Summer's Lease

I understand most of the country has been sweltering through a miserable heat wave, but we have been having an unbroken streak of perfect weather (except for one day that dipped its toe in the 90's): morning after morning of cool air and clouds blowing in off the ocean, to burn off to sunshine and 70s by mid-afternoon. 

With only the twins around (Deux is helping out Bookworm until the addition is finished), and them having achieved the all-but-adult age of 17, summer looks very different from years past. Dash is working at a couple of different things and drives himself everywhere he needs to go, and a few places we need him to. Dame is plowing through 18-book series and occasionally emerging to pontificate on centaur spines and whether harpies would lay eggs. The only thing that carries over from years ago is the usefulness of stocking the freezer with ice cream sandwiches.

It's a mercy the summer is mild, because at the current state of the addition not only do we not have air conditioning, which we have never had, we also have minimal air circulation with one whole side of the house blocked off. However, after a stall of a few months work is supposedly going to resume soon. 

Having set the goal of climbing a mountain, and finding myself with the forgotten luxury of a little more time and energy than is strictly necessary for survival, I've been adding to my daily routine a mile and a half loop around as many neighborhood hills as I can manage with a loaded pack on my back. It's been rather exciting to actually be growing detectably stronger--a month ago, I needed to pause a few times on this loop. Now, even at the end of a long day, I can do it easily with increased speed on the uphills. Two weeks ago Dash and I hiked up a smaller, closer mountain and I struggled to go more than a dozen steps uphill at a stretch and never made it quite to the summit. Yesterday we did the same trail again and I paused less than a third of the times, made it to the summit, and still cut 45 minutes off my time. Right now the main concern about our goal hike is that the trails are closed due to a threatening wildfire, and while the weather has not been hot, neither have we had any rain to speak of nor are likely to before September. 

Thanks to this gorgeous arrangement getting stuck in my head, I've been memorizing Shakespeare's Sonnet 18. It's always struck me as odd. Beautiful, expertly crafted, but weird. It's not really about the beloved--in which, to be fair, it is not unlike most love poetry, which tends to be about the sensation of love rather than the parties involved. But it's not really about being in love, either. It's about the poet's expectation of the immortality of his own poetry. (About which, to be fair, he was not wrong.) But perhaps that is because a large part of what love, or at least the feeling of being "in love" is about--the sensation of touching immortality, even though, paradoxically, only for a moment. 

It seems, at least to me, that a large part of the transition from falling in love to mature love is letting go of the vision of the idealized and immortal beloved and accepting the messy human that they are now. It is like in the movie Inception where Cobb rejects his dream-wife to return to the reality where his real wife is dead: "But I can't imagine you with all your complexity, all you perfection, all your imperfection. Look at you. You are just a shade of my real wife. You're the best I can do; but I'm sorry, you are just not good enough." In time it is the annoying, imperfect, mortal being we come to love. 

Perhaps parenting is a bit like that, too. Babies are, for the most part, very easy to fall in love with because they are wide open for the imagination, because they give us a brush with immortality. And to a baby or toddler, a parent is all wise and all powerful. It would be heady stuff if one weren't so sleep-deprived. But adolescence comes and not only does the child realize his parents are human, the parents have to come to term with the child being human, of growing up into an ordinary person with an ordinary skill set and ordinary range of foibles. It's a difficult process for the parent, not just the child, but both of the alternatives--the parent who sees the grown child with all the rosy intoxication of infancy, and the parent who has never gotten over the disappointment of humanity--turn into something hideous in time. 

Mountain Mama

Which is a lyric that has never made sense to me, but I'm not from West Virginia. 

Over the past few years DOB has been working out how to do some off-roading in the Olympics. It started as just a diversion en route to the annual beach pilgrimage, involving a lot of dead ends and occasionally bees. Over the years he has acquired more off-roading capable vehicles and figured out where to print off maps of the logging roads. 

This year we spent Memorial Day chasing down roads along with a few other people. He wanted to do that again on the 5th, but it didn't work out for anyone else, so just Dash and I went along. I suggested a relatively tame loop, but Dash and DOB wanted something more interesting. We went as far as the trailhead for Mount Ellinor, which my father used to climb regularly in his youth and which I ascended with him when I was about 10. My only memory of this trip is clinging to the summit in terror. Still, it was cool to be up there and Dash and I are discussing doing a summit. It's a challenging trail but there were plenty of people coming down with grade school children in tow, so it can't be that difficult, right?  On the other hand, while I walk a good deal on relatively level ground I was getting winded just descending a bit from the parking lot, so I probably should try some lesser elevation hikes first. 

After that we tried various roads. The first one had apparently been wiped out by a landslide several years back (judging from the scrubby trees growing out of it). Fortunately the wipe out was clearly visible from where it turned off the main(ish) road and there was a parking lot, so DOB stayed there while Dash and I hiked a short way down and discovered it would indeed have had incredible views if it had been traversible. But that one would have been a dead end at best anyway, so we were not too disappointed.  

The next one we had passed on the way up and the maps indicated would lead us on a large and windy loop that would eventually get us back to Highway 101. However, as should be indicated by my statement above, the maps are not in any way updated to show that roads have become impassable or closed. It is entirely a use at your own risk system, and often we would see roads clearly marked on the map of which there was no sign that a road had ever existed. 

The entrance to this one was rocky and narrow but clear, so we headed out and DOB was rather disappointed when the rocks dissipated to gravel and a clear but narrow road lined heavily by trees that looked more like an overgrown driveway than a mountain adventure. We continued for quite awhile with nothing more terrifying that a good bit of paint damage when the road began to be more along the edge and we came across a rockslide where a boulder blocked half the road and there was no shoulder on the other side. Dash got out and determined it was *just* wide enough for the truck and he spotted DOB through it while I tried valiantly but not always successfully not to scream. 

There were a few other narrow spots between fallen trees and boulders, and one with loose scree high on one side and a narrow edge on the other. There were also some lovely views and absolutely no other vehicles on the road, which was both a relief and a concern. 

I decided after the first time, that it would be for the good of all if I got out and walked around the next bend and examined the very lovely wildflowers while these locations were being traversed. So we continued on for a couple of hours (at about 5 mph) thinking that at least we would not need to past *those* obstacles again when we came to a place where the road was entirely covered a couple feet thick in loose scree that tapered off into more landslide on the other side. There were tire tracks on it, and the road did continue on the other side, but DOB concluded that it was beyond even his considerable skill except in a Jeep with a winch. (I did not previously realize that having equipment to tie your car to a tree and drag it over such obstacles was even a thing.)

Well. That meant all those obstacles we were relieved to get past were still waiting behind us, and that only after DOB backed the truck the quarter mile back to the closest turnout. I did even more walking ahead on the way back, along with some fervent prayers and, at that hour, some bug slapping. However, we did eventually make it all out alive. (DOB swore that death was not really a potential outcome, although getting the truck stuck in a stand of trees was one, in which case I felt like I would still be in a much better position to render aid if I waited down the road.) We got back to the main forest road and took the more mundane loop back to the highway, although we did pass where the road would, theoretically, have come out. 

Anyway, having discovered that while I do still have some fear of edges, edges with my feet on solid ground are much less scary than edges in the passenger seat of a 3-ton truck with an inch clearance for its tires, so I am looking forward to tackling Mt. Ellinor again. 

Tales of Long Ago

It's been a long while, but then I have been reading some very long books. Chief among which has been Romance of the Three Kingdoms, by Luo Guangzhong. It's an abridged translation but it's still very, very long. This was a follow-up to Emperor of the Seas by Jack Weatherford (about Kublai Khan) which seems to have kicked me off on a Chinese history rabbit hole. Romance of the Three Kingdoms is itself a late medieval work but tells of ancient times. It covers several decades, countless wars and battles, and dozens of figures, all of which I knew absolutely nothing about and still am pretty lost, but the opening line is as timeless as ever: "Empires arise from chaos and empires collapse back into chaos. This we have known since time began." What do loyalty and honor look like when all the options are bad? How do you tell the Will of Heaven from just killing the most people? 

Also on the China theme, but at yet another time (please do not ask me to stick to one thing), was Return to Dragon Mountain (Memoirs of a late Ming man) by Jonathan D. Spence. I actually started this one a few years back but at that point I could not stomach the early chapters about his pre-collapse life of luxury when he would dedicate months to optimizing his cup of tea. I have come to terms with it, however. Some people must struggle just to survive, and some people are Chinese bureaucrats in 1625. He had plenty of struggling later on to make up for it, living in the drafty ruins of his former library and trying to find enough quiet and rice to finish his book. 

Bad Therapy by Abigail Schrier. I mostly read this as a counterpoint to the Resilience Myth and Myth of Normal books I read last year. Schrier and Mate agree on two things: kids shouldn't have smart phones and parents should trust their instincts. I'm pretty sure as humans in social interactions we don't have much in the way of instincts to go on; what feel like instincts are deeply colored by our experiences, exposures and culture to a degree we can never objectively evaluate. Which is no doubt why Schrier and Mate have opposite ideas about how parents will act when they are acting on their instincts. Also I think both of them overestimate (due to life stage, Schrier's children are too young and Mate's too old) how much parents can ultimately intervene between their children and the larger culture; at some point they will have to live now, not 100 years ago. Schrier does have some good points that psychotherapy, though undoubtedly having helpful applications, has not been an unmitigated boon, and is particularly untested and uncertain when applied to children. Overall it does seem like the more we think and talk and raise awareness about mental health, the more miserable everybody is. (And I say this as someone who has been using therapy and found it helpful for many years.) I don't think the picture is as bleak as she paints, though. As both a parent and employer of a significant number of Gen Z, I find them as reasonably functional as human beings as anyone is at that age. We have no doubt screwed them up a great deal, but then we always do. 

Talking about other fascinating beings, though, I thoroughly enjoyed The Mind of the Raven by Bernd Heinrich about the social lives and problem-solving abilities of ravens. I also appreciated the amount of time Mr. Heinrich spent squatting in the snow under branch shelters to bring us these accounts. 

Taliesin by Stephen Lawhead. Duchess finished her Christmas stocking book at the airport and left it for me to read. I've always wanted to read Lawhead's take on Arthur, although the introduction of Atlantis definitely threw me for a loop. I did enjoy it but found the pacing uneven and some things didn't seem to add up. I do look forward to reading the rest but feel that I am still looking for an Arthur retelling that is as good as the title of The Once and Future King is. 

Earth Unaware by Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston. This one, the beginning of a prequel series to Ender's Game, was Deux's stocking book but I found it a little too grim for bed time reading. There's only so many corpses in dismembered spaceships I can handle right before bed. Still I've found it pretty engaging and have carried on with the next few books, albeit earlier in the day. 

For before bed reading I have instead been revisiting Bookworld with the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde. 

Slightly Deranged

A few weeks ago the enchilada casserole turned out extra-crispy which we thought was just the result of lack of attention, but then we noticed that the turned off oven was still going strong and further that it was the broiler, which hasn't worked in years. When the smoke alarm went off we decided our only option was to flip it off at the breaker, which did put a stop to it. Subsequent tests revealed that even if the oven was never turned on at all the broiler started heating up immediately. We could use the stove top, but only for about twenty minutes before the house started filling with smoke, or we could broil something very quickly. 

We put in a call to our friendly local appliance repair company, who have fixed our stove many times before, and they replied, without even looking at it, that if it was doing that now it was beyond further repair. So we adapted for a few days, doing a lot of scrambled eggs on the pancake griddle and tea in the microwave and soup in the instant pot. On particularly brave days we would cook a very quick supper on the stove top. The rest of the time we kept it flipped off at the breaker.

It's never a good time to replace an appliance, but right now is a particularly bad time as, if we ever get past Phase 1 of our building project to add on enough bedrooms and living space for Bookworm and Rocketboy to join us, at some point we will get to Phase 3 of making the kitchen fully wheelchair accessible at which point a new stove will be needed that would not fit into the current configuration. 

However, we were alerted to a free stove along the side of the road and DOB rounded up people to load it up, bring it home, and after much straining and some swearing, haul it all the way up and around the back and get it into the kitchen. 

While this had been going on, Deux had been making supper and noted that, for the first time in a week or more, the broiler had not come on. But that just seemed like a fluke, and the project was too far committed to withdraw, so we pulled the old stove out, brought the new stove in and . . . discovered that there was more than one type of stove plug. Some of our helpers considered swapping the cords between the stoves but thought better of it and finally with enough googling we found out that there were adapters that could be used and arrive in a few days. 

In the meantime we had two stoves in a kitchen that definitely was not designed for two stoves and no one wanted to drag the other stove back outside somewhere, so we plugged the old stove back into the old stove slot, shoved the new stove into a corner where it has converted the kitchen from difficult to navigate in a wheelchair to difficult to navigate in corporal form, and resumed using the new stove. 

Since then, the broiler has never come back on. We don't trust it. We try not to leave the breaker flipped but sometimes we forget. I baked gingerbread, which takes an hour of steady temperature, and it came out perfectly. We still don't know if the other stove even works because no one wants to drag the now-functioning stove out of the wall and plug it in to test. 

I am not sure what the moral is here but hey, at least we're not out the money for a new stove. Yet. 

Farewell Picnic

The time of this has been imminent but shifting for the last six months as Mr. Duchess worked out his military path, but the time has finally come and Duchess moved out of state yesterday. They won't get housing until he is further in his training so her stuff is all still here, but she can stay with some of his extended family and see him on weekends. So. It was time. 

We decided last Sunday to gather everyone up and do a picnic in the park. We hadn't all been together since Christmas, as Dame is still living in Seattle with Bookworm awaiting the completed addition. And we hadn't done a picnic in the park since . . . I'm afraid it might have been pre-Covid. I took the kids on some local hikes during Covid but DOB was not doing well enough to venture out, and then when he was better everyone was bigger and busier and everything had changed. But when they were little it was something we did pretty much every week the weather was remotely tolerable. 

It made the most sense to meet up with Dame and go to a park in Seattle and it proved to be the sort of glorious spring day that occurs much more in fiction than in actuality. We had been to the Asian Art Museum last month and I thought it might be fun to visit the park around it, especially since there was an old water tower you could climb for a view of the city. When I saw how nice the day was I was worried it would be too crowded, but it was just pleasantly populated. 

However, by the time we arrived, DOB was in desperate need of finding the restrooms and parked near one, while Deux and Dame immediately hopped out of the car and made a beeline for the tower at the other end of the park. Dash and Duchess and I unloaded the folding chairs and lunch and then were trying to catch up, while DOB followed along in a faint hope that there would be a restroom at both ends of the park and he could watch the stuff while we climbed the tower. 

There was not a restroom at the other end of the park, nor was even the approach to the tower accessible, so DOB wheeled back to the other one by the car while the rest of us trailed the first two to the top of the tower, Dash and I ladened with three folding chairs and a cooler bag full of lunch. After we had briefly caught our breath and admired the view at the top of the tower, we all went pell-mell back down again, back across the park to the car only to encounter no sign of DOB along the way. 

At this point we had had about enough of walking about with everything and so we decided to just sit down where we were (there was plenty of nice grass handy) and hope DOB turned up. Dash went off to look for him but apparently they both just spent some time wandering separately on some of the trails and enjoying the view. Eventually everyone and the food all made it to the same location and we had lunch and a resounding game of 6-person Spades (scoring invented on the spot) and the sort of conversation that would horrify people if it were made into cute little cards to stimulate conversation but the more printable of which was, "If you swallowed sunglasses whole, would you be able to digest them?" (Which was itself a spin-off of, "If I swallowed your sunglasses, would they still be in the car?")

Like every perfect moment it was over far too quickly and it is a thing that will almost certainly never occur again, but also, to steal a bit from Winnie the Pooh, in an enchanted place on the top of the Forest, four little ducklings will always be playing. 

 

Quite a Lot of Books

 It's been a while since I did a book post, but then I was reading some rather long books and then they kept interacting with each other in my head and I wanted to get them to settle down a bit before I reviewed them. 

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: This was in my childhood re-read slot. People do ask about its suitability for children a lot. Well, there's obviously murders but things are pretty tamely described for nowadays. Yes, Holmes does do cocaine occasionally between cases to keep his brain busy and Watson lectures him about it. It's an interesting glimpse into a pre-prohibition world and I don't know of any cases of children becoming drug users because of the example of Sherlock Holmes. 

I've also seen charges of racism, which I think is unfair. There are some terms that are no longer polite, but not used intentionally to be demeaning. And there are characters who express contemporary attitudes, but not once does a stereotype prove to be the solution to the problem. Indeed, that would be antithetical to the whole nature of Sherlock Holmes to accept a prejudice instead of probing to the facts. His attitude toward women is also surprisingly even-handed. He'll take facts wherever he can find them. 

In spite of all that's come down since they're still quite readable. Holmes is definitely not the detective you'd want to have over for dinner (that would be Father Brown if I'm cooking, Precious Ramotswe if she's cooking, or Lord Peter if he--or rather Bunter--is acquiring the comestibles elsewhere). But he's fun to watch. Which is probably because, despite his emphasis on logic and reason, he's not a dispassionate emotionally repressed person (even if he and Watson both believe he is). His passions are just entirely focused on problem-solving. 

Radium Girls by Kate Moore. This was our previous book club read and it was grim but fascinating. It might help to have a little more charity towards skeptics of the latest greatest new thing to recall that over the last two hundred years there have been quite a few new things that we didn't know, or didn't fully grasp, all the downsides of. Science can only tell us the answers to questions we have thought to ask; experience tells us answers to questions we don't even know about. 

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. I usually do *not* like books that are currently popular, but I gave this one a try and to my surprise I loved it. It was a little fast-paced for my taste but so well done and it had one of my favorite sci-fi themes of figuring out communication and what things are essential and what things are variable for sapient life and just fun nerdy buddies. I liked it so much I talked my book club into doing it for our next selection, it was time for something lighter after Radium Girls. I also read The Martian and then DOB and I watched the movie, both were fun. 

The Resilience Myth by Soraya Chemaly and The Myth of Normal by Gabor Mate. I'm putting these together not just because of the title overlap because they have a lot of common themes and I think the same glaring blind spot. Resilience's main point that treating resilience as a sort of internal mental toughness that people need to just have all by themselves is false and often actively destructive; sometimes we need to avoid harmful situations, lots of bad things *don't* make us stronger, and all of us need the care and support of others. Normal expands on Mate's common theme of the role of trauma in addictive behavior to look at physical and mental health and all sorts of social toxicity. Resilience I felt like was much longer than it needed to be and the author got bogged down fitting everything in the world into her hypothesis which somehow exactly matched up with well-drawn political lines which rather detracted from the usefulness or uniqueness of what she had to say. Mate at least has the humility to see some of society's problems in his own mirror. 

The starting point for both of them seems to be an assumption that modern society is unusually bad/stressful/toxic in various ways. And I always wonder about that. Not that we don't have plenty of problems. But are they genuinely *worse* than other humans have dealt with through time? Do we really suffer more than others in the past? That seems hard to swallow with almost any reading of history. Or perhaps we are not suffering more, but dealing with it worse--in which case we should probably be looking not just to the things that have always been there (war, poverty, prejudice, violence), but to things that have actually changed, including the changes that we like. Or again perhaps we're not suffering more *or* dealing with it worse we are just more often surviving things that would have killed past humans and needing coping skills to deal with the fallout.

And one thing I think they both brush on but don't genuinely appreciate is that the things they want to see more of are inherently in conflict. Mate expounds on this the most; he talks about the deep human needs for attachment and authenticity. He almost brushes against the potential tension between these two values but then scurries away from it and spends his entire final section devoted to advising people on how to deepen authenticity in their life without really delving in to how much in conflict this value is with the level of human support and connection that would be needed to provide people the support he advocates for in the beginning of the book. Whenever I hear someone declaiming on their journey to authenticity and self-care I always listen to the undertones because you can almost always detect quite a lot of people who were cut off or abandoned along the way. And then what became of *those* people's journey to authenticity? The same, probably, and the end result is a lot of very authentic but very lonely people. 

If there's one thing modern (American, at least, but from what I can tell it's pretty far spread by now) humans, of every political persuasion, are in agreement on it is that they should be absolutely free from constraint and judgment in their personal lifestyle choices. (Indeed, if authenticity is really what we're missing how is it the past seventy years of devotion to authenticity have not improved matters?) We don't have a lot of first-hand accounts from hunter-gatherers but we have quite a lot of information from small closely-knit agricultural communities and they are unanimous that the kind of village that provides comfort and support through the ups and downs of life is also insular, judgmental, intrusive, rife with gossip, and harsh on nonconformists. There have also been quite a few attempts to live a simpler, communal life closer to nature since the Industrial Revolution and the ones that didn't turn into sex or death cults mostly seem to have just fizzled out as staying alive is hard on those terms and the comforts of industrialization, even for the poor, are quite alluring.

Humans are social creatures, but like most social creatures, a lot of that socialization is squabbling. We can't be close without stepping on each other's toes. One person's allergy is another person's emotional support animal. To have the benefits of a group, we all have to give up some perfectly valid and good parts of ourselves, like trees in a forest losing their lower branches. To take an example Mate trips all over without noticing, he speaks vigorously of the need for greater support for parents and young children so that children can have the emotional and physical safety they need to thrive. Well and good. But he never openly acknowledges that to do that we would have to, as a society, assert that parenthood was a lifestyle choice that is deserving of an extra degree of social support--thus implying that it is in some ways *better* than not being a parent. Sure, that'll go over well.

Both authors spend plenty of time critiquing the downsides of capitalism, everyone's favorite whipping boy, without really proposing a viable alternative. The world not being made up of pure distillation of 19th-century economic theories, the reality is that we don't have competing systems in the modern world. Every major modernized country has a capitalized private sector that is then taxed and regulated to various degrees to support various kinds of public programs. Differences are in the details but the common unquestioned basis is money, which allows us to get the benefit of the labor of other people (which we could not survive without) without needing any kind of personal relationship with them. It is a system designed for individual authenticity--and solitude. And that is probably why neither author can point to a place where more generous social programs than the US are making that much of a dent in the essential modern problems. The impersonal transactions of modern life (mediated by the government or not) cannot provide a community. As someone who works around the edges of public systems, both getting people in, keeping people on, and kicking people out, I can attest that the world of public benefits is still a terribly lonely one. 

Anyway, while I think Mate is right in bringing light to the role trauma plays in both physical health and addictive behaviors, he does tend to overstate his case. If you define trauma so broadly that everyone has it, and addiction so broadly that everyone suffers from it, then you're definitely going to land at 100% correlation but still not have shown causation. We could certainly do with looking at more than the merely physical and finding connection and support for the struggling instead of relying on, "Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled." But looking solely inward doesn't seem quite the right direction.

I thought this article had some interesting counterpoints to the assertions in both these books. I have done plenty of therapy and found it helpful but it is at best a tool, not a goal. And tools can be easily misused, as I was reminded of meeting with a young man who was facing a much-deserved protective order from his ex-girlfriend. As I was advising him of what he could tell the court to hopefully get an order that would minimize its impact on his future career, I suggested he could promise to go to therapy. "Oh I've been in therapy for years," he proudly asserted, "I've got a great therapist." In many ways therapy is a commercialized lopsided substitute for genuine human connection. We are about equal parts matter and story. Sometimes therapy can help us tell ourselves better stories. But we still have to choose which stories we allow to shape us. 

Sabriel, Lirael, and Abhorsen by Garth Nix. This was a fun re-read. I got these books for Dame for Christmas because I know she will love them when she actually reads them but being 16 she is always in doubt about anything I recommend. But she has been gone since New Years' (Bookworm has taken over her schooling and with our house being currently in turmoil while we put on an addition for Bookworm and Rocketboy to move in, it just made more sense for her to stay with them until we are all ready for the move), I decided *I* might as well re-read them. They're one of the few depictions of necromancy that I find intriguing (bells--so lovely and mysterious) with intriguing characters and worldbuilding. (Like the series below, they're not actually a trilogy as such--they're a stand-alone followed by a duology.) 

The Curse of Chalion, Paladin of Souls, and The Hallowed Hunt by Lois McMaster Bujold. I did a search and it appears I've never really reviewed these on here which is wild because they are undoubtedly at the top of my list of books I've found as an adult. They are fantasy, but the only real fantasy element is the quintarian religious system which manages to be both natural and transcendent, organized and organic. The main characters are mostly failures, usually middle aged, traumatized and cursed. And therefore in a position to be used by the gods. They certainly have much that is grim but they are also profoundly hopeful and real.

Intimations of Mortality

Our new year began with the sad news of DOB's Uncle Dan's sudden passing. This, in turn, spurred an unplanned trip to Ohio for the first time in 15 years, along with Duchess, Mr. Duchess, and Dash.  DOB wound up spending about ten hours on the phone straightening out the tickets. Duchess coordinated entertainment and snacks, Dash navigated, and Mr. Duchess pushed the wheelchair (DOB does not trust his power chair to the tender mercies of the airlines). I showed up and didn't lose anything I was carrying (except my lunch, once) and was very much reminded why we never tried to do this with four small children. 

The bittersweet thing about funerals that starts coming home in midlife is that they are often the only time you get together and see all the rest of the people. We were able to stay parceled out amongst DOB's two youngest brothers and their families, meet the baby neiphlings, see DOB's parents and other aunt and uncle, visit our old church and show Duchess and Dash our early houses and the parks we always played at. (Everything being covered with a foot of snow, we mostly viewed things from inside the cars.) 

We also caught the norovirus, which delayed Duchess and Mr. Duchess traveling back with us. This may have contributed to the unwise moment when Dash and DOB decided to try traversing the moving sidewalk with the wheelchair. The first one went uneventfully, even with DOB dragging a wheeled carryon alongside him and Dash having a massive backpack on. So we got on another, me trailing behind carrying a large carryon, my purse, two coats, a water bottle, and a badly wrapped sandwich. And then at the end of the second moving sidewalk, the front wheels jammed and Dash and I were stuck behind walking briskly in place to keep from being crushed into the back of the wheelchair with no room to get around the extra wheeled carry on. I realized something needed to be done to change the situation and the best thing I could think of was to fling myself--bags, coats and snacks entire--over the top of DOB to get to the other side of the sidewalk and then tug the wheels loose from that side. Somehow I did this and then did indeed manage to drag the chair off the sidewalk, although by this time the back wheel tire had also come off. We were flung about in the debris of this encounter and trying to wedge the tire back on when a flight attendant strolled by and remarked blandly, "You're not supposed to do that." No kidding. (Yes, there was an emergency kill switch, but no, I did not notice it in time to use it.)

After we returned home I went to the eye doctor's to pick up my very first pair of driving glasses. This is probably not a big deal to those who have worn glasses their entire lives, but for me it is a big step, and not just the physical adaptation to having something on my face (hopefully at some point without triggering a headache). Every other sign of aging one could probably address in some way with more yoga or less fat or eating three pumpkin seeds by the light of the crescent moon, but this just is: your eyes are old. They are getting older. It will not get better. It will just get worse, and worse, until you die. I did the math today and realized that Uncle Dan was just about the age DOB and I are now when I joined the family. Those 22 years went quickly and I do not know if I have another 10, like my mother, or 22, like Uncle Dan, or even 46 like some of my grandparents. But I very likely have less ahead of me than behind of me. 

The Ends of the Earth

 I have somewhat mixed feelings about keeping track of my reading . . . or, well, anything I'm not required to . . . but it was rather nice to be able to come up with some titles when everyone else starts posting year in reviews of their books. Like my newfound ability to sort laundry, it may be concrete evidence that the neurofeedback I've been doing really is helping with the ADHD. Nonetheless I'm sure I'm missing some here.

Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne. This was actually back in the summer but I keep forgetting to list it. Chesterton once observed that the stereotype of the "stiff upper lip" British man does not appear in history--back when men were men they were always falling in each other's arms and weeping. Nor does he appear much in literature--Shakespeare's men are not emotionally repressed, not even Dickens'. However, here he is at last. His name is Phileas Fogg. Wow, is he boring. He can travel around the world without disrupting his whist game. His assertion that this feat can be done by mathematics is wrong; it is done by spending a ridiculous amount of money at every obstacle, which, unsurprisingly, can accomplish quite a lot. This is an unapologetically imperialist book. At the same time, it is impossible not to be infected with wonder at the possibilities of a whole world opened up. But Phileas Fogg is the exception. He does not care. He will go back to playing whist. Aouda should have run off with Passepartout. 

 Ten Tomatoes that Changed the World by William Alexander. As recommended by Ordinary and Oblique, this was a fun read and definitely the one to do if you want to regale your helpless family with obscure tomato facts. 

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. Emily Dickinson once described poetry as feeling as if the top of one's head has come off, and that's how I felt throughout this book. Intense, vivid word pictures and dialogues. "Every morning the world flung itself over and exposed the town to the sun. So Janie had another day." "Janie, Ah done watched it time and time again; each and every white man think he know all de GOOD darkies already. He don't need tuh know no mo'. So far as he's concerned, all dem he don't know oughta be tried and sentenced tuh six months behind de United States privy house at hard smellin'." Janie herself is a kindred spirit to Dorothea from Middlemarch--a woman who wants not to be an ornament to some man's grand plan for life, but a fully loved and seen partner. Someone who is willing to throw away (relative) wealth in pursuit of that but must deal with the (not inconsiderable) risk that she will throw it away and get nothing in return. 

The House in the Cerulean Sea by T. J. Klune. This was a book club pick which I only finished because I felt guilty about not finishing the previous selection. It is not really fair to criticize a book that is trying to be predictable and cozy for being trite and cloying, so I will just rant about a modern myth that I find particularly insidious: the myth of "finding your tribe." Somewhere out there, this runs, there is a group of people who will love and accept you just as they are; this tribe, of course, is the exact opposite of any historic concept of tribe--your existing family, neighbors, co-workers are all ineligible, they are all, if not actually terrible people, at least unworthy of notice because they don't "get" you. (You must not, under any circumstance, pause to ask if you have exerted any effort to "get" them.) What this myth fails to mention is that as soon as you change in some small degree from what fits this new "tribe" you will be summarily dismissed from it. It is as transitory as its basis, which is a current blend of stage of life and philosophical alignment, all of which are not only likely, but virtually guaranteed, to change.

What I fear is that the modern pressures of society and technology against community are so immense that it is nearly impossible to form any community for any length of time without an unhealthy element of control or hostility to outsiders. I do what I can by talking to the neighbors but it hardly seems sufficient.

 South by Ernest Shackleton: On the other hand, what's always been really good at forming community is shared struggle. Humans are perhaps at their best when struggling against the elements together. But even a century ago people had to travel to Antarctica to get much of a struggle in that regard. Anyway, this has been quite engrossing and it's nice to get it straight from the original instead of retellings--there are a lot more longitude and latitude readings and a lot less second-guessing. We forgot the worming medicine for the dogs. Whoops. Carry on. Mistakes are inevitable but we will get through today and keep trying. 

What Monstrous Gods by Rosamund Hodge. This was a fun read with some intriguing philosophical elements. Theological horror, you might call it.  I would throw in another Chesterton quote here but one is probably enough per post. 

The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson. OK now I am finally tackling some serious Sanderson and I've got to admit, it's quite good. Huge world-building and deep character development at the same time. But I've really got to start these closer to when I get them from the library if they are ever to be back on time. 

Curated Pairings

This is probably of interest only to me, but while I know nothing about and don't intend to learn about wine and food pairings (I like food but don't care much for wine and figure a good hard cider goes with everything), I really enjoy appropriate book and video game pairings. 

For instance, Life Between the Tides, which broadened its scope from the tidepool to the hardships of historical Scottish life inspired another visit to the game Clanfolk, in which you help a fledgling Scottish clan get itself established and on good terms with the neighbors. (I've seen it criticized as basically being a simplified Rimworld. This I concur is true but not a criticism from me. I tend to enjoy simpler games with fewer options and a more focused scope. I do enjoy Rimworld as well, though.) Life is hard in survival games, but not nearly as hard as real life surviving has been for most people in most times.  

Then polar exploration in general such as In the Kingdom of Ice of course pairs well with Frostpunk and the recently released Frostpunk 2, in which you are trying to manage a Victorian-era city coping with a new Ice Age. They're gritty (though not as gritty as the over-18 rating would lead you to believe) and require careful planning and hard choices but it's very satisfying to stay alive in the cold. 

This is less of a book pairing but Stardew Valley, which the descendants have not entirely outgrown and we sometimes still co-op, always inspires me to get out gardening. Rocketboy set us up with potatoes in individual pots with individual sprinklers this year which was both highly manageable with my limited time and energy for gardening and felt exactly like Stardew Valley.  Brother Cadfael mysteries also always make me want to garden and that reminds me that I should hunt up A Morbid Taste for Bones for Dame who is (semi-permanently) on a medieval kick. 

The ultimate game for book lovers in general, though, has got to be Book of Hours in which you are a librarian of esoteric knowledge refurbishing the ancient halls, reading arcane books, learning new languages and cultivating strange acquaintances. It's particularly inspiring for language study, as the librarian is, of course, already fluent in several real (mostly dead) languages and learns several imaginary ones as the game progresses. 

Narnia and the North

I reread all but one of the Narnia series on our weekend getaway we did for our anniversary in early September. In publication order, of course. It was and remains a delightful journey. Some of Lewis's adult women in his other books are a bit dubious, but his children, boys and girls, are uniformly real. (One of my favorite lines, ever since I *was* a child, was the exclamation "We can pretend we are Arctic explorers!" upon entering an entirely alternate world unphased. To be a child is to live in a world where everything is both wonderful and possible.) 

There seems to be some controversy these days about ethnic diversity in fantastical fiction, though whether there is any real controversy or just a few trolls and bots is always impossible to say. (We will soon reach the point where social media is entirely taken over by AI talking to itself and then we can all go play outside again.) This seems wrong-headed to me on either end of the spectrum. 

On the one hand, there is nothing at all wrong with people telling their own stories, even if they happen to be white people, and any fantasy rooted in folktales is going to reflect its place of origin and also humanity's intrinsic ethnocentricity. There is nothing offensive about all the characters in *Monkey King* being Asian and let's remember that Westerners tend to cast Aladdin as Middle Eastern but the Middle Eastern tale sets it in China, and how they tell it in China I don't know but I bet it's somewhere far away from there. If we want more diversity the thing to do is encourage and read stories by all different kinds of people. 

 On the other hand, anyone who really loves a story should think it a great compliment if it can work in different times and places or with people of different origins. That's a testament to its power and universality as a story. A prime example of this is Shakespeare. While quasi-Elizabethan performances are common, so is every possible kind of racial swapping, gender swapping, setting swapping, and while not every production is great there is no doubt that Shakespeare works in so many settings that Shakespeare himself could never have visualized, and very few people get huffy about it. 

 Anyway, supposedly Calormen is one of those areas that is problematic in Narnia and why *The Horse and His Boy* has never been cinematized even though it is a perfectly cinematic story. But on re-read I don't see *The Horse and His Boy* version of Calormen to be offensive. Lewis did not put much effort into worldbuilding, it's true, but then nobody at all did that I can think of before Tolkien. He simply mashes together a bunch of fairy-tale settings and Calormen is simply an Arabian Nights setting. Sure, it's a dictatorial society but then let's not forget the worst tyrant of all in Narnia is the *White* Witch so there is hardly a racial monopoly on such behavior. It's also a far more civilized place than Narnia and nobody looks askance at intermarriage. (It's actually *The Last Battle* that has far more offensive references to Calormen, but at that point Narnia is an occupied country and that does tend to make even the best people testy.) 

 But in contrast to that, I would like to point out something that nobody, not even Lewis particularly, seems to remember, which is that canonically, the Telmarines are at least 50% Pacific Islander in origin, and the rest of their heritage could and should be a pretty fair racial mix because it was a crew of pirates, who were not fussy about such things. And as far as I can tell all of the human population of Narnia is Telmarine from Caspian forward. I suggest someone cast The Rock as Lord Berne, the reclaiming of the Lone Islands could be a great little action episode. 

I think my favorite of the series is *The Silver Chair*, partly because it's simply a great straightforward quest story about holding on to hope in the dark and the cold, partly because of all the children I identify most with Jill's mix of down-to-earth grit and occasionally being a show off or breaking down, and partly because Puddleglum is just the absolute best. 

 Other books I read or didn't as the case may be: 

*I Cheerfully Refuse!* by Leif Enger: Enger is one of the very few current authors I make an effort to read new books more or less as they come out (I'm still slow). This is set in a not-so-distant dystopia and built on a tragic loss, and yet it's full of light and joy and laughter and the joyful defiance of friendship. love, and literature in the teeth of cruelty and ignorance. 

 *Elder Race* by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I enjoyed *Children of Time* so much I decided to check out some more, and this one was also great. It's a very quick read but it still manages to delve into the "science as magic" theme with great depth and also a thought-provoking exploration of the power and limits of dissociation as a coping method. 

 *In the Kingdom of Ice* by Hampton Sides. I have not finished this yet, but I intend to even though it is quite overdue. I still seem to be on a high seas adventure kick, and this one, about an unsuccessful attempt to find the "Open Polar Sea" has got perils, hubris, scientific advancement and follies, and the danger of taking a crewmember who is addicted to puns. After this I will probably need a Shackleton book. 

 And some I did not finish: 

*In the Kingdom of the Sick*. Despite the promising title, this was not nearly as interesting, being about how being chronically ill sucks and nobody gets it, especially doctors and insurance (public or private). While that is a valid point, I already could write several books on the topic so I don't see a point in finishing. 

 *The Dutch Wife* This was the current book club selection which I usually try to finish even if it's not my cup of tea (which realistic historical fiction seldom is) but I just couldn't do back to back chapters of rape, torture, and then more rape. For me anyway the graphic physical descriptions diminished rather than increased empathy so I called it quits.

A Wedding

 This does feel like a full circle moment, as this blog was started shortly after our own wedding and also very shortly before we found out Duchess was on the way, and now here we are. 

Professional shot

Coming out for pictures

Dinner

 

I did manage to make it on time and all siblings were present and suitably, if somewhat eccentrically, attired. (Though I realized two-thirds of the way through the day that I was wearing a mismatched set of boots. I did bring a more wedding-ish pair of heels for the ceremony but I changed back out as soon as it was over because we were getting pretty deep in mud and also I hate heels.)
 

Between Duchess and DOB they managed to orchestrate a beautiful and well-organized wedding on four weeks' notice based on Mr. Duchess's ever-shifting departure date for the Air Force. (We have been racking our brains to come up with a good blog name, but Mr. Duchess will have to do for now.) 

Our family has a long-standing joke about our surprisingly good luck with outdoor wedding weather in our very uncertain climate as over the past twenty-some years we, Their Majesties, Toolboy and his wife and a couple of years ago the oldest girl cousin all have had outdoor weddings in either September or May and the weather has uniformly been delightful. While September weather around here is a transition from the desert dry of July and August to the rainforest rest of the year, heavy rain is quite unusual and there are many beautiful days or at least beautiful hours. So we were hopeful when the weather forecast a few scattered showers with clearing.  

That is not what happened. What happened was it rained buckets, starting during the rehearsal the night before, when we scrambled to cover the tables before the decor got soaked (though Duchess had already prepared for that contingency with plastic tarps). Continuing through the rehearsal dinner, which we were supposed to have on the deck of a local restaurant but by great luck their indoor group canceled and we got the event room. And then the following day it drizzled throughout getting ready and set up, poured during the pictures, let up to a light drizzle for the ceremony in the woods, poured again for the reception, and only finally ended in time for dancing and send-off after dark. We had a few canopies to cover the meal tables but mostly everyone just got soaked. And had a marvelous time doing it. 

An Accomplishment

I have at last, for the first time ever, completed my coloring in page and obtained the library's 100-hour reader t-shirt for the summer reading program. While keeping track of time, or even the tracker, has been a barrier, I have to admit that even for me 100 hours in three months is quite a lot of reading. (DOB opines that reading for work should count but I never do count it, it's too fragmentary.) I don't listen to books in the car or while doing chores usually--I need a lot of auditory silence to function the rest of the time--so it essentially means I must eschew nearly all other leisure activities in favor of reading. It was fun to do but I'm also quite relieved to be done. I don't really need a lot of extra challenge in my life. 

My latest childhood re-read was Huckleberry Finn, which I picked up when James by Percival Everett came in at the library. It was a compelling pairing. The tone is understandably vastly different--Huck is a boy having the adventure of a lifetime, James is an adult in constant mortal peril. I didn't try to do a point-by-point comparison of the plot or timeline--most of major characters and events carry over and James has his own encounters during the portions where they are separated. The ending is completely different, but Tom's "rescue" is so absurd I don't see any way it could have fit in the more serious book. On the whole it gave a compelling perspective of what it is to live a life of oppression in a world superficially pleasant. There were a few places where James felt more like an idealized 21st century character than a genuine person in the past. For instance, while I can accept James as a skeptic, especially after sneaking Enlightenment authors out of Judge Thatcher's library, he comes across as a 21st century skeptic for whom the lack of the spiritual is a simple given not as a 19th century one always looking over his shoulder. More than that, the portrayal that all the enslaved people were feigning any religious fervor solely to pacify the white folks seemed disrespectful to the history and contribution of the African-American church. 

The Frugal Wizard's Guide to Surviving Medieval England by Brandon Sanderson was just plain fun. 

Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope. I needed one more long public domain audiobook to get me through and this was just the ticket. Except there are some events that did not happen in this one so clearly I'm going to need to finish the Barchester Chronicles. Trollope is particular vicious in his satire of the Victorian gentry posing over birth and money in this one. Also I had to laugh at the lawyer who complained of needing to work until 9 every night and then wasting hours of time just chit-chatting. I've seen those billable records. I'm still working on getting myself to stop at 5, though. 

1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric Cline. OK, I really have been spoiled by my recent ancient history readings. This one was, despite the inspiring title, quite dull and academic and full of hedged answers and cited quotations from specialists in Mycenean pottery, which caused me to lose interest and start speculating on how one becomes a specialist in Mycenean pottery and what their lives looked like. I guess it was interesting enough for me to finish, though. 

I almost forgot because I finished it awhile ago but wanted to wait to add it to my list until after book club discussion: A Warrior of the People by Joe Starita. I read this first about a year ago and thought my book club would enjoy it, which they did. Susan LaFlesche (the first Native American to become a doctor with Western medicine) was an amazing person and the way she and her siblings threaded the balance as advocates for their people and simultaneously helping their people adapt to the changing world was thought-provoking. It definitely held up to a re-read. 

And now Duchess is getting married in two weeks so who knows what reading will occur, although I'm not really trying to contribute anything more than showing up and making sure siblings are decently attired.  

Robin Hood and his merry . . . everything

Robin Hood has always been a favorite of mine because it is, for Anglo-derivative cultures, the fairy tale of which the Magna Carta is the founding document--the ideal of the rule of law, of the king and the sheriff being subjects of the law, not the origin of it. And, of course, it's just a lot of fun. Though I have to admit, it's a bit repetitive, something even the small ducklings twigged onto back when they would listen to the Howard Pyle audiobook every night. First Robin Hood meets a stranger--they get in a fight--Robin Hood loses--everybody laughs and they join Robin Hood's band. Though even that formula has a subtle truth about leadership. 

But what struck me more this time was the sheer joy at the root of protest. Robbing the rich to give to the poor is of course not quite on point; Robin Hood is part an Anglo-Saxon partisan sticking it back to the Normans and part his own arbiter of a rough justice. But though Robin Hood is happy to help out the poor when the occasion comes, it sounds to me like of the money lifted from the overfed abbots most of it goes to keep the merry men in ale and Lincoln green. Nonetheless, he certainly does have a revolutionary edge but I think the strength of it is that it comes from joy more than anger. If there is one adjective that gets painfully overused in the stories, it's merry. But that is also the key. Vengeance nearly always turns sour; the men get replaced with pigs but the same oppression goes on. But joy . . . joy can be shared. Joy can let us remember what we are fighting for. Even the Sheriff of Nottingham can join the fun if he only submits to lightening his purse and laughing at himself. 

Anyway, children have been reenacting Robin Hood and Little John for almost a thousand years and I hope they continue for a thousand years more. 

Moby Dick I finished it and it was well worth re-visiting; it won't be the last time. The more I read it the more the long digressions on natural history felt like the book itself was deliberately taking us on the similitude of a whaling voyage; long periods of boredom interspersed with heart-stopping action. And the compelling triad of the cheerful skepticism of Stubbs, the steadfast piety of Starbuck, both ultimately doomed by Ahab's obsession.  

And the Ocean was Our Sky by Patrick Ness. It seemed like a good time to do a Moby Dick riff; in this one, it's the whales who are the heroes. It was fun to read but I didn't feel the whale world quite held together and the book and its moral seemed at odds with each other. 

Life Between the Tides by Adam Nicholson. This one was a spontaneous grab from a library display and I was blown away by it. It's about a man building his own tide pool on the Scottish coast but it's also about philosophy, ecosystems, natural history, and nearly everything else, beautifully written. 

On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes by Alexandra Horowitz. This was recommended on a local book list and was fun read; the author walks around her own block, then takes a similar walk with a variety of experts, from a geologist to a sound engineer, to learn to notice more. My favorite of all was the walk with her toddler son, though. That was still one of my favorite things ever that the kids and I did when they were tiny; we could walk the same route every day for a year and there was always something to notice, something to talk about. Although my block is very different from Horowitz's and many of her experts would not have much to work with (there's almost no lettering and hardly any rocks except gravel) the idea of there always being more to see applies to everything.

Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson. I have been meaning to read this for a long time but finally remembered to actually do it. It was utterly delightful; there are deadly spores and a brave and resourceful heroine and an adorable talking rat in a pirate hat and everything wrapped up just as it should, but in quite surprising ways. However, I am not satisfied with the water cycle explanation, even if it means I have no personality. 

The Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells. This was easy to get on audio once Moby Dick was over, inspired by some passing reading of a post complaining of the "mad scientist" trope because such individuals (as first typified by Dr. Moreau and Dr. Frankenstein) were clearly not mentally ill. This seemed not only to miss the rather obvious point that words have many shades of meaning, but that "mad" in particular is not about cause but effect: behavior that outrageously passes the bounds of human expectation--whether motivated by anger, mental illness, whimsy, or scientific hubris. 

The Princess and the Goblin

 The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald is one of the most perfect fairytale stories that exist. From the brisk mountain air to the absurd and terrifying goblins to the transcendent and mysterious Grandmother, with Irene's courage matched with faith and Curdie's courage matched with intelligence and humor, it has everything a fairy tale should have and I will never get tired of it. 

I have to read The Princess and Curdie to go with it, and I could hardly say I dislike it, but it's a very, very different book. Our hero and heroine have only advanced from primary to secondary school, but the tone of the book has advanced from childhood wonder to midlife crisis. The villains are not comical goblins, but ordinary people being selfish and cold in ordinary ways. And for that, there is no permanent cure. The last story's happily ever after dissolves and never comes back. The tone is so very different that I do want to sit Mr. MacDonald down and ask him what *was* going on when he wrote the second book. 

Other Books:

The Brothers Karamazov: I finally finished this. I loved the trial scenes, although I did probably spend an inordinate amount of time wondering whether the rules of evidence really allowed that or whether it was just the novelist's oversimplification. It ends satisfactorily but untidily, but I am left imagining my own ending in which Dmitri and Gruschenka *do* successfully escape to America where, despite Dmitri's current opinion, they settle permanently and Ivan and Katarina follow, along with Ilyosha, and thirty-five years later everyone is trying to have a nice normal American Thanksgiving for the sake of the grandchildren with all this dramatic backstory which keeps coming up awkwardly. 

How to Read Nature  by Tristan Gooley. Yes, I will just be working through all of this author's books I can get from the library. This is a small one and highly accessible, packed with very simple exercises that can be done without fancy equipment right where you are. The theme is the opposite of snooty, as Gooley focuses on the conflict, sex and death that always arrest human attention and that are going on all around us all the time. 

Monkey King: Journey to the West, by WuCheng'En, translated by Julia Lovell. I actually started this when Dame chose it for school last year but I've taken it slowly and just now finished up. This is a classic Chinese fantasy tale, and it is a wild ride. It reminds me of nothing so much as Looney Tunes with the wisdom of fools and so much slapstick. I presume it's been serialized many times. Monkey King is a subversive, obnoxious, and hilarious trickster hero and I remain a little in doubt that he's actually achieved enlightenment by the end. The translation is pretty accessible but as with most old stories modern parents might want to edit a few parts for the younger readers. 

Moby Dick by Herman Melville. I *was* listening to this on Spotify and then they put in a 10-hours max per month audiobook rule so now I'm listening on Librivox. Anyway, the dry Yankee wit is a welcome change from all the Russian drama. (My favorite scene is when Ishmael tells the captain that he wants to sign onto a whaling ship to "see the world." The captain gestures to the water over the starboard side as a fair sample of what he will actually be seeing.)  

It's certainly long-winded but I find myself enjoying the diversions and rambles and there's a lot of interesting insight into early natural history and classifications. Think of it as a podcast. It goes well with farming or grinding in video games. Every era has its way of wasting colossal amounts of time and everyone wrings their hands over the current ones and praises the prior ones as superior or abuses them as tedious but the reality is, we're large mammals. While movement is essential, we aren't meant to spend all day every day tearing around like insects or hummingbirds. We're meant to "waste" a good bit of our time, it's how we operate. 

Also, I'm making great progress towards my 100-hour reader t-shirt for the first time ever. 

Echo North by Joanna Ruth Meyer. There are a lot of retellings of East o' the Sun, West o' the Moon, or as I think of it, the Heroine's Journey (aka Cupid and Psyche or Beauty and the Beast), but that doesn't mean there's no need for more. This one felt a bit cliche to me at first but it drew me in. 

Stories in the Stars by Susanna Hislop. Dame has been on an astronomy kick lately wanting to learn to identify some more constellations, so I reserved a bunch of books. (This time of the year is the only time we really have a shot at observing the stars on any regular basis; unfortunately it takes a very long time to get dark.) This one was not particularly helpful for identifying but is more a highly varied sampler of the stories behind them. I did enjoy learning about some of the more modern creations or the myths from different cultures. 

A Walk through the Heavens by Milton D. Heifetz and Wil Tirion. This one, on the other hand, is perfect for actually finding new constellations, it starts you off at the Big Dipper and gives step by step instructions to each one. We also discovered that some old red tissue paper over a flashlight works fine for preserving night vision. And I have discovered that my eyes are starting to decline, and I cannot see all the stars that Dame can. I should have spent more time learning constellations when I was younger, I suppose.  But I can spot Cygnus now, and Vega of the Lyre. 

Trial by Jury

Progressing through *The Brothers Karamazov* I was startled to hear a jury being selected. Tsarist Russia has trial by jury? Turns out it did, for some crimes, for a little while, as part of Tsar Alexander II's reforms in the 1860s, shortly after freeing the serfs and ending with the 1917 revolution. This law review article answered a lot of my questions, though being over twenty years old it still leaves me wondering how the revival of trial by jury is going these days. 

Anyway, you can hear the skepticism of the upper classes as the jury is seated--what can these muzhiks know about the passions and motives of a (sort of) aristocratic Karamazov? Well, everything, of course, because crimes are committed by humans for human reasons, and what we need of the jury is to simply be human beings. Which brings in Chesterton's great defense of exactly why the right to jury is so important: 

Our civilisation has decided, and very justly decided, that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. It wishes for light upon that awful matter, it asks men who know no more law than I know, but who can feel the things that I felt in the jury box. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round.

Interestingly, while jury nullification (i.e. the unavoidable ability of the jury to refuse to convict a person even though the case against them is proven, because they disapprove of the law) is a hush-hush or lunatic fringe concept in American law, it was explicitly authorized and stated in Russian trials. Yet despite that, and despite a presumably higher historic degree of antagonism between the government and the people, acquittal rates in Russia were always similar to those in the US, which suggests that perhaps we will not unloose anarchy if we talk about it.  

My practice does not involve many jury trials, none criminal, but I have conducted or assisted with a few. From what I have seen, it is quite true that it is impossible to impress the nuances of legal concepts upon a jury. No matter how carefully explained, they will have no comprehension of burden of proof or causation. But they will very seriously try to understand who is in the wrong and to be fair, and in the end that comes out as close as we could ask for. 

On a lighter note, the miniseries Jury Duty provided a goofy but surprisingly heartwarming look at our judicial system. The premise is that a single person gets what they believe to be a legitimate jury duty summons and is seated on what appears to be a real jury. Only everyone--judge, attorneys, litigants, and all the other jurors--are actors. (The judge is also a retiring judge, so the legal process itself is fairly accurate.) The actors then provide increasingly absurd hijinks yet, through it all, our random juror remains committed to trying to give the litigants a fair trial and make a just ruling. 

The Phantom Tollbooth

 Last winter someone was asking in a Facebook group on reading for more books like *The Phantom Tollbooth* and neither Bookworm nor I could come up with any. There's really nothing like *The Phantom Tollbooth*. However, on further reflection, although it would completely skew anyone's expectations of either book, what *The Phantom Tollbooth* is most like is *Pilgrim's Progress.* It is a *Pilgrim's Progress* of the mind. The zany characters and situations are not merely a series of puns, they are the embodiment of ideas, turns of phrase, paradoxes. And it is, of course, a moral journey: from ignorance and indifference to wisdom and curiosity. 

I am afraid that will convince no one to read it, or the people who do read it will find it not at all what they were expecting. It is also a hilarious, delightful, relatively easy read. It has been one of my favorite books since I first read it at an age so young I no longer remember. It was definitely the most formative book of my first decade of life. As a child for whom abstract knowledge came more readily than the often overwhelming world of the senses, it convinced me that the real world was full of wonder as well. 

Other Books:

*Atlas of a Lost World* by Craig Childs. G. K. Chesterton writes in several places with great humor of the folly of archaeologists and anthropologists imagining "primitive man" (as the term used at the time) as some utterly alien being full of incomprehensible behaviors instead of (whether separated by time or geography) people very much like us with customs no stranger, when you stop to think about it, than our own. Fortunately I think this is one area where the prevailing mindset has improved, and this book was a terrific example. The author writes of various archaeological discoveries related to the arrival of humans to the Americas in the Ice Age, and intersperses those with his personal camping and travel experiences (on foot or by boat) among landscapes that might resemble those of the Ice Age. It's a wonderful exercise of the imagination, vividly portraying the courage, curiosity, and skill must have taken to survive in a world of megafauna.  

*The Summer Book* by Tove Jansson. This is a deceptively simple book, about a little girl and grandmother experiencing summer on a remote island in the Gulf of Finland. That sounds rather saccharine, but it is not. Grandmother is not growing old gracefully and the little girl is as contrary and unpredictable as any real child and the simple life close to nature is undertaken with the casual indifference of an earlier era when it was perfectly normal to throw your trash into the sea. There is Father, too, but he is a middle-aged person who spends all his time working or fishing. It's up to the very old and very young to experience being human.

*The Brothers Karamazov* I've almost made it to Dmitri's trial. I really don't think much of Dmitri but I also don't think he did it. Dostoevsky is certainly deft about exploring the labyrinths of the human mind: though everyone is a bit over the top, especially the women, they are over the top in recognizable ways. 

*Songs of Willow Frost* by Jamie Ford. This is the current book club selection, so I am finishing it even though it's not the kind of thing I like (but it is definitely the kind of thing that winds up picked for book clubs so apparently a lot of people do like that kind of thing.) It's a notable local author who provides well-developed stories illuminating local history. I just don't really read to deal with realistic family problems and personal calamities, that's what I deal with all day. But I take it like medicine and then I go read something like:

*Oath of Swords* *The War God's Own* *Wind Rider's Oath* *War Maid's Choice* by David Weber. These are the books you read when you want some big damn heroes with great big swords to stabbity stab some even bigger nasty demons. While the main character, Bahzell, a verrry reluctant paladin, is a joy in any circumstance, I'm also a big fan of his fellow paladin Dame Kareitha, who has a sword divinely blessed to let her know when documents are forged and who settles boundary disputes with some deft legal expertise combined with using the sword in its more traditional fashion. 

*What Feasts at Night* by T. Kingfisher. I never know what to say if people ask if I like horror. I don't find horror particularly horrifying for whatever reason, so reading for pure adrenalin does not work for me. It's a book, nothing's going to eat me. If there's interesting psychological development, though, horror doesn't put me off. This series, by T. Kingfisher, tends to have a rather botanical twist and features frequent appearances by Beatrix Potter's aunt, a noted mycologist. 

Wind in the Willows

 Wind in the Willows, someone once said, is not a book that you judge: it is a book that judges you. But it is a kindly judgment, not the imperious magistrate casting you into the gaol, but the friends dragging you back home for your own good. It is a book I feel sorry for people who never got to read, or who cannot appreciate it. And I can understand why some people struggle with it (beyond those who have no enjoyment for anything fantastical): the pacing is erratic, lurching between pastoral lyricism and the crazy adventures of Toad. But so be it. It is not for us to judge. 

Whereas Winnie the Pooh deals with life's small and ordinary feelings and encounters, Wind in the Willows dives right into some of its hardest tangles: the line between supporting friends and enabling them; the tension between the longing for home and longing for adventure; the overwhelming weight of glory and the mercy of our day to day agnosticism. 

The thing that struck me most of all on this reread was that Grahame succeeds in a way almost unique to bring the modern (to him at least) world into his fantasy without losing any of the sense of wonder. It is extremely easy--nearly every modern YA fantasy book does it--to render magic into mere technology. It is not particularly unusual to write fantasy, like Tolkien did, in which technology is the enemy and hostile to magic. But to make a world where Mr. Toad can steal a motor-car--and a train for good measure--and yet every tree and streamlet is laden with mystery and purpose--that is quite uncommon. 

It had been too long since I read it (not since Dame and Dash were second graders, so eight years at least), and I will do my best not to let so long go by again. 

Other Books:
I finished How to Read a Tree, by Tristan Gooley, but I really think I need to own it because it's a book to read a tiny bit of and then go for a lot of long walks and noticing. Not that I get to spend a lot of time noticing since my walks are usually desperately trying to restrain or hopelessly trying to locate the dogs, but I still am spotting some more. Looking forward to trying out more by this author, the library has a bunch. 

I also got back from the library and finally finished The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery. Last year everyone was reading Incredibly Bright Creatures, including our book group, and while we enjoyed it pretty well (especially for the local setting and for being more cheerful than *most* of the local books we get to read), the best part was definitely the octopus and if you really want to spend some time with octopuses, The Soul of an Octopus might be more what you want.

Our book club's newest selection is In The Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick. I am looking forward to hearing everyone's opinions on it--it's the true story on which Moby Dick was based. I think everyone will enjoy it, except perhaps Barb who has some cannibalism-related trauma due to being a child before movie ratings systems came out. Adventure on the high seas and all that. I really want to give Moby Dick another go now (I last read that as an extremely stubborn but largely uncomprehending 10 year old) but I'm still only about a third of the way through the Brothers Karamazov. I definitely want to check out more by this author. 

In children's books that came out since my time, I've been reading a whole slew of Harriet Hamsterbone and Danny Dragonbreath adventures by Ursula Vernon. They're in the gaining fluency stage, somewhere between a graphic novel and a chapter book, and they're hilarious and inventive and in my opinion a significant cut above the better known series in that range. Harriet and her battle quail solve various fractured fairytale crises, while Danny and his small reptilian buddies cope with various more or less mythical monsters. They manage to have great adventures without dead or absentee parents, potty humor, or any excessive degree of family turmoil. I also highly recommend Castle Hangnail. 

The Brothers Karamzov I have moved to audio book--it's way easier to keep the characters straight with an actor doing different voices than it is to remember who is going by which name in what context. Russian literature, I suspect, is rather like watching reality TV or soap operas: one's own life can hardly escape looking better by contrast. It is great and profound and thought provoking and also sometimes I just want Flora from Cold Comfort Farm to show up and convince everyone to stop being so melodramatic. 

I saw a bunch of recommendations to try Louise Penny as a modern mystery writer and I must say the titles and cover art were very compelling. I read A World of Curiosities and found it pretty well done but in the end I really don't like the grittier kind of mystery very much. (Even though, if you think of it, cozy mysteries are far more disturbing--to think that an ordinary person living their ordinary life could have personal knowledge of dozens of murderers who mostly murdered for rather humdrum and ordinary reasons--is far more troubling than to think that the chief detective for a large metropolitan area would need to deal with the occasional serial killer.) But I will probably read a couple more because the titles are so lovely, but not right before bed.

Due to wanting to inspire Dame to keep up on her Latin I started doing Latin on Duolingo, but the course is not very long and I have already gotten to the part that's only review while still being very far from actually reading anything interesting in Latin. So I'm very excited to have purchased Scribblers, Sculptors and Scribes along with Wheelock's Latin, which promises reading real Latin writers from the very beginning, even if we have to start with graffiti and copybook headings. 

The Great Brain

 So for February my revisitation of children's literature went to The Great Brain by John D. Fitzgerald. There are more in the series, but we seem to have the first two. (My library consists of a very random amalgamation of books--mostly American history--purchased by DOB in his youth; books of many varieties picked up by me at random library sales, books obtained for school for the kids in various years, and quite a number that were rescued from the farm. Also Bookworm's library is slowly migrating this way. And in the past couple of years I have finally started deliberately purchasing books I actually want to re-read. So I am often in ignorance of what exactly is in our library. Also DOB hired some housecleaners to come install additional bookshelves and bring order to the chaos upstairs a couple of years ago and while they did make everything much neater, they had not the slightest conception of how books should be organized so pretty much everything is just random. After the addition goes on and Bookworm moves in we shall have a grand book reorganizing.) 

*The Great Brain* is in the category of realistic kid adventures with a strong historical and geographical setting--in this case turn of the 20th century (we have to specify which one now) Utah. They are based on his own childhood and I have no idea how fictionalized they are (or what his older brother immortalized as the titular character, a money-loving eleven-year-old con artist, thought of the series.) 

On re-read, these are solid but not immortal books. The prose is a little clunkier than I remembered. There are many things that might grate on modern sensibilities, but on the whole the series is good-hearted and doesn't shy away from tough issues (immigration, disability, suicide, lack of community care for an outsider). Honestly I think most parents would definitely put it in the read-aloud-and-discuss category. It's certainly a very different world, one where a boy's status is entirely measured by physical violence and girls don't even exist, where weeks of the silent treatment is the enlightened parental alternative to the whippings routinely handed out, where dividing along cultural and religious lines is hardly even to be questioned. But I think it's good for kids to visit some different worlds, and even to realize that places not all that distant in time or space still had dramatically different outlooks and unquestioned values. 

Other books I have been reading:

I finished Byzantium and it held up well through the end. The Vikings remained a hilarious RPG party throughout; even being sent to the silver mines could not squelch them and they horded as much silver as they could until rescued. And yet it also felt real when the one Viking convert, despite his entire instruction being at the hands of his captive/slave/friend, a disillusioned and apostate Irish monk, spoke movingly of the day he nearly died of torture in the mines that he knew that Jesu would be there at the harbor to welcome him home, and would understand, as he had suffered in the same way.

This also got me interested in Eastern European medieval trade routes, which is being further whetted by a podcast on The Voyages and Travels of the Ambassadors, about a journey from Germany through Russia and Persia in the 1600s, but I cannot find anything on it at all at the local library.  

On the monastery theme, I convinced my book club to read A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters, and I am always happy to spend some time with Brother Cadfael. We'll see how people like it. 

On a bit of a mystery kick, then, I also reread Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy Sayers. It is wild to think that this book is nearly a century old; I wonder if it is one of the first examples of the modern workplace comedy with its banter that still feels familiar territory but surely did not exist much earlier, before, well, workplaces were co-ed. (One cannot imagine such a place in Dickens.) Granted it's still early days and there are no women in management but there is one actual female copywriter and a couple of typists whom Sayers, holding true to her principles, treats as humans. And though the language of the actual advertisements have all the absurdities of vintage advertisements, the general motive of advertising and its very mixed blessings have not changed all that much even if the media have changed dramatically. 

I've decided my next tough classic to tackle is The Brothers Karamzov. There's nothing like a little Russian literature to remind one that one's troubles are not really so bad. 

Pooh and Alice

 I started off the year with A. A. Milne. I'm sure the idea is not original with me that children's literature can have a much broader scope than adult literature because, with the attention-hogging topics of sex and death off the table, the writer must delve into the more nuanced joys and sorrows that actually make up the bulk of life. Probably no books exemplify this as well as the Winnie-the-Pooh books, which celebrate life's small joys like sitting in the sun with a friend and its small sorrows like discovering one already ate the snack one was saving for later. Although I think it is the poems that I find even more enlightening, as there are few days in which I do not feel like The Old Sailor My Grandfather Knew, not to mention those days of discovering another knight whose squeak has gone, or needing to enlist a suitable third party to suggest an answer I am not entirely sure of. We will never forget Pooh, even when we are 100. 

Then I went on to Lewis Carroll, which are an entirely different kind of fantasy, the kind where even the ordinary becomes strange. This puts some people off, but for those of us who are always finding ourselves at odds with the world, it is strangely comforting. (Pooh and Alice view from different angles the joy of reciting one's own poetry and the horror of having to listen to other people's. Such is human existence.) There is also a special place in my heart for *The Hunting of the Snark*, though it is much less well known:

He had bought a large map representing the sea,

   Without the least vestige of land:

And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be

   A map they could all understand.

"What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,

   Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?"

So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply

   "They are merely conventional signs!

"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!

   But we've got our brave Captain to thank

(So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best—

   A perfect and absolute blank!"

Anyway, they were both a good way to spend January, including one particularly exciting Friday when the temperature dropped to 12 Fahrenheit, the pipes froze, the heaters stopped working, the dogs got out, and CPS dropped by (due to an offender in the neighborhood).  

Other things I am reading:

Byzantium by Stephen Lawhead. This is the first time I've actually read Lawhead, as far as I know, though I've tried several times but always been stymied by not having the right books in the right order. As far as I know, this one stands alone. So far it's been quite enjoyable (and a nice medieval follow-up to Doomsday Book, which I read over New Year's). It does feel a bit like a role-playing game somehow in the sequence of adventures, but I do not consider that a demerit. 

The Planets by Dava Sobel. I wanted a reliable science writer after starting on a book off the library new books rack that had a glorious title and promised to be about deep sea creatures but instead spent an awful lot of time on the author's Tinder dates, which were of no interest to me. This was not about deep sea creatures, but it was, as advertised, about the planets, both their attributes, exploration, and the history of human views and legends about them. The only thing I wished it had was an update for the most recent fly-bys. 

How to Read a Tree by Tristan Gooley. I haven't finished this yet, because it's best read in small doses so I can then look for things on my next walk, or as much as I can do while disentangling the dogs from the huckleberry bushes. This book focuses on general species that have common traits throughout the Northern Hemisphere and then on specific things to notice about the trees in front of you and how their growth and patterns have been influenced by their surroundings.