This Week in Reading: Week 3

Gosh, what a heavy week—Obama said goodbye to public office, Trump was inaugurated and Republicans started wreaking havoc, oh, immediately. And the women’s marches around the world were great, but, you know, we have a lot of work to do.

Which is why I’m really happy that I read the following three books this week!

Mafalda #2 by Quino
I’m continuing with this Argentinian comic strip series that had so much success across South America during the 1960s-70s. It’s addresses war, human rights, the environment, and feminism in a warm, lighthearted way. Read in Portuguese.

Habibi by Craig Thompson
I LOVED this book! Thompson studied Arabic calligraphy, the Koran, the Hadith, and Arab traditions, myths, and culture for nine years in order to create this book. The result is a huge tome stuffed with magnificent beauty that combines everything in a magical, heart-wrenching package. There were a lot of surprising, hard parts in the story, but what really stood out was the complexity of the combination the stories that come from physical calligraphy, with religious stories, and A Thousand and One Nights. Read in Portuguese.

Trainwreck by Sady Doyle
So ideal that I finished this book on a sliver of contemporary feminism the same week as the Women’s March on Washington (and around the world)! A longer review is coming, but until then…
Doyle shows, using conversational blog-type language and mountains of primary source material (complete with citations in the back), that fabricating a trainwreck narrative out of women in the public eye is nothing new, and has existed for centuries. It comes from an impossible-to-achieve (examples in book!) standard and internalized patriarchy. We enable a fictional narrative to dominate our minds, bodies, and culture—the lie that there are "good women" and "bad women" and that all of us are either one or the other, when in fact we are all humans who make good decisions and bad decisions, who do holy things and sinful things... even the privileged, air-brushed celebrities.

This Week in Reading: Week 2

One of the highlights this week was I got a São Paulo public library card! I plan to write about that in a different post, but I'm happy that my reading possibilities have expanded :) Like always, I'm in the middle of like five books (official count... unofficial is closer to 10) and finished three.

A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami
This is the third book in The Rat series (a nickname of one of the characters is The Rat), but it is only vaguely connected with the other two (Hear the Wind Sing, and Pinball). I mean, if you have read those two you will recognize some characters and places, but all three of the books stand alone. A Wild Sheep Chase is the best of the three so far, but there is a fourth and final book in the series (Dance Dance Dance).

In this book, a typical Murakami dude (single, likes sex but has trouble maintaining relationships with women, drinks a lot, has an unremarkable life, no close friendships, likes playing vinyl records) is told by a mysterious stranger that he has to find a specific special sheep, OR ELSE. So it’s almost like a detective novel, revolving around a sheep, a suicide, and a whole bunch of weird &$#% near the end.

I liked it, but my favorite Murakamis are still 1Q84 and Kafka on the Shore. I feel like I read about five Murakami books a year but never get any closer to accomplishing my goal of reading all of his works… Maybe 2017 will be the year.

Mafalda #1 by Quino
Mafalda is a much-beloved Argentine comic strip that ran from 1964 to ‘73. It was translated and published in many South American countries, including Brazil, and its themes of poverty and inequality, brain drain, inflation, corruption, political freedom, female empowerment, and world peace resonate even today. Mafalda is a young girl (like 5 years old), she has a mom and a dad (who remind me a lot of the mom and dad from Calvin and Hobbes), and she has a gang of friends comprised of a super-capitalist, a girl whose sole aim in life is to get married and have kids (frequent conversations revolve around trying to convince her to dream bigger), and an all-around normal boy. Mafalda herself is blunt, observant, and introspective, like Charlie Brown but with less pessimism. I’m reading in Portuguese and I'm proud of myself that I understood most of the punch lines and Silas only had to explain a couple. Humor is the last thing to be understood in a language. It’s cute and uplifting, and it reminds me to be content with life’s simple pleasures.

You Have Me to Love by Jaap Robben
I read this one for work (I’m doing an internship with a foreign rights agency!) — originally published in Dutch. A boy on an island has a dad who dies at sea, and then his mom goes crazy, and the boy is just trying to navigate puberty while being stuck on a tiny island with a crazy mom. He starts caring for a baby seagull by locking it up and forcing it to depend completely on the boy for food, which is a reflection of the oppressive care that his own mother gives him. I guess the message of the book is that people need to socialize with others in order to not go crazy.

Plot points happen quite abruptly (you find out the mom goes crazy from one page to the next), and I would have originally thought that it’s the author’s style, or maybe something got lost in translation. But I’ve read three Dutch books in the past month and I now would say that it’s a cultural preference or an aesthetic that is pretty different from what I am used to reading. It’s not bad, but it’s just different. These three books all had me like:

I’m glad that I’m getting the opportunity to read so many different types of stories. Until next week!

This Week in Reading: Week 1

I challenged myself to read 100 books in 2017. Last year when I challenged myself to read 52, I didn’t think that I would actually read that many. I want to read 52 books every year, but I don’t really care too much if I complete that amount or not—the page count varies so much in the types of books that I like to read that reading a full 52 books doesn’t matter much to me. Consequently, I had never done it before. But in 2016, I surpassed my goal by some 40 books! And I read a wider range of things than ever. I was purposefully seeking out books by foreign and minority authors (in addition to reading whatever caught my fancy at the moment).

All this to say, I’m going to continue reading a lot of books this year, and I think I can read at least 100.

The Rose & the Dagger by Renee Ahdieh
This is the second and final book (the first is The Wrath & the Dawn) in a romantic, dramatic, adventurous and beautiful take on One Thousand and One Nights. This book started out slow, but picked up the pace to tie up all the loose ends. It’s kinda fun reading a duology instead of a trilogy! Actually, there are quite a few “alternate” chapters and storylines available as ebooks, but as much as I enjoyed reading this book, I was satisfied when it ended. It didn’t hit me as one of those “Aaahh I never want this universe to end!” books where you feel sad and a bit down for a week after you finish the book. I’ve read a few retellings of One Thousand and One Nights in the past couple years, but have never read the original. I guess with the live-action Aladdin coming out soon, it’s going to be popular to read, so I should get on that.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
I’ve started watching Gilmore Girls and though I had never seen an episode before last month, I always knew that Rory and I had a lot in common. I’ve taken a glance through Rory's reading list, and we have similar tastes… meaning we read everything. What surprised me was how many of the books on her list that I have already read, and that made me want to read all the rest. I really love checking things off the list. So that’s why I read The Perks of Being a Wallflower. That, and I’ve heard of this book my whole life but had no idea what it was about.

If you like reading about precocious teenage boys (they’re so adorable), you’ll probably like this epistolary/diaristic book. The first part of the book comes across as advice for teenage readers that barely hides the fact that the adult author is trying to make the book a guide for any possible problem that a teenager could confront. But if you stick with it, the story develops and the preaching becomes more subtle. The characters face all kinds of heavy situations: drugs and alcohol as coping/self-medicating, abortion, rape, physical and sexual abuse, discovering sexuality in all kinds of ways, etc. If you’re a teen, it would be good to have an adult read it at the same time so you two could talk about it.

Though one of my favorite parts of the book is kind of preachy: Sam and Charlie have a heart-to-heart about what they think and the expectations they have regarding each other. It’s a really sweet and honest moment, but Sam confronts Charlie on what friendship really is—friendship is not going along and “being there” for everything your friend is doing. It’s confronting and telling your friends No if they are doing something that is not healthy. A good lesson for all of us.

My Favorite Books from 2016

I started this year with a pledge to read all of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I didn’t even finish Swann’s Way. One day I’ll get to it. There are certain books that I need a physical copy to hold while I read: books by Toni Morrison, for example.

In 2016, I read more than I ever have in my life. Eighty-six books and counting! Part of this is because I made an effort to practice reading faster—chunking, not sounding out syllables, listening to audiobooks at a faster speed—but also I really got my personal system down for reading in nearly every spare moment. I have an audiobook, a non-fiction, a literary fiction, a book in Portuguese, and a “fun” fiction going all at the same time. So no matter what my mood or where I am physically at (I pretty much only read e-books), I have something to fit the bill. I gave up reading a lot of books, and this helped me not get swamped with procrastination and avoidance of reading because I wasn’t really into what I was working on.

Most of the books I read were fine, mediocre, nothing to write home about. But here are the ones that were really memorable for me.

   

Nurture Shock by Bronson & Merryman
Non-fiction gathering fistfuls of psychological studies that show what kids do naturally, and how to help them be better. Did you know that humans are born racist and you have to actively teach them to not be, starting at like age 1?

11/22/63 by Stephen King
I’m gonna call this Stephen King’s best book ever. It’s not scary at all; it’s an action-romance and it will give you warm fuzzies.

Earthseed series by Olivia Butler
I wasn’t overwhelmed by the greatness of this dystopian speculative fiction, but man, Butler predicting Trump’s campaign slogan and other stuff more than two decades ago is eerie.

The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan
I know people have a bone to pick about how Tan propagates racist stereotypical thinking, and how white people love her books so much because she writes characters about “good immigrants” aka Asians who do exactly what we expect them to do. But honestly, she is a really, really great storyteller and an amazing author. This was the first book I’d read by her and I was just fascinated. 

 

Horses Make the Landscape Look More Beautiful by Alice Walker
I’ve been on a quest to read and enjoy more poetry, but usually I just don’t have the patience for it. I loved the poems in this collection because they are powerful, approachable, and important: they talk about specific injustices in society.

The Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater
YA urban fantasy set in small-town Virginia with awesome storycrafting and great character work. It’s not often that I fall in love with every one of the characters, even the bad guys.

The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning
I only read a handful of Christian books this year, and none of them came close to this classic about giving yourself and others grace and forgiveness. It is particularly important in today’s tense climate where it’s easy to step on other people’s toes and judge other people for not being as morally superior as yourself. I’m going to reread this one for sure.

Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli
Shows a great parent-teen relationship that is so sadly absent in many YAs. p.s. Simon is in film production, so read it now and be cool early ;)

   

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
Small wonder the entire world is talking about this series set in Napoli in the 1950s. Rich, complex, beautiful pictures of daily life, but what stood out was the explanations of the psychological decisions behind why characters do certain actions. I have never read a book with such a good understanding and conveyance of human motivations.

Maus by Art Spiegelman
This is the true story of an Auschwitz survivor (the author’s father), and I felt like I got an understanding of why people do selfish things, or why they act uncharacteristically in times of duress. It helped me to be more merciful.

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Set in Nigeria in the 1960s, this book looks at the creation and destruction of the nation of Biafra through the eyes of its characters: two upper-class sisters, a British guy, a scholar, and a servant. It’s an all-around solidly graceful book, but I really liked the changes that happen to the attitude of the British guy as he moves from his colonialist identity to trying to embrace and carve a space for himself in Biafra. I can identify.

Little Altars Everywhere by Rebecca Wells (prequel to the Ya-Ya Sisterhood)
The slow reveal of this Louisiana family’s dark secrets blew me away.

Three Books with Empire Waists

In the past month I’ve read three books set in times past, and I realized that though the purpose and language of each book is different, they all have this in common: protagonists wearing empire waists!

One Good Earl Deserves a Lover (Sarah MacLean) is the second book in the Rules of Scoundrels romance novel series (judge me, haters), set in Regency England. In this book, the independent, smart, aint-gonna-take-nothin-from-nobody Lady Philippa unwittingly seduces the silent and closed-off owner of a sleek gambling club. She uses her wits, brains, and nerdy-girl charm to save the day. I don’t think this book is particularly historically accurate, but Princess Peach rescuing Mario, so there.

The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton) was written and set in turn of the century New York. The story gets way too melodramatic at the end, but I really enjoyed watching the tailspin of the life of the protagonist Lily. She reminded me a lot of Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse because of how quick she is to snub those who aren’t good enough, only to later realize how much she needs to be in the good graces of others. The whole book uses language straight from theatre to emphasize that everyone is playing a role and wearing a mask. No wonder my favorite character, Lawrence Selden, is the fresh of breath air who criticizes all the superficiality. Fun trivia: Edith Wharton’s maiden name was Jones—it was her family that inspired the phrase “Keeping up with the Jones’s” because they were the richest and showiest family in Old New York.

Longbourn (Jo Baker) is Pride & Prejudice retold from the servants’ perspectives. This answers questions such as: Does Hill have children? What happens to servants’ children when they do have them? Wasn’t there a war going on, and why wasn’t anyone concerned about it? Was the abolitionist movement before or after this? How did Darcy and Bingley become so rich? I really, really liked all of the choices that Jo Baker made in adding details to the original cast. She brought a deeper and more rounded perspective to all of the characters. Wickham is a pedophile, for example. And Elizabeth is more self-absorbed in a way that highlights the ugliness of her pride.

I disliked where Baker quotes exactly from P&P (though she always does it in a clever way), and my favorite parts were where she diverged completely from Austen. There is a very informative discussion of the role of slavery in producing the wealth of the British upper class and its contribution to England’s economic development. The story also explains more details about the class differences between soldiers who self-enlisted in the army and those who bought their way in (like Wickham). As a particularly sharp criticism, one of the footsoldiers is in a rural village in Spain, “saving” the Spanish from the French, when he sees obscenities in English scrawled on the walls of a sacked house. He realizes that he is a pawn caught in a rich person’s game.

In spite of all the things I enjoyed and the writing being lush and really well developed, I thought the book was okay. My personal preference is that P&P adaptations be set in other times and places than the original, because can anyone really top that?

Reading Journal || March

This month I ripped through books at a pace that surprised even myself! One week I finished five books in five days. It’s bound to happen, I suppose, because I read so many books at the same time that I can finish a bunch in a row.

Despite my best efforts, I cannot resist reading less than eight books at once:

• Audiobook
• Poetry
• Fiction
• Non-fiction
• A Portuguese book for fluency
• A Portuguese book for vocab study
• Something on the ‘backburner’
• In Search of Lost Time

But I’ll focus on what I completed in March, not what I’m in the middle of.

Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents are a duology by Octavia E. Butler that were written in the 1990’s and set in a dystopian America in the 2020’s. Usual dystopias that I read feature oppressive government control; these show a country on the verge of anarchy. Poverty, substance abuse, vandalism/robbery/rape/murder, and extreme drought are the backdrop for Olamina to set out on her own to develop a community based on the principal of a religion that she leads called Earthseed. The mantra of the religion is “Change is God”, and her goal is to advance the community so much that they start a fresh life on another planet. The novels don’t reach that far into the future, and the mostly focus on how hard it is to inspire trust and win commitment in relationships when everyone is hellbent on self-preservation. What was most interesting to me was how Butler predicted the appearance of a Donald Trump/Ted Cruz character, down to the line of “make America great again.” Butler herself is an interesting person—an African-American female science fiction writer who earned a lot of awards for her work.

I continued the Lunar Chronicles series by Marissa Meyer with reading Scarlet. I was let down by the cartoonish new characters and predictable plot. Probably not going to finish reading the series.

Though there are literally hundreds of people waiting for the e-book copy of Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee, no one seems to want to listen to the audio (even though it’s read by Reese Witherspoon). So I snatched that up and was proud of myself for keeping my vow that I wouldn’t read the book until after Ms. Lee had passed. My brief responses to the FAQs:

• I believe that Harper Lee did not intend for the book to be published. Many passages are standalone short stories or underdeveloped dialogue—more of a polished writing exercise than material that moves the current of the novel forward.
• Atticus is racist, and no, it doesn’t appear to be an alternate universe Atticus.
• Reading GSAW did not change how much I like TKAM. Though it’s not set in an alternate reality, since I really believe that Harper Lee wasn’t finished developing this novel, it’s easy for me to categorize it as something totally separate, in its own box.

I made a conscious decision to read more female authors this month, and want to continue with that for the rest of the year. I should have tried to take a history of feminist lit class to fulfill my gender studies requirement in college… though I am thankful that such an abundance of material exists on the subject that is totally easy to find and read for free online. I started making my way through feminist classics with A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf . If you haven’t read it already, you should know that it is an extended essay that was fleshed out from a talk that Woolf gave to a girls’ college about the absence of female authors in literature. Woolf makes surface-level observations, but it’s a perfectly good place to start to lay a foundation for future readings. It reminded me of feminist art in the 1960’s-70’s (Judy Chicago, et al)—very blatantly obvious about what it was trying to communicate, but it was appropriate for the time, place, and context.

Immediately after, I read A Rogue by Any Other Name by Sarah MacLean. Maybe you don’t see the connection between an extended essay about women’s exclusion from literature and a romance novel, but the connection exists in my mind. The heroine in A Rogue by Any Other Name is fighting for her rights to make life decisions for herself instead of her father, fiancé, or society to make them for her. The point is that females can do things too and don’t need the peanut gallery to make a running commentary about it! I picked up this romance novel on Amanda Nelson‘s recommendation and because I thought, “Hey, I’m an adult, I can read what I want and I don’t need society shaming me into reading or not reading something.” I did feel proud that I read that book, silly smut and all, because it felt like cutting one more string to caring about doing things because it’s what people want me to do instead of what I actually want to do. I'm working towards my goal of becoming the Honey Badger.

Bird by Bird (Anne Lamott) and It Chooses You (Miranda July) approach the same subject in slightly different ways. What do you do when you want to write something but you are procrastinating on actually sitting down and doing it? Both books were a delight to read, well worth waiting for years on the waitlist, and I reviewed them together because they are so closely related.

I finished Sandman: Endless Nights by Neil Gaiman in Portuguese. My boyfriend keeps telling me to read Neil Gaiman stuff, and I keep doing it, and I keep not liking it. He and I do have similar tastes that often overlap, but there are many cases where they don’t. Dear readers, should I trust him once again and give a final try on American Gods?

I was let down by The Psychopath Test (Jon Ronson), too. I blogged about my disappointment, because I hoped that I would be able to spot the psychos living around me if I read that book. Maybe this reveals a hidden motivation for trying to understand why people in Brazil do what they do (I bet they’re just psychopaths. Let’s find proof.), or maybe it just means that I’m tired of reading books by white British dudes.

Connections || Bird by Bird and It Chooses You

If you have ever been interested in learning more about the process of writing, perhaps learn some tips about how to braid parts of a story together, or maybe have your hand held along the way, and you expressed that desire aloud or maybe on the internet, someone somewhere has probably referred you to Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott.

This book has been on my radar for years, and I was in line on the waitlist at my library for years, so that culminated in me getting to read the book for the first time this month.

My preconception of the book was that it would be fairly serious and detailed, but in an interesting way. I didn’t really know how it would go about teaching me how to write better, but I just assumed that it would. I think I picked up this notion from the rather academic-looking cover and the way that other people revere this book as the go-to thing for writers in search of direction.

It’s really not a book about practical advice for NaNoWriMo. There are many very good how-to’s and roadmaps available online for that. It doesn’t give advice about common structural pitfalls and how to correct them, ways to write realistic characters, things to think about when constructing fantasy worlds, or how to finish a personal memoir essay with a snappy and relatable ending. But it is a book full of encouragement to start writing, and more importantly, to finish what you’ve started.

Lamott repeats herself a lot: Write a first draft, no matter how bad it is, because it is only by writing the first draft that you are able to arrive at a better second draft. If you are facing writer’s block, go do something else for a while to fill yourself back up with fuel. Keep index cards handy to jot down ideas and quotes. Form a habit of writing a little bit every day. And write about your childhood.

The day after I finished reading Bird by Bird, I read It Chooses You by Miranda July.

I have been following July’s career for years, and I am fascinated and awed by how she views the world. She is able to turn the most mundane things into something interesting, important, and magical. She’s openly Proustian in the way that she actively looks for secret messages or symbols in her interactions with the world around her, and when you absorb any of her work you are left with the feeling that you too can be a creative person if you just pay attention to the messages. It Chooses You is more of that magic.

July is writing the screenplay for her film The Future, and she is stuck. Not only does she have plot and procrastination problems (I’m not immune! I’m just pointing out that she also is not immune), but she has a dread finishing the project because of all the things that will come next. So she devises a project that will solve so many of her problems at once: It will give her ideas for her movie (like Lamott says to do), she will feel productive instead of like she is procrastinating, and it will help her avoid having to work on writing.

During the height of the Great Recession, July contacts people who place free classified ads in the PennySaver and asks them if they would be willing to let her interview them and her friend Brigitte Sire to take photos. The people who agreed to this are unique and um… special. The book, It Chooses You, is the documentation of the interviews, the photos, and how each person helped July in her process of finishing what she started.

At first I couldn’t tell if it was all staged or not. The photos looked like sets sometimes, the people were perhaps actors. That’s a lot of what Miranda July does. She stages performances or interactions that blur the lines between what is real and what is performance art. See, for example, this video on how to make buttons. In her writing it’s much harder to see what is true and what is merely inspired by what is true. It wasn’t until I reached the final character’s story that I believed it as all real. He convinced me because this character makes it into the movie, The Future, playing himself.

See Also
An excerpt of the book featured in The New Yorker
My 10 Favorite Books: Miranda July
A review of It Chooses You by Head Into the Heavens

Reading Journal || January & February

This blog is turning into more of a reading journal and less of a YA book review blog, and I’m okay with that. This year in general I’ve been focusing on expressing my thoughts because I want to express them and not because I want other people to know them. When I read my posts from last year, I was really happy that I took the time to write them and I was glad that they look pretty and easy to find in the format of a blog. So, I want to keep up my blog for those reasons.

Let me recap my 2016 reading journey so far.

After listening to The Heart Goes Last (Margaret Atwood) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Ken Kesey) during the turning of the year, my mood swung to things that were equally disturbing but in a slightly different genre. Horror manga.

I read both the Uzumaki and Gyo series by Junji Ito. Ito is known as the patriarch of horror manga, and really, these books are bad dreams. Each chapter in Uzumaki functions almost independently and focuses on a spiral pattern that drives people to mental and physical insanity. The Gyo series is about a mutated fish invasion, and if you weren’t already jumpy about things touching your feet while you are swimming… this will convince you.

I think each person has their own idea of what truly inspires fear and horror. When I had a book club that discussed The Shining (Stephen King), the three of us discussed which parts of the book were the scariest for us personally. I am claustrophobic, so the part where Danny gets stuck underneath the snow in a small tunnel was the part that got the most sensory reaction out of me. For me, Ito’s nonsensical illustrations are disgusting (imagine my facial expression when I watch a medical show on TV), but the stories are not scary. In my mind, manipulative stalkers are true horror.

Speaking of true horror, I listened to Dark Money: The Hidden History of Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Political Right (Jane Mayer) after I heard an interview with the author on NPR. It’s loquacious and has its flaws (not citing sources of minor information), but it legitimizes the feeling that US politics has become more polarized than it used to be. This book made me feel more wary of “organic” political movements and skeptical of opinion articles. It also made me think more than ever before that I am being manipulated by a system that is out of my control, and the only solution that I have in my grasp is to read and write (or create) more. If you love hating Monsanto, Sallie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the Seven Sisters, then read this book.

After that glut of heaviness, I read a bunch of fluff: How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are (Anne Berest et al), some smutty manga in Portuguese, and Carry On (Rainbow Rowell). Carry On makes my second m/m romance read, and though I still haven’t heard a good explanation for why straight women like to read it, I guess I fall in that group.

Also in the romance category, 11/22/63 by Stephen King surprised me in all the right ways. The only other King book I’ve read is The Shining, and that book disappointed me in a mass-market paperback sort of way. Forty years of prolific writing later, 11/22/63 completely redeemed King. Every single aspect of it is en pointe—characters, pacing, action, feelings, plot rhythm, originality. As a plus, the audiobook narrator was mindbogglingly fantastic. I can’t recommend the audiobook enough.

After over a year of being on the hold list, it was fiiiiinally my turn to listen to Cinder (Marissa Meyer). I’m a few years behind on The Lunar Chronicles bus, but I’m glad I got to see for myself what all the fuss is about. Cinder was good. I thought it was cute, creative, and I adored the characters. Scarlet and Cress came in soon after, and I was excited to listen to them as well. Scarlet had some big issues for me regarding character development (the thing I loved the most about the first book) or rather, lack thereof. The plot was yawningly predictable, and I almost didn’t stick it out to the end. I kept finding more things that annoyed me, and that’s when I decided I probably have had too much YA in a row. I’m going to wait to read Cress until the next time I feel like being in a tub of book fluff.

My ongoing project of reading In Search of Lost Time has been progressing very slowly. I keep getting caught up in other books! I’m a chronic multi-book reader.