7ToF: If you could only have one color of toenail polish, what would it be? Some version of dark teal for me, I think.

1. I’ve been reading another decluttering book. It’s a less obnoxious than Marie Kondo, but still has some major eye roll moments. I’m working on our bathroom right now—which is an easy task since it is tiny, with a pedastal sink and has no cabinets other than the over-the-sink medicine cabinet we installed when we moved in. The author of this book wants your bathroom countertops to be completely bare. You can have a candle or a potted plant, but nothing else. In other words, your bathroom will look like a hotel.

2. I’m not really a candle fan, and I avoid house plants because I kill them, so that would mean I could have absolutely nothing on the counter. Which is Not Happening. Especially because there are no cabinets, and thus no countertops, in our bathroom. We have a vanity with a sink in our bedroom, and that’s where all my bathroom crap is. My God, she would go ballistic. ALL THAT CLUTTER, AND A SINK IN THE BEDROOM. But you know, our renovation funds only stretched so far and completely rebuilding the master bed/bath was way outside our budget.

3. Why in the world am I always so much wordier than I meant to be? This was only going to be one Thing. So anyway, I did decide that I would try to at least cut back, so that the only things on the counter (on the vanity in our bedroom) are the things I use every day. Everything else has to go underneath in the cabinet. And I have to admit (grudgingly), it does look better. Although I don't think it exactly makes me feel calm and serene.

4. Also, she wants you to limit yourself to one bottle of fingernail polish, one bottle of shampoo, one eye shadow, and so on. Doesn’t she ever have moods? What if she wants green toenail polish one week and fuchsia the next? (says the woman whose toenails are navy blue at the moment). Does she just throw out each color as she gets the next one? Probably not. Probably she is that put-together person who has a signature toenail color, and a signature scent, and all her bath towels match. More power to you, lady, but that’s a little twee for me.

5. (It’s possible that I’ve been overusing the word twee recently but it is so perfect: “excessively or affectedly quaint, pretty, or sentimental” according to Google.)

6. Major new tool in my battle with my phone: I have an iPhone, a 6-Plus, which I love so much that I may just get another one when this one dies. I upgraded to the new iPhone operating system (iOS12) this week and was happy to discover that they've included a new app called "Screen Time" that tracks your screen time by application, and also lets you set limits for how much you want to be on your phone. So far it's by application group, which is less helpful than it could be (for example, both text messaging and Instagram, which are two entirely different things if you ask me, are included in Social Networking)-- but still it has been great. If you go over the time that you specified, you can choose to ignore the time limit, or get a reminder in 15 minutes. So far, love it. 

(Also, if you're setting it up on a teen's phone, you can require a passcode to override the limits, but since I'm just using it as a reminder to myself of how I want to spend my time, I haven't used that feature.)

7.  Food for Thought: I tried a new podcast called Conscious Construction. In the episode I tried (from August 16th), the host Abi Robins interviewed a therapist named Matt Inman, who talks about how to live inefficiently. Our culture prizes efficiency: maximize profit! speed through your to-do list! get more done! streamline your workflow! But the things that make life enjoyable, the things that make life memorable, are things that are inefficient, that accomplish nothing—playing Uno with your kids, sitting and watching the sunset, playing a musical instrument badly just because it’s fun. I mean, let’s face it, dancing around the kitchen while you’re fixing dinner slows you down. I could become a big fan of inefficiency.

So, that’s it for me. I’m pre-writing my posts for next week since I’ll be out of town, but as long as I get them scheduled right (always a dicey proposition), they’ll show up on time. Let’s be inefficient this weekend! Have a good one!

In which I do not act like the heroine in a Newbery award book

There are a lot of things I want to say right now, but for the life of me I can't figure out how to say them. So instead I'm posting this story, which has been sitting in my drafts folder for months--according to the last edit date, the last time I worked on it was in February. I have no idea how it will sound to you.

When I was in junior high (forty+ years ago, in the mid-70s), we lived in a rural area in East Texas a half-hour drive from my school. The school I attended was about one-third black kids, two-thirds white kids. (That is purely a guess, I don't really know the exact numbers.)

We moved to East Texas from Dallas the year I started junior high, so I was the new girl. Lydia, the black girl who sat behind me in English, was just about the only kid in the school who was friendly to me for the first couple of months. Junior high sucks.

I was grateful to her and friendly in return, but neither of us made any effort to be friends outside of class. Generally speaking, the white kids were friends with the white kids, and the black kids were friends with the black kids.

There is no way I can pretend that there was no prejudice at that school, or in our part of East Texas. There were occasionally black cheerleaders, and there were a bunch of black athletes, but for the most part, the popular crowd (which I was not a member of) was all white, and the black kids kept to themselves. Or, to phrase it a different way, although it wasn’t conscious on my part, we didn't allow them to be part of us. The school had been desegregated, but it was still segregated.

In the summer, we had a few weeks of summer band practice every weekday morning. There was a black family with a band kid my age that lived near us in our rural area, and my mom decided we should arrange a carpool with them so she wouldn't have to drive me back and forth all the time.

I have a memory-- which is vague on details but strong in general sensation-- of listening to my mom arrange this with the other mom. My memory is that I knew it wasn’t going to work, and the black mom knew it wasn't going to work, but my mom forged ahead. Even forty+ years later, I can’t decide if I think she was brave for bucking the way things were, or oblivious to the difficult situation she was creating.

The first day I was supposed to ride with them, my mom was off doing something else so I was home alone. (I am ashamed to admit this. It's making me feel flushed and hot to even type it out.) I was at the back of the house, and I "might have" heard a horn honk outside, but I pretended I didn't. I didn't even go to the window and check. After a few minutes, they left -- I guess. Since I didn't look, I'm not sure what they did. I know they didn't honk twice. When my mom got home, I told her they never showed up. We didn't try it again.

Yeah.

I was 13-ish, not an age when anyone is at their best. I suppose I could argue that it isn't a 13-year-old's responsibility to change the world. But this is obviously, clearly bad behavior.

I didn't really think it out and I certainly didn’t think to myself "I am not riding to school with a black family"-- it wasn't nearly that conscious. It was just a gut reaction born partly of a thirteen-year-old's entitled anger at her mom (all the other kids’ moms drove them back and forth) and partly a deep knowledge: This is not done. This is not how we do things at this school.

If I were a braver person, I would have tried it, and maybe I would have forged a bond with that family, and maybe it would have made a tiny difference in a world of prejudice. But I’m not a brave person, and I didn't. I don’t say that as an excuse, I’m just stating the bald truth: I was not a brave child, and I didn't.

It is occurring to me only now (and maybe that is the most shameful part of the whole thing) that maybe I hurt the other girl's feelings. I've always assumed that she felt the same way I did, but maybe she had hoped that we would be friends. I don't know.

Am I culpable for going along with the informal segregation in our school? Yes, I most certainly am. Was I acting on some deep-seated personal prejudice? well, I must have been. Theoretically, in my head, I didn't have any problem being friends with black kids, but I also didn't have enough personal strength to buck the system. I just knew it wasn't done, and I wasn't enough of a maverick to push against the way things were. I wish I had been.

I have no moral to this story. I'm just thinking about it as I read Brown Girl Dreaming, Jacqueline Woodson's memoir, which is terrific-- equal parts love letter to and indictment of the South.

7ToF: recreation of a post that disappeared

I got my Seven Things on Friday post done down through #6, and then I lost it. This has happened once or twice before, and I do not understand it. It is so frustrating, because I've been sitting here for over an hour and I thought I was almost done and now I have to freaking start over. UGH. This was worded more gracefully in the original.

1. It's fall. It's gorgeous. I like it.

2. A woman on Instagram posted that sometimes with book-to-film adaptations, when she isn't sure if she wants to read the book, she goes to see the movie first. Thus breaking the ancient law of all book snobs: Read The Book First. I had Crazy Rich Asians in my To Be Read (TBR) pile and I wasn't sure if I wanted to read it, because maybe it would reinforce Asian stereotypes.

3. So I decided to try her idea and go see the movie before I read the book. The movie is fun-- both Dean and I enjoyed it. And I see her point, because now I feel no need to read the book. And since I always have too many books to read, that is a good thing. New opinion: sometimes it is OK to see the movie first.

4. blah blah blah about how painful the issue of body weight is for women our age.

5. This week's interesting thing around the internet: an article that rounds up a bunch of research and makes a pretty clear case that our current thinking about obesity is counter-productive, although the title is a little exaggerated: Everything You Know About Obesity is Wrong. He rightly calls out the medical profession for fat shaming. Worth reading.

More about the Enneagram ahead, leave now if you're not interested, and have a great weekend!

6. (this part existed elsewhere, so I could just cut and paste it again) I saw a post by a person of color last week that dismissed the Enneagram as something for white people with too much time on their hands. Point taken. I can't think of anything to say in defense. I'm Caucasian/cis/straight, so there is an entire universe of challenges I don't have to deal with, challenges that would be both energy draining and time consuming. Just thought I should acknowledge that for the record.

7. However. Being white/cis/straight is not something I can change, and at the moment I am finding the Enneagram to be extremely helpful. The "path to growth" for Type 5 is yielding insight after insight for me, and since we all have elements of all the types within us, some of the other types (esp 9 and 4) are helpful, too. So I'm going to continue to work on it for awhile. There will be at least one more post next week, apologies to those who aren't interested, although I guess you've quit reading if you're not, so never mind.

OK, I hope this made some sense. Maybe I will come back later and work on it some more when I'm not so pissed. Although maybe it makes more sense like this than it did when it was way wordier. Have a great weekend.

Types, and my formative years

I think most of us around here are about my age, in our fifties, a few of us a bit younger, a few a bit older. So we spent our early, formative years in the pre-feminist era. Feminist ideas were hovering around, waiting for the match to spark the flames, but really, feminism, or at least the second wave of feminism*, didn't get started until the seventies when I was halfway through grade school and able to at least partially understand what the issues were.

So we're a funny hybrid. I can't imagine that anyone who reads here would argue against the basic ideas of feminism: outside some minor limitations of upper body strength, women can do whatever jobs men can do, if they are so inclined. Women should not be defined by their reproductive capabilities or lack thereof. Women are not here to be support staff for the important work that men are doing. We should be equally supportive of all human beings, regardless of race/gender/orientation/religion/whatever.

And yet we were raised back in the early 60s, in a world where the old ideas were still strong. Women could maybe have other interests on their own time, but really their primary job was either to be supportive of, or ornamental to, the "real" world of men. We weren't valuable on our own (which is why it was so supposedly awful to be unmarried), but only to the extent that we were helpful or pleasing to the men in our lives. And we raised children.

I was not raised to think that I could be of value just exactly as I was--a sometimes moody, sometimes dreamy, definitely shy, bookish, nerdy girl. How could that possibly be of value to the people around me? I believed that I needed to be cheerful, friendly, uncomplaining, and attractive (thin), to be of worth. I'd never even heard of being an introvert. It wasn't an option.

Whether or not that was what the people around me intended, that was what I picked up, and that was how I modeled myself. I developed a perky, enthusiastic social persona that sometimes worked, and often didn't, and that got me through my first twenty-two years of life. (Nowadays, I can tell when I'm feeling really stressed about a social situation, because I'll find myself pulling that persona out again. If you ever see me being perky, pull me aside and tell me to calm down.)

But putting on that cute, friendly act exhausted me. I still remember the night when it broke beyond repair. I don't remember the exact date, but in late August 1983, after I graduated from college, I was starting grad school for a master's in English, and I went to a meet-and-greet for the new grad students. There might even have been ice-breaker activities.

In other words, it was what I now think of as my worst nightmare. But I didn't know that then. I thought I was supposed to enjoy getting to know my fellow students. About an hour or so into it, I found myself uncontrollably on the verge of breaking into tears. I couldn't stand it for one more minute. I left early, drove myself back to my brand new apartment and cried for hours.

It was weeks, maybe months, before I could begin to understand why I was crying. But now I know: I had reached the end of being able to pull it off, the illusion that I was this eternally cheerful, outgoing person. That minor breakdown started a couple of years of deep confusion for me, culminating in my mid-twenties with the deepest depression I've ever experienced.

I ended up dropping out of grad school, and it wasn't until a couple of years later when I had a job and several months of therapy under my belt (yay for work benefits that include therapy) that I started to feel like I was putting myself back together. Or maybe putting myself together for the first time.

And it wasn't until a year after that that I learned about being an introvert.  It was like suddenly someone handed me a Get Out of Jail Free card-- I was flooded with relief. OH! THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH ME! I'M JUST AN INTROVERT.

And to this day, that is what I love about personality types. For me, the primary value is validation. Here you are, and you're just fine exactly the way you are. And 30+ years later, the Enneagram did the same thing for me in a different way, and that is why I am so fascinated by it at the moment.

I listened to a guy, an Enneagram "expert," on a podcast yesterday who said that the danger in using the Enneagram for validation is that it becomes an exercise in narcissism, and I thought: you only think that because you're a man. You've never needed validation. It was a judge-y and catty (and probably unfair) thing to think, but that's the first thing that popped into my head.

(It probably has less to do with gender than whether or not you're already comfortable with who you are.)

Well, this time I didn't get anywhere close to where I wanted to go. In fact, I'm even further away than I was at the end of the last post. But this is plenty long enough. Have a great day.

* the feminism that swept the country in the seventies is called "second wave" feminism. The first wave was the suffragettes back in the early twentieth century. And the third wave is where we are now, with a plurality of different ways to be empowered human beings.  

Types, and therapy, and mental health (or what passes for it)

I was in therapy/counseling off and on from my mid-twenties until my late thirties. It was invaluable. There were a few therapists I saw only once or twice and decided it wasn't going to work, but for the most part, I found great people. If you're confused or anxious or depressed or need a sounding board, I highly recommend it. Find a therapist you can work with (which isn't always the first one you see), and let them help. *advice over*

There have been some definite trends in therapy over the years, and since I'm not a therapist, I only understand them as someone who has been to therapy, not from the other side. But during the eighties, when therapy was still relatively new, even as it was helping me, there were things we were all figuring out.

For example: You, as the client, were always told you were the innocent victim and (whatever had happened to you) wasn't your fault-- which just seemed sort of absurd. All the good people are in therapy, and all the bad people are not? No. Children can be innocent, but with adults, it's always complicated.

There was an undercurrent to the therapy that I received that more-or-less gave the impression that all problems could be solved. If you learned to think rationally about your situation, you could always figure out what was the right thing to do, way to be, how to act. There was a big emphasis on rational problem solving, which is a useful skill, but it only goes so far.

And then there was an assumption that mental health should look the same in everybody. Remember, this is back in the eighties. It seemed to me that there was an unspoken assumption that anyone who was mentally healthy would be ready for a lifetime monogamous commitment, raising children, and "settling down" in a single location to sink deep roots in a community.

So if you went to therapy and started to work out whatever it was that you were working on, pretty soon your life would look like The Brady Bunch. We've had some tough times in the past (weren't Mike and Carol Brady both widowed?)(did that ever get discussed?), but everything's coming up roses now!

But of course nothing is that simple, and people are different, and complicated, and wildly and blessedly diverse. We think differently, we have different strengths and weaknesses, we interact differently with the people around us, we process information differently. Mental health looks entirely different from one person to another.

Therapists are by and large pretty smart people, and they've figured it out. By the nineties, I could even joke a little with my therapist about what therapy had been like in the eighties. Remember back when we thought it was possible to have a perfect childhood? And if you didn't have one, you'd been robbed?

The reason I'm telling you this is because I've continued to read and learn and listen to podcasts about the Enneagram, and for the most part it has been an amazingly, astonishingly helpful thing. But from certain quarters of the widely diverse Enneagram community, I'm starting to pick up this same old thing. If you pursue the path of growth for your personality type, your personality type will disappear. In other words, that same old saw: mental health looks the same in everybody.

Since this seems like a major step backwards to me, it has really surprised me. Really? We're going back there again? I mean, maybe there is some ultimate, transcendent way this is true, but in my own experience, it's just not true. Happiness and contentment in my life may look entirely different than how happiness and contentment will look in yours.

The thing I've found so valuable about the Enneagram is that it has helped me figure that out. You figure out your dominant personality type, and when you understand that, you can learn to manage your needs and preferences. And you become aware of your shortcomings and the ways you can be blind, and you can manage those better, too.

I started out trying to say something specific in this post, and I don't think I got there. But I don't have time to start over, so here you go.

7ToF: Oddly happy

1. It is an absolutely gorgeous fall day here, while on the East coast they are bracing for hurricane Florence. We have family in the Carolinas, so our hearts are definitely with the folks who are bracing for impact.

2. You probably think that when I say I write this blog for me, I'm just saying that. But it really is true. Every day since I posted the phone update, I've reached a point where I've been on my phone five minutes longer than I meant to be, and I've caught myself before it turned into an hour, thinking-- I said I was working on this. I'd better stop.

3. Even though I'm not working, I've signed myself up into busy-ness this fall. I've never stopped doing the food bank on Tuesdays, and now I have choir on Monday night, band on Thursday night, and I started a three-year term on my church's session (leadership team) this week, which looks like it will average out to about one meeting a week. Plus our book club, and blogging and instagramming. It's less structured than work, but I think it is going to be good. In fact, I'm more excited about what I'm doing right now than I have been for a couple of years.

4. I even caught myself with a generalized feeling of happiness this week. I've been happy plenty of times over the past few years, but it was usually connected to a specific event or situation. It's been awhile since I've felt that sort of generalized contentment. And that makes me-- um....., well, happy. :-)

5. Deb Perelman, of Smitten Kitchen fame, has been the source of some great recipes PellMel and I have tried over the past few years. This week she pulled together her favorite recipes with 5 ingredients or fewer. I'm equally grateful for the recipes and that she said "fewer" and not "less."

6. Dean and I were in the mood to watch Jane Austen this week. We started with the BBC's 2009 version of Emma, starring Romola Garai as Emma and Jonny Lee Miller as Mr. Knightley. Emma is a horrible snob, so it is only due to good writing on Jane Austen's part and good acting on Romola Garai's part that you end up liking her in the end. And she and Mr. Knightley have some great, very entertaining arguments. The first time I saw this version four or five years ago, I didn't care for it, but it's grown on me. We both give it thumbs up. And yes, I do realize how lucky I am to be married to a guy who will watch Jane Austen.

7. I'm writing this on Thursday, and one of the Instagram photo challenges I follow had this prompt today: "[post a photo of] a book that was released the year you were born." I had no idea what books were published in 1961, but of course Google knew. Turns out I have copies of four books published in the year of my birth: James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl, The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, The Ivy Tree by Mary Stewart, and The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie, which I just picked up at a used bookshop last week. Since James and the Giant Peach and Phantom Tollbooth were two of my very most favorite books when I was in elementary school, and even better, today was coincidentally Roald Dahl's birthday, it has made me oddly happy.

Hmmmm. Oddly happy would be a good title for this post, yes? Have a great weekend, and if you're on the east coast, be safe and stay dry.

Phone Update

I'm not one to talk on the phone. But I still spend entirely too much time on my phone. It's not the ability to talk that does it, it's access to information. I'm continually googling things, or using imdb to figure out who that familiar-looking guy was in The Post, or using Goodreads to figure out what is the name of the next book in the Brother Cadfael series, or whatever. It's like an addiction-- instant access to anything I want to know.

I spent quite a bit of time at the beginning of the year experimenting with different ways to corral my phone time (see this post and this one if you missed it), and I thought I had it figured out. To my surprise, I missed my two games (Candy Crush and some other game I can no longer remember) more than I missed social media. So I figured if had no games, and I only let myself use my phone between noon and bedtime, the problem would be solved.

It worked pretty well for awhile. But then I put my games back on to pass the time on a trip, thinking that I had been disconnected from them long enough that it wouldn't be a problem anymore. And it is nice to have them for odd moments when you're bored. And my mom and my sisters and I started a tradition of texting every morning (partly to have a daily check in for my mom, who lives alone).

And then six weeks later, I was back to spending an hour or more per day playing games, and I had forgotten all about avoiding my phone before lunch. So I deleted the games again, ran through the whole process again, put them back on my phone, a couple of months later realized I was spending an absurd amount of time arranging little patterns on my screen, and last week finally admitted to myself: I cannot have those games on my phone.

They are like crack for someone with a brain like mine. They feel oddly relaxing at first, but eventually, I'm just rearranging tiny pictures on my screen, over and over, getting that little hit from a line disappearing, their orderliness increasing and decreasing at the same time.

This is why we can't have nice things, the saying goes, only my version is: this is why I can't have games on my phone. Because it starts out fine, and then before I know it I'm on level 348 and I've logged an absurd number of hours just moving things around on the screen of my phone.

I want that time back. So I deleted them again, and I've only had a couple of word games for the past ten days or so. For some reason those aren't as dangerous, so I rarely play them for more than the odd five minutes, which I'm OK with.

But last night I scrolled through Instagram, which is the one social media app that I still really enjoy, got to the end of the day's updates, and decided it was time to go to bed. Those of you who are similarly afflicted can guess what happened-- an hour later, I was still sitting there, scrolling through things I didn't care about, because Instagram--like all social media-- will just keep feeding you new things to see as long as you're willing to sit there.

Which is making me think, maybe I shouldn't even have a phone. Or at least, not a smart phone. Just a phone that does voice and texting, and nothing else. It hasn't been so very long since that was all we had.

I remember Google used to have a number that you could send a question to via text, and you'd get an answer back in a few seconds. It was my first nirvana of infinite info. I could find out ANYTHING. But ten years later, my brain is already oversaturated with information, and there's probably not much of anything that I need to know right this instant. It's tempting to go retro.

But I can't imagine I actually will. work in progress.

7ToF: I'm Nobody! Who are you?

1. It's a commonplace these days to say that women in their 50s are invisible. If you haven't experienced it, lucky you. You can read about it here and here and here and lots of other places.

2. I remember the first few times I experienced middle-aged invisibility were at restaurants, where the waiters are basically paid to be friendly to their patrons. That's a cynical way to look at it, but you get a better tip if your people like you, and the restaurant gets a better reputation, and everyone is happy. When I was younger, I took a waiter's attention for granted--if I was sitting in a restaurant with friends or my kids, the waiter (male or female) would take some time to talk (flirt) with me. But suddenly, somehwere in my late 40s, waiters started ignoring me to talk to my younger friends or my kids.

3. I'm not exactly a femme fatale, so there was no reason to expect that wait staff would fall all over themselves to socialize with me, but still-- the first few times it happened, it was so unexpected that it was obvious. I'd heard that middle-aged women felt invisible, but it was still a surprise to actually experience it. Oh, that's what they mean!! Now I get it!

4. Plenty of has been written about the larger cultural reasons why this happens, mostly about factors that have nothing to do with us personally (other than we keep getting inexorably older, silly us). But what I've been thinking about recently is the part of it that is personal to me. As an introvert who has never had particularly strong social skills, it was a surprise to me to discover that a small, unconscious, but signficant portion of my attention had been taken up with the who-gets-noticed, who-is-attractive, who-is-a-potential-sexual-partner game. I've been in a monogamous relationship with Dean since I was 21, so it never really meant anything, but it was still happening. Until suddenly it stopped.

5. So, this isn't anything earthshaking or personally shattering, but it did take a bit of adjustment and I'll even say a little bit of mourning for something that had been a kind of fun and interesting aspect of interacting with people. And oddly, as I approach 60, it almost seems to be coming back. Maybe the 50s really are just a no-man's/woman's-land. The culture doesn't know what to do with us, and we don't quite know, either. I find myself almost looking forward to 60.

6. This week's interesting read: from Book Riot, a list of contemporary books with strong women protagonists over age 50. My TBR pile for this fall is already full, but maybe I'll try some of these in the new year--the only one I've read already is the one about the two women in Alaska.

7. Here is a picture from Labor Day weekend. This is our usual: I'm sitting and reading a book, and see that tiny, blurry figure on a stand-up paddleboard in the background? That's Dean, being active. Yup.

Me reading, Dean exercising.

Quote of the week (which relates back to the fitness for couch potatoes post), from The Wisdom of the Enneagram: "...the basis of confidence, the feeling of being full, strong, and capable, arises from the instinctual energy of the body, not from mental structures. Thus, Fives grow by coming down out of their heads, and coming into deeper felt contact with their vitality and physicality." I live so much in my head, that idea is almost shocking to me. Really?

Cool. I can work on that. Have a great weekend.

August Reading Wrap-Up

Hmmmm. It's 10:30pm on Monday (Labor Day), and I just realized I should have written a blog post today. Oops. I guess I had a little too much holiday relaxation. It was a beautiful weekend here-- considerably cooler than the previous week, which has knocked back the fires so that the smoke is way better, too. We were wearing sweatshirts out on the lake, but I can live with that.

OK, I thought of something. I will do an August reading wrap-up. Although I'll warn you in advance that I didn't read any books during August that I'd say were drop-everything-and-go-buy-this-book-type reading experiences. Good but nothing great. It's not as long a list as it seems because two of them I started months ago, so I only read the last couple of chapters this month.

I've joined the Modern Mrs. Darcy online book club for the fall-- they had some books coming up that I wanted to read anyway, and I've been meaning to try it for awhile. The August book was I'll Be Your Blue Sky, by Maria de los Santos. I already had another book by that author on my shelves (Loved Walked In), and people were gushing about how much they love this author. So I read them both. She's a great writer, and she puts together an absorbing story. But I am way too cynical for these books. They needed about a triple dose of snark to make them work for me. Recommended for some time when you want a warm, compassionate story about people learning to love and trust.

A Secret Sisterhood, by Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney, about little known literary friendships of famous female authors. Authors like Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte are often seen as solitary figures with few friends outside their immediate family circle. But the authors of this book have uncovered correspondence that proves this simply isn't true. It's a fascinating topic, and if you're interested in the biographies of these writers (those two plus George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Katherine Mansfield), you should definitely pick this one up. But it's marred a bit by a stiff, overly-wordy writing style. 

Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert. I've got mixed feelings about this one. I really want to dislike Elizabeth Gilbert because she's so dang popular, and she's annoyingly positive and (in my opinion) full of herself. (was I unusually grumpy this month?) But there really is a lot of wisdom about creativity in this book. I read it in small doses-- a chapter or two whenever it crossed my mind to pick it up, which means it took me over a year to read it-- and read that way, it's definitely worth reading.

The rest of these I'll just list with the star rating I gave them on Goodreads (out of 5 stars, with 5 stars being the best)
Believe Me, Eddie Izzard's memoir 4 stars
   (uneven. British trans comedian inspires with his persistence and determination)
Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout 3 stars
  (fascinating character study of small-town mathematics teacher, almost ruined by cheesy ending)
The Tenth Island, Diana Marcum 4 stars
  (journalist finds friends and professional renewal in the Azores)
Off the Clock, Laura Vanderkam 4 stars (advice for how to get more done while staying relaxed)
Vinegar Girl, Anne Tyler  3 stars (disappointing rewrite of Taming of the Shrew)

I guess the good news is I didn't read anything awful, either.

It's been a long time since I read a knock-your-socks-off book, if you have, please pass along recommendations!! I do have some new ideas for posts, but I was planning on writing the first one tomorrow (thinking it was Monday), so now I'll probably put it off till next week. Have a good one.