Tag Archives: reading

Oh, Boy! Day Off!

books, etc., family, humor, television, , , , ,

Days off are great! Most people get two days off a week and fill them up with a number of things, from picnics in the park to errands they couldn’t take care of during the week. Mostly, that occurs on weekends, which are eagerly awaited and finished with reluctance.

My husband and I have different attitudes regarding days off. This was recently brought home to me when we each had a chance to explore what days off meant to us.

Dan actually had five days off in a row. Before you gasp in amazement, he didn’t actually take five days off work. He took three vacation days and smushed them together with his normal two days off to make a solid week.

I had one day off this week. I do project-based work rather than a regular 9-to-5. When my previous project was over, I scheduled one day off before I started my next one. (I’m not a total masochist. Since I don’t work 9-to-5, I can fill up those hours however I like. I generally work for a few hours in the morning and longer in the afternoon. In between, besides lunch, I make phone calls and deal with bills, banking, appointments, and other “housekeeping” issues. (Non-housekeeping housekeeping, if you get my drift.) But I digress.)

So, what did we do with our respective days off? Dan slaved. I relaxed.

Dan had been anticipating his days off for literally months. He did have to request them off at work since they were technically vacation days. But most of the planning consisted of ordering plants from online nurseries, staking out local nurseries for sales, and scheduling deliveries of literal truckloads of compost and mulch.

So, Dan spent a lot of his time off planting everything that had been delivered and a few more of the plants he picked up locally. He decorated his garden bed with large rocks. He watered and rototilled nearly every day. (I once knew a man who rototilled naked. He was very brave. (The first Saturday in May is Naked Gardening Day, in case you didn’t know. Dan does not celebrate it, much to our neighbors’ relief.) But I digress again.)

After five days of this, what did Dan have at the end of it? A lovely, large flowerbed (with no thistles) and a flourishing vegetable garden. And a ton more plans that would require even more truckloads of mulch and compost, pounds of micro clover seeds, and still more flowers, shrubs, and trees. And probably more big rocks. All of which – except, presumably, the rocks – will cost hundreds of dollars more than he spent last week.

In addition to that, he had serious muscular pains, grubby everything, and a severe case of Gardener’s Butt Burn. (That happens when his shirt rides up as he’s planting and exposes to the blazing sun a strip of flesh between his shirt and pants. Fortunately, it’s hidden when he goes back to regular work and wears his uniform shirt. Yet more digression.)

And what did I do on my one day off? I was much less ambitious. I checked my email and timeline, as usual. Generally farted around on the computer. Petted the cats. Watched a little food competition TV, as usual. Then came the time when I usually start my work, and I was at a loss.

I settled in my comfy chair and picked up a book. Ordinarily, I only get to read for about a half hour when I go to bed. This was special. With a cold drink on my little table and an actual paperback novel in my hand, I dove in. I read until I couldn’t anymore – that is, until I got sleepy. Then I retired for a three-hour nap. (I have a third-degree black belt in napping.) When I awoke, I went back to my book, and by the time I was done reading, I had finished half the book. (It’s proving somewhat interesting, except the characters’ names got on my nerves. Maximus Bluster. Solless Cinderheart. Snidely Krewler. Jo Naberly. I mean, this was a middle-grade book (I think), but honestly!)

Then, in the evening, I did some actual housekeeping. Except for that, it was a beautiful, relaxing day. At the end of it, what did I have? A day much like my usual, except for not doing all the writing. A marginally cleaner study. But, oh, the nap and the reading! They fed my head, rested my body, and soothed my soul. That’s my idea of a day off!

Frankly, though, I don’t know if I could do it five days in a row. But early next month, if I work a little harder now, I’ll have the chance to find out!

Life (Not Death) by TBR

books, etc., literature, , , ,

By now, everyone’s seen that cartoon where a grieving widow and a coroner are looking at the squashed husband, saying, “It was his TBR pile.” There are even those who say that will be my fate – to be smashed into a literary pancake by all the books I mean to read someday.

That could certainly be true if all my books were dead-tree editions. But slowly (more quickly since the tornado) I’ve been replacing my books with ebooks. (To those who say ebooks aren’t real books, I say phooey! They each have their good and bad points. Ebooks don’t have that delicious new-book smell, but ebooks allow for dwindling eyesight without having to resort to the 50 or so books in the LARGE PRINT section of the library. They both do, however, convey the same information or story. But I digress.)

I usually read two books at a time, one with each eye. (Not really. I wish.) I switch back and forth between a book of fiction and one of nonfiction. If I read two of the same sort, they can get muddled in my easily-muddlable brain.

Right now, my two books are Artemis, a science fiction novel by Andy Weir, the guy who wrote The Martian. Artemis is a city on the moon, and our MC (Main Character, for those of you not up on the jargon) is a shady delivery person who gets in far over her head. If it were a movie, it would be a caper film. The nonfiction book is The Suspect. (It has the impossibly long subtitle An Olympic Bombing, the FBI, the Media, and Richard Jewell, the Man Caught in the Middle, which at least tells you what the book is about without me having to. But I digress again.)

But what’s next? I have over 1,000 choices (another of the benefits of ebooks – they can all exist on my bed table without the threat of pancaking me). There are a few front-runners.

Fiction:

The Calculating Stars, by Mary Robinette Kowal. About women astronauts.

Calypso, by David Sedaris. (I mean, if it counts as fiction, which I can’t always tell.) I hope it’s as good as his early works.

While Justice Sleeps, by Stacey Abrams. Just to see if she can really write as well as legislate.

Battle of the Linguist Mages, by Scotto Moore. Because, duh.

Any of Dick Francis’s oeuvre, which I’ve been making my way through a little at a time.

Nonfiction:

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, by Steven Pinker, because I’d like to see him prove that.

Live Forever: The Songwriting Legacy of Billy Joe Shaver, by Courtney S. Lennon, because I love his music, if not his voice.

To the Stars: The Autobiography of George Takei, Star Trek’s Mr. Sulu, by George Takei. Oh, Myyy!

Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance, by Leonard Peltier. I’ve read about the case from a law enforcement perspective. Now I want the man’s own story.

Killing Rasputin: The Murder That Ended the Russian Empire, by Margarita Nelipa. Because I love Russian history.

Of course, that’s just a sampling. I have hundreds more to choose from. I tend to read the books that I’ve bought most recently, since they caught my eye for one reason or another. Almost none of the books on my Nook are popular, current bestsellers. With as many books as I buy, I try not to pay more than $3.99 per. Of course, that means I buy a few that are real clunkers. I read a chapter or two and then mosey along.

(To those who are curious, I generally read on a Nook or an iPad with Nook software. (I can also read on my phone or iPod, if I’m willing to read a paragraph or less at a time. Sometimes it becomes necessary.) Recently, I acquired a Kindle Fire (it was given to me) and I have at least a few books on it, including Rift, by Liza Cody, which I’ve never been able to find for Nook, for some reason. My problem will come when B&N (and my Nook) finally turn belly up and I have to find a way to convert the 1000+ books to Kindle. Or find someone who knows how to do it for me. But I digress again. At length.)

And for those who remember that I used to be a full-time literary maven, rest assured that I do have serious works on my Nook as well – the complete Shakespeare, James Joyce, Cervantes, Emily Dickinson, to name but a few. But I read them all, back in grad school (100 years ago), so they’re not high on my TBR list. They’re weighty tomes, to be sure – but not anything likely to topple on my head. Hold the maple syrup.

Tip Jar

Choose an amount

$2.50
$5.00
$10.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is appreciated.

Donate

Reading With Abandon

books, etc., literature, writing, , , ,

I’m an unrepentant bibliophile. I started reading at the age of four and never stopped. I prided myself on the number of books I read, even after I grew too old for the library’s summer reading program. However, increasingly, there are books that I just can’t read. (And not because my eyesight is bad. My e-reader makes up for that with its bump-up-the-type-size feature.)

No, the books I can’t – or won’t – read anymore are ones that manage to annoy me. I start reading them and can’t go on anymore. I don’t actually throw them across the room, but I am tempted to. (Except that, as noted, I read on a Nook or an iPad and don’t want to throw those across the room.)

So, what kinds of books annoy me enough to be figuratively tossed across the room?

I buy a lot of bargain e-books. I get multiple emails daily offering books that are not in their first flush of youth or frequently are self-published. Sometimes I even buy them, if the title is interesting or I recognize the author. I do try to check them out a bit before I hit “submit order,” but occasionally a clunker gets by me.

There was one, for instance, that was supposed to be about how stupid decisions affected history. It sounded interesting and only cost two bucks. However, when I started reading, I discovered that every example the author gave involved a stupid decision regarding a military campaign. I was disappointed. I was hoping for stupid decisions in politics, science, medicine, and other fields as well as war. I’m not a big fan of military history – with a few notable exceptions – and I lost interest so rapidly that I abandoned the book after a few chapters, when it became clear there would be nothing else.

I also abandon books with wretched writing. I recently bought a book by a well-known writer that was a sequel to a book I remember from a couple of dozen years ago. I made it about halfway through. I like foreshadowing and setting up a later revelation if it’s done skillfully, but this novel used the “had I but known” gambit that gives away the “surprise” twist. It also used the narrator to give backstories for every character and describe their inner motivations instead of letting the reader discover them through the characters’ words and actions. And these nuggets broke up what should have been a dramatic and suspenseful story.

Another book got on my wrong side because of its descriptions. It was a mystery with a literary setting, which I ordinarily like. But the author engaged in serious fat-shaming, describing an overweight character in not just unflattering but demeaning terms. It was gratuitous, too – had nothing to do with the plot or the character’s character (as it were). It was clearly meant to make the reader dislike the character for her appearance only.

Speaking of mysteries, I have been annoyed by ones that are too easy to figure out. One, for example, gave away the killer in the introduction. I noticed that the author avoided using personal pronouns (which makes the writing very stilted and artificial), and I knew that the brutal killer must be a woman because why else would they leave out “he” or “she”? Then when a female character gave another person a false alibi – thus alibi-ing herself as well – I knew whodunnit and spent the rest of the book trying to interest myself in another character. I actually finished that one, just to see myself proved right.

And I avoid altogether buying books that are the beginnings of series. Oh, I’ve enjoyed – even adored – series in the past, but anymore I want to read a stand-alone book. Maybe it’s because I can’t commit, but I no longer want to be sucked into thousands of pages of text or endless cliffhangers. If a book wants commitment from me, I want resolution. Fortunately, most series now announce themselves proudly as “Book 1 of the XYZ Series,” so I don’t fall into them by accident. At least I don’t have this problem when it comes to nonfiction.

Despite my newfound ability to discard books and refrain from ordering ones that violate my “rules,” I feel a sense of not just disappointment but a bit of self-criticism when I’m not able to stick with a book. I know this is ridiculous – I still have a TBR list that’s long enough to keep me engaged for the next hundred-plus years. Some of them may prove less than captivating, it’s true. But though I may have given up on certain books, I will never abandon my quest for better ones – or my love of reading.

Tip Jar

Choose an amount

$2.50
$5.00
$10.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is appreciated.

Donate

Hooray for Horror!

books, etc., film, literature, television, , , , , , , ,

What is it about the horror genre that gives us both shivers and thrills? I’m not talking about the excessively gory kind of horror, though that has a place and a fandom. Instead, I mean the more pop-culture renditions (sorry not sorry) of horror beasties and things that go bump in the night. Zombies are a big thing on TV, in the movies, and in books right now. So are vampires and werewolves. Anything creepy that humans can turn into, really.

Let’s take a look at these creatures and their evolution.

Here Come the Zombies

Zombies are a staple of modern horror. The Walking Dead, Fear the Walking Dead, and more have brought zombies out of George Romero movies and into the mainstream. My favorite version of the zombie pandemic is Feed and its sequels by Mira Grant (aka Seanan McGuire). It rises above the body (sorry not sorry) of the typical shambling, brains-eating stereotype by being caused by a literal pandemic, despite the fact that it came out in 2010, back when few of us feared a pandemic, zombie or otherwise. It also adds meaning and interest because it addresses other pertinent topics such as media, conspiracies, and politics.

(Seanan-Mira has also plumbed the depths (sorry not sorry) of horror by writing a novel, Into the Drowning Deep, about killer mermaids, which is a lot more horrifying than that description makes it sound. But I digress.) 

Bite This!

Vampires seem passe now. They’ve been done to death (sorry not sorry). The craze, I think, really took off in 1976 with Anne Rice’s novel Interview with the Vampire, which later became a movie (now remade, I understand) and a TV series. I personally thought the novel was overwritten and too long, but that didn’t stop it from becoming a runaway bestseller. More recent but still old (from 1997) was Buffy the Vampire Slayer, still my favorite of the vampire-themed media sensations. It was based on an older movie, about which the less said the better.

The Twilight books and movies proved extremely popular as well, though I haven’t succumbed to any desire (I have none) to read or view them. What’s interesting about them is that they pitted vampires against werewolves, not as killing machines but as romantic rivals. It’s kind of disturbing that heartless killers are presented as love objects and sexual partners.

None of these modern iterations have anything to do with Bram Stoker’s original Dracula, which has been committed to film many times. Nor is this an all-inclusive list, which would take more space than I allow myself in this blog. I will, however, recommend Those Who Hunt the Night by Barbara Hambly as my favorite vampire novel. (Although the first time I read it I thought one character was the main character (or MC, as we writers say). A rereading revealed to me that she was a supporting player. But I digress again.)

Loup-Garou

(Okay, I’m showing off. “Loup-Garou” is French for “werewolf.” But I digress some more.)

Werewolves became as fashionable as vampires during the heyday of the Twilight series. Fans divided into Team Vampire and Team Werewolf based on who they thought should get the girl and I don’t mean as a snack.

It should be noted that not just werewolves, but all kinds of shapeshifters have become popular. There have been were-bears as far back as Beorn in Tolkien’s The Hobbit and other shapes to be shifted into, including crows, hawks, and leopards, among other beings. I guess you’d have to think about Zeus, too, who appeared to various women as a swan, a bull, a shower of gold coins, and a goddess, to hide his extramarital exploits from his wife. While Zeus’s transformations were hardly what you’d call romantic, shapeshifters in modern fiction are often presented in those terms. It’s called the “dark fantasy” or “fantasy romance” novel.

Welcome to Hogwarts

And of course, we couldn’t catalogue otherworldly beings without including witches and wizards. Although most of the witches and wizards in Harry Potter are positive characters, that’s not the case in many other books in the genre. Evil wizards and malevolent witches abound. In more subtle books, there are those with mixed motivations – for example, a low-powered witch who eventually turns into a dragon and back (making her both a witch and a shapeshifter, I guess) in Barbara Hambly’s excellent Dragonsbane. (It’s a book that I recommend to others just so we can discuss it later. That’s how I was introduced to it. But I digress even more.)

Why do we love horror so much? I think it’s because we know that, however disturbing the beings are, they can’t really get to us. The COVID pandemic, though, made pandemics all too real, except for the fact that people turned into vectors, not zombies. Perhaps the glut (sorry not sorry) of zombies will soon recede and we’ll go back to ghost stories, the classical alternative that hardly ever gets written or filmed these days. Even the movie Ghost‘s most memorable scene featured pottery, not haunting. It’s a form of horror bait-and-switch.

If only they would find a new creature to menace the humans – like the bunyip, an Australian water monster. But I guess “Attack of the Bunyip” just sounds like something warm and fuzzy. What we need are fresh kinds of horror, something that will scare a whole new generation.

Tip Jar

Choose an amount

$2.50
$5.00
$10.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is appreciated.

Donate

Help Yourself

books, etc., humor, writing, , , , , , ,

I admit it. When I was younger, I used to read self-help books. You know the kind, ones with titles like Women Who Hate Women Who Love Men Who Love Women Who Hate Cinderella. Back in the day, most self-help books were targeted at women who wanted to know why their love lives were train wrecks or why their psychological conditions were train wrecks. (Apparently, they didn’t consider that their psychological conditions might be train wrecks because their love lives were train wrecks. But I digress.)

Nowadays, most self-help books are written for business leaders – excuse me, entrepreneurs – and have titles like Give Yourself the Power to Lead Right Now With Powerful Leadership Secrets From the Early Etruscans. The rest are some modern-day versions of Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking, which I suspect the Early Etruscans knew something about too.

I don’t know much about business leadership except that I prefer managers who use a hands-off management style (for both business and interpersonal interactions). I also don’t know much about women’s love lives, except my own, which I don’t think would be appropriate for a self-help book. I do know a thing or two about psychological conditions and write about them every week in my other blog, Bipolar Me.

Nonetheless, I find myself in the perhaps-awkward position of writing self-help books in my guise as a ghostwriter. (Or disguise. I’m required by the company to use a pseudonym.) I haven’t tackled one on women’s love lives yet, but I have written a couple about life with pets, something kind of New-Agey about envisioning your future, and two sort of business-y ones about listening to your inner voice and setting boundaries. My latest endeavor, which I’m about to start working on, is a senior health book, about which I ought to know a bit more than I actually do.

Apparently, a lot of the books that people want to have written are some variety of self-help – parenting tips (titles like Why Your Teen Behaves Like a Teen and Why You Can’t Do Anything About It), investment advice (Become the Only Person in America Who Tries to Pay the Electric Bill With Cryptocurrency), and doomsday prepping (Apocalypse When? Build Your Own Bomb Shelter Using Wattle and Daub) being some of the most-asked-for topics. (Again, subjects about which I know nothing.) I put in requests for book projects with more mental health focus such as overcoming anxiety or dealing with your inner child. But no. I get inspirational titles.

I must admit, I hate inspirational books. If they’re not about succeeding in business without really getting a business degree, they’re about positivity.

What’s wrong with positivity? Well, first of all, it’s been hard for me to achieve for most of my life, seeing that I was diagnosed with depression for decades. I’ve never been perky and seldom gung-ho. In addition, I’ve always hated cheerleaders, both the pom-pom kind and the believe-in-yourself ones. I guess I just don’t believe it’s possible to think yourself to a better, more fulfilling life with daily affirmations that sound like something from Jonathan Livingston Seagull. (If I’m going to take advice from a bird, I’d rather it be a parrot. Although it could conceivably provide me with daily affirmations. But I digress again.)

In fact, I’ve been exploring self-help books that are about non-positivity (not that I’ve been asked to write any of that kind). But Barbara Ehrenreich, the noted author of Nickled and Dimed who died recently at the age of 81, wrote a book titled Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. Another such book, which I’m reading now, is The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman. (Ehrenreich also wrote a book called Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer, another one that I need to read, though probably not until I finish writing the self-health book.)

I sincerely do hope, though, that readers will get more out of the books I write than I did out of those that I read. I’d hate to think that all my good, if ill-informed, advice is going to waste.

Tip Jar

Choose an amount

$2.50
$5.00
$10.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is appreciated.

Donate

Loving the Library

books, etc., family, literature, , , ,

I love libraries. They and the books within them have shaped my life.

The idea of libraries went back, evidently, to ancient Assyria, but libraries in the United States caught hold in 1731, when Benjamin Franklin founded the Philadelphia Library Company with a bunch of his friends. I’m pleased to note that it’s still in operation today and has, as you might guess, many of Franklin’s papers and all sorts of historic books and manuscripts, including the Mayflower Compact and first editions of Moby-Dick and Leaves of Grass. The current collection is over 500,000 books.

I have a t-shirt that says “I Love You to the Library and Back.” That’s what I should have said to my father. Every other Saturday, the bookmobile parked in the Rike’s Department Store parking lot, and I got my reading fix. I almost always checked out Green Eggs and Ham, until my mother told me that I should get something else, too. (My mother once tried to make me green eggs and ham. It worked for the eggs, but not so much for the ham. But I digress.) My dad drove me to the bookmobile and sometimes even to a small library just a bit farther away. I brought home double armloads of books and started reading them on the drive home.

Later on, my father even drove me to the library downtown, where I could check out a particular record album I loved and could find nowhere else (I now have it on iTunes, but this was long ago). Libraries now have CDs and DVDs and video games and ebooks and sometimes even tools you can check out. They also have computers that the public can use for searching the online “card catalog” and for their own wants and needs. They have children’s summer reading programs, storytimes, and crafts.

My father wasn’t really a reader himself until he was laid low by cancer and couldn’t even get to the room with the television. Beth McCarty, a family friend and the “traveling library lady,” brought books to shut-ins and never failed to bring my father bags of the Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey and Foxfire books he loved.

When I was in junior high, I volunteered to work in the school library during my free period, shelving books. It was there I became acquainted with Robert Heinlein’s juveniles and Ray Bradbury’s short stories, beginning my lifelong love of science fiction. (I once was concentrating so hard on the titles that I walked right off the little stool I needed to reach the upper shelves. But I digress again.)

I spent my undergrad college years working in the grad school library, which had closed stacks. I was a page and retrieved books for people and sent them down in what was essentially a dumbwaiter. It was my first exposure to the Library of Congress classification system, though it wouldn’t be my last. I loved the job, since when there weren’t any requests, I could read to my heart’s content from the topics shelved on whatever floor I was stationed on. In later life, I also read while on duty when I worked at an unsuccessful bookstore.

By the time I was a young adult (though older than what is called “young adult” these days in terms of fiction audiences) I made regular trips to the library. I discovered Sue Grafton’s alphabet series while she was still only a few letters in. Another type of fiction that I explored was children’s literature. The library never made me feel silly about checking out Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain series. And I particularly haunted the new acquisitions shelf. I was always on the prowl for something I didn’t know about that sounded interesting.

I thought of the overdue fines I paid over the years as my little contributions to the libraries’ budget. (A much more substantial contribution to the Ohio libraries – over $600,000 – was made by comedian Drew Carey, who gave away what he had won on game shows, before he ever hosted one.)

Of course, if Ben Franklin were alive now (and I wish he was), the concept of libraries would most likely never have gotten off the ground. A place accessible to anyone where they could get books for free? Supported by our tax dollars? It’s hard to imagine that going through these days.

Anymore I think of librarians as a type of freedom fighter. They take access to books and the privacy of patrons seriously. Back in 2001, when the Patriot Act was passed, they refused to rat out their patrons based on what “unsuitable” books they checked out. Now, they resist efforts to remove books from their shelves based on the wishes of pressure groups.

At one point in my life, I seriously considered becoming a librarian myself. I sometimes still wish I had. I would be proud to join their ranks, even with the low pay, lack of funding, and political nonsense. It’s a job that needs doing, and always will.

(I’ll have more to say about libraries next week.)

Tip Jar

Choose an amount

$2.50
$5.00
$10.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is appreciated.

Donate

What Good Is Fiction?

books, etc., literature, , , , , , , ,

Nonfiction has purpose. It informs, educates, and illuminates. What does fiction do? Nothing but provide escape.

And what’s wrong with that? Nothing, as far as I can see. If there’s any time when people need escape, it’s now. I don’t have to detail the current political, social, and news situations to know that’s true. At times like these, who doesn’t want to escape to a desert island or another planet?

Actually, escapism has never been a bad thing. There are always things in life that need escaping from. At least there have been in my life. Misunderstanding, bullying, depression, loneliness – fiction helped me escape from these, from Green Eggs and Ham to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to A Wrinkle in Time to The Lord of the Rings.

Nor do you need high-brow fiction to provide escapism, though that is there as well. I’ve found escape in Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax books, a cozy mystery/adventure series with included travelogues. In fact, mystery books still provide an escape for me. And science fiction and fantasy, perhaps the ultimate escapist literature, still fill many spots on my to-be-read list, as well as my to-be-reread list. (The fact that I am friends with several sf writers is also a factor.)

I’ve had my innings with classic literature, it’s true, particularly in college, when I was an English major – though one of my favorite courses was children’s literature (aka kiddie lit). If you look at my e-reader, you’ll find Shakespeare and Cervantes along with Grafton, Heinlein, Dumas, and others.

Fiction, like nonfiction, can inform, educate, and illuminate as well – spark thought and inspire to action.

Take Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. In that book, it’s poetry (another “useless” pursuit) that helps the protagonist understand the value of literature and the futility of trying to suppress it. It’s still extremely relevant, considering all the book bannings lately. Or take Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, as appallingly relevant as the day it was first written. Or The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell, which has the first contact with an alien civilization being made by Jesuits. If that’s not thought-provoking, I don’t know what is.

There’s also historical fiction, which, while not always totally accurate (we have nonfiction biographies and autobiographies for that), speculates about the inner workings of famous people’s psyches and posits reasons for how they lived. Melanie Benjamin’s The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb and The Aviator’s Wife, about Anne Morrow Lindbergh, are two examples.

Then there is fiction about fiction and books that provide escape for the mind that cannot be found anywhere else. The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak, is one such. John Irving’s The World According to Garp is another famous example. With books like these, one can delve into the mind of the creative person who provides escape for others.

Of course, nonfiction can be escapist as well. Mary Roach’s Packing for Mars provides an entertaining history of the space program, but also NASA’s current exploration of the possibilities of, well, going to Mars. Now that’s escapism – but not fiction. Histories can whisk us away to another time and place with explorers who climbed Mount Everest or charted the Amazon. Ernest Shackleton’s diaries can take me right out of a sweltering day and make me feel the freezing air and hear the buffeting wind of Antarctica.

I will admit that there’s a lot of nonfiction on my e-reader – including true crime, science, biographies, adventure travel, language, and mental health. But it’s fiction I return to again and again. I recently read a beloved novel that I hadn’t read in at least 40 years, and I still remembered not only the plot but also lines of dialogue. And I’ve tried my hand at writing fiction too, which provided mental escape of a different sort.

So, what good is fiction? Even if it’s only escapism, it’s extremely valuable and not to be sneered at. At its best, fiction can make one’s interior world more vibrant, more fascinating, and more meaningful; and the world around us more wondrous, more exciting, and more entertaining. That’s enough of a recommendation for me.

Help me satisfy my reading jones!

Choose an amount

$2.50
$5.00
$10.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is appreciated.

Donate

Adventures in Ireland, Part One: There and Back Again

etc., family, health, , , , , , ,
No. This wasn’t us. Not hardly.

Our recent trip to Ireland was a combination of the sublime and the ridiculous. Ireland is a marvelous country and our time there was sublime. But getting there and back was ridiculous.

It all started (or didn’t, actually) when we got to the airport in the evening to discover no one was behind the airline counter. A few phone calls later, we discovered that the airline had changed the flight time – back in December – and we never got so much as an email from them about it. So we missed the flight to Ireland by approximately four hours.

There were no other flights out that evening, though they had one the next day. Unfortunately, since we were officially no-shows, we had to rebook and pay more money. I spent considerable time on the phone with our bank and credit card company too, trying to shift money around so we could still go.

We had already stowed our car in the non-airport long-term parking and didn’t feel inclined to retrieve it and go back home. So we had to get a hotel room and spend the night. Even that was a trial. None of the hotels that had vacancies had shuttle service to the airport and one of them didn’t even have hot water. So it was Uber for us both that evening and in the morning. At last we got on our way, but we had missed one day of our vacation, spent it in a Best Western instead of an Irish bed-and-breakfast, and already cut into our less-than-extravagant budget.

When we finally arrived in Dublin, we rented a car and set off to our first hotel. The vacation company had booked us into swanky hotels for the first and last stops, presumably on the theory that we’d be exhausted at those points. We didn’t stay in Dublin, because I was dubious about driving on the left in a big city the first day we got there. Instead, we went to the Dunboyne Castle Hotel, which is a little bit away from the city and just as impressive as it sounds.

Our first real b-n-b was in Donegal, and it was in many ways my favorite of the places we stayed. Brook Lodge was a regular house with a comfy bedroom (and en suite bathroom, which all our accommodations had) and a lovely woman who cooked us breakfasts while we watched and Dan chatted with her about gardening.

Our first real stop was a ditch on the way to Brook Lodge. It was 11:00 p.m., we were spent, and we ended up on a one-lane road that stopped at a cattle gate. We managed to get turned around, but went off the side of the road. Fortunately, we had a small flashlight with us (Girl Scout training came in handy there) and Dan took off down the road to find some help. I waited with the car.

Within half an hour, Dan was back with a great couple who drove us and our luggage to Brook Lodge, then came back the next day to pull the Toyota out of the ditch and magically remove the dent so that Hertz wouldn’t make us buy a whole new car when we turned it in.

(The Tom-Tom GPS that came with our rental car was useless and for most of the trip we used Google Maps on my phone. Dan did the driving as I was too nervous to do it, and I did the navigating as he wasn’t able to do both at once. But I digress.)

It was another ridiculous story when it was time to return to Ohio. When we went to catch our plane (after far too long driving around the airport trying to figure out where to leave our rental car), we arrived at the counter only to find that we couldn’t board the plane. Naively, we had thought that our COVID triple-vax cards would be sufficient for travel to the US as they had been going to Ireland. But no. We needed an antigen test. Since the testing site was in another part of the airport and our plane boarded in 30 minutes, there was no way we could get the test in time. There were no other flights that weren’t booked solid for four more days.

I got on the phone with the airline and spent a good hour and a half with them trying to figure out a solution. Eventually, we achieved one. There would be a plane that we could take – from Dublin to Newark and Newark to Chicago and thence to Ohio. And it wouldn’t take a four-day wait. Only two.

Again, we had no choice but to find a hotel room. And just as the flights were booked, so were most of the hotel rooms. We found one that had two rooms left and quickly snagged one. (It was an accessible room, with all kinds of extra equipment in the bathroom. We didn’t need the pull cord for the nurse, but some of the other accommodations proved handy because my husband and I are somewhat mobility-challenged. But I digress again.)

So we spent two days in a Dublin airport hotel, except for taking the hotel shuttle to the COVID testing site at the airport. (Need I say that we both tested negative?) I suppose we could have taken buses to explore the city, but by that time we were both beyond fatigued and demoralized, not to mention out of money. We spent the time playing Mille Bornes, which we had for some reason brought with us, and reading and playing solitaire on our Nook e-readers. And trying to get a charging cable for my phone in case I needed another marathon session with the airline. The hotel provided one. They kept the cables people had left behind for six months, then handed them out to anyone who needed them.

We were enormously relieved to get home and retrieve the kitties from the vet where we had boarded them. We immediately started saving to go back to Ireland, though with a few lessons learned.

There’s lots more to tell and show, but I’ll leave the more sublime parts of the story – and the photos – for next week’s blog, when I’ll no doubt digress again and again. More sublimity and more ridiculosity to come…

Help me pay for my Ireland vacation!

Choose an amount

$2.50
$5.00
$10.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is appreciated.

Donate

We Were Girl Scouts Once … and Young

cooking, etc., fun and games, , , , ,

Yes, I know. The main thing that most people associate with Girl Scouts is cookies. And those are certainly one important part of the Girl Scout experience. But they’re far from the only thing, or even the most important.

Officially, cookie sales promote goal setting, decision making, money management, people skills, and business ethics. All the money raised stays with local councils and troops. Nowadays, Girl Scouts no longer sell door-to-door as we did back in the day. Instead, Scouts do phone and online selling, or set up tables in front of stores and in parking lots, often waving signs to attract buyers.

I was a Girl Scout from Brownies through Seniors. And yes, I sold cookies. (Many scouts had their fathers and mothers take the sign-up sheets into work, where coworkers often ordered their goodies. My father wouldn’t do it because, he said, he worked for a government institution and it wouldn’t be proper. But I digress.)

Although the activities that cookie sales funded were many and varied, my favorite – even more than earning merit badges – was camping. I wrote about camping a few years ago. As I described it:

There we were, bedding down on sleeping bags in our tents, the cold, hard ground only a layer of canvas or plastic away. When we sprang out the next morning, our lithe teen forms dressed in green shorts and Vibram-soled boots, we hoisted our backpacks and hiked over hill and dale and rocky trails, singing optimistic songs and breathing deep of the fresh air. We ate granola as we walked.

Later that day, we built a fire and sat upon logs, tree stumps, or little water repellent squares while our dinner cooked slowly, smoke curled around our heads, and mosquitos had their meal before we had ours. Then it was more songs, jokes, stories, and talk till it was time to pour water on the fire, make sure the ashes were cool, and return to our sleeping bags, where, after hours more chat (not the electronic kind, either) we dozed off.

That was, indeed, one style of camping we did. We also went to official Girl Scout camping facilities instead of state parks. I have vivid memories of those adventures, some terrific and others less so.

There was one decidedly memorable state park trip. We set up our tents, which we shared, four scouts per. After dark, we settled in our tents to tell stories and jokes. The girls in my tent read aloud from the book The Hobbit, to the glow of flashlights, lanterns, and the occasional candle (one thing we had learned was how not to set one’s tent on fire and what to do if we did).

A sudden storm came up and turned violent, with rivers of rainwater flowing through our camp, and indeed through our tents, our candle threatening to sail away. As we read the book, we were at a passage describing a storm rife with heavy wind and rain. Every time the storm in the book became more severe, so did the storm in our camp. It was eerie. Eventually, we decided we should stop reading before we were completely washed away. The next morning we had to cope with damp sleeping bags and muddy ground. But that’s what we did. We were scouts.

Other memories were less dramatic and less pleasurable. There was the time we ate “brontoburgers,” hamburger patties wrapped in bacon and then in foil and cooked in the embers of a dying campfire. The next morning we learned a valuable lesson about the inadvisability of eating meat that was less than thoroughly cooked.

Official Girl Scout camps had large tents on raised wooden bases, so we didn’t have to worry about rainwater. We had camping names like Rover and Binky and ones based on the Lord of the Rings (Strider) or MASH (Trapper, Hawkeye), which were popular at the time. We learned songs (some of them from Free to Be (does anyone else remember that?), as well as traditional songs that must have been around since the invention of scouting (“Make new friends, but keep the old./One is silver and the other’s gold.”) The best times were when we became camp counselors, in charge of younger scouts for a month at a time.

Those were the days, never to return. But now some of my sister scouts are grandmothers and I buy my cookies from their offspring.

Tiny Little Type

etc., funny things, , , , , ,

We’ve all heard and, I hope, know and live by the advice to always read the fine print. Generally, that refers to contracts or other official documents we must sign.

Well, that’s all well and wonderful, and certainly good advice, but the problem remains as to how we are to read that fine print. I know my eyes are aging (quite possibly faster than the rest of me) and reading fine print does not come as easily as it used to. Even the recent bump up in the power of my glasses and the enhanced bifocal lenses have not helped me read ingredient labels or the 800 numbers on insurance cards and the like.

What to do?

First, you can give the document (or whatever) to another person and let them read it to you. My husband exists for this purpose (among many others) because he is nearsighted. I am farsighted and so have especial trouble reading the fine print. (If we had ever had a child, I maintain that the far- and nearsightedness would have canceled out and she or he would have had perfect vision. But I digress.)

Then there’s the ever-useful magnifying glass. Except try to find one when you need it. “Reading glasses” that you find in drugstores are no help either. Would I wear them over my prescription glasses or under? Reading glasses certainly wouldn’t address any of my other eye problems such as crossed eyes.

There is a trick I learned just the other day. If you are trying to read the prescription number on a bottle of pills, for example, simply whip out your camera (easier to find than a magnifying glass), take a quick snap, then use the camera to enlarge the image. (Of course I still always ask the pharmacist if next time, could they please use smaller type? They never get it.)

But you can’t use that trick in every situation, I guess. There’s no use taking pictures of every square inch of a road map and blowing them up, for example. For that you do need the magnifying glass, which I can guarantee is not in the glove compartment of your car, along with the gloves that aren’t there either. Or a road map with larger lettering, which would be twice as hard to refold.

For everyday reading, you can use large-type books, which I refuse to be seen with, or a computer that will enlarge your screen. This only works on certain devices, though. Thankfully, my e-reader is one of them. I can bump up the point size till there’s only one word on a page.

Still, my farsightedness does come in useful for small type that is at a distance from me, such as on the television. (I could probably read the pill bottle if my arms were longer. Say, about two feet longer.)

There are some interesting things in the fine print on TV. There’s always the “Drink responsibly” warning that’s in type as small as that on road maps. (Does anyone really think that those messages actually cause someone to forego that fourth beer before they drive home?) And there are the disclaimers that the person in the ad does or does not really have the disease the medication the commercial is promoting.

But there’s lots more to learn – for example, the definition of perineum (aka “taint”) in medical commercials. And in case you didn’t know it already, you can learn that the car is driven by a stunt driver on a closed course. You can even find out what that liquid is they’re soaking up with the paper towel (150 ml of “green juice”).

One of my favorites is a commercial that shows a person falling down the stairs. The disclaimer reads: “This was not a person. It was a dummy we threw down the stairs.” That was welcome news.

My absolute favorite is an ad for chicken that offers “serving suggestions.” You know, like on the cracker boxes where the crackers are all Martha-Stewarted and the fine print says “serving suggestion” as if you intended to serve naked crackers to your guests. Well, the chicken ad showed: broiled chicken (serving suggestion); roasted chicken (serving suggestion); barbecued chicken (serving suggestion); and oops chicken – it fell on the ground and the dog was eating it. It still said “serving suggestion.”

If you can’t read these disclaimers on TV, just pause the program and rummage through your desk for that pesky magnifying glass. Or get your husband to read the fine print to you. He’ll feel useful, and trust me, it can be educational or at least worth a giggle.