It's...Friday

I'm caught somewhere between disappointment and relief that none of us are psychic. I did remember one time when I was in a band in high school and while we were practicing one girl got really upset and said she felt like something bad was going to happen, and then a friend called and said he'd been in a car accident (everyone was fine). Am I like Mulder, do I just want to believe? I also remember lying in bed while extremely pregnant and trying with all my might to send Matt a psychic message to bring me a cup of tea. It didn't work.

I feel a little thin on blog fodder right now, but I really want to keep up some kind of momentum because I think my mental health is better when I'm blogging, however badly.

It was a good week. I did a couple extra shifts to fill in for my sick co-worker and in the morning announcements the secretary said "can we get a whoo-hoo, Allison is in the library". I came home from work and took Lucy for a good walk a couple of times, which I've been too tired to do for a couple of months (right after work, I mean, I have walked her, although not enough). Eve and I took her out on Sunday to get some sun and air, and met a wide cross-section of little kids whose parents had taken them out for the same reason. Some of them went headlong into puddles in their haste to pet her, and one scowled an adorable scowl until we were safely past and then called "bye-bye" very sweetly.

Matt got home from Florida a few days before it started snowing.

And snowing.

And snowing.

And snowing some more.

It wasn't blizzardy, but it was relentless. I didn't have to go to work Thursday to fill in because buses were cancelled and most students are bussed at that school so since my shift was casual they told me not to bother. I sat by the window and watched the snow and read an amazing book and felt like I was inside a snow globe.

 I meant to get on the treadmill on Thursday and it didn't happen. I was washing my face that night thinking "Jesus, I have to get some exercise" in a panicky kind of way, and then I stopped and thought "wait. That's not technically true. I don't HAVE to do anything except die and pay taxes. Lots of people don't exercise. Fat people, thin people, sick people, healthy people. There's no exercise police (well there kind of is, but as long as you stay off their Facebook groups they'll probably leave you alone). Why am I not thinking 'I would LIKE to get some exercise', because I generally feel better when I do?" I felt like a great weight had been lifted. And today I went on the treadmill because I LIKE it, and I stopped when my lower back started to hurt, even though that was at 28 minutes and 41 seconds, instead of pushing myself to make it to at least 30 minutes even. I feel like the real workout was shrugging off some of the indoctrination.

Matt and I caught up on the latest two episodes of Picard tonight. I love this show, and Isa Briones is ridiculously beautiful, and that is all I have to say about that.

Oh, and one for the I Am Not Smart files: I've been trying to figure out how to make the perfect virgin frozen Bellini for a friend who doesn't drink. I'm pulling from various recipes, assembling frozen peaches, peach nectar and ice cubes, and at one point I thought "why would I use Club Soda, isn't it supposed to be Prosecco?" totally forgetting that I was shooting for an ALCOHOL-FREE version. Reminiscent of the time someone told Collette they were going to a Vegan Sugar Shack Brunch and she said "what's the point of that? Oh, I guess at least you can have turkey bacon"...

Collette and I will be over here with the alcoholic failed vegans. Have a great week-end.

Mediums Rare

Heartfelt thanks for the lovely comments on my last post. Although Ernie's comment made me think this:

Ernie: "You are really funny, probably without trying."

Me:




I've had an up and down week. I had a couple of really productive days and thought hey! I can do this, I'm all good. Then I would sit down in a chair and fall asleep for three hours or feel like I was run over by a truck the day after being busy and think okay, maybe I'm a useless waste of skin after all and optimism is for chumps. Bloodwork and a doctor's appointment are on the docket, but I have a sense the diagnosis is going to be the usual - depression, anxiety, perimenopause and/or terminal lameness.

I worked in the school office for the first time at my Wednesday school. I did mainly attendance, which is sort of a repetitive, Zen exercise. I gave out late slips, which is always something I thought would be kind of fun - you plug in the name, a little slip zips out of the little machine! - and it is! It is kind of fun! It was also fun when one of my library students would come in and side-eye me suspiciously or say "HEY, what are you doing in HERE?" There's an office administrator in the office, and the v.p. and principal's offices are right off the main office, so it's also got a fun community vibe that I don't get in the library. I think it will be a nice way to get some extra hours in. Also, the librarian went home sick just as I was finishing off my office shift, so I hopped over to the library, like a regular multi-tool (instead of just a tool, which frequently feels like my default setting.) Then I raced home to take Lucy around the block in the twenty minutes I had before my haircut. I was on top of shit that day. I had to sleep for fourteen hours to recover, but whatever.

Eve came downstairs last night and said "well, I made a prediction that just came true, so I'm psychic now and I don't know what to do with all this responsibility. Do I use my powers for good?" which got me thinking about psychic moments. I'm sure I've had some that felt genuine, but at the moment all I could think of were fake ones. When I was at Youth Encounter - a bizarre, possibly slightly abusive thing our church and Catholic school did, where they crowded dozens of teenagers together in a school for the week-end, deprived us of sleep and subjected us to long religiously-themed lectures and gave us letters from our parents in an effort to, I don't know, get us to see God or maybe manifest telekinetic abilities or something - I was doodling on a paper during one of the lectures, and there was this guy named Dave beside me. Then a few people performed some musical numbers, and afterwards he said to me "okay, you have to explain this to me before my mind explodes", and he showed me that I had written Forever Young in a doodle before someone had played it on the piano. I think what happened was that I had heard the person rehearsing the song earlier, but for a few minutes I could have had Dave playing any lottery number I told him to.

When I first got a phone in my room, it was a touch tone that I eventually realized made a tiny, almost sub-audible chirp just before starting to ring, so I could always pick it up before it rang and make the person calling think I had precognition.

My friend Collette's mom used to believe in psychic abilities, and would make Collette do the ESP testing where you're supposed to guess what symbol is on the card. Collette could see the reflection of the card in her mom's glasses, and she guessed mostly right with the odd wrong just enough that her mom was convinced she was the next, uh... someone famous and psychic.

I don't know where I land on the notion of actual psychics. I tend to think that anyone that is in public claiming them is probably full of shit, but I could probably be convinced that some people have a heightened sensitivity to the world and other people that could manifest in ways that seemed psychic, although psychic is defined as "phenomena that are apparently inexplicable by natural laws", which makes me think of Dana Scully saying "nothing happens in contradiction to nature, Mulder. Only to what we know of it." So there. So there?

Feel free to share your own psychic experiences. I'm off to explore my suddenly recovered memories of Youth Encounter and possibly call my mom to ask what the hell she was thinking letting me go to one.

It Is Always My Intention to Make You Laugh

My body and brain are still doing weird shit. Both my sciatic nerves feel inflamed, but in a surface, neuralgia-type of way, so stretching doesn't really help and it hurts to sit down. I had this happen once before, but it was when Matt had come home from a week away, when it's not unusual for my body to engage in some weird-ass immune-response bullshit. Matt is away now, but I've been having a lovely long week-end with Matt and Eve and girlfriends, so I'm not sure what the deal is, but it's less than ideal.

Valentine's Day, right? What a fraught minefield. There were years when I had a boyfriend and everything was deliriously romantic. There were years when I had a husband and everything was deliriously romantic. There were years when I had a husband and we did nothing and I was angry, not that we did nothing but that we didn't discuss doing nothing first. There were years when we did nothing and I was fine with it. The year Angus was two, we got an amazing catered dinner from Tulips & Maple, with many small containers of delicious courses and tiny containers of adorable garnishes. Angus was watching cartoons upstairs but he kept coming down to check that we didn't need his help, because the whole thing was a little weird to him and he was sure that it couldn't be that much fun if he wasn't involved. 

Friday I had lunch with Eve's friend's mom who has become a very close friend on multiple drives to Montreal with a van full of girls and Jackson. Friday night Eve and Matt and I got Vietnamese and watched Toy Story 4 (I'm still a bit dehydrated from the whole experience), and then Matt and I watched the new episode of Picard. I got cupcakes with heart garnishes. It was perfect.

Saturday I had a Galentine's Day dinner a couple days late (I know, I hate the name and yet it's kind of dead on) with five friends from ... blogging, I guess, it's been so long I've kind of forgotton the genesis. They are wise, wonderful women and I love them, and we get together every six months or so at the same restaurant because it's mid-way for all of us, and we often get the same smart-ass older man for a waiter and he's used a couple of his jokes twice, but that's okay, it's a really hard job, whatever gets you through. 

Then I went late to our friend group's Valentine's Day Guys Cook dinner - I was sorry to miss the first part, but I see these friends way more than I see the other friends, so it was an acceptable trade-off. Matt went home earlyish because he had an early flight to Florida Sunday to spend the week watching Angus's team play baseball for the start of their season. I stayed later for a couple more rhubarb-ginger gin and tonics. I think I made the right call.

Yesterday Eve had a hipster Sunday with two friends and one's boyfriend - they went to a cat café and a restaurant called El Furniture Warehouse (is that not just deliciously conventionally unconventional, or something?). I watched scary movies while she was out, then she came home and we watched a Veronica Mars, then she had to go to bed because she hadn't slept the night before. 

My friend Dani drove me to the restaurant Saturday night and we were there a few minutes alone. She said she was really happy right now and apologized if that was annoying to me. This fits in with Suz saying that I made her laugh with my last post, which she thought was probably not my intention. I realize it might not be obvious, but I think of myself as a happy person. A happy person with a tendency to depression, anxiety and nuclear levels of snark, but a happy person nonetheless. It is never, never offensive to me if someone I love is happy - even someone I don't love, unless they're happy because they just passed a bill to restrict women's reproductive freedom or whatever. It's true that it can be comforting to know that I'm not the only one who struggles, but the expression "misery loves company" isn't really true. Misery needs acknowledgement might be closer. 

How could I not be happy? I have a wonderful husband. I have two children who are constantly amazing me with how funny, creative, kind and weird they are - I MADE two new whole people and they are out there in the world fucking shit up in ways I could never have conceived ( ha ha, get it, conceived?) I have people who consider me a friend that, growing up as a disaffected adolescent I could never have imagined would even talk to me. I have a job I love that I can do part time. I started a blog that introduced me to people I never would have crossed paths with otherwise. And I am funny! That sounds immodest, but I think it's true. Not in this post specifically, which I think I just wrote in case some day I'm thinking "what the hell DID we do for Valentine's Day in 2020?" But generally. And I am endlessly entertained and entranced with the exquisite ridiculousness of things. 

So I'm going to take my burny sciatic nerves out for a drive with my daughter because we have been lax at driving practice lately. If we don't crash the car, I'm going to limp around the block with Lucy, because we have also been lax at dog-walking lately. And then I'm going to watch another episode of Veronica Mars with Eve and go to bed with a book. 

Happy Valentine's Day a few days late. I choo-choo-choose all of you. 

Not-Quite-Surly Not-Quite-Thursday

February, man. It's almost worse than January, because January is this big suckhole after December, which is exhausting but also fun and rewarding, and then you get out of January and you lift up your head and look around hopefully, just to get smacked in the head with Fucking February. The whole stupid WORD February doesn't even make any goddamned sense. Almost everyone says Feb-you-ary. I really try to say words correctly (it's NUCLEAR, people, NOT NUCULAR), but I feel like a douche saying Feb-roo-ary. Okay, I just tested it, never mind, I never say it correctly. 

You know how sometimes you have to just be okay not being okay for a while? I was feeling pretty good about seeing January out without too much emotional drama, and then my uterus caught fire and I was unable to sleep or walk or find a position that didn't hurt for a couple of days, and then it went away, but at this time of year it's way too easy for something physically bad to tip me over into something mentally bad, and here we are. And last week I was busy Monday to Wednesday with work, and then Thursday and Friday I was going to work out for the first time in forever and start getting my shit together, and geez, it's hard to feel like my own body isn't sabotaging me semi-on-purpose sometimes, which is not a fair or helpful way to look at things, so I'm trying not to. I'm not on a deadline. I'm never going to make progress in a constant upward-trending line - most people don't. So for now I'm just going to be okay not quite being okay.

We did have a really lovely time on Saturday night - one of the coaches from our Little League World Series team invited all the other coaches over for dinner, so four couples, three old like us and one young because our head coach was a dude in his twenties who inexplicable decided to give up a huge chunk of his life to whipping a bunch of ten-year-olds into a really fine team over a few years, ending up in a once-in-a-decade upset of Canada's B.C. team at Nationals  his equally awesome fiancé gave up her holidays to hang out in Glace Bay Nova Scotia and Williamsport Pennsylvania in 2013). We were really close with these people for a number of years, and we've kept in touch but not to the same level, so it was really nice to reconnect. We have plans for a ten-year trip back to the LLWS - less pressure this time. Did I tell you about the really nice article someone at Elmira wrote about Angus last year? The only problem is, now somehow that picture of him, thirteen years old with braces at the Little League World Series, now keeps getting attached to his current profile at the university, which he hates and which Matt finds inexpressibly amusing.

Coach Mark, Coach Mark, Coach Matt and Coach Brian

Eve turned seventeen. Of all the birthdays - two, five, ten, thirteen, sixteen - this one seems the most impossible. I don't know what else to say about that. 

With the cake I knocked together at the last minute because we had technically already celebrated her birthday and I really wasn't feeling well

We took an Uber to the party on Saturday. This violates my principles, because I really don't like the way Uber gets around the licensing laws and the way it screws taxi drivers who have to pay thousands of dollars for a license and who are more heavily regulated. I also don't like the way Uber has responded to sexual assault allegations by its drivers and in its corporate culture, but the same could be said for taxi companies. Also, I believe I have demonstrated on several occasions that some of my principles are less iron-like than noodly. And the Uber drivers on Saturday and their vehicles were really nice. And technically it was Matt doing it and I was just along for the ride (just following orders, sir). 

We have used Skip the Dishes on several occasions also - we got tired of only ordering pizza, Eve is more and more lactose intolerant, we really like Vietnamese, and once I'm home for the day I hate going out again. This seemed like the perfect solution. Then I found out that Skip the Dishes is kind of a poisonous business model that tends to screw both the participating restaurants and the drivers, who end up not getting paid enough to make up for the inevitable wear and tear on their vehicles. So when Matt and I got home from Thunder Bay at four in the afternoon having not eaten at all because of various circumstances, we were going to go home and order something but then decided to just stop and pick it up on the way home. And a couple of times I have forced my lazy ass to get in the car and go pick something up instead of ordering on a Friday night. 

I cannot stop giggling at the thought that I used to feel virtuous if I cooked instead of ordering something. Now I feel a freaking saint if I go pick it up myself instead of having someone else deliver it. 

I was stopping for groceries after work today, and as I turned into the parking lot there was another car coming towards me in my lane, and he seemed to be taking his sweet damned time moving over. I was a little annoyed until we got closer together and I saw that the reason was apparently that he was steering with one hand and eating a giant ice cream cone with the other.

In February. What a weird-ass month. 

Surly Thursday, Mind and Body Edition

Sometimes I have to save up my surliness for today, which I have a little, but honestly I could probably peg the whole post on the fact that (TMI ALERT), a year and a month after I got my giant fibroid removed and my uterus scorched, guess whose door Aunt Flo started knocking on last night?? FUCK OFF AUNT FLO, NOBODY INVITED YOU. The bleeding isn't bad so far, but the abdominal pain is horrific - I thought I was dying last night. Then I realized what was going on and was immediately nostalgic for five minutes ago when I was dying. I had deleted Pink Pad off my phone! I had traveled care-free! I had not gotten rid of all supplies because I'm not a complete idiot (ha, that's a total lie, I meant to, I was just too lazy). 

Actual footage of my current mood

I've done some reading and I can't really figure out if this is just how it goes sometimes or if I'm actually dying. I guess I'll go to the doctor. For now I'm just bitching and swearing a lot.

We were in Thunder Bay visiting Matt's mom and her husband on Bell Let's Talk day. I have some serious reservations about this event, given what I've heard about how Bell deals with its contracts in prisons (more about that here, if you're interested), but I don't begrudge anyone who uses it as a jumping-off point to talk about their own experiences with mental illness. Browsing Facebook before bed, I came across a post by a friend I know from a long-ago baby playgroup, linking to an article she had written about how she is "always working on her mental  health".

I clicked on it. I really wish I hadn't. It was a new-agey, anti-science, non-evidence-based load of crap about how she'd finally "taken responsibility" for her own depression and used a combination of "various self-help gurus' books, podcasts, self-awareness training classes, diet and exercise" to replace anti-depressants. It was full of catchphrases like "a breakdown is an opportunity to break through!" and "transform your thinking!" and ended with a "theory" that "thoughts are more powerful than anti-depressants".

I felt like I'd been kicked in the gut. I was hurt. I was angry. I was baffled by the raft of fawning comments on the post. I commented that I really took issue with people who claim that the Power of Positive Thinking can replace medication, and asked if she would tell someone with asthma to just think oxygenated thoughts, and she said "I get it, thanks for sharing!" I can't help feeling like she doesn't, in fact, get it. 

Are we not past this kind of horse manure? Can positive thinking have an effect on one's outlook? Absolutely! Is talk therapy and CBT a valuable adjunct to medication? Yup! If for whatever reason you have a deficit of the neurotransmitters you need to survive and function, are all the catchphrases in the world going to make you better? NO THEY ARE FUCKING NOT. Not to mention the fact that training yourself to think only positive thoughts can be inherently toxic. It's twenty fucking twenty, people. We don't pray the gay away, vaccines don't cause autism and you can't just positive think your way to mental and physical health. 

I didn't unfriend her at first. I try not to do things like that in anger, and I do believe in trying to work through disagreements before severing friendships (not that we were ever terribly close). But I couldn't stop going over and over it and wanting to open it up again with her, and I realize there would be no point. I can't imagine she'll notice, or care even if she does - why would she want to be even Facebook friends with someone too weak-minded to think her way out of depression and anxiety? There are a lot of things I will overlook in a friend - turns out this isn't one of them. I guess we agree on one thing - to a certain extent we're responsible for our own mental health - to me that means taking my medication and limiting my exposure to toxic people. 

Then there's the library ebook system. Which I love. But there's a borrowing limit of ten books (yes, that's plenty, shut up), and if a hold becomes available it will say "it looks like you already have ten books out. Return a book in order to borrow your hold or try to borrow it anyway". Like...what? I am dealing with an automated system here, there is no appeal, there is no sweet-talking, there is no clemency, this is a wholly futile endeavour you are counselling, WHAT FUCKERY IS THIS ANYWAY? 

Deep breath. Feel free to share your own surliness, or go the other way and spout sunshine and loveliness, I promise I'll be receptive either way. 

Books Read in 2019: Books That I Inexplicably Forgot to Post About Because I Am An IDIOT

I was idly scanning one of my book review posts and suddenly realized that I didn't remember posting a review of The Institute by Stephen King. I thought maybe I did it on auto-pilot, but then I worried that I posted the title and synopsis but not my review. I went through all my four-star review posts and... not there. I was baffled. I was bemused. I went to Goodreads and called up my stats and looked at the rows of book covers and saw a few other books that I didn't remember reviewing. I gritted my teeth and went through all the posts counting the books I had reviewed and did the math add up? READER, IT DID NOT. I was befuddled. I was bewildered.

So now what do I do? Pretend it didn't happen? I fear I am too much of a completist for that. Just sneak the missing titles into the posts? I could - let's face it, I feel like we're all a little weary and ready to move on from Allison's Book Review Posts at this point. I can't quite make myself do it, though - they are all four-star reads and I feel like I have to give them their proper due (I will also place them in the relevant posts, though). I promise this is the very, very, very, almost certainly last post of its ilk for this year. I feel like I've used the word 'ilk' weirdly often lately. It makes me feel like my brain has the hiccups.

If you see one that I DID already review, just... maybe don't tell me? It's winter in central Canada. It's rough, people.

Endurance by Jack Kilborn. Synopsis from Goodreads: WELCOME TO THE RUSHMORE INNThe bed and breakfast was hidden in the hills of West Virginia. Wary guests wondered how it could stay in business at such a creepy, remote location. Especially with its bizarre, presidential decor and eccentric proprietor.

ONCE YOU CHECK IN...

When the event hotel for the national Iron Woman triathlon accidentally overbooked, competitor Maria was forced to stay at the Rushmore. But after checking into her room, she quickly realized she wasn't alone. First her suitcase wasn't where she put it. Then her cell phone was moved. Finally, she heard an odd creaking under the bed. Confusion quickly turned to fear, and fear to hysteria when she discovered the front door was barred and the windows were bricked over. There was no way out.
...YOU'LL BE DYING TO LEAVE
One year later, four new female athletes have become guests of the Inn. Will they escape the horrors within its walls? Or will they join the many others who have died there, in ways too terrible to imagine?
ENDURANCE by Jack Kilborn
Are you brave enough to finish?

As a thriller, this was fantastic. Great narrative energy, the characters more well-rounded than in your typical horror offering. The relationship between the three generations of women was wonderful, warm and nuanced and complicated. The budding relationship between the disabled runner and the reporter was organic and felt earned. It would make a fantastic horror movie and was easy to visualize. One twist at the end was, well, a twist too far for me and made me roll my eyes. This is also definitely not for the sensitive reader. Highly recommended for horror fans. ***mild spoilers*** I have a small issue with the use of birth defects to horror effect. There was one passage where I could just imagine the writer trying to come up with a long list of things that could be wrong with the human body and it was a little distasteful. The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay. Synopsis from Goodreads: The Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts adds an inventive twist to the home invasion horror story in a heart-palpitating novel of psychological suspense that recalls Stephen King’s Misery, Ruth Ware’s In a Dark, Dark Wood, and Jack Ketchum’s cult hit The Girl Next Door. Seven-year-old Wen and her parents, Eric and Andrew, are vacationing at a remote cabin on a quiet New Hampshire lake. Their closest neighbors are more than two miles in either direction along a rutted dirt road. One afternoon, as Wen catches grasshoppers in the front yard, a stranger unexpectedly appears in the driveway. Leonard is the largest man Wen has ever seen but he is young, friendly, and he wins her over almost instantly. Leonard and Wen talk and play until Leonard abruptly apologizes and tells Wen, "None of what’s going to happen is your fault". Three more strangers then arrive at the cabin carrying unidentifiable, menacing objects. As Wen sprints inside to warn her parents, Leonard calls out: "Your dads won’t want to let us in, Wen. But they have to. We need your help to save the world." Thus begins an unbearably tense, gripping tale of paranoia, sacrifice, apocalypse, and survival that escalates to a shattering conclusion, one in which the fate of a loving family and quite possibly all of humanity are entwined. The Cabin at the End of the World is a masterpiece of terror and suspense from the fantastically fertile imagination of Paul Tremblay. I've read two or three other books by Paul Tremblay because they always sound right up my alley, and they usually end up skewing just slightly off kilter from my alley and I wind up obscurely disappointed. This is by far my favourite. It's both a fascinating thought experiment and a thumping good yarn, particularly in the set-up with Leonard and Wen.  Sawkill Girls by Claire LeGrand. Synopsis from Goodreads: Beware of the woods and the dark, dank deep. He’ll follow you home, and he won’t let you sleep. Who are the Sawkill Girls? Marion: the new girl. Awkward and plain, steady and dependable. Weighed down by tragedy and hungry for love she’s sure she’ll never find. Zoey: the pariah. Luckless and lonely, hurting but hiding it. Aching with grief and dreaming of vanished girls. Maybe she’s broken—or maybe everyone else is. Val: the queen bee. Gorgeous and privileged, ruthless and regal. Words like silk and eyes like knives, a heart made of secrets and a mouth full of lies. Their stories come together on the island of Sawkill Rock, where gleaming horses graze in rolling pastures and cold waves crash against black cliffs. Where kids whisper the legend of an insidious monster at parties and around campfires. Where girls have been disappearing for decades, stolen away by a ravenous evil no one has dared to fight… until now. I tracked this down because it was by the same author as a children's book I read at one of my libraries, and goodness, this was drastically different - both books were great, but that one was entirely realistic and this one is very... not (in all the best ways - it's extremely inventive and imaginative). I just read a review that accused this book of being 'man-hating', which baffled me because I had been thinking that it was a great example of girl power lit without being especially heavy-handed or man-hating in any way (and, truthfully, made me angry, because a similar book with a cast of mostly male characters would most likely not be accused of being 'woman-hating'). It was sort of refreshing in a couple of ways - there was no beating around the bush or coyly hinting at the real story, we just got right down to brass tacks. There were three female main characters that were all fully realized, nuanced and badass bitches. It reminded me somewhat of Beware the Wild by Natalie C. Parker which I also loved - a sinister force tied to a particular place, and a female character who seems bad but it's much more complicated than that. It's great for diversity and representation also, without making a big deal of it. It had archetypes, but the twists were unique enough that it felt fresh and surprising. I really liked it, and I'll probably reread it at some point.

The Idiot by Elif Batuman. Synopsis from Goodreads: A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself.
The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. Selin may have barely spoken to Ivan, but with each email they exchange, the act of writing seems to take on new and increasingly mysterious meanings.
At the end of the school year, Ivan goes to Budapest for the summer, and Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside, to teach English in a program run by one of Ivan's friends. On the way, she spends two weeks visiting Paris with Svetlana. Selin's summer in Europe does not resonate with anything she has previously heard about the typical experiences of American college students, or indeed of any other kinds of people. For Selin, this is a journey further inside herself: a coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer. 

Read it for book club. This was a bit of a strange reading experience. I read a few pages, felt like I was reading a creative writing project and wasn't terribly engaged. I read a few more, found myself bookmarking passages and laughing out loud. I loved the parts involving linguistics. I hated the parts about her relationship with Ivan and their deeply pretentious email exchange - I wanted to warn her that if they ended up together he would never cook a meal or change a diaper. There are some brilliant and hilarious parts, but it was a whole lot of 'this happened, then this happened', and listing quirky people doing quirky (i.e. rude, incomprehensible, disagreeable) things, and the ending really wasn't one. And yet I can't say I didn't like reading it. When I got annoyed with Selin for being lugubrious or pretentious in a "alas, I feel things so deeply", I would remind myself that she was nineteen or twenty and I was no less irritating and fancied myself no less a Profoundly Wounded Soul at the same age. 

The Institute by Stephen King. Synopsis from Goodreads: In the middle of the night, in a house on a quiet street in suburban Minneapolis, intruders silently murder Luke Ellis’s parents and load him into a black SUV. The operation takes less than two minutes. Luke will wake up at The Institute, in a room that looks just like his own, except there’s no window. And outside his door are other doors, behind which are other kids with special talents—telekinesis and telepathy—who got to this place the same way Luke did: Kalisha, Nick, George, Iris, and ten-year-old Avery Dixon. They are all in Front Half. Others, Luke learns, graduated to Back Half, “like the roach motel,” Kalisha says. “You check in, but you don’t check out.”
In this most sinister of institutions, the director, Mrs. Sigsby, and her staff are ruthlessly dedicated to extracting from these children the force of their extranormal gifts. There are no scruples here. If you go along, you get tokens for the vending machines. If you don’t, punishment is brutal. As each new victim disappears to Back Half, Luke becomes more and more desperate to get out and get help. But no one has ever escaped from the Institute.
As psychically terrifying as Firestarter, and with the spectacular kid power of It, The Institute is Stephen King’s gut-wrenchingly dramatic story of good vs. evil in a world where the good guys don’t always win.

My relationship with recent Stephen King works has sometimes been a bit troubled. This felt like a return to Vintage King with all the stuff he does best - the "spectacular kid power of It" puts it really well; the kid characters are exceptional but still kids, and he writes them that way. There are the unrepentant evildoers with their pure motives and the schmucks who go along with the evil plot but eventually seek redemption. When an author has written as many books as this one has, it's impossible not to see echoes from other works, and I caught the flavour of Firestarter, The Tommyknockers, It, The Dead Zone, and a few others, but it didn't make this feel derivative, just agreeably familiar in some ways and different in others. I very much enjoyed seeing the two disparate story lines from the book's' beginning join up near the end as well. 

The Boston Girl by Anita Diamant. Synopsis from Goodreads: From the New York Times bestselling author of The Red Tent and Day After Night, comes an unforgettable coming-of-age novel about family ties and values, friendship and feminism told through the eyes of a young Jewish woman growing up in Boston in the early twentieth century.

Addie Baum is The Boston Girl, born in 1900 to immigrant parents who were unprepared for and suspicious of America and its effect on their three daughters. Growing up in the North End, then a teeming multicultural neighborhood, Addie's intelligence and curiosity take her to a world her parents can't imagine - a world of short skirts, movies, celebrity culture and new opportunities for women. Addie wants to finish high school and dreams of going to college. She wants a career and to find true love.
Eighty-five-year-old Addie tells the story of her life to her twenty-two-year-old granddaughter, who has asked her "How did you get to be the woman you are today?" She begins in 1915, the year she found her voice and made friends who would help shape the course of her life. From the one-room tenement apartment she shared with her parents and two sisters, to the library group for girls she joins at a neighborhood settlement house, to her first, disastrous love affair, Addie recalls her adventures with compassion for the naïve girl she was and a wicked sense of humor.
Written with the same attention to historical detail and emotional resonance that made Anita Diamant's previous novels bestsellers, The Boston Girl is a moving portrait of one woman’s complicated life in twentieth-century America, and a fascinating look at a generation of women finding their places in a changing world. 

I don't really know how to articulate why I loved this so much. I started it one night and went to sleep not sure if I would finish it. I had plans that were cancelled the next evening and my daughter and husband came home late so I finished it instead of making dinner. I loved the simple, matter-of-fact style. I loved the string of helpful women that came into Addie's life. I loved that the horrors were the regular horrors of life, and that the author didn't feel the need to add any extra-super-bad horrors. It was just a really great story about a strong woman who had a rough start but got some help along the way from other strong women. I loved the way that historical events were touched on well enough to get a sense of what it was like to live through them. It always makes me feel a little sad to read a book that encompasses a character's entire life - it makes it seem like that life passes so quickly. I like that Addie is still making plans even as the book ends.

Books Read in 2019: Five-Star Fiction, Non-Fiction and Short Stories

Monday mornings are always a little painful because I stay up way too late and never sleep well and Monday is my early work day. It's a bit of a pleasant surprise, though, that they're only a little painful. I don't love dragging myself out of bed, but by the time I'm in the library booting up my computer I am perfectly happy to be there. I don't have any classes I don't like, but my favourite on Monday is the last of the day, which is nice because I always go out on a good note. The kids are engaged and ask about books a lot and are very sweet and grateful. Everyone has trouble pronouncing my name, which is both weird and not when I look at it, and this teacher has made her students practice it until they say thank-you perfectly.

Also, if you want to feel powerful and work in a kids' library? Choose books to face out at the end of the shelves. It's like they can't resist anything with a full cover showing. Almost every single book I face out will be checked out by the end of the day. I have to work not to get too caught up in it, in a 'with great power comes great responsibility' way, or I spend way too long deliberating about what gets put out this week.

Last book round-up post, wherein I feel a fairly immense sense of accomplishment and a bit at loose ends about what I will blog about now.

Fiction

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. Synopsis from Goodreads: In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, a community devoted exclusively to sickness, as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death.

Whew. This was the first Big Classic I attacked this year. As with Middlemarch, I started it with dogged determination and took a bit before I fell into the rhythm. I found it quite a bit less accessible than Middlemarch, though. It's a Novel of Ideas, and some of those ideas were a bit beyond me. There were characters that stood in for certain ideologies - humanism, radicalism, the Dionysian principle etc. - which doesn't really float my boat overly, and not just because I would read their long-winded musings over and over again without quite comprehending them. At one point the narrative lapses into French for several pages without any translation. I limped along gamely for most of it, but it really brought home that this book is kind of a "can't get there from here" thing for me. 

I gave this five-stars not in the more traditional (for me) meaning of "I loved it beyond all words", but in the literal "it was amazing" sense. It's amazing to me that Mann plotted this all out and wrangled it (over some twelve years) into a cohesive whole - what an enormous accomplishment. 

Because I was so unfamiliar with the traditions of this kind of novel-writing, I was sort of confused by what was happening - Hans Castorp goes to visit his cousin at a tuberculosis sanatorium before beginning his work, but just as he's about to leave it's discovered that he also needs treatment, in a manner that seemed slightly sinister, but I don't think it was. 

Then there's the fact that the novel makes sanatorium life sound positively blissful. There are sumptuous meals. There is mountain walking. There are hours of reading in the world's most comfortable chairs on balconies for hours in the evening, with fur blankets when the weather is cold (sign me the fuck up!) It sounds like resort living with a touch of fever. But I've had the flu twice and I know this isn't really true - it's not possible to enjoy this kind of thing when you feel like your lungs are shredding themselves in your chest. I understand that the realities of t.b. are not really the point, but it irritates me that Mann makes it sound so idyllic.

I don't have it in me to do the extensive quote pull-out for this one, but I really have to give you this one on how much Hans Castorp's bewilderingly extreme - one might even say unseemly - fondness for his Maria Mancini cigars. This follows his cousin Joachim's declaration that he's never smoked. 

"'I don't understand it,' Hans Castorp said. 'I never understand how anybody can not smoke -- it deprives a man of the best part of life, so to speak -- or at least of a first-class pleasure. When I wake in the morning, I feel glad at the thought of being able to smoke all day, and when I eat, I look forward to smoking afterwards; I might almost say I only eat for the sake of being able to smoke -- though of course that is more or less of an exaggeration. But a day without tobacco would be flat, stale, and unprofitable, as far as I am concerned. If I had to say to myself tomorrow: 'No smoke to-day' -- I believe I shouldn't find the courage to get up -- on my honour, I'd stop in bed. But when a man has a good cigar in his mouth -- of course it mustn't have a side draught or not draw well, that is extremely irritating -- but with a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe, nothing can touch him -- literally. It's just like lying on the beach: when you lie on the beach, why you life on the beach, don't you? -- you don't require anything else, in the line of work or amusement either. --People smoke all over the world, thank goodness; there is nowhere one could get to, so far as I know, where the habit hasn't penetrated. Even polar expeditions fit themselves out with supplies of tobacco to help them carry on. I've always felt a thrill of sympathy when I read that. You can be very miserable: I might be feeling perfectly wretched, for instance; but I could always stand it if I had my smoke.'"

Whew. All I could think (besides "seriously, are we going with 'a cigar is just a cigar' here?") is thank goodness the man never married.

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward. Synopsis from Goodreads: Winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction
A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch's father is growing concerned. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesn't show concern for much else. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn't much to save. Lately, Esch can't keep down what food she gets; she's fourteen and pregnant. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pitbull's new litter, dying one by one in the dirt, while brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child's play and short on parenting. As the twelve days that comprise the novel's framework yield to the final day and Hurricane Katrina, the unforgettable family at the novel's heart—motherless children sacrificing for each other as they can, protecting and nurturing where love is scarce—pulls itself up to struggle for another day. A wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, "Salvage the Bones" is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real.

I swear I don't only give five stars to books that are overwhelmingly sad. I just happened to have read a few books this year that are both luminously gorgeously written and, incidentally, about horrifyingly sorrowful circumstances. This happened to be one of them. It's not tragedy porn, it's just an incredibly evocative slice of life that makes personal something that is often only understood in general terms. 

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler. Synopsis from Goodreads: Meet the Cooke family. Our narrator is Rosemary Cooke. As a child, she never stopped talking; now that she's started college, she has wrapped herself in silence: the silence of intentional forgetting, of protective cover. Rosemary is now an only child, but she used to have a sister the same age as her, and an older brother. Both are now gone—vanished from her life. Her once lively mother is a shell of her former self, her clever and imperious father now a distant, brooding man. And there was something unique about Rosemary's sister, Fern.
You'll have to find out for yourself what it is that makes her unhappy family unlike any other. 

I had read about this years ago, which sort of spoiled one of the main surprises, but that didn't really matter. I loved this. It's rare to find such a riveting story coupled with such beautiful writing - if I read with a highlighter, I would have been highlighting every second sentence. Family dynamics, the ethics of scientific research, all manner of dysfunction, quirky characters, dark screwball comedy and inconsolable grief - it's all in here. It made me wonder why I haven't read everything Fowler has written. 

Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick. Synopsis from Goodreads: Two boys – a slow learner stuck in the body of a teenage giant and a tiny Einstein in leg braces – forge a unique friendship when they pair up to create one formidable human force. A wonderful story of triumph over imperfection, shame, and loss.

This may be the best book as far as impact-to-page-number-ratio I've ever read. It's so slight, and so packed with insight and revelation. Every character gets their due, even ones that seem like they might just be types upon first introduction - Grim, Gram, Iggy, Loretta. Max's description of how he is imprisoned by his oversized body and his family history is wonderful, and the way he describes Kevin is perfect. I cried a lot. Non-Fiction

Love Lives Here: a Story of Thriving in a Transgender Family by Amanda Jette Knox. Synopsis from Goodreads: An inspirational story of accepting and embracing two trans people in a family--a family who shows what's possible when you "lead with love."
All Amanda Jett� Knox ever wanted was to enjoy a stable life. She never knew her biological father, and while her mother and stepfather were loving parents, the situation was sometimes chaotic. At school, she was bullied mercilessly, and at the age of fourteen, she entered a counselling program for alcohol addiction and was successful.
While still a teenager, she met the love of her life. They were wed at 20, and the first of three children followed shortly. Jett� Knox finally had the stability she craved--or so it seemed. Their middle child struggled with depression and avoided school. The author was unprepared when the child she knew as her son came out as transgender at the age of eleven. Shocked, but knowing how important it was to support her daughter, Jett� Knox became an ardent advocate for trans rights.
But the story wasn't over. For many years, the author had coped with her spouse's moodiness, but that chronic unhappiness was taking a toll on their marriage. A little over a year after their child came out, her partner also came out as transgender. Knowing better than most what would lie ahead, Jett� Knox searched for positive examples of marriages surviving transition. When she found no role models, she determined that her family would become one.
The shift was challenging, but slowly the family members noticed that they were becoming happier and more united. Told with remarkable candour and humour, and full of insight into the challenges faced by trans people, Love Lives Here is a beautiful story of transition, frustration, support, acceptance, and, of course, love.

This kept me up until four in the morning even though I know how it ends - if that's not the hallmark of a great book, I don't know what is. If you know Amanda, it can be easy to forget that she has, not to put too fine a point on it, Gone Through Some Shit, even before her daughter and her wife came out as trans. This is an unflinchingly honest, unapologetic, hilarious, heartwrenching, clear-eyed account of a bunch of that shit. I guess coming through the fires of horrific bullying, adolescent addiction, sexual trauma, then finding out two of your family members were assigned the wrong gender at birth must really season the soul. As a long-time reader of Amanda's blog, I knew that she could write. As a fairly long-time friend, I knew that she was a big-hearted, generous woman. This book roundly confirms both of those things. She's neither naive nor cowed in the face of all the hate that is out there, much of it directed at her and her family daily. She just realizes that, for the most part, living well - and having the wittiest quips on social media - is the best revenge.

A Good Wife: Escaping the Life I Never Chose by Samra Zafar. Synopsis from Goodreads: She faced years of abuse after arriving in Canada as a teenage bride in a hastily arranged marriage, but nothing could stop Samra Zafar from pursuing her dreams
 At 15, Samra Zafar had big dreams for herself. She was going to go to university, and forge her own path. Then with almost no warning, those dreams were pulled away from her when she was suddenly married to a stranger at 17 and had to leave behind her family in Pakistan to move to Canada. Her new husband and his family promised that the marriage and the move would be a fulfillment of her dream, not a betrayal of it. But as the walls of their home slowly became a prison, Samra realized the promises were empty ones.
In the years that followed she suffered her husband’s emotional and physical abuse that left her feeling isolated, humiliated and assaulted. Desperate to get out, and refusing to give up, she hatched an escape plan for herself and her two daughters. Somehow she found the strength to not only build a new future, but to walk away from her past, ignoring the pleas of her family and risking cultural isolation by divorcing her husband.
But that end was only the beginning for Samra. Through her academic and career achievements, she has gone on to become a mentor and public speaker, connecting with people around the world from isolated women in situations similar to her own, to young schoolgirls in Kenya who never allowed themselves to dream to men making the decisions to save for their daughters’ educations instead of their dowries.  A Good Wife tell her harrowing and inspiring story, following her from a young girl with big dreams, through finding strength in the face of oppression and then finally battling through to empowerment.

I'm sort of embarrassed to admit that I had heard about this book and felt a little dismissive, partly because it was so "popular" (that was snobby) and partly because it would most likely be difficult to read. Then I realized that I should freaking well make myself read it, because reading it wouldn't be a millionth as difficult as living it, and having a reminder that this kind of thing still goes on far too often is no bad thing. It is hard to read, of course - you go from being gutted with sadness to shaking with anger, all while reading breathlessly to see how she did "escape". She writes so insightfully and intelligently about how she became trapped in a horrible situation, even coming from a progressive family. It's a wonderful, important book, and I'm glad I got over myself enough to read it.

The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton. Synopsis from Goodreads: Any Baedeker will tell us where we ought to travel, but only Alain de Botton will tell us how and why. With the same intelligence and insouciant charm he brought to How Proust Can Save Your Life, de Botton considers the pleasures of anticipation; the allure of the exotic, and the value of noticing everything from a seascape in Barbados to the takeoffs at Heathrow.
Even as de Botton takes the reader along on his own peregrinations, he also cites such distinguished fellow-travelers as Baudelaire, Wordsworth, Van Gogh, the biologist Alexander von Humboldt, and the 18th-century eccentric Xavier de Maistre, who catalogued the wonders of his bedroom. The Art of Travel is a wise and utterly original book. Don’t leave home without it.

Oh my freaking god I loved this. It's on our book club list so I borrowed it from my friend who recommended it, but I've already ordered my own copy. I don't for a moment think that everyone will love it this much, but it's amazing to me because he's captured so many of the things I've thought about travel but articulated them brilliantly. He soars from the most minute of details to the most expansive conclusions, without arrogance or mawkishness. He synthesizes a large body of examples and illustrations into a series of tightly focused yet expansively expressed reflections. I couldn't stop reading it, which almost never happens for me with non-fiction.

Short Stories

Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang. Synopsis from Goodreads: From an award-winning science fiction writer (whose short story "The Story of Your Life" was the basis for the Academy Award-nominated movie Arrival), the long-awaited new collection of stunningly original, humane, and already celebrated short stories
This much-anticipated second collection of stories is signature Ted Chiang, full of revelatory ideas and deeply sympathetic characters. In "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate," a portal through time forces a fabric seller in ancient Baghdad to grapple with past mistakes and the temptation of second chances. In the epistolary "Exhalation," an alien scientist makes a shocking discovery with ramifications not just for his own people, but for all of reality. And in "The Lifecycle of Software Objects," a woman cares for an artificial intelligence over twenty years, elevating a faddish digital pet into what might be a true living being. Also included are two brand-new stories: "Omphalos" and "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom."
In this fantastical and elegant collection, Ted Chiang wrestles with the oldest questions on earth—What is the nature of the universe? What does it mean to be human?—and ones that no one else has even imagined. And, each in its own way, the stories prove that complex and thoughtful science fiction can rise to new heights of beauty, meaning, and compassion.

I discovered Ted Chiang when I read The Story of Your Life (several times), which was then made into the movie Arrival. I then resolved to read all the Ted Chiang stories I could find. A lot of them are harder sci-fi than I usually like, but somehow he strikes the perfect balance between cerebral and soul-stirring.


Laughter at the Academy by Seanan McGuire. Synopsis from Goodreads: From fairy tale forest to gloomy gothic moor, from gleaming epidemiologist’s lab to the sandy shores of Neverland, Seanan McGuire’s short fiction has been surprising, delighting, confusing, and transporting her readers since 2009. Now, for the first time, that fiction has been gathered together in one place, ready to be enjoyed one twisting, tangled tale at a time. Her work crosses genres and subverts expectations.
Meet the mad scientists of “Laughter at the Academy” and “The Tolling of Pavlov’s Bells.” Glory in the potential of a Halloween that never ends. Follow two very different alphabets in “Frontier ABCs” and “From A to Z in the Book of Changes.” Get “Lost,” dress yourself “In Skeleton Leaves,” and remember how to fly. All this and more is waiting for you within the pages of this decade-spanning collection, including several pieces that have never before been reprinted. Stories about mermaids, robots, dolls, and Deep Ones are all here, ready for you to dive in.
This is a box of strange surprises dredged up from the depths of the sea, each one polished and prepared for your enjoyment. So take a chance, and allow yourself to be surprised.

Yes, that is five Seanan McGuire (writing as herself or Mira Grant) this year, and three of them in the five-star lineup - unapologetic fangirl, get used to it. I was excited to see this anthology, but I've read so many McGuire stories in so many mixed anthologies that I expected I would have seen many of them before. Then I discovered that I hadn't seen the majority of them, and remembered that McGuire is one of the most insanely prolific writers ever. There is a marvellous range of weirdness here - dark urban legends, twisted fairy tales, sinister science stuff - all with the usual sharp and haunting prose. 

Six Months, Three Days, Five Others by Charlie Jane Anders. Synopsis from Goodreads: -A master absurdist...Highly recommended.- --The New York Times
Before the success of her debut SF-and-fantasy novel All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders was a rising star in SF and fantasy short fiction. Collected in a mini-book format, here--for the first time in print--are six of her quirky, wry, engaging best:
In -The Fermi Paradox Is Our Business Model, - aliens reveal the terrible truth about how humans were created--and why we'll never discover aliens.
-As Good as New- is a brilliant twist on the tale of three wishes, set after the end of the world.
-Intestate- is about a family reunion in which some attendees aren't quite human anymore--but they're still family.
-The Cartography of Sudden Death- demonstrates that when you try to solve a problem with time travel, you now have two problems.
-Six Months, Three Days- is the story of the love affair between a man who can see the one true foreordained future, and a woman who can see all the possible futures. They're both right, and the story won the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Novelette.
And -Clover, - exclusively written for this collection, is a coda to All the Birds in the Sky, answering the burning question of what happened to Patricia's cat.

I've read this multiple times, and I love it more than I can say (especially now when I am reviewing book 98 of 99, I'm sorry friends, my adjective tank is on fumes). It's an amazing combination of shockingly original ideas and fantastic writing. I loved all the stories, but As Good As New -- a funny, quirky, moving version of the genie in a bottle story - is my favourite. 

The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales edited by Dominik Parisien. Synopsis from Goodreads: An all-new anthology of cross-genre fairy tale retellings, featuring an all-star lineup of award-winning and critically acclaimed writers.
Once upon a time. It’s how so many of our most beloved stories start.
Fairy tales have dominated our cultural imagination for centuries. From the Brothers Grimm to the Countess d’Aulnoy, from Charles Perrault to Hans Christian Anderson, storytellers have crafted all sorts of tales that have always found a place in our hearts.
Now a new generation of storytellers have taken up the mantle that the masters created and shaped their stories into something startling and electrifying.
Packed with award-winning authors, this anthology explores an array of fairy tales in startling and innovative ways, in genres and settings both traditional and unusual, including science fiction, western, and post-apocalyptic as well as traditional fantasy and contemporary horror.
From the woods to the stars, The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales takes readers on a journey at once unexpected and familiar, as a diverse group of writers explore some of our most beloved tales in new ways across genres and styles.

I am endlessly fascinated by fractured fairy tales - I've made multiple displays of them in my school libraries and they're always a big hit - and I've read a lot of them. I feel like this is THE definitive anthology of modernized fairy-tales retellings. The twisted Western feminist version of Little Red Riding Hood. The horrifying retelling of The Pied Piper. The awesome super-dark super-gay Sleeping Beauty. The science-y Snow Queen. The flat-out hilariously amazing stoner version of Hansel and Gretel (love love love). I had read Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver before, but hugely enjoyed reading it again. Then there were a couple where I didn't know the source material and I enjoyed the author's notes about it. I've given multiple copies of it away already. It is magical.