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.