Comments, coincidences, complaining

 Did you guys see Shawna's comment on my last post?: "So this is weird: I followed a link here from Swistle... only to read your description of the Covid protocols your school is following, leading me to think "huh, that sounds like the same protocols we'd have to follow", leading me to click on your profile and find out we live in the same Ottawa suburb!" 

I LOVE when shit like this happens. I had a really good friend in grad school and one day in the library I asked her when her birthday was and she said "June. Fifteenth." Then she looked at my face and said "wait, is that your birthday too? So right now you're thinking, like 'I didn't ASK you MY birthday. I asked you YOUR birthday. You don't even KNOW my birthday so why are you saying it to me?'" and we were doing all this while whisper-laughing hysterically. 

I also want to thank everyone who didn't chime in "oh yeah, you're always allowed to park for only three hours on residential streets, even with no signs", on my parking post, because I posted and then kind of went cold in terror that this was a universal rule that everyone knew. 

I also didn't realize so many kids in the U.S. haven't been in school for almost a year. Is this a state-specific thing? I thought I had read about teachers being forced to go back in some places. But wow, it must be weird having not been back at all. Eve has been back on alternate days from last September, and then was home again for a few weeks after Christmas when we were in lockdown, but the elementary kids went back earlier because of the child care issue. The schools in our area have not had many cases at all, and whatever cases there have been seldom have any high risk contacts in the school (which means it's not an outbreak, just one or two individual cases at a a time). 

I did a shift in the office on Friday and it was pretty quiet, although I am constantly amazed at how many kids bump their heads every day. This week I am helping with the snack program because the office administrator, bless her heart, has taken to thinking that I must want more hours of any description, and is trying to keep me busy, and I have not been able to screw up the courage to say "I appreciate this so much, but I am a depressed, anxious, easily overwhelmed, chronically lazy person and busy is not something I aspire to be kept". 

I don't feel good. I'm sleeping even worse than usual. I either have migraine-level pain or very very bad headache-level pain. If I sit down, I usually fall asleep. I just tried to count how long my head has been hurting for and realized that someone in January talked about going dry for February and I said I already wasn't drinking because my head hurt all the time. I called the doctor finally, but couldn't get an appointment until next week. When I touch my orbital ridge the pain is so bad I almost pass out, and when I stop touching it I get dizzy, so I imagine I'm looking at some kind of sinusitis. If she can't do anything I may be out hunting for street drugs - Shawna, you're from around here, do you have any connections?

Yesterday I asked my husband to just tell me I was doing okay because I am feeling really crappy about myself right now. Right after that, someone posted that this is likely the anniversary of the last normal week in a lot of people's lives, and your inner anniversary timer probably knows that. So that might be it. I just have these waves of realizing now and then that I probably am not going to grow out of my sleep and consequently my eating and weight being chronically disordered. A big part of that is that thirty-plus years of disordered sleep from undiagnosed sleep apnea really, really fucked me over. It's okay, mostly. This family works around it. I can be normal short-term. I have an understanding husband. We can afford for me not to work full time. I do stuff that needs to be done, just at weird hours sometimes. I just wish I was more normal sometimes. 

Last week we went to get Eve's prom dress altered. We pulled into the parking lot and I said "I'm not sure they'll let me come in with you." She looked at me aghast and said "They better! I can't do this crap without my mommy". I said "remember how you're eighteen now?" and she said "age is just a number. Mommies are forever". So we got her dress altered and then we got A&W and came home and watched Modern Family and it was the best afternoon, and this is why I decided a while ago not to take on any extra work stuff until she graduates and leaves home next fall, even though Matt isn't traveling right now, so I technically could. Which is weird, maybe. So I guess we're not normal in a few ways, and mostly that's fine - good, even. Most of my favourite people are weirdos. 

Not Quitting My Other Day Job

 I have been covering the school office quite a bit over the past month because they've been down a person and Covid means everything that was simple is now much less so. It's very different from working in the library, especially right now when I don't have classes coming in. I really like having the human contact, getting to know more of the students, problem-solving and the fast pace. I also find it utterly draining. Yesterday was almost comically crazy - the office administrator was out sick so it was just two of us dealing with everything - parents coming to pick up their kids, parents calling because they couldn't access their kids' report cards, four bumped heads, one bleeding mouth and one bleeding nose of mythical proportions, and no fewer than eight stomach complaints - which under Covid means the student has to go into an isolation room, any siblings have to be pulled out of class, and they all have to be picked up and can't come back until after a negative Covid test or ten days isolating.

I feel bad for so many people during all of this, obviously, but the past couple of days have made me think of Angus, who has always had a very nervous stomach, and frequently called to be picked up from school when there was nothing wrong other than anxiety. If he had an understanding teacher (which was often), they would tell him to have a snack, go to the washroom, put his head down on his desk. If he didn't, they'd send him to the office to be picked up, and I would try not to act exasperated even if I was. Now any kid who has this happen is off school for at least a few days, possibly two weeks, and it affects their siblings and parents also. That, not to put too fine a point on it, sucks cube-shaped wombat poop. 

The kids who bled all over me were really freaking cute. The little boy with the nosebleed said, with great equanimity, "it doesn't hurt. It's just bleeding a lot" (me, mopping his face and hands and jacket and pants and shoes off with a bale of paper towels: "you don't say"). I took the little girl with the bleeding mouth into the staff bathroom to rinse out and assess the damage (it was minimal) and she looked in the mirror and said "my lips are really red!" I said "yeah, it looks like you're wearing lipstick" and she declared earnestly "I'm not! I think it's just the blood!" I'm not sure what to say about the kid who came at eleven for ice for a bump on the back of his head and came back at one for ice for the bump on the front of his head - maybe he was going for symmetry.

The first few days were an exercise is constant terror, because I knew so little about the policies and procedures. I'm getting better, but I keep forgetting things like making sure I ask for teachers' names when they bring a student down or need to see the principal or v.p. This culminated in the truly epic moment when I approached the vice principal's door and said "do you have a moment for..... uh, Dude with the British Accent?" I mean, what are they gonna do, fire me? 

And now I'm very tired and need to take a bleach bath and put a gallon of moisturizer on my poor hands. 

Mind if I Just Park This Here?

 It's always hard to get the first post out after the book posts. It's like I can't remember what else I do here. My boring life? Who wants to hear about that? 

Oh! I have kind of a funny boring story.

So I work at one school this year - I was at two but I got surplussed out due to lower enrollment, which was a bummer because I really loved the other school and being the librarian for the autism unit. But when I was at two schools there were parking issues for both, which was slightly annoyingly ironic because I was really excited when I got permanent positions meaning I could park in the parking lot without fear. I soon learned that the parking lot at one school is slightly too small so I could never be sure of getting a spot, especially if there was a lot of snow, cutting off the last few spots. At the other place I learned after I'd been hired that they block off the parking lot entrance for a good half hour every morning because students walk through the parking lot to get to school. Look, I know this is a first world problem and I sound petty. I know that kids not getting hit by cars is a good thing. But if you see the layout, it seems like it wouldn't be that big a deal for them to, I don't know, just NOT CUT ACROSS THE PARKING LOT. The parking lot that is supposed to be for staff to park in. Naturally, my arrival time falls right smack in the window of the parking lot being closed.

It's not a huge deal. I could come in early. I just have this (again, petty) thing where I have logged a LOT of free hours for the Ottawa School Board and I'm becoming less and less inclined to to so. So when I don't feel like getting there twenty minutes early, I park on the street. It's not that inconvenient and because of how far the parking lot is from the front door it's not even a longer walk. 

Last year when things were normal, on one snowy day one of my classes was in the library and the teacher remarked that she had gotten their later than usual because the roads were bad and had to go out and move her car because you'd get a ticket if you parked for longer than three hours. I was startled and a bit outraged because there are no signs to this effect, but after that if I was working a full day I would go out and move my car into the parking lot at my break (I've since looked it up and apparently the rule is you can park for three hours on a residential street unless otherwise posted. Maybe this is common knowledge, in which case I an embarrassed in addition to being startled and outraged. Oh well, won't be the last time). 

So lately I've been working in the library in the morning and the office in the afternoon. I usually go move my car at my library break. Last Monday it was three o'clock, half an hour before I was done, and I realized I had forgotten to move the car.

I looked up at the clock and had that instant pit in my stomach that's half "motherfucker, WHY can't I remember anything for more than ten minutes anymore?" and half "motherfucker, am I going to get a ticket that costs almost as much as I made today?" 

I stewed for a few minutes. It was really dumb, I was done my work and I probably could have just told the Office Administrator what happened and either leave early or go move the car. But I was embarrassed and sort of paralyzed. I'm new to working in the office and I already feel like I'm asking a dumbass question every forty seconds, and I was just super not enthused at another opportunity to look like a dickhead.

Do you ever get the urge to just randomly Google "do I have cancer?" or "will my kid get into university", as if Google is a fortune teller or a kindly old aunt that might be able to tell you exactly what you need to hear, instead of a heartless algorithm-driven search engine that doesn't give a single fuck about you? 

I sat there with my fingers hovering over the keyboard, thinking "maybe I'll just type 'am I going to get a parking ticket?'" and see what happens.

Instead, I Googled "Ottawa three-hour street parking limit". The first result, in very large letters, was "Ottawa parking enforcement of three-hour parking limit on streets where there is no signage SUSPENDED during provincial lockdown".

What do you know. Aunt Google came through for me after all. 

Books Read in 2020: Five-Star Fiction

I'm feeling slightly better. I spent a little less time online yesterday and today and argued with maybe 60% fewer assholes, and didn't swear at any of them (I usually know it's time to take a break from Twitter when the word 'fuck' overtakes a certain percentage of the other 280 characters. Either that or Twitter puts me in a time out for 'possible abusive behaviour' and instead of being incensed I think "yeah, that's probably fair". My hands and wrists are less throbby, although the rest of me still feels like it has a headache. It's Eve's birthday tomorrow and I'm sad she can't get together with her friends today, but last year Jody and I took them to the Van Gogh exhibit in Montreal and had a blast, so at least we have that, and next year she'll be 19, so we can have a giant party and she can... watch all her friends get drunk, probably, because she doesn't enjoy alcohol. 

I'm reading a lot right now and enjoying it quite a lot, although I'm also aware of a kind of hectic urgency that indicates that I'm not really mentally well. There seem to be rules for what I should be reading, and there are things I want to reread but instead I'm feeling like I should try to keep reading down the pile (which is so dumb, because it's bottomless, there's no point). I think I have to make myself reread something, and then start something long and dense and force myself not to care what 'progress' I'm making. 

So then, onward to the last book review post for 2020. Thanks for playing along. Reading is solitary but a reading community is not, and that is one thing the internet is spectacular for. 

Five-Star Fiction:

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi: A novel of breathtaking sweep and emotional power that traces three hundred years in Ghana and along the way also becomes a truly great American novel. Extraordinary for its exquisite language, its implacable sorrow, its soaring beauty, and for its monumental portrait of the forces that shape families and nations, Homegoing heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction. Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle's dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast's booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia's descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation. Generation after generation, Yaa Gyasi's magisterial first novel sets the fate of the individual against the obliterating movements of time, delivering unforgettable characters whose lives were shaped by historical forces beyond their control. Homegoing is a tremendous reading experience, not to be missed, by an astonishingly gifted young writer.

This was on my radar for quite a while before I read it, partly because I kept seeing it in the Ottawa Library ebook section and then hearing Gyasi Went Home by Bedouin Soundclash in my head. Felt like kind of ass for waiting so long when I finally read it. It's hard to believe this is a first novel. May be my favourite book of last year, which is a little weird to say about something that is largely about the legacy of horror wrought by white people (I also loved the movie Get Out - I am good with acknowledging that I am (probably) not personally evil but do benefit enormously from privilege in a system of white supremacy. I think art that highlights and criticizes this system is necessary and good). For a first novel I am in awe of the confidence and sophistication of the prose, and the mastery of a structure that could easily have beaten a less capable writer. The fact that she was able to distill each character or set of characters down to basically one chapter and still generate such an impact, and then illustrate the reverberations down through history in successive chapters - brilliant. The African and American settings both ring utterly true. It is heart-wrenchingly sad with luminous moments of grace and beauty. I read her second book early this year, and it is every bit as good. 

The Unseen World by Liz Moore: Ada Sibelius is raised by David, her brilliant, eccentric, socially inept single father, who directs a computer science lab in 1980s-era Boston. Home-schooled, Ada accompanies David to work every day; by twelve, she is a painfully shy prodigy. The lab begins to gain acclaim at the same time that David’s mysterious history comes into question. When his mind begins to falter, leaving Ada virtually an orphan, she is taken in by one of David’s colleagues. Soon she embarks on a mission to uncover her father’s secrets: a process that carries her from childhood to adulthood. What Ada discovers on her journey into a virtual universe will keep the reader riveted until The Unseen World’s heart-stopping, fascinating conclusion. 

There are actually two or three great stories in here. It's always interesting to read about children being raised by very non-mainstream standards, and the parallel of Ada's upbringing along with that of the baby AI is really fascinating. Having spent quite a bit of time in a university environment, I found the description of the lab group amusing and realistic. The tracing of David's dementia is predictably heartbreaking, and then the investigation into his life before having Ada yields a whole other affecting tale. I was never quite sure where it was going, but it was an entirely agreeable journey. 

Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club by Megan Gail Coles: #1 National Bestseller Finalist, CBC Canada Reads Finalist, Scotiabank Giller Prize By turns savage, biting, funny, poetic, and heartbreaking, Megan Gail Coles’s debut novel rips into the inner lives of a wicked cast of characters, exposing class, gender, and racial tensions over the course of one Valentine’s Day in the dead of a winter storm. Valentine’s Day, the longest day of the year. A fierce blizzard is threatening to tear a strip off the city, while inside The Hazel restaurant a storm system of sex, betrayal, addiction, and hurt is breaking overhead. Iris, a young hostess, is forced to pull a double despite resolving to avoid the charming chef and his wealthy restaurateur wife. Just tables over, Damian, a hungover and self-loathing server, is trying to navigate a potential punch-up with a pair of lit customers who remain oblivious to the rising temperature in the dining room. Meanwhile Olive, a young woman far from her northern home, watches it all unfurl from the fast and frozen street. Through rolling blackouts, we glimpse the truth behind the shroud of scathing lies and unrelenting abuse, and discover that resilience proves most enduring in the dead of this winter’s tale.

Another Canada Reads book from last year. I admit that I read the first couple of chapters and thought "is anyone in Newfoundland happy EVER?" And then I got to a section that asked questions about the reasons for a lot of issues in Newfoundland and the answer to every one was "poverty", so, fair enough. It is guttingly, unremittingly bleak, but also brilliant in the way it traces destructive patterns of thought in the characters, both self-destructive and outwardly so. I stayed up way too late reading one night when I had to work early the next day, and I almost never do that with a book that isn't genre fiction. The ending seems almost too much, and also kind of perfect. Don't read it unless you're in the mood to go to a dark place. 

Radicalized by Cory Doctorow: Here are four urgent stories from author and activist Cory Doctorow, four social, technological and economic visions of the world today and its near—all too near—future. 'Unauthorized Bread' is a tale of immigration, toxic economic stratification and a young woman's perilously illegal quest to fix a broken toaster. In 'Model Minority' a superhero finds himself way out his depth when he confronts the corruption of the police and justice system. 'Radicalized' is the story of a desperate husband, a darknet forum and the birth of a violent uprising against the US health care system. The final story, 'The Masque of the Red Death', tracks an uber-wealthy survivalist and his followers as they hole up and attempt to ride out the collapse of society. 

And another Canada Reads book. I started this on a flight home from Thunder Bay to Toronto, continued it on the flight from Toronto to Ottawa, barely paused to put my coat down and finished it a couple of hours after we got home. It strikes that seldom-seen balance between being topical and incisive and uncomfortable and also insanely readable. There was a bit of a Baader-Meinhof effect in that I had just read about farmers that had purchased farm equipment with proprietary programming so they would be gouged for repairs that they should have been able to do themselves. In "Unauthorized Bread", it is kitchen appliances (and elevators) with restrictions that add to the marginalization of immigrants, and the toaster revolution prompted by this injustice. 'Model Minority' is a suffocatingly bleak illustration of the intractability of institutionalized racism, and shows that even a superhero comes up short against the ugly, deep roots of it. Doctorow is a speculative fiction writer, and that's what this is - really dark, really smart speculative fiction, but unfortunately the speculation isn't about whether things are bad, but about how far we might have to go to make them better. 

Watching You Without Me by Lynn Coady: From the author of the Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning story collection Hellgoing --an electrifying, brooding novel about the lengths we go to care for family, and what happens when a stranger places himself at the center of one household. " Watching You Without Me is like a Lorrie Moore book suffering a Patricia Highsmith fever dream. You slide right along on Coady's witty and endearing style, and meanwhile the trap has closed over you without your ever standing a chance." --Jonathan Lethem 

After her mother's sudden death, Karen finds herself back in her childhood home in Nova Scotia for the first time in a decade, acting as full-time caregiver to her older sister, Kelli. Overwhelmed and consumed by the isolation of her new role, Karen finds a shoulder to cry on in Trevor--one of Kelli's caregivers. Karen gratefully accepts his friendship and comes to trust him all the more when she discovers how close Trevor was to her mother, Irene. But all is not as it appears to be. What begins with friendly advice and someone to talk to soon takes a dark and mysterious turn. Who is this person Karen has let into her home and into her family's life? How well does she know the stranger she has entrusted with her sister's well-being? As Trevor slowly weaves himself into Karen and Kelli's lives, Karen starts to grasp the unsettling truth about him and his relationship with her mother--and to experience for herself the true and dangerous nature of Trevor's "care."

I read the synopsis for this and thought "well that sounds lame", but it's Lynn Coady, so obviously I was going there anyway. It was amazing to me in the way that most of Lynn Coady's writing is amazing to me - I look at the synopsis and think 'meh' and then I start reading and wonder why I doubted, even for a second, that she would make it sadly amusing or amusingly sad, and relatable, and a little bit absurd, and so very, very human. 

Evvie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes: In a sleepy seaside town in Maine, recently widowed Eveleth “Evvie” Drake rarely leaves her large, painfully empty house nearly a year after her husband’s death in a car crash. Everyone in town, even her best friend, Andy, thinks grief keeps her locked inside, and Evvie doesn’t correct them. Meanwhile, in New York City, Dean Tenney, former Major League pitcher and Andy’s childhood best friend, is wrestling with what miserable athletes living out their worst nightmares call the “yips”: he can’t throw straight anymore, and, even worse, he can’t figure out why. As the media storm heats up, an invitation from Andy to stay in Maine seems like the perfect chance to hit the reset button on Dean’s future. When he moves into an apartment at the back of Evvie’s house, the two make a deal: Dean won’t ask about Evvie’s late husband, and Evvie won’t ask about Dean’s baseball career. Rules, though, have a funny way of being broken—and what starts as an unexpected friendship soon turns into something more. To move forward, Evvie and Dean will have to reckon with their pasts—the friendships they’ve damaged, the secrets they’ve kept—but in life, as in baseball, there’s always a chance—up until the last out. 

Look at me, reading something that almost screams Chick Lit and loving it. I know, I know, a good book is a good book. And this was a really good book, although part of the reason I called it amazing is that I was amazed that I liked it so much. It's just smart, entertaining writing, with some good insight into what can torpedo a life and what can start to repair it. Smart, funny dialogue. Organically built relationships. Fun characters that you want to hang out with. And enough whimsy that it's not just real life. 

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk: In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount, Janina inserts herself into the investigation, certain that she knows whodunit. If only anyone would pay her mind . . . A deeply satisfying thriller cum fairy tale, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is a provocative exploration of the murky borderland between sanity and madness, justice and tradition, autonomy and fate. Whom do we deem sane? it asks. Who is worthy of a voice?

"I think it tallies with one of my Theories -- my belief that the human psyche evolved in order to defend us against seeing the truth. To prevent us from catching sight of the mechanism. The psyche is our defense system -- it makes sure we'll never understand what's going on around us. Its main task is to filter information, even though the capabilities of our brains are enormous. For it would be impossible to carry the weight of this knowledge. Because every tiny particle of the world is made of suffering."

I took an entire university seminar on the poetry of William Blake. Back then it seemed like heady stuff to me. I've been thinking I should revisit some of it and see how I feel about it now.  I definitely think it would be a tough task to translate it into Polish. I started reading this a couple of weeks into the first lockdown last March, when we were still dazed and reeling. I thought hard about whether I wanted to continue reading it at that time. I still can't quite decide if it was the absolute worst book to read right then, or the absolute best. I came down on the side of the latter, although it meant forcing myself to be willing to go to some very dark and uncomfortable places. There was a very desolate, noir, non-mainstream consciousness at work here that was odd, abrasive, compassionate, charming and then obscurely comforting. 

"It is at Dusk that the most interesting things occur, for that is when simple differences fade away. I could live in everlasting Dusk."

Some of this was likely due to the setting being rural Poland, and the fact that I was reading in translation. I loved the little scenes of people taking comfort in community under such unkind circumstances. I loved that Janina, who hated her own name, gave the other villagers such epithets as Big Foot and Oddball and Good News. I loved that she was obsessed with astrology and yet admitted that she was quite bad at it. Near the end of the book I realized that I had been so beguiled by the tiny details of the book that I had missed a pretty obvious big-picture thing - almost literally like missing the forest for the trees - but it was okay. I also realized, after I had already bought the book and sent it to my brother-in-law and his wife for Christmas, that Olga Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018 and I had never heard of her, and that wasn't really okay, how am I this clueless? I couldn't decide if I felt like it looked snobby sending them a book that won a bunch of awards from a Nobel-winning author, or if I was happy that at least it seemed that many other people agreed with me that it was a wonderful book.

"The only coarse and primitive Tool gifted us for consolation is pain. The angels, if they really do exist, must be splitting their sides laughing at us. Fancy being given a body and not knowing anything about it. There's no instruction manual."

 I then did some reading about Olga Tokarczuk and was delighted to find Janina termed "a kind of Eastern European Miss Marple", and the author described as "a woman who combines an extraordinary intellect with an anarchic sensibility". I stumbled across a movie the other day that seemed strangely familiar, and realized that it was, in fact, based on this book. I haven't watched it yet - frankly, the trailer didn't look or feel right to me - but I still might. I will definitely be reading more by this author. 

"Gradually I felt flooded by a powerful sense of communion with the people passing by. Each man was my brother and each woman my sister. We were so very much alike. So fragile, impermanent and easily destroyed. We trustingly went to and fro beneath the sky, which had nothing good in store for us."

Books Read in 2020: Five-Star Non-Fiction

Yes, I am slightly ashamed that I am still working on book review posts from last year and it's already February, but on the other hand I read a LOT OF BOOKS, OKAY? This would have been out earlier but I've picked up a few office shifts at the school on non-library days and I just don't feel that physically well at the moment. I've been having dry eye issues for a couple of years, but they are extra-bad right now, which means wearing contacts is difficult and I have to wear contacts for work because otherwise my glasses are fogging and I can't read or type, which is a big part of the job. I can get through the day, but even with reading glasses it's an effort, which means my already-borderline-migrainyness (which I think is weather-related) is even worse. Plus what I think is a fibro-flare, so all things considered I'm just not loving my time in this body right now. And our Covid cases are down and the kids are back to school, which is good, but we're all still on edge. Matt has always had issues with short-term memory, and right now they are at an all-time peak point, and I am having trouble being gracious about it. He comes upstairs and asks me if I want anything while I'm reading and I ask for water or tea and he says great, be right back, and then he goes downstairs and never comes back. And let's be honest, I didn't have the water or tea before, so really I'm no worse off than I was, but now I'm angry and convinced that I'm thirsty even if I wasn't five minutes ago. Plus I feel bad for being bitchy about it, because he's working really hard and he's not doing it on purpose. But dude -- you know this is how things are, stop promising liquids that are never going to materialize. 

But today Eve and I baked a buttload of cookies and then she practiced driving while we delivered them to all her friends (they have a dedicated chat called Where Are the Cookies for just such occasions). And despite being thrown every unfavorable condition in the book - snow, the sun at that angle where it drills right into your eyes, people walking five across the street, construction, a truck parked the wrong way - she drove like a champ. And I brought warm cookies to my absent-minded husband while he was on a work Zoom meeting and he told his colleagues to suck it. So it's not all bad. 

 Five-Star Non-Fiction:

No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters by Ursula K. Le Guin: Synopsis from Goodreads: From acclaimed author Ursula K. Le Guin, and with an introduction by Karen Joy Fowler, a collection of thoughts—always adroit, often acerbic—on aging, belief, the state of literature, and the state of the nation. Ursula K. Le Guin has taken readers to imaginary worlds for decades. Now she’s in the last great frontier of life, old age, and exploring new literary territory: the blog, a forum where her voice—sharp, witty, as compassionate as it is critical—shines. No Time to Spare collects the best of Ursula’s blog, presenting perfectly crystallized dispatches on what matters to her now, her concerns with this world, and her wonder at it.    On the absurdity of denying your age, she says, If I’m ninety and believe I’m forty-five, I’m headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the bathtub. On cultural perceptions of fantasy: The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is ‘escapism’ an accusation of? On her new cat: He still won’t sit on a lap…I don’t know if he ever will. He just doesn’t accept the lap hypothesis. On breakfast: Eating an egg from the shell takes not only practice, but resolution, even courage, possibly willingness to commit crime. And on all that is unknown, all that we discover as we muddle through life: 

How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.

I read this as my 'crone lit' entry for book bingo. It's a selection of blog posts from LeGuin's blog in her later years. I've always been in awe of her as a writer, and this was an experience akin to reading Virginia Woolf's diaries - a privilege and a pleasure to be granted a peek into her witty, sharp, kind and humorous consciousness. The parts about her cat are worth the price of admission all on their own. 

We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir by Samra Habib: Synopsis from Goodreads: A CANADA READS 2020 SELECTION NATIONAL BESTSELLER How do you find yourself when the world tells you that you don't exist? Samra Habib has spent most of her life searching for the safety to be herself. As an Ahmadi Muslim growing up in Pakistan, she faced regular threats from Islamic extremists who believed the small, dynamic sect to be blasphemous. From her parents, she internalized the lesson that revealing her identity could put her in grave danger. When her family came to Canada as refugees, Samra encountered a whole new host of challenges: bullies, racism, the threat of poverty, and an arranged marriage. Backed into a corner, her need for a safe space--in which to grow and nurture her creative, feminist spirit--became dire. The men in her life wanted to police her, the women in her life had only shown her the example of pious obedience, and her body was a problem to be solved. 

So begins an exploration of faith, art, love, and queer sexuality, a journey that takes her to the far reaches of the globe to uncover a truth that was within her all along. A triumphant memoir of forgiveness and family, both chosen and not, We Have Always Been Here is a rallying cry for anyone who has ever felt out of place and a testament to the power of fearlessly inhabiting one's truest self.

Last year I decided to take a crack at reading all the Canada Reads books for the first time - I've usually read one or two. I had read one already and read three of the others and thought they were all really good. This one was amazing. Habib faced so many levels of discrimination, from being a persecuted Ahmadi Muslim in Pakistan as a child to being a Muslim teenager in Canada, and then a queer Muslim woman struggling to be accepted by both Muslims and other Canadians. The way she's engaged with her struggle through journalism and photography and the reconciliation she's achieved with her parents are both really inspiring. This gave me more of an insight as to why queer people still consider themselves Muslims, as well, which is something I've wondered about (same with Catholicism). I am going to look up more of her work. 

Had it Coming: What's Fair in the Age of #MeToo by Robyn Doolittle: Synopsis from Goodreads: "A decisive snapshot of this moment in history that considers where we were, and sets the stage for where we might go, and will no doubt be used to describe this moment long after we move on to a new normal." --Zoe Whittall, author of The Best Kind of People An illuminating, timely look at the changing landscape of sexual politics by the author of Crazy Town. For nearly two years, Globe and Mail reporter Robyn Doolittle investigated how Canadian police handle sexual assault cases. Her findings were shocking: across the country, in big cities and small towns, the system was dismissing a high number of allegations as "unfounded." A police officer would simply view the claim as baseless and no investigation would follow. Of the 26,500 reported cases of sexual assault in 2015, only 1,400 resulted in convictions. The response to Doolittle's groundbreaking Unfounded series was swift. Federal ministers immediately vowed to establish better oversight, training, and policies; Prime Minister Trudeau announced $100 million to combat gender-based violence; Statistics Canada began to collect and publish unfounded rates; and to date, about a third of the country's forces have pledged to review more than 10,000 sex-assault cases dating back to 2010. Had It Coming picks up where the Unfounded series left off. Doolittle brings a personal voice to what has been a turning point for most women: the #MeToo movement and its aftermath. The world is now increasingly aware of the pervasiveness of rape culture in which powerful men got away with sexual assault and harassment for years: from Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Bill O'Reilly, and Matt Lauer, to Charlie Rose and Jian Ghomeshi. But Doolittle looks beyond specific cases to the big picture. The issue of "consent" figures largely: not only is the public confused about what it means, but an astounding number of police officers and judges do not understand Canadian consent law. The brain's reaction to trauma and how it affects memory is also crucial to understanding victim statements. Surprisingly, Canada has the most progressive sexual assault laws in the developed world, yet the system is failing victims at every stage. Had It Coming is not a diatribe or manifesto, but a nuanced and informed look at how attitudes around sexual behaviour have changed and still need to change.

I got this from the library and it was so excellent I ordered a couple of copies to give to people. I love how Doolittle starts with admitting and illustrating how she bought into rape culture before she started realizing the reality of it. I appreciated how she asked herself how she could 'quantify' rape culture, and then does exactly that. She acknowledges that this book could very easily have slipped into a "burn it all down" screed, and that would be justified, but it stays fair and balanced - for instance, Doolittle maintains and supports the argument that the verdict in the Jian Ghomeshi trial was the right one under the circumstances. I learned some things (her statistics and explanations of a lot of Canadian laws are really clear and helpful: in short, Canadian sexual assault laws are among the most progressive, but the way the cases are assessed and investigated - or not -  needs serious reform) and learned how to articulate some things more clearly. One thing I really appreciated was the articulation of how it can important to meet people on their level - not appeasement, but understanding of the fact that not everyone has a degree in women's studies. I often feel obligated to speak up in situations where I don't really want to, and I actually thought I had to use up-to-date terms to be more credible. Doolittle's reminder that it probably isn't useful to go the call-out route - and throw around terms like 'micro-aggression' with seventy-year-old Uncle Bob at dinner, and that inviting people to have a productive discussion is likely to yield more positive results. It made me angry, predictably, and was a good reminder that none of this is comfortable, but it also gave me more of a vocabulary for talking about these issues, and gave me a tiny bit of hope. Highly recommended. 

The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying by Nina Riggs: Synopsis from Goodreads: An exquisite memoir about how to live--and love--every day with "death in the room," from poet Nina Riggs, mother of two young sons and the direct descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the tradition of When Breath Becomes Air. "We are breathless, but we love the days. They are promises. They are the only way to walk from one night to the other." Nina Riggs was just thirty-seven years old when initially diagnosed with breast cancer--one small spot. Within a year, the mother of two sons, ages seven and nine, and married sixteen years to her best friend, received the devastating news that her cancer was terminal. How does one live each day, "unattached to outcome"? How does one approach the moments, big and small, with both love and honesty? Exploring motherhood, marriage, friendship, and memory, even as she wrestles with the legacy of her great-great-great grandfather, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nina Riggs's breathtaking memoir continues the urgent conversation that Paul Kalanithi began in his gorgeous When Breath Becomes Air. She asks, what makes a meaningful life when one has limited time? Brilliantly written, disarmingly funny, and deeply moving, The Bright Hour

 is about how to love all the days, even the bad ones, and it's about the way literature, especially Emerson, and Nina's other muse, Montaigne, can be a balm and a form of prayer. It's a book about looking death squarely in the face and saying "this is what will be." Especially poignant in these uncertain times, The Bright Hour urges us to live well and not lose sight of what makes us human: love, art, music, words.

I could probably write an entire post about this book, and about the fraught experience of reading books by dying people. The reason I came across this one is the sort of Hollywood-ish circumstances surrounding Nina Riggs's husband and Paul Kalanithi's wife. I had already read Kalanithi's book When Breath Becomes Air, written when he was dying of lung cancer. Then I saw a story about Kalanithi's widow Lucy and Riggs's widower John who were in a relationship after connecting over their spouses' dying memoirs. So then I had to read The Bright Hour. I loved it, possibly more than When Breath Becomes Air, which is, bluntly, probably because it is the kind of book I would write if I was dying. Riggs's family is also much like mine - using humour, sometimes black and inappropriate, to cope with fear and grief. She was also a descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson and a poet. I adored her elegant and elegaic observations, her writing about her children, her treatment of the absurd catastrophe of going through cancer treatment at the same time as her mother. 

Some of the reviews of the book on Goodreads made me fume. One person said she was hoping for more insight, as in Paul Kalanithi's book. I was like, whatever, he was a brain surgeon and really fancied himself, clearly you bought into that. Another person was annoyed that she referred so often to Emerson, which what? She was related to him, she was also a poet, he wrote about death a lot and the references to him tied COMPLETELY APPROPRIATELY into the subject matter. But it's really dumb to get upset about other people not connecting with a book just because you connected with it. Particularly because I have totally read books that were supposed to be brilliant and brave and life-changing and thought things like "well, that was definitely the best book written by blinking out one letter at a time I've read this year, but that's all I can say about that". 

It's amazing to me that anyone, when faced with the clear and present fact of their death, can string a number of coherent sentences together. The fact that Nina Riggs produced this work of courage, beauty and love is miraculous. 

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote: Synopsis from Goodreads: On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues. As Truman Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, he generates both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy. At the center of his study are the amoral young killers Perry Smith and Dick Hickcock, who, vividly drawn by Capote, are shown to be reprehensible yet entirely and frighteningly human. In Cold Blood is a seminal work of modern prose, a remarkable synthesis of journalistic skill and powerfully evocative narrative.

I'm not sure how it took me so long to get around to this, other than that I don't really read true crime - is this even true crime? How does it fit into that genre? Okay, one article says it "set the standard" for true crime writing. Capote said it "scraped (him) right down to the marrow of (his) bones". I chose this as my pick for book club last year because I felt like I should read it, but I anticipated it being a bit of a slog. I was completely wrong, I could not put it down. The meticulous, loving description of the Clutters' last day, laden with the heavy inevitability of what was to come. The grace granted to the murderers of tracing their bitter, traumatic backstories. The people haunted by the aftermath. The vivid sense of place and community. It's an unbelievably beautiful book about a terrible, ugly occurrence. Also a reminder to myself to stop dismissing entire genres. A good book is a good book. 

My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead: Synopsis from Goodreads: Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch, regarded by many as the greatest English novel. After gaining admission to Oxford, and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage and family, Mead read and reread Middlemarch. The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," offered Mead something that modern life and literature did not. In this wise and revealing work of biography, reporting, and memoir, Rebecca Mead leads us into the life that the book made for her, as well as the many lives the novel has led since it was written. Employing a structure that deftly mirrors that of the novel, My Life in Middlemarch takes the themes of Eliot's masterpiece--the complexity of love, the meaning of marriage, the foundations of morality, and the drama of aspiration and failure--and brings them into our world. Offering both a fascinating reading of Eliot's biography and an exploration of the way aspects of Mead's life uncannily echo that of Eliot herself.

My wonderful sister-in-law sent me this when I told her I was reading Middlemarch. Every year I go back and tackle a sizeable classic that I missed somehow. It's not my preferred reading genre and I have to force myself to start, and then there's often a nearly-audible 'click' when I fall into the rhythm, which definitely happened with Middlemarch. Many reviewers complained that the title of the book is misleading, which is definitely is, but it didn't bother me. Mead makes it very possible to imagine growing up in England and having this book as a touchstone through various stages of life. The rest of the book is a combination of a study of George Eliot's life and close readings of various parts of the book. I read this in the reading spot my husband set up for me on our tiny back deck, and it was a sublime experience. This is a wonderful companion to Middlemarch.

So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo: Synopsis from Goodreads: In this breakout book, Ijeoma Oluo explores the complex reality of today's racial landscape--from white privilege and police brutality to systemic discrimination and the Black Lives Matter movement--offering straightforward clarity that readers need to contribute to the dismantling of the racial divide In So You Want to Talk About Race,

 Editor at Large of The Establishment Ijeoma Oluo offers a contemporary, accessible take on the racial landscape in America, addressing head-on such issues as privilege, police brutality, intersectionality, micro-aggressions, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the "N" word. Perfectly positioned to bridge the gap between people of color and white Americans struggling with race complexities, Oluo answers the questions readers don't dare ask, and explains the concepts that continue to elude everyday Americans. Oluo is an exceptional writer with a rare ability to be straightforward, funny, and effective in her coverage of sensitive, hyper-charged issues in America. Her messages are passionate but finely tuned, and crystalize ideas that would otherwise be vague by empowering them with aha-moment clarity. Her writing brings to mind voices like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay, and Jessica Valenti in Full Frontal Feminism, and a young Gloria Naylor, particularly in Naylor's seminal essay "The Meaning of a Word."

I have followed Oluo on Twitter for quite a while, and bought this book first after deciding that I had to do some reading on racial issues (I read Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me a few years ago). I feel like this should really be required reading. The way she lays it out for us is generous and gracious. Easy to understand, easy to gather what first and next steps we should be taking. As with the Doolittle book, she would have been within her rights to go medieval on our asses, and her restraint is admirable. Still. What the fuck are we even doing, people?