Category — Uncategorized

I’m reading Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell about his bookshop in Scotland. I picked it up because it was on sale (and not in our library system) and didn’t know a lot about it. But I’m absolutely smitten by it and have marked three passages so far.

The first came early on in the book––page 31––when he went to clear the estate of a childless/childfree couple and pick up their books for resale in his shop. He explains,

The experience of clearing a deceased estate is one familiar to most people in the second-hand book trade and it is one to which you slowly become desensitised, except in situations like this, in which the dead couple is childless. For some reason the photographs on the wall – the husband in his smart RAF uniform, the wife as a young woman visiting Paris – evoke a kind of melancholy that is not there in deals where couples are survived by their children. Dismantling such a book collection seems to be the ultimate act of destruction of their character – you are responsible for erasing the last piece of evidence of who they were. This woman’s book collection was a record of her character: her interests, as close as anything she left to some kind of genetic inheritance. Perhaps that’s why her nephew waited so long before asking us to look at the books.

I sat with that passage for a long time. It was written by someone who––as far as I know––doesn’t have children, and his experience, perhaps, has informed his beliefs. But I had a hard time tying it to parenthood. Dismantling any person’s book collection is about releasing their character, and hopefully all of us are more than just our book collections.

Meaning, that concept of the ways we announce to the world “This is who I am” happens through our possessions, even when there are children, AND our possessions or children are not the only statement we leave behind.

Moreover, the children we raise aren’t the only carriers of our story. My former students, for example, carry part of my story. And that story of who I am and what matters to me (they would all tell you the French Revolution; it was the one unit where I cried every year, without fail) is no less important than the story that the twins know.

Unless you never leave your home or interact with other people, that evidence continues to exist, whether we like it or not.

What are your thoughts?

Three posts popped up in my Reader or on a listserv this week that all felt worth mentioning separately from the Roundup.

The first was in The Atlantic and titled “All the Pregnancies I Couldn’t Talk About.” The author chronicles her nine pregnancies and one child. She writes,

We do not talk openly about miscarriage and fertility in America, and yet miscarriage is more common than the flu … For years, I never told anyone about my miscarriages, because as a professional American woman, I’d been indoctrinated to mute the implications of my gender. I should never hint at the idea that my body is capable of reproduction or that I might someday want to start a family.

It’s a moving article, but it will also make you want to get up and cheer. And stand behind her and shout “yes!” because… “I’m older and stronger now, and with some distance I can see that refusing to talk openly about miscarriage is utterly and inexcusably ridiculous. America lacks a requisite societal maturity in how we discuss pregnancy and professionalism.” She’s leading the revolution, and I’m throwing my support behind her.

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The New Yorker has an article about the Polish government seizing the frozen embryos of single women. The author states: “That summer, the laws covering fertility treatment in Poland were shifting. Informed by the Vatican’s absolute opposition to IVF, the socially conservative Law and Justice Party, known by its Polish acronym, PiS, had put forward legislation that would ban IVF and criminalize its provision.”

It’s a look at how anti-IVF sentiment can grow inside a country. It’s terrifying and informative; anyone concerned about reproductive rights (all of us, right?) should read it.

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Finally, a post that is not actually about infertility (or… maybe it is… the author doesn’t state what the injections are for) but about giving yourself (or someone else) an injection. If you’re scared of needles, it’s a great little trick. While I didn’t do it for pain reasons, I did always line up my needle with my skin before pulling back an inch and then plunging in. Makes the shot so much easier.

I love Robin Sloan’s emails. The newsletter will come to an end soon–he promised that in the beginning of the project–but for the time being, he either points out interesting things or makes interesting statements. I don’t mind because it’s more about what he shares vs. the writer himself.

In one of the September newsletters, he talked about this concept of building the end into the beginning. He writes:

There are all these people starting email newsletters suddenly, and I’m glad! It’s good! That said, I hope some of them have considered ahead of time how their newsletters might end. Every internet project is sorta by default open-ended, and I don’t think that’s healthy.

His recommendation is to treat every project as you would a book: beginning, middle, end. You know when a book is complete. You can feel good, knowing you wrote the story across the finish line.

A blog, on the other hand, is an amorphous beast. You either keep writing it forever––this blog is over 13 years old––or you fade away, sometimes without a goodbye. But very few people start a blog and say on the first post how long they’ll write–and then end it when they say they will. Still, with no edge to bump against, how do you know when you’ve accomplished something?

I don’t look at this blog as a project. I look at it as an online home; a space where I live on the Internet. But I’ve been chewing his words as a reader. Would I start reading a blog (not a newsletter) if I knew the blog was going to end? Would I be more likely to skip it because part of blogging is becoming attached to the voice and the writer–not the plotline?

I don’t know. Would you start reading a blog if the person said in the first post, “This blog will be completed on X date” or “This blog will end after X happens”?

This article. All of it. From that opening about giving your baby the gift of being able to actually return to first moments they’ll never remember:

“First memories, forever.” That’s the promise of Babeyes, a product unveiled in January at the Consumer Electronics Show. The idea is simple: Attach the Babeyes camera to your newborn or infant, and it will gather footage of the world from a baby’s point of view.

To the fact that Generation Z is the first generation that has–in some cases–complete day-to-day documentation. While there are a handful of pictures of me from each year of childhood, my kids can reconstruct their lives via pictures on my phone, Tweets, blog posts, Facebook updates.

This generation has never not been watched. Even if their parents don’t share pictures online, they still usually take them. And if they’re not taking them, someone else is taking them. These kids are coming of age and going online themselves, broadcasting their world to their peers. And there are people out there–oftentimes strangers–watching their lives. Which is weird. But as the article states: “when considering these aspects of life, they won’t think of surveillance at all. It won’t be weird.”

Is it surveillance if you agree to it?

And is there any way to not agree to it at this point?

Does this describe every kid? No. But does it ring true, too? Um… yes:

They are saved in the cloud, perpetually viewable, the memories of memories posted to the stream long ago, unable to forget or be forgotten. They are a generation living in a paradox: The more they do and the more they come alive, the more they’re watched and the more narrowly they’ll be defined, boxed in and buried under the data they produce.

Your thoughts?

My cousin and I just started a book club for two. We have lunch every other week or so via Skype. (It’s sort of like being at a restaurant because our disembodied heads on the screen are facing each other.) We decided to layer in a book club meeting every few lunches.

It works like this: we both list ten books we’re excited about from our To Be Read list. First, we see if we overlap with any book. If not, we then look to see if any of the other person’s ten overlap with a book that we didn’t offer up but happens to be on our larger TBR list. Finally… I guess we just convince the other one to read a book we’re excited about.

It helps that we have somewhat similar reading tastes. I mean, not exactly, but we overlap in a bunch of areas. Both of us are reading something we really wanted to read, BUT we also get the benefit of getting to talk about it. Our first selection is an Agatha Christie book we both had on our TBR.

I’m feeling pretty smart at this moment.