire.
But I have been reading! Perdita was magnificent about the newly-instituted "quiet time" that I tried in Vermont, which meant informing her it was quiet time, putting her in the play pen with a stuffed animal and some board books, and settling down myself to read. I tended to get about forty-five minutes to an hour of her happily looking at her books or marching the stuffed animal around the play pen while chatting to herself, presumably about his adventures. Amazing.
The books:
On Immunity: An Inoculation, by Eula Bliss. I almost put this book down two minutes in, when Bliss says that she was undecided about vaccinating her child, but I'm very glad I didn't. Bliss writes elegantly and compassionately about her journey from "meh, vaccines" (although it ultimately sounds like she was never as "meh" as she initially states) through the history and science of vaccinations, and her arrival at being a passionate advocate. Should be required reading for anyone similarly undecided.
The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World's Most Perplexing Cold Cases, by Michael Capuzzo. I hated this. It's ostensibly about the Vidocq Club, a group of people from various law-related arenas who get together and work on cold cases, but it's really only about three of them, and they are all incredibly sexist and homophobic. Capuzzo cheerfully recounts their dialogue about homosexuality being a perversion and how sexually-active women should have known that they were inevitably going to be murdered, and expects us to find these three guys just as charming and fascinating as he does, and I have no idea why I finished this.
Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Quest, by Carl Hoffman. I am not sure that Hoffman convinced either me or himself that Rockefeller's collecting of "primitive art" because of daddy issues was actually a Tragic Quest, but getting eaten is still not a good way to go. I enjoyed this book, though pop anthropology is so hard to do without paternalistically othering hard-core. Hoffman acknowledges his urge to do so, which is maybe all we can ask. And he writes well.
The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver. This took me a long time to read - kept putting it down for a while and picking it back up. It's astonishing in some ways, but the four impossibly-different sisters felt like a gimmick to me, especially since for the first two-thirds of the book we have to get every plot point retold four times in their different voices, meaning this book really didn't have to be the length it was. Also the fact that one kid is going to die (not a spoiler: we're told this at the very beginning) made it hard for me to keep going. (I am such a wuss about this now that I have a kid.) Once that fatality was out of the way (it's horrible, but the anticipation of it was worse) and the three remaining sisters all go their separate ways and start having separate adventures, I enjoyed it much more.
Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three, by Mara Leveritt. Meh. This was redundant for me since I've seen all the documentaries, and not that great.
The Day of Atonement, by David Liss. Revenge Monte-Cristo-style, except that our hero is a pugilistic Jew who returns to eighteenth-century Portugal and beats up everyone he encounters on his way to defeat the Inquisition, and then there is an earthquake. Utterly silly and fun.
Sovereign, by C. J. Sansom. A lawyer during the reign of Henry VIII must solve mysteries (this is a series, apparently). The period detail is glorious and the infodumping as painless as possible. I liked it a lot.
Dead Run: The Murder of a Lawman and the Greatest Manhunt of the Modern American West, by Dan Schultz. Interesting at the time but I can already feel it fading from memory.
The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters. Rather engaging, rather beautifully written, but you can see what's coming a mile off and the supporting characters are broad-stroke stock.
Speak Now: Marriage Equality on Trial, by Kenji Yoshino. A wonderfully clear, compassionate, and wise description of the legal challenge to Prop 8. Very timely read right now.
May you all avoid earwigs and have whatever adventures, or quiet time, or adventures during quiet time, that you desire.
Sunday, July 5, 2015
more from the guilt files
I suppose everyone's parental life has its measures of guilt and inadequacy. Probably even the parents who only feed their children on hand-milled rice flour grown from their own backyard paddy and vegetables guided to their fullest potential by gentle men from New Hampshire feel guilt sometimes, not just those of us who are fully complicit in Trader Joe's employees filling our child with alphabet cookie samples at her lunchtime. I tend to imagine I have more guilt than anyone else, which is probably half true and half a desire to condemn everyone else as hedonistic. Competitive Calvinism! Good times!
I am only lately coming to terms with the fact that I do have an inner Cotton Mather, and he's not a pleasant fellow. He tends to manifest mainly when I want to think things like, "Well, she may be setting the academic / literary / business world on fire while also growing everything her family eats and only putting her child in daycare ten hours a week, but at least I'm not having any fun." And if that doesn't make sense to you, congratulations, your family has no Scottish Presbyterian roots.
I exaggerate (I don't), but it makes sense, in a twisted sort of way. If I weighed on one side of the scales the high-powered career / totally organic lifestyle / my-life-is-my-children options, and put in the other side a "meh, I'm cool with sort of moodling around the edges of all of those things," and was okay with the moodling being heavier, I'd be a Bad Person. I can be a Good Person as long as I feel bad enough about being the person I am.
(I love writing this shit out. Honestly. It may reinforce with all of you that I am bonkers, but it's so good for me.)
I want to let the moodling be okay, because it is who I am. In most cases I didn't make a considered choice to abstain from high-powered anything; I just don't have the energy. (I'm a radiation-therapy-recipient who doesn't drink caffeine and has the introvert's drained-by-other-people problem tested daily by a shared space at work, so anyone who thinks I should have the energy [Cotton Mather] can just shut his face.) But I do keep using that as an excuse instead of owning where I am in life and not constantly, automatically, apologizing for it. Being okay with where I am today doesn't mean that I've given up and will never try to be anywhere else. And it doesn't make me a lazy, self-indulgent person.
The thing about an inner Cotton Mather is that all he wants you to keep saying to yourself is, "More weight." I need to remember that.
Read lately:
The Ghost in the Mirror, by John Bellairs. Apparently someone finished a bunch of Bellairs' manuscripts after his death, which explains why several I'd never heard of showed up on the library website recently, and also explains why this felt so unsatisfying. I plan to go back and re-read some of the originals, which scared me to death in delightful ways as a child.
The Heroine's Bookshelf: Life Lessons From Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder, by Erin Blackmore. Blackmore talks about the "lessons" we can take from each heroine of a classical novel, naming each chapter with a virtue ("Faith", "Steadfastness", etc), which - while Blackmore's love of literature and belief in the importance of reading are never in question - ends up rather taking the fun out of it. I wanted to like this more than I did. (It didn't help that the second chapter - on Their Eyes Were Watching God - was incredibly awkward and forced and felt like an editor had said, "No, you can't have only one chapter on an African-American author, let's get another one in there and make it about God for good measure." I totally agree that this book needed more diversity, but Blackmore obviously didn't feel that chapter the way she felt the other ones, and making it [and its assumption that her readers are all practicing Christians] the very second chapter almost put me off the whole book.)
The Stockholm Octavo, by Karen Engelmann. I was bored to tears by this piece of generic semi-mystical historical fiction, and yet when its library loan expired I got it back out and made myself finish it. When I'm feeling that duty-bound it's rarely a good sign of how I'm managing my life. Generic semi-mystical historical fiction AND trigger warning! Still a waste of my reading time.
Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston. Odd to be reading this at the same time as the Blackmore above. It's incredible, what can I say.
Tigers in Red Weather, by Liza Klaussmann. Oh GOD. An entry in the bestselling fiction realm of "people are horrible, love is a myth, beautiful women destroy all the lives around them and can't help themselves and are always forgiven" genre. After, like, the sixteenth time our female protagonist sleeps with a stranger / her husband's boss / her daughter's fiancé and it's presented as something that is, scorpion-like, in her nature to the extent that it's literally beyond her control, I had to just start laughing. Klaussman can write, no question, but the effort to make all of her characters either destroying or destroyed seemed, I don't know, not worth the candle.
Iron Lake, by William Kent Krueger. Serviceable mystery about tough men in a cold climate. I did hate how the girlfriend was set up as Fatality Fodder from the very beginning, so that she can be our hero's motivation / reason for his tough exterior in subsequent books; and the sudden shift to another point of view in the last several chapters didn't really work; but I will probably read more in the series.
American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest, by Hannah Nordhaus. Nordhaus investigates the legend that her ancestor haunts the La Posada Inn in Santa Fe, and tries to discover what she can about the family. It runs parallel tracks, between the family members who came to America and ended up in Santa Fe, and those who stayed in Germany and suffered the fate of German Jews in the twentieth century. Although Nordhaus' tolerance of psychics becomes a bit much after a while, I quite liked this book.
Lion in the Valley, by Elizabeth Peters. Cute period mystery, though the series gets less cute as the supposedly-cute child becomes a more active character. Stop trying so hard, Peters.
A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Jonestown, by Julia Scheeres. Oh God. OH GOD. This is a really well-written and fiercely detailed book, telling the story mostly from the points of view of four individuals who followed Jones to Guyana and who left either substantial written documentation or survived to be interviewed afterwards. But that in itself does not warrant the raw horror I felt while reading. I think I knew, on some level, that there were children in Jonestown. I must have known that. Surely I didn't think that of 900 people who joined Jim Jones' group, none of them had families? But I did not register it. And when, early on in the book, I was forced to register it, I spent the entire rest of the book hoping desperately that the end wouldn't be what it was. That the one fact I just never heard about Jonestown was that someone got all the children out before the end. Which of course is nothing like the case. I read the last few chapters in a horrified late-night gulp, and cried like crazy, and wanted to spend the rest of the night in Perdita's room watching her breathe. AAAAAA.
What a cheerful note on which to conclude! Unfortunately, the alphabet is a harsh mistress. Unless she is arriving in cinnamon cookie form, I suppose.
I am only lately coming to terms with the fact that I do have an inner Cotton Mather, and he's not a pleasant fellow. He tends to manifest mainly when I want to think things like, "Well, she may be setting the academic / literary / business world on fire while also growing everything her family eats and only putting her child in daycare ten hours a week, but at least I'm not having any fun." And if that doesn't make sense to you, congratulations, your family has no Scottish Presbyterian roots.
I exaggerate (I don't), but it makes sense, in a twisted sort of way. If I weighed on one side of the scales the high-powered career / totally organic lifestyle / my-life-is-my-children options, and put in the other side a "meh, I'm cool with sort of moodling around the edges of all of those things," and was okay with the moodling being heavier, I'd be a Bad Person. I can be a Good Person as long as I feel bad enough about being the person I am.
(I love writing this shit out. Honestly. It may reinforce with all of you that I am bonkers, but it's so good for me.)
I want to let the moodling be okay, because it is who I am. In most cases I didn't make a considered choice to abstain from high-powered anything; I just don't have the energy. (I'm a radiation-therapy-recipient who doesn't drink caffeine and has the introvert's drained-by-other-people problem tested daily by a shared space at work, so anyone who thinks I should have the energy [Cotton Mather] can just shut his face.) But I do keep using that as an excuse instead of owning where I am in life and not constantly, automatically, apologizing for it. Being okay with where I am today doesn't mean that I've given up and will never try to be anywhere else. And it doesn't make me a lazy, self-indulgent person.
The thing about an inner Cotton Mather is that all he wants you to keep saying to yourself is, "More weight." I need to remember that.
Read lately:
The Ghost in the Mirror, by John Bellairs. Apparently someone finished a bunch of Bellairs' manuscripts after his death, which explains why several I'd never heard of showed up on the library website recently, and also explains why this felt so unsatisfying. I plan to go back and re-read some of the originals, which scared me to death in delightful ways as a child.
The Heroine's Bookshelf: Life Lessons From Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder, by Erin Blackmore. Blackmore talks about the "lessons" we can take from each heroine of a classical novel, naming each chapter with a virtue ("Faith", "Steadfastness", etc), which - while Blackmore's love of literature and belief in the importance of reading are never in question - ends up rather taking the fun out of it. I wanted to like this more than I did. (It didn't help that the second chapter - on Their Eyes Were Watching God - was incredibly awkward and forced and felt like an editor had said, "No, you can't have only one chapter on an African-American author, let's get another one in there and make it about God for good measure." I totally agree that this book needed more diversity, but Blackmore obviously didn't feel that chapter the way she felt the other ones, and making it [and its assumption that her readers are all practicing Christians] the very second chapter almost put me off the whole book.)
The Stockholm Octavo, by Karen Engelmann. I was bored to tears by this piece of generic semi-mystical historical fiction, and yet when its library loan expired I got it back out and made myself finish it. When I'm feeling that duty-bound it's rarely a good sign of how I'm managing my life. Generic semi-mystical historical fiction AND trigger warning! Still a waste of my reading time.
Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston. Odd to be reading this at the same time as the Blackmore above. It's incredible, what can I say.
Tigers in Red Weather, by Liza Klaussmann. Oh GOD. An entry in the bestselling fiction realm of "people are horrible, love is a myth, beautiful women destroy all the lives around them and can't help themselves and are always forgiven" genre. After, like, the sixteenth time our female protagonist sleeps with a stranger / her husband's boss / her daughter's fiancé and it's presented as something that is, scorpion-like, in her nature to the extent that it's literally beyond her control, I had to just start laughing. Klaussman can write, no question, but the effort to make all of her characters either destroying or destroyed seemed, I don't know, not worth the candle.
Iron Lake, by William Kent Krueger. Serviceable mystery about tough men in a cold climate. I did hate how the girlfriend was set up as Fatality Fodder from the very beginning, so that she can be our hero's motivation / reason for his tough exterior in subsequent books; and the sudden shift to another point of view in the last several chapters didn't really work; but I will probably read more in the series.
American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest, by Hannah Nordhaus. Nordhaus investigates the legend that her ancestor haunts the La Posada Inn in Santa Fe, and tries to discover what she can about the family. It runs parallel tracks, between the family members who came to America and ended up in Santa Fe, and those who stayed in Germany and suffered the fate of German Jews in the twentieth century. Although Nordhaus' tolerance of psychics becomes a bit much after a while, I quite liked this book.
Lion in the Valley, by Elizabeth Peters. Cute period mystery, though the series gets less cute as the supposedly-cute child becomes a more active character. Stop trying so hard, Peters.
A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Jonestown, by Julia Scheeres. Oh God. OH GOD. This is a really well-written and fiercely detailed book, telling the story mostly from the points of view of four individuals who followed Jones to Guyana and who left either substantial written documentation or survived to be interviewed afterwards. But that in itself does not warrant the raw horror I felt while reading. I think I knew, on some level, that there were children in Jonestown. I must have known that. Surely I didn't think that of 900 people who joined Jim Jones' group, none of them had families? But I did not register it. And when, early on in the book, I was forced to register it, I spent the entire rest of the book hoping desperately that the end wouldn't be what it was. That the one fact I just never heard about Jonestown was that someone got all the children out before the end. Which of course is nothing like the case. I read the last few chapters in a horrified late-night gulp, and cried like crazy, and wanted to spend the rest of the night in Perdita's room watching her breathe. AAAAAA.
What a cheerful note on which to conclude! Unfortunately, the alphabet is a harsh mistress. Unless she is arriving in cinnamon cookie form, I suppose.
Sunday, June 14, 2015
grief and summer
Times have been hard.
Two weeks ago, Claudio's mother died from ovarian cancer. She was Naomi to my Ruth - I've talked before in this space about how I got to keep my in-laws in the divorce, and how they embraced Berowne and treated Perdita as their biological grandchild. It's a horrible loss for everyone who knew her.
There's also work madness afoot, and a baby with diaper rash so bad that for several nights I had to get up every three hours to change her, and though I have managed to snatch reading here and there, because that's what I do, I'd been reluctant to blog here. Partially because when Perdita naps on the weekend, which is prime blogging time, really all I've been capable of is napping myself, and partially because I didn't want to write about the death. I don't feel I have the words to do her justice, or to express the magnitude of the loss, and this entry felt all too likely to turn into a litany of complaints that includes death of a mother figure, work irritation, and "my toddler has an eczema raccoon mask and people stare at us in the store", and makes it sound like I consider all those things to be on the same level. Ugh.
Anyway. The reading, such as it is:
Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson, by S. W. Gwynne. A fascinating biography of a man I knew very little about. Very well done, and Gwynne actually makes battlefield maneuvers clear and understandable in prose (he barely resorts to maps at all), which is so rare.
Devil's Brood, by Sharon Kay Penman. Penman writes historical fiction that is only fiction in the sense that she imagines dialogue and usually adds one minor made-up character; her research and detail are amazing. This is the third in her series about Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. In this one, their children are grown and rebelling against Henry and each other just all the damn time, which I know is historically accurate but still gets grimly hilarious after a while. Seriously, how did anyone living at the time even keep track? And given that the book is over seven hundred pages, you feel like you're living it in real time, too. Good stuff but I don't need to read another of hers for a while.
Rosanna, by Maj Sjöwall. Total ugh. This was touted as having been the precursor to all the popular Scandinavian mysteries - it was written in the 1960s - and also as having aged well. I dunno, maybe if you think the idea that a sexually aggressive woman deserves death is still okay, then it ages just fine. For me, it was an unpleasant read and I shouldn't have bothered to finish it.
Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free, by Héctor Tobar. Excellent reporting: compassionate and comprehensive. Tobar's writing walks that fine line between elegant and overdone, and is for the most part lovely.
There have been lovely things in our days as well, even in the last two weeks. Yesterday we took Perdita to the beach, and within fifteen minutes she went from crying because the water is so cold to gleefully running back into the ocean, like the little nautical girl she is. It's iced coffee season. Nights are not yet too hot for sleep but warm enough to have the windows open. Floppy hats abound in our household. There is grief, and always will be, but summer shouldn't be taken for granted.
Two weeks ago, Claudio's mother died from ovarian cancer. She was Naomi to my Ruth - I've talked before in this space about how I got to keep my in-laws in the divorce, and how they embraced Berowne and treated Perdita as their biological grandchild. It's a horrible loss for everyone who knew her.
There's also work madness afoot, and a baby with diaper rash so bad that for several nights I had to get up every three hours to change her, and though I have managed to snatch reading here and there, because that's what I do, I'd been reluctant to blog here. Partially because when Perdita naps on the weekend, which is prime blogging time, really all I've been capable of is napping myself, and partially because I didn't want to write about the death. I don't feel I have the words to do her justice, or to express the magnitude of the loss, and this entry felt all too likely to turn into a litany of complaints that includes death of a mother figure, work irritation, and "my toddler has an eczema raccoon mask and people stare at us in the store", and makes it sound like I consider all those things to be on the same level. Ugh.
Anyway. The reading, such as it is:
Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson, by S. W. Gwynne. A fascinating biography of a man I knew very little about. Very well done, and Gwynne actually makes battlefield maneuvers clear and understandable in prose (he barely resorts to maps at all), which is so rare.
Devil's Brood, by Sharon Kay Penman. Penman writes historical fiction that is only fiction in the sense that she imagines dialogue and usually adds one minor made-up character; her research and detail are amazing. This is the third in her series about Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. In this one, their children are grown and rebelling against Henry and each other just all the damn time, which I know is historically accurate but still gets grimly hilarious after a while. Seriously, how did anyone living at the time even keep track? And given that the book is over seven hundred pages, you feel like you're living it in real time, too. Good stuff but I don't need to read another of hers for a while.
Rosanna, by Maj Sjöwall. Total ugh. This was touted as having been the precursor to all the popular Scandinavian mysteries - it was written in the 1960s - and also as having aged well. I dunno, maybe if you think the idea that a sexually aggressive woman deserves death is still okay, then it ages just fine. For me, it was an unpleasant read and I shouldn't have bothered to finish it.
Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free, by Héctor Tobar. Excellent reporting: compassionate and comprehensive. Tobar's writing walks that fine line between elegant and overdone, and is for the most part lovely.
There have been lovely things in our days as well, even in the last two weeks. Yesterday we took Perdita to the beach, and within fifteen minutes she went from crying because the water is so cold to gleefully running back into the ocean, like the little nautical girl she is. It's iced coffee season. Nights are not yet too hot for sleep but warm enough to have the windows open. Floppy hats abound in our household. There is grief, and always will be, but summer shouldn't be taken for granted.
Monday, May 25, 2015
battling shoulds
Yes, I breathe yet (and read yet, albeit in snatched moments right before falling asleep, most of the time). Work has eaten me alive these past four weeks - the week before last I was at work thirteen or fourteen hours a day, and came in on Saturdays for the whole month, and of course everything that needed to get done with the project still didn't get done. At a certain point I made peace with that, but it didn't mean I got to stop working my butt off.
During all of this, not coincidentally, I developed GI symptoms so unpleasant that it was very easy to convince myself it was cancer. (Although we should remember I also convince myself that ingrown toenails are cancer.) I got everything checked out and it was deemed, alas, lactose-related: the moment I stopped eating dairy, 90% of the issues went away.
I already relied on almond milk, just because too much cows' milk has always made my complexion react badly, but... no more cheese. No more ice cream. No more cheese. I am not happy about this. Also, it turned out that almost all of my fat intake came from cheese, so combining a cheese-free diet with intense stress and the aforementioned fourteen-hour days during which I barely had time to grab a snack caused me to get unfortunately skinny pretty fast. There is a lot of recuperation needed around here.
This weekend has been about that recuperation: lots of eating and napping and reminding myself that the shoulds will keep for another weekend. That if I spent all three days scrubbing floors, they wouldn't magically stay clean forever - they'd need to be scrubbed again in a couple weeks. Of course the should-loving part of me thinks the floors should get scrubbed every day, because said part of me has no investment whatsoever in the actual cleanliness of my floors (or the organization of my closets, or the progress of my manuscript, or the size of my waist); its only investment is in setting standards which are impossible for me to meet. My weight loss is the perfect example of this: the should-troll tells me every hour of every day that I should be thinner, until I am, and then it switches without a second's hesitation to telling me every hour of every day how crappy I look with skinny legs and a flat butt. So I try to keep in mind that, in the incredibly-unlikely event of my kitchen floor ever being spotless, the troll would just switch to telling me that I'm a shallow obsessive who could have used that scrubbing time to write an entire novel, and who should at this point in her life make enough money to pay someone to clean her house anyway. The troll can't be stopped by trying to please it - you have to eventually just burn its bridge. Or something. I'm still very tired.
Anyway! I have managed to read a bit. The latest books:
The Native Star, by M.K. Hobson. Nineteenth-century California with magic. I liked the world-building well enough, and appreciated that the magic followed rules, but our heroine was dull and the love story was duller (the instant we're introduced to the character who annoys our heroine most, no prizes for guessing whether he's her True Love or not, and then we have to sit through two hundred pages of bickering because if you've ever exchanged civil words before your first kiss, it's not True Love). The end sets up for a sequel, but I didn't like the heroine nearly enough to care.
The Handsome Man's Deluxe Cafe, by Alexander McCall Smith. Very slight and forgettable. Made me want to re-read the earlier books in the series.
Soldier Girls: The Battles of Three Women at Home and at War, by Helen Thorpe. Three women from the Indiana National Guard who signed up before 9/11 find themselves serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's tough to read at times, and very well done.
The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific, by J. Maarten Troost. This could have been so much better if only it was written by someone who wasn't a slightly racist jerk. Troost's handling of the topic of other cultures - which is the topic of the entire book - is really uncomfortable-making.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, by Jeanette Winterson. Winterson's memoir, and pretty intense, and occasionally amazing with language as she can be, and occasionally unbearably pretentious, as she can be. Overall I liked it, but I am so tired of writers in their memoirs talking about the book inside them that Had To Be Written, and how they only slept three hours a night for two years to write it, because it Had To Be Written, and that is how you know you're a real writer, when you have a book inside you that Has To Be Written and you do whatever it takes to write it. And maybe thinking it doesn't work that way is precisely why I haven't written the three or four novels I was supposed to have written by this point in my life. Are there books inside me waiting to be written? Of course. And of course they spring plot points and lines and characters on me all the time, and I write down what I can, but staying up until two every night in order to write a novel isn't happening right now. Because of work, I got less than six hours of sleep a night for four weeks and it was horrible - I had to go back on caffeine, which makes me feel like shit, but without it I wasn't safe behind the wheel of a car, and when my toddler is in the backseat of that car, that takes precedence over being able to call myself a real writer. I wouldn't be able to care for my child (or myself) or do my day job properly if I was only sleeping three hours a night, and the troll can say whatever it wants about how a real writer would find a way; I believe that the book which Has To Be Written can just keep its damn pants on until real life and I work something out around writing it.
Hmm, got a little carried away there. I blame the lack of cheese. Eat some for me, friends, and try to ignore your trolls.
During all of this, not coincidentally, I developed GI symptoms so unpleasant that it was very easy to convince myself it was cancer. (Although we should remember I also convince myself that ingrown toenails are cancer.) I got everything checked out and it was deemed, alas, lactose-related: the moment I stopped eating dairy, 90% of the issues went away.
I already relied on almond milk, just because too much cows' milk has always made my complexion react badly, but... no more cheese. No more ice cream. No more cheese. I am not happy about this. Also, it turned out that almost all of my fat intake came from cheese, so combining a cheese-free diet with intense stress and the aforementioned fourteen-hour days during which I barely had time to grab a snack caused me to get unfortunately skinny pretty fast. There is a lot of recuperation needed around here.
This weekend has been about that recuperation: lots of eating and napping and reminding myself that the shoulds will keep for another weekend. That if I spent all three days scrubbing floors, they wouldn't magically stay clean forever - they'd need to be scrubbed again in a couple weeks. Of course the should-loving part of me thinks the floors should get scrubbed every day, because said part of me has no investment whatsoever in the actual cleanliness of my floors (or the organization of my closets, or the progress of my manuscript, or the size of my waist); its only investment is in setting standards which are impossible for me to meet. My weight loss is the perfect example of this: the should-troll tells me every hour of every day that I should be thinner, until I am, and then it switches without a second's hesitation to telling me every hour of every day how crappy I look with skinny legs and a flat butt. So I try to keep in mind that, in the incredibly-unlikely event of my kitchen floor ever being spotless, the troll would just switch to telling me that I'm a shallow obsessive who could have used that scrubbing time to write an entire novel, and who should at this point in her life make enough money to pay someone to clean her house anyway. The troll can't be stopped by trying to please it - you have to eventually just burn its bridge. Or something. I'm still very tired.
Anyway! I have managed to read a bit. The latest books:
The Native Star, by M.K. Hobson. Nineteenth-century California with magic. I liked the world-building well enough, and appreciated that the magic followed rules, but our heroine was dull and the love story was duller (the instant we're introduced to the character who annoys our heroine most, no prizes for guessing whether he's her True Love or not, and then we have to sit through two hundred pages of bickering because if you've ever exchanged civil words before your first kiss, it's not True Love). The end sets up for a sequel, but I didn't like the heroine nearly enough to care.
The Handsome Man's Deluxe Cafe, by Alexander McCall Smith. Very slight and forgettable. Made me want to re-read the earlier books in the series.
Soldier Girls: The Battles of Three Women at Home and at War, by Helen Thorpe. Three women from the Indiana National Guard who signed up before 9/11 find themselves serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's tough to read at times, and very well done.
The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific, by J. Maarten Troost. This could have been so much better if only it was written by someone who wasn't a slightly racist jerk. Troost's handling of the topic of other cultures - which is the topic of the entire book - is really uncomfortable-making.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, by Jeanette Winterson. Winterson's memoir, and pretty intense, and occasionally amazing with language as she can be, and occasionally unbearably pretentious, as she can be. Overall I liked it, but I am so tired of writers in their memoirs talking about the book inside them that Had To Be Written, and how they only slept three hours a night for two years to write it, because it Had To Be Written, and that is how you know you're a real writer, when you have a book inside you that Has To Be Written and you do whatever it takes to write it. And maybe thinking it doesn't work that way is precisely why I haven't written the three or four novels I was supposed to have written by this point in my life. Are there books inside me waiting to be written? Of course. And of course they spring plot points and lines and characters on me all the time, and I write down what I can, but staying up until two every night in order to write a novel isn't happening right now. Because of work, I got less than six hours of sleep a night for four weeks and it was horrible - I had to go back on caffeine, which makes me feel like shit, but without it I wasn't safe behind the wheel of a car, and when my toddler is in the backseat of that car, that takes precedence over being able to call myself a real writer. I wouldn't be able to care for my child (or myself) or do my day job properly if I was only sleeping three hours a night, and the troll can say whatever it wants about how a real writer would find a way; I believe that the book which Has To Be Written can just keep its damn pants on until real life and I work something out around writing it.
Hmm, got a little carried away there. I blame the lack of cheese. Eat some for me, friends, and try to ignore your trolls.
Sunday, May 3, 2015
quick book report
Snatching a quick blog opportunity while the baby naps - I really should be napping myself, given that I'm so tired it hurts most of the time, but I am not going to have a chance to touch this blog during the coming work week. (I probably won't have a chance to read, either, but hey.)
Read lately:
The Pure in Heart, by Susan Hill. Huh. Everyone raves about Hill, but my reaction to finishing this book was to actually be a bit bummed out that I own another one in the series. The mystery isn't solved, and our hero is a self-righteous asshole in love with his sister. Eeesh.
Texts from Jane Eyre: And Other Conversations with Your Favorite Literary Characters, by Mallory Ortberg. Utterly freakin' hilarious. Absolutely the perfect mix of high- and low-brow humor for me. It gets repetitive - you definitely want to read it in small chunks rather than at one sitting - but I would unhesitatingly recommend it.
Death on Blackheath, by Anne Perry. The thirty-somethingth in her Thomas Pitt series. Brief, predictable, comforting.
Take the Cannoli: Stories From the New World, by Sarah Vowell. Autobiographical essays by a writer I like very much. I enjoyed these, though I think I prefer Vowell talking about history to talking about herself. (And I learned why she sucked up so much to Ira Glass in a previous book: he was her boss at the time she wrote it.)
I also tried to re-read Outlander, the TV show having engendered such warm feelings, but lord, having seen a good adaptation of it made it even worse. I got as far as the scene where a nine-months-pregnant woman is asked what being nine months pregnant is like, and her response, to a group which includes her brother (I cannot emphasize that fact strongly enough), is to feel herself up and say that being nine months pregnant is exactly like having sex all the time, except she says it much more graphically. To her brother. Now, of course, everyone's experience of pregnancy is different (as is everyone's idea of appropriate sibling boundaries, I suppose), so I will restrict myself to saying that if my experience of sex was one-tenth as physically miserable as my experience of being nine months pregnant, then I would never have ended up nine months pregnant in the first place. À chacun son goût! And if your goût is kinda creepy, then I am not going to finish your book. Not the third time around, anyway.
And now, must scrub the kitchen floor before the baby wakes. Ha! not likely. I had to work yesterday, the living room got cleaned this morning, there are two loads of laundry out on the clothesline in the beautiful spring sun, and we had an educational visit to a museum and the Salem waterfront before lunch ("say 'privateer', Perdita"). The kitchen floor can stay filthy for another day. I've got a mug of tea to drink and some birds to listen to.
Read lately:
The Pure in Heart, by Susan Hill. Huh. Everyone raves about Hill, but my reaction to finishing this book was to actually be a bit bummed out that I own another one in the series. The mystery isn't solved, and our hero is a self-righteous asshole in love with his sister. Eeesh.
Texts from Jane Eyre: And Other Conversations with Your Favorite Literary Characters, by Mallory Ortberg. Utterly freakin' hilarious. Absolutely the perfect mix of high- and low-brow humor for me. It gets repetitive - you definitely want to read it in small chunks rather than at one sitting - but I would unhesitatingly recommend it.
Death on Blackheath, by Anne Perry. The thirty-somethingth in her Thomas Pitt series. Brief, predictable, comforting.
Take the Cannoli: Stories From the New World, by Sarah Vowell. Autobiographical essays by a writer I like very much. I enjoyed these, though I think I prefer Vowell talking about history to talking about herself. (And I learned why she sucked up so much to Ira Glass in a previous book: he was her boss at the time she wrote it.)
I also tried to re-read Outlander, the TV show having engendered such warm feelings, but lord, having seen a good adaptation of it made it even worse. I got as far as the scene where a nine-months-pregnant woman is asked what being nine months pregnant is like, and her response, to a group which includes her brother (I cannot emphasize that fact strongly enough), is to feel herself up and say that being nine months pregnant is exactly like having sex all the time, except she says it much more graphically. To her brother. Now, of course, everyone's experience of pregnancy is different (as is everyone's idea of appropriate sibling boundaries, I suppose), so I will restrict myself to saying that if my experience of sex was one-tenth as physically miserable as my experience of being nine months pregnant, then I would never have ended up nine months pregnant in the first place. À chacun son goût! And if your goût is kinda creepy, then I am not going to finish your book. Not the third time around, anyway.
And now, must scrub the kitchen floor before the baby wakes. Ha! not likely. I had to work yesterday, the living room got cleaned this morning, there are two loads of laundry out on the clothesline in the beautiful spring sun, and we had an educational visit to a museum and the Salem waterfront before lunch ("say 'privateer', Perdita"). The kitchen floor can stay filthy for another day. I've got a mug of tea to drink and some birds to listen to.
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