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.

Thinking about thinking

When I was in grad school, I had to take a theory class. Theory, if you haven't been in college in the past thirty years, is now required for undergraduate humanities majors, but it was barely even a thing when I was in college, so I had no idea. I had studied literary criticism, but for that we just read the great critics from Aristotle to the present. And yes, they were mostly white men. (But sometimes they were brilliant.)

So "theory" was new to me, in the sense the word is used now. I'm not nearly pretentious enough or confident enough in my academic skills to explain to you exactly what it means, but I can tell you what I learned from it, and that is to critique my assumptions, and the assumptions of the culture I live in. You methodically learn to question everything you know about economics, war, history, gender, race, politics, and so on.

It's difficult and mind-bending at first, but as you get the hang of it, it becomes fascinating, and even exhilarating. You realize that our reality has no universal inherent meaning, rightness, it's just the way we've been raised to think about things. The sentient multi-gendered sea slugs of the Alpha Centauri system would not understand human homophobia. Our version of culture, the way things are, is a human construction, something we've created by living it.

Theory is also the reason that conservatives have become so disgusted with higher education. For the past couple of decades, conservative parents have proudly sent their kids off to college, only to have them come home full of bizarre ideas that don't make any sense to someone who has never questioned their culture, the world they live and breathe and move in. Their kids are like fish who have suddenly become aware of the water, while the parents are still steadily, and sometimes with great difficulty and perseverance, swimming onward, unaware that water exists.

But for better or for worse, those of us who have made the Theory Leap can't go back. But sometimes we fail to realize two things (maybe more, but I've only got two of them). One is the solid gift of living in a functioning society, where generally speaking things work. Elections happen (yes, sometimes voting rights are compromised), water runs out of taps (yes, sometimes tainted water in economically disadvantaged communities), if you call 911, ambulances or police cars arrive (yes, faster if you live in a wealthier community). Kids get educated, houses are bought and sold, groceries are shipped to grocery stores. Those things aren't true everywhere. Those mystified parents are sometimes right when they react with their own outrage: you don't know how good you've got it.

But also the theory converts have failed to take the next step and realize that the new way we have learned to think is its own human construction. Just as the old, increasingly obsolete, ways of thinking about things are nothing more than the way we've always taught/trained/brainwashed to think, so the new ways are nothing more than the way we've come to think, that will eventually become obsolete again. Rather than realizing that you can always take a meta-stance, you can always widen your scope and broaden your point of view, we've fallen into the trap of thinking that the new ways are the ways to think, the right ways to think. And like the conservatives who are viscerally offended by challenges to their cherished "way of life," we become deeply emotionally attached to our new ways of thinking.

It's so damn hard to avoid this. I've had my own personal realization about this over the past couple of days. I saw a post on Instagram that deeply, strongly disagreed with one of my own deeply, strongly held opinions. (for the record, it was someone considerably farther left than me talking about one of my more moderate--yet still strongly held-- opinions). She was passionate, and heartfelt, and also --in my opinion-- exaggerating.

Exaggerating is one of the principal tools of both of the extreme sides. You spin the story, choose the details you want to see, maybe ignore or skim over the details that might not quite jibe with what you want to see here, and then BLARE YOUR OUTRAGE. It's a standard tactic of a persuasive argument. It's the way legal cases are built, it's the way vacuum cleaners are sold, it's the way people get elected to public office or shunned for life. I'm sure I've done it myself, probably right here in this blog. It's so much a part of the way humans interact that we're probably not even aware of when we've done it.

But even though I know that, I found myself with a ridiculously physical reaction. I was a little shaky, a little sweaty, a little nauseated. Because part of me sees her point-- she is, after all, a liberal, as I am-- I felt a little ashamed that I hadn't fallen into line with her MORAL OUTRAGE, that I hadn't felt that OUTRAGE myself at the situation, before she stated her opinion.

But you know what? I didn't. She can spin the story the way she did, and she can pick apart the situation we were both thinking about, and she can make it work. Because the situation is complicated, and complicated situations lend themselves to that. But she also has to ignore a few details, skim over some broader concerns, and unload an entire mountain of historical and cultural guilt on a situation where one person was acting in the way that he thought he was supposed to act. And she gets to walk away from that BLARE OF OUTRAGE feeling self-righteously pleased with herself, but a few of us are thinking...... wait a minute. And when those few of us include me, I sadly don't usually say anything, because the online climate right now is not about reasonable discussion, it's about EXPRESSING OUR OUTRAGE.

So, I wrote this last week, and I'm still thinking about it. Posting it anyway. Moderates unite.

creative writing week 1

THE MIGRAINE
    4:57 a.m. Sondra swims up toward wakefulness as if she were rising from the bottom of a lake of mud. For a few seconds, all is well. Then slowly her head starts to throb. Damn, she thinks. Dammit all to hell. Maybe if she goes back to sleep, everything will be fine. (She knows it won’t be.)
    5:32 a.m. She wakes up again, but this time the pain is instant. Fuck, she thinks. She is not one to swear, except when it feels like someone is hammering an ice pick into her brain. She rolls to her other side. Maybe that will help. (She knows it won’t.)
    5:43 a.m. John is still sleeping next to her. His alarm will go off at six. Sondra tries to raise the energy to get up and take the hated meds. She really, really doesn’t want to take them. The side effects—the jitters, the upset stomach, the drugged feeling— will throw off her whole day. And anyway it feels like giving in, like she is too weak to conquer a stupid headache. Maybe if she goes back to sleep. Maybe if she punches up her pillow to support her neck. Maybe if she is tough enough, the pain will subside so she won’t have to take the meds. (She knows it won’t work, but she goes back to sleep anyway.)
    6:10 a.m. When she wakes again, John is in the shower. She must have slept through his alarm. Immediately she knows her head is worse. If she gets up right now, she can take the meds and be back in bed before John gets out of the shower. She doesn’t want him to know. He will worry, and there’s nothing he can do. She hates it when people feel sorry for her. When her head hurts this bad, sympathy just makes her mad. She thinks to herself that she should get up. (She doesn’t.)
    6:23 a.m. She must have dozed off again. Her head is worse. Now it feels like a giant is squeezing her head, like there is a fire burning at the base of her skull, like the backs of her eyeballs have been sandpapered raw. She hates her head. She hates the drugs. She does not want to take them. But if she doesn’t take them soon, she won’t have enough time for them to work before she has to get up at 7:30. Fuck, she thinks again.
    6:25 a.m. There is no help for it. She must get up. She pulls herself up, swings her legs over the side of the bed. Her stomach rolls, but it is not rolling hard enough to make her throw up, and that is a relief. Standing, her head feels slightly better. Maybe if she just takes a couple of Advil and some Excedrin migraine. Maybe that will do it. (She knows it won’t.)
    6:29 a.m. She has taken the Advil and the Excedrin, downed some water. She’s heard that headaches are caused by dehydration, so she makes herself drink as much as she can stand. She gets back in bed. Thinks about her meeting. She could call them and say she has a migraine. But she doesn’t want anyone to know. She is ashamed of her migraines the way someone else might hide their lame foot or cauliflower ear.
    6:48 a.m. She hears the garage door open and then close as John leaves for work. The Advil and the Excedrin are not working. She’s either going to have to take the drugs or stay in bed all day, miserable. This is ridiculous, she thinks. I am an adult. I have a legal prescription for migraine meds and painkillers. I have a migraine. Why do I do this to myself? But the compulsion to hide, to pull the covers over her head and crawl down in, is nearly impossible to resist.
    7:02 a.m. It is dark under the covers, and darkness feels better. But the headache is not going away. In fact, it might be getting worse. She has to do it.
    7:11 a.m. She has to do it.
    7:15 a.m. She really, really has to do it. As it is, she will have to reset her alarm for 7:40 so she can shut her eyes long enough for the damn things to work.
    7:16 a.m. GODDAMMIT, she yells, inside her head. She throws the covers off, rolls out of bed, and stomps over to the cabinet. Or she would stomp, if it didn’t make her head throb. She digs through the basket where her meds are, finds the pill bottles. She shakes out a pain pill, puts it in the pill cutter and cuts it in half. She peels back the paper liner of the Maxalt. She takes the half pain pill and the pink Maxalt and swallows them with more water. Goes back to bed. Resets her alarm for 7:40. Waits.
    7:27 a.m. And waits.
    7:32 a.m. And waits.
    7:38 a.m. Finally, finally, the blessed reprieve begins. She will pay for this later, but for now, the pain recedes, like cool rain washing over hot pavement, like sinking into a feather bed after a night on a bed of nails.
    7:40 a.m. Her alarm goes off. She gets up, gets in the shower, tries not to weep with gratitude for the relief of pain. Next time she will take the meds right away. (She knows she won’t.)

7ToT: Bouchercon trip report

1. Bouchercon 2019 was fun. In fact, if you're a book lover, there's probably not much that's more fun than going to a book convention. Everyone around you is as big a nerd as you are. Bouchercon is devoted to the world of mysteries, which they define broadly as anything that involves a crime. So there were authors and readers of everything from thrillers to cozies, and a broad array of panels to match.

Convention Pro Tip #1: Know how to pronounce the convention name. The "boucher" in Bouchercon rhymes with "voucher." It is named after a devoted mystery writer, editor, and critic named Anthony Boucher. Fortunately, I heard someone else say it before I embarrassed myself too badly.

2. It was in Dallas this year, so I spent the first half of the week in East Texas with my mom and sister, and then drove to Dallas on Thursday (because, like a dummy, I didn't read the schedule ahead of time, so I didn't realize there was a full day of activities on Wednesday). 

Convention Pro Tip #2: Look over the schedule before you go. Duh.

3. It was really remarkably well-run, especially since it is done entirely by volunteers. My only complaint is that there was no way you could get to all the panels you wanted to hear. There were seven or eight going on at any given time, and you can only go to one at a time. I think my favorite was the one with a retired trauma surgeon, a forensic scientist, a molecular biologist, and a cop, who talked about things that writers get wrong in books and movies/TV. They were great--very funny, very talkative. That one could have gone on for a couple of hours, easy.

4. Book conventions are great if you want to meet authors. Sandra Brown was there, and Charlaine Harris, Elizabeth George, Rhys Bowen, Laurie R. King, Sherry Thomas, Kellye Garrett, Julia Spencer-Fleming, and dozens more. Of course, you already know I'm way too shy to approach an author on my own, so I only met two.* My friend Karen introduced me to Laurie R. King, author of the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series, who is just as lovely in person as I expected from reading her books (I'm on #8). And I bolstered my courage and stood in line to meet Christine Carbo, who lives one town over here in Montana. I don't know why I'm so scared to walk up and introduce myself, because both of them were very nice.

* three, if you count Julia Spencer-Fleming, who struck up a conversation with several of us in the elevator while I tried not to hyperventilate. I managed not to squee until I got back to my room. But we didn't exchange names, I only knew who she was because I could see her nametag.

part of my #bookhaul

5. At Bouchercon, you get four coupons when you check in, and then you get to go to the Book Bazaar and pick out FOUR FREE BOOKS. Pro Tip #3: get there early on the first day. I didn't get there until late afternoon the second day, so it was a little picked over. But even then there were two books that I really did want, and somehow I managed to pick out two more. Then I bought three more at the paid book area, and bought three more at Half-Price Books (the flagship Half-Price Books is in Dallas, and it is huge). I could barely get my suitcase shut, even with the extension unzipped.

6. Which means that all that good work that I did at the beginning of the year with not buying new books is now shot to hell. Especially because I bought two before I even made it to Dallas, and three a couple of weeks ago in Phoenix that I haven't found shelf space for yet. Oh, well. I'm not feeling particularly upset about it, as you can tell.

Most Memorable Line of the Weekend: Sherry Thomas, in a panel on Women in Sherlock: "Let's face it, the original Sherlock stories are competence porn." 

7. There were plenty of breaks in the schedule, including an hour-long lunch break, so it wasn't nearly as exhausting as it could have been. But at lunch time, everyone wants lunch, and the restaurants in the convention center were packed. This particular hotel only had one nearby restaurant, and everybody knew about it, so it wasn't much better. Next time I do this, because I definitely want to do this again, I need a better supply of snacks. I ran out by my second day. In fact, since there was a fridge in my room, I should have just brought some food. Pro Tip #4: Bring snacks, more than you think you need.

That's everything I can think of about Bouchercon. Hope you get to go some day!

7ToF: BETWEEN TRIPS, which means I am both happy to be traveling, and also completely nuts

Very cool succulents at Desert Botanical Garden

1. We went to Phoenix last weekend for a trip that was business for Dean, and nothing but fun for me. I wish we could do that more often-- Dean's air fare, the rental car, and the hotel room were paid for, we just have to pay for my airfare, food, and all the books I bought. Then on Monday, I'm headed to Texas to spend a few days with my mom and then go to Dallas for the big mystery readers/writers convention, Bouchercon. I've never done anything like this and I'm really excited about it. I will report back.

2. Highly recommend Washington Black by Esi Edugyan. It's the story of Wash, a young boy who starts life as a slave on a sugar plantation. The brother of the plantation owner takes him on, and then the two of them are forced to flee when Wash is implicated in the death of a white man. It obviously has some parts that are difficult to read, but for those of us who are Highly Sensitive Readers (a title I claim with some embarrassment), it's readable. You can do it. Edugyan's writing is wonderful, the voice of Wash is mesmerizing.

3. But I was struck by something that I guess is a sign of the times. (Minor spoilers ahead) Wash starts a relationship with a young woman several years after his escape. Even though they are clearly living together, at no point do they worry about getting pregnant. I've noticed this in various historical romances, too. Even though there weren't really any effective methods of birth control in the nineteenth century, somehow the author projects her own lack of worry about pregnancy back onto her characters. It is so weird. In my generation, as soon as you became sexually active, you worried about getting pregnant. Even when I was married, I worried somewhat obsessively about getting pregnant when I didn't want to. But apparently, today's young women are so confident in their birth control options that they don't know what that obsessive dread of getting pregnant is like.

4. On the one hand, I'm really happy about this. Women will never achieve economic stability if they can't control when they get pregnant, and this tells me that we're getting there. These young women don't seem to know the psychic burden of worrying about getting pregnant. That is great. But on the other hand, it's so not accurate. The consequences of an accidental unwanted pregnancy back then would have been enormous.

I guess it's the same argument as using a Bible that has the pronouns updated to be more inclusive, or Hamilton, where we are reimagining the past the way it should have been. And I am entirely in favor of both of those, so I think I am deciding that this is a good thing.

5. You know what I am tired of? (this is starting to be a regular topic: things that make me grumpy) I am tired of obsessing about skincare. MY GOD. I have a skincare routine--it even has several more steps to it than it did when I was in my 30s and all I had to worry about was preventing breakouts. So it's not that I'm completely uninterested in the topic. But suddenly it seems to have become The Thing to obsessively listen to skin care podcasts and read blog posts and spend hundreds of dollars on trying out new products. It's ridiculous. There are no men who are doing this. It is just women. What is it with us?

6. But now that I've said that *blush* I have to confess that I did a three-week test of a new skin care product someone raved about on buzzfeed. The skin of my chest, which I think we are supposed to call our décolletage, is covered in moles, age spots, dark patches, and red dots (yes, the dermatologist did tell me the technical name and no, I cannot remember it). The dermatologist told me that it's just the joys of aging, and we have to claim our wisdom and our years and whatever other bullshit they tell you, and there was nothing to be done. The downside of a northern European gene pool, I guess. I don't very often envy younger women, except when I see someone with a perfectly smooth décolletage. Then I want to scratch her eyes out.

7. So anyway. I tried Stila's One Step Correct ($36 at Ulta) for three weeks. I even took before and after pictures so I could tell what really happened, and as you might be able to predict, there is not a chance in hell I am posting them. But you know what? While it made zero difference in the number of moles/spots/skin tags, it made a huge difference in how my skin looks. I was, honestly, kinda shocked, because I am a pretty big skeptic about skin stuff. I'm going to keep using it. That particular product may not work for you, but I guess I can't turn my nose up at people who are trying different things, because sometimes you find something that helps.

That's it for me. Have a great weekend.

7ToF: the days go by

1. Suddenly, right at the moment when I'm surprised to look up and see that it's already October, it is October tenth (eleventh by the time you read this). I have no idea how these things happen. Part of the reason I've been busier than usual is that I signed up for a creative writing class-- not necessarily fiction, it's for whatever kind of writing you want to do. Since it's hard to write a blog post after I've spent hours working on something for the class, I might post a couple of the things I've written. So if something strange pops up in your feed, no worries, it's just me, practicing.

2. I've been wearing the same power of cheaters (+1.75) for at least five years. Just in the last couple of weeks, it appears that it might be time to change to +2.00. Ouch. The downward spiral.

3. Paper towel update: I figured out that the reason I like using paper towels for cleaning is that you throw them out, as opposed to using dish/wash cloths, which hang around wet, dirty, and germ-y, waiting to be used again. Yuck. The solution seems to be having enough dish cloths that they can be single use. I use one to wipe down the counter and then throw it in the laundry. For some strange reason, in the past this has felt uncomfortably wasteful to me, which is weird because really it is way less wasteful than paper towels. For now, it is working. They take up hardly any room in the washing machine, so there's no increase in laundry-- which would be a deal breaker. Also, I've been having fun finding cheap cotton cloths.

4. In an effort to get out more, we've been going to more movies. We don't usually go-- in the past, we've been to the theater maybe three or four times per year. It seemed like the worthwhile ones were always depressing, and the fun ones always seemed to involve hours of car chases. Is there anything more boring than a car chase? Apparently that is one of my many unpopular opinions, because all blockbuster movies have car chases, even sci-fi or fantasy ones where they're not actually driving cars, they're driving some hopped-up moon rover or dune buggy or whatever. You just sit there and watch special effects chase around the screen until they're done.  /*rant over*/

4a. Sadly, though, even though we've seen more movies lately, I don't have any to recommend. We've seen some that kept us entertained for a couple of hours, but none that were knock-your-socks-off. Although I will say that The Goldfinch was way better than I expected, given its terrible reviews.

5. Am I the last person to find out about the phone app Serial Reader? You download it to your phone, pick a classic novel, and then every day a snippet of that novel appears in the app. So by reading 15-ish minutes a day you can get through Jane Eyre in 72 days, Frankenstein in 28 days, or The Legend of Sleepy Hollow in 5 days. It's mostly books that are in the public domain, of course, and the selection is a little limited, but he's adding new stuff all the time. I'm working my way through various Sherlock Holmes stories right now. The basic functions are free, or you can pay more to read more than one book at at time, plus other features. Love it.

6. That said, I've realized over the last few months how much self-imposed pressure I've felt to keep up with my TBR pile. One of the things I've lost is the joy of re-reading. I have always loved re-reading my favorite books. When I was a kid, I used to read the Narnian Chronicles every year. I've read Pride and Prejudice at least five times. But now I'm so aware of all the books out there that I want to read, I've allowed myself to succumb to reader FOMO. I don't have time to re-read! I've got to keep up! So now I've resolved to have at least one re-read going all the time. Right now it's The Thirteenth Tale, which I've actually only read once before, but I wanted to see if it's as good as I remember before going on to her new book, which came out this summer.

7. You know what I don't mind? I don't mind being referred to as a guy. When I'm sitting with a group of friends and one of them says, "What are you guys reading?", it just doesn't bother me. It's partly regional-- "you guys" is the midwest equivalent of "y'all." But it's also just not that big a deal. I've been treated with kindness and respect by people who use all the wrong, politically incorrect words, and I've been treated badly by people who said all the right things. I know which I prefer, and it's not the people who can check off all the correct buzzword boxes.

wow, two rants in one post.

Have a great weekend.

7ToF: If you want to destroy my sweater, hold this thread as I walk away

1. I told you awhile ago about my happiness with using microfiber washcloths instead of single-use disposable face wipes, and I am still happy with them (in fact, I just ordered some more). I am not as happy about my attempt to get rid of paper towels. I ordered bamboo towels that come on a roll just like regular paper towels, but you can run them through the laundry and reuse them for months instead of throwing them away. Unfortunately, before they were washed, they were stiff and hydrophobic, and once they were washed, they were very "linty," if you know what I mean. They left hairy bits on everything. So I am still working on a replacement for paper towels. I don't actually use that many, so I'm not sure how important this is to me. If you have any ideas, let me know.

2. Drumming update: I have progressed to Weezer's Sweater Song. The basic version of the drum part has to be the simplest of any top 40 hit ever, bless them.

3.  If you enjoy smart, thought-provoking conversations about books, try the So Many Damn Books podcast episode about the literary canon and how it has changed/should change (episode 120, Back to School)(episode 117, about Lonesome Dove, is also relevant). The Front Porch's episode #242 from this week is an unexpectedly interesting conversation about banned books. I am forever grateful that my parents, conservative as they were, never restricted my reading in any way. It was partly because back in the sixties, parenting was a much more hands-off activity than it is now. But it is also partly because they were really in favor of reading. Left to my own devices, I tended to pick books that were pretty tame anyway (see item 5).

Aside: a further shoutout to So Many Damn Books for recommending the book Dreyer's English in episode 119, which is so fun if you are a word nerd. Funny, literate, frequently deliberately provocative. Five stars. The interview the SMDB guys do with Dreyer is also interesting, and spurred me to re-read To the Lighthouse this summer.

4. I am, for lack of a better term, an immersive reader. When I'm reading, I'm in there, in the story, like it's happening to me. When I was reading Sing Unburied Sing, I had to put the book down at one point because I was so angry and upset that the mom wasn't feeding her children. It was several minutes before I pulled myself out of it enough to remind myself that it was fiction and it wasn't really happening right that minute.

5. And I can't read horror or suspense books because they (not kidding) give me nightmares. I remember not being able to sleep for several nights when I was in junior high and read 83 Hours Till Dawn, about an heiress who was kidnapped and buried alive in an oversized coffin for more than three days. I can't give you a more recent example than that because I never read a book like that again. Gone Girl, which I tried because I kept hearing about it, gave me nightmares. I can recognize her innovations, and the on-the-nose description of a marriage that's a mess, but I'm not reading anything else she wrote. Nope.

6. I'm starting to realize that reading like this really inhibits my enjoyment of what could be some great stories, but I have no idea how to change. If you have any ideas, let me know. I'm working on it right now. I was listening to a tense part of an audiobook yesterday and I paused it, made myself breathe and reminded myself this isn't happening to me. It's not even really happening to her, since it's a fantasy novel. HA. How ridiculous am I??

7. At our house, all of us have... well... ummm.... lucky underwear. Is this just us? When you have something especially scary or stressful happening on a particular day, you wear your lucky underwear. For me, it also extends to socks. I have several pairs of socks (like the ones with pink and purple stripes that my friend Susan gave me, or the ones with goldfish on them) that help me feel brave when I'm feeling intimidated. You can't see them, but I'm wearing my lucky socks! For some reason this week it occurred to me to wonder if we are just as weird as we could possibly be, or if everyone does this.

So, that's it for me. Have a great weekend.

Musings after a writers' conference

We have a very active, very successful local writers group that I've never joined. Not because I don't like them-- I know several people who are in it and they are great. But their monthly meeting is on a night that I have a conflict, and there's the whole social panic aspect of it, and also-- well, I've never really considered myself to be a writer, even though I write blog posts and emails and Goodreads reviews all the time.

Anyway.  This past weekend was their annual writers conference, and it was great. I think I've attended two or three times over the nearly three decades we've lived here, and it is always good. I don't know how they manage to attract such great speakers and keep the cost so low (under $100 for the weekend, including food).

I don't have any writing projects I'm working on right now, or even any plans to start one in the immediate future, but I signed up as soon as I saw the list of speakers because I saw that Bob Mayer was going to be there. He and Jennifer Crusie wrote the romantic suspense novels Don't Look Down (2006) and Agnes and the Hitman (2007), which were the books that convinced me that rom-coms weren't dead and could still be funny and smart and entertaining.

It seemed like a good idea when I signed up, but then I had to actually walk into a room full of strangers and I almost didn't go. I function relatively normally in a social situation where I know people, but throw me into a room with 125 strangers and I turn into my seventh-grade self, immediately heading for the back corner of the lunchroom in a minor panic because I don't know what else to do. But I ran into half a dozen people that I know over the weekend, and it got better. If it had gone on for another day, I might have actually felt brave enough to participate.

The only problem was that this conference is a very practical, how-to-be-successful conference, no woo-woo creativity exercises allowed. There was information about how to find an agent, how to work with an editor, how to use social media to your advantage. So pretty much everybody there was seriously working on a novel or a memoir or some major project.

All weekend every time the person next to me politely asked, "What's your current project?" I had to admit sheepishly, well, nothing, I just came to hang out with the writer people and hear Bob Mayer. I can always sit and listen to smart, interesting people talk, and there were a lot of them there this weekend. I had a good time, even though I didn't need to create a one-sentence pitch, which is what almost everyone in the room was working on.

I gave up on writing fiction years ago, since I have been so spectacularly unsuccessful at it every time I've tried, but over the course of the weekend, a couple of ideas came up that I thought I might try. I'm quite sure it won't result in a novel, maybe it won't even be fiction, but it might be fun to try something new. I'll let you know if it turns out.

Have a great day. I'm off to re-read Agnes and the Hitman, which I haven't read in at least eight or ten years.

I'm Still Standing- midlife mental health again

I'm doing better. I don't know if you can tell. Mental health is such an individual thing, I'm not sure if writing about my own issues is going to help anybody else. But it helps me, so here you go. This got a bit long. Save it for when you're in the mood.

As I told you last time we talked about this, my mental health issues are depression and paranoia. I think I will always be prone to them. It's like being headache-prone (which I also am). You can figure out the triggers, avoid behaviors that make things worse, and do your best to be healthy. But I'm always going to have headaches, and I'm probably always going to go through periods of depression and paranoia.

So understanding my "issues," and having the tools to deal with them and know when I'm headed into a spiral (of either headaches or depression), is only going to help.  

I think part of what I've been going through is the longer-term adjustment to the empty nest. That kind of surprised me. MadMax left last week to start his senior year of college, so this isn't new. We've been empty nesters for three years now.

But there's the initial oh-my-god-my-children-have-moved-out part, which is hard enough but didn't last very long, and then apparently there is another longer adjustment that I am still navigating.

The first part, that wrenching feeling that you tore your right arm off and left it in that freshman dorm, is the more obvious one, the one everyone knows about, and it's not easy. But it's pretty fast. With each of our kids, by the time they'd been gone a couple of months, we were getting used to it.

And then there's Phase Two, which I was not expecting. Why should there be a longer term adjustment? I'm plenty busy. I'm involved in a lot of things in our community. It's not like my life revolved around my children.

But you know-- it did revolve around my children. I was never a helicopter mom, but having kids in the house was the organizing principle of my schedule from 1990 to 2016. That's a lot of years.

Apparently there is a longer term adjustment that I'm still figuring out. When you're a parent, you have obvious significance, even if it's just localized to your kids. You are that child's parent. You are needed. Even when they're 17 or 18, you keep at least some track of where they are, their dentist appointments, their parent-teacher night, their band concerts.

It's going too far to say it gives your life meaning, but it does mean that you've got a certain number of default things that can only be done by you, even if it's just paying attention and being there when they need you. There's a certain amount of purpose involved in that.

And figuring out what is going to take the place of that has been a longer process than getting over missing my kids. Whom I still miss, of course. It's not like you stop missing them, but you get used to it.

So, that's part of what's been going on. Another part of it is still related to something we've talked about before, which is that feeling that this is not the life I thought I was going to have. I guess it's regret, to put it plainly.

That has been a really tough one for me. I didn't think I was going to end up at age 58, living in a rural area with only a string of part-time jobs on my resume and no professional accomplishments.

This is embarrassing to admit, because it makes me sound like such a whiner. I have a hard time even typing it out without surrounding it with snarkiness because I know I sound like a spoiled brat. I am so blessed, so privileged. But the struggle is real, as they say, and pretending like it's not there doesn't help.

My adult life has been so contrary to the way we think these days-- if your life isn't going the way you want it to, change it. Get a new job. Move. Get a divorce. Have an affair. Join a commune. Take art classes, do yoga, change it up, make your life into what you want.

We believe we have agency, the power to make our lives into whatever we want. We believe what the individual wants should be, at least to some extent, more important than family or community ties.

But I couldn't do the life that I had mapped out in my head and have my husband, my children, and my integrity. I can run back through the decisions we made every time we decided to stay here and not move somewhere with more job opportunities for me (which we considered multiple times over the years), and even in hindsight, I would make the same decisions over again. At every stage, I made the decision that was the "right" one for me/us at the time.

It just was never the decision I would have made if I'd been single and childless and unattached. I kept deferring what I wanted to do, thinking someday my turn would come. But then I hit fifty, and I ran slam up against the realization that some of the things I had really wanted to do were not going to happen. Not helped any by the people I could see around me who at least appear to have it all-- family, career, living in the location of their dreams.

Then I had a conversation this summer that has really helped (beyond what we've talked about before, which is realizing how damn lucky I am). I had dinner with one of my college roommates a couple of months ago, the first time I'd seen her in thirty-five years.

I was talking through a brief version of this issue with her over dinner, the decisions I had made that weren't always the ones that I wanted to make. And she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, you made those decisions according to your values. You made exactly the decisions you wanted to, because those are the things you value.

It's one of those ideas that was interesting at the time, but later, it bloomed in my head. It's re-framed the way I think about the past and let me begin to be able to forgive myself for (supposedly) not being "strong enough" to "create the life I wanted."

I've been so angry at myself for not following through on all the things I felt like I should have done, all the accomplishments I should have under my belt. (I should have just put my foot down and demanded that we move!) But I was strong enough to make the decisions that deep-down were the ones that I felt were right for our family. And that's something I can live with.

Refusing to forgive leads to bitterness and hardened anger, even if the person I can't forgive is myself. I'm working on extending grace to myself for not being the person that I thought I would be. I don't think I'm quite there yet, but the more I work on it, the easier it gets. Work in progress.

There's another piece to this, but this has already gone on long enough. More later.

My So-Called Reading Life, Part I Stopped Counting: Bookstagram and Reading Challenges

I've been on Instagram for awhile now. I like it better than Facebook, because for people my age--or at least, among my friends-- it isn't about presenting your best fake self, it's about pictures of grandkids and craft projects and vacations. And we don't usually write long captions, so there's not much in the way of opinions and rants. In other words, it's the way FB used to be.

Matilda, for a book and ice cream prompt

Then last year I discovered #bookstagram, which isn't a separate app, it's just a hastag within instagram. People post pictures of their books or their bookshelves or their bookish stuff. For booknerds, it is totally fun.

I've enjoyed it enough that I've created a separate account for it (@bookspate). Finding people my age with my interests is not exactly easy, but I've found a few who are my age-ish and who love to read. Some of them take amazing photos, and some just snap a pic of what they're reading next to a cup of coffee. It's fun.

And I've discovered to my surprise that it's really fun to mess around with my way-too-many books and my way-too-many tchotchkes and take pictures of them. (The photos in this post are from my bookstagram account.) Weird, yes, but I suppose there are stranger hobbies. I just don't know what they are.

Reading challenges: In a reading challenge, someone comes up with a list of somewhat arbitrary categories--a book with a blue cover, a book set in Asia, a book that was published in the year you were born-- and challenges you to read something in each category within a certain amount of time, usually a year.

The first one I ever saw, maybe four or five years ago, was PopSugar's (their most recent challenge is here), and I thought it was a great idea. I printed out the list at the end of December, set it on my desk, and promptly forgot all about it.

The whole point of a reading challenge is to get you to read more, and since I already read plenty--some might say, and do, too much-- I then decided that I wouldn't do reading challenges.

But somewhere on Instagram I found Book Challenge by Erin. Twice a year, you're supposed to read ten books in four months. At the time, I was looking for a way to motivate myself to read some books that had been on my shelves for far too long, so I decided to try it.

I'm in the middle of my second time, and it is working well for me. It's run through Facebook and I know that's an immediate no for several of you. But if the idea of a book challenge appeals, there are dozens of them out there (google "reading challenges"), so keep looking until you find the one that works for you.

Favorite books-into-movies prompt

I think a year was too long a time frame for me. Ten books in four months is do-able, but it's a short enough time period that I have to get to work on it. Having an accountability system to get specific books read has worked great.

The only problem is that there are sometimes categories that are (for me) a little obscure, so I end up picking a book that I don't really care about just to finish the challenge. For example, in the current challenge, one of the categories is "a book with 'rain,' 'lightning' or 'thunder' in the title," and I don't have a single unread book on my shelves that meets the criteria.

I picked up a used copy of James Lee Burke's Rain Gods, but it is now my tenth book of the current challenge, and I cannot get excited about reading it (unlike several other non-challenge books I have on my TBR pile).

Should I read it and finish the challenge? or bag the challenge and read something I really want to read? There's no penalty if I don't finish, of course, just my own personal need for completion.

Black and white #bookstack prompt

I'm going to start it next weekend and see how it goes. Maybe I will discover an untapped love for James Lee Burke, who lives part of the year near Missoula and is considered one of our own around here. I just don't usually read thrillers. (Is it a thriller? police procedural? I actually don't know. I guess I'll find out.)

Every time I write the last 'reading life' post, I think up six more things to say, so I think I will stop numbering them as part 4, part 5, etc. and post them occasionally.

Have a great day.

My So-Called Reading Life, part 3: choosing what to read, podcasts, and the tyranny of my library hold list

Figuring out what to read next has always been a random process for me (in other words, if you're trying to figure out how to choose books, I'm not going to be much help).

Back before the internet, there were libraries and bookstores. There were certain authors I would always buy if they had published something new, but for the most part, I figured out what to read based on reading jacket flaps in a bookshop, or because of something I overheard or a friend's rec. Choosing a book because of a cool cover illustration was not unheard of.

Now there are more online ways to indulge my love of find books than I could possibly exhaust. There are email newsletters, blogs (yep), vlogs on YouTube, browsing online bookstores (besides Amazon, Powells, Page1, The Bookshelf, and Alibris are ones I've used recently), the bookstagram hashtag on Instagram, and my favorite-- podcasts.

Podcasts are great. I just enjoy listening to people talk about books. I have three that I listen to devotedly-- So Many Damn Books, The Front Porch, and I've told you before about What Should I Read Next-- and half a dozen more that I listen to occasionally (Reading Glasses, Currently Reading, etc.).

So Many Damn Books is two guys, Christopher and Drew, in NYC, I think in Brooklyn (although I'm always a little fuzzy on the boroughs having only been there twice). They love to read, and even though they're the age of my daughter, I love listening to them talk. If I were their age, I think Christopher would be practically my reading twin. On a recent episode, their guest asked what was the first book they stayed up all night reading. I think she was expecting them to say some amazing, life-changing work of art, or at least a thriller, but Christopher sheepishly said it was probably Redwall, and Drew--equally sheepishly--agreed. I heart those guys so hard.

And for the record, I've never stayed up all night reading, even when I was young. Which is weird, because on average, I stay up way later than anyone else I know. It's just never all night. I'm usually asleep by 12:30 (a.m.). And even when I'm reading something I can't put down, somehwere around 2:30 or so, my need for sleep is greater than my need to find out what happens. (or *blush* I flip over and read the end so I can sleep.)

The Front Porch is Annie, owner of The Bookshelf in Georgia, and her friend (and possibly bookshop employee??) Chris, who is a recently minted PhD in (something humanities). I rarely agree with them, but they are interesting and engaging and like I said, I love listening to people talk about books. In a recent episode (which had guest host Hunter instead of Chris), they actually convinced me to give The Goldfinch a try. I've heard so many negative reviews that I had decided it wasn't for me (even though I loved Secret History). But now I think I'm going to try it. Just not any time soon because my library hold queue is already full.

I've already told you about What Should I Read Next so many times that I'll just say I still listen and I still love it. Anne, the host, is not an exact match in taste with me-- she tends a little more toward the soulful, all-the-feels type of book. But there's enough overlap that I can usually figure out from the way she describes something whether or not I will like it. She recommended Good Morning Midnight, To Night Owl from Dogfish, and Less, among recent favorites.

Honestly, the real way I currently figure out what to read next is by my library hold list. Our library allows you to have up to ten ebooks on hold, and I usually have eight to ten books on there. Then I read whatever book becomes available next. It's pretty simple.

About a year ago, I decided I should try to be more intentional about what I'm reading, but now I've decided it's actually a pretty good system. As with everyone who uses their library queue, that means I have the occasional unfortunate problem of three books I've had queued for weeks becoming available within two days of each other, but I suppose there are worse crises.

Oddly, I've had several experiences lately of unintended similarities in the books I'm reading. I've read three books this summer that had to do (loosely speaking) with time travel or the ability to pursue alternate timelines (Dark Matter, Life After Life, and Doomsday Book). And I just finished a book about life in a great English house between WWI and WWII (Remains of the Day) only to find that my next book, a mystery novel called Justice Hall, is also set in a great English house between WWI and WWII. How odd is that?

I've rambled on long enough that I'm even boring myself. As far as I know, everybody who reads this blog is also an avid reader, so you probably don't need any advice about how to pick books. So, one might ask, what exactly was the point of this post? And I can't say I know. But now that I've typed it out, I'm posting it.

Because it's 12:15 a.m. and it's time for bed.

Other posts in this series:
My So-Called Reading Life, part 1: writing book reviews
My So-Called Reading Life, part 2: rating books

7ToF: keeping the beat

1. Last time I told you about my foray into playing percussion, I was in the early stages of learning to play the concert bells. I'm way better at it than I used to be, but still not great-- probably I'm at about the skill level of a high school sophomore. We've had two concerts this summer, one on the Fourth of July, playing patriotic tunes at a local historic landmark, and the other one was this morning at the Northwest Montana Fair, playing some of the same patriotic stuff plus medleys of Sam Cooke and Tijuana Brass, etc.

Bells' eye view of 4th of July concert

2. Aside: I love the fair. Dean is not a fan. He thinks it is dirty and the people who work there are a bit questionable and it's often hot and dusty. But I grew up going to the fair and it is so fun. I used to take the kids every year, and we'd visit the draft horses and the goats and the chickens, and then go to the arts and crafts building to see the quilts and the photography. And of course there's the food. How can you not love fair food? Corn dogs and elephant ears and huckleberry milkshakes, barbecue sandwiches or noodles crisped up in a wok-- and that's only scratching the surface. Totally miss having kids the right age for going to the fair.

3. I'm still the only person in our community band that's willing to play the bells, so that is my main job. But I've also been drafted by another group to play the actual drums, so I've been learning-- snare drum and bass drum, and most intimidating of all, the drum set. I am not a good drummer. Or at least, not yet. I've been working my way through various rudiments, and I'm probably about as good as the aforementioned high school sophomore on snare. On drum set, I am kind of a disaster.

Last week, the dog. This week, the cat.

4. It is entirely different than playing a melodic instrument. In fact, it requires not just different physical skills, but an entirely different way of listening to music. Since I was a flute player and a member of a choir, I've spent my entire life listening for melodies and harmonies. PellMel played the bass, so I made a stab at learning to listen to a bass line, but even so, that is different than listening for the drums. Try it sometime. Drummers are amazing-- frequently their hands and feet are doing entirely different things. Sometimes it's hard to believe it's one person.

5. Honestly, every time I sit down at the drum set I am terrified. (We bought an ancient set for $250 that had been sitting in someone's garage and it is crappy, but sufficient for learning to push foot pedals at the same time that you are playing snare with one hand and high-hat cymbal with the other). I'm so afraid of the damn thing that it's hard to make myself practice. Progress has been slow. I think the people who asked me to play drums with them are starting to regret it-- even though I told them! I told them I was a rank beginner! I think they thought I was just being modest.

6. But I have come far enough that I no longer think of myself as a flute player, and that is cool. I'm not quite to the point where I think of myself as a drummer, but the days when I sat under the director's nose in the front row seem like a distant memory. There I am in the back with the drummers, hanging out in the percussion section. I love that.

Cool nest spotted right at eye level

7. OK, I think we've exhausted the topic of my drumming skills. Or lack thereof. What else can I tell you about for one more thing? Best books I've read this summer? Well, that's easy: The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai, is probably going to be my top book of the year. It's a heartbreaker (in the best sense) about the AIDS epidemic in Chicago in the mid-80s. It's a slow start, but once you get immersed in the story, it's terrific. My other two five-star reads probably aren't going to be for everybody-- The Friend by Sigrid Nunez will probably only work for people who have taken a creative writing class or hung out with creative writing students (??? not sure about that, I just know that reviews on goodreads are pretty evenly divided between people (like me) who found it thought-provoking and occasionally hilarious, and the people who thought it was a dead bore). And I just finished Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, a time travel novel published in 1992 that feels a bit dated (she couldn't imagine cell phones in 1992?), but still has Willis's trademark lovable characters and absurdist humor, even though reading it is sometimes like wading through jello.

OK, that's more than you wanted to know. Drum up a storm this weekend. (Not literally. Dean and MadMax are on a three-day float trip, so no storms allowed.)

7ToF: it's hot and I'm in a gripey mood

Black-eyed Susans
 from our garden

 1. Do you remember the months when I was griping about how cold it was and when would the weather ever get better? Yeah, well, now it's hot and I'm griping again. Dean says I have a two-degree range of comfort temperature-wise, and I suspect he's right.

2. A few weeks ago, when the weather finally got nice, there were a bunch of movies that I wanted to see, but it was so beautiful out after that long winter that we couldn't stand to spend our precious summer hours in a dark movie theater. Now that it's beastly hot and I would actually enjoy sitting in an air conditioned theater, there's nothing I want to see. Darn it.

3. I'm completely opposed to piracy of music, movies, books, and any kind of art. Use it legally. Pay for what you want to read or watch or listen to, or rent it or borrow it from a library. I've said it here before, and I'm saying it again.

4. But you know what makes me gripey? The assumption on the part of people who are outraged about piracy that every time someone illegally reads a book or downloads a movie or a song, it's a lost sale for the artist. I don't know that I've ever illegally downloaded anything, but back in the dark ages when we were making mix tapes on cassettes and passing them around, I wouldn't have bought that music. If I didn't have the tape, I would have just not had the music. I couldn't afford to buy that stuff. Sometimes I even recorded things off the radio, and I would be so mad when the DJ talked over the beginning or the end of the song. But I wouldn't have bought it. A pirated copy isn't always a lost sale.

Can you see what Sadie is staring at?

5. Speaking of legally listening to music, my kids convinced me to abandon Pandora and move over to Spotify. It's way better, mom, they told me. So I cancelled my Pandora membership and transferred over to Spotify. And I tried to like it, I really did. But either I never really figured out how to use it (entirely possible), or I am just a Pandora person. So I am back on Pandora.

6. Pandora lets you start a channel of music by choosing an artist or a song that is in the style you want, and then it magically plays other similar songs. If it plays one that you don't like, you press "thumbs down," and if there's one that you especially like, you press "thumbs up." So over time, Pandora learns what you like, and really it is kind of astonishing the way it chooses music to suit the channel you've created. For example, I have a channel that I started with James Taylor and Bonnie Raitt that plays 70s/80s soft rock, one that I started with the Oasis song "Wonderwall" that plays all my favorite 90s music, and one started with Lorde's song "Royals" that plays a really surprisingly good mix of music from when MadMax was in high school. #Pandoraforthewin

View through the binoculars

7. Back in the 80s, independent coffee shops and sandwich shops were springing up in college towns and tourist towns and it was something new and different. The menu was always on a chalk board, and there were quirky things on the menu that you'd never tried. Now that kind of place is practically a cliché, but once upon a time, they felt cutting edge. Anyway. Once in about 1985, we were at a café in the mountains in Vermont, and the chalk board menu described a sandwich called the "Four Fat Sandwich" that had bacon, cheddar cheese, avocado, and mayo. Possibly the best sandwich I've ever had. Thirty years later I still think about it --although now I would sub deli mustard for the mayo. #foodmemory

Huh. Well, that was a strange mix of stuff. What weird things have you been thinking about? Have a great weekend!

My So-Called Reading Life, part 2: ratings

There has been a push recently among some readers to stop rating books. It's not fair to authors, the argument goes, because ratings have become disproportionately important in determining all kinds of things in this age of data mining--things like product placement and print runs and search result standings.

What could mean nothing to you-- a bad rating that you gave on a day when you were already in a bad mood-- could mean all kinds of dire things for a self-published author who is trying to make a living in competition with publishing conglomerates.

And also, if you find someone who is clever enough to know how to get away with it (they're definitely out there), and you can afford to pay for it, the system can be gamed by posting fake reviews--either positive for your own products, or negative for your competitors.

They have a point. But with all the book ratings I've seen and reader reviews I've read, I've only seen one example where I felt like there was a serious misuse of the system.* I've read about a few others, but overall, I'm not convinced there's a problem here. Generally speaking, good books have good ratings.

So I use the star rating system on Goodreads. It's useful to me. At the end of the year when I'm trying to remember my favorite books, or when I'm having coffee with a friend and she wants to know what's the best book I've read in the past couple of months, I can just scan down the list on my phone. Otherwise I'd have to go through and read the individual reviews to remember what the book was about.

And if you're thinking, if you can't remember the book three months later, it must not have been that great, you have a point. But I also think that if you thought that, you are under the age of fifty. Half the time I can't remember my children's names and birthdays if I'm put on the spot, let alone the name of that great book I read a month ago.

The Goodreads system is one star (not good) to five stars (great). The stars, of course, mean different things to different people and I'm no exception. My concession to the people who are worried about authors' feelings is that I almost never give below a three-star rating.

My rating system is: three stars=meh, four stars=liked it, five stars=loved it. It works for me. For the most part, if I don't like a book, I stop reading it, so those books don't make it onto my Goodreads shelves anyway.

When I first started using Goodreads, I thought I needed to give low star ratings to lower quality books because I had to prove to the world that I have good taste. But a couple of years ago I realized how nonsensical it was to give a three-star rating to a book I loved just because it was genre fiction.

So, now my ratings are purely based on how much I liked the book-- although I'm unlikely to enjoy a really dumb book, so there's that. In my last three books, I gave a four-star rating to both Evvie Drake Starts Over (a rom com) and Life After Life (literary fiction), and a three-star rating to The Idiot (brilliantly intelligent, but tedious to read and ultimately--in my opinion--clichéd). If that offends your literary sensibilities, you are welcome to not look at them.

(My Goodreads page, which I forgot to give you in Part One.)

* it was a YA book published by a Big5 publisher that had a suspicious number--like hundreds-- of short five-star reviews like "Loved it!" or "Great book!" compared to dozens of one- and two-star ratings with long, passionate reviews by readers who felt betrayed by the author over a controversial ending. It was hard not to think that the publisher had somehow used a bot to stack in the positive reviews in an attempt to gloss over an almost universally reviled ending.

7ToF: Catching up, reunion version

1. Remember how I smugly told you in my last post that I never buy books from amazon anymore? Yeah, well, less than TWELVE HOURS later I bought a book from Amazon. I didn't even realize the horror until several hours later. *rolls eyes at self* But I also said the exceptions were gifts and Kindle sale books, and it was a gift to myself. That's my story.

2. It was a gift to myself because yesterday was my birthday, so I am now 58 years old and sixty is looming ever closer on the horizon. I can't quite believe I'm this old, but other than that, it feels pretty good. I don't think sixty will bother me the way fifty did.

aside: I think the age I feel is mid-forties, maybe 46? Some days it's even mid-thirties.

3. The book was Evvie Drake Starts Over, which had been recommended as a fun read at least half a dozen times recently. Since it was my birthday, I let myself read a lot longer than I usually do and I finished it late last night (with some time out for a) boring errands and b) birthday fun betwixt). It is indeed a fun book, and even made me laugh out loud once or twice. It's fairly short--less than 300 pages-- and that is both part of what makes it fun and part of what makes it a little thin. There were a few things that felt under-developed. But you know, fun reading isn't supposed to be dense and heavy. I gave it four stars on Goodreads.

aside: I decided after typing that that I am going to make a push to bring back the use of betwixt. Great word.

4. So, I think I told you that I had three reunions in a row during my two week vacation. There was a week in South Dakota with us and 30 of my cousins and their families, my mom, and an aunt and uncle. Fun and relaxing. Then there was the one night 40-year high school reunion, which was also fun, but since it involved four plane flights in about 48 hours to make it happen, it was a little stressful. Maybe I will write more about it later. It was fun to reconnect with people I hadn't seen in decades, and also to see a couple of friends that I do see more regularly. In fact, that was the best part.

5. Then the second week was here locally-- we rented a place on a lake near here and Dean's siblings and their families and his dad and wife came and spent the week. We weren't really officially hosting since we've all known each other forever and we don't really need a host. But still, it's our home town and we felt responsible-- and the weather was not good. Unlike our usual pristine July weather (which coincidentally we are having this week), last week was rainy and windy and cool. No one --including us-- wanted to hang out and swim at the lake, which was pretty much all we had planned. But we managed to come up with things to do, and I think everybody ended up having fun, even if it was a little disappointing.

6. All of that meant that when things finally calmed down this week, I felt like I needed a vacation from my vacation. I was worn out, and you know-- introvert with two solid weeks of fairly intense socializing. Ouch. I plowed through the mountains of laundry, dealt with leftover food from the rental last week, unpacked, ran errands, paid bills, etc etc and then yesterday for my birthday, I gave myself the day off. It was great. I don't usually do much about my birthday because I've never seen the point of big birthday celebrations-- it always feels like just another day to me-- but it was pretty nice yesterday.

7. So, back to it today. I shouldn't even be sitting here typing this! Hope you have a great weekend, and that you get to relax and read a fun book.

My So-Called Reading Life, part 1

I kicked off the summer with a bunch of 4- and 5-star reads-- in fact, if you go back to the last week of May, there have been TEN. That is unheard of for me. I was thinking smug thoughts. I've got this book picking thing nailed!!

But then I read four that weren't so great, three of them back to back, so it must have just been coincidence. That sounds like a lot of reading to some of you--doesn't she have anything real to do?  (hey! I've been on vacation! and there were four days of airports and planes!). Others are thinking only a dozen books so far this summer? slacker!!  

Whichever category you fit into, this post and the next one or maybe two are about reading, tracking your reading, reviewing books, figuring out what to read, bookstagram, etc etc. You've been warned.

Years ago, I spent quite a bit of time agonizing over the "right" way to do book reviews. One of the main reasons I started blogging lo, these many years ago, was because I wanted someplace to write about my reactions to the books I read. I don't know many readers around here, and even fewer who share my tastes.

But I got a fair amount of pushback when I posted negative reviews. And since it was much more fun to snark about books I didn't like than prosing on about books I did, the negative reviews tended to be longer and funnier and more numerous.

But what about the author's feelings? I heard. Don't you need to be respectful of the author and all the hard work they put into writing a book? And honestly, I have to say that had never even occurred to me.

First of all, in my mind, authors were godlike creatures that exist in some kind of Elysian Fields where they are far too lofty to notice individual book reviews. And secondly, if they did happen to read my review, why would they care what I think? I'm just a lone reader in the hinterlands of Montana. What possible difference could it make what I think about their book?

But once it was pointed out to me, I got it. If I were an author, I could scan through thirty positive reviews and smile, but it would be the one negative review, no matter who wrote it, that would stick in my craw. So in spite of the unlikelihood of an author running across something that I wrote here in this little space, I quit reviewing books-- other than telling you when I read something I loved, like Less or The Intuitionist.

Unfortunately, reviewing books in my blog was how I had been tracking my reading. I needed a replacement for that, so after trying several different things, I've ended up using Goodreads. I signed up for it ages ago but never did anything more than poke around until a couple of years ago. At first I just marked the books I read and gave them a star-rating (more about stars in Part Two).

Then last year I started adding short reviews. I'm pretty sure that no one reads them, but it helps me to remember what I read and why I liked it (or didn't). No matter how negative I am, there are always a bunch of reviews that are far more negative (Goodreads reviewers can be vicious), so I don't have to worry about posting negative reviews anymore-- although I do try to be polite and respectful.

A quick review only takes a few minutes (usually), and I love being able to refer back to them. Since the Goodreads app is on my phone, it's easy to do no matter where I finish a book (on vacation, sitting in a doctor's office, in bed in the middle of the night)--unlike a journal or notebook or a file on my laptop. I can mark a book as read and give it a star rating in less than a minute, and seeing it there reminds me to write a review later.

I know some of you refuse to have anything to do with Amazon, and Goodreads is owned by Amazon, so there's that. But you don't buy anything on Goodreads, so I think their profit is mainly from advertising. Presumably they're hoping you'll learn about great books on Goodreads and then buy them on Amazon, but for the most part, I no longer buy books on Amazon.

Yep, you read that right. I check out kindle books from my library, and I buy books at indie bookstores when we're traveling, and at Target and Costco when we're not-- they're not indies, but they are local and create local jobs, etc. (We don't have an independent retail bookstore in our town, as I've told you a bazillion times now, although we do have a lovely, very good used bookshop.) The only exceptions are for gifts, and also I subscribe to a couple of "kindle deals" newsletters, so I buy kindle versions of books I want when they're on sale for $1.99 or whatever.

This is entirely too much on this topic, but believe it or not, I'm not even close to done. Enneagram 5: loves to go on and on about topics they're interested in, even if their listeners' eyes are glazing over. I will move on to more interesting things soon. (More interesting to you, but probably not to me-- I can't tell you how much time I spend thinking about this stuff.)