Books – Page 7 – Butterfly Mind

Restless reading

February 22nd, 2020

I adored Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres. It was one of the books that made my epic Andrea Reads America reading project worth the effort. I don’t think I would have discovered her book without actively seeking books set in Iowa, and I am very happy I found it.

Somewhere recently, I read someone writing about The Greenlanders. I love books set in cold places. The Shipping News in Newfoundland, The Snow Child in Alaska, Winter’s Bone in Missouri, and The Tricking of Freya in Iceland are some of my favorite novels. I didn’t realize until I looked it up that The Greenlanders is written by Jane Smiley, and I got very excited.

Then I opened the book and saw a huge long list of character names with descriptions of how they fit into the story. That’s never a good sign for me. It doesn’t help that the novel is a long one, either. It’s no War and Peace, but it is more than 600 pages.

After the first 50 or so pages, I shelved the book. I was bored and couldn’t keep up with all the people and places. I looked for other novels. I started and stopped a few. After a couple of days of trying other books, I kept wanting the landscape and ice and fjords of The Greenlanders. So I opened it up again.

I’m restless because I’m still not sure yet if I like it. I’ve noticed when I’m restless in the book I’m reading, I’m also restless in my life. I’m constantly looking for the next thing to do, or wanting things I can’t have (like spring) when the book I’m reading hasn’t hooked me.

It’s strange to think that books would be my anchor, rather than, say, reality. I’m hoping I’ll settle into this one soon. I’ve still got six weeks until spring, and I don’t know if I can stand to be this fidgety for that long.

Another Saturday, Another Book

February 15th, 2020

I feel so free now being able to read whatever I want! My new ereader connects directly to my library account so when I finish one book, I can immediately check out another. I love it so much 😍.

Two big bottlenecks, though, are that my small-town library doesn’t have as many titles digitally as it has in physical form, and the titles it does have often have very long hold lines. The wait time on The Overstory is 12 weeks, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is 16 weeks, and A Discovery of Witches is 18 weeks.

I’m hopeful these bottlenecks will open over time as libraries and publishers figure out fair digital licensing fees. I’d love for libraries to be able to afford and offer digital copies at the same availability as physical copies. Think of the reduction of waste as digital reading becomes more accessible! So many fewer trees felled, so much less paper and ink waste, so much less manufacturing pollution for print runs, so much less fuel burned for trips back and forth to libraries. With an ereader, I never have to leave my house for reading material. I no longer have book emergencies after library hours — I can get new books at any hour of the day or night. And best of all, I can make the font as big as I want with digital reading.

Morning reading

February 4th, 2020

I received a surprise in the mail last week. Out of the blue, a friend sent me this book: Braiding Sweetgrass. My friend said in her gift note, “Beautiful blend of personal narrative, ecosystems, and botany. Her voice reminds me of your blog posts.” After reading a few chapters, I have to say that latter part is a great compliment. Thank you, Gracie, if you’re reading. Funnily, the author of this book also wrote Gathering Moss, which was listed by the author of How to Do Nothing as a favorite — the How to Do Nothing book I thought I didn’t need, and then realized maybe I do.

Gracie was right about the beautiful blend part. This book has become part of my daily ritual. I read a chapter with my coffee every morning before writing, and it’s a lovely way to begin the day. I get lost in the fragrance of sweetgrass, the power of ceremony to marry the mundane and the sacred, or the reasons certain flowers are striking together.

My favorite chapter so far is the one I read this morning, “Asters and Goldenrod,” about why the author pursued a the path of botany when she went away to college:

I wanted to know why we love the world, why the most ordinary scrap of meadow can rock us back on our heels in awe.
Robin Wall Kimmerer

When she told her freshman advisor, “I chose botany because I wanted to learn about why asters and goldenrod looked so beautiful together,” he scoffed and said that’s not what science is about. She, and I, argue, that he suffers from a failure of imagination, and that’s exactly what science is about: testing hypotheses to understand our world. As Kimmerer ultimately deduced,

[Aster and goldenrods’] striking contrast when they grow together makes them the most attractive target in the whole meadow, a beacon for bees. Growing together, both receive more pollinator visits than they would if they were growing alone. It’s a testable hypothesis; it’s a question of science, a question of art, and a question of beauty.
Robin Wall Kimmerer

I’m very much enjoying this gentle way to begin my days. It’s way better than scrolling Twitter.

Saturday daydream

February 1st, 2020

*Norwegian Wood* (Haruki Murakami) and Tootsie

Saturday morning, reading by the window. I’ve got no plans. Maybe I’ll read all day with a cat on my lap, pausing only to eat and make coffee.

Probably I won’t do that, but it’s a nice dream.

I got through my New Yorker backlog!

January 27th, 2020

When I was contemplating a subscription to The New Yorker, I talked it out with my friends wondering, will it be worth it, or will it just stress me out because it comes so frequently? One friend laughed and sent me this bit from The Good Place, which is one of my favorite scenes from the show:

Torture in the bad place: a giant stack of New Yorker magazines. And “they’ll just keep coming.”

Despite my friend’s warning, I subscribed. And in January, the issues started piling up.

In my zeal after finishing my massive reading project, I put myself on the waitlist for multiple books at the library. At first, because I had to wait in line, there was no pressure, and I read magazines and unwanted books at my leisure.

But then one of my holds became available when I was midway through another book, and I knew I had limited time to get to the library book and get through the library book before it would expire and go to someone else, so I had to hustle. When I was midway through that library book, one of my other holds became available. Then another one.

Meanwhile, the New Yorkers piled up. I kept them in a small stack behind my reading chair in the living room, thinking, oh boy, the more those pile up, the more overwhelming it’s going to feel to get through them, and then they’ll stress me out and I’ll never get to them and I’ll always be behind.

Yesterday, I said, Enough. Forget the library books. I can get those again another time. I’ve got all the January issues of The New Yorker here, and it’s only four, and four is manageable. If nothing else, I can read the short stories and the cartoons from four issues and call it a day.

So I did, and now I feel better. I’ll be able to actually sit down with the next one that arrives in the mail and read it unburdened. And, since I was between books when I finished the backlog yesterday, I was able to begin a new novel last night: Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami.

Reading in 2019

January 2nd, 2020

Last year was a big year for my reading life. After reading a few phenomenal short story collections, and because I dared to try writing fiction, I wanted to study short stories. I subscribed to The New Yorker for a weekly dose of curated short fiction. I started with a 12-issue trial, and when in the 10th issue of my trial there was a new Olive Kitteridge story from Elizabeth Strout, I bought a 6-month subscription. Each week when a new issue arrives, and my husband deposits the mail on the kitchen table, I say “ooh!”, pick up the magazine, and flip to the page 2 table of contents to see who the fiction author will be. Sometimes I even read other parts of the magazine, and I have been delighted to come across surprises like personal essays from David Sedaris or Anthony Lane’s “The Intoxicating History of Gin,” which honest-to-god used the word “recharché.”

I also subscribed to a quarterly magazine called Offscreen. It’s beautifully designed, independent, and takes an unvarnished, thoughtful view of technology with the hopes of helping us steer it in humane directions. I enjoy quiet time away from a screen reading and thinking about the tech world we live and work in.

Those subscriptions are novelties in my reading life, and I enjoy their fresh differentness compared to my usual long-form reading. But by far the most significant reading I did in 2019 was to complete my Andrea Reads America project (with a few detours). Oh! And I read two Tolstoy novels! After six years of American literature, I now get to move into the wide open world of reading without rules. If my tracking in Goodreads is to be trusted, I read 60 books in 2019:

Thanks to Matt Mullenweg whose 29 Books in 2019 post inspired me to reflect on my reading life in 2019. I was particularly struck by his comment about how little books cost for how much they give. Looking through my list above, I think I purchased fewer than 5 of them; the rest I was able to borrow from the library.