Bleak Midwinter Bookish Things

We are now deep into what I like to term the bleak midwinter, mainly because I love the hymn and "bleak midwinter" is more poetic than "I've been freezing my arse off for months and it's conference season and Christmas is over and I hope I don't catch the flu." And so the drab chill of February is upon us.

I've been attempting to revise my manuscript from last summer (not the NaNoWriMo one from November--the one before that), and I get interrupted about every other sentence. I should just go to Starbucks with Bose headphones or something, but I always argue to myself that it's not worth killing the travel time. Instead, I nearly kill everyone in my household. I've tried locking the door, but  . . . they bang and bang and bang.

It's at these points I wonder (read: panic). If a free afternoon on a cold rainy day with nothing scheduled does not give me enough space to meaningfully revise, when oh when oh when will I ever make progress? It makes me anxious. And kind of cranky. And sometimes bitchy.

So that's where I am in the manuscript. Crawling forward, and it's frustrating. It's not a massive rewrite! Just a revision. Gah.

In the land of bookish things that I am not writing, the girls and I started the year out with Roald Dahl's whimsical James and the Giant Peach. We recently read Call It Courage, which is like a boy Moana tale. It's worth a read if only to study pacing. Now we're in the midst of Gentle Ben, set in the Alaskan Territory. This is a far more realistic book than we usually read--there's no magic, no fantasy, no ridiculously oversized tree fruit. But the girls are into it, especially the idea of a huge scary bear being gentle and kind. And then Charlotte asked a legitimate question: Can we read a book about a girl next?

Yikes. Yes, yes, I assured her, and checked out Anne of Green Gables from the library. We got two paragraphs in. "Boring!" my girl children sing-songed. Well, poo on you, I said. We'll try again later. I'm not giving up on Anne. In the meantime, Gentle Ben has a few more chapters to go, and I have a some ideas for our next book.

One problem I'm having with reading time and the girls is that Charlotte's dang homework involves a reading log, and SHE needs to do the reading. I've tried having her and me switch off reading pages, but she's just clunky enough reading aloud that Lorelei's attention span fades as the rhythm of the story gets slowed down. So we're reading together less now, and I feel like that's not a good thing. Perhaps we can  tack on Charlotte's reading assignment after reading together. Of course, THAT requires an efficient evening routine, and I can't tell you how many things conspire to botch that each night. (The main reason: We eat dinner too late. Oh, and the girls take 3 hours to brush their freaking teeth.)

And grown-ups read too. Chris and I (yes! Chris too!) just finished C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces, a brilliant retelling of the myth of Psyche and Cupid. We read it as part of a 5-week study in (adult) Sunday school. It was great fun and I'm sad it's over.

I also finished Black Milk by Elif Shafak. This was one of those precious books I read slowly in small doses to make it last longer. Shafak creates a sort of fictionalized autobiography as she merges motherhood and writing. She has a harem of different little women inside her head who vie for her attention and she doesn't know which parts of her self to listen to. I loved this book.

Most recently, I finished Frank Conroy's Body & Soul, a brilliant coming-of-age story of a talented musician in New York in the 1940s. It's long--long--and fascinating. To me it complemented (or perhaps vice versa--this was published in 1993) composer Phillip Glass's autobiography, Words Without Music, in which I learned a ton about music, composition, and creating art. Although Body & Soul has a whiff of Dickensian chance--oh, the stars align over and over again for dear Claude--it's still great.

Okay, enough with the biblio gushing. I'm currently reading Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady. (No, I have never read it. Stop judging me!) It moves at the snail's pace of most Victorian novels published serially, so all you can do is sit back and take your time with it. I confess that I was a bit anxious and meh one evening and realized that I silently stressing about Isabel Archer's marriage (I had been forced to stop reading in a less than ideal spot). So that's healthy.

My list of books to read grows faster than I can read them, but it's a good problem to have. Especially in February.

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