Reading Round-Up: February 2023

/ Christine Pennylegion / Leave a comment

It’s spring! The dwarf irises are blooming in my garden (always the first flowers up, by a considerable margin) and it’s well past time to take a look at what I read last month. February was particularly fruitful, I felt, in part because I’ve hit on a reading mode that really works for me: nonfiction books on paper, and fiction on my phone. I love the portability of ebooks and the ease of borrowing them — instantaneously! — from my local library. But for some reason that I haven’t bothered to parse, on-screen reading doesn’t seem as suitable for nonfiction texts, at least for me. Maybe it’s because I approach the text differently if I can hold it in my hands; maybe it’s just nice to differentiate long-form nonfiction from the constant stream of emails, blog posts, and articles I’m already reading on my laptop or phone screen. Whatever the reason, this method of separation seems to work.

Here’s what I read last month:

  • A Single Thread (Tracy Chevalier)
  • Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law (Mary Roach)
  • At the Edge of the Orchard (Tracy Chevalier)
  • Several People are Typing (Calvin Kasulke)
  • The Long Haul (Finn Murphy)
  • Dear Mr Knightley (Katherine Reay)
  • The Man with Two Left Feet and Other Stories (P. G. Wodehouse)
  • Draft No. 4 (John McPhee)
  • Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
  • My Salinger Year (Joanna Rakoff)
  • Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen)
  • So You Want to be a Wizard (Diane Duane)
  • Deep Wizardry (Diane Duane)
  • High Wizardry (Diane Duane)
  • A Wizard Abroad (Diane Duane)
  • The God of the Garden (Andrew Peterson)

Let’s do the fiction first.

I read Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring a few times about a million years ago, back when everyone was reading it, but hadn’t at all kept up with her work after that. Both A Single Thread and At the Edge of the Orchard are historical novels: the former examines the lives of the “surplus women” of Britain’s post-WW1 demographic crisis; the latter, American expansion to the West in the early/mid-19th century. They’re both immersive and richly detailed; I enjoyed learning about cathedral embroidery (what we would probably call needlepoint now) and the British gardening craze for exotic American trees like California’s giant redwoods. At the Edge of the Orchard used a number of dialect variations to differentiate between point-of-view characters, which I found somewhat distracting the first time it shifted but worked well overall. I will note, however, that (as with Girl with a Pearl Earring), attempted and/or actualized rape was used as a plot point in both novels, which, at this point, just seems lazy.

From the historical we move to the extremely contemporary, with Calvin Kasulke’s delightful, absolutely bonkers Several People are Typing, an absurdist novella told entirely through workplace Slack conversations. It was blurbed as “where WFH meets WTF,” which strikes me as entirely accurate — and includes some literary Easter eggs if you’re paying attention (watch for how Kasulke uses excerpts from Yeat’s “The Second Coming”). I read this in a single evening when I had been feeling extremely blue about something — I don’t even remember what — and it was just the ticket. It’s bananas.

One of the advantages of keeping a reading log is that when you’ve read something previously, or think you have, you can actually go back and look for it. The first time I read Dear Mr Knightley was in the summer of 2014; I was massively pregnant with Anselm and house-sitting for one of our professors, on whose shelves I found a copy. That’s long enough to have forgotten everything about it except a general positive impression. Dear Mr Knightley is epistolary almost in its entirety, following former foster-kid Samantha Moore, who deals with her trauma by sublimating herself in 19th-century novels, particularly the Austen oeuvre. She is granted an anonymous scholarship to a prestigious graduate journalism program, on the condition that she writes letters to her benefactor, keeping “Mr Knightley” informed as to her progress. It’s a sweet narrative despite Sam’s inherent, um, annoyingness. As with many romances it’s necessary to consciously suspend some disbelief, but in the end Sam finds a forever-family as well as a love interest (the former is admittedly more satisfying), and all’s well that ends well.

Speaking of Austen — skipping Wodehouse for the moment — last month I finished both Pride and Prejudice (for like the 30th time, and as an audio version in this case) and Sense and Sensibility. Reading the latter was a very strange experience. I was sure I had read it at some point, perhaps as a teenager, but as I went on I realized I had no idea where the plot was going, except I could remember some things, or thought I remembered them — I think I must have seen the movie, or bits of it, and that combined with a general sense of what happens that I’ve just picked up here and there somehow convinced my brain that I had read this novel. Reader, I had not. And I probably won’t again because, whew, it could definitely stand to be chopped down by a good 50-80 pages… also I hated everyone but Elinor, who marries (imho) the wrong man at the end, anyway. I was profoundly disappointed that when Austen afflicted Maryanne with fever she did not take the obvious opportunity to kill her off, and really, the whole lot of them ought to go jump in a lake. Perhaps Sense and Sensibility would not have disappointed me so much had I not been reading it right at the time I was finishing up listening to Pride and Prejudice, which is such a sparkling delight; the comparison was not flattering. (It’s odd that they’re so different in quality, too, because they were published less than two years apart, and Austen seems to have been revising them both around the same time.)

The Man with Two Left Feet and Other Stories is a wonderful collection. Wodehouse is best known for the Jeeves and Wooster novels, but he wrote short stories as well, all of them with his trademark wit and humour. I especially enjoyed the two stories told from a dog’s perspective, although I cannot just now remember their titles.

Finally, wonderfully, engrossingly: the first four installments in Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series of young adult fantasy novels. I just tore through these! In the first one, So You Want to Be a Wizard, young teenager Nita is drawn to a mysterious book of the same title on the shelves of her local library, and finds herself drawn into a world of magic, powered by the Speech that holds the universe(s) together, where wizards unite in the fight against entropy and its champion, the Lone Power. It’s terrific stuff, and though Duane’s books aren’t religious per se, and she draws from many different mythologies, there’s a lot of really interesting theological things going on in the underpinnings if you’re willing to look for them. The only real caveat is the series timeline, which is woefully complex and contradictory, due in part to the span of time over which they were published. In the second book, A Wizard of Mars, Nita’s younger sister Dairine gets a top-of-the-line home computer that is essentially a lightly-disguised Apple II; only a few books later, they all have cell phones and ipods (and Dairine, notoriously, has aged a few years backwards). If you’re willing to accept that the books are set in some sort of “eternal now” — rather like comic strips, I suppose — then it works, but once I noticed the discrepancies I found it them hard to overlook.

On to the non-fiction!

Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law is another one of Mary Roach’s fascinating, one-word-titled (Bonk, Stiff, Spook, Gulp, Grunt), long-form explorations of unusual topics — in this case, the conflicts, legal and otherwise, between humanity and the animal kingdom. It’s absolutely typical Roach: engaging, funny, and full of weird facts I never knew I needed to know.

The Long Haul is Finn Murphy’s memoir, centred on his life as a long-haul trucker; more specifically, as a cross-country professional movers. We hired movers for our second-to-last uprooting (a ten+ hour drive and across an international border) and it was a very interesting experience; kind of weird to have other people doing so much with our stuff, and of course requiring a great deal of trust as they took off with it once all of the packing was finished. I found Murphy’s narrative fascinating; it’s always cool to get an insider’s-eye-view of an industry. People! Doing things! My friends, the world is infinitely fascinating.

Also on the memoir menu, I read Joanna Rakoff’s My Salinger Year, her account of a year spent working at a NYC literary agency of some prominence during the mid-1990s. Rakoff is older than I am, but not by so much that I didn’t resonate with many of her cultural touchstones. The book is revealing — of an agency struggling against modernization (her boss grudgingly allowed one computer to be purchased for the entire office, which had to be used in a public place), of the ways the ways that we bend ourselves to try and fit a mold we think we want or need, of Rakoff’s own coming of age. It was highly engrossing. (You can figure out which agency she worked for with an internet search or two; I wonder what they thought of it?)

John McPhee’s Draft No. 4 is partly a memoir, I suppose, although it’s really about writing and a life spent doing just that. McPhee writes long-form nonfiction — articles that come in at 40 or 50 thousand words — and I found his remarks about structure to be especially illuminating. The whole thing is just chok-full of tidbits, really, and obviously written by a master of his craft. This was a library copy but I plan to purchase my own.

Finally, I closed out the month with Andrew Peterson’s beautiful The God of the Garden. Peterson seems to do a bit of everything: he writes both fiction and nonfiction, he sings, he founded an artists’ community… The God of the Garden is a meandering memoir written over the lockdown year of 2020, about faith, gardening, creativity, place and rootedness, theology, and the wonder of trees. (I too often wonder at trees.) It was beautiful, and made me more eager than ever to get my hands in the dirt again this spring.

Tangerine: Poems at 94

/ Christine Pennylegion / Leave a comment

My late grandmother, Tangerine Bell, published her first collection of poetry in 2017, at the age of 94. Her poems reflect a lifelong engagement with the genre, exploring themes of creativity, parenthood, love and sex, literature, religion, friendship and family relationships, and above all, the beauty and fascination of the natural world. Here are a couple of nice write-ups she received at the time:

Publishing a Life’s Work (St. John’s College news bulletin)

Former Newark resident pens first book of poetry at age 94 (the Newark Post)

Until now, her book has only been available as a paperback book. I am very happy to announce that I’ve just put together a new digital edition! She was so pleased to have put together her collection, and I am pleased in turn to make the e-book available.

Tangerine: Poems at 94 is available as a Kindle e-book from your Amazon storefront of choice (US | UK | CAN and others). And of course, for those who prefer physical books, the paperback is only a click away 🙂

Solitary

/ Christine Pennylegion / 2 Comments

A few weeks ago, I took Perpetua and Tertia to our local playground for an afternoon romp. As we were preparing to leave, I was listening to the sound of our feet on the asphalt path and a line of poetry—“I have become a connoisseur of footsteps, mostly mine”—sprang, whole, into my mind. “Hey,” I thought, “that’s in iambs! I should use it in a sonnet!” So I did.

“Solitary” has recently been published by Autumn Sky Poetry DAILY.

Sunrise/Sunset Shawl

/ Christine Pennylegion / 5 Comments

I enjoy all sorts of crochet projects, both practical and decorative, but there’s no question that some projects really highlight the beauties of the craft. This is one of them. I recently completed a shawl for a friend of mine who is going through one of those life-altering transitions that hit us from time to time—and I was also thinking about the transitional times of day, sunrise and sunset, when I chose my materials. I wanted something that would look like a dark sky over a lightening horizon, and I wanted to make something fine and lacy. So I picked a beautiful colourway from YarnArt’s “Rosegarden” line (colour #326), and over a few weeks, effected the transition from this:

… to this:

Rosegarden is a 100% cotton yarn, which comes in a 250g/1,000m self-striping cake. With long gradient cakes like this one sometimes I’ll just let the colour changes flow, but for this project I wanted them to be at least semi-controlled. When the colour changes were simply different proportions of the same colours in the strand (like moving from 1:3 to a 2:2 ratio of orange:yellow, for example) I let the changes fall where they would. But when the change involved adding a new colour, I cut the yarn to make sure it came in right at the edge instead somewhere in the middle. This meant sacrificing a bit of length—I had 16g left over, so about 64m—but I think it was worth it… even with the mini heart attack I gave myself when I made the first cut. No turning back after that!

It had been quite a while since I’ve worked with a 1-weight yarn, so it took a few rows to get my sea legs back. But things went well after that, especially since this pattern was a joy to work with. It’s the “Klaziena Shawl” by designer Kirsten Bishop, and she has put together one of the most well-written patterns I’ve ever encountered. Seriously, it’s amazing: clear written instructions, sharp photographs, and charts. After two foundation rows, the pattern repeats rows 3-20, which became satisfyingly mindless after my first time through. I had enough yarn to go to row 52, falling just four rows short of three complete repeats. It still ended in a logical place, though, so I don’t mind. The shawl was completed with a 4mm hook; the pattern calls for 3.5mm but I wanted it to be a little more open. I’m curious to try it with the smaller hook next time; this is definitely a pattern that I will make again!

Bodily work

/ Christine Pennylegion / Leave a comment

All three kids are coughing today, which meant no church for us; coupled with their long sleeps engendered by the time change, this left me with an unexpected chunk of unscheduled time this morning. I decided to pull out my sewing machine. We bought new curtains for our dining room and den — oh, months and months ago, maybe more than a year at this point. They look great but are far too long, and have spent that time haphazardly pinned up or dragging on the ground, and occasionally stepped- or sat-upon by the small set. I had already figured out the amount I needed to trim some weeks ago, so all I had to do was measure, cut, and hem.

Out came this beauty:

I think I’ve blogged about my machine before: a Singer 403A, passed down by my grandmother, that’s about the same age as my mom. I’ve had to replace a few small plastic parts, but it runs extremely well (especially now that I’ve corrected the small, crucial, error I had been making while threading it). Since I needed room for all of the curtain fabric, I hauled it downstairs to the dining room table — stopping in the bathroom on the way, out of curiosity, to weigh it. Eighteen pounds! Without the case at hand, I had to cradle it closely, like wearing 2-3 newborn babies in a sling at once.

I find great pleasure these days in the thing-ness of things, especially mechanical things. Using this machine is such a tactile experience: the weight and texture of the fabric, the smell of hot steel and machine oil, all the satisfying whirrs and snicks and thunks of the moving parts, the whisper of the thread unspooling. I tell the machine what it must do by manipulating a series of levers and knobs. To make it go very slowly, I use my hand to turn a wheel. To make it go quickly, I press a pedal with my foot. If I want to switch to a zig-zag or scallop stitch, I open up the top and insert a little disc that changes the movement of the mechanisms below. So satisfying!

It’s satisfying in part just because I think mechanical things are clever and cool (don’t even get me started on doorknobs). But anything that engages our bodies and our senses also offers a refreshing contrast to the way that so much of our work and pleasure is mediated to us via screens — and even when that work is good and useful, often it still only engages our bodies to the extent of giving us backaches and carpal tunnel syndrome. The screen provides a way of being in and interacting with the world that leaves me, on the whole, deeply ambivalent.

I’ve just finished reading Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley, a memoir detailing her time working in Silicon Valley — itself a profoundly ambivalent narrative. Wiener chronicles techbro culture from the inside, from a position that’s both critical and complicit, and there’s a lot to unpack inside — but in light of this morning’s activities I was forcefully struck by this passage:

I sometimes wondered whether there was a unique psychic burden shared by people who worked in technology, specifically those of us building and supporting software that existed only in the cloud. The abstractions of knowledge work were well documented, but this felt new. It was not just the cognitive dissonance of how lucrative and powerful tech companies had become, when their tools did not physically exist, but that all software was vulnerable, at any time, to erasure. Engineers could spend years writing programs only to have them updated, rewritten, and replaced. […]

My own psychic burden was that I could command a six-figure salary, yet I did not know how to do anything. Whatever I learned to do in my late twenties, I learned from online tutorials: how to remove mold from a windowsill; slow-cook fish; straighten a cowlick; self-administer a breast exam. Whenever I wrenched a piece of self-assembly furniture into place, or reinforced a loose button, I experienced an unfamiliar and antiquated type of satisfaction. I went so far as to buy a sewing machine, like I was looking for ways to shame myself.

I wasn’t alone. Half the programmers I knew between the ages of twenty-two and forty, mostly men, were discovering that their fingers were multipurpose. “It feels so good to do something with my hands,” they said, before launching into monologues about woodworking, or home-brewing or baking sourdough. […]

I envied Ian [a roboticist], who was trained to think in terms of hardware, the embodied world. He stared at a computer all day, too, but the laws of physics still applied. His relationship to the internet was different from mine: he didn’t have accounts on any of the social networks, was unfamiliar with memes and unattuned to the minutiae of other people’s lives. He didn’t stand up at the end of the day and think, as I did: Oh, right—a body.

Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley, pp. 218-9.

Note the adjectives modifying “satisfaction” there: unfamiliar, antiquated. Obsolete. And that is the techbro mindset in a nutshell, maybe: the work of the body outmoded; the body itself an obstacle until hacked and gamified; the solution, to everything, more technology. (And here is Wiener’s ambivalence on display, as it often is in Uncanny Valley. Even as she recognizes the psychic hazards of Silicon Valley’s bodiless work to create a bodiless world, she is still at least partially under its spell.) But I would suggest that the satisfaction that she felt in putting together furniture or reinforcing buttons, and the joyous bemusement of her programmer coworkers discovering physical hobbies, in fact points to the great truth that our bodies are not obsolete. They matter, in fact, very much—the things we (can) do with them matter, and our satisfaction in using them is natural and appropriate.

Anna Wiener bought a sewing machine to shame herself. She might do better just to sew some curtains.