Category — DYDT

I have stopped reading another book.  A long time ago, I would read a book to the end whether I liked it or not.  Sometimes, if I was only two or three pages in, it felt fair to quit.  Sort of like spitting out a piece of gum after two chews when you suddenly remember that you don’t like spearmint.  But once I had blown a bubble with the gum, I was all in until the flavour was gone.  And that’s how I’ve always been with books.

Since September, I have stopped reading dozens of books.  Sometimes I’m a chapter in.  Other times, I’m only a chapter or two to the end when I quit.  One time, I was six pages from the end.  Six pages.  I literally couldn’t read the final six pages because I wasn’t enjoying the story anymore.  I have a sense the three main characters live some version of happily ever after, but who knows… they could all be dead, hit by a meteor.

It feels cruel to put down a book.  It’s like making someone your best friend and then saying a day later, “I don’t really like you.”  Sometimes it really is me and not the book; my mood changes and I’m no longer grooving on apocalypse fiction.  Sometimes it’s losing patience with a meandering book in grave need of a different editor.  Sometimes I feel like I’ve gotten everything I’m going to get out of the book and I don’t need the ending to feel satiated.

Time feels short.  Life feels short.  It feels too short to feel pressure to finish a book, even a good book.  It feels too short to feel pressure to read certain books just because everyone else is reading them and you don’t want to be left out.  I’ve been using our mortality as a barometer: if I died tomorrow, would I be okay with the books left on my to-read list and would I be okay with the books I just consumed?  What if this book I’m reading now is the last book I ever get to read… will I be okay that this was the last story that passed before my eyes?

The answer to those questions usually leads to me finishing the book.  But dozens of times, it has led to me to look at the to-read pile and think something else would be a better use of my time on earth.  We only have so much time to consume stories and information, and I want to use that time well.

I recently finished The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker.  It was amazing.  Such a good read.  I’d be okay if that was the last book I got to read (though… er… I’d love to still be around and read a lot more books).  I just finished reading One Good Egg by Suzy Becker – a memoir about assisted conception – and it’s fabulous.  I blurbed it, hence why I got to read it ahead of time.  All I can say is that I couldn’t wait to get back to it every night.  I just gave up a book-which-shall-not-be-named, and I’m instead reading The Fault in Our Stars by John Green and Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley (thank you, Loribeth!) along with Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link.  I am so excited about all three of those books.

What is your personal rule for stopping reading books if you have one at all?  Do you feel any guilt when you stop reading?

And leave a book recommendation or ask for one by telling us what else you like.

I am so fascinated in these breakdowns of socks or no socks and house temperature.  I have two more questions that have come out of the comment sections of those posts, and I’ll break them down into two separate posts.  So the first question is whether or not you make your bed.

We do not make our bed.  Pretty much ever.  Maybe if I’m doing the laundry early in the day and new sheets are going on the bed before 10 am.  But if I put on clean sheets in the afternoon or evening?  Never.  Our bed is always unmade.

The twins’ beds are always unmade.  Their rooms are neat.  Their rooms are clean.  Their rooms are vacuumed and dusted and organized.  But their beds are always unmade.

I was never a big bed-maker, and I don’t remember my parents enforcing a bed rule.  I feel a little guilty when I think about this because my mum probably came up to my room after I left for school and made my bed. (I’m sorry!)  But once I left for college, I made the conscious choice not to make my bed.  I wanted to always feel like it was waiting for me, beckoning me to climb under the blankets for a few minutes if I got a chance in the middle of the day.

And I do.  If I’m working out a difficult plotline in my head, trying to come up with a character’s motivations, I climb into bed and set a timer for 5 minutes.  I do my best thinking in that bed.  Don’t you always have 3000 thoughts as you’re trying to fall asleep?  Well, I find that if I get back in bed in the middle of the day, I get those same 3000 flooding my mind.  So I leave the bed unmade.  Because there is only so much time in the day, and I’m not going to spend my minutes making the bed a half dozen times.

Plus while I know some people love that moment of peeling back the blanket and climbing into bed, I have no strong feelings about that moment.  I don’t look at a made bed and think about how delicious it will feel atop smooth sheets.  I just like my sheets clean.  Once clean sheets are on the bed, the blanket can be a crumpled up mess.

We are also an anti bedroll or decorative pillow house.  Everything that goes on the bed gets used: pillows, blankets, and stuffed animals.  And that’s it.

So now you know how messy I am when it comes to my bed.

So do you make your bed every morning?  Or do you leave it unmade?

I have to tell you that the discussion on house temperature was very eye-opening.  While I don’t love being super hot, I would take it any day over being even a little bit cold.  I would never in a trillion years partake in a winter sport that kept me outside for longer than 5 minutes.  I won’t even go to ice hockey games and the rinks are heated.  If it were up to me, I’d keep the house near 74 in winter.  But it’s not up to me.  And I can’t seem to figure out how to change this newfangled thermostat.  So I’m stuck with 70 degrees.

Though a few of your answers brings up an interesting question: do you wear socks to bed?  Do you like socks?

Because I think the world is really divided into the sock-wearers and the sock-endurers.  I am a sock wearer.  I like to wear socks.  I wear them to bed.  I wear them in summer.  I like to buy pretty socks.  Fun socks.  I like to match my socks to my clothes.  If I’m not happy with a certain pair of socks, I will change said pair until I am happy and then can focus on my work.  I do not wear stockings if I can help it, but I do love a good pair of socks.

Sock-endurers wear socks because they have to wear socks, not because they want to wear socks.  They wear socks because it is cold and they need their feet covered if it is cold.  But if given their choice and a decent temperature, they would opt for no socks.

I even have a song about my socks that I wrote and sing any morning that I put on a pair that I particularly like, a sort of commercial-like jingle for my socks.  I’ve heard the kids humming it to themselves as they put on their socks.  Josh is the only person in the house who does not derive great pleasure from his socks.  He just wears them.  He does not partake in reveling in the joy of a good pair of socks wrapped around his feet.

My guess is that sock-wearers tend to like their homes warm and sock-endurers can handle colder temperatures inside.

So are you a sock-wearer or a sock-endurer?  And does that match with how you like your home temperature?

What temperature do you keep your home?  We keep ours around 70 in the winter.  I was promised that once we fixed the windows, I would feel an immediate change; that the 70 degrees on the thermostat would really be 70 degrees as opposed to beforehand with our cruddy windows.  I have not felt said change.  The house feels exactly as it did before.

I like the house very warm.  I once lived in an apartment in Wisconsin where we couldn’t control the heat.  We had these old metal radiators.  Regardless of whether we wanted them on or not, they clanged alive, filling the apartment with hot air.  We wore t-shirts in the middle of winter.  I hated that apartment when I lived in it — the floor was so bowed and uneven that you could put a marble down and it would roll around the room — but I miss the heat that I didn’t pay for, that came out strong and hot, as if it were mimicking the sun.

The problem also is that my home is my office, which means that I’m always cold.  I could put another sweater on, and I usually do, but that doesn’t change the fact that my fingers are cold.  The tips of my fingers are freezing right now.  I decided I would poll all of you to see where our house temperature falls with the general public.  Are we keeping it too cold?  Are we (I highly doubt this) on the high end of the house temperature spectrum?  Or are we somewhere in the middle; in which I have to ask: do you think your home is cold too?

What temperature do you keep your home?