2022 in Books

(2021, 2020 and beyond)

Some notables from a year of reading:

• Favorite old-men-contemplating-their-lives nearly plotless novel (a micro-genre exemplified by Gilead and Jayber Crow): Death Comes for the Archbishop (Willa Cather) — I’d had this on my shelf for years, since I found it at Goodwill shortly after falling in love with Shadows on the Rock, but I haven’t much liked the other WC I’ve read in the interim. This one knocked my socks off and I know I’ll reread it someday. I was enchanted, and now have a much stronger desire to finally see the American southwest.
• Time travel/history/Catholic mysticism nominee: Sun Slower, Sun Faster (Meriol Trevor) — I talk about it here.
• Best discussion fodder: The Genesis of Gender (Abigail Favale). I read this over summer vacation and then met with a much smarter friend over gelato to grapple with it. I didn’t love the beginning or end and I’m skeptical of the veracity of the subtitle (A Christian Defense) as it relies heavily on a Catholic argument against contraception, but I appreciated Favale’s methodical building of an argument and contextualization of hot button topics.
• Most upsetting but rewarding realistic fiction: Yolk (Mary H.K. Choi)—I might not have finished this except that my sister loaned it to me, and I’m so glad I did. Both Jayne and June are prickly, broken people and it took me awhile to see what Choi was doing with her narrator and the story. But of what I’ve read this year it’s one of the books I think of most often, even if it was difficult.
• Most delightful and thoughtful literary fanfic: Miss Austen (Gill Hornby). I talk about it here.
• Best audiobook experience: Fortunately the Milk (Neil Gaiman). A friend recommended this one to us and we all guffawed our way through it on a short road trip to the monastery earlier this year. Since then, Pip and I have read it aloud together again and enjoyed the insane illustrations.
• Favorite poetry: Richeldis of Walsingham (Sally Thomas). Lovely. I am a sucker for stories that weave in and out of time over a bit of land, and these narrative poems surrounding Mary’s apparition in England and the history of that one place sure delivered. I hope we can make a pilgrimage to Walsingham this summer.
• Most pleasantly perplexing: Piranesi (Susanna Clarke). I read a tolerable number of books and while I haven’t read exhaustively in fantasy and science fiction I can usually tell what tradition a story is working out of and guess some of the reveals. Not this time! John read this aloud to me in the weeks before and after Teddy was born, and the sweet narrator kept me guessing straight through.
• How did he ever plot this? Award goes to: Cloud Cuckoo Land (Anthony Doerr). A friend mailed this giant tome to me and I read it during one cold week in January and it kind of blew my mind. There was the same beautiful prose as in All the Light We Cannot See but the disparate strands here absolutely defy categorization. There are strands of science fiction, literary fiction and historical fiction and somehow—somehow—they all work. Such a wild ride. I loved it.
• Best comfort read romcom: Very Sincerely Yours (Kerry Winfrey). I read this at the end of 2022/2023, exhausted, traveling, and, unbeknownst to me, rapidly slumping into gestational diabetes, and it was just what I want in a romance: funny, charming, with a strong sense of place, engaging side characters, a bit literary and not too explicit.
• Book I most want to live inside: The Little White Horse (Elizabeth Goudge). It took me and Scout several terms and a couple restarts to get through this, but I’m so glad we did, because we both enjoyed it so much that for her last birthday I gave her a new copy (the dog having eaten the cover off our original) and a little pink geranium of her own. Things I look for in books for Scout: strong but feminine female leads, lots of beauty, descriptions of flowers and clothes, maybe a fantastical creature or two. This delivered.
• Best sick day book: Spinning Silver (Naomi Novik). I didn’t end up liking the whole book as much as the early chapters hinted I would, but I enjoyed the fairy tale aspects, the unusual perspectives, the mysterious, foreboding tone of the early chapters. I can see how those would be difficult to sustain, though — I just wish some of the protagonists hadn’t dealt in such morally questionable behavior and been rewarded for their wiliness, even if that’s in keeping with folk tales generally.

Low-Bar Homeschooling: Music Study

A music appreciation study by someone who doesn’t understand music for people who also don’t understand music!! What could go wrong?

For the last two years, I’ve been trying to create my own vaguely Charlotte Mason-esque music study units with varying degrees of success. This one, on Benjamin Britten’s “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” is the one that has gone best without running out of steam mid-term. I’m a librarian by trade, and librarians are all about saving effort and sharing their projects, so in this spirit, I offer you what I’ve done.

It helps to think of this piece as a guide in the sense of a tour, as described here, like you enter the lobby of a building and are led through it all, ta da, ta da.

• Vocabulary (For me, the music-naive — I don’t dwell on the terms with the kids, just mention them in passing.) Definitions from this site:
  • Theme: main tune
  • Variation: alterations to the theme or “the tune in different ways— faster, slower, happy, sad, even upside down!”
  • Fugue: a melody with many voices entering at different times, a little like a round.
• Versions of “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” We Watched
  • Trippy cartoon — I led with this to give them some visuals when listening to this piece, which is longer and less narrative than Peter and the Wolf and The Nutcracker, which we’d studied before.
  • Performance. We usually just watch several performances of our piece, one per week, because it seems to help all of us to have something to look at while we listen. I know some families listen while driving but my kids are usually already looking at books or chattering, so this works better for us.
  • Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra — empowering because kids! Filmed during lockdown, so you really see how the pieces fit together as they were all filmed separately.
  • Royal Philharmonic — also filmed during lockdown.
  • Really lengthy but helpful recording from the New York Philharmonic — lots of good explanations (like using the “Happy Birthday” to explain variations) and some funny parts. There are also interactive features.
  • Truly insane rip-off Muppet tour — ok, so my girls loved this, but I’m pretty sure it would fall under Charlotte Mason definitions of “twaddle.” Still, it taught me that a spit valve just has water from respiration (probably still spitty but STILL), which is a huge relief and something I wish I knew earlier so I wouldn’t have spent so many years haunted by the idea of spit valves.
• Purcell’s Original
  • Scene from 2005 Pride and Prejudice featuring Purcell’s original rondeau, which Britten wrote his variations around. My early music expert brother-in-law pointed out the instrumentation elsewhere in this movie doesn’t reflect historical reality (I guess they’d still be playing harpischords rather than piano fortes? IDK), but I think it still gives a taste of the stripped-down look at the smaller piece of music that informs Britten’s larger piece. (And I love to show movie clips featuring our music selection because it really emphasizes how music literacy plays into other media and art forms — like the references to Peter and the Wolf in A Christmas Story. You can ask, “What does knowing this music tell you about this scene?”)
  • You can also see Purcell’s original performed as Purcell would have composed it in this clip.

What I don’t do in music study:

• the aforementioned car listening
• worksheets of any kind
• sitting or lying still just listening, because no one is that good at concentrating among my littles and I for one would fall asleep

How has music study looked in your family?

Obscure Advent Recommendation: The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman

My elderly copy

Ok, stick with me here — I am about to make a recommendation so obscure, I know it’ll need a little explanation.

So here goes: Louise Plummer’s under-appreciated 1995 YA rom com masterpiece, The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman, is the just-for-fun book you should read this Advent. (Or Christmas. Or whenever.)

Kate Bjorkman is doing just fine. She’s a high school senior and lives with her pleasant, humorous parents in a close-knit neighborhood of St. Paul, Minnesota. She classifies herself in the second tier of Christmas happiness, even with Coke-bottle glasses and a 6′ frame, but when her big brother arrives home for Christmas unexpectedly with his new wife and old best friend — the one Kate’s had a crush on for years — suddenly she’s in the running for the top tier of Christmas bliss. But does Richard feel the same way?

I’m really picky about rom coms, both on film and in books. The very best ones, in my opinion, have relatable narrators and likable love interests, but, at least as importantly, a rich community of quirky characters. (Think You’ve Got Mail — or even Notting Hill, where, as far as I’m concerned, the side characters are the only thing that save the movie from its tedious leading couple.) Unlikely Romance has just such a cast: a capable but not obnoxious Pinterest mom (before Pinterest was a thing), a sleepy linguist professor father, nuanced friendships and a life-changing teacher who flits through the pages. Characters offer glimmers of backstories and inside jokes and complicated histories that just might make the villain a little less villainous. This community surrounding Kate makes the stakes both higher and lower: an enduring relationship leading to marriage is the unstated goal, but she has a full life even if Richard never declares his love:

“Anyway, the minute I began walking down Folwell Street, I felt glad to be alive. Even before the hero entered, I was pretty happy with my life. I’m not the sulking type. My father, the linguistics professor, had been playing one of the Brandenburg Concertos when I left, and I felt as if the flute music were trapped inside me and that if I opened my mouth, it would trill out into the night air.”

It’s a funny book, with the kind of whip-smart dialogue I love in Love Walked In, and Kate, a very self-aware narrator, often draws cutting comparisons between real-life romance and the stories she read in her friend’s favorite romance novels. But Plummer’s book is also noteworthy for raising serious questions about romantic love, contrasting the will-they-or-won’t-they romance between Kate and Richard with her newlywed brother’s relationship and her parents’ longstanding marriage. Characters cast a critical eye on romantic overtures and grand gestures and instead try to get to the bottom of what makes a real, warm love. It’s a consideration that rewards re-reading at different life stages—I loved it when I first discovered it in my early teens, and I love it still, even when my life stage is much more that of Kate’s parents. I can’t think of an example of another YA book that inquires so seriously into the real work of love — can you?

Family-friendly? I think the book suggests ages 12 and up; I’d skew a bit older for references to virginity, even though the protagonist doesn’t lose hers.

Where to get it: Bookshop.com has it; a lot of local libraries seem to have weeded their copies.

Obscurity level: 9/10; the only people I know who know it are ones I’ve made read it.

Bringing the cover into the 21st century?

Having a Miscarriage Plan

(An important caveat: I did the Bradley birth thing for my first three kids. I am a planner and I like to research the heck out of things. I read books set in the place I’ll visit before a trip, and I read birth stories when I’m pregnant, and pestered friends and strangers alike about their homeschooling decisions before starting that particular adventure. It is just how I feel most comfortable. If you don’t find yourself nodding in agreement, this post probably isn’t for you.)

Reasons Why You Don’t Brave the Library (And What to Do About It)

 

Shh! — slightly scary

 

Here is a real thing we learn about in library school: LIBRARY ANXIETY. It turns out that many people get nervous about going to the library, and especially about asking for help. It seems quiet! And organized! Everyone else knows what they’re doing! You’re just some weirdo bumbling around with your small herd of children trying not to break into a cold sweat.

Don’t Let Hand-Me-Downs Get You Down

 

Excellent hand-me-down winter wear

When I was eight months pregnant with my firstborn, I was on my way into the university health center with J when we ran into a very slight acquaintance of his. Upon learning we were expecting a November baby, she exclaimed, “I had a November baby last year! Come by my house! I’ll leave bags of clothes outside for you.”

I was floored that someone I didn’t know would gift this poor grad student so generously, and still more so when I arrived at her porch to discover heaping trash bags full of lovely little things. I hadn’t yet learned the rule of motherhood: stuff, stuff, ever going in and out of the house.

Since then, I’ve learned to embrace the constant inflow and outflow of Stuff. I try to pass along things we are done with, and in turn, to accept and make good use of what we are given. A lot of that has to do with organization, so I thought I’d outline my approach.

An Exhaustive (and Exhausting) Pre-Travel Checklist

The girls on a recent road trip

In preparing for a recent trip, I decided to think about all the labor I put into a moderate to long road trip for our family (I’d say moderate = 3+ hours of driving, 2+ nights away, but we’ve sometimes traveled for as long as five weeks).

Dear College Student

A few years ago, I was walking on a New England college campus in spring and came upon a cherry tree in blossom which, upon closer examination, was decked out in tiny paper cranes. It was striking for its senselessness and beauty, two characteristics closely associated, in my mind at least, with college.

Now, as I drive through a college campus on a cold Tuesday morning in spring, I’m confronted by students who seem hardly present, just going through the motions. These students slump along, eyes on their phones, carelessly decked out in workout wear, seemingly oblivious to their surroundings.

And let me tell you: college is for many things, but most of all, college is for caring. 

Linking Meals, Using Up & Making Do

These are not my teacups. They’re my sister-in-law’s, because she is classier than I am.

“Now the aim of the good woman is to use the by-products, or, in other words, to rummage in the dustbin.” –G. K. Chesterton, “The Romance of Thrift”

First, let me say, there is nothing wrong with just having a meal plan rotation. I have recipes I use over and over and even a homemade cookbook of favorites. But I often find I have things to use up, and wanted to share my strategies for avoiding waste in the kitchen.

7 Quick Takes: On Reverence

You might as well know now I don’t love Latin Mass. It falls somewhere between beer and Bruce Springsteen on the list of things I suspect I should enjoy and don’t especially.