Reading Report 2020, part one: to read, or to watch? that is the question

Reading at the laundromat (RIP dryer)

(This post is about my reading year, a topic that sounds boring to me before I even start, and the next one will be actual book recommendations. You've been warned.)

One good thing about 2020--I read a lot more books than usual. The previous two years I'd been right at a hundred books; in 2020, I read 120. That might sound like a lot, but I've heard plenty from people who read two to three hundred during lockdown. That doesn't include the many that I started and didn't finish (was I the only one who couldn't settle on what I wanted to read? I feel like I bailed on two for every one I finished, but I don't know for sure since I don't usually track DNFs). 

During the spring, Doug was working longer hours than ever. He and the pandemic team at our hospital spent 10-12 hours a day, seven days a week, figuring out how our hospital would respond to COVID-19. Which meant that I was home alone, like a gazillion other people, for weeks on end. So I read.

I'm not sure I can explain why I prefer to read than watch TV. Since it's what I like, of course I think it's "better," but objectively, there's no reason for that. Plenty of people who are way smarter than me have said that the best writing and creative work of the past dozen years have been in television-- more than in movies (taken over by blockbusters and superheroes) or print (because serious literary fiction has become so dense and impenetrable that nobody wants to read it). 

TV feels like too much to me. It might even be a neurological thing. The way my brain is wired, the combination of visual stimuli and music and characters coming to life on the screen feels overwhelming, especially if those characters are being bullied or tortured or oppressed. It feels like I'm handing control of my brain over to someone else, opening the door and inviting in images of devastation and despair. It's too much. Things inside my brain are dark enough without inviting that stuff in.

So I'd rather sit with a book, preferably not one of the dense/miserable/despairing types. And anyway, it seems to me that there's been a movement away from literary despair in the past year or two. I read a handful of books this year that were intelligent, self-aware in literary terms, and fun to read. Ten or fifteen years ago, you couldn't claim to be a serious writer if your book ended in anything other than hopelessness. I think that's starting to change.

Of course, that has never been true of romance novels, and it's one of the reasons romance has been derided as frivolous and negligible. (It's also a typical strategy of the traditional patriarchy-- restrict women to the world of home and relationships, and then define any art that deals with home and relationships as unimportant or silly.) 

I've told you before that I am an ardent defender of people's right to read whatever the hell they want, whether that is a steady diet of romance novels or anything else. But I haven't been entirely forthcoming with my own reading of romance novels, because tbh I haven't read a romance published in the last few years that I liked. Readers of romance get enough criticism without me piling on, and if it's what you like, then it makes no difference what I think. So I just didn't say anything.

It seems to me that the current trends in romance are either to concentrate on the sexual attraction between the two characters almost to the exclusion of anything else (like a plot), or to use a strange type of narrative that irritates me no end-- there will be one line of dialog, then several paragraphs of interior monologue, then another line of dialog and a page and a half of interior monologue, and then another line of dialog.... etc. 

The first time I read one, I thought it was kind of odd, but okay, I can go along with this. But now it seems like every one I pick up is that way, and I am so done with it. Sometimes it feels like you've read a dozen pages for a five-minute conversation. Yawn. Other than the occasional novella that bucks the trend (for example), until recently it had been years since I read a currently published romance novel all the way through. It's really disappointing to me, because it used to be a reliable way to cheer me up-- a fun rom-com about people figuring out their relationship, with a happy ending. What's not to like? 

That seems to be changing, though. I read several romance novels I liked this year, and three that I loved. Two of them were by British authors (is that relevant?) and two of them were LGBTQ romances (is that relevant?). Titles to come. Stay tuned.

Day 18: in which I bore you because I am bored: Georgette Heyer, audiobooks, and free samples

After a quick scroll through bookstagram, it's obvious that almost universally, book lovers are having trouble reading anything but comfort reads. A few people are looking for thrillers or true crime to keep them sucked into a story, but most of us just want to read something that feels positive and leaves us feeling uplifted instead of despairing.

In the past few weeks, I've re-read a favorite series from childhood (Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula LeGuin), Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell, and a couple of romance novels (Red, White, and Royal Blue and Love Lettering) that worked for that. Also The Lager Queen of Minnesota, which isn't exactly a comfort read, but has lovable characters who have to deal with a variety of different (occasionally hilarious) life situations, and resolves in a thoroughly satisfying way.

But really, what I'm mainly doing is re-reading Georgette Heyer. You may remember my first obsession with her if you've been around for awhile. She's not a perfect writer-- you have to forgive her inordinate love of exclamation points, and you have to be able to skim over her sometimes excessive use of period slang. But once you get past those flaws, they're so much fun. Some of them I would say even qualify as romps.

Stack of books by Georgette Heyer

This time around, I started with Black Sheep, which wasn't one of my top favorites, but I remembered liking it. It worked so well that I moved on to Reluctant Widow. Now I'm reading Cotillion, which is one of my top faves of hers. Maybe my #1 favorite.

The problem with Cotillion is that there's vast cast of characters, and it takes awhile to figure out who's important and how they are related to each other. Kitty, an orphan who has lived for years with her miserly, wealthy guardian, is outraged when he more or less puts her up on the marriage auction block to his grand nephews. Since she is penniless on her own, she comes up with a plot to get at least a month in London, a last moment of freedom, before she has to accept the inevitable and figure out what she's going to do. Of course that gets more and more complicated, and then she meets other people and gets involved in their complications, and the whole thing is just a delight.

Spoiler alert: it ends happily for everyone; well, except for the people who deserve what they get.

And, bonus: the audiobooks are fabulous. The narrator of Cotillion, Phyllida Nash, is a genius. I made Dean listen to it the other night while we were working on a jigsaw puzzle, and he was so hooked that he ended up reading the whole thing. Just give it time, because it takes awhile to get oriented to all the characters, and Kitty's complicated plans.

And here is a clue for taking advantage of Amazon. Amazon has always allowed you download a free sample of a kindle ebook or an audiobook (through their subsidiary, Audible). The audiobook samples stream, and even if you don't have a kindle, you can download the kindle app and take advantage of the free samples. It usually amounts to about 20 pages of an ebook, or about five minutes of an audiobook. Why not use them?

I've had it work both ways--sometimes the five minute sample of an audiobook helps me get into a print book I'm having trouble with (for example, Gods in Alabama). Sometimes the 25 page sample of the ebook helps me get a complicated cast of characters straight when the audiobook feels like chaos (for example, And Then There Were None, which is ably read by Dan Stevens, but introduces so many characters in the first chapter that I was bewildered until I was able to read the print version).

That's it for me today. Thank you for letting me go on and on, since I am now considerably less bored than I was yesterday. Did I tell you yet that MadMax came home on Friday? Our internet may not be up to the task of his online classes, but he had had enough of living alone in an apartment during shelter in place. It's nice to have some company.

7ToF: Nerd Central

1. I thought it would be so fun to do book puzzles on my bookstagram account. The first one was books with numbers in the title, and I spent hours gathering up the obvious ones (1984, Fahrenheit 451, The Two Towers, Station Eleven) and combing my shelves for less obvious ones (The Thirteenth Tale, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Tenth of December, Hyperbole and a Half). I even created rules: the number had to be in the title, not in the subtitle; collections like Best American Short Stories with the year in every title didn't count; Stephanie Plum didn't count, because it would have taken all the space.

2. Perhaps not surprisingly, no one else thought this was as much fun as I did. Only two people bothered to respond, and no one took up my challenge to think of more (although I have to admit I took all the easy ones). When I told MadMax about it, he started laughing and said affectionately, Oh, Mom, you are such a nerd. (I'm sure he meant it in the nicest possible way.) I already had a list of possible future puzzles going before I posted, though, so I will probably keep doing it. I may put less time and effort into future versions, though.

3. Best outcome: I re-discovered Eight Cousins, by Louisa May Alcott, which I adored as a child and read several times. I always liked it better than Little Women, which-- to be honest-- I never read all the way through until I was in my twenties. But now I can't really remember either one, so I'm in the midst of a re-read. Thirty pages in, all I can say so far is that Rose (from Eight Cousins) is more of a prissy snob than I remembered, sort of like Amy in Little Women, but we'll see.

4. Not long ago I wrote about my obsession with finding the perfect tea. I mentioned that I always warm the cup before I put tea in it. My reasoning was that if my tea was made in a warmed cup, it would stay hot longer than it would if made in a cold cup, and I lose interest in tea (or any hot drink) once it's cold.

I decided to put that to the test. We have a motley assortment of mugs, but we do have two that are the same. So I pre-heated one with hot tap water, then heated water in the electric tea kettle and poured it in each cup. After one minute, the water in the pre-warmed cup was four degrees warmer than the other cup; after five minutes, the difference was three degrees. Not as big a difference as I would have thought. NOW YOU KNOW.

But being a creature of habit, I still made my cup of tea the same way this morning.

5. Once again I got in a discussion with some friends about genre fiction. It just astonishes me how anti-romance people are. And honestly, I think it's a completely false opinion. I'm pretty sure if I handed them one of my favorite romance novels and actually forced them to read it, they'd come back and say, that's not a romance novel! It's just a good story! And yet it IS a romance novel, and the problem is that they don't know what they're talking about because they've never read one. Or maybe the problem is, as one Book Riot editor realized in this week's Interesting Read, our culture's misogyny has created a disdain for romance.

6. But having said that, I have to say it's been a long time since I've read a current romance novel (published in the last couple of years) that I finished. I'm all in favor of occasional escapist reading, but all of the ones I've read recently have been of the fantasy type-- the hero is fabulously wealthy, drop-dead gorgeous, and his only faults are the adorable sort. And/or they're so insanely attracted to each other that there is almost no story besides their physical attraction. I'm good for one or two of those a year--they can be fun to read-- but that seems to be all that's being published these days.

7. Summer is here. I lose faith every single year--winter lasts so dang long, and then spring never really seems to come, and then suddenly it is gorgeous and I almost get teary-eyed when I go outside to feed the chickens. We had record breaking heat and then wildfires for most of last summer, so this year is especially appreciated. Here is the picture I snapped this morning, strategically aimed so that you don't have to look at chickensh!t (you're welcome)(Past the fence is our neighbor's field).

And that's it for me. Have a great weekend.

you have to start small, like oak trees.

I love a good road trip, always have. One of the main reasons I love them is because you have time to think. We've been so busy for the past few months that I got behind on my thinking. So when the opportunity came to drive to Seattle last week to retrieve PellMel, I jumped at the chance. Really, she could have driven herself, but I wanted to do it. Two of my dearest friends live in Seattle, for one thing, and there's all that time in the car.

It was a lot of fun. PellMel and I had a great time bopping around downtown Seattle, we had some great food, we had lots of fun with our friends Laurel and Kami. But also, thankfully, I had lots of time to think.

And you know what I realized? Almost like a voice said it in my head: I am done blogging.

I think I've known it for awhile, but I'm a stubborn person, and I didn't want to be a quitter. This blog has never really taken off, and I didn't want to give up on it.

My previous, more successful blog was fairly anonymous, but this one is not. And one of the things that happens when you tell people you have a blog is that you start getting feedback. Most people are completely uninterested--in fact, they look slightly panicked when you tell them you have a blog, because you might expect them to actually read the thing. And then there are the few, my beloved readers--you--who are supportive, and make it all worthwhile.

But there is also a third group, whose voices sometimes sound loudest in my head, who react with criticism or disdain, or who are so stunned and surprised that it's a little insulting, or who can't understand why I think anyone would want to read something I'd written. Or the woman who said with great warmth and kindness, "I remember when I used to have time to do things like that." She didn't pat me on the head, so there's that.

And those responses made me stubborn. Even though I've wanted to quit several times over the past few months, I didn't want to prove the negative people right. I didn't want this blog to fail. So I kept going.

Finally, when I had the time to think these past few days, I realized that I can't let the naysayers make my decision for me. If I'm done, I'm done. Maybe after more than a dozen years of blogging (my first post was in December of 2003), it's time to move on.

So *hiccup* this might be my last real post (see postscript below). It's possible this is a temporary decision, but at the moment, I'm pretty sure it will be permanent. I had three or four posts planned for the next couple of weeks, but once the idea of stopping took hold, it seemed kind of pointless to continue. 

I am forever grateful to those of you who have followed along. Hugs and love and happy trails.

p.s. There may be one more post after this one--when I have time to put it together-- with links to the posts from this blog that I think are worth reading, sort of like an index, but it won't have anything new. So if you're subscribed, you can safely unsubscribe without missing anything.

p.p.s. the post title is from the end of The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett. It seemed better to end by looking forward.

Day 8: and we lived happily ever after

The post that goes with the previous one is definitely not ready, so on a different topic.... Let's talk about happy endings. Books, stories, movies. I love them. I loved them as a child. I loved them as a teenager.

Then I got to college and learned that happy endings are bad. They're unrealistic. They're sappy and sentimental. They're stupid. The intellectuals surrounding me had nothing but disdain--sneering disdain--for any thing that ended with me smiling and feeling warmly about the human race. Is there any influence that's harder to deflect than sneering disdain?