Longer than I intended... writing and reading
I keep a regular journal besides LJ/DW. I have since I was 9 years old -- it's a well-worn story I tell kids when we start weekly journaling at the beginning of each school year. I was nine years old, in the winter of 1975/76, and my mom told me I had to go clean up the trash cans that had been knocked over in our alley. In the slush and the snow and the ice of February. I was so pissed, because **I** hadn't knocked over our trash cans, and there were two units in our two flat apartment, and why ME? Anyway, I stomped downstairs and put the heavy, dingy, dirty metal trash cans upright and gingerly picked up trash to put back in them. Somehow thrown clear from the trash, on a dirty bank of snow near the back fence in the alley, there was a brown and maroon book with the word "Journal" embossed in gold letters on the front. It wasn't new, but only one or two of the first pages had been used -- just numbers, no name or anything. It was ruled as some kind of account book, maybe? Anyway, I considered it a perk of the unfair chore, and took it upstairs and began a very banal diary, printed in pencil. We were learning cursive that year, and I complained about that in one of the first entries. I love my semi-cursive normal handwriting now, but I hated my handwriting until I changed it by force of will in ... maybe sophomore year of high school? Anyway, it's not like my entries were fascinating, not even for a nine-year-old. Stuff about the TV my sister and I watched. Stuff about how stupid the Bicentennial was. When our cat Inessa (after Inessa Armand, Lenin's lover and a revolutionary in her own right) died.
That diary lasted through the rest of fifth grade, sixth, and into seventh grade. It was journal Roman Numeral I. I am on journal LXXII now. I have lost one or maybe two over the years, which is horrifying. One I lost in the Northwestern University Library, and one the first year I was a teacher, at my middle school in West Oakland. Luckily, that one I had only just started, and in both cases I had gotten over writing "[Redacted First Name] [Redacted Last Name] 827 Monroe St. Evanston, IL United States, North America, Earth, the Solar System, the Milky Way, the Universe."
I did not write in my journal this year once between my total hysterectomy in December of 2021 and the end of radiation treatments in April of 2022.
I don't write when I am depressed. I am starting to write a little, now, in the past couple of months (though I wouldn't say I am NOT depressed, right now). It's also hard, when I am depressed (or perhaps this is just laziness, which I have a strong tendency towards) to keep track of my reading. I read indefatigably, but I don't read very... consciously? With discrimination? Reading for me is comfort of the most basic sort, and maybe because of that, I do a prodigious amount of re-reading. There are books I would not be surprised if I have read more than 50 times, no lie. Anne of Green Gables, for instance. Ha, it just struck me that it's a Canadian classic, and it's a Canadian series that sparked my impulse to write this LJ/DW entry.
In terms of keeping track of my reading, I joined Goodreads several years ago (I was going to write "a few years ago" but time surges on, and I think it's been more than "a few" by now) and signed up eagerly to the book challenge, knowing that if I include re-reads (probably illegal in some way) I would EASILY read 365 books a year. It absolutely astounded or horrified kids when I would show them completed tallies of 365-books-a-year. I think I reached 500 one year? But recording the books... oh, that's a pain in the ass, including re-reads. I have a million tags, and I have to add one for what year I am re-reading the book in and it's a slow process to look it up on Goodreads, and just... annoying. For new books, choosing all the categories, deciding whether to review the book, etc. Just tedious, especially since I would never do it when I finished a book, but only in great gulps, every few months.
I haven't done it -- set a goal or tried to record my reading -- for maybe two years now? Or three? Probably three.
But tonight, as I start the fifth book in a mystery series I never read before (I might have heard of the author, maybe? I'm not sure) I felt an inclination to write about my reading in 2022. Not in great detail. Don't expect any challenging titles (I don't think). But in lieu of the Goodreads challenge, and because several of the people I enjoy reading on LJ/DW write about what they read, I thought I'd list some -- dunno if I could even do ALL by November of this year -- of what I've been reading.
First of all... there are categories/genres I read a lot: historical fiction, mysteries -- and within mysteries, especially historical mystery series (all periods and all places), mysteries of place (that is, they are contemporary but their settings are crucial -- National Parks (Anna Pigeon, by Nevada Barr), Ireland, England, France (including a series I am very conflicted about because the author seems like an asshole Washington journalist who gets wet dreams about spy bullshit but chooses to write about the Dordogne, a little like a mash-up of My Year in Provence (which I hasten to add, I've never read) and that idiot insurance agent (I think) Tom Clancy. These are the Inspector Bruno novels...), India, the American South in various locales, etc., some fantasy, some sci-fi series (Kim Stanley Robinson, Neal Stephenson, Lois McMaster Bujold, John Varley, Vonda McIntyre, Octavia Butler and so on), Regency Romances, Young Adult Fiction, some contemporary novels (though rarely super recent ones; I seem to require some years, maybe even a decade, for new releases to mellow, or something. Well, except for YA. I read more recent YA, more quickly, probably because as a teacher, I want to be able to make current recommendations. Or I just like a lot of new YA. Not all of it. Some stuff my nieces used to recommend... nope. Nope to Sarah J. Maas, for example. And to Rick Riordan.
Anyway, the series I encountered belatedly (there are 18 books now, apparently) thanks to The Guardian, my comfort read of a daily newspaper -- yes, it's a liberal rag, but it's a marginally better liberal rag than the NYT, though I read both -- is one I also have some conflicts about. I am suspending those hesitations for now. It's a mystery series -- probably close to the "cozy" subgenre -- by Louise Penny, with the main character as a homicide Chief Inspector with the Sûreté de Québec. This is an Anglo writing about a Francophone Québecois character, so from get, it makes me uncomfortable, but fascinated. I think Penny started the series in 2005, and already there was a movie deal by 2013. I even like the actor chosen to play Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. But oh, man, I didn't make it five minutes into the movie before I had to quit. As a student told me this week (it made my heart pitter pat) "All movies are worse than the books". This one, damn. Nathaniel Parker is a Brit, but he went for what seemed like an American accent (though the first book lays down the canon that Gamache's English is Oxford English... weirdly, because as a college student, he learned English there, which seems... kind of ridiculous... not that he wouldn't have learned English earlier -- I've met plenty of Québecois for whom not learning English is a political act -- but that he'd be accepted to a program at Oxford knowing none. ANYWAY... There was no attempt for any of the actors to a) speak any French, b) have a Québecois accent... which is my preferred French accent.
I went there when I was fourteen, the summer after graduating 8th grade, to stay with lefty friends of my parents as a graduation gift. It was a transformative experience for me... right after the failure of one of the referendums on separation (1980), and at the same time as le jour de Saint Jean-Baptiste, the 24th of June, Québec's national holiday. I got to help at a working class neighborhood's fête, despite my pretty pathetic two years of middle school French. But man, I learned to say "Tu veux une bière? Labatts ou Molson? Un sandwich au jambon ou au fromage?" flawlessly. I was a hit with the neighborhood kids younger than me, though we could barely communicate... we managed with drawings and chalk art on the sidewalks. Québec flags and "Québecois et fière de l'être" and "Gens du Pays".
So reading this series is weird. Its setting -- in a Brigadoonish cozy village in the Eastern Townships just over the border from Vermont -- is both attractive and unbelievable, a pastiche of Canadian and Québecois comfort food (pouding au chômeur à l'érable, habitant soup, poire Hélène, etc...) and an Anglican church, a proud heritage of United Empire Loyalists (that is, for Americans, Loyalists who fled their defeat in the American Revolution) (I should be grateful that at least, so far, there are no Orange Lodge Protestants from the North of Ireland or Scotland in this mythical village) and Francophone Québecois villagers.
Louise Penny
Still Life
A Fatal Grace
The Cruelest Month
A Rule Against Murder
The Brutal Telling (I've just barely started this one)
C. J. Sansom (Tudor mystery series I somehow never read until a few weeks ago, a very odd lacuna in my generally robust collection of early and late medieval mysteries)
Dissolution -- fascinating, taking the backdrop of Cromwell's and Henry VIII's money grab from dissolving the monasteries of England.
Dark Fire
Sovereign
Revelation
Heartstone -- includes the backdrop of the wreck of the Mary Rose, Henry the VIII's gigantic flagship, in a naval battle against the French
Lamentation -- includes a lot about the Religious struggles, and Catherine Parr
Tombland -- I'm still reading this one; it's very good so far, but these mysteries tend to be intense (definitely not cozies) so I sometimes take a break... into which fell the Armand Gamache series.
Sara Sheridan (Brit mystery series centered in Brighton in the 1950s, with a female lead who was with OSS during WWII, and is now a private detective cum debt collector)
Brighton Belle
London Calling
England Expects
British Bulldog
There are five more of these, but ONLY THE FIRST THREE are available on Kindle, and only two more of them have been uploaded to my new (but quite old in internet years) love, Internet Archive. They are available in Amazon.uk, but not .us Bastards. I think Operation Goodwood is on Internet Archive, but I'm almost saving it, because it's depressing that the other books aren't there. I really like this series, which is close to a subgenre of historical fiction I enjoy -- WWII homefront books -- and post WWII historical (and YA historical) novels, such as those by Michelle Magorian. I do wonder whether the racial aspects of the friendship between the main character and a Black Brit woman whose parents are from the Caribbean is all that realistic. I can't decide if it's super woke (or if that is a problem for me).
Okay, this entry got away from me. It's been a while. Next time maybe more books and less autobiography. I miss Québec, though.