You’ll probably read Lincoln in the Bardo because everyone is talking about it and because George Saunders is some kind of savant of literary genius who writes sentences that are so particular in their detail and yet so vast in their evocation of feeling that while reading you sort of stumble between the narrative itself and the awareness that you are reading the work of a master of language-to-mean. Not unlike my own opening run-on-sentence, right? Right. Continue reading
One Good Turn: Why Does My Cat Lick Off All Her Leg Fur, And Other Pressing Mysteries
Without knowing it I stumbled into a mystery series. Typical Sunday library book browsing: I was looking for Kate Atkinson’s God in Ruins for book club (and to follow-up on my enjoyment of Life After Life) and it wasn’t where it should be on the shelf. Instead I found One Good Turn with the handy (thanks, library staff) “mystery” sticker on the spine. And I thought, yeah, okay, I’m in for a mystery. Continue reading
Filed under British literature, Fiction, Mystery
Anxiety Addendum
Me again. I meant to be evasive with major life events and anxiety, because I meant to be inclusive in thinking about how we all might read (or not!) while anxious. I didn’t mean to cause alarm among my readers/friends! So: rest assured! I’m fine. My partner and I decided to move and so the last few months have been the upheaval of selling a house, finding a new one, etc. Add my personal predisposition for anxious reactions and you get the no-sleep, no-focus. Sorry for being purposefully evasive; I’ll strive in future to do a better balance of telling you what you may want to know with getting around to actual book reviewing. Now let’s all rest easy. xo
Filed under Fiction
The People in the Trees: Reading While Anxious
I’ve had some things going on in my life. Some major life things, or Life Events, or what-have-you. As a consequence I’ve been really, really good at not falling asleep, and fretting, and ruminating, and considering pro’s and con’s. I’ve been really, really poor at reading an entire novel. So between the start of March and now I’ve read things that made space for my fleeting focus (which isn’t to say these things don’t require focus, only that I was only able to muster focus for a fleeting period: half an hour in the bath, twenty minutes on the bus): Alice Munro short stories, re-reading for the hundred million-th time the Beverly Cleary Ramona series and starting and then dropping a sequence of novels that in another time would have had me captured (Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad is the most unlucky in the lot – I made it a third of the way in, put it down for a week of fretting, and when I returned could. not. recall. what I had already read and so abandoned the whole project. Even though I recognized in the first third that it was an excellent novel. I digress). A side question for you then is what do you read when you’re anxious? Or unable to focus? Continue reading
Filed under American literature, Fiction
Literary Vice 