I Am Reading Too Many Books At the Same Time Again

I've been having a bit of trouble maintaining a good reading focus lately. I'm not sure whether it's perimenopause or too much electronics use or - most likely - a combination of both. When I'm reading on my ipad, not only do Twitter and Facebook notifications float across my screen, but if I think of something I wanted to know or if something I read touches off a string of associations - and when doesn't it? - it's way too easy to click away and look up the name or phrase or reference I'm thinking of. Further, if I force myself NOT to look it up right then, the likelihood that I will remember it later is very low. So I could stop and just make a note to look it up later, but then I'd still be interrupting my reading. You see my dilemma.

Sometimes this kind of fuzziness leads to me starting multiple books in search of something that will hold my attention better, but I don't think that's actually the case this time. I usually read in the rough order of: something with a deadline, i.e. book club book, borrowed book, library book expiring soon; library ebooks that can't be renewed; library books that can be renewed; books I own. I keep telling myself to stop borrowing library books until I finish my pile of books that I own, and I keep not doing that.

So. The last book I finished was Exhalation, a book of short stories by Ted Chiang (who wrote The Story of Your Life, an amazing short story which was made into the movie Arrival). It was excellent. I moved it up in my queue because it was a library ebook that only had a few days left before it expired. Before that I was reading a library ebook that still had a couple of weeks left - An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green, brother of John Green whose books I adore. I don't have a really good read on it so far, but it's fast-paced and enjoyable. The funniest thing is that it revolves around giant mysterious statues that appear around the world, and the first girl to discover them and become the public face of their reception calls the first statue "Carl", which then becomes the name of all the statues. This vividly recalled to me the many times I would walk Eve home from school in the winter when she was five and six and seven, me trudging along the sidewalk or road, her in her blue snowsuit scrambling over snowbanks and climbing up on people's snow-piled lawns. She talked non-stop, to me or to herself or to the trees in her path. She called all the trees Carl.

Just before I started reading that, Indigo put five dollars in Plum points in my account. I decided to order a book by a woman, since I've been trying to read more books by women (for obvious reasons, I hope). I ended up ordering three books ("how much was it again? FIVE dollars?" Eve asked, somewhat unkindly): Wait Til You See Me Dance by Deb Olin Unforth - honestly, can't even remember how I came across it  but the first three stories have been excellent; Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers - Monstrosity, Patriarchy and the Fear of Female Power by Sady Doyle because it sounded insanely cool and also extremely rage-provoking and talks about horror books and movies, and the first bit has been wonderful (and also rage-provoking, naturally). One of my favourite quotes so far: "The Babylonian Talmud states that 'if a menstrating woman passes between two men, if it is at the beginning of her period she will kill one of them' (I added a note saying "maybe he told her she'd be prettier if she smiled"); and Tender, a book of short stories by Sofia Samatar, a Somali-American educator, poet, and writer (because I'm also trying to read more books by black women). The first story is called Selkie Stories Are for Losers, and the first line bit reads "I hate selkie stories. They're always about how you went up to the attic to look for a book, and you found a disgusting old coat and brought it downstairs between finger and thumb and said 'What's this?' and you never saw your mom again." I trust you'll agree I chose well.

Before the lovely afternoon I spent getting to know those three books, I was reading three OTHER books on my Kindle. One was This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar, which I pre-ordered and waited for impatiently, and it is awesome - time-travelly and badass woman-ful and I think kind of gay - but it's very dense and I'm enjoying reading it very slowly. Two was Tide of Stone by Kaaron Warren - I've read a few of her short stories and they are devastatingly good and very much not for the faint of heart. This is also extremely original and inventive and laden with doom and dread, but there is very little narrative energy, so again I'm reading it slowly. Three is The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales edited by Dominik Parisien. So far I've read a fantastic Little Red Riding Hood retelling by Seanan McGuire, a story by Karin Tidbeck that completely turns fairy tale logic upside down and a version of Hansel and Gretel by Daryl Gregory that is both howlingly funny and extremely moving and has a ton of drugs in it.

But right now I am concentrating solely on finishing The Idiot by Elif Batuman for book club, which would normally have been last night, but we're down a member so we're not starting until October this year, which, given the way this month has gone is kind of a relief.

I can't remember who picked this book and I didn't know much about it going in. The first thirty or so pages didn't leave me impressed. I couldn't tell if it was a memoir or fiction, and it just seemed to be a journally account of a young woman's first year at Harvard with a lot of so what-type moments. The next hundred pages won me over to an extent - there was a bunch of fun linguistic stuff: "In linguistics class, we learned about people who had lost the ability to combine morphemes, after having their brains perforated by iron poles. Apparently there were several such people, who got iron poles stuck in their heads and lived to tell the tale – albeit without morphemes. By studying where the poles were, and what morphemes got lost, you could figure out where the morphemes were stored". There were a few laugh-out-loud moments: "The whole week was depressing. I spent nine hours of it shivering, wrapped in the Gogolian coat, through a nine-hour documentary about the Holocaust. At some point I thought I had grown a lump in my thigh, but it turned out to be a tangerine – it had fallen through a hole in the pocket and ended up trapped in the lining".

There were also a couple of clunky lines that reminded me of things that I wrote in college and considered terribly profound: at one point she looks at a bunch of people in a pool learning how to scuba dive and thinks "how did all those people know that they wanted to learn how to scuba dive?" Ugggghhhh. Also, she's falling in love with another student through a series of incredibly pretentious email exchanges which just make me want to warn her that he will have the worst man-colds imaginable and won't ever change a diaper. So I'm not all in, but it's diverting enough. 

So obviously my reading life is completely out of control, but I'm happy and excited about all of it, and will share many more morphemes presently.

Colour Your World

Every time I think about blogging, I have to ask myself, what the hell am I doing? Why do I consistently find ways to avoid something that's really good for me, something that I do fairly well, something that I can literally do sitting on my ass in my kitchen, something that can easily take under half an hour? 

The preceding question could fairly equally be applied to playing the piano (big piece of furniture one room over, somehow turns invisible when I walk past) and exercising (not the sitting on my ass part, but you get me.). I would almost certainly feel better if I did these things far more regularly. Why do I not do them? Do I hate myself? 

Anyways. To just lay out a little of the stuff whirling around in my mind lately. Painting the main floor walls. When we moved in here, I was determined that we weren't going to have walls that were builder's white. I wanted colour, deeply saturated, more than one. We painted the family room a medium blue, the kitchen a sunny yellow, the living room an orangey terra cotta, and the entrance a deep green. I wished slightly that the family room blue was darker and the entrance green was more sage than kelly, but on the whole I was happy (it turns out, sort of weirdly, that the entrance was the exact green of East Nepean Little League, which launched Angus on a few fairly amazing adventures, so that's kind of neat). A few years later we repainted the family room a sort of café au lait. I wished we had extended that colour into the kitchen (in my mind we did, and I'm shocked every time I rediscover that the kitchen is still yellow), but again, I was happy. 

Lately, I suddenly feel a strong need to have fewer and calmer colours. I go and visit Zarah, who gets to make all the decorating decisions for herself since her cheating-ass husband left, and I sit reading among the soothing neutrals and the understated decor that flows naturally from room to room and feel a kind of tranquillity I almost never do at home. I think of a blogger I used to read who was pregnant after the stillbirth of her first baby, and she was repainting her kitchen and living room from a gorgeous range of saffron and honey and amber - like a Middle Eastern spice market - to white and off-white. I thought she was nuts. I loved the old colours. I didn't understand how different experiences and states of mind can result in just really wanting to be surrounded by different colours.

I followed Rachel Held Evans on Twitter. I own one of her books, haven't yet read it, but she seemed like a really remarkable person (her Twitter bio begins with "Doubt-filled believer", which really resonates with me). Fairly soon before she died far too young, she was tweeting about painting a new house, or maybe repainting her house. She said she loved warm, rich colours like yellow, orange and red, that she "hated every sad, gray page of the Pottery Barn catalog". I smiled, because I remembered thinking the exact same thing. That she never got to redecorate her house, or reach the age when she would long for soothing neutrals, if she ever would, is absolutely in the minutest of minutiae in the vast tragedy of her death for her family and friends and followers. But I still think of it, and it makes looking at paint chips and trying out simulation programs seem freighted with privilege and implications, and makes it seem both less and more important than it actually is.

Is this rather a lot to lay on a few buckets of Kendall Charcoal, Balboa Mist or Metropolitan Gray? Why yes, it well may be. I'm at a time in my life, and in the life of the world, where almost everything sets off a cascade of thoughts about privilege and mortality. Our days are not unlimited. So I'm going to do my best to write more - here at least once a week, and if I fall off the wagon, feel free to call me on it. And I will drag my recalcitrant ass to the gym (buckle up, Pammy, we're going back in). And I will play my stupid piano. And I will try very hard not to procrastinate too much on clearing out some junk and painting my house some happy colours that are perfect for this point in my journey.