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.