I have reached the Contradictory Stages of pregnancy:
I Cannot Wait To Not Be Pregnant Anymore vs. Please Please Cook the Whole 40 Weeks and Be Healthy;
I Remember Well How Sleeping Only Two Hours Feels vs. At Least I Would Be Sleeping Those Two Hours Instead of Painfully Half-Dozing for Six;
Work Will Implode While I am Gone vs. Work Will Realize They Don't Need Me At All.
And then of course there are the stages that hardly confine themselves to confinement:
Nesting vs. I Need a Nap;
House-Cleaning vs. Nope, Gonna Nap;
Folding Laundry in a Timely Fashion vs. Meh.
Other major aspects of my life pretty much include the gestational diabetes diet (SO bored with nuts) and the delightful physical sensations of being thirty-three weeks pregnant. Perdita is being moved up to preschool starting in September, which has me sobbing helplessly at random moments of the day. Berowne is working seven days a week, thirteen hours a day (temporarily). I am tired.
Read lately:
Shirley, by Charlotte Brontë. Weird, yet enjoyable.
Manners and Mutiny, by Gail Carriger. Steampunk teenagers, in a series that gets fluffier with every book. And of course our heroine gets more universally adored and impossibly skilled in each one as well. Yawn.
A Famine of Horses, by P.F. Chisholm. Very fun historical fiction about dealing with the Scots in the sixteenth century.
Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World, by Anthony Doerr. Gorgeously written, as you would expect from Doerr (All the Light We Cannot See), and a lovely memoir about living in a foreign country for a year. But not good to read if you are currently not permitted pasta.
The Man Who Touched His Own Heart: True Tales of Science, Surgery, and Mystery, by Rob Dunn. Popular medical history, in its usual vein (ha! genuinely no pun intended). Jumps around a bit chronologically and occasionally gets obsessed with the subjects' eccentricities to the detriment of the scientific discoveries. But I enjoyed it.
As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride, by Cary Elwes. Basically just reads, "Yeah, all those people are as sweet as you want them to be."
The Silent Wife, by A.S.A. Harrison. Ugly, boring thriller in the genre of "no one really behaves like that ever".
Drink: The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol, by Ann Dowsett Johnston. A good balance between memoir and research, and compellingly readable even while being quite sad.
The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir, by Josh Kilmer-Purcell. Sweet in its own way, but rather too obsessed with name-dropping and reminding us every other page that Kilmer-Purcell used to be a drag queen. Yes, I do remember that from the last chapter, thanks!
The Witches: Salem 1692, by Stacey Schiff. The language is too overwrought and the dramatis personae are not kept nearly clear enough. Also Schiff ends up with no real hypothesis as to what caused the Salem witch panic, and that was frustrating.
And now, a nap. (What? I vacuumed fully half of the downstairs this morning, and I have only half an hour before my next required handful of almonds. Nothing more useful is getting done between now and then, I tell you.)
Sunday, August 28, 2016
Sunday, August 7, 2016
pregnancy number 2, contd.
Items:
1. Gestational diabetes diagnosis, sigh. And of course no matter how many medical professionals tell me it's probably due to hormones and not to anything I did wrong, all I hear is "probably" and then we have the conversation that starts with "what do you eat?" and my face turns bright red and I start stammering, because I can't respond with, "Only kale salads with local grilled salmon," or something. It seems especially unfair because I have eaten so much more healthily this pregnancy than I did last time - I've been craving salads and fresh fruit rather than chocolate donuts - and yet here we are. But at least now we know that how shitty I've been feeling isn't just the heat (which is what I was attributing it to) and I get to play around with data points. (And the nurse I saw told me that she did have a patient who ate only kale salads and still got GD to a degree that ended up requiring medication to control, so I shouldn't keep beating myself up.) It's nonetheless good that I was already in therapy for my body image issues, because this is rough.
2. Eating every two hours while parenting a toddler is also rough. If we have any errands to run or such (Friday I had to stay home with her and get her to the doctor after a lovely rash showed up), then things are hard to time, and in any event if she sees me eating she wants to eat too. I suppose it's not the end of the world if, on the next ten weekends, she gets to eat every two hours as well, as long as she doesn't eat too much. (Same for me, I guess).
3. The baby is most likely fine. There is a chance he'll get too big through the shoulders, but with Berowne as his father that chance was there anyway. He's also still breech, and while there is some time for him to turn (Perdita turned long before this), I am starting to wonder if his blog name will end up being Macduff, if you know what I mean.
4. Honestly, I'm totally fine with it if Macduff he turns out to be, though we'd rather he not be untimely, of course. I have yet to see any compelling data on the Horrifically Absent Immune Systems of Babies Born Via C-Section that corrects for gestational age, meaning that the immune systems of babies born via emergency C-section six weeks early are being compared to those of full-term babies born vaginally, and the conclusion that the only thing which could cause the difference is the time in the birth canal is - what is the scientific term? - stupid. But what do I know, I just work with data for a living.
5. I swear, though, at least once a day I feel like I would knock old ladies down for the chance to eat a bowl full of grapes. It's August, damn it, I should be allowed to eat chilled grapes if I want to. But noooo.
6. On that note, to anyone out there thinking about getting pregnant: an October delivery may seem perfectly safe, but my advice to you would be to avoid your third trimester and summer overlapping at all. Like, plan to deliver no later than May and no earlier than December. The heat is just too miserable, and it's entirely possible I avoided GD last pregnancy simply because it wasn't summer - being overheated messes with your blood sugar. At least I can go to the beach often and stand bump-deep in the waves until I feel a tiny bit better.
7. Books:
Lady Audley's Secret, by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Ah, the overwrought Victorian scandal-novel! Love me that stuff.
Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. I... skimmed. I had to. Very intelligent and comprehensive and more abstract than I had expected, and too emotionally hard for me to read in depth right now.
Death of a Hollow Man, by Caroline Graham. Solid British mystery, in the character-development vein that I love so.
Heresy, by S.J. Parris. Historical mystery that bored me.
Bad Faith, by Aimee Thurlo. Crime-solving New Mexican nun. Hard to miss, right? Especially once she's adopted the enormous white German Shepherd. But it never gelled, and the characters' dialogue was agonizingly unrealistic, and while I know the first book always has First Book Problems, I am not thrilled at the thought of trying more in the series.
It Ended Badly: Thirteen of the Worst Breakups in History, by Jennifer Wright. Occasionally a little too silly in its efforts to be like a Buzzfeed article, which was sometimes mitigated by Wright's obvious amount of research and sometimes made more irritating by it (as in, stop assuming your reader needs these "timely" [i.e., dated by the time the book is published] pop references to enjoy your narrative voice and the history itself). But overall I quite enjoyed it. I'd been reading too much heavy stuff and this was an excellent palate-cleanser.
Eat some ice cream and fruit for me, and stay cool.
1. Gestational diabetes diagnosis, sigh. And of course no matter how many medical professionals tell me it's probably due to hormones and not to anything I did wrong, all I hear is "probably" and then we have the conversation that starts with "what do you eat?" and my face turns bright red and I start stammering, because I can't respond with, "Only kale salads with local grilled salmon," or something. It seems especially unfair because I have eaten so much more healthily this pregnancy than I did last time - I've been craving salads and fresh fruit rather than chocolate donuts - and yet here we are. But at least now we know that how shitty I've been feeling isn't just the heat (which is what I was attributing it to) and I get to play around with data points. (And the nurse I saw told me that she did have a patient who ate only kale salads and still got GD to a degree that ended up requiring medication to control, so I shouldn't keep beating myself up.) It's nonetheless good that I was already in therapy for my body image issues, because this is rough.
2. Eating every two hours while parenting a toddler is also rough. If we have any errands to run or such (Friday I had to stay home with her and get her to the doctor after a lovely rash showed up), then things are hard to time, and in any event if she sees me eating she wants to eat too. I suppose it's not the end of the world if, on the next ten weekends, she gets to eat every two hours as well, as long as she doesn't eat too much. (Same for me, I guess).
3. The baby is most likely fine. There is a chance he'll get too big through the shoulders, but with Berowne as his father that chance was there anyway. He's also still breech, and while there is some time for him to turn (Perdita turned long before this), I am starting to wonder if his blog name will end up being Macduff, if you know what I mean.
4. Honestly, I'm totally fine with it if Macduff he turns out to be, though we'd rather he not be untimely, of course. I have yet to see any compelling data on the Horrifically Absent Immune Systems of Babies Born Via C-Section that corrects for gestational age, meaning that the immune systems of babies born via emergency C-section six weeks early are being compared to those of full-term babies born vaginally, and the conclusion that the only thing which could cause the difference is the time in the birth canal is - what is the scientific term? - stupid. But what do I know, I just work with data for a living.
5. I swear, though, at least once a day I feel like I would knock old ladies down for the chance to eat a bowl full of grapes. It's August, damn it, I should be allowed to eat chilled grapes if I want to. But noooo.
6. On that note, to anyone out there thinking about getting pregnant: an October delivery may seem perfectly safe, but my advice to you would be to avoid your third trimester and summer overlapping at all. Like, plan to deliver no later than May and no earlier than December. The heat is just too miserable, and it's entirely possible I avoided GD last pregnancy simply because it wasn't summer - being overheated messes with your blood sugar. At least I can go to the beach often and stand bump-deep in the waves until I feel a tiny bit better.
7. Books:
Lady Audley's Secret, by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Ah, the overwrought Victorian scandal-novel! Love me that stuff.
Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. I... skimmed. I had to. Very intelligent and comprehensive and more abstract than I had expected, and too emotionally hard for me to read in depth right now.
Death of a Hollow Man, by Caroline Graham. Solid British mystery, in the character-development vein that I love so.
Heresy, by S.J. Parris. Historical mystery that bored me.
Bad Faith, by Aimee Thurlo. Crime-solving New Mexican nun. Hard to miss, right? Especially once she's adopted the enormous white German Shepherd. But it never gelled, and the characters' dialogue was agonizingly unrealistic, and while I know the first book always has First Book Problems, I am not thrilled at the thought of trying more in the series.
It Ended Badly: Thirteen of the Worst Breakups in History, by Jennifer Wright. Occasionally a little too silly in its efforts to be like a Buzzfeed article, which was sometimes mitigated by Wright's obvious amount of research and sometimes made more irritating by it (as in, stop assuming your reader needs these "timely" [i.e., dated by the time the book is published] pop references to enjoy your narrative voice and the history itself). But overall I quite enjoyed it. I'd been reading too much heavy stuff and this was an excellent palate-cleanser.
Eat some ice cream and fruit for me, and stay cool.
Saturday, July 16, 2016
pregnancy two: the resolutioning
As I enter month seven of my second pregnancy, I've been working on some resolutions around taking it easier on myself. (Ha!) Let's jump right in:
-Update this blog more often oh wait, that's not taking it easier on myself
-Don't work on Saturdays whoops, have been doing that
- Not expect the house to look a certain way (like "clean" or "presentable") until five years from now. Not in the sense that it's going to take me five years to clean the house (I'll grant that it's a pit at the moment, but it's a small pit), but in the sense that it will be five years before both children stop attending the daycare that adds three hours of commuting to my day, and before they are both old enough to either play unsupervised for long stretches of time or "help" without making every task take twice as long. I am away from home nearly twelve hours every day due to a full-time job and the aforementioned commute. And even if we could afford a house cleaner while having two kids in full-time daycare, I am 100% the type of person who would clean in preparation for the house cleaner out of shame, so it would be a stupid waste of money.
So I'm trying to tell myself that I've got five years before I'm a Bad Person if my house isn't spotless, and in the meantime I should just be grateful for the dishwasher and for the many improvements Berowne makes around the place. We have a fenced-in yard now! We can entertain without trying to cram guests into a tiny house that looks like a dusty children's museum exploded in it! Or we could if our neighbors weren't engaged in an enormous construction project for, like, the fourth summer in a row. Perdita naps in Berowne's professional-quality sound-blocking earmuffs, and that is not a joke. I hate summer.
- Stop comparing my weight gain and physical appearance to that of other women's pregnancies.
HA HA HA! In all our fucking dreams. The hot new thing on the internet - and I swear I come across this everywhere, I am not looking for it - is professional fitness models / trainers showing off how tiny they remain throughout pregnancy. Now, logically I know that if my paycheck was potentially going to stop the minute my pregnancy was visible, and not resume until I looked exactly as I had done pre-pregnancy, I would find a way to work out and restrict my eating throughout the nausea and the cravings and the exhaustion. I would have to. These women are my worst nightmare while they are being held up as examples for admiration, but they are also human beings who probably (I want to think) are sitting there with calculators working out how long they can make their savings last once they start showing, and who have nights where they would trade all the likes on their Instagram photos (is that how Instagram works? I don't even know) for the ability to eat a hot dog or four.
Anyway, I can usually talk myself out of comparing myself to women whose careers revolve around how they look. Not when I'm feeling especially pregnancy-brain-stupid and therefore equally insecure about my own job security, but what can you do. The main problems with comparison are around women I actually know, friends and co-workers, who either stayed tiny during their pregnancies (one co-worker, to whom I am normally comparable in height and weight, didn't show until around month seven and was the size I am now two days before she delivered) or totally got the glow and the glorious hair and looked like damn earth goddesses. I am just, well, huge, and clumsy, and sort of visibly and piteously uncomfortable in my flesh.
All bodies are different. All pregnancies are different. I need to remember that in July and August I'd be retaining gallons of water weight under the least pregnant of circumstances, and though my ankles wouldn't be quite the loaves of bread they are now by the end of the day, they would be somewhat muffinly. So of course I feel fatter now than I did in January 2014, equally pregnant with Perdita. And normally I wouldn't be weighing myself in the summer, either (or much at all).
I'm trying to trust my body, even though in addition to all the belly weight gain it is quite sure that to grow a baby one requires love handles the size of two juvenile walruses, with an equal walrus-equivalent strapped to each thigh. And when that doesn't work, go back to what my therapist pointed out: that pregnancy is like puberty in so many ways. Your body changes drastically, complete with metabolism changes and weight gain that feel literally, nightmarishly uncontrollable if you were a skinny pre-adolescent like I was; everyone is suddenly paying attention to your body in a sexualized way with which you are not comfortable, and frequently commenting upon it, when you are already self-conscious to the nth degree; and there is massive societal pressure to perform your female existence to impossibly perfect standards of the kind set by movie teenagers played by 25-year-old models / carefully-edited-for-social-media versions of rich white sanctimommies. And when I think of that little Beatrice going through all this during puberty, and how no one could have been harder on her than she was herself, I want to wrap her up in a judgment-proof force field and tell her, over and over, You are so much more than perfect.
I can't do that for her/us then. I can do it for us now. And I am going to try to keep that in mind when I fall back into the self-judgment patterns.
Well, this got away from me a bit, which my whining tends to do. I actually do have some books to document, which I will do quickly:
The Brontes: Wild Genius on the Moors: The Story of a Literary Family, by Juliet Barker. Huge and comprehensive and quite excellent, even if the conclusion was that you would not have wanted to be friends with Charlotte or Emily. (We already knew that.)
The Dream Lover, by Elizabeth Berg. A novel about George Sand that was, well, bad.
Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh. Oh man, this was good! Amazingly-written historical novel that I would recommend to anyone. My one quibble is that the dialect in which some characters speak gets a tiny bit old, but it's not Safran Foer levels, or even close.
Shylock is My Name, by Howard Jacobson. So, the way publishers put out a series of myths retold a while back, Hogarth Publishing is putting out a series of modern retellings of Shakespeare plays. I read two this month, and both suffered enormously (I thought) from having the play in question exist in the book's universe, to the extent that characters quote from it, and yet they never remark on the similarities of the play's plot to the events of their lives (or even on having all the people they know have the exact same names as Shakespeare's characters). I just do not understand that decision. And this one, while quite clever in its modern twists on the original characters, was a deeply unpleasant experience for the same reason that watching "The Merchant of Venice" over and over for as long as it would take you to read a book would be: every character is more or less horrible. I skimmed, not going to lie.
Slow Kill, by Michael McGarrity. A pretty bad procedural. The murderer is exactly who everyone thinks it is from the beginning, and she's never given a motive beyond "trophy wives are inherently evil to the point of acting completely against their own interests", and I wasn't at all invested.
They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper, by Bruce Robinson. Robinson is a lot angrier about what he perceives as false theories about who Jack the Ripper was than I really think the occasion warrants. Also he's super-homophobic. I finished this because the level of research impressed me, but I think my time could have been better spent.
The Gap of Time, by Jeanette Winterson. The other Hogarth Shakespeare, this one a retelling of "The Winter's Tale" (with characters quoting from the play but never drawing connections between it and things like an adopted daughter named Perdita, for heaven's sake). It was as well written as we can expect Winterson to be, but the beginning was a very rough slog, especially since Leo/Leontes' musings on his wife's supposed infidelity were literal porn. I suppose it makes sense for them to be, in the modern day, but those were not the best couple of chapters I have ever read, and the book never really quite recovered for me after setting that tone.
May the weather be cooler where you are, and may we all find a way to do a current kindness to our former selves.
-
-
- Not expect the house to look a certain way (like "clean" or "presentable") until five years from now. Not in the sense that it's going to take me five years to clean the house (I'll grant that it's a pit at the moment, but it's a small pit), but in the sense that it will be five years before both children stop attending the daycare that adds three hours of commuting to my day, and before they are both old enough to either play unsupervised for long stretches of time or "help" without making every task take twice as long. I am away from home nearly twelve hours every day due to a full-time job and the aforementioned commute. And even if we could afford a house cleaner while having two kids in full-time daycare, I am 100% the type of person who would clean in preparation for the house cleaner out of shame, so it would be a stupid waste of money.
So I'm trying to tell myself that I've got five years before I'm a Bad Person if my house isn't spotless, and in the meantime I should just be grateful for the dishwasher and for the many improvements Berowne makes around the place. We have a fenced-in yard now! We can entertain without trying to cram guests into a tiny house that looks like a dusty children's museum exploded in it! Or we could if our neighbors weren't engaged in an enormous construction project for, like, the fourth summer in a row. Perdita naps in Berowne's professional-quality sound-blocking earmuffs, and that is not a joke. I hate summer.
- Stop comparing my weight gain and physical appearance to that of other women's pregnancies.
HA HA HA! In all our fucking dreams. The hot new thing on the internet - and I swear I come across this everywhere, I am not looking for it - is professional fitness models / trainers showing off how tiny they remain throughout pregnancy. Now, logically I know that if my paycheck was potentially going to stop the minute my pregnancy was visible, and not resume until I looked exactly as I had done pre-pregnancy, I would find a way to work out and restrict my eating throughout the nausea and the cravings and the exhaustion. I would have to. These women are my worst nightmare while they are being held up as examples for admiration, but they are also human beings who probably (I want to think) are sitting there with calculators working out how long they can make their savings last once they start showing, and who have nights where they would trade all the likes on their Instagram photos (is that how Instagram works? I don't even know) for the ability to eat a hot dog or four.
Anyway, I can usually talk myself out of comparing myself to women whose careers revolve around how they look. Not when I'm feeling especially pregnancy-brain-stupid and therefore equally insecure about my own job security, but what can you do. The main problems with comparison are around women I actually know, friends and co-workers, who either stayed tiny during their pregnancies (one co-worker, to whom I am normally comparable in height and weight, didn't show until around month seven and was the size I am now two days before she delivered) or totally got the glow and the glorious hair and looked like damn earth goddesses. I am just, well, huge, and clumsy, and sort of visibly and piteously uncomfortable in my flesh.
All bodies are different. All pregnancies are different. I need to remember that in July and August I'd be retaining gallons of water weight under the least pregnant of circumstances, and though my ankles wouldn't be quite the loaves of bread they are now by the end of the day, they would be somewhat muffinly. So of course I feel fatter now than I did in January 2014, equally pregnant with Perdita. And normally I wouldn't be weighing myself in the summer, either (or much at all).
I'm trying to trust my body, even though in addition to all the belly weight gain it is quite sure that to grow a baby one requires love handles the size of two juvenile walruses, with an equal walrus-equivalent strapped to each thigh. And when that doesn't work, go back to what my therapist pointed out: that pregnancy is like puberty in so many ways. Your body changes drastically, complete with metabolism changes and weight gain that feel literally, nightmarishly uncontrollable if you were a skinny pre-adolescent like I was; everyone is suddenly paying attention to your body in a sexualized way with which you are not comfortable, and frequently commenting upon it, when you are already self-conscious to the nth degree; and there is massive societal pressure to perform your female existence to impossibly perfect standards of the kind set by movie teenagers played by 25-year-old models / carefully-edited-for-social-media versions of rich white sanctimommies. And when I think of that little Beatrice going through all this during puberty, and how no one could have been harder on her than she was herself, I want to wrap her up in a judgment-proof force field and tell her, over and over, You are so much more than perfect.
I can't do that for her/us then. I can do it for us now. And I am going to try to keep that in mind when I fall back into the self-judgment patterns.
Well, this got away from me a bit, which my whining tends to do. I actually do have some books to document, which I will do quickly:
The Brontes: Wild Genius on the Moors: The Story of a Literary Family, by Juliet Barker. Huge and comprehensive and quite excellent, even if the conclusion was that you would not have wanted to be friends with Charlotte or Emily. (We already knew that.)
The Dream Lover, by Elizabeth Berg. A novel about George Sand that was, well, bad.
Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh. Oh man, this was good! Amazingly-written historical novel that I would recommend to anyone. My one quibble is that the dialect in which some characters speak gets a tiny bit old, but it's not Safran Foer levels, or even close.
Shylock is My Name, by Howard Jacobson. So, the way publishers put out a series of myths retold a while back, Hogarth Publishing is putting out a series of modern retellings of Shakespeare plays. I read two this month, and both suffered enormously (I thought) from having the play in question exist in the book's universe, to the extent that characters quote from it, and yet they never remark on the similarities of the play's plot to the events of their lives (or even on having all the people they know have the exact same names as Shakespeare's characters). I just do not understand that decision. And this one, while quite clever in its modern twists on the original characters, was a deeply unpleasant experience for the same reason that watching "The Merchant of Venice" over and over for as long as it would take you to read a book would be: every character is more or less horrible. I skimmed, not going to lie.
Slow Kill, by Michael McGarrity. A pretty bad procedural. The murderer is exactly who everyone thinks it is from the beginning, and she's never given a motive beyond "trophy wives are inherently evil to the point of acting completely against their own interests", and I wasn't at all invested.
They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper, by Bruce Robinson. Robinson is a lot angrier about what he perceives as false theories about who Jack the Ripper was than I really think the occasion warrants. Also he's super-homophobic. I finished this because the level of research impressed me, but I think my time could have been better spent.
The Gap of Time, by Jeanette Winterson. The other Hogarth Shakespeare, this one a retelling of "The Winter's Tale" (with characters quoting from the play but never drawing connections between it and things like an adopted daughter named Perdita, for heaven's sake). It was as well written as we can expect Winterson to be, but the beginning was a very rough slog, especially since Leo/Leontes' musings on his wife's supposed infidelity were literal porn. I suppose it makes sense for them to be, in the modern day, but those were not the best couple of chapters I have ever read, and the book never really quite recovered for me after setting that tone.
May the weather be cooler where you are, and may we all find a way to do a current kindness to our former selves.
Sunday, June 26, 2016
playing catch-up
Aw geez, I am so far behind on this blog. I'd cut myself some slack due to being pregnant, parenting a toddler, working full-time, and refusing to give up my reading, but I am certain there are women out there who do all that and keep their houses clean and cook gourmet meals into the bargain. So be it.
Anyway, not going to get into too much self-pity here. I'm in the tail end of the second trimester, and starting to get heartburn and having a very hard time sleeping, but I know no matter how uncomfortable I get and how endless the time seems, October will be here before I know it. As will the end of Perdita's nap, so I'd best hasten here!
Bitter Creek, by Peter Bowen. A very strange book in a mystery series I hadn't read before. This one comes late in the series, and maybe the others are more traditional procedurals, but this one was about a historical mystery and a lot of drinking and very strange dialogue patterns. I didn't dislike it, but I never felt that I got into its rhythm.
Lair of Dreams, by Libba Bray. Second in a series about teenagers in the 1920s who have magical powers. As with the first, the 20s dialect / slang is waaaaay overdone, and our main character is kind of repulsively selfish, but in this one other characters get more page time and the story is gripping. I do like Bray quite a bit.
A Single Man, by Christopher Isherwood. Angry and heartbreaking and lovely.
The Owl Killers, by Karen Maitland. Novel about a medieval town in the grip of a KKK-like group of men. It's incredibly disturbing and so well-written and I couldn't put it down, even though as in her other book I've read (The Company of Wolves) the villains are almost zero-dimensional Portrayals of Evil. And, in this one, the people you hope will win... don't (although the villains don't either, really). So I found the ending sad and a bit of a letdown, after staying up too late tearing through it. But lord, this woman can write.
A Feast for Crows, by George R.R. Martin. Yup, nothing happens. But I was prepared for that, and so just went along for the ride, and was fine with it.
Death in a Cold Hard Light, by Francine Mathews. Mystery set on Cape Cod. Efficient and enjoyable.
The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe, by Michael Pye. A really fascinating popular history of what changed in Northern Europe during the Middle Ages and how that shaped the modern world.
Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, by Sarah Vowell. Vowell's take on the American Revolution. Fun and informative.
Code Name Verity, by Elizabeth Wein. Tense and upsetting and occasionally twee and very hard to put down.
That doesn't look like a lot for how long I've been away from this, but I've actually discarded quite a few books that bored or irritated me as well, after wasting several days on them (Chadwick: A Place Beyond Courage: story is set during the struggle for power between Matilda and Stephen and should have been interesting, but our hero is an asshole and his second wife / true love is absolutely impossible to bear in her relentless perfection - I gave up after she's "radiant" twelve hours after giving birth and has her old figure back six weeks later; Horne: Hubris: The Tragedy of War in the 20th Century: boooring, just gonna re-read Tuchman's The March of Folly instead; Theorin: Echoes From the Dead: child death and unpleasant characters). Anyway, excuses. Off to clean the house. By which I mean read and eat, probably. Let's not fool ourselves.
Anyway, not going to get into too much self-pity here. I'm in the tail end of the second trimester, and starting to get heartburn and having a very hard time sleeping, but I know no matter how uncomfortable I get and how endless the time seems, October will be here before I know it. As will the end of Perdita's nap, so I'd best hasten here!
Bitter Creek, by Peter Bowen. A very strange book in a mystery series I hadn't read before. This one comes late in the series, and maybe the others are more traditional procedurals, but this one was about a historical mystery and a lot of drinking and very strange dialogue patterns. I didn't dislike it, but I never felt that I got into its rhythm.
Lair of Dreams, by Libba Bray. Second in a series about teenagers in the 1920s who have magical powers. As with the first, the 20s dialect / slang is waaaaay overdone, and our main character is kind of repulsively selfish, but in this one other characters get more page time and the story is gripping. I do like Bray quite a bit.
A Single Man, by Christopher Isherwood. Angry and heartbreaking and lovely.
The Owl Killers, by Karen Maitland. Novel about a medieval town in the grip of a KKK-like group of men. It's incredibly disturbing and so well-written and I couldn't put it down, even though as in her other book I've read (The Company of Wolves) the villains are almost zero-dimensional Portrayals of Evil. And, in this one, the people you hope will win... don't (although the villains don't either, really). So I found the ending sad and a bit of a letdown, after staying up too late tearing through it. But lord, this woman can write.
A Feast for Crows, by George R.R. Martin. Yup, nothing happens. But I was prepared for that, and so just went along for the ride, and was fine with it.
Death in a Cold Hard Light, by Francine Mathews. Mystery set on Cape Cod. Efficient and enjoyable.
The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe, by Michael Pye. A really fascinating popular history of what changed in Northern Europe during the Middle Ages and how that shaped the modern world.
Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, by Sarah Vowell. Vowell's take on the American Revolution. Fun and informative.
Code Name Verity, by Elizabeth Wein. Tense and upsetting and occasionally twee and very hard to put down.
That doesn't look like a lot for how long I've been away from this, but I've actually discarded quite a few books that bored or irritated me as well, after wasting several days on them (Chadwick: A Place Beyond Courage: story is set during the struggle for power between Matilda and Stephen and should have been interesting, but our hero is an asshole and his second wife / true love is absolutely impossible to bear in her relentless perfection - I gave up after she's "radiant" twelve hours after giving birth and has her old figure back six weeks later; Horne: Hubris: The Tragedy of War in the 20th Century: boooring, just gonna re-read Tuchman's The March of Folly instead; Theorin: Echoes From the Dead: child death and unpleasant characters). Anyway, excuses. Off to clean the house. By which I mean read and eat, probably. Let's not fool ourselves.
Saturday, May 28, 2016
parenting, guilt, and an announcement
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:
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!
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
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!
Sunday, May 8, 2016
girls and sharks
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.
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.
Sunday, April 24, 2016
brief report from the consumption ward
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.
(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.
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