Alright, alright, it’s Monday, so fine. I guess we will do this. Even though all I really want to do is rewind the clock and go back to Saturday night, which I spent dancing and singing along with my husband in the front row at a Decemberists concert. And feeling like the luckiest girl alive, even after a rough, rough Saturday full of Peanut tantrums and legal research. It was all worth it to see my favorite band strumming away at songs I’ve loved since 2005. And to share it with Steve, who normally doesn’t agree with my taste in music, but who is a newly-minted Decemberists fan after a fabulous night. I’ll tell you all about it on Wednesday, though, because I just had to relive the whole thing in an epic long blog post (almost as long as one of the Decemberists’ twelve-minute mini rock opera extravaganzas). Sunday was a fun day, too. For one thing, I wore my concert t-shirt from the night before. For another, it was a gorgeous day and we spent the morning at Mount Vernon with my parents and our dear family friends. Of course there was a steady soundtrack of Decemberists tunes playing in my head all day – but that’s not actually that different from every day.
Reading. I’m having just the loveliest, most serene reading streak. Earlier in the week, I blazed through My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues. I love a good bibliomemoir, and this one was really enjoyable. Then I picked up another library book, which I was really excited about reading, but put it down after one chapter because it was riddled with expletives and I just wasn’t in the mood. I turned to Life in the Garden, Penelope Lively’s garden-memoir-slash-history-slash-literary-exploration and am loving it. (Plus, look at that cover.) Along with it, I’m almost done with the current Slightly Foxed and have been inspired to pick up Swann’s Way based on one of the articles. It probably won’t happen anytime soon, but the idea is percolating.
Watching. Had a fun discovery this week, thanks to a Facebook video share in the Drunk Janeites group I frequent – Cunk on Britain. For the uninitiated, there are just a few episodes available on this side of the Pond (via YouTube, so free!) but it’s a mockumentary-style progression through the history of the British Isles, starring the hilarious Diane Morgan as historian Philomena Cunk, whose take on history is brilliant and side-splitting. (A sample: “Henry of Eight was best known for his chronic wife addiction. He had six wives, all called Catherine. He was a Catherine-oholic, or Catholic for short. After he killed all six Catherines, he got bored of killing wives and he had to come up with a new way to get rid of them, so he invented divorce. The Pope didn’t like that, so Henry divorced him and invented a new religion, which is easier to do than Popes like to pretend.”) You get the drift. And she delivers her lines completely deadpan, in the brogue-iest of Yorkshire brogues. It’s madcap and wonderful. Go watch it! Cunk on Britain.
Listening. Some podcasts, probably, but more to the point, I am listening to The Decemberists. All the time. Sometimes (like on Saturday night) I am listening to them LIVE IN CONCERT! Other times, I am listening on my earbuds, and other times I am just listening to the soundtrack in my head, which is mostly selections from The King is Dead. I will tell you all about the concert (literally, I am going to tell you all about it) on Wednesday, so get ready.
Moving. Well, there was a lot of dancing on Saturday. And a lot of walking on Sunday. I’m a weekend warrior at the moment, and not even a very enthusiastic warrior. But if Peanut keeps having tantrums like she did all day (ALL DAY) Saturday, I’ll probably resume my running habit just to get away from the house.
Blogging. Going to be a fun week. Gigantic recap of Saturday’s concert coming to you on Wednesday, and on Friday I’ll have one more poem to close out National Poetry Month. No teasers for you this week, because I haven’t chosen a poem yet. I was planning to end with Tennyson, but his poems are loooooooong, man. So we’ll see.
Loving. I will be a broken record for awhile, but this week I am especially loving The Decemberists, after that incredible concert. I could barely sleep on Saturday night for being so happy, and on Sunday I promptly downloaded the few items I had on CD only or didn’t have at all, so I could keep binging on their special brand of literary reference-peppered indie folk rock baroque pop. Man, I just love them so much.
Asking. How totally right am I that The Decemberists are the best band currently playing?
Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?, by Kathleen Collins – I’m not sure how I happened upon this slim volume of short stories, but I’m glad I did. Collins was an African-American playwright and filmmaker, apparently quite widely known, and very well-regarded, in the world of drama, theatre and film. Since that is decidedly not my world, I’d never heard of her until I learned of this book, published posthumously. In it, Collins writes of people like herself – artists, living in New York City, making their way through relationships and ambition and the social scene. The writing is luminous and the characters are fully realized, which is a hard thing to do in the short story format. Short stories are, as you all know, not my favorite – but I really enjoyed this.
Winter in Thrush Green (Thrush Green #2), by Miss Read – There is really nothing I like better than a big cup of tea and a meander through one of Miss Read’s beautifully drawn English villages. In this installment of the Thrush Green series, the reader is taken through a change of seasons in the village, and with it, some changes in the faces from the last book. As autumn settles in, Ben and Molly Curdle are married but gone, off traveling with Curdle’s Fair. Dr. Lovell has taken over the medical practice, married Ruth, and the two are expecting their first baby. There’s drama – a new neighbor and a possible romance for the vicar, plus someone has bashed the schoolteacher over the head and stolen her jewelry box; Paul Young suspects Sam Curdle. There’s joy in the Lovells’ new little one and in love for the widowed vicar at last. And once winter settles in, there’s snow and a daring rescue of Dotty Harmer from her cottage. In short, everything you could want.
This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America, by Morgan Jerkins – Hmmmm. What to say about this book? I had heard wonderful things and it mostly lived up to the hype. I like the personal essay as a literary genre, and I am particularly interested in reading about the experiences of women of color. There’s no doubt that Jerkins is an incredibly talented writer, and I found most of the essays in this collection informative and moving. I thought that her essays about race were the best; the female and feminism-focused essays were not quite as strong, in my opinion. I did try to keep in mind that I was reading about someone else’s experience, and that her reactions to certain things (like breakups) were different from what mine would be because she was coming to them with a different set of life experiences. There was one essay, though – about a medical procedure, and you’ll know what I’m referring to if you’ve read the book – that I cannot un-read. And I really wish I could.
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, by Michael Wolff – So, I just had to read this because everyone in D.C. is talking about it. I’m not sure what to say about it here, though – seems to me that everything has been said. I’ll just note that while certain details in the book (i.e. confusing Mike Berman and Mark Berman in the Four Seasons breakfast scene, and misidentifying Wilbur Ross as the nominee to head DOL, when in fact he was nominated for Commerce) are incorrect – likely a function of rushing the book to publication – if even a third of what Wolff writes is true, dayum. And not in a good way. I really wish I hadn’t had occasion to read Fire and Fury. I wish I worked in a Washington, D.C. that was going about its regular business under President Hillary Clinton. I wish my friends who are career government employees (and I know a lot of them – thanks to law school and my own stint at DOL I have friends or acquaintances at DOL, Commerce, Justice, Education, State, GSA and quite a few of the smaller agencies) weren’t so downtrodden and depressed, and that the rest of us weren’t constantly reevaluating our emergency plans. But I wasn’t not going to read this book.
Young Jane Young, by Gabrielle Zevin – I was heartily sick of politics by the time I finished Fire and Fury, but library deadlines dictated that I had to tackle Young Jane Young next. Fortunately, it was a fast and fun read and it only took me a day. Jane Young wasn’t always Jane Young. Years ago, she was Aviva Grossman, a Congressional intern who had an affair with her married boss. The affair came to light, of course, as they so often do, and Aviva took the fall while the Congressman emerged unscathed. Finding herself unemployable, Aviva changed her name, moved to Maine and became a wedding planner. But now she has decided to run for Mayor of her small town – against a notorious local jerk – and the truth is bound to come out. So, I found Young Jane Young engaging but the central plot was kind of unbelievable. Not the affair part – see above, I live in D.C., I can totally believe that everyone in Congress is having affairs – but I just couldn’t believe that Jane ran for public office. I get that she loved politics and that the other guy would’ve been a nightmare, but she spent eighteen years keeping her head down and her identity a secret, and then threw it away? Does not compute.
Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, by Carl Safina – This one had been on my list for a long time. Safina is a conservationist writer who is clearly passionate about what he does and has some serious writing skill, too. Beyond Words is organized into four sections: there are sections on elephants, wolves, and killer whales, and somewhat confusingly a section on Safina’s dogs and the sea birds near his home (interesting, but could have been condensed into an introduction or epilogue; jammed in the middle as it was, it kind of broke up the rhythm). Safina analyzes animal social behaviors and spends considerable time interviewing experts to conclude that these animals are “who” animals – they have their own family lives, means of communicating (killer whales have distinct language that varies by group, which is a documented fact), and emotions. I thought Beyond Words was beautiful, moving, sad and inspiring.
African Short Stories, ed. Chinua Achebe – I have been meaning to read Achebe’s classic, Things Fall Apart, but I thought this collection of short stories, collected and edited by him and to which he contributed one story, would be a good place to start. I liked, but didn’t love it. The main weakness of the collection is that the quality of the stories is extremely uneven. There are some – such as Achebe’s offering, and one by Jomo Kenyatta – that are really breathtaking and outstanding. There are others that are sort of middling, and a few that are just really, really bad and one that was completely unreadable – as if the idea was to go for a Ulysses-style effect, but without the skill or panache of James Joyce (and I am not a Bloomfan). It’s a short book, so not a huge time commitment, but I have to think there are better collections featuring African writers.
Slightly Foxed, Volume 3: Sharks, Otters and Fast Cars, ed. Gail Pikris – My slow read-through of all the back issues of Slightly Foxed continues. To be honest, I don’t remember much about this one, beyond the titular essay on a biography of Gavin Maxwell, who sounds like a real character. (It didn’t make me want to seek out the biography, but I did note that the Folio Society publishes Maxwell’s A Ring of Bright Water and Slightly Foxed has his memoir.) The other essays were a little less memorable – I think the magazine is still hitting its stride in issue 3, and clearly it has done so, as issue 57 just arrived on my doorstep not long ago. But Slightly Foxed does offer reliably excellent writing, and each issue contributes a few more titles to my inflated TBR.
Love, Hate and Other Filters, by Samir Ahmed – I came to this one hoping it would be 2018’s answer to The Hate U Give. I’m not sure it’s quite in those heights, but it was still excellent. Maya Aziz is a high school senior who loves filmmaking, dreams of studying at NYU, and is crushing on the captain of the football team (of course). But she’s also Indian, and she’s not sure how to tell her strict parents that she doesn’t want to go to college close to home and become a lawyer. (Don’t be a lawyer, Maya!) And she’s Muslim, and finds herself and her family in danger when a terrorist attack a few hundreds of miles away brings out the latent hate in her own community. So – I liked this, but as I said, it wasn’t quite at the level of The Hate U Give. There was a tiny bit too much romance – I counted three possible love interests for Maya – and it distracted from the more important issues that Maya was dealing with. Still a great read, and I blew through it in 24 hours.
1066 and All That: A Memorable History of England, by W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman – I had kind of a rough week at the end of the month – nothing serious, just a couple of disappointments – and needed some levity, and 1066 and All That fit the bill perfectly. Sellar and Yeatman present a madcap journey through British history, from the Romans to World War II. Along the way we learn about the Magna Charter (a Good Thing), efforts to amuse Queen Victoria (a Good Queen), Mary Queen of Hearts (a Romantic Queen), Anne of Cloves, and more. There were also “test papers” after each chapter, asking questions like “What convinced you that Henry VIII had VIII wives? Was it worth it?” It was a lot of fun, and I giggled throughout.
