pages turned

Happy MLK Jr. Day!

2025-01-20T15:35:00.004-05:00

This morning I took our senior cat Charlie to the vet for his monthly arthritis shot. L. ordered an induction range (on sale!) for our retirement house. I went to the grocery store. I had a long, good-for-the-soul phone conversation with WMK.

I didn't buy books today, but did consider it.

I used "felon" as my opener in Wordle.

At noon I put a rack of ribs in the oven. I hung out a load of laundry. I went to CVS.

I currently have four books in progress in physical copy and an Audible selection to finish while I straighten the kitchen after supper. The rest of the day will be devoted to reading.

Today temperatures reached 36 degrees and will drop to the low 20s overnight.

The wind is cold but the sun is shining.

2025-01-01T10:33:00.001-05:00

I read the concluding story in Ben Shattuck's The History of Sound, "Origin Stories," this morning and am counting it as my first read of 2025. The collection covers a lot of the same territory as North Woods, although I prefer this one to that, and has a structure faintly reminiscent to Cloud Atlas. I listened to several chapters while traveling in December and read the remaining on the kindle. I gave it five stars on Goodreads, which indicates that I want to read it again at some point. Perhaps I can convince book club to read it since everyone loved North Woods.

I'm starting the year surrounded by stacks: of scifi/fantasy informed by Jo Walton's list of iconic books of the 21st century; of a selection of Tournament of Books shortlist fare; of Jane Austens to read with Bluestalking's Austen 250 in 2025 project; and random other books I'd like to read sooner than later. I want to reread Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground before reading Edwin Frank's Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel.

I read a few novels back to back last year that either had a dead narrator or dead main characters; I'm intending to repeat that experience this year just for the fun of it. I'm hoping I won't encounter as many endings that simply didn't work for me as last year--really, authors, don't write yourself into a hole and go all Alice In Wonderland on us instead of having the guts to just let the chips fall where they may.

Happy reading, everyone.

End of the year recap

2024-12-31T16:33:00.000-05:00

Let's attempt a return to blogging, shall we? I know I've tried this before, particularly at this time of year, but perhaps it will stick this time.

I'm dividing this post into four parts because most of the past year, outside work, fall into these areas.

Reading

I spent so much time at the end of 2023 compiling lists and organizing books so that I could have a meaningful reading year. I intended to participate in several slow community reads of books I already owned but had never gotten around to (or needed to revisit). Alas, I fell behind before the first week of 2024 had ended, abandoned lengthy books throughout the year, whenever I felt particularly panicked about falling so woefully behind on my Goodreads goal, and told myself I'd have time for these books once I retire. I bought too many and left them to languish while I read library books and galleys.

My favorites, the books I finished feeling that I would happily read them again:

I am Homeless if This is Not My Home. Lorrie Moore

James. Percival Everett

Julia. Sandra Newman (I recommend interleaving its chapter with those of 1984 for an incredible reading experience)

During the Reign of the Queen of Sheba. Joan Chase

The Sum of Trifles. Julia Ridley Smith

Three Days in June. Anne Tyler

Orbital. Samantha Harvey

Enlightenment. Sarah Perry

Chouette. Claire Oshetsky

The Ministry of Time. Kaliane Bradley

The first time I pulled even with my Goodreads goal was on December 15. I finished my 101th book for the year earlier this morning--David W. Blight's bio of Frederick Douglass, which I started back in June!

Renovating

We started with the basement windows in my childhood home and the fascia and soffits outside in September 2023. In November, our contractor suffered a brain bleed, and no one knew if he'd recover. He did, and on January 1, 2024, he started demo in the basement so that we could transform space there into a studio apartment and bathroom, with a long, wide hallway that's going to serve as the home library once L.'s built the shelves. I spent too much of the year being told I had to make a decision NOW and actually believing it. The bathroom counter was finally templated yesterday and will be installed next Monday. That will mean the bathroom will be finished one complete year after work started. We still don't have the floor installed in the studio and hallway although we've had the planks on site since the summer. Because we are idiots, we decided to start another project before the basement was finished: enclosing the carport into a sun room, a half bath, and a tiny pantry/scullery. The contractor convinced us we needed a deck before the windows were installed because labor would be easier/less expensive than using scaffolding. Despite being told several times since late May that the windows are on order, we still don't have them and feel confident the contractor used our money to pay other bills (he had "Christian" insurance when he had the brain bleed; I am sure he didn't receive much help beyond a few thoughts, prayers, and casseroles). So in theory we have rudimentary walls that can't be finished until someone else pays the contractor for their project and he uses their money to order our windows. And Trump's tariffs are on the horizon! Whee! I suppose we will wind up ordering the windows ourselves to avoid the tariffs and trust we can get enough labor out of the contractor to pay back what we've given him.

We have two to three more years of renovations to go. Plus all the work to get our current house ready to go on the market. I'm very much tired of it all.

Rescuing

In the past five years we've adopted three abandoned cats who've shown up in our back yard and lucked into rehoming a fourth. Our established cats (five of them) refused to accept any of the newcomers and L. keeps them at the house under renovation where they're happy to be inside but not confined to a bedroom. In January this year I took in a young female who we bonded with over the last month of her pregnancy. We are so so fortunate that we were able to get her and her five adorable babies into an actual rescue and that they were all placed in good homes. A month later another female cat started showing up for meals and since she was feral, not abandoned, I attempted to trap her and failed. It was the end of the summer before she brought two tortie kittens around to show them where the meals come from. These feral kittens I've had tnr'ed. They sleep in the crawl space and hang out on some shelves outside the patio doors most evenings, where they observe us and play with us through the glass. Right now we have a pseudo colony of five regulars and a couple of others who come and go. I spend way too much time fretting over these cats but who else is going to do it?

Retiring

Not from the library, but after 32 years of working at the polls, I've had enough. I'm tired of the insomnia of worrying over staffing. And I'm tired of feeling that my efforts to provide the precinct with a smooth-running experience are all for naught. We had a good turnout for November's election, but I don't understand why so many of our voters, voters who didn't vote for their party's candidate, threw their votes away on third party candidates or write-ins. One curbside voter filled in every bubble on her ballot in the president's race except Trump's. Anybody but Trump, right? But the tabulator won't count over votes, so she effectively didn't vote for president. A mentally handicapped man who couldn't wait for me to exit the voting panel pushed the button for Trump: why? Has his mother never told him what Trump thinks about the handicapped? A woman in a Christian tee shirt came in crying and saying she was afraid the candidates were demonic. She wanted me in the booth with her as she voted. Actually, she wanted me to vote for her, but I demurred. She calmed down after I told her she didn't have to tell anyone who she voted for. And then she voted for Harris.

A bang, not a whimper

2023-07-08T12:48:00.000-04:00

Two months into L.'s retirement, and I'm finished with the stockpiling of books. No more book purchases! Or at least, no purchases until I am ready to start the book instead of having it on hand for the future.

The books that I succumbed to before transitioning totally into this new stage:

The Novel: A Biography by Michael Schmidt. A 700-year history of the novel, this tome concerns itself with "the creative dialogues between authors and between books, and suggests how these dialogues have shaped the development of the novel in English."

The Way the Day Breaks by David Roberts. Mental illness in 1980s Yorkshire.

One Afternoon by Sian James. This first novel won the Yorkshire Post Book Award in 1975 and has been reissued by Persephone Books.

Space Crone by Ursula K. Le Guin. Somehow I've allowed Le Guin to be a gap in my reading. Must remedy that.

The Love of Singular Men by Victor Heringer. The latest title from my Peirene Press subscription by a Brazilian author who died in 2018 at the age of 30.

I am Homeless if This is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore. Moore's a favorite, an automatic buy. Between the subject matter and some of the reviews, I'm almost afraid to read it.

To Battersea Park by Philip Hensher. A novel set in London during the pandemic.

Cousins by Aurora Venturini. An Argentine novel published when the author was 85 and had already published more than 30 books; it's her first translated into English.

Still Life at Eighty : The Next Interesting Thing by Abigail Thomas. These days I'm interested in books with elderly narrators/protagonists, so when Stephen King himself raved about this memoir on Twitter, I was quick to both order and read it.

The Lie of the Land and The Three Graces by Amanda Craig. I'm currently reading The Three Graces, the story of three women in their 80s living in Tuscany, and The Lie of the Land, an earlier Craig, features some of the same characters.

Windmill Hill by Lucy Atkins. Elderly main characters who live in a windmill. I've already read it and it was delightful.

Who's Your Founding Father? by David Fleming. An exploration of how Thomas Jefferson plagiarized the Declaration of Independence from the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence. Local history!

The Blazing World : A New History of Revolutionary England 1603-1689 by Jonathan Healey. Heavy sigh. I have so many history books stockpiled I should really try to schedule a year when I read nothing but.

The World : A Family History of Humanity by Simon Sebag Montefiore. I read the sections on Oliver Cromwell in conjunction with Robert Harris's Act of Oblivion last month.

Oblivion : An After Autobiography by Robin Hemley. Hemley's memoir about his sister, Nola, is one of my favorites. The only reason this joined the stockpile instead of being read immediately is I don't want to subject it to my usual a-bit-here-a-bit-there reading approach. I want time to read it without interruption and it's hard to manage that.

The Lola Quartet and The Singer's Gun by Emily St. John Mandel. I started reading Mandel with Station Eleven and need to loop back to her earlier novels.

Mischief Acts by Zoe Gilbert. English folklore.

Reynard the Fox by Anne Louise Avery. French folklore.

The Year of the Cat by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett. Yet another pandemic novel set in London.

Under the Henfluence : Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People Who Love Them by Tove Danovich. There's a country store within walking distance of the house we're renovating that sells baby chicks; I can't wait until we can put together our flock.

Beaver Land : How One Weird Rodent Made America by Leila Philip. There are beavers in the creek on L.'s mom's farm and I think they're awesome.

At the Table by Claire Powell. I think this is supposed to be in the vein of Meg Mason's Sorrow and Bliss.

In Ascension by Martin Macinnes. I love literary science fiction and I am very much looking forward to this.

Big Swiss by Jen Beagin. I read this one right after purchasing. I enjoyed it, but should probably have waited to get it from the library.

The Woman Who Climbed Trees by Smriti Ravindra. An impulse buy from an actual trip to an actual bookstore instead of my usual online method. The author went to NC State.

Forbidden Notebook by Alba De Cespedes. I help select popular reading titles at the university library and I put this one down to order in January. It is still yet to be purchased and that's why I obtained by own. I hope to have it read before Her Side of the Story comes out in October.

Humanly Possible : Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope by Sarah Bakewell. This will join How to Live and At the Existentialist Cafe on the shelf and perhaps they can work it out among themselves which one I should read first.

The Stone World by Joel Agee. The first novel by James Agee's son. For when I'm tired of reading about old folk.

The penultimate stack post

2023-03-19T11:39:00.004-04:00

Let's be dramatic about it: we are entering the dark wood of a transitional stage of our lives. L. is retiring in six weeks! (Unfortunately, I am still close to four years out from my own.) He's been on the verge of retiring for at least a couple years now, but the ability to work from home and the bear market kept him going. His employers now insist on half time in the office and between that absurdity (everyone sits at their office desk to zoom into meetings with people) and his age (68 this summer), he's said enough, and we will just have to hope for the best when it comes to the sequence of returns risk. Perhaps deferring social security until 70 will help offset any financial chaos enough for us not to run out of funds in our later years. I will admit to being quite paranoid about money and the state of the world, now and in the future, and did a bit of lobbying for him to postpone the loss of his reliable paycheck until after we knew if the Republicans would default on the debt, but he's eager to work on home projects, not computer code, and I can't blame him even if I am awfully worried about our 401(k)s.

Anyway, the plan is to completely renovate my parents' 1958 ranch house between now and when I retire. I was adamant that I would never even consider moving back to my home town until we became caregivers for my sister after she was diagnosed with ALS and I had to face some hard facts. We live in a two-story house, on a hill, and even if we put in a stair lift, and added a downstairs bedroom suite onto the back of the house, continuing to live here would be complicated. And there's the change to the traffic flow on the highway our neighborhood feeds out of which stresses me to no end! There are days I drive miles out of my way to avoid it altogether. Let's move where we can hear donkeys and cattle and see the mountains when we look out the windows. Let's raise chickens and have a garden. Let's finally have a basement.

Another thing I've been adamant about: I'd quit stockpiling books when L. retired. Most of my reading consists of library books and Netgalley fare anyway; yet the fact that I've been freewheeling through the 21st century buying books whenever I found something the library didn't have, or couldn't get to me soon enough (usually to sit unread on my shelves long past when it did become readily available), makes this change one that's apt to prove difficult. The books above were supposed to be the last purchases of the year except for a couple automatic buy items being published later in the year and yet I already have another even taller stack with three books still en route.

I am returning to blogging to bring some accountability to my reading life. Read what's at hand. Plan some projects to counter the urge to buy something new.

Now for the books above:

The Lioness by Mark Powell. Eco-terrorism in the Appalachians. I want to pair this with Eleanor Catton's Birnam Woods.

The Guest Lecture by Martin Riker. I intend to read this along with Sigrun Palsdottir's History. A Mess. and Lucy Ives's Life is Everywhere for an academic life project.

The Bethrothed by Alessandro Manzoni. Reading this now with A Public Space. Somehow I'd never heard of this classic before. It's good!

A Good Horse Has No Color and Song of the Vikings by Nancy Marie Brown. Because I love Iceland and Icelandic horses and horses in general. I probably won't read these until after I retire.

The Deluge by Stephen Markley. I am considering devoting my summer to reading nothing but science fiction and dystopian fare. This would be one of the first I'd tackle.

Collected Works by Lydia Sandgren. A Swedish addition to my Scandinavian shelf. I'm reading A System So Magnificent It is Blinding now, so maybe this one should be next?

Reading by Year, 2023

2023-01-01T10:20:00.102-05:00

Keeping a Reading Record

Books Read in 2025

(in backwards order)

A History of Sound. Ben Shattuck

Books Read in 2024

(in backwards order)

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. David W. Bight

Liars. Sarah Manguso

Exordia. Seth Dickinson

The Anthropologists. Aysegul Savas

Hackenfeller's Ape. Brigid Brophy

All Systems Red. Martha Wells

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Screenplay. William Goldman

Brightly Shining. Inguild H. Rishoi

I Hold a Wolf by the Ears. Laura van den Berg

The Ministry of Time. Kaliane Bradley

Margo's Got Money Troubles. Rufi Thorpe

The Book Censor's Library. Bothayna al-Essa

Chouette. Claire Oshetsky

Monsignor Quixote. Graham Greene

The Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus. Sophocles

Way Far Away. Evelio Rosero

Aura. Carlos Fuentes

Toward Eternity. Anton Hur

The Caretaker. Ron Rash

The Wood at Midwinter. Susanna Clarke

Creation Lake. Rachel Kushner

Odes to the Ordinary. Emily Benson-Scott

The Year Without Sunshine. Naomi Kritzer

Stone Yard Devotional. Charlotte Wood

Ever After. Fred Chappell

The Alternatives. Caoilinn Hughes.

State of Paradise. Laura van den Berg

Everyone's Happy. Rufi Thorpe

Secrets of the Sprakkar. Eliza Reid

Penelope. Norman Thelwell

Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People. Tiya Miles

Story, Misty's Foal. Marguerite Henry.

North Woods. Daniel Mason

Time's Agent. Brenda Peynado

The Vaster Wilds. Lauren Groff

Misty of Chincoteague. Marguerite Henry

Enlightenment. Sarah Perry

Bright Objects. Ruby Todd

The Strange. Nathan Ballingrud

Sipsworth. Simon Van Booy

Haunt Sweet Home. Sarah Pinsker

Getting to Know Death: A Meditation. Gail Godwin

2001: A Space Odyssey. Arthur C. Clarke

Orbital. Samantha Harvey

The Employees. Olga Ravn

All the Horses of Iceland. Sarah Tolmie

Walking to Aldebaran. Adrian Tchaikovsky

Three Days in June. Anne Tyler

Town Parrott. Penelop Bennett

Notes from the Henhouse. Elspeth Barker

A Game of Hide and Seek. Elizabeth Taylor

Interesting Facts About Space. Emily R. Austin

Martyr! Kaveh Akbar

The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe. Laura Gilpin

The Weight of a Soul. Laura Gilpin

What is the Slave to the Fourth of July? Frederick Douglass

Practice. Rosalind Brown

Wandering Stars. Tommy Orange

Stories are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. Annalee Newitz

Moonbound. Robin Sloan

Playground. Richard Powers

The Sum of Trifles. Julia Ridley Smith

Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin. Jill Lepore

Even As We Breathe. Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle

Landscapes. Christine Lai

During the Reign of the Queen of Persia. Joan Chase

1984. George Orwell

Julia. Sandra Newman

The Sleepwalkers. Scarlett Thomas

Quarter Moon. Preston Ford

I Cheerfully Refuse. Leif Enger

The Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45. Milton Sanford Mayer

A Wild Swan: And Other Tales. Michael Cunningham

Watership Down: The Graphic Novel. James Sturm

Sula. Toni Morrison

The Cemetery of Untold Stories. Julia Alvarez

James. Percival Everett

Lincoln in the Bardo. George Saunders

Oblivion. Robin Hemley

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home. Lorrie Moore

It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over. Anne de Marcken

World of Trouble. Ben H. Winters

Countdown City. Ben H. Winters

The Librarianist. Patrick de Witt

The Auburn Conference. Tom Piazza

Dayswork. Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel

The Last Policeman. Ben H. Winters

The Bee Sting. Paul Murray

Him. Geoff Ryman

Mortality. Christoper Hitchens

The Long Form. Kate Briggs

Beautyland. Marie-Helene Bertino

All My Cats. Bohumil Hrabal

And Person is the Only Self. Elsa Babbert

Old Crimes: And Other Stories. Jill McCorkle

Aug 9 - Fog. Kathryn Scanlan

The Tusks of Extinction, Ray Nayler

Bad Animals. Sarah Braunstein

In Universes. Emet North

We Loved It All: A Memory of Life. Lydia Millet

Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. Heather Cox Richardson

Books Read in 2023

(in backwards order)

The Dark is Rising. Susan Cooper

The Matisse Stories. A.S. Byatt

We Are Too Many. Hannah Pittard

People Love Dead Jews. Dara Horn

Terrace Story. Hilary Leichter

The Moviegoer. Walker Percy

Fifteen Wild Decembers. Karen Powell

The Book. Mary Ruefle

Open Throat. Henry Hoke

Minor Detail. Adania Shibli

Night and Day. Virginia Woolf

Necessary Trouble. Drew Gilpin

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. James McBride

Day. Michael Cunningham

Went to London, Took the Dog: A Diary. Nina Stibbe

Wellness. Nathan Hill

A Few Rules for Predicting the Future. Octavia E. Butler

In the Valley of the Kings. Terrence Holt

Doctor Glas. Hjalmar Soderberg

Arboreality. Rebecca Campbell

The Private Lives of Trees. Alejandro Zambra

The Haunting of Hill House. Shirley Jackson

The English Experience. Julie Schumacher

"Bloody Summer." Carmen Maria Machado

The Fraud. Zadie Smith

"What's Expected of Us." Ted Chiang

"A Visit." Shirley Jackson

The Mysteries. Bill Watterson

A Council of Dolls. Mona Susan Power

Prophet Song. Paul Lynch

The End of Drum-Time. Hanna Pylavinen

Normal Rules Don't Apply. Kate Atkinson

Exadelic. Jon Evans

Half Life. Krista Foss

The Deluge. Stephen Markley

The Great Transition. Nick Fuller Googins

A Far Cry from Kensington. Muriel Spark

Pete and Alice in Maine. Caitlin Shetterly

The Birds Tarjei Vesaas

Mobility. Lydia Kiesling

The Survivalists. Kashana Cauley

Far Creek Road. Lesley Krueger

In Ascension. Martin MacInnes

Inseparable. Simone de Beauvoir

Trust. Heran Diaz

A House With Good Bones. T. Kingfisher

Streaming Now: Postcard from the Thing That is Happening. Laurie Stone

Sun House. David James Duncan

A Man Called Ove. Fredrik Backman

The Fish. Joanne Stubbs

Professor Hudson Finds a Home. W. K. (work in progress)

To The Lighthouse. Virginia Woolf

The Three Graces. Amanda Craig

The Forbidden Territory of Terrifying Women. Molly Lynch

Commitment. Mona Simpson

A Very Easy Death. Simone de Beauvoir

A Novel Called Heritage. Margaret Mitchell Dukore

Act of Oblivion. Robert Harris

The Parrot and the Igloo. David Lipsky

Still Life at Eighty : the Next Interesting Thing. Abigail Thomas

My Stupid Intentions. Bernardo Zannoni

Windmill Hill. Lucy Atkins

Uncommon Kitchens. Sophie Donelson

The Years. Virginia Woolf

The Future. Naomi Alderman

Big Swiss. Jen Beagin

Beyond the Burn Line. Paul McCauley

The Dog of the North. Elizabeth McKenzie

Delta Wedding. Eudora Welty

The Last Animal. Ramona Ausubel

Birnam Wood. Eleanor Catton

Let Us Descend. Jesmyn Ward

Games and Rituals. Katherine Heiny

Welcome Home, Stranger. Kate Christensen

The Terraformers. Annalee Newitz

The Vulnerables. Sigrid Nunez

Biography of X. Catherine Lacey

The Betrothed. Alessandro Manzoni

All of Us Together in the End. Matthew Vollmer

Strong Female Character. Fern Brady

The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. Jeff Sharlet

Decent People. De’Shawn Charles Winslow

A System So Magnificent It Is Blinding. Amanda Svensson

Call It Horses. Jessie van Eerden

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. Shehan Karunatilaka

Barbara Isn’t Dying. Alina Bronsky

Diary of a Void. Emi Yagi

Reproduction. Louisa Hall

What You are Getting Wrong About Appalachia. Elizabeth Catte

Take What You Need. Idra Novey

The Latecomer. Jean Hanff Korelitz

Generations. Lucille Clfton

Mouth to Mouth. Antoine Wilson

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Gabrielle Zevin

Psalms for the End of the World. Cole Haddon

Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night. Jon Kalman Stefansson

Babel, or the Necessity of Violence. R.F. Kuang

Looking for the Hidden Folk: How Iceland’s Elves Can Save the Earth. Nancy Marie Brown

Singer Distance. Ethan Chatagnier

My Volcano. John Elizabeth Stintzi

Delphi. Clare Pollard

Coronavirus Chronicles, Entry 1

2020-04-05T18:02:00.002-04:00

I've spent a bit of time today trying to piece together when we began to take Covid-19 seriously. L. ordered elderberries to make into syrup to boost our immune systems as early as late January. Tornadoes touched down near us in early February and as warnings continued to pop up on all campus screens and sirens screamed the library dean ordered staff back onto the public desk contra university policy to seek shelter in the basement away from windows. Essential personnel equals expendable personnel, I began to think then, and have had no reason since to modify my opinion.

Not that it was anything I particularly brooded over that month (the dean is now aware of and in line with university policy where tornadoes are concerned); I was busy. I went on an otherwise lovely writers retreat mid-month with WMK where I was attacked by an escaped ram while on a walk down a country road and came home bruised, achy and swollen; friends' parents were ill and required much discussion; Millay's vet saw fit to prescribe her an Albuterol inhaler and I had that to fret over. It was late February, the week of an extended family gathering and an Old Crow show with a friend (we took light rail uptown, something I cannot imagine doing again in 2020), that L. finally pushed me into paying attention to the spread of the virus.

I resisted at first; we'd stockpiled canned food against a coming apocalypse once before and I had no desire to repeat that particular bout of nonsense. Then L. said he had no problem with us starving but he didn't want to live in a house full of starving cats. That was a point I could concede. By Feb. 23 I was placing large orders for food and litter on Amazon instead of purchasing it all locally. I spent $300 at CVS on March 1, although most of that was spent on Millay's inhaler meds. That same day I did the same at Food Lion.

Already too late to buy hand sanitizer, though.

And I was reading more about it. I made my first Facebook post about coronavirus--a link to the Atlantic's "You're Likely to Get the Coronavirus"-- on February 24 and a high school classmate (the one with the inactive medical degree) commented by saying Corona beer was an "affective" vaccine.

I'd concluded that North Carolina would have its first case by the end of the first week in March. I glanced at my phone while working at the polling station Tuesday, March 3, and saw that a case had been identified in Raleigh. That was the point when it felt real, not a mere hypothetical to run through in my mind.

L. worked from home that Friday and had a week of vacation carried over from 2019 scheduled for the following week. His boss told him by the time he'd be ready to come back to work, he wouldn't be coming. (He's still home, working out of our upstairs study.)

Still halfway in denial, I sent a link touting low airfare to London to WMK Friday evening. We closed on a home equity loan before work on Monday, March 9, and by then I was astounded that the closing officer offered his hand to shake. I took it, though. I scrubbed my hands thoroughly once I reached the library.

Oh, the library. The library with its book dust and the students who make me sneeze. I'd stockpiled tissues since I knew I couldn't stop touching my face. We had one container of Clorox wipes out at the desk and we'd been told to make them last since the next shipment was backordered to July. I knew that everyone in admin probably had an unopened container in their office, but it took another week, after admin was sent home to work remotely, for a full box of them to make their way downstairs to the front desk.

Wednesday, March 11, the university community was told we'd be moving to online instruction "wherever possible," beginning March 16 and continuing until the end of the month. Public services had been asked the previous day who'd volunteer to come in if we moved to online classes. The old essential/expendable situation, when everyone else got to stay home. One of my co-workers cried frequently; she didn't have leave to take if she refused to volunteer and wanted to stay home. Another, of the age and with the health problems that indicated she ought to stay home, hated to use her leave when she needed it to visit family over the summer. Our supervisor put together a schedule where no one would have to come in more than twice a week; we'd work from home the rest of the time.

I'd requested Monday off so that I could take my sister, who lives back in our hometown, to a doctor's appointment. Spent the weekend questioning whether we should go out to lunch prior to the appointment with our cousin and a couple of friends. In the end my sister and I met my best friend from high school at 11 am to limit any possible contact with other people. We didn't hug.

My daughter had phoned over the weekend to say she was coming home. Then I talked to her again and she'd said she was staying in NY. By Monday night she'd gotten spooked and had decided she would leave her apartment, but would stay with friends at a lake house outside the city. She's still at the lake house.

Monday night the dean sent an email saying we would no longer process physical items for ILL. When I got to the library Tuesday morning and saw that circ desk was still accepting returns, I got a co-worker to help me move a return bin out in front of the desk so that we wouldn't have to touch them.

That Tuesday would be my last day at work. The number of employees going in constricted, as did the library's hours. Gov. Cooper issued an executive order to close sit-down service in restaurants. The next day the public libraries in Mecklenburg closed at 5 pm.

Our small crew was still expected to provide services for the students who remained on campus. When Mecklenburg issued its stay at home announcement on March 24, the provost said at first it didn't apply to us and that the students on campus and those who lived in the surrounded community needed a place to go. Our dean didn't send the letter saying we would indeed close until 10 pm.

The state stay-at-home order went into effect on March 30.

Learned in an online meeting last week that all instructors are being told to plan to teach their classes online again in the fall. On April 2 we were told that six dorms on campus are to be used as a pandemic field hospital.

I think we're going to be home for quite some time.

blows off the dust

2020-01-05T09:51:00.001-05:00

Oh, dear. I'd forgotten all about my attempt to return to blogging last January. Let's hope I'm more successful this time!

Reading plans for the year, I have a few. I completed my 60 by 60 challenge last week. Yeah, I'd wanted to complete that five-year challenge by my 60th back in October, but I procrastinate and I get distracted. I'll continue drawing from the list for suggestions over the next five years instead of coming up with an entirely different pool of books and authors because my real challenge will be to read all 11 volumes of Will and Ariel Durant's The Story of Civilization before I retire. I read the introductory chapters in the introduction on "the nature and foundations of civilization" in December and am ready to devote the next nine weeks or so to the Near East.

I would like to read more non-fiction, particularly history, and more science fiction over the next year. I need to branch out beyond the time travel/parallel universe and the post-apocalyptic fare that I reach for when I do read sf.

Late last January I decided to embark on another long-term reading project, one I'm calling the Decades Reading Challenge. My intention was to read ten previously unread classics published within a particular decade within a calendar year and I started with the 1850s since that would give me a century of books to draw from before my birth at the tail-end of 1959. I was on track until I hit Little Dorrit over the summer, and my dithering on whether to force myself to finish the book or to move on to another brought me to a standstill where the 1850s were concerned. (I do not understand my difficulties with Dickens.) I'm now sporadically reading Trollope's The Three Clerks, published in 1858, but I only finished eight books from the 1850s last year. Henceforth I will consider the Decades Challenge a success if I finish a mere seven books and I will also allow myself a couple of rereads.

I've completed two books since January 1: Hope Jahren's Lab Girl (now anxiously awaiting the release of The Story of More in March) and Elizabeth Gaskell's Lois the Witch, an 1861 novella about the Salem witch trials. I am totally absorbed in Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport and I'm a few pages into Dominic Brownlow's The Naseby Horses. I've also just started Katherine Mansfield's Selected Stories. I have a slew of books on hand that I'm champing on the bit to start, but I can save those for another post.

2019-01-06T09:21:00.000-05:00

As a reader I cherish the fantasy of one day stopping acquiring books, of subsisting only on what is already stashed away in the crammed larder that I call a study. Buying books and not reading them – or waiting to read them – is a form of hoarding, similar to picking up and hanging on to something because it might one day come in handy, but a book is always both more and less than handy: potentially life-changing and, at the same time, quite useless. In a quasi-Borgesian way, I would ideally draw my last breath just as I turned the final page of the only unread book left in my collection. At that moment my library – my life – would be complete.

--Geoff Dyer, "Better read than dead"

I'm back again

2019-01-01T16:17:00.001-05:00

Before I discovered book blogs, but after I had realized the internet could be used to place holds on library books and to find other readers in like-minded communities, I enjoyed perusing the comprehensive reading lists that others were putting online. If only I had kept a list of every book I'd ever read--or had maintained consistent lists for my kids that lasted for more than a random school year here and there!

I went to work creating as comprehensive a list of my own could be, sans children's books, using the lists I found as a way of jumpstarting my memory. I made the list I constructed the center of my auxiliary blog once I started this one, and updated it fairly regularly, even after I'd stopped blogging here. It was just so useful to have a list close at hand whenever I needed to make a recommendation but could remember only a partial title or that the author's name had started with an S.

In late November I saw a link to a journalist's lifetime list that dated all the way back to 1949. I loved perusing the years, seeing what had stood the test of time and what had not. It sent me back to my own yearly lists, where I was dismayed to note that for way too many books, I had retained nothing. Clearly, I needed to either return to blogging my reading or begin annotating my lists from here on out.

And because bookish camaraderie is what I need more than the fretting over politics that's made up the largest portion of my social media diet of the past few years, here I am.

I've long intended to reread my Margaret Drabbles in the the order that they were written, interspersing them with my Anne Tylers. These two may seem an odd coupling for most, but my instructor assigned The Realms of Gold and Searching for Caleb in a lit class my freshman year of college and I've counted Drabble and Tyler as favorites ever since. I reread A Summer's Bird-cage and The Garrick Year in December. I'm now reading Tyler's first, If Morning Ever Comes. Chances are I won't work my way through all their books this year, but I'm hoping to get through the ones written in the 60s and 70s at least.

Otherwise I want to spend the year reading from my 60 by 60 list, a five-year reading plan that ends on my birthday in October, and from which I still need to read 18 books. I've been overly focused on just-published books the last few years.

Happy New Year and happy reading!

"I don't believe in ghosts, but I see them all the time."

2017-07-15T10:38:00.004-04:00

Sherman Alexie cancels book tour for memoir about his mother.

2017-07-12T17:14:00.001-04:00

She had never felt so vulgar in her life.

Later, he said: 'I doesn't make you happy, though, does it?'

'It doesn't make me anything.' Then she added with a rush: 'I'm sorry. I don't feel real. Everything seems a long way ahead or a long way behind, and I seem in the very middle of a vast vacuous interim. Do you understand that?'

He shook his head. 'Never mind. What do you do in London?'

'Why?'

'I just wondered what you did.'

She took a deep breath. 'I run one house in London and another in the country.'

'What country?'

'Kent.'

There was a pause while she waited for him to say something about Kent; but he said nothing, and she continued faster and more defensively: 'I look after my children. Julian's at his prep school and Deirdre goes to a day school near London. I--'

'So they are away or out all day,' he interrupted.

'Yes. That's what all childen do at that age. Many children,' she corrected herself--obviously he had not done it. 'Then we entertain a good deal. Conrad likes streams of people.'

'So you have a lot of cooking.'

'I don't do the cooking. I couldn't possibly cook well enough for Conrad. I do the arranging of it. There is a lot of arranging, you know. I read, and look at pictures, and garden, and listen to music - and Conrad minds awfully about clothes so I spend a certain amount of time on them--' She stopped: she knew dimly how it all sounded to him and knew dimly what it was all like - equally and differently unsatisfactory and incomprehensible to them both, and her talking only made it more irreconcilable.

'I suppose I'm a sort of scene shifter for Conrad,' she finished. 'He likes an elaborate setting, and he likes it to vary. I try to do that for him.'

'I'm sure you're very good at whatever you try to do,' he said; and they surveyed one another worlds apart across the small table. Anyway, I can leave him, she thought; it will not be difficult at all, and years hence it will simply be a surprising and friendly thing to remember. We have nothing in common, she thought, and if we go on now, I shall be back before the children are asleep.

--Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Long View

Have You Seen My Trumpet? by Michaël Escoffier

2016-10-22T18:39:00.000-04:00

This interactive book consists of a series of questions, the answers to which are found in the final word in the questions. For example, the final word of one question is “dandelion;” the answer to the question is “lion.” Interspersed among the questions is a recurring query from a little girl who is looking for her trumpet. Yes, she does eventually find her (you guessed it) pet. How delightful to read a book that makes words fun! How nice that this title is preceded by two others of the same ilk. A minor complaint is that some of the answers are spelled the same as a part of the final word in the question, but they do not sound the same, which could be confusing to emerging readers. For example, the last word in one of the questions is “fishbowl.” The answer to the question is “owl.” The silver lining is the opportunity for teachers, parents, and caregivers to instruct readers in the wonderful world of the phonetic vagaries of the English language. The illustrators are a feast of earth tones, texture, personality, and humor. In addition, the manner in which Di Giacomo rendered the eyes of the characters enables the reader to know instantly the emotional construct of these characters. As for the humor, what child will not delight in seeing a bat sitting on a toilet? Note: On the first page, Frisbee is not capitalized. It should be, for it is a trademarked brand name. In addition, a line of text on the final page is missing a comma.

Swallow the Leader: A Counting Book by Danna Smith

2016-10-22T18:38:00.000-04:00

In this amusing spin on the universal childhood game of “Follow the Leader,” one little fish, the leader, leads one, two, three, then ultimately nine other small fish through a winding course in the ocean. Along the way, they follow the leader as it splashes, hides, floats, and imitates other sea creatures. And when the leader instructs the other fish to eat a snack, they follow suit, eventually eating each other one by one. The last fish just happens to be a shark that gleefully swallows fish number nine, which, like the Russian nesting dolls, contains all of the other fish. However, all is not lost, for the shark emits a huge burp, expelling the nine little fish. Told in a singsong rhyme, the tale is part poetry, part marine biology, part addition and subtraction, and part happily ever after. The illustrations of the little fish and shark remind this reviewer of Muppets: bright colors, simple bodies, big mouths, and bulging eyes. The watery environment and its residents of rays, blowfish, turtles, crabs, and a whale have a softer feel— as if they were created with tissue paper and watercolor. Whatever the method, the book is a visual joy.

Shapes, Reshape! by Silvia Borando

2016-10-22T18:36:00.000-04:00

This new spin on a counting book invites children to rely on key words, shapes, and colors to identify different animals. Each two-page spread consists of text on one page and a collection of shapes in different sizes and colors on the other. The text is simple and follows a pattern: The first sentence gives a hint as to what the shapes will make once they are reassembled. Each answer is brief and includes a few alliterative descriptive words to describe each of the eleven different animals featured in the book. The illustrations look like bright pieces of cut paper that are stacked on one page and then reassembled as lions and crabs and hedgehogs and other animals on another. The design choice of lots of white space around the text and illustrations allows the simplicity to shine. Children who enjoy this book will also enjoy Borando’s Shapes at Play. Note: Activities related to this book can be found at http://minibombo.com/en/games-activities/shapes-reshapes.php.

Bunny Dreams by Peter McCarty

2016-10-22T18:35:00.001-04:00

During the day, bunnies know to eat vegetables, stay away from dogs, and seek safety in underground tunnels. During the night, though, it’s another story. In the night, bunnies dream: they dream of flying, of knowing the alphabet and numbers, of writing their names. And when they emerge from their dream state to wakefulness, they gather outside to admire a very special moon. This bedtime story is certainly unique, but what makes the book so charming is the artwork. The bunnies, dogs, and lone chicken (don’t question, just accept) look like elongated balloons with appendages and ears. (They’re so darn cute that this reviewer wishes the publisher would package the book with a plush toy.) This fantasia really takes flight with the dream sequence, for the bunnies are by turns striped and numbered, then clad in form-fitting purple unitards—all the while flying about with lettered wings. This book is by no means conventional; instead, it’s charmingly weird and captures the unmoored imagination found in children.

Curious George by H. A. Rey and Margaret Rey

2016-10-22T18:33:00.001-04:00

The 75^th anniversary re-release of this classic tale is updated to include a free audio download. The story and illustrations are unchanged, and George is as much a stand-in for curious children today as he was when the book was originally published. For those unfamiliar to the story, it’s a tale of a little monkey named George who is captured in Africa by the man with the big yellow hat in order to be delivered to a zoo in an unnamed city overseas. Along the way, George’s curiosity impels him to try to fly, to call the firehouse, and to send him on a skyward journey via balloons. The delightful illustrations capture the personality and energy of George, as well as the colorful chaos and mayhem that he instigates. Although the first book ends with George’s safe delivery to the zoo, his friendship with the man with the big yellow hat is cemented and the two star in six more books by the original author. Actually, that would be authors, for H.A. Rey’s wife, Margaret, is acknowledged to be an equal partner in the creation of all of the original Curious George books. (For more information on their collaboration, see the publisher’s website, http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/features/cgsite/history.shtml#authors). Although the first edition was published under H.A. Rey’s name only, the reason is no longer relevant, so it’s a mystery and a shame that the publisher decided not to credit Margaret in this 75^th anniversary publication. The very least the publisher could have done in this anniversary re-release was to add her biography to that of her husband’s and John Krasinski’s, the narrator for the audio download, on the book’s jacket flap. Note: Resources for teachers and librarians, as well as games and activities for children, can be found at http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/features/cgsite/.

Alexander Hamilton

2015-04-08T10:27:00.000-04:00

Back in the very early days of this blog, I spent several months slowly making my way through Ron Chernow's superb biography Alexander Hamilton. I recommended it to Wendy, and she also became a fan of both the book and its subject.

In December I learned of the upcoming off-Broadway musical Hamilton and sent Wendy a link to Lin-Manuel Miranda's 2009 Hamilton Mixtape performance at the White House.

In January we ordered tickets for a late March performance. It turned out to be a Javier Munoz, or #Javilton show, and after three months of obsession over all things Miranda, it took a bit of mental adjustment over the course of one musical number to accept someone else in Miranda's role, but then I was caught up in the overall awesomeness of the show and in Munoz's own performance.

The show moves to Broadway this summer. The cast album comes out this summer. I'll be buying the cd immediately and I'm hoping I can manage to get to NY to see the show again.

And I need to reread Chernow.

The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope

2015-04-06T17:56:00.000-04:00

Anthony Trollope's 200th birthday takes place on April 24, and Karen at Books and Chocolate is hosting an Anthony Trollope Bicenntennial Celebration all this month in his honor.

Due to my reading slump, who knows if I'll get a Trollope novel completed by the end of the month, so I thought I'd repost a review from 2010. I read The Way We Live Now then as part of the Classic Circuit's Trollope Tour.

The Way We Live Now, a satirical attack on the "commercial profligacy"of early 1870s England, is regarded as one of Anthony Trollope's finest novels, if not his masterpiece. In the summer of 2009, Newsweek put it at the top of its list of works that "open a window on the times we live in," explaining "[t]he title says it all. Trollope's satire of financial (and moral) crisis in Victorian England even has a Madoff-before-Madoff, a tragic swindler named Augustus Melmotte."

The audience of Trollope's day was less appreciative of its portrayal. Reviewers took issue with and resented the title itself; they argued that Trollope had not created a novel that was an honest characterization of their world. According to Marion Dodd, who wrote the introduction the 1950 edition, Trollope had peaked in the 1860s: "Mercenary marriages, abuse of the wealthy and their ill-gotten gains, satirical treatment of the nobility bereft of money, morals, and stamina, were so different from the material in Trollope's other books that the result was first shock, and then indifference and weariness."

(illustrations: Lionel G. Fawkes)

Trollope had intended to focus the novel on Lady Matilda Carbury, his notes show:

Living in Welbeck with son and daughter, spoiling the son and helping to pay his debts -- clever and impetuous. Thoroughly unprincipled from want of knowledge of honesty -- an authoress, very handsome, 43 --trying all schemes with editors, etc. to get puffed. Infinitely energetic --bad to her daughter from want of sympathy. Flirts as a matter of taste, but never goes wrong. Capable of great sacrifice for her son. The chief character.

The book opens with Lady Carbury dashing off letters to the editors of the London papers with the intention of securing the necessary reviews for her just-published Criminal Queens, a book in which she's spread "all she knew very thin, so that it might cover a vast surface. She had no ambition to write a good book but was painfully anxious to write book that the critics should say was good." Lady Carbury, the narrator tells us, "was false from head to foot, but there was much of good in her, false though she was."

Lady Carbury's greatest desire is to marry her handsome son off to an heiress. Sir Felix Carbury at 25 has already run through all the money left him by his late father and has no compunction against demanding and wasting the little that his mother and sister have to live on keeping horses in the country and gambling at the Beargarden, the club where all the young wastrels spend their time passing IOUs back and forth (living within one's means is not the way anyone lives now). Mother and son set their sights on Miss Marie Melmotte, only daughter of financier Augustus Melmotte, recently established in London and growing in prominence among the upper-crust despite a cloud of rumors.

It was at any rate an established fact that Mr Melmotte had made his wealth in France. He no doubt had had enormous dealing in other countries, as to which stories were told which must surely have been exaggerated. It was said that he had made a railway across Russia, that he provisioned the Southern army in the American civil war, that he had supplied Austria with arms, and had at one time bought up all the iron in England. He could make or mar any company by buying or selling stock, and could make money dear or cheap as he pleased. All this was said of him in his praise, -- but it was also said that he was regarded in Paris as the most gigantic swindler that had ever lived; that he had made that city too hot to hold him; that he had endeavoured to establish himself in Vienna, but had been warned away by the police; and that he had at length found that British freedom would alone allow him to enjoy, without persecution, the fruits of his industry."

Melmotte desires that his daughter marry well, in the upper rungs of society; Lord Nidderdale is willing "to take the girl and make her Marchioness in the process of time for half a million down." While the men are arguing terms, Marie, who's been developing a mind and opinions of her own, falls for the undeserving Felix, who at least is paying attention to her.

Melmotte refuses to consent to the match, telling his daughter that Felix is destitute and wants her only for her money. Undeterred, realizing that all men want her for is her money, Marie contrives to elope to New York with Felix, stealing money from her father and giving it to Felix to finance the trip. Felix, however, fearing that Melmotte will cut them off without a penny despite Marie's assurances that she has a fortune already signed over in her name, is too much of a coward to meet Marie in Liverpool as they've planned. He instead loses the money given to him gambling at the Beargarden while Marie is prevented from getting on the ship by men her father has sent to bring her back. Much to Lady Carbury's dismay, Felix gives up on the schemes to marry Marie. Melmotte and Lord Nidderdale, however, continue their negotiations for a mutually beneficial marriage; Marie is but chattel to them and nothing she says or does really signifies.

There are several other affairs of the heart that thread through The Way We Live Now--Felix's sister Hetta is loved by both her much-older cousin Squire Roger Carbury, who Lady Carbury wishes her to marry, although not because he's the most moral man around, and Roger's close friend Paul Montague, who Lady Carbury disdains. Hetta loves Paul, but more difficulties arise when Paul's former fiance, the American Mrs. Hurtle, follows him to London and demands he keep his promises to her. Ruby Ruggles, whose farmer grandfather is one of Roger's tenants in Suffolk, doesn't want to marry the slow-witted but loving John Crumb, who's always covered in meal, when Sir Felix Carbury is willing to see her on the sly, especially when she runs off to London to stay with her aunt. And Georgiana Longestaffe, whose father can no longer maintain a lavish lifestyle, is so desperate that she condescends to engage herself to an elderly Jewish banker (anti-Semitism abounds in TWWLN, unfortunately).

But the engine at the center of the novel is definitely Melmotte's maneuverings through the artistocratic society that doesn't approve of his kind yet cannot resist associating with him due to his incredible ostentation and power. And, of course, his shady investments and financial skulduggery--buying property without paying a dime to the too-afraid-ask-for-it Longestaffe, for example--keep the reader attentive. Melmotte chairs the London board of directors for the Great South Central Pacific and Mexican Railway, a railway proposed to run from Salt Lake City down to the port of Vera Cruz. There are no plans to actually build the railway; it is just a reason to float a company and engage in stock speculation.

Melmotte entertains the Emperor of China and is elected a conservative member to Parliament before it becomes impossible for society to continue to condone his fraudulence. Those who'd attached themselves to him earlier begin to break away and Melmotte is left alone -- his wife and daughter don't count -- to face a fast approaching arrest. Trollope provides a psychologically gripping portrayal of Melmotte's attempts to bully and bluff his way through, including a scene where he mortifies himself after showing up drunk in the House of Parliament.

What I found most disturbing in Trollope's depiction of Victorian England is its routine disregard for and mistreatment of women:

Henrietta had been taught by the conduct of both father and mother that every vice might be forgiven in a man and in a son, though every virtue was expected from a woman, and especially from a daughter. The lesson had come to her so early in life that she had learned it without the feeling of any grievance. She lamented her brother's evil conduct as it affected him, but she pardoned it altogether as if affected herself. That all her interests in life should be made subservient to him was natural to her; and when she found that her little comforts were discontinued, and her moderate expenses curtailed because he, having eaten up all that was his own, was now eating up also all that was his mother's, she never complained. Henrietta had been taught to think that men in that rank of life in which she had been born always did eat up everything.

A daughter or wife who refused to accept this natural order, or was unlucky in who her care depended, could expect and did receive violent treatment. Lady Carbury's backstory contains a history of physical abuse which she as a matter of course attempted to hide from the world; she bore the brunt of the scandal when she separated from him for awhile. Likewise, the independence of the American Mrs. Hurtle, who dared pull a gun on her ex-husband to keep him from sexually assaulting her, is presented as the grounds that justify Paul Montague's preference for the meek and innocent Hetta Carbury: Mrs. Hurtle is "a wild-cat" and just won't do in polite society.

Marie Melmotte is horribly beaten by her father during the course of TWWLN and accepts such treatment: Melmotte had certainly been often cruel to her, but he had also been very indulgent. And as she had never been specially grateful for the one, so neither had she ever specially resented the other. . . she. . .had come to regard the unevenness of her life, facillating between knocks and knick-knacks, with a blow one day and a jewel the next, as the condition of things which was natural to her.

Beaten by her grandfather, Ruby Ruggles is on the verge of being raped by Felix Carbury when John Crumb shows up to save her. Small wonder Mrs. Hurtle and Ruby's aunt do their best to ensure Ruby marries John despite her belief that the man is beneath her: he'll keep her well-fed and won't beat her. Isn't that all a Victorian woman could want?

2015-03-25T12:59:00.002-04:00

Ye gods, is there anything worse than a reading slump?

"One last story left to tell. . ."

2015-03-08T11:40:00.000-04:00

Inspiration up and left you? Writer's block getting you down? Burnout aggrieving your soul? Singer/songwriter Radney Foster's been there and put it to song.

L. and had a great time at Radney's show at the Double Door Inn here in Charlotte Friday night and his "Whose Heart You Wreck (Ode to the Muse)" was one of the highlights for us--I was thrilled that my video of this one turned out. And I got an autograph and a picture taken with Radney afterwards!

But alas and alack, while I was able to upload the video to Facebook, Blogger say the file is too large to upload here. (Really? Not enough space for a single song?) Sigh. So here's Radney Foster singing "Ode to a Muse" somewhere else back in 2013.

(Mine was better grumble grumble.)

Thoughts on The Vet's Daughter by Barbara Comyns

2015-01-16T13:18:00.000-05:00

"She can't do that, can she?" I asked myself when I reached the last page of Barbara Comyns' 1959 novel The Vet's Daughter. "She can't have a first person past tense narration and then kill off the narrator on the last page! I mean, obviously, she can, but isn't it stooping kind of low?"

Then I looked back a few pages, spotted a one-sentence flashforward whose significance I'd failed to note previously, and all was forgiven. I love dead narrators. Alice Rowland has been playing this card--that she's talking to us from beyond the grave--close to the vest.

Many things are played close to the vest in The Vet's Daughter, leaving the reader at the end not quite sure how we're supposed to interpret certain events, or even certain characters. For example, the novel opens with a description of a "man with small eyes and a ginger moustache" who walks along the street with Alice while she "was thinking of something else. . . . He told me his wife belonged to the Plymouth Brethren, and I said I was sorry because that is what he seemed to need me to say and I saw he was a poor broken-down sort of creature. If he had been a horse, he would have most likely worn knee-caps." This man is not seen or mentioned again until the final pages of the book. Clearly Comyns intends the ginger man to serve more purpose than arouse Alice's pity--but what? I can't worry it out.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. This is the story of Alice Rowland, 17-year-old daughter of an abusive London veterinarian who is more apt to send an unwanted puppy to the vivisectionist for a pound than to put it down humanely as he is supposed to. He's broken Alice's mother's front teeth with a kick in the face, and even worse, her spirit. He mostly ignores Alice since she disappointed him by being born a girl, but she's still frightened of him. Their house is grotesque--dark, smelly, decorated with the rug of a Great Dane's skin and a monkey's jaw, filled with animals in cages that Alice is required to take care of.

One night shortly before Alice's mother, who is dying of cancer, is euthanized against her will by Alice's father, Alice listens to her mother reminisce once again of growing up on a farm in the mountains of Wales: "Dark brown moss grew in the mere by the farm; and once I saw a little child floating on the surface. She was dead, but I wasn't afraid because she looked so pure floating there, with her eyes open and her blue pinafore gently moving. It was Flora, a little girl who had been missing for three days. . . "

The morning that Alice is told her mother has died, she sees a Jacob's ladder that the sun has made across the floor of her mother's bedroom.

After the funeral, Alice's father goes missing for three weeks. He returns with a barmaid --the strumpet from the Trumpet-- Rosa Fisher (a fisher of men?), who he euphemistically tells Alice will be their housekeeper. Rosa quickly assumes an evil stepmother-like role in Alice's life. One afternoon while fixing their lunch in a steamy hot kitchen Alice imagines--or so she thinks at first--that she is floating above water in the mountains. "This wonderful water world didn't last long because a mist came, and gradually it wasn't there, and something was hurting my head. Somehow I'd managed to fall on the kitchen floor, and knocked my head on a coal scuttle. Coal had got in my hair, but otherwise everything was as it had been before I'd seen the water garden--just boiling beef and steam, and heard Rosa's and Father's voices coming through the wall."

Alice hasn't realized it, but her mother's reflections and death have inspired her to begin levitating. For most of the book, I was prone to read these instances metaphorically, as they happen after times of great psychological distress for Alice. Yet Comyns has Alice read ghost stories and Alice mentions how happy her mother's ghost must be when she leaves home to be a companion on an island for Henry Peebles' mother (Peebles is a kind man who cares for Alice, although she does not particularly want to marry him). There's no denying that there's something supernatural going on here, especially once you accept the story's being told from beyond the grave.

And after Alice's father decides to exploit her talent, once she has returned home following Mrs. Peebles' suicide, to have her "rise up before all the people on the Common" it becomes clear that Comyns is turning Alice into a Christ figure, parodying the Christ story, since, as a character explains, the beauty in Alice's case is she isn't religious: Alice is given wine to drink and thinks it must be blood; she smells sour bread and cockroaches; she is kept prisoner; she exclaims, "Please God, don't let that happen to me. Father don't make me do this thing. I don't want to be peculiar and different. I want to be an ordinary person. I'll marry Henry Peebles and go away and you needn't see me any more--but don't make me do this terrible thing."

Alice's ordeal is not removed. Alice, in despair and humiliation, is brought in a bride's white dress, in a hearse-like carriage, to rise up and then come "down amongst the people." Trampled by a frightened crowd milling about in circles, she dies. Unlike the man with the ginger mustache, who dies with a terrified expression on his face, at the moment Alice's life is finished, she states, "[F]or the first time in my life I was not afraid."

And now I'm left with the thought: is the man with the small eyes and the ginger mustache a stand-in for the reader? A small-eyed someone Comyns and her characters briefly walk beside while thinking of something else?

2015: A dare and a new long-term project

2015-01-01T11:25:00.001-05:00

I am horrified to look back and discover that last January I didn't even manage to recycle my usual Eschew the New! resolution, that my first post of the year (and sparse they were) didn't come until February 1. I am extremely grateful that Wendy was willing to share her thoughts on books over the course of 2014 and hope she will continue to do so forever and ever. I just need to get my groove back, so prepare for a lot of inane posts while I redevelop the blogging muscle, all right? Mixed metaphors will abound!

I finished the Fill in the Gaps Project very quietly in April. A five-year plan, the objective had been to read 100 books, but we were to count ourselves successful if we read 75. I read 86, then completed another six from the list by the end of 2014. Over the course of the project, I realized I liked long-term projects with large pools of books.

And that brings me to my new project, one I'm calling 60 by 60, although I certainly hope I manage to read more than 60 books on the list. It's heavy on the classics--Gissing, Trollope, Stendhal--and other authors I really ought to have read, or read in more depth, by now.

So that's the five year plan. Perhaps I can get a head start on it, since between today and April 1, I'm participating in James' TBR Double Dog Dare. (I am so glad James didn't retire the dare!) I have a book on back order and of course I will buy the new Anne Tyler the moment it comes available in February, but other than that, I can think of no books that will break my determination to read from the books I already have stockpiled here and on my desk at the library. Of course, one reason my will seems so strong is that I have ten books from the Tournament of Books long list either on hand or on hold!

Happy 2015, everyone. Happy reading.

Reading stats, favorites and Claudius, the chemo cat

2014-12-31T15:20:00.002-05:00

This year has been all about Claudius.

In February we noticed he had a ruptured anal gland. I took him to the vet, who wouldn't even fake concern over this injury; she'd felt a mass near his bladder during his exam. After a quick flurry of tests over the next few days, Claudie was diagnosed with large cell lymphoma, and his vet referred us to an oncologist.

In all honesty, I wasn't enthused at the thought of Claudius undergoing chemo. I've charitably called him "the startle puss" on the blog before, but closer to home I refer to him as "the family paranoid schizophrenic." He's had on-and-off liver issues all his life. He's been a terror to medicate. He'll ruin your shirt and try to scratch your innards out, is what I've always told anyone crazy enough to want to pick him up. Wasn't quality of life, not quantity, all that mattered to a cat?

Try chemo for a month and see how he does, Claudia, the oncologist, advised.

He came out of his muzzle during his first session of chemo and sent two vet techs to the ER. I had to deal with the required-by-law visits from Animal Control and Claudius was sedated before treatment from then on. But he handled the chemo itself well and we never thought about stopping. He didn't quit biting the blood out of me when I gave him his meds until sometime in August. He and I have been through a lot of stressful times this year, but I'd say his quality of life has been much improved.

We're all glad he's still around. I think he is, too. He's been sitting beside me on the couch, watching me blog this afternoon. He spent Christmas holidays playing with my daughter's kitten as if he were a kitten himself. (Very strange: remember when he was afraid of Ellie when she was a kitten? He didn't play then, He hid under the couch for 36 days.)

I'm sure sitting around waiting for him during his chemo sessions is part of the reason I managed to read 115 books this year--the highest number I've ever read, although I remain more impressed with the 112 I read in 2000 since that list included several lengthy classics. While I counted 12 books as classics this year, the two that were pre-20th century were definitely short.

And paying for chemo also helped me further rein in my spending on books, an expenditure that was already on the decline.

My reading stats for the last ten years (this year's in bold):

Books Total 115 / 74 / 100 / 82 / 101 / 101 / 78 / 81 / 74 / 77
Nonfiction 14 /13 / 5 / 12 / 16 / 15 / 13 / 8 / 14 / 13
Novels 84 / 57 / 80 / 66 / 78 / 79 / 62 / 62 / 50 / 47
Short Story Collections 15 / 3 / 4 / 2 / 7 / 7 / 3 / 4 / 1 / 8
Library Books 53 /36 / 29 / 39 /26 / 48 / 27 / 14 / 31
Newly Acquired/Read 17 / 14 / 21 / 12 / 23 / 32 / 32 / 31 / 24
Newly Acquired/Stockpiled 26 / 58 / 78 / 120+ / 113 / 140 / 88 / 141+ / 75+
E-texts Read 11 / 12 / 20 / 12 / 17 / 10 / 12
Free E-texts Read 3 / 4 / 10 / 6 / 9 / 5 / 7
Just-published books 35 / 35 / 30 / 21 / 36 / 55 / 41 / 34 / 33
Classics 12 / 7 / 22 / 23 / 21 / 10 / 8 / 23 / 12
Pre-20th Century 2 /1 / 8 / 10 / 9 / 7 / 4 / 12 / 11
Written by women 87 / 49 / 38 / 46 / 55 / 42 / 33 / 28

Ten authors with multiple books: Alice Munro (5); Jane Gardam (3); Joan Didion (2); Linda Grant (2); Tessa Hadley (2); David Mitchell (2); Lorrie Moore (2); Anthony Powell (2); Elizabeth Taylor (2); Rebecca West (2).

Three rereads: Anagrams by Lorrie Moore; A Lemon and a Star by E.C. Spykman; and Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion.

It was a very enjoyable reading year for me, but an unusual one in that I feel more favorably disposed to authors than to particular books. I don't know if it's a sign of my age, that I'm not finishing nearly as many books thinking that I'd like to read them again some day, but without that feeling, I don't regard that book as a favorite, no matter its quality.

What did I finish in 2014 that I can imagine rereading? Jane Gardam's Old Filth and its sequels? David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks, despite its flaws, just for the fun of it? Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven?

I want to read more Elizabeth Taylor and Dorothy Whipple. I want to read everything Alice Munro and Penelope Fitzgerald have written.

Reading resolutions tomorrow.

Happy New Year.

2014-11-20T17:33:00.002-05:00

Books, you know, they're not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art--the art of words.

--Ursula LeGuin, "We will need writers who can remember freedom"

pages turned

Happy MLK Jr. Day!

End of the year recap

A bang, not a whimper

The penultimate stack post

Reading by Year, 2023

Coronavirus Chronicles, Entry 1

***blows off the dust***

I'm back again

"I don't believe in ghosts, but I see them all the time."

Have You Seen My Trumpet? by Michaël Escoffier

Swallow the Leader: A Counting Book by Danna Smith

Shapes, Reshape! by Silvia Borando

Bunny Dreams by Peter McCarty

Curious George by H. A. Rey and Margaret Rey

Alexander Hamilton

The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope

"One last story left to tell. . ."

Thoughts on The Vet's Daughter by Barbara Comyns

2015: A dare and a new long-term project

Reading stats, favorites and Claudius, the chemo cat

blows off the dust