Another Update in the Shape of a Reading List

It is SUMMER, at least in terms of work, if not the actual season or weather.  That means I'm reading a lot mostly by choice.  Sort of a mismash of things that are work related and things that are personally interesting or relevant.

• Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection.  I've listened to Brown on audio before but hadn't ever sat down with the book.  I've been trying to read more strategically in self-help/ psychology, and this was a quick and useful read.
• Lots of things on ADHD kids and dysregulation, including Russell Barkley's 12 Principles for Raising a Child with ADHD (I think that's the title) and Getting Ahead of ADHD.
• Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach's poetry (all three collections).  Her work engages her family's immigration story (Jewish refugee from Ukraine in the 90s) as well as motherhood more broadly.  Love her work.
• Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot.  This was a re-read for me, but I'm having trouble caring about fiction right now so starting with a known quantity felt good.  Because I knew the major plot turns (ahem!) I was able to see how they were set up.  Highly recommend this one!

Feel free to let me know what you're reading in the comments!

An update in the shape of a reading list

Folks who have been reading here for a while probably know that my particular corner of the academic universe is English professor, with the specific subfields of creative writing and twentieth-century and contemporary literature and gender studies.  That means I read a lot though my list of books completed feels relatively small.  Some of the things I've finished or dipped into recently (meaning, within the last three weeks):

Megan Giddings' novel The Women Could Fly (dystopian narrative via gender and race, featuring witches).  This took me months to read, though I liked it and it's relatively short as far as novels go; I just had more pressing things to do.  I read the second half of it in a week (spring break).

After Giddings, I immediately started reading Celeste Ng's Our Missing Hearts, also dystopian.  (Yes, that's most of what I do when I do novels these days, although honestly realist fiction about NOW reads dystopian enough.)  Also love it so far--like two chapters in-- and put it back on the shelf because there's a dissertation I need to read.

Student dissertation, which is a combo of a novel and a long (~100 page) critical introduction.  I hope this novel is published.  It's pretty brilliant, dealing with rape, family secrets, economic class in rural England in the early part of the twentieth century.  LOVE IT.

Undergraduate student writing.  A lot of it.  For class and for departmental scholarships and awards.  When it's good it's good and when it's bad it crushes my soul.

Jenny Odell's Saving Time.  I love Odell's work, as I mentioned on SHU's blog.  I read the intro  and stopped, again, not for lack of interest but because I own this book and sometimes I kick library books that have been recalled to the top of the pile.

I put Odell away to read Sheila Liming's Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time, which is brilliant and so enjoyable, and crystallized for me why any of the arguments that "we all have 168 hours in a week" just don't sit right, even if factually true.

Karla McLaren, The Language of Emotions.  I've had this on my side table for months and just really started looking at it in earnest.  I've read the anger and shame chapters, for my dealings with Tiny Boy.

On that, checked out 12 Principles for Raising a Child with ADHD because we have periodic "crises" and I feel like we're in one, and I read these books and feel better for the moment even if the suggested strategies don't quite work with my kid.

Devoured Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach's 40 weeks, which is a book of poems largely about her second pregnancy, and I cannot recommend it enough, though I doubt most of the folks here spend a lot of time with poems.  I've requested her other work via interlibrary loan.

I feel like I'm missing something?  I bought a bunch of books at/after a recent conference.

Although enjoyable, most of what's here falls in the murky space between work and leisure.  Like, I could teach the novels and excerpts of Odell and Liming quite easily, as well as the poems.  And the psychology / ADHD stuff is also practical and on my mind right now. 

And now I have to get back to the dissertation.... defense is coming up.  

Things to Read and Watch (Recommendations and Requests!)

In this current post-trump pandemic world, I am finding myself willing (eager?) to read fiction again.  I am currently reading Alison Stine's Road Out of Winter and recently finished Lily Brooks Dalton's Good Morning, Midnight (the inspiration for that Neflix movie with George Clooney--the book is better than the movie in most ways other than George Clooney).

Tiny Boy has been devouring the "Spirit Animals" series and needs to move on to something else....recommendations?  He seems to be reading at third/fourth grade level (at his age LG was reading far above grade level and reading Harry Potter and other long books).  He definitely leans toward the speculative.

As a family we finished watching both seasons of The Mandalorian and are now onto WandaVision.  LG and I are making our way very slowly through 30 Rock, which I have never seen.  I'm not sure what we will do next (sitcoms seem to be what we're both willing to do--before 30 Rock we did Community.  LG adores The Office and let's just say I do not.  I also adamantly do not like Schitt's Creek, despite many people from many walks of life insisting that I would).

That's all for a Sunday.  Let your recs on my me!

Summer--finally! (and miscellany)

• For the past couple weeks I've been living in a weird limbo between spring semester and summer, with teaching done and grades submitted, but lingering administrative nonsense and professional development type things that meant my days were so full of human contact and appointments that I couldn't even make it to the gym.  That's not to say there weren't pleasurable moments (I got my hair cut on Weds, which involved a scalp massage, and I've been reading fiction) but I felt like I couldn't quite relax and definitely couldn't start All the Summer Writing and Reading Plans.  I mean, I haven't even articulated All the Summer Writing and Reading Plans.
• Thursday, which was the first day I didn't actually need to be on campus in I can't tell you how long, I had what I think of as A Day of Sloth.  I watched a good chunk of the current season of Killing Eve.  I read some stuff.  I cleaned some stuff and generally puttered around and fed my children and took Tiny Boy to baseball, where I read some more and looked up to watch him bat.  Friday more of the same, including watching Killing Eve while walking inclined on the treadmill, which left my glutes so sore that I can still barely walk (oops), and a massage that had been rescheduled because I actually forgot to show up to an appointment the week before, because All the Work.  Then this weekend I actually did not need to think about work or even check email, so although I had a colleague from work over for a glass of wine, that's because we are friends and mostly talked about non-work things.  I took Tiny Boy swimming with a friend from his class, whose mother I am starting to like, which is nice, because she might be the kind of friend who could just come over and drink a glass of wine while kids run around in the back yard, and it is nice to have those, as I didn't mostly when LG was young.  All that is to say, good weekend.
• I have been reading all the things I want to read, including Claudia Rankine's play The White Card (brilliant!), Tracy K. Smith's poetry anthology American Journal that I ordered for class, Ross Gay's delightful Book of Delights that I will also end up using for class, Meg Wolitzer's The Wife (I have not yet seen the movie with Glenn Close but want to).  I also started Maria Kuznetsova's Oksana, Behave! which wouldn't have come across my desk but for a work thing, and I'm enjoying it mostly, though it's not really my kind of fiction.  Oh, and Daisy Johnson's book Everything Under which also mostly wouldn't have made it on my radar but I got it from a friend and was immediately drawn to it.  Books.  Good.
• Today I am still going back to campus, but I think this is THE LAST MEETING for a very long time.  And I am making a mental note to make actual physical notes of all the job-related things I do over the summer when I am not actually paid to do them.  Including this meeting.

The Week of All the Books

It's "spring break," which I put here in quotes as it is neither spring (the wind chill is well below zero) nor a real break (I made the unfortunate mistake of checking email and the administrative nonsense is piling up).  But it is break-like, insofar as I do not need to go to the office or prep for class.  I'm in my pajamas.  I've had time to spend with each of my children.  I've worked on book projects.  I've done some household projects.  I've read.  A lot.  Some things I've read this week, and something resembling reviews:

Becoming by Michelle Obama:  I finished this, finally, after moving back and forth between the print version and the audio.  It was "well-written," and there were some moments I adored (i.e. Michelle Obama sitting in her car eating Chipotle on lunch break) but not a page-turner for me, which is why it took me weeks to get through it.  Perhaps because it's not really a memoir so much as an autobiography in its wide lens...

Caroline: Little House Revisited by Sarah Miller:  I don't really remember how I stumbled across this (maybe one of my kindle suggestions?)  In any case, the title gives it away.  I struggled to get into the first fifty pages and then I finished quickly.  However controversial Little House on the Prairie might be these days, it was my childhood favorite, and the first TV show I really loved.  While not the sort of thing I usually read, I very much appreciated the depth of this book and its point of view.

Outer Order, Inner Calm by Gretchen Rubin:  Yeah, I pre-ordered this one because generally I love Rubin's work.  This was a waste of money, in truth.  For anyone who has read anything on "decluttering" there's absolutely nothing here that's new.  Like, nothing.  Highly disappointing.

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Those are the books I've finished.  I'm also working my way through three others that I'm really enjoying.

Generous Thinking by Kathleen Fitzpatrick (I doubt this will inspire actual change, but it should be required reading for all academics, and I'll be giving a chunk of it to my honors seminar as a way to get them to talk to each other differently)

A Body, Undone: Living on After Great Pain by Christina Crosby (I'm fascinated by Maggie Nelson writing about Crosby and Crosby writing about Nelson and need to do something about this.  This book also has solidified my desire to teach a class on literature of/and the body)

Atomic Habits by James Clear (this is probably the best self-helpy type thing I've read in a while)

The Right Book

My day job involves teaching reading.  A lot of my energy lately has gone into pushing students to explore why they feel about books.  They know what they think.  They have a critical vocabulary for that.

I've been reading Michelle Obama's memoir, slowly; I'm only about 70 pages in.  I know I will like it, as a portrait of a woman I like.  It's "well written."  Eventually, I'll finish it.  But I've put it down to plow through two other books--Layli Long Soldier's poetry collection Whereas and Dani Shapiro's memoir Inheritance, which I read in about 24 hours.  What is it about Shapiro that holds me captive in a way that Obama does not?

I'm not entirely sure I have an answer.

There are books I have tried--and failed--to read multiple times.  I'm at the point in my life and my career that I don't need to--and won't--finish them.  If I were a student and they were assigned, I would.

There is something magical about reading the right book at the right time, and in this era of the algorithm I wish there were some kind of formula to determine what that is.  I suspect I'll be reading a few other things before I get back to Obama in a serious way.  

The Year of the Book, The Year of Peace?

I'm drinking coffee.  There are cinnamon rolls in the oven.  LG and her friend (who slept over) and Tiny Boy are on the sofa bed watching kid TV.  I spent New Years Eve watching Homeland and filching potato chips from the girls.  It was really nice.

I find myself more and more lately thinking about THEN and now.  Because I think the distinction between them is just becoming more clear.  Reading at Dr. Gorgeous's office solidified that.  While I will always be infertile, and while that time shaped my identity in ways I don't think I have yet fully processed, I really do now have the life I wanted, even if it came about in a way that was less than desirable.  Still, sometimes I am astonished when I think about just how hard those years--years in which I was coming up for tenure and driving for treatment and raising a small child and having a lot of family drama--actually were.

A lot of goodness happened in 2014:  I had two books published and another accepted, on top of many smaller pieces added to my CV.*  I settled in to an administrative position I will keep probably for another year or two (maybe until I go up for promotion to full?  I'm not entirely sure).  I'm sleeping better, if not great, but at least enough that I don't have many of those "lost days" any more.  LG is, if a bit pre-adolescent-surly, a real companion at this age (she'll be 11 in Feb), and Tiny Boy is, well, a tiny boy who talks in complete (and complicated) sentences and plays with trucks and doles out many hugs.  I am tempted to say I have found something resembling peace.

I'm not sure what 2015 will bring.  I should have a book out in the fall, and assuming all goes well, a new nephew or niece this summer.  LG will start middle school (yikes!).  Professionally I'd like to finish up the two book projects that I have lingering (a co-edited collection that's in review, and a hybrid creative/scholarly monograph thing that I've been working on since I was pregnant) and solidify what my next thing will be, as I'm eligible to apply for an internal grant again next fall. Personally I'd like to lose 5 pounds (which is such a weird thing to say, because I've historically had the opposite problem) mostly by increasing exercise (which should happen anyway) and paying a bit more attention to my diet (I think I need to go low histamine/low inflammatory because I'm getting a ton of headaches lately).  And read more outside my field(s), probably social science (psych, anthro) and cognitive/neuroscience designed for "lay" readers.**  I'd also like to do better about routinizing certain things (cooking, cleaning) to free up some head space and time.

And how nice it is that none of this is high drama, just routine life.  Hope all of you have a great year. If you're reading and haven't commented in a while (or never!) please do say hi.





* what's stupid is that these won't "count" for much of anything because book publication already earns highest merit in our annual review process, so it's actually better to sit on things and deliberately space out publication.

**if you have recs, send them my way

Post-Infertility (Again)

It's been a weird week.

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Because my collection of poems is being published by an imprint that focuses on illness, my editor asked me to secure someone to write a "medical introduction."  For reasons that I assume would be fairly obvious, I sent an email to Dr. Gorgeous.  Who said she'd love to do it.  And then followed up by talking about an open house at her new facility, with an art exhibit, and to contact her staff about it.  I have no idea what she has in mind.  I'm not sure I can stomach going, regardless of whether she wants me to participate.

It's an odd thing.  I can imagine, in another life, being friends with her.  But having her read this book makes me feel more exposed than during any medical procedure in which her hand was up in my vagina.  Not sure why that is.  Not like she hasn't seen me cry.

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So I was on a keynote panel for a conference, at which I read chunks of my memoir and answered questions asked by my editor's students.  It seems I have a small fan club.  Some of them are now following me on twitter.  That's all kinds of fun.

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The conference was great.  Good food, good conversation, hotel bath, walk in an actual city, time away from kids.  Met some really cool people.  The book sold out.  Sleep could have been better (but also could have been worse).  And now I'm home and have a ton of catch up work.  But not tonight.

Technicalities

Just over five years ago, I sat on my porch waiting for the phone to ring.  I expected the nurse to tell me I wasn't pregnant.  What she said instead was that I was "technically pregnant"; I'd been around the block long enough to know a beta that low wasn't going anywhere.  Indeed, I didn't make it past six weeks.

I received an odd email from an editor on Monday.  Two sentences telling me I'd done a lot of work and she wanted to talk to me.  She didn't say she wanted to publish the book.  She didn't say she was rejecting it.  Indeed, a friend of mine agreed the tone was weird, and she didn't know how to read it.

She finally called me today, and I ended up in a state that can only be described as psychological whiplash.  She repeated to tell me I'd done a lot of work--yes, indeed--and launched into a laundry list of problems with the manuscript, burying in there something like "I'm not saying we won't publish it if you won't make these changes but..."  At some point I said I wasn't going to do anymore work without a contract.  I've done a lot on this book already, as requested. 

Like that beta a long time ago, I expected to be pregnant or not, not some hazy space in between.

I told her that it's not supposed to be like this; being told your book is going to be published should be exciting, and it's just not.  She told me she'd said only positive things...but every interchange I've had with her as been distant and somewhat negative, like she just doesn't get what I'm doing.  I hung up the phone crying.

And then she called back and left me a message that gave me the good news that she really should have started with:  I've done good work and they're delighted to publish it

Still, feels like a rocky pregnancy, not a guarantee of a live birth.

Babies and Books (II)

I.

I cried during Yoga for Pregnant People again.  And I got passive aggressive.  Or maybe just plain aggressive.  I'd tried to make an innocuous observation that I'm dealing with anxiety/emotional issues rather than physical ones, when the whiniest of the Presumed Fertiles said--and it was well-intentioned--that she thought probably all of us are dealing with anxiety.  Yes, I said, but I was given a 90% chance of miscarrying in my first trimester.  Let's just say that shut everyone up.  Perhaps not my finest moment.  But I think it made the point.

Instead of retreating with my tail between my legs and going back to normal yoga, I think I will stick it out.  Maybe this is the "release valve" my therapist always wanted me to have.  A space that allows me to deal with all the emotional stuff I'm dealing with.  Because, let's face it, it's not going away any time soon.  As A. said, I probably have something like Post-Traumatic Reproductive Stress Disorder as do many of you who read here.

II. 

I have my regularly scheduled OB app't tomorrow and quite a long list of things to talk about.  Among them:  (1) If he's still breech, I think I suck it up and schedule the c-section; if he's not, I think I suck it up and schedule the c-section and hope I don't need it.  (Of course, not needing it means either preterm delivery or giving birth potentially on Thanksgiving.) (2) I'm contracting.  A lot.  Which would have me really worried if I hadn't experienced the same phenomenon with LG from about 32 weeks on and still never made it past 3 cm during delivery.  But I do think I should at least mention it.

III.

If you had a c-section and resent it,
If you had a hospital birth and resent it,
If you had a home birth
If you had a birth with a midwife
If you are pregnant and thinking about your birth options
If you are trying to get pregnant and thinking about your birth options
If you are a writer who plays in innovative forms
If you are a reader who likes innovative forms
If you are a feminist

Check out Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker's Home/Birth: A Poemic.

I devoured it in one day.  (Yes, when I should have been doing other things.)  Despite the subtitle, I'd be more inclined to call it an essay than a long poem.  But it is SO up my alley, both in terms of content and form.

It does have what I've come to think of as "the D word" (no, LG, not damn, but dead baby) but I knew that going in and found it profoundly moving.

Sometimes you need someone to say it:  sometimes babies die.  Maybe next week I'll recommend it in YFPP.  Snort.

It's June, and what have I done?

Yesterday, unable to sit around and wait for more bad news about my sister, I took a walk to campus to pick up my Folgard and check my mail (more dissertation chapters!). Naturally, I ran into a senior colleague who asked me about the summer--what's going on, what I'm working on, what LG is going, etc. Surely, she said, something good has happened, glancing not so subtly at my waist (she knows I'm ttc only because she asked me point blank a few months ago and I'm a very bad liar). No, I replied, it's been a really shitty summer.

That it has. So all my big plans about what I was going to accomplish have pretty much fallen by the wayside. I did, fortunately, manage to get my book manuscript in the mail last week. And my classes for fall are in decent shape, at least until late August when I need to copy/scan things. Which leaves the writing that I'm not doing. Oh, sure, I've written in my journal and on this blog and kept up with my regularly-scheduled non-academic project. What I haven't done is finished the damn article I started working on in April or made any real headway on other short essay revisions. In other words, I'm writing but seriously lacking discipline. Same goes for reading: I'm in the midst of Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire, a couple scholarly books relevant to the article, Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts, and the constantly growing stack of lit mags I ignore during the academic year. I returned Dove's Sonata Mulatica to the library yesterday because it was too overwhelming; it's a BOOK not a collection of poems I can read one at a time while I'm sitting in the waiting rooms of various offices or in the line at the grocery store.

I'm not going to say I wasted this first quarter of the summer, because it really wasn't my intent to lounge on my porch and watch a lot of movies. I was pregnant. I was grieving. I needed that time. And now, I think, I'm ready to work.

Random Bullets of the First Day of Summer

• LG and I are visiting her Gram. She woke up early (how I hate the time zones!) and has already played computer games and watched one show on PBS. We need to get dressed and plan our day (museum? park? library?).
• As of about 30 seconds ago, my grades have been submitted. I feel somewhat liberated.
• I'm progesterone-ing. That is to say, nauseated, sleepy, and having strange dreams. I hope it adds up to something (8 days until beta!) but I honestly doubt it.
• I've got a good research plan for the summer. But there is much housework to be done before I can really get to it.
• My summer reading project is, I think, to read all of Virginia Woolf (novels, at least). I have tried this before and haven't made much headway, mostly because I can't handle Voyage Out. To deal with this problem, I've decided to read in reverse chronological order, which will allow me to begin with the books I love. This project is only tangentially related to my actual research (well, to be fair, very far away from the research I'm doing this summer) but allows me to return to those halcyon days of graduate school, which is a fine thing. And at least one of those novels will be included in a fall course, so this is "prep," people!

Oh, weekend, where did you go?

Two trips for groceries (co-op and sells-orange-juice-for-under-$5 store); two trips to libraries (campus and city) including requisite playtime for LG at both; local event involving many farm animals and, consequently, too much manure; swimming lessons; cheapie ice cream place where LG bought herself a raspberry-cherry (a.k.a tastes-like-cough-syrup) slushie for 85 cents and I drank a coke (because if I'm going to eat ice cream and get a migraine, it will be the overpriced, high-fat, coffee and/or chocolate variety, thank you very much).

Otherwise, she colored; I read for class and responded to emails (including sending back my proofs and taking care of weekly submissions). And I cooked (black beans and rice, omelet and hashbrowns, tacos with non-dairy fixings).

Tonight: I need to make oatmeal for the week (it's my current breakfast of choice), comment on student writings, clean the kitchen, and take a shower. Maybe paint my toenails purple (yesterday, at least, it was spring).

Two weeks (plus exams) left in the semester. A few days left (I hope) in this non-ttc cycle. Yeah, it's about time to put together my summer reading list. Suggestions?