The Richer Part of Simply Richer Living

  I am a huge reader.  I love a wide range of literature, depending on my mood; during this particular time of change in my home life, I'm loving non-fiction (biography and history).  When I'm calmer and feeling a lot more secure, I love more serious fiction -- Lolita baffled me, until I got to the end and everything became clear.  When things are smooth, I have the patience to make a long investment to find out why something is worth the effort.

And of course I'm a sucker for really great popular fiction, like (I'm not embarrassed to admit) Twilight or Outlander or The Partner or a great mystery/thriller/spy/horror novel.  I love that summer gives me such an excellent excuse to read beach books.

Because I'm in a time of transition and the busy-ness of the end of my kids' school year, I'm enjoying the solidness of a good biography, which is absorbing and thought-provoking, but solid and lacking any real suspense.  The one I'm reading now, Lytton Strachey: The New Biography ** by Michael Holroyd*, is exceptionally well-written, and the story of Holroyd's efforts to bring it forth is interesting in itself.  I'm really enjoying it, but since I know the broad outline of Strachey's story, I am totally OK with setting the book down to run an errand or go to bed or hang out with my kids or whatever the day requires.  Whereas, when I read Twilight, I sucked the four volumes down in one weekend while my kids watched waaaaaay too many movies and ate peanut butter & jelly sandwiches so I could prepare their meals while I read the book (I'm not kidding -- I set the book next to their plates and read while I spread the jelly).

The best exercise I've gotten in the last six months was the hour I spent pacing my own house while I read  the last few chapters of Dragonfly in Amber, the second book of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series.  Seriously, I was panting by the time I had to put the book down to pick up my kindergartener, and it wasn't just because of the steamy sex scenes.

Anyway, business is beginning to wind down on this whole house sale/move business -- FINALLY -- and my mind is turning to fiction and engagement again.  So when I found this article, "Read and Comprehend (Nearly) Everything" by Nick Kolakowski, the timing was right.  And I liked it.  Apparently, the secret to understanding Dante's Inferno isn't just being a poetry-comprehension genius -- it's in shelling out the bucks (or having the patience to find for cheap or free) for a really good explanatory edition.  And then having the patience to work your way through it with the endnotes/footnotes.

I have to say, that's pretty reassuring.  It takes a lot of that whole "I didn't go to Oxford so I will never understand this stuff" out of it and just replaces it with a bit of work.  Which one is free to undertake, or not, with basically a $15-$17 investment.  Not to mention Internet access.

Kolakowski also references the Modern Library Top 100, which apparently wasn't only relevant on the eve of Y2K.  The cool thing about the Top 100 list is that it's actually several lists, including reader lists and board ("expert") lists, Radcliffe's Rival list, and a list of 100 Best Non-Fiction.  It's a nice resource to reference when you're not sure what to read next, or if you just want to create kind of a "bucket list" of reading material.  For myself, that's an impossible task, as my "to-read" list grows literally at least twenty times faster than my "read" list.

Which brings me to Goodreads.  I have kept a journal of the books I've read and had recommended to me since I was in high school, but I've abandoned them all now.  I keep track of what I've read and what I'm going to read and what I am currently reading on Goodreads.  It's like a Facebook for fellow readers.  I'm very picky with my friends list -- I have only 23 on Goodreads, compared to ten times that many on Facebook -- and that includes writers who interest me (like Jasper Fforde, who also merits his own blog entry).  I only want friends on Goodreads who are either so close that I can't ignore them (like my husband) or whose reading taste is so similar to mine that I want to know what has caught their eye -- like two friends whose permission to be mentioned I have not requested.

The point is, I recommend Goodreads as a great resource for reading and for reviews.  The reviews are a little more stringent, but more accurate, than those on Amazon, and tend to be written by people who actually read or attempted to read the book they are reviewing.  There are also opportunities to receive free books as part of Goodreads' Giveaway program, among other things.

....

Sorry, got a little distracted placing entries for the Giveaway program...

Anyway, Goodreads doesn't give me anything to plug them, either, but I love how functional and reliable it is.  If the zombie apocalypse comes along on December 21, 2012, and there's no more internet, then I'll be hurting for sure, but for now, it's a great tool and resource.  Check it out.

Kolakowski's final paragraph takes all the pressure off reading with a purpose:

Most constant readers find a balance between the complex, "deep" stuff (i.e., Nabokov, weighty biographies of famous historical figures) lightened with servings of frothy popular literature and nonfiction.

The takeaway here is:  even when life is crazy and hectic and maybe even borderline unmanageable, find a way to do the things you love in ways that fit your life as it is shaped in the moment.  There is something out there that can refresh your brain, whatever way it needs refreshing, and if you don't, then what's all the rest of it for?

Lytton Strachey,
as painted by Dora Carrington
courtesy Wikipedia

  *Lytton Strachey was a member of the Bloomsbury Group and a close friend of Virginia Woolf's.  He is famous in his own right for his excellent historical writing, especially Eminent Victorians and Queen Victoria (I'm not sure this link is the best edition available but hopefully it's all right).  He was one of the first historical writers to write not just hagiography, but a full and personal biography that considered the subject from a variety of perspectives.  This is a lot more important than it sounds and would be worth spending an entire separate post on, but for now it's sufficient to say that the world would be a much stiffer place without Lytton Strachey, who is an absolutely delightful character.  If you don't have it in you to read 500 pages of great and detailed biography that includes snippets of him prowling darkened WWI London in search of handsome young men, then watch the movie Carrington, starring Emma Thompson and Jonathan Pryce, among others, available on Netflix Instant Queue.

** Note that I'm not remunerated by anybody at all for anything that I put on my blog at this time, I'm only sharing these links for my readers' convenience.

Laundry is My Emmamy

At the very end of 2009 the obligatory Facebook app made the rounds, summing up a year's worth of posts with cloud labels.  Coming off a high-low year that contrasted the demands of running a household with three children aged six and under with the incredible experience of training for and completing the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer 3 Day, I installed it.  I expected to relive all the satisfaction of the work I did for the 3 Day, something that reflected my hard work and success.  Which I did.

But the mentions of the laundry were a lot huger.

I'm going to backtrack a bit to a Cute Thing My Kids Said a couple of days ago.

Me, serving dinner: "Quentin, would you like any grape tomatoes?"

Quentin (age 4), looks up: "No." Looks back at his plate.  No expression.

Duncan (age 6), astounded: "But why not?  They're the most delicious things ever!"

Quentin, deadpan: "Vegetables are my emmamy."

Which is it, in one.  Laundry is my emmamy.

Now, I do try not to be Debbie Downer on Facebook.  So I use little euphemisms, like "I'm off to tackle Mount Washmore!" because it really was the most interesting thing going on in a day that is typically filled with various potty responsibilities and the making of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  Also, I think just lurking is sneaky and Facebook was, at that time, pretty much my only adult interaction for days on end.  On a really good day I might post "Mount Washmore is a molehill!" but by the next morning somebody would have wet the bed and I'd be in silent despair as I contemplated the loads of bedding to be dealt with.

I don't expect many men to have made it this far into the SAHM's lament, but just in case my husband's eyes haven't yet glazed over, and also to enumerate the pain of fellow laundry haters, I will spell out exactly why I loathe a job that is primarily done by two (mostly) automatic machines.

First is sheer volume.  In my household there are two adults, three children, and a cat.  Now, though I don't actually dress my cat, he does generate more than his share of laundry... if you get my drift.  He's old and not as spry as he used to be and, like the children in 2009, he doesn't always get there in time.  Which is fun.  I expect the rest of the family is self-explanatory, but what it all amounts to is that there is a lot of laundry and it's generally very disgusting, especially in 2009, when my children were 6, 3, and 1.

Second is my own idea of a job well-done.  Apparently there are a lot of ways to separate laundry (one friend divided them into "whites, reds or pinks, and everything else") and I use one of the more elaborate systems, involving not only color but fabric care. So nobody else is allowed to separate the laundry but me.

Third is the amount of time the machines take and the nature of parenting.  The washing machine takes just under an hour, but the dryer takes just over an hour.  This means that if I start the washer and the dryer at the same time, the washer will have to sit, completed, till the dryer finishes.  Except, if I put a load of line-dry only clothes in, I can squeeze two loads into the washer before I have to move the second one over to the dryer, so theoretically I get more done.  Except, when you are the only adult in the house reponsible for three children under six, inevitably there's going to be some reason to forget that you are supposed to go back and move everything over, and you certainly can't babysit the machines when you have to prevent the children from killing each other, or poisoning themselves, or when you have to fetch them from school or take them to baseball practice or... take your choice.  Children are distracting... as is Facebook.

Then there's the folding... the endless, monotonous folding.  It's not so bad when I can watch a lot of TV while I'm working at it, but I can't really watch TV while the children are around if I don't want their brains to rot in their heads and leak right out of their ears, so I inevitably end up taking 2 nights a week with a gargantuan mound of laundry next to me and watch something like 4 episodes of Star Trek Voyager until I get it all done.  Which is fine, I guess, although we are now a one-TV household and my husband really likes his xBox.

I won't talk about lugging it all around to the five rooms in the house where it is all stored.

Are you tired yet?

So in 2010, when my youngest son was 2 1/2 and we judged that my parents wouldn't hate us if they kept the three children while my husband and I took a long weekend to ourselves, we went to stay at a resort in Jamaica.  We went there to sit on the beach and just rest.  I exerted myself far enough to get a pedicure.  While I was at the salon, just me and the aesthetician, there was a terrible thunderstorm and the power went out.  She opened all the windows and we had enough light for her to keep working.  It was quiet, really, really quiet, and peaceful, and she was a very beautiful woman.  Not magazine beautiful, but character beautiful.  Someone you could really like.  And in that peaceful setting, with her working on my feet, we got to talking like women, sharing about our families (she had two teenage daughters) and how things were in Jamaica, which at that time was experiencing a lot of unrest in Kingstown, on the other end of the island.  (Now that I think about it, I don't know how or if or when that worked out, and I'm a little ashamed).

She said, "Three children, that's a lot of work."

And I, feeling rested and relaxed after two and a half days of enough sleep and nobody begging me for anything, said, "Yes, they are a lot of work.  But they're a lot of fun, too.  The laundry is the worst part."

She was surprised and we got to talking about laundry.  She never even thought of it as a chore, she said, because nobody has a washing machine, let alone a dryer, you just wash all your clothes in a tub, and it takes maybe ten or fifteen minutes.  You put it out on the line and a couple of hours later you bring it in and that's all there is to it.

So it got me wondering.  Has our labor-saving device turned what could be a short, quick job into something that requires hours of thought and effort?  If I did all my laundry in the bathtub instead of in a high efficiency front loader would I be able to make peace with that chore?

But then I look at Mount Washmore.  And I think of putting all that in a tub, and scrubbing it by hand, and hauling it out to the clothesline my neighborhood won't permit me to have, and how long it would take to dry in the San Francisco Bay Area fog belt even if I had one, and I think, not bloody likely.

So, laundry is, and shall remain, my emmamy.