What I read in October

The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu--It's hard to talk about this book, the second in a trilogy, without telling you things about the first book that I want you to be free to discover on your own. Suffice it to say that the English translation of the first book won the Nebula in 2015, I was expecting to be disappointed with the second book, and I wasn't. I'm not generally a fan of hard science fiction, and I find this trilogy challenging at times, but the questions it poses and the answers it posits make the effort more than worth it.

A Man Called Ove by Frederik Backman--Another translation, this time from Swedish. My mother-in-law gave me this book for my birthday back in the spring, but it didn't come to the top of the reading queue until the fall. The first chapter made me laugh out loud and annoy my children by reading bits of it to them. Ove is a delightfully lovable curmudgeon.

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth--I picked this up on a whim, because I was running out to pick up kids, thought I might need to wait a bit, and none of the many books I am in the middle of happened to be in the room with me, so I grabbed this one off the shelf. It's an alternate history in which Lindbergh (yes, that one) defeats FDR in 1940 and cozies up to Hitler. It was like reading about the current election without reading about the current election. I was engrossed by this book right up until the last page. The ending felt as if Roth realized he had hit his word count or reached his deadline, slapped a final sentence on the book, and mailed it off. I can't think of the last time I've been caught completely off-guard by a bad ending. Usually I have ample warning that a book is going to disappoint, but this one felt like a slap in the face.

I also listened to almost all of Galileo's Daughter, which I read in 2012. It was my book group's selection for the month, and I decided to give audio books another try, because my library system had it available in that format. Nope, still don't like them, and not only because the last two files didn't download properly. This is actually a decent book, even the second time through. The parallels with the current religious objections to the teaching of evolution are as obvious as they were the first reading, but this time I thought more about why I found Suor Maria Celeste--a nun who was sincerely devoted to her father--somewhat annoying.  I wanted her to be angrier that Galileo simultaneously didn't pay to make her legitimate, like he did for her younger brother, and wouldn't let her marry because anyone who would offer to marry an illegitimate woman would not be worthy of the Galilei name. I did not want her to be so grateful for the chance to sew collars for Galileo. It's hard to shake my feminist ideals.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson--Much like when I read Dracula several years ago, I wished I could have read this book fresh, without having it be part of my cultural background for as long as I can remember. It would have been more suspenseful. And yet, there was still a fair bit I didn't know, so the final reveal was interesting, and the Victorian exploration of human nature was somewhat unexpected.

Reach out and touch someone . . . or not

My community experienced a tragedy last week. One of those moments that becomes a new milestone in life, a stake in the flow of time by which we date future events. Years from now, people will still talk about where they were when they heard the news.

I was sitting on my couch, checking my email after having returned from being officially received into the Episcopal Church. On the drive home, I'd been musing over whether to blog about that.

And then suddenly, nothing mattered except the tragedy.

Social media exploded, and the schedule filled with opportunities to gather with others in times of communal mourning and meditation.

My immune system took that moment to find another cold I had somehow missed in the last month. And not just any cold: fever, chills, sore throat, cough, laryngitis.

While my community walked together into grief, greeting casual acquaintances with hugs, I've felt honor bound to hold myself aloof.

I watched the embraces, the clasped hands, the kisses. Anytime someone approached me, I warded them off, "I have a really bad cold."

This afternoon, I stood on hill beside a pond, feeling on my back the warmth of the sun breaking through the clouds, listened to eulogies for someone far too young, and watched parents face the unimaginable, surrounded by people who love them. 

The service was four cough drops long.


 

I'm baaaaaack

When I stopped blogging back in 2013, I told myself that I was going to use my blogging time to get caught up on our photo albums.

Way back in the mid-90s, in a burst of twenty-something enthusiasm, I decided that in addition to a family album, I needed to create an album for each child, so that when they left home, they would have photos and we would have photos.

And then I had four kids.

And we got a digital camera, which resulted in more photos than I thought possible.

I've been behind on the albums for at least a decade. Just when I'm about to get caught up, I visit my family, avid photographers all, and I sink under the deluge of great photos they take of our time together.

I finally broke myself of treating each picture as if it might be the only remaining documentation of someone's life. (Having a mother who is an avid genealogist can have some weird effects on a person. My kids are millennials. An underdocumented life is not going to be a problem they face.)

I embraced digital scrapbooking, which allows me to create pages for five photo albums for the effort of one.  

The photo albums are still exhausting, and I do almost anything to avoid working on them. The truth is, I suffer decision fatigue about 20 seconds in to each scrapbooking session.

Of the three similar photos of the kids in this location, should I pick shot 1, 2, or 3? How many pictures do I need of our time in the botanical gardens in Copenhagen? Do I have too many photos of Kid4, who is still young enough to like posing for photos, and not enough of the self-conscious teenagers? Do I have to include one photo of each person on each day of our trip?

Too. Many. Decisions.

However.

Twice in the last month, I've found myself looking things up in past blog posts, and I realized that I miss not having a blog record of the past three-and-a-half years.

And I'm egotistical enough to think I have things that are worth saying, and I miss not having a platform.

So I've decided to jump back into blogging, photo albums be damned.