April 13, 2021 at 11:30 pm (Books, Family, Memoirs, plans, Relatives, Women Writers)
Tags: COVID Reading, decisions, grief, reading lists, transitions, wisdom
The author persuades her aged parents to go into assisted living. She tells them to try it, they can always move back home if they don’t like it.
Self will never. Ever. Especially after the past year.
You set foot in a certain kind of river and you know that as soon as you do, the current will have you.
— I’ll Be Seeing You, p. 30
February 14, 2021 at 4:20 am (Books, Lists, Memoirs, Women Writers)
Tags: COVID Reading, decisions, essays, novel, reading lists, Saturday, science fiction
February 9, 2021 at 12:25 am (Books, plans, Weather)
Tags: COVID Reading, decisions, Garden, Mondays, reading lists, science writing
The days will grow longer. Then the front yard will die, as it does every summer. Self has never mowed her yard, not once in three years. The grass is a bright green, and all the different things she’s planted are green and lush and it’s beginning to look like an ecosystem. Like a balanced ecosystem. Which is what she wanted to do in the first place, though a year and a half ago, she had only a vague idea.
Onward.
She has briskly dispatched The Butterfly Effect. She skimmed the later chapters, which had a lot to do with industry and man’s ingenuity and how man depends on insects for manufacturing product, yada yada yada. She also skipped the chapter on eating bugs because, while surely fascinating, she doesn’t feel the slightest inclination to experiment in that direction.
She has three library books currently. Two of the books begin in high summer, and the third is about a polar bear in the Arctic. So she’s reading Ice Walker, because it’s cold here in her house. It’s probably best to read about polar bears when it is actually cold.
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
February 2, 2021 at 2:23 am (Books, Recommended, Surprises)
Tags: COVID Reading, crime, decisions, Mondays, novel, reading lists
Self has made her selection of her next book (High as the Waters Rise is sooooo sad, now she has to write sad fiction to work it out of her system), and it’s neither This Is All I Got or Ice Walker. (Sorreeee!!!)
Sorry for being so indecisive. It seems that what self is in the mood for reading is — not about homelessness, or about the environment — a really good, fast-paced crime novel!
Thomas Perry’s Eddie’s Boy fits the bill. She hasn’t read Butcher’s Boy, but she understands from the reviews that you don’t need to have read the earlier novel to appreciate this one.
This is, oh my God, so GREAT.
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
July 31, 2020 at 8:35 pm (The Economist)
Tags: advice, COVID Reading, decisions, Fridays, medicine, news, summer
Modest Changes in Behavior leads to “huge rises in coronavirus infections”: The Geometry of the Pandemic, p. 19
This article focuses on a model by Rajiv Rimal of Johns Hopkins University. And it’s a big, fat chunk of the article (maybe a third), longer than she usually manages to quote. But she wanted to share it. Knowledge is power!
When “American states began easing lockdowns . . . their caseloads were three or more times higher than in Europe, in part, argues Jarbas Barbosa of the Pan-American Health Organization, because most states never had full lockdowns. Texas had 1,270 new cases on the day its governor said restaurants could reopen: 44 per million. In Georgia, the rate was 95 per million. Disney World reopened the day before Florida announced a record 15,000 new cases in a day. Just as incredibly, in two-thirds of states, infections were rising when governors started to ease lockdowns. By contrast, France, Spain and Italy had 13-17 new cases per million when they began to re-open their economies and numbers were falling fast.
“On April 12th … 95% of the population was staying at home (leaving the house only for essential visits), with 5% ignoring lockdown rules. Based on those assumptions, his model predicts that Americans would have had 559,400 cases on that day — an accurate assessment (it actually had 554,849). On July 14th, Mr. Rimal assumed that 80% of the population was staying at home, i.e., only a gradual change. On this basis, his model predicts the country would have 1.6m cases, again not far off the actual number and confirming the impact of modest rises in activity. If people really altered their behaviour, the number would rise even further to 5.6m cases if the stay-at-home share drops to 60% and to 9.5m if it falls to 20%. In that worst case, America’s death toll could top 400,000. Such is the dark logic of geometric growth.”
The Economist concludes that “to drive the level of infection down to perhaps a tenth of what it is now (closer to European or Asian levels) … seems to require full lockdowns.”
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
November 25, 2019 at 3:57 am (Artists and Writers, Books, Family, Memoirs, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Sundays, Surprises, Women Writers)
Tags: decisions, English writers, nonfiction, reading lists
p. 232 of Lady in Waiting:
Three years after their eldest child became hooked on heroin, the Glenconners decided to dis-inherit him. The boy was 19. He had to sign a contract, agreeing to relinquish all rights to the British properties (there were substantial properties also in the Caribbean, but the contract only covered Britain. Because the British properties were more important to the family name?)
Darn, even at 19 the kid had enough savvy to require two conditions: a) a bigger monthly allowance; b) an agreement that his parents “cover his future medical bills.” (Did he, self wonders, hire his own lawyer?)
The parents’ fear was that, if anything happened to them, and their ‘seat’ fell to the eldest, he would sell it for drugs. The contract protected the property for future generations. The decision must have been very painful. But — three years? They reached that decision when their son had been addicted for just three years? That was a business decision.
Stay tuned.
October 11, 2019 at 4:37 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: decisions, Fridays, novel, reading lists
Self was going to read The Overstory after finishing The Parasites (five stars, five stars, six stars if that were even possible) but decided she needed a less angst-y read (!!!) So she decided to start An American Marriage, then she read reviews on goodreads which said it was about a love triangle, and she’d had enough of those for a while and was about to put the book aside when she decided to read the first page, and that first line was simply amazing:
Stay tuned.
January 28, 2019 at 8:44 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, destinations, Explorers, Lists, Memoirs, Places, plans, Recommended, Traveling, Women Writers)
Tags: book lists, decisions, Mondays, nonfiction, reading lists, travel books
Excited to be adding these wonderful books to self’s 2019 Reading List. Self loves travel books. It’s been a year since she devoted a reading year to them:
Alan Booth
Alexandra David Neel
Alison Wearing
Ann Jones
Anthony Doerr
Best Women’s Travel Writing series
Bill Bryson
Blair Braverman
Bruce Chatwin
Dervla Murphy
Ellen Meloy
Gabrielle Hamilton
Gretchen Legler
Isabella L. Bird
Isabelle Eberhardt
Jamaica Kincaid
Jan Morris
Julia Child
Katrina Kittle
Kira Salak
Mary Henrietta Kingsley
Melanie Bowden Simon
Peter Mayle
Rebecca Solnit
Robyn Davidson
Stanley Stewart
Suzanne Roberts
January 21, 2019 at 9:17 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, plans)
Tags: decisions, indulgences, Mondays, novellas, reading lists, translation
Self has to resort to all sorts of mental tricks to keep reading Swann’s Way.
She makes the decision, after reading to p. 44, that she’ll consider Combray and Swann In Love as two separate works — two novellas, if you will. And thus, she’s reading them simultaneously. Because if she follows the sequence in the book — she’s finished Chapter 1, and finished reading the part about the madeleine — Chapter 2 is a very long reminiscence about the town. While Swann In Love is about socializing, with all sorts of fascinating words to consider: for instance, the word “bourgeois.” Self, who is so easily exasperated these days (which is just another way of saying she is stressed), may get exasperated enough to stop reading Swann’s Way. And she would consider that a regrettable moral failure.
So, to forestall any such feelings of exasperation, she skips ahead to Swann In Love, resolving to return to Ch. 2 of Combray (and using two bookmarks) after she’s finished Part II.
Maybe she’ll even read Part III, Place Names: The Name before returning to Combray.
What a disgustingly eccentric way to read Swann’s Way, but there you have it. Self would love to extract maximum pleasure and understanding from this book, and this is the only way she thinks she can do it.
Stay tuned.
January 8, 2019 at 6:36 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Lists, Personal Bookshelf, plans)
Tags: decisions, history, novel, reading lists, Russia, Russian literature, Russian writers
Self making mincemeat of her reading list.
First, she abandoned all six books of My Struggle after reading just one page of Book One.
Then, she stopped reading Barracoon at the first page of the narrative proper, she just couldn’t agree with the decision Hurston made to write him as he appeared, not as he truly was: a grown man, a man who had endured unimaginable suffering.
Today, she put aside her copy of If On a Winter’s Night a Travel.
What does she want? What is she looking for?
Hopefully it’s Anna Karenina.
From the Introduction:
The lovers live in a realm beyond good and evil. After all, good and evil depend on choice, and where fate governs, choice is out of the question. No matter how much pain the lovers cause, one cannot condemn them . . .
That is the story Anna imagines she is living. As one of her friends observes, she resembles a heroine from a romance . . . As Anna Karenina imagines herself into the novels she reads, such readers imagine themselves as Anna or Vronsky . . . Anna feels that fate has marked her out for a special destiny, perhaps tragic but surely exaulted.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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