reader. writer.

My weekly check-in on my favorite topics

What works

Once a week, evaluate your progress from the previous week, then set goals for the next week. There have been times in my life when I did this regularly, and times I didn’t. I’ve started again, though with a light touch, reminding myself every week that the evaluation is not to scold myself for not doing everything but rather to take stock, to reflect how things went and why. I’m also reaching an age where days and weeks fly by so quickly, so this weekly habit helps me slow things down just a tiny bit. 

What I’m writing

I’m now focusing my revision on specific books in the series, including going through and finding comments and annotations I’ve flagged to revisit. This has so far gone much more quickly than I expected (knock on wood), a flash of light at the end of the tunnel. Well, a little light, and that’s always helpful.

What I’m reading

I’d had Leif Enger’s I cheerfully refuse on my TBR list, though I wasn’t sure when I’d be brave enough to read it. With a book both dystopian and literary, I suspected it would be wrenching, despite the words in the title. I was right, though I am nonetheless glad I read it. His characters felt alive to me from the very start, as if I stood in the kitchen with them. There were lines that simply sang, and a rising conflict kept me turning the pages. Reading this book at this point in our history reminded me of when I read Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven in the fall of 2020. Both books depict worst-case scenarios of current crises, Enger’s on the rise of a brutal oligarchy and the fracturing of social bonds, Mandel’s on surviving an extremely deadly global pandemic. Thanks to Enger’s skill in making me care about the characters, I was hollowed with grief at points in the reading, partly for the loss of an important character and partly for the parallels to horrors both real and potential in our country right now. The hope the book offers is that one can come out on the other side to reach a space of stability and community again. It is small comfort when we are sitting on this side of it.

Democracy, yes please

Rebecca Solnit’s recent blog piece on the value of “bread and roses” provided insights I needed. There are terrible things happening all around the world, including the unbearable prospect of mass starvation used as a weapon, inflicted by those who should know better. Also taking place are unsettling events, power grabs that may or may not stick, including court cases over rights so entrenched in our constitution that it is jaw-dropping that a court ruling is even necessary. And of course, endless events that aren’t necessarily harming anyone but are just so damn irritating (Gulf of what?). Any of these events alone could justify spiraling in endless outrage, and certainly we should take action when and however we can to push for peace, justice, empathy, food for the hungry, shelter for those in need, compassion and more compassion to replace soldiers in our streets… And yet, it’s been months. Indeed, for those who have been paying attention, it’s been years, decades. Outrage has its place, as does political action, and yes, we need bread. And also roses. 

Notable words

“By now I’d read enough to know what irony meant but not what a devious bastard it is.”

“How are you feeling? Her instant reply, Probably doomed and perplexingly merry, was a concise report of our handmade lives.”

“That our job always and forever was to refuse Apocalypse in all its forms and work cheerfully against it.”

“What scares me is the notion we are all one rotten moment, one crushed hope or hollow stomach from stuffing someone blameless in a cage.”

From Leif Enger’s I cheerfully refuse