Modern Mrs. Darcy 2020

Happy New Year! Every year I take on these reading challenges and really bite off more than I can chew, if I'm being completely honest. I almost finished the Popsugar one... I'll write about that later. This is my list from the much more do-able Modern Mrs. Darcy list!

A book published in the decade when I was born: This was a great reason to reread The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, which I'd read probably 10 years ago. Not only is it my dad's favorite book, but I just turned 42, so it seemed perfect. It juuuuust qualified, published in 1979.

A debut author: The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna by Juliet Grimes. I got this a couple of years ago at a bookstore in Wethersfield, CT (RIP, That Book Store... another casualty of covid that I might never get over). If I'd known how fantastic it was, I wouldn't have let it sit on the shelf for so long. It's not a happy book or a funny book. I recommended it to a friend who said she liked it but it was really depressing. Yeah, that's true. Not a lot of happy things happen to Stella but the writing is so gorgeous.

A book recommended by a source you trust: Why Fish Don't Exist by Lulu Miller. I heard about this on the Reading Glasses podcast. More accurately, I didn't hear about it. They said to read it, but go into it knowing nothing, so that's what I did, and it was so great. 

A local author: Sea Wife by Amity Gaige. A family leaves it all behind to go live on a boat. It's romantic and harrowing.

A book outside my (genre) comfort zone: Love Lettering by Kate Clayborn. Look, Anne recommended it on her podcast (What Should I Read Next?) and in her summer reading guide, so even though I really don't like romance novels, I went for it. I was not impressed but I gave it a shot. Someday I'll have to examine why I don't like romance novels. They bore and frustrate me at the same time.

 A book in translation: Convenience Store Woman by Syaka Murata. A young woman who has trouble fitting into the world finds her perfect niche as a clerk in a convenience store. Translated from Japanese. I really enjoyed this one.

A book nominated for an award in 2020: The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead came out in 2019 but was nominated for this year's National Book Award. A story of race and juvenile justice...?... in Florida, inspired by a real place.

A reread: Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh, because her new book came out this year.

A classic you didn't read in school: the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Sparks. A teacher takes on a group of favorite students at an all-girls' school in Scotland.

Three books by the same author: The Poet X, With the Fire on High, and Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo. Three young adult novels (two in verse) that deal with life as a teenage girl of Black and Dominican descent in New York, Philadelphia, and the Dominican Republic. Her characters are so perfectly drawn that you believe they're real people you know. The author reads the audiobooks herself. I don't read a lot of YA but for work I'm getting back into it, and I was so impressed with these!

Sunrise, Sunset

This has nothing to do with reading, but I feel like I need to write about this. Feel free to skip it; it's the story of loving and losing my cat, Patch. I'll start with his life, as much of it as I knew. I'll tell you when we get to his decline, and you can skip that if you need to. It will resume after the photo of him.

Before we get to Patch I have to talk a little about Mittens. Mittens was the cat I adopted when I was 22. She was the first pet I had that was just mine, in my first apartment. My ex boyfriend and I went to the local animal shelter and picked her out. She and I quickly fell in love. She was estimated to be between 2-4 years old and had been picked up as a stray but there's no way she was feral because she was so tame. Mittens and I lived together in four different homes over the course of 12 years, and then she died of kidney failure at the age of about 16. It was a long decline and it was hard but I felt like I got to say goodbye. 

About six months later, a friend of mine who volunteered at a local no-kill shelter reached out. "We have this great cat that nobody wants," she said. Patch was estimated to be 6 years old. He was painfully shy and was passed over again and again because people just couldn't connect with him when they came to browse the cats. He'd imprinted on my friend but she couldn't take him because her house was at max capacity. She trusted me enough to love and care for him, so sight unseen I agreed.

Patch came home with me in early April of 2014. For the first two weeks he mostly lived under my bed. I decided to just let him do his thing, but when I was home I would sit on the floor next to the bed and read. He would come out when he wanted to and let me pet him a little, then go back under the bed. Before too long, he started to realize that he was home and that I was nice, and then he would come greet me whenever I got home. He was a big dude but he had this cute, chirpy voice. 

He went from being one of 20 cats to being alone, and I was working full-time, so he was alone a lot. The shelter told me that he wasn't really interested in other cats. He never fought with them and he never sought them out. He just didn't care. I still thought he could use a friend, so my boyfriend and I went back to the shelter and adopted Buster, a little black kitten to be his buddy. When they first met, Patch would look at me as if to say, "Was this really necessary?" while Buster played with his tail. The one night I felt movement at the foot of my bed. I turned on the light to see them lying there together, and Patch was grooming Buster. That was it. Brothers forever. 

And this is where you can skip down if reading about losing a pet is too much; I understand. It's nothing graphic or gross; he just got sick. Skip down to under the photo of him holding hands with me and Buster.

At the end of October, Patch started limping. We wen to the vet, who assured me that he was just getting older and had some arthritis. We tried a pain killer but all it did was make him sleep all day. We tried cutting it in half but it didn't stop his limping. We tried a anti-inflammatory but that didn't do anything either. We had a battery of tests done and got second and third opinions, all the while watching him get weaker. He spent a lot of time nestled in some clothes in the back of my closet. Buster would come snuggle in with him and bring him toys.

Finally we brought Patch to a neurologist. Neurology is a fancy word for this will cost all the money you've saved up for your wedding. But I did it anyway. I couldn't say goodbye to him without a diagnosis. I needed to know that we had tried everything. We had a nice snuggle and we got to say goodbye to him before he went into the MRI. I kept telling him it was just until after the procedure, but everyone else in the room (I'm sure including Patch) knew that this was the last time we would see our baby.

The vet told us to leave because it could take up to two hours to know the MRI result, and so we did. When he called he told us that Patch had a tumor in his spine that was crippling him. There was nothing he could do, and even if we'd brought him there immediately it would have been inoperable. 

I don't know what else to say except that we miss our boy. Buster would look for him, especially at dinnertime. When he got bored in the wee hours he would knock over the lamp on my nightstand just to show us that he was feeling angsty, sad, lonely, restless... Matt would just say, "Does the cat want something?" He wants his brother back. I get it. I want Patch back too.

On the day after Christmas, we went to the shelter in town and interviewed lots of potential new friends. Our criteria was simple: does he/she like other cats? Not just tolerate them but actually want to be with them? Because Patch was so important to Buster, and we need someone who will want to play and snuggle. It was a tough decision but we settled on a gray tuxedo cat named Banner, who looked so sad and scared in his profile photos. When we met him he looked us over, then let us touch his face. After thinking for a second, he rolled onto his back and requested belly rubs. (I keep saying we're going to rename him because I have no idea what kind of name Banner is, but Matt is lobbying for Banner Boxing Day as his full name, since we got him on Boxing Day and that makes it a "banner day." That's growing on me.)

We're still learning how the new four of us fit together as a family. Banner is learning the rhythms of our house (which are weird, since I was on Christmas break and Matt is still working from home) and he and Buster are getting used to each other. There has been some mutual sniffing and there is virtually no growling and hissing anymore. We have high hopes for this. My heart wasn't ready but Matt's and Buster's were, and Christmas break was the perfect time for a new cat to come into the fold, so we're doing it. 

I thought it might be disrespectful to Patch to replace him so soon, but really there is no replacing him. He's a tough act to follow. Instead I'm viewing it as a tribute to what a great cat, what a great brother, what a perfect part of our family he was that we can't be a family of just three.

Our time together was much too short. We love you so much, Patchasaurus.

Into the gray and blue world

Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind them All is a young adult historical fiction novel set in Chicago during World War II. Frankie and her brother and sister are living in an orphanage because her mother died and her father has set out to start a new life that doesn't involve them. Frankie is starting to age out of the orphanage, taking classes on stenography and typing while her brother is drafted into the army. Her story is told through the eyes of a ghost who has been spying on her and the other girls in the orphanage, and over the course of the book the ghost reveals her own story as well. There is a mystery here, too. How did she die? 

I loved this book. I know it's long on atmosphere and short on plot, so you have to enjoy that kind of story. Things do happen but it's very important to the author to make sure you're immersed in the mood of it all, so she sidetracks with a subplot, fairy tales, and lots of details about the scenery and tone. In that way it reminds me of The Night Circus or even The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. I love ghosts, I love books that make me feel like I'm inside the world with the characters, and I love a good mystery, so this book checked off those boxes for me. I thought the writing was gorgeous. I actually pictured everything happening in the same color palette as the cover of the book, with the exceptions of the fox, the trumpet, and Marguerite's dress.

I also cheered when I read this quote: "Why does the world demand girls be beautiful, but when they are, punish them for it? why does it punish girls either way? Why does the world want girls to be sorry, some even more than others? Sorry, sorrier, sorriest." It was something Taylor Swift said in her Netflix documentary; at one point she swore in an interview and then clapped her hand over her mouth and said "Sorry!" Then, "Why am I sorry? I'm sorry I swore in the house that I bought with the money I earned from the songs that I wrote about my life..." I digress.

But this book was lovely. I loved it. :)

The real monsters are the scariest.

I picked up this book after hearing about it on NPR a few years ago and finally read it yesterday. It was a great October read for a day when I wanted to be out hiking but I managed to hurt my leg last week and can't do anything like that... so I sat in the recliner with my cats and read this book. 

This is a graphic novel the size of a phone book (remember those?) that starts with Karen, a 12-year-old horror enthusiast living in the 1960s telling you that it's her sketchbook. Through her detailed, brilliant drawings, she tell us the story of her life so far, as well as that of the woman upstairs. Her upstairs neighbor is an elderly Jewish woman living with her husband. They are holocaust survivors and Karen only vaguely understands what that means at the outset of the novel. Early in the book, Mrs. Silverberg is shot, and Karen resolves to solve her murder when the police have ruled it a suicide. 

Karen's life serves as a framing story to Anka Silverberg's, whose voice we hear on some cassette tapes Karen gets from Mr. Silverberg. Karen is also dealing with her mother's terminal illness, her own questions about her sexuality and self-image, and her older brother, who is keeping some big secrets. When Karen draws herself into scenes, she depicts herself as a young werewolf. 

This book was heavy and not for children, despite Karen's age and its graphic novel format. We learn about the horrors of Nazi Germany (especially for women and children) and we see a lot of sex. 

There is a volume two of this story, which I feel is essential now because there are a lot of loose ends to be tied up. I just learned that the publication date for that has been pushed back more than once, so I'm not sure when I'll get to read it! If you're a fan of graphic novels and coming-of-age books, give this one a read.

What could have been

"Chickie Pete and his trumpet. He might have played professionally, why not? A session man in a funk band, or an orchestra. If things had been different. the boys could have been many thins had they not been ruined by that place. Doctors who cure diseases or perform brain surgery, inventing shit that saves lives. Run for president. All those lost geniuses-- sure not all of them were geniuses, Chickie Pete for example was not solving special relativity-- but they had been denied even the simple pleasures of being ordinary. Hobbled and handicapped before the race even began, never figuring out how to be normal."

This is the moral of this book in one paragraph. The Nickel Boys is a book about cycles. We're all born into groups, into patterns that we don't recognize when we're young or when we don't have anything else to compare it to. Elwood is one person who sees it easily, however. His parents are drifters who left him with his grandmother at a young age. His grandmother provides a loving, supportive home for him, and Elwood is determined to do well. Even when the other kids make fun of his glasses. Even when the other kids break his bicycle.

Elwood's determination to let nothing derail him lands him in exactly the wrong place at the wrong time, and the harder he resists, the harder the world pushes back. This book is a heart-breaking look at how people are so often trapped in their circumstances, no matter what they do to break free. It also shines a light on the brutality of our justice system, especially the way it can be abused when dynamics of power and race are factored in. It's a worthwhile read, especially for anyone who works with teenagers.

What do these two books have in common?

Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds

Will is so sad that he's skipped over being sad and went right to anger. He knows the rules. Don't cry, don't snitch, and get even.

Will's brother Shawn was shot coming home from an errand for their mom. Will wants revenge and he's pretty sure he knows who did it.

In this novel in verse, Jason Reynolds introduces us to Will as he boards the elevator to get to the ground floor of his building. He has seven floors between his apartment and the street where he plans to shoot the boy he thinks shot his brother. And on the way down he grapples with the choice.

Will is alone in the elevator... or is he?

Jason Reynolds wrote this book inspired by A Christmas Carol. If you're familiar with that story, then you already have a hint, but I don't want to give away too much! Part of the wow factor of this book is the surprises you find. 

This book has so much to think about, even if you're not a teenager. It will take you less than an afternoon to read. Read it!

Between a hoax and a scam

This isn't a book review but it's kind of about a book... 

Since the shut-down, my boyfriend has been watching a lot of Law and Order in the background while he's been working from home. When school ended I started joining him and we laugh together about some of the weird dialogue. They couldn't just say two people were having an affair; they were "sweating up the sheets." We have fun spotting character actors and I Google where we might know them from. It helps that WE TV is showing nothing but Law and Order, all day every day. We joke that I have to leave the house on the hour to go for a hike or to go to the store because if not I'll get sucked into another ripped-from-the-headlines plot.

Yesterday, Matt texted me and said, "Remind me to tell you about the most ridiculous Law and Order plot yet when I get home." Look, as someone who likes to write and still has aspirations to publish a novel, I know it's not nice to pick on other people's writing. I've also just taken two levels of a sitcom pilot writing class, and this stuff is way harder than it looks. So if the plots of Law and Order episodes are little far-fetched it's fine. I still couldn't wait to hear about it.

Matt had just watched an episode called Faith about a publisher who was murdered because he caught onto the fact that the teenage author with ALS whose memoir he was publishing might not have been real. I said, "Oh my God, Matt. This isn't crazy. I knew this person! This is a real story!"

So I'm going to take you all back to 1995. We were early adopters of the Internet in our house, at least among people I knew. We were faithful AOL users. I liked to hang out in the teen rooms and I remember specifically spending time in chat rooms and message boards for teenagers who liked to write. I started chatting with a guy whose screen name was TONE123 (at the time I was SybilVane, named after a character in The Picture of Dorian Gray.) TONE123 told me that his name was Tony and that he was my age (about 16) and he was a published author. For real, a kid my age had published a book. I was fascinated. He'd written an entire book, found himself an agent, and had the thing published. It was a book I could go to Waldenbooks and buy. It was called A Rock and a Hard Place, and I did indeed go to Waldenbooks and buy it. It was a harrowing memoir of the child abuse he suffered at the hands of his biological parents. The story was that his parents used to physically and sexually abuse him and allow their friends to do it too; in fact, that's why he was also suffering from AIDS. It was horrifying. It was the saddest thing I'd ever read. And it was all a true story. I knew this guy. His full name was Anthony Godby Johnson, and we were IM friends. 

We used to email each other stories back and forth and give each other feedback. I chatted on the phone with him once. He supposedly lived in New York City and I was in northern NJ. Once, some TV developer he knew was putting together a focus group of teenagers and my dad drove me and my sister into NY to learn more about the variety show they were brainstorming. Tony was friends with Oprah, Mr. Rogers, Keith Olbermann, and Armistead Maupin. And me, apparently. And I'm sure lots of others. This was before the days of Skype and Facetime. There was no video chatting. There was email and there was the phone, and catfishing was easy.

Somewhere around when went to college, we lost touch. My dorm wasn't outfitted with the ability to connect to AOL. I could use email from campus but not IMs or anything. We did email once in a while but his responses were far apart and finally we just... I guess lost touch. 

I hadn't thought about Tony in a long time, but several years later my dad asked my sisters and me at Christmas to go through some boxes of things from our house in NJ and take whatever we wanted; the rest was getting tossed or donated. In my pile of books was A Rock and a Hard Place, all highlighted and underlined. By then, Google was a thing and I was wondering what was going on with Tony. Was he even still alive? Had he written anything else? Google turned up a bunch of links instead about the fact that there never was an Anthony Godby Johnson. I found this article by Tad Friend in The New Yorker. I also learned about Armistead Maupin's novel The Night Listener, which was made into a movie by the same name. 

There's something about finding out that something you just took to be true having been a total fabrication. It kind of shifts the ground under your feet for a second. Tony was a completely made-up person, fabricated by a woman named Vicki Fraginals, who claimed to be his adoptive mother. Nobody had ever met him face-to-face. He wasn't allowed to meet anyone because he was soooo sick, but Vicki had fooled a literary agent and a publisher enough to get his memoir published and distributed. That added legitimacy to it, so none of the celebrities (at least at first) questioned anything. Internet and publishing hoaxes now are much more common, from James Frey's A Million Little Pieces to Catfish. 

I went down a little rabbit hole last night, watching a youtube video of Keith Olbermann talking to Armistead Maupin about the fact that they'd both been tricked by Vicki. Keith is angry. Armistead seems to have dealt with it. 

I think it's time I read and watch The Night Listener. I was only a small blip on Vicki's radar, I'm sure. I wasn't rich or famous. I had nothing to offer her as far as fame or publicity. It's kind of creepy that she hung out pretending to be him in AOL chat rooms. She was clearly a pretty disturbed person. There is going to be a short film released soon called Tony Fraginals made about Tony Johnson by another teenage friend of his. I couldn't resist sending him an email about Tony. I haven't heard back yet but I can't wait to watch the film. 

Like juicy gossip over pasta...

Lately I've put my finger on one of the things that makes me fall completely in love with a book. A narrator can make or break a story, and I love the kind that makes it feel like the narrator is actually telling you the story. You're somehow a part of it all, even though you're just the reader. This is one of those books. As soon as you open it up, you feel like the narrator (whose identity you find out much, much later) is pressing you down into a comfy chair and handing you a plate of pasta and meatballs, saying, "Sit. Eat. I have a juicy story to tell you and you're going to need that spaghetti and wine." The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna is an utterly gorgeously written novel. It's one of those books that aspiring novelists (like me...) read and think, "How did she do this?" You do feel a little like your favorite brutally honest grandma is laying it all out for you.

Picture it: Sicily, 1922.

Stella is born in the village of Ievoli in 1920. Over the course of her life, she has a lot of brushes with death. The family story is that even though her name roughly translates to "lucky star," she's cursed by the ghost of the older sister who died before she was born. Maybe, maybe not? 

Throughout the story you meet her entire family, including the generation before her, and learn how hard survival was in Italy for a family at that time. In her late teens, they immigrate to Hartford, CT, and life goes on. I really don't want to say much more because I don't want to spoil anything that happens. But trust me, it's juicy. It's twisty and turny. And there is just enough nudging and winking by the story teller to keep you going, "And then what? And then what?" I need to talk to Juliet Grames and find out if there is even more to this story, based loosely on her own grandmother. I actually cried at the end of this book, and I don't really cry at books. 

Content warnings for some scenes of violence against women and children. They're short scenes, but two come pretty close together about 2/3 of the way in and I had to actually walk away from the book for a couple of days to process that.

My great-great-great-granparents, Clemente Serafini and Giuseppa (Pizzutti) Serafini.

Reading this made me think of my own family of immigrants. My mother was half Italian; her mother's family was from Italy (but from Frosinone, not Calabria). They arrived in the USA and settled in Leominster, Massachusetts in 1905 (the Lanzas) and 1921 (the Roccas, by way of France). Mary Lanza was born in 1905, just a few months after her parents arrived, and was the first of eight children. Renaldo Rocca was a young adult when he arrived. Family lore is that Mary and Renaldo were an arranged marriage. Their daughter Josephine (my grandmother) told me that their families knew each other from "the old country." Reading this book made me think a lot about them, and I wished I could talk to my great-grandmother about it. I'm sure she had stories from her parents about Italy. I was lucky enough to have her in my life until I was 22 and she was 95. We did make ravioli together and she was the kindest, sweetest, tiniest and possibly my most Catholic relative (although there is some competition on Dad's side for that title). 

   

Left to right: Mary (Lanza) Rocca; her parents Giovanni Lanza and Giulia (Serafini) Lanza

I have a cousin (who is actually my mother's first cousin if we're being technical) who based an entire TV show around Mary and her ravioli. 

And now Mary, Josephine, and my mother Janet are all gone. The Italian blood has been diluted by my grandfather's English/Irish and my dad's Eastern European. Still, 23 and Me and Ancestery.com confirm that I have it! Reading this book during quarantine inspired me to start studying Italian in earnest. Someday we'll be able to travel again, and I've only seen a small portion of Italy. I really want to go to Alvito, the villiage in Frosinone where my great-greats and great-great-greats came from. I feel like in order to really do it right, I need to have a basic mastery of Italian. I want to correspond with someone over there who knows how to find records and find out where my relatives actually lived. I want to be able to speak Italian with people who might be my distant cousins. I've already heard from someone on Instagram who saw (Mary's mother) Giulia's photo and said that he has her maiden name as his last name and he believes he has her mouth. His name is Mario. 

We went to Venice and had a day trip to Trieste in 2016. We first were in Hungary and Austria, and when we got to Venice after a bus, a train and a boat and then a vaporetto, we had to haul our luggage up two flights of stairs. We checked into the hotel and then found a place to have dinner and I had a chance to finally just sit and look around and take it in. My boyfriend asked why I was crying. I said, "Because I'm in Italy." My mom never made it to Italy. My grandmother told me many times that she wanted to see it. And there I was, about to order a plate of spaghetti on a palazzo. For a few days I lived almost entirely on spaghetti, gelato, and white wine, and somehow my pants still fit by the end of the trip. I can't wait to go back.  

Anna Josephine (Rocca) Gould; Janet (Gould) Lewin

This entry is kind of all over the place, which I recognize. This book brought up a lot, I guess! I'm not a big re-reader but this is one I will re-read. I promise you'll love it, or I'll take you out for pasta. Even if you do love it (WHEN you do love it) I'll still take you out for pasta. I want to talk about Stella with someone else who's gotten to know her. 

For another book about someone who's almost died again and again, I highly recommend the memoir I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O'Farrell. For a book with a similar vibe, try My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. (I need to read the rest of that series.)

Crafting and Reading go hand-in-hand

My nephews are summer babies. One has a birthday on June 27 and the other is July 25! They're turning 6 and 8 this summer (or 8 and 6, if you want to go in the right order) and they've been reading Harry Potter with their parents. I bought them each a gift from their wish lists but I wanted to make something special as well.

And so, here we go:

The Sorting Hat!

And Hedwig!

I found both patterns on Ravelry.

Both are crochet. The Sorting Hat is a free pattern that you can find here.

Hedwig is a paid pattern called the Wizard's Snowy Owl. It was more challenging for me because while I made the pieces easily, I haven't done a lot of stuffed animals. Connecting everything was more of a challenge. 

What a tangled web...

"There's nothing like a PowerPoint presentation to stamp out green shoots of happiness, especially one involving sound and visual effects." This is the dry humor you'll find in Richard Roper's debut novel, How Not to Die Alone. This is a workplace rom-com with a twist.

Andrew works in a government office that deals with people who have been found dead in their homes with no obvious next-of-kin. Andrew and his coworkers have to enter the homes after the person has been removed and search for anything they can find that might give them a clue as to who might want to know that this person has died. They also need to look for anything they can that might help pay for the person's funeral. It's a grim job, but someone has to do it. It also sheds light on how important it is to stay in touch with those who matter to you and to check on your elderly neighbors.

Andrew is someone who has no next-of-kin. His parents and his sister have all died, and he has no other family. The problem is that he's told his coworkers all about his wife, Diane, and their two kids, David and Stephanie. Andrew has a spreadsheet that helps him keep track of the details he's told everyone about his family, including allergies, hobbies, and proclivities. Everyone in the office believes him; they don't have a reason not to, but then Peggy comes on board. Peggy, who shares Andrew's sense of humor and is everything he could want in a partner, believes that he's very happily married with two children. So now what?

This book reminded me of a few things:

• the story of Joyce Vincent, a London woman who died and was not discovered for more than three years in her apartment (and the documentary about her, Dreams of a Life)
• the rom-com While You Were Sleeping, in which Sandra Bullock falls in love with Peter Gallagher without ever actually meeting him, and his family comes to believe they were engaged. It's a lie that she can't see her way out of once she stumbled into it.

This book is a 4/5 for me. I felt for Andrew and his situation, and the humor was wry and British. This would be a good vacation book, on the off chance that anyone is taking a vacation this summer! Maybe read it in your back yard. ;)

There is a trigger warning for this book for a scene about suicidal ideation, and there is a lot of discussion about death, grief, and loneliness. 

What if it was an actual train?

In response to the recent Black Lives Matter movement's surge, I decided it was time to make sure I was reading a diverse variety of authors, and black authors specifically. Of course, it wasn't the time to buy anything new (thanks, coronavirus) but I gathered the books I knew off the top of my head that were already in my house, and I had a nice little pile.

Not pictured that I remembered later: The Mothers by Britt Bennett and My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite. I decided to start with The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, because I'd heard so much about it.

He doesn't need my little blog that hardly gets any traffic to boost his signal. ;) This book won so many prizes, including the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. The premise is this: what if the Underground Railroad was an actual underground railroad? Who ran it? Where did it go? This is the only bit of magical realism in this book, if you even could call it that. It's more like speculative fiction. It follows one enslaved woman named Cora from the plantation in Georgia where she was born to... I can't give away the ending. Sorry, but I can't!


The horrors of slavery and of trying to escape aren't sugar-coated. I was actually stressed out reading about her harrowing journey. You also meet the people who help her along the way and the slave-catcher who relentlessly pursues her. The penalty for helping or harboring a fugitive slave was death, and there were still people willing to do it. Not all of their stories end happily, but that's real.

I'm finishing up a novel I started before this one, and then I plan to read White Fragility, which is by a white author but is important, especially in this moment.

A Little too Weird.

I got this signed ARC of Little Weirds by Jenny Slate at my favorite local independent book store. (As a gift from the owner! I know they're not allowed to sell ARCs!) The owner got it at Book Con in 2019. I was excited because I liked Jenny Slate during her short stint on SNL and in the film Obvious Child, and her web series about Marcel the Shell with Shoes on is adorable.

Jenny Slate is clearly a talented writer. I was jealous of some of the phrases she turned. I thought this little book of essays would be a good one to breeze through on a rainy afternoon but it took me months to get through. I would pick it up and read one or two essays and put it down again. She creates vivid images and certainly has fun playing with words but so much of it is a run-on, stream-of-consciousness spiral.

Example: she's describing a garden and choosing the plants she wants. "The flowers looked like the shape of a fruit, and I always like it when those two images, fruits and flowers, gesture to each other. I like that and I always have, and I like it when fruit is in flower arrangements and I like it when flowers are in the salad or on cakes and I like it when fruits are on women's heads in their hats or if their whole hat is fruit." This is how 90% of the book goes, and it just wasn't for me.

Then there were little gems that jumped out at me, which made me want to finish it out and find more gems. She has an essay of nice things to do for yourself. There is a brilliant two-page essay comparing holding a big, unwieldy dog to trying to navigate life after a breakup and dealing with the person who broke your heart. There was a metaphor that for me sums up the physical feeling I also get when I'm dealing with being depressed and anxious. "I try to imagine the blood in my arms and all I can imagine is air being blasted through pipes made of paper." I thought I was the only one. And there is the brilliant way she imagines a conversation between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, if they could look at the way that humanity turned out and express their disappointment to each other. "This is not our fault."

So while overall Little Weirds was too weird for me, there were little glimmers in there that worked for me. I wouldn't say it wasn't a good book but the frenetic, run-on style isn't up my alley. I'll happily check out her next project, though. She has a lot to offer!

Tracking Your Reading

I am a list-maker. I love to make lists and I love to cross things off. I have all kinds of ways to do this. I use Goodreads.com for my reading lists: my to-be-read (way too long for this lifetime), my current reads, and my past reads. I confess that checking things off can just as satisfying as actually completing them. Maybe that means I have a sickness of some kind. ;)

I have been thinking of using Book Riot's reading log this year as well. I mean, it's not like I don't have plenty of time at my computer right now. ;) 

There was also a great episode of What Should I Read Next about how people track their reading. I was listening to it while I was driving so I need to go back and give it a re-listen and take some notes to decide if I want to try any of those things. For now, though, Goodreads has been my way to go.

Recently I listened to My Life With Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues by Pamela Paul. I did this as an audiobook. (Side note: A lot of times when I'm listening to a book while I'm hiking, I associate certain spots on the trail with parts of the book. With this one, I know that when she was talking about the trip she and her sister took to Auschwitz, I was hiking toward Pryden Falls in the Paugussett State Forest in Newtown, CT.) This book is a memoir about Pamela's life growing up as a reader and becoming the editor of the New York Times Book Review. She talks about her childhood, her family life, and her travels through Europe and Asia before beginning her career in earnest. It was refreshing, honestly, to read about the ways it went wrong and almost went wrong, because I know that when I've traveled by myself there have been some moments that in hindsight I really could have handled better! I'm glad we both ended up ok!

But through all of this, she has kept the same fat notebook chronicling all of the books she's read. She talks about how she was so protective of it and what happened when a boyfriend wanted to write his reading in it too. (How about get your own?) And I'm jealous because I didn't keep such a notebook! I I've gone into Goodreads at times and recorded books I know I read before I started using it. Part of it was for the thrill of list-making and part was sort of for record-keeping. ;) There's no way I'm going to remember everything I read in middle school but also I know that I read every Babysitters Club Book as soon as it came out, so if I look at the pub dates that will be easy to find! I can pinpoint a lot of books down to what grade I was in. I have a terrible short-term memory but lots of things from when I was a kid have stayed in there. 

I give this book 5/5. I learned about it listening to the Well-Read Podcast. :) I also enjoy Pamela Paul's New York Times podcast!

Don't Overthink It

I was given the opportunity to read an advance copy of Don't Overthink It by Anne Bogel.

Anne is one of my favorite book podcasters (What Should I Read Next?) and has written three books now. Her third, Don't Overthink It, is a manual on how to break the cycle of ruminating on decisions that should be made instead of debated and debated and debated... At first I didn't really know if this book was for me, because I honestly can be very decisive. I didn't hesitate about getting a new cat when my beloved Mittens died, and then I didn't debate about getting my second boy; I just knew we needed to. When we found the apartment we live in, as soon as we toured it and found out that it was in our price range, I was good to go. When Matt suggests a vacation destination, I usually just agree because I want to go everywhere I haven't been, so I don't make pro/con lists. I just start trying to learn Norwegian or Hungarian.

But then I realized that it's not the big things I overthink. I get lost in the weeds on the little stuff. How should I phrase this email to a parent? Is this really the healthiest cat food for the boys? I can't go on that hike because I haven't printed the trail map yet and the printer is out of ink but the one I do have printed isn't where I want to go today because I don't want to drive all the way to that park so I lose 30 minutes deliberating and I'd already almost be there by now...

I know I need to meal prep but I can't make decisions on what to cook because I start getting lost in things like proteins verses carbs versus fats, and what's a good carb, and what's a good fat, and when the recipe calls for a sweet potato, how big should that potato be, exactly? And then I decide to put off the thinking until tomorrow and just order Chinese food.

Anne lays out strategies for freeing up your brain space and just making the choices. My favorite chapter is the one called "Small Shifts Toward Simple Abundance," in which she lays out the decision of whether or not to buy herself some flowers when she's grocery shopping at Trader Joe's. She goes on to talk about the little things that make life richer, like a small square of dark chocolate after dinner or writing with a high-quality pen. I'll admit that I already tend toward letting myself have the little things, so I agree with all of these sentiments! For me, it's not flowers; my little cat will eat them and poison himself. But it's books and yarn, for sure. I have to limit myself because I love to treat myself to that new best-seller that's all over Instagram or that gorgeous color combo I found at Michael's. I've learned to tame it down a bit by taking pictures with my phone of the books and yarns that I really like and revisiting them. If I read a bunch of the books I have in my house already and rehome them by June, then I can buy more books. If I finish a few of the projects I'm currently in the middle of, I will have space for new yarn.

Finally, something that I plan to write down and keep on my desk at work is this quote:

"We can be creators of justice, love, joy, compassion, and peace. But when we take a look at the world around us, it's clear that these things don't just happen; we have to think about them - and then act on those thoughts."

As a teacher, this is a very important statement to keep in mind.

Why is this book a book?

For the second year, I've taken on the Popsugar Reading Challenge. I've had a lot of fun finding things to fit the prompts. In another entry I'll talk about which books I chose and what's still left. I haven't only been reading books this year that fit the prompts, so there have been times I've had to get creative. I read Joshilyn Jackson's excellent novel Never Have I Ever, and I realized that it could fit into the "two books with the same title" prompt if I found another book with that title. It's a common enough phrase, so I did a search on my library's audiobook shelf, and I found Never Have I Ever: My Life (So Far) Without a Date by Katie Heaney.

And... why?

At least it was short enough. I was able to get through it in a few days, between my commute and a couple of hikes in the woods. But still. I would have given up on it, but I needed a book to fill this prompt and it was short and I'd already downloaded it. When it was short and I'd already downloaded it are the two biggest things a book has going for it... you know where this is going.

Katie Heaney wrote this book in her mid-twenties. She was 25 years old and claimed at the outset that she'd never, ever, been on a date. This was a bit of a truth-stretch because you will find in the book that she in fact had gone out a couple of times with a couple different guys. I don't know how she's defining date. In any case, she talked about how awkward she was. It was a lot of rambling pages about how she and her friends would group-text about the guys they liked and discuss the subtle nuances of what they said and whether those things meant anything. "If he texted me this, is that good?" The stuff my friends and I did in high school, but we had to do it in person or on the phone because group-texting wasn't invented in the early 90s. 

I get that sitting here at 40, as a person who has always had a lot of contempt for the whole charade of dating and the game-playing, I'm not the target audience. But still. I don't really understand who looked at this manuscript and thought it was interesting enough to publish as a book. 

And now, years later, we have the answer. The real reason Katie Heaney didn't connect with any of those guys she was trying to make herself like is that she's gay. She wrote this article for the New York Times that sums it up really well. In fact, her last sentence is something that could apply to all of those agonizing group texts from back in grad school. (Grad school! She was still doing this in grad school!) "If you have a question, and especially if you find yourself asking the same question for five years or more, chances are good you already know the answer."

According to her Instagram, she is now married to the woman she describes in the Times article, and I couldn't be happier for her. It does answer a lot of the weird agony in the book. However, it was good to get two prompts checked off. 

My review of the other Never Have I Ever will be up soon. If you don't want to wait for it... just read that one. Skip this one.

Gotta watch out for those elderly ladies...

An Elderly Lady is Up to No Good.

This tiny little hardcover with its perfect cross-stitch illustration immediately called to mind Sofia Petrillo. This is a book about a little old lady who kills people.

Maud is the last one left in her family; her parents and her sister died a long time ago, and she lives rent-free because of a loophole in the housing contract her father signed a lifetime ago. Maud may seem defenseless and vulnerable, but she has a very long memory and no tolerance for fools. She could be called a serial killer, technically, but she really doesn't do it because she's blood-thirsty. She just has no time for people who might be getting in her way.

This is a tiny little book that would be a perfect stocking-stuffer. It contains five short stories about Maud and her various justifiable murders. The idea of a sweet little old woman being a killer is the novelty that engages the reader, but Helen Tursten does a great job keeping the reader involved because of Maud's so unlikeable that she's likeable personality.

Other books about seniors citizens from Sweden (who don't kill people): A Man Called Ove and Britt-Marie was Here by Frederick Backman
Other Nordic Noir: The Snowman by Jo Nesbo 

It Only Hurts When I Breathe

"I don't know why I'm doing this to myself," I said to the man at the deli who saw me reading this book and remarked that he thought it was excellent. I mean, yes, it is, but that doesn't mean it wasn't hard to read.

One December evening, after visiting their daughter in the ICU, Joan Didion and her husband sit down to have dinner, and he suddenly dies. Right there at the kitchen table.

What follows in this book is Joan's journey through her grief. She doesn't go to support groups, she doesn't turn to religion. What she does do, without meaning to, is slip easily into denial quite often. John will be home soon. I can't donate John's shoes to charity; he'll need them when he gets home. She eagerly reads over the results of the autopsy. There is something about if I can just find out why this happened it can be undone. That's the magical thinking. He's not really dead. It's the disconnect from reality. If you don't accept the fact then you don't have to hurt because he's not actually gone.

My mother died when I was 21, but there was nothing sudden about it. She had a long, slow battle with breast cancer that spread. For a long time after that, it didn't seem real. I was there, physically there, holding her hand when she died. But I still sometimes expected her to come home. There were times I would forget for a second; a song would come on the radio and I'd think, "I'll have to tell her I heard this." Then I would remember. But that's not even what I'm talking about. There was also the magical thinking.

That whole year was an alternate reality. For months, I would hear, "I'm sorry about your mom." The first person to say it was my then-boyfriend's mother. I called him after everything calmed down from the spike of activity. I was alone in the room with her when she died. I'd told her it was OK to let go, and she did. And then I freaked out. My dad was at the pharmacy getting more pain medication and we'd never talked about what exactly to do at the moment it happened, and I lost my mind. I called 911, which was exactly the wrong thing to do. They swooped in and did CPR until my dad could produce the hospice paperwork stating that they shouldn't be doing that. One of my sisters noticed the neighbors all standing outside on our normally very quiet street, staring at the ambulance in the driveway, and she started yelling at them. "My mother just died! That's what happened! Go home now! Stop staring at us!" Dad calmly brought her back inside. I called my aunt and just said "She's gone." That's all I could choke out. Then I called my boyfriend because my aunt and I couldn't bear to stay on the phone; she called my grandmother. My boyfriend was at work, but his mother answered. When she said he wasn't home I just said it again. "She's gone." "Oh, Chrissy, I'm sorry."

I'd just started my job two weeks before. I took a week off for the services and the day I came back, people I had only seen once or twice were coming up to me. "I'm sorry about your mom." "I'm sorry about your mom." It would blindside me sometimes. I even heard it at a chiropractor appointment. I went to see a doctor because for some reason I was storing all my stress in my right shoulder. It was at the point where turning my head was painful, and for some reason I thought a chiropractor would help. After my appointment, I was paying the receptionist and she said, "I'm sorry about your mom." I said, "How did you--" "That lady who just went in after you is your sister's French teacher. She told me." Is it crazy that that enraged me? Because it enraged me, but I said thank you and left.

Everyone was well-meaning but it was so stressful. First of all, I really wanted to compartmentalize and not think about home at work. That wasn't happening. Also, nothing to be sorry for... because the whole thing just felt like a lie. When I would tell people my mother died, a voice in my mind would say, "No she didn't! Why are you saying that?"

This past fall I went to the Gilmore Girls Fan Festival in Kent, CT. One of the events was a screening of a film made by Edward Herrmann's daughter called Home. Edward Herrmann, known to all of us as Grandpa, died of brain cancer, and his daughter made a beautiful short film about magical thinking called Home. In it, a young woman can't accept her father's death to the point where she keeps looking for him and trying to call him. I told Emma after the film that I got it.

Mom died almost 19 years ago and I still look for her.

Home by Emma Herrmann:

Fixer-Upper, Moroccan Style

We just visited Fez, which is why I decided that I had to pick this book up when I saw it at The Book Barn. I love to read books that take place in cities or countries we'll be visiting. It helps me prepare for the trip.

My boyfriend first floated the idea of visiting Morocco in the winter. We've gone on a few vacations overseas before, but always to Europe, so the idea of going to Africa was really exciting. First we spent a week in Spain, then took a boat to Tangier, and a bus to Fez. I finished this book during our first couple of days in Spain, and left it in the hotel where we stayed in Cordoba on the communal book shelf.

Before setting foot in Fez, I will say that it was hard to picture exactly what this author was talking about. She and her husband are Australian journalists who spent time in Fez and found that they missed it so much when they got home that they decided to buy a house in the Medina and fix it up. This was basically like Fixer Upper, Morocco-style. If you like to read about home renovation but get bored when things seem to mostly go smoothly, this book will keep your attention.







They buy a house in the medina. Before we arrived at our hotel in the medina, I really didn't appreciate how complicated it really is.














The medina is truly a dizzying maze of dead-ends and cobblestones. Most of it is covered. Take ten steps in the wrong direction and you're hopelessly lost. Duck your head, go down this passage and through a door that looks like it will just lead to another dark lane, and suddenly you're in a gorgeous riad (a large house) that is covered in gorgeous tiled walls and serves as the carpet shop. Go down another road and you're in the middle of merchant stalls, where people sell everything from dates and figs, spices, shoes, bags, ceramics, jewelry, and fish and meats. We literally came face-to-face with camel heads. Just the heads, hanging there. Stray cats dart in and out between your feet. People yell out to you to buy this and that in Arabic, French, and English. It's overstimulating and claustrophobic. Thank God we hired a guide for a couple of hours; otherwise, we would still be lost in there. Since cars can't get in there, goods are brought in by donkey. On the morning we left, it was garbage day. A man was leading his donkey up the street with a huge box on its back, collecting garbage from people's front doors.

All of this is to say that it's really hard to imagine buying a riad here to remodel and bringing in all the building materials, but they really did, via donkey. Suzanne and her husband ran up against some cultural differences, including a plumber who shows up when he feels like it, layers and layers of bureaucracy, and language barriers. You get to know some of her employees, but I really wanted to know more about them. What kinds of homes did they live in? What were their lives like? I'm hoping she writes a sequel at some point.










Meanwhile, her husband Sandy maintains a blog, The View from Fez. Here you can keep up with some of their adventures.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Books

Somewhere on Facebook a couple of months ago, I came across an interesting offer in one of my book groups. Fill out the Google form and you would be assigned to a group of four strangers. Each person in the group chooses a book to read and marks it up as he or she reads. Underline, annotate, draw little pictures, whatever you want. Finish it within a month and then mail it off to the person under you. In the end, you make notes in four books and read what the person or people who had it before you wrote, and finally you get your own book back so you can read what everyone else was thinking. It's like a real-world version of S by JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst.

I looked on my TBR shelf for something I'd been meaning to read and texted three titles out to the other members. Since everyone in the group had already read a book by Kate Morton, I settled on The Clockmaker's Daughter as my selection. I am ashamed that I finished it really late and set the group back a bit... We had a vacation in the way. I tried to finish it before we left but there was just no way.

Anyway, my marked-up copy of this book is wrapped in brown paper and will head to the post office tomorrow morning!

It was really fun to write in the book, if I'm being honest. I never do that, nor do I fold pages, nor do I set them down open in case I wreck the spines... so it felt like an act of rebellion. ;) The next book that I need to read for this project is The Bookshop on the Corner by Jenny Colgan, and I need to get started on that one ASAP!

The Clockmaker's Daughter is the story of Birdie, a young girl whose father leaves her behind in 1860s London to seek his fortune in America. He promises to send for her, but in the meantime, she ends up in the hands of some unscrupulous people. The book jumps around in time, including timelines in the 1940s and 2017. I will say that I would have liked to see more of the 2017 characters. The 1860s chapters were just a little repetitive for me. However, I would say that the tone of this book and the atmosphere that Kate Morton creates are just perfect. This book is exactly the right companion for curling up on a rainy day. It's partially a ghost story, it has elements of Oliver Twist, A Little Princess, and even Titanic. You'll see what I mean!

Pick this book up if you're in the mood for historical fiction, Victorian England, and a ghost story that isn't scary.

4/5 stars

How it always should be

Rosie and Penn have five growing sons. At least, that's what they think.

When their youngest child, Claude, is five years old, he starts telling them that when he grows up, he wants to be a girl scientist. He wants to be a girl doctor... he wants to be a girl.

Rosie and Penn are very present parents. They are very liberal people. They are open-minded and at first just have a gender-neutral household. Sure, Claude can wear a dress if he wants to. His grandmother buys him a pink bikini and they don't argue with her about it. They let him grow his hair out.

Eventually, it's pretty clear that Claude is a girl, and when Claude asks, the family makes a seamless transition along with her. Just like that, Claude is Poppy.

Penn and Rosie are doing their best for their child. They even move the family to a more liberal part of the country in hopes of keeping Poppy safe and happy. They have meetings via Skype with a social worker who helps them navigate these waters. Sometimes it seems that they've overcorrected and done too good a job, and this is also to Poppy's detriment.

But who can tell what the right thing to do is in every situation? There is no control sample in a human life. Parents have to keep making the best choice the best they can, and then again, and again, and hope for the best. This is how it always is.

I gave this book a solid 5. The writing is stellar and the subject is handled with great care. Poppy does seem a little too old for her age sometimes, but that's chalked up to having four older siblings. Rosie and Penn are the parents that ever trans child deserves.