7ToF: my favorite books of 2019, and some odds and ends

1. Have you looked at any of the dozens of "best books of 2019" lists that have been published in the last couple of weeks? Maybe I'm just reading a strange bunch of lists, but what has struck me is that there is very little consensus. The Nickel Boys and Normal People (neither of which I've read) are on many lists, but not all. Other than that, it's kind of a grab bag. Seems odd to me, like part of the point this year is to prove that you read a bunch of obscure books.

2. When I was thinking about my personal favorite of 2019, three immediately came to mind: The Great Believers (Rebecca Makkai), The Friend (Sigrid Nunez), and Washington Black (Esi Edugyan). So that's that, I thought. But then I started scrolling through Goodreads, and was surprised at how many books I had given five stars and then forgotten. (Is there a lesson there?)

3. So for the record, here are ten favorites that I read this year. I was going to list all the ones I gave five-star ratings, but there were twenty, which seems like a lot. So these are just ten that stood out when I scrolled through the list:  

The Intuitionist Colson Whitehead
Mary Poppins on audio with Sophie Thompson narrating
The Great Believers Rebecca Makkai
Less Andrew Sean Greer
The Friend Sigrid Nunez
What Truth Sounds Like Michael Eric Dyson
Born a Crime Trevor Noah, on audio
Matilda by Roald Dahl, on audio narrated by Kate Winslet
Washington Black Esi Edugyan
An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green
Runners-up: American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson, Dreyer's English by Benjamin Dreyer

Pretty good, huh? I still have a few more I might get through before the end of the year, so maybe there will be more. I can hope.

4. I wasn't thinking about the End of The Decade until I recently saw a list of the best books of the decade. Whoa. The top one was Visit from the Goon Squad, which I haven't read but which was fortuitously available immediately from our library website, so maybe I will get it done before The End of The Decade.  Ha.

5. The Reading Glasses Dilemma, otherwise known as, How To Find a Pair of Reading Glasses When You Need Them. My solution for the past ten years that I've been wearing cheaters is to have a dozen pairs and spread them out--a pair in the bedroom, a pair in the kitchen, etc-- so I could always find one. But of course it didn't work. I could never find them. My new solution, which has only been for three weeks but is working much better: I have a ceramic jar on my kitchen counter and I keep all of them there. So any time I see a pair, I bring them to the kitchen and drop them in the jar. The only ones that aren't there are the ones in my purse, which I try to never take out so I always have a pair with me when I'm out of the house. So far, there has always been a pair in the jar. If you've got a better plan, please let me know.

6. Dean's solution, in case you were wondering, is to wear Clic Magnetic glasses, which are split in half at the nose piece and join up with a really strong magnet. Hard to describe, you'll have to go look at the picture. They hang around his neck almost all the time so he never loses them. But the band that goes around your neck is stiff, and it doesn't fit right under my hair, so I haven't been able to use them.

7. If you're in despair about today's young people, I strongly encourage you to show up for some activities at your local high school. Check the school website and show up for a play, or a band or choir concert, or a volleyball game. We've been to a couple of events recently, especially the winter choir concert, and the kids are bright, talented, and enthusiastic. They have worked so hard. They're going to be just fine, except they've got to deal with the mess we made.

And that's it for me. Hope you have a lovely rest of the holiday season. I'm not sure when I will post again but it might be after the New Year.

Last-minute gifts and other minor things

Drummer snowperson!

I meant to post my favorite gift ideas a couple of weeks ago, but you know what they say about good intentions. For the record, although I have no problem with affiliate links and use them all the time on other sites, these are not affiliate links. I am unassociated with these products in any way, they're just things I like. 

1. Jelt Belts, for men and women, the no-show belt I've been looking for. If you, like me, have wondered why no one has continued to make those striped elastic belts with the d-ring metal clasp that we all wore in junior high, here you go, because the woman who came up with these thought the same thing. They are even one better, because the clasp is not metal, so you can keep it on when you go through airport screening. Also, Montana made.

2. Another Montana made product: compression socks from Vim & Vigr. These are adorable, not those horrible beige things that our grandparents used to wear. If you've never worn compression socks before, you will be surprised. I wear them on the plane, and those crazy "young people today" wear them for post-workout recovery, so any millenial athletes on your list will be appreciative, in addition to those of us with lagging circulation.

3. Highly recommend a trip to the hardware store or NAPA auto parts store for stocking stuffers. I just went by Ace Hardware this morning and wandered around until I had half a dozen things. The woman who checked me out commiserated with me that presents for the men in our lives are the worst, and she even suggested a couple of other things that I immediately went back and picked up (flares for auto emergencies-$2.99 each- and a lock de-icer for sleety weather, which I think was $3.99). You can always throw in a 2-pack of sharpies and a couple of bungee cords, too.

4. Spotify gift cards for the under-30s in your life (see previous discussion about spotify, #5 and 6 in this post). Unless you are already paying for their Spotify account anyway.

5. Buying a stack of books (meaning 3 or 4) for each of my family members has been a long-time tradition, and one of my favorite parts of Christmas shopping. In fact (who am I kidding) it is hands-down my favorite part of christmas shopping, and one that I happily devote hours to, sometimes to the point where I'm neglecting a whole lot of other shopping I need to do. But we now have our kids' significant others in the family Christmas scene, and they are not readers. I love them dearly, but *despair*, they are not readers. And I don't want them to feel bad about that. So this year, I'm ditching the traditional stack of books, and of course I'm doing it cheerfully, it's only here that I'm confessing to my sadness. But if you do have readers, a bookstore gift card is always an option. Or a book subscription from Page1 or The Bookshelf or Bas Bleu or any number of other similar sites.

6. Moment of sadness: I made my annual Small Business Saturday trip to the independent bookstore about fifteen miles north of here, the only retail bookstore in our area. I had a list of a dozen books I wanted, and because I'm increasingly concerned about amazon's dominance (more about that in another post), I was prepared to pay full price and buy all the ones I could find. They had exactly one of them. And this was not an obscure list. They just don't carry the kind of books I like to read. Of course, they would order them for me, but they are such snobs about it (admittedly, my biased perspective), I can never bring myself to do it. So I got online and ordered them from Powells and The Bookshelf. Also, what a world we live in when giving a Barnes & Noble gift card feels like a subversive act.

7. And lastly, this is not a gift idea but a recommendation for surviving the holiday rush, which is Harry Connick Jr's song "I Pray on Christmas"-- all of his Christmas albums are great, but that song is on When My Heart Finds Christmas, which I think was his first one. Here is Harry singing it (still the best), and here is a cover by an a cappela group, here is and here is a cover with a Norwegian gospel choir (under the heading: It Takes All Sorts). It's the perfect song for when you're dragging and feel like you just cannot do another holiday-themed thing. I pray on Christmas, you'll get me through another day, with full whoop-whoop gospel choir background. Sing it loud.

Puzzle solved: the appeal of City of Girls

I've been thinking lately about not fitting in. I do my best to think about this with a minimum of angst, because probably every person on this planet has had moments of feeling like they don't fit in. It's part of being human, and there's nothing particularly interesting about it.

But some of us Don't Fit In more than others of us don't fit in. I suspect that if I were a six-year-old now, I would be diagnosed as being somewhere on the autism spectrum. I've never quite managed social interactions naturally. I miss obvious social cues. I'm pretty good at reading tension and mood of a room, but I'm definitely not good at interpreting body language and facial expressions.

I think that's one reason why slow, beautifully acted movies and TV shows don't work for me. I heard a podcaster say this week that the reason they love Claire Foy so much in the TV show The Crown is because the camera can linger on her face and you can see an entire story happen in her facial expressions. I immediately understood why I've never been able to get into that show, even though everything about it sounds like something I would love. When the camera lingers on an actor's face, I just get impatient. It feels like a vanity shot-- look how gorgeous I am in all this makeup! Unless they're actually crying or laughing, I cannot see a single thing going on in the actor's face/eyes/expression.

I've especially never managed social interactions with women very well (I'm talking mainly about groups here, not individual, one-on-one interactions). Women In Groups are so complicated. I've heard it said that you can never trust a woman who is more comfortable with men than with women, so all I can say is, don't trust me! Because in a social situation like a party or a group gathering, I would a hundred times rather talk sports or tech or photography or anything with men than try and understand the nightmare-ish complications of social talk among women.

There are a whole bunch of expectations that I completely miss. Or sometimes I get them, but I can't take them seriously. I mean, I get that if you dress in ways that fit with current fashions, you feel like a competent human being who can manage adulting, but there's always an aspect of it to me that is like playing a game. I can't take seriously that someone really cares about what I'm wearing.

I wear jeans to church-- clean ones, in good condition. To me, showing respect for my surroundings means I pulled out a clean pair of jeans and I'm not wearing sneakers and a sweatshirt. But to some of the women in our congregation, it is a sign of disrespect that I don't dress up more for church. That's so far from the way that I think that it was years before I even picked up on this. I had no clue that anybody cared or even noticed what I wear. I'm just clueless about this stuff.

Aside: Remember back in the sixties and seventies when your mom would tell you that it doesn't matter what's on the outside, it's what's on the inside that counts? Can you even imagine someone saying that now? In these days of selfies and continuous online presence and endless make-up vlogs and fashion influencers?

So this entire setup was just to tell you that I finally figured out my problem with City of Girls, the bestselling novel by Elizabeth Gilbert that came out earlier this year. I am a sort-of fan of Gilbert's. I've like several of her books, fiction and non, and even the ones I haven't liked I've found to be interesting.  She really is an amazing writer. So I was looking forward to her new one, especially because so many women were posting reviews that said it was their favorite novel of the year, an instant classic, the most fun they'd had reading a book in forever.

But I could not get into it. Gilbert's writing was great, as it always is, but City of Girls just seemed dull to me. I 've read plenty of books where people got drunk and partied, but I've never read a book where there were pages and pages of descriptions of drunken partying to the point where it just got tedious. I mean, seriously, where was her editor? There is no new information, no character development (until it all comes to a crashing halt), just pages and pages of going out and drinking until you can't stand up and are puking into the gutter.

Then I read a brief description of it this morning on Vox's list of the 15 best books of 2019, and the light dawned. City of Girls is a girly-girl book. It's about getting dressed up and wearing great clothes and being dazzling, and feeling powerful because you are so gorgeous. I can understand that as a mental exercise, but it has almost zero meaning to me in practice. The Vox reviewer said that the thing that had stuck with her months after she read it was the clothes. Whaaaaat? No wonder I didn't get it. It is not a book for me. 

So problem solved, because it was really puzzling me why so many people (not just women) love, love, love this book.

Sorry I've been so absent, but for some reason, around here the stretch from Thanksgiving through the first week in December is the busiest time of the year. But I'm almost done-- this past week has been insane, but then next Wednesday I have my community band Christmas concert, and then I have almost nothing on the calendar through the rest of the month. I will drive you crazy with all the things I've been wanting to write about but haven't had time.

Have a great weekend.