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December 31, 2022

Seeing out 2022

Hello again. It’s the semi-obligatory end of year post. Thanks to the semester break in my academic year, I’m even more prone than the average person to take stock of the calendar year that’s ending and think about tweaks large and small to the way I do things. I used to write a year-in-reading post on the blog, with the productivity post coming in January. But given my sparse blogging over the last couple of years and my almost-as-sparse reading, I figured I’d do what I did last year and combine them.

READING

I read more than last year, thank goodness. I managed 30 books this year, which is still a low number by my historical standards but better than the 18 (!) I read last year. My early reading was shaped by a presentation I gave on the works of Arundhati Roy, which led me to read more of her nonfiction and revisit her two novels. I was lucky enough to meet her in person when she came to St. Louis, and what a lovely opportunity that was. She is gracious, soft-spoken, and fierce, and I felt fortunate to have the chance to talk with her after reading her work for so many years. Her Booker-winning novel is better known and more widely praised, but my personal favorite is The Ministry of Utmost Happiness; it throws you into the middle of Old Delhi and takes you all over the map emotionally, geographically, and sociologically. It’s not as “polished” as The God of Small Things, but it immerses you just as thoroughly in a world. I also strongly recommend sampling her nonfiction, which is quite different but excellent for the myriad insights she provides into contemporary India.

There wasn’t much of a pattern to my reading, although in looking at my chronological list I went back and forth between reading literary fiction and taking a break with mysteries (Simenon, Mick Herron, and le Carré, Higashino and Kirino in translation) and romance/romantic novels (a few Burchells and the latest Sarah Morgan). The only non-work nonfiction I read was Adrian Tempany’s And the Sun Shines Now, which is about the Hillsborough disaster (Tempany is a Hillsborough survivor) and the search for justice as well as the corporatization of football that characterizes the modern game. It’s a bit disjointed at times but very worth reading.

In literary fiction I had a few standouts:

  • Telephone by Percival Everett (Version B, I think?)
  • A Far Cry From Kensington by Muriel Spark
  • Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
  • The Paper Lantern by Will Burns
  • Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta by James Hannaham.
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July 8, 2020

Weeknote 13 (and hiatus)

We had a very nice trip to Colorado. It was good to get to go beyond the Outer Ring freeway for the first time in 3 months.

RRW is going on hiatus for a while. I am finding the internet an increasingly unpleasant place to be in the current environment. You’d think when your world has shrunken to the extent ours has that having a window into a bigger world would be helpful. But there’s too much chaff to find the wheat, at least for me. Being outside, talking (virtually or otherwise) to people, spending time doing productive things, just seem like better options. I have Fall2020 classes to prepare, for which I can access help that doesn’t come with complaints and angst as part of the package. I am knitting. I am reading, fitfully. I am writing, slowly. We cleaned up our bicycles and have been tooling around the neighborhood and campus. Rowing in the basement is better than I expected (and the treadmill is bearable). The tomatoes are coming in thick and fast. The kale hasn’t turned bitter yet. It’s very hot and humid, but that’s STL in July for you.

I don’t know how long I’ll stay away; probably at least through the summer and maybe until after Election Day. Stay safe, everyone, and good luck getting through this.

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December 18, 2019

SuperWendy’s TBR Challenge for December: The Boys of Christmas by Jane Lovering

It’s the last TBR Challenge post of the year and I’m actually on time. Before I get to the review, though, I want to thank Wendy for organizing the challenge and encouraging us to participate in it in whatever way works for us. This is the first year I’ve managed to fulfill every month’s post (eventually) as well as stick to the categories for the most part. A few weeks ago Wendy was up in the air about whether she would continue, since the number of romance bloggers has dwindled considerably. I didn’t get a chance to weigh in but I am so glad and grateful that she has decided to keep going. Plans for the 2020 Challenge are posted at her blog and I’m absolutely in for the year. Even though I don’t read as much romance anymore, I still enjoy being on the fringes of the community and keeping contact with romance readers and old friends, and I won’t be running out of TBR possibilities any time soon. So thank you, Wendy, for continuing to center romance blogging and reviewing. And if you’re not blogging but you’re on social media, you can join and contribute through those platforms as well.

On to the book. I have a few Lovering titles in my TBR but they’re dwindling because they are the perfect reads when you want a book set in a charming place which features characters who feel down to earth and realistic. The Boys of Christmas is no exception. Mattie has left her controlling, psychologically abusive boyfriend Simon and is figuring out her next moves when she receives an inheritance from her great-aunt Millie. It’s a big, rundown, somewhat scary house in a Dorset village rejoicing in the name Christmas Steepleton (and if you think that’s unlikely, I suggest you look at a map and check out village names in England). And it’s Christmastime! She decides to down to check out her new acquisition, accompanied by her supportive friend Toby.

The weather is as forbidding as the house, and just as cold, but Mattie and Toby make do and set about planning a last-minute Christmas celebration. Mattie is also occupied with meeting the condition of her inheritance, which is to sprinkle Millie’s ashes over “the Boys of Christmas.” Now she just has to figure out who they are. Unraveling this mystery introduces her to a variety of village residents and visitors, and spending her days with Toby deepens their friendship. Toby gently chivvies Mattie into acknowledging and returning to the person she was before Simon drained her of her self-confidence and cheerfulness.

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August 17, 2019

Harlequin TBR Housekeeping

I’ve been knocking more books off the Harlequin TBR. For those of you who weren’t around when I started this TBR last year, it came into being when I downloaded all the books I had purchased directly from the Harlequin website (which I began doing in 2007). I went through this because HarperCollins decided to stop letting readers download their (DRM-protected) books to their computers; now they are only readable online or through a dedicated app. Good times.

While I was pretty sure I had most of them backed up in local folders, I downloaded every last one of them just to be sure. I wound up with 620 books, and I wasn’t sure how many I’d already read (Harlequin titles tend to run together). My first pass at the list got me down to 516 books. Then, as I would peruse the covers looking for new reads, I realized I had read more of them that I initially thought, so I went through and struck off a few more.

My next move was to get rid of author backlists if I didn’t like a book I’d read or was sure I was done with their work. As a result of these purges my last TBR read was #466.

But I’m still culling. A recent and very persuasive review by Miss Bates (Kay) sent me to see what I had by Maisey Yates in the TBR. I only had one book from my Harlequin purchases, surprisingly, and it was a novel in a Harlequin connected series in the Presents line called The Santina Crown. I’ve enjoyed some of Harlequin’s themed series, and I bought a number of these. But when I started reading her prequel novella for the series, The Life She Left Behind, I had trouble with it. It’s well written and it features reunited lovers, which is a trope I enjoy and which works well in a shorter format. But the hero is an Arab prince (named Taj for some reason) and I realized that I just can’t read Sheikh or Fake Middle Eastern Royal Hero books anymore. I’m probably also going to balk at books that glorify men in the military or the police, unless maybe if they are Regular Joe kind of guys (I’m pretty sure Janice Kay Johnson has written a few of these).

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July 31, 2019

Social Media Downsizing

As advertised, I’ve deactivated my main Twitter account. I kept it for the year I was off Twitter because the other two times I killed my accounts someone immediately grabbed the username. But Twitter will have to become something entirely different for me to return, and since that is unlikely it doesn’t matter to me if @ProfNita is swept up into Botland.

I’ve also deleted my Goodreads account. Longtime readers and friends know about my love-hate with Goodreads and my hesitance about going back. It’s been a much better experience this time and I’ve enjoyed a lot of my interactions. But as usual, I have negative visceral reactions when Someone Is Wrong on the Internet, and it sucks up my time and energy to fight my inevitable desire to correct them. It’s a stupid trait but not one I’ve been able to eradicate. I love talking to people about books, but the people I most want to talk to aren’t the only ones I wind up interacting with or paying attention to.

Thanks to Laura Vivanco I just read a post by Meljean Brook that describes my condition exactly, because it’s apparently her condition as well:

Twitter has a constant stream of info coming at you from people who really do have a lot of interesting and important things to say. But I wasn’t doing a good job of prioritizing my own mental health and needs.

(And ha, this was explicitly demonstrated to be the right move, because I deleted my Twitter right before the plagiarism/ghostwriting scandal erupted, and although I of course followed it…not having a Twitter account that is connected to so much of romancelandia made it all much easier check in on the few people I still follow, then go. So I was informed but not obsessively checking, and it made a huge difference.)

I have done this exact same thing with Twitter (especially before the recent Horrible Redesign) and I do it with GR too. There are key public groups whose discussions I can compulsively read and with which I am mentally arguing on a too-regular basis, and I don’t seem to be able to stop. They’re not as bad for my well-being as rabbit holes and kerfuffles of the past, but they’re not good either and they distract me from producing rather than consuming. I’m so much better than I was, but I’m still not where I want to be.

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