july 12
and another week has gone by! Honestly, I don’t know if it’s my memory or just how time works now, but the past week has been kind of a huge blur. I don’t even know what I DID with the week, exactly, beyond the usual working and then collapsing at the end of the day. I’m trying new strategies to keep track of myself and the things I want to do for myself, and integrating them into the strategies I had before. Really I love anything that makes me feel like I have a new start at something; I love to try, try again. (Following through to the end is something we’re working on.)
Anyway, I am still behind in terms of writing my reviews, but we’re getting there, which is pretty good because I feel like I just started a bunch of fairly lengthy and/or difficult books, which means I feel like I’m going slowly in terms of reading (or just struggling to read at ALL because I feel overwhelmed by the length or difficulty of approaching a book.) I know I always say like “I don’t know if there will be a newsletter next week,” and I’m not going to say that because I know I have at least two more reviews before I catch up to where I was before. And hopefully I will finish some books in between now and then! But time seems to float away and I’m having a tough time trying to get a grip on my brain enough to read. But we will keep it up! And in the meantime, today I went through all my twitter likes (which I use like bookmarks, because I’m VERY bad at using the website correctly,) and put them into my citation organizing tools so maybe some day I will read them! So I AM doing things with my time, just maybe not as much reading as I would like.
But instead of moping about it, let’s move into
Books I Wrote About This Week
You know when you read a book and you're like "man I know I did not give a book the time it was due"? That's how I feel about this; the stories were very good, but for whatever reason (being sick, a lot of other stuff) it took me forever to work through the stories, especially "Especially Heinous" (which is, admittedly, the longest story in the book) and I didn't feel like I was giving the book its due. So this is one I'm putting in my 'reread' pile for the future, and we will see if I ever get to it.
Some of it was intense--sexual assault is a huge theme in these stories, and so some of that is trying to work on what I am capable of approaching, and so reading it right before bed is a lot sometimes. But it was really good, nonetheless, and that's why I wish I read this more consistently, had really worked with it and tried harder. I'm disappointed in myself, more than the book, I guess, and I want to tag back in and try again.
(It's also hard to write a review about a book that took me nearly two months to finish, and then almost another month to write a review about! These things have to be kind of fresh, or I have to formulate them as I'm reading. I'm trying to be more conscious of that act, knowing I have this space to write in; I want to make this count, for lack of a better way to phrase it, and use this space not just to ramble and but to work publicly on thinking and writing and making these connections, and this is a lot of how I want to use this space. But! Can't do that with this book because it took me forever to read! But we'll keep going on with it.)
I did it, friends! I did the Pandemic Read of War and Peace! And it was fine; yes it took me almost three months; I got the book at my very last library trip before the quarantine went into full effect and the local public libraries shut down. They are slowly opening up to some degree now, where I am--I am hoping to go this week (at the time of writing,) to finally be able to start returning the books I've had for months and months (not as many as I would like to have gotten through in the time of not having any real socializing or other reasons to not read books, except that we're in a pandemic and reading books is hard!
And it was... fine. I thought some of it was delightful (I love court drama because it reveals that what feels so high stakes for rich people is actually not high stakes at all, so it's VERY popcorn.gif and like cotton candy to me) and some of it was moving and thought-provoking (we love to think about how to live a Good Life and what that means for our own lives. I don't think that Tolstoy's vision of the Good Life works for me personally, because I have a hot mess of a relationship to God and also I'm like in the now and not quite ready to resign myself to death, but we'll see!) And then someone of it was him picking on historians which was VERY funny at first, because I am also wary of approaches to history that paint political or military leaders as geniuses (because like lol that doesn't work my dudes) but maybe as an essay, Leo? Not as like a HUGE part of the last third of your book?
I don't know that I came away from the book being like "EVERYONE SHOULD READ THIS;" I think there are some people who would enjoy it and some people who have very valid reasons to be like "why tf would I waste my time on earth reading this." I found some stuff I did like and some stuff I was like "okay Leo let's get back to my good friends Pierre and Natasha and see what they're up to." I'm not like a better person for having read it, and maybe it's a book I have to return to later to get out of it what other people seem to really really love. Or it's just not my thing and that's fine! I have read it and I enjoyed some parts and not others and that's cool. BOOKS ARE RELATIVE. A CANON REVEALS MORE ABOUT THE CULTURE THAN THE VALUE OF THE BOOKS THEMSELVES. LIFE IS SHORT, CHOOSE HOW YOU WANT TO SPEND YOUR LIMITED FREE TIME UNDER CAPITALISM, MY FRIENDS.
Resolution Check In
100 books: still at 67! Only 15 books ahead now, but we will keep chugging along and doing our best. And I’m still definitely ahead!
10 books of poetry: 2/10 done, one in the works. Trying out here!
Discworld: 2/10! But I’m wrapping up a long book I’ve been reading in the morning so maybe that will make up for some of it, I can pivot to a Discworld book quickly or something.
Bible: DONE! War and Peace: DONE, as you’ve seen! Depending on how this goes, I might tag in a book about theology instead of another long book, but we will see because I’m still in the middle of
Moby Dick: I got past the (apparently) famous Sermon chapter, and we are not yet at sea but I’m having a GREAT time hanging out with my good friend Queequeg. (I actually got sidetracked trying to find this other, historical story about an Indigenous man—Kānaka Maoli or Maori, maybe, I can’t remember clearly—who like has a romantic/possibly sexual relationship with a white sea captain as they sail around, but I can’t seem to find so I have to go back and read certain books more closely. If you know what I’m talking about, will you please tell me???)
YOT/Liberation Book Club: I haven’t had book club yet not have I written my reviews, but I did finish The End of Policing and have started (but not seriously dug into) Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? so we’re learning more and more about policing!
HMU
Reminder that next week, July 19, we’re talking about The End of Policing and I’m really excited to see what folks have to say about it! Let me know if you are interested in joining in on that discussion! You can find me on twitter @fadesintointent or on instagram @sonofahurricane, or add me on the StoryGraph where I am aimiller! They have a ‘like’ feature and I want to use it on your reading activity!
Otherwise, I hope you are all doing okay as we keep dragging through this summer, that you are taking care of yourselves and each other as best as you can given the circumstances. If there is anything we can do to help you, let me know and we can start to coordinate something. <3