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I went through a bit of a reading crisis recently where I got beyond the midway point in two books and stopped enjoying them. They weren’t actively upsetting me; picking them up felt like a slog.

I know the whole sunk cost fallacy of continuing to invest time into something you’re not enjoying, but one of the drawbacks of tracking your reading in a tool like Goodreads is that you want credit for that initial time investment. You want those pages read to count in your page total at the end of the year.

A bad reason to keep reading a book.

I read a statistic recently that gave me pause, and I’ve been using it as a barometer for whether to keep going:

You’re likely to only read 2,500, maybe 5,000 books in your lifetime. Is this book you’re slogging through really worth the time that could be spent reading another, better book?

Only 2,500 books? Would I get to the end of my life and be happy that I used one of those slots on the book I’m reading?

In one case, I kept reading the story. I didn’t enjoy it, but it wasn’t terrible. I was glad I finished it because it gave me insight into whether I’d like other books in that genre. (Probably not.)

The other book was in a familiar genre, and while a lot of other people would like it, I found that the author kept saying the same thing. I looked up and realized I was 120 pages into the book and hadn’t learned anything new about the characters or the plot. So I stopped reading that one and switched to something I was certain I’d be happy to have spent one of my 2,500 on.

It brings a certain weight to your choice if you think of it as a set budget of time. A limited number of slots. It doesn’t mean everything has to be profound or amazing, but I need to stop holding onto books I know I’ll enjoy for some future point and consume them now so I’m not using up those slots on things I don’t love and never getting to the ones I know I will.

There was a warning for damaging winds in my area on Sunday, but I had symphony tickets, and everything looked okay outside, so I decided to head to the performance. About 20 minutes into the show, the lights went brighter on the stage, then they went off, then the house lights went on, and then we were all plunged into complete darkness.

The musicians kept playing.

At intermission, the director explained that the light changes were due to the generator. The power was out to the building, and they were operating at 50% lighting capacity. He said they were going to try to finish the performance, and they would help people out of the building if the lights failed completely.

Many people left immediately. I decided to stay.

The conductor promised that he would finish with an Enescu piece that would be electrifying to make up for the ever-changing light situation. He delivered — it was the most impassioned, gorgeous, energetic performance of “Romanian Rhapsody” ever played.

I drove home carefully; traffic lights were out along the way, but everything was fine at home. We had clearly lost power while I was out, but it was back on. I ate dinner, spoke to the kids, and went about preparing to watch the SNL special.

And then the power went out. It came back on a few times only to turn off again a moment later and finally stayed off for good. I had one flashlight, so I went downstairs to Beorn because he gets scared in storms. He was standing at attention with all of his hair raised and his eyes wide, so I sat with him, spoke quietly, and shined a flashlight at the ceiling, telling him that I thought the lights would come back on soon.

And that’s when we heard a series of deafening cracks, one after the other, and thumping crashes that shook the house. I put my arms over my head, and Beorn let out a shriek. When the noise stopped, I looked around, determined the room looked fine, and gave Beorn his hiding house when I went upstairs to investigate.

Enormous tree limbs had fallen into our yard, exploding upon impact, so branches filled the space. I shone the flashlight outside, taking in the damage, and saw a single bird still standing on the branch. It had fallen with the tree and stood there for about 10 minutes, looking around, before it flew away.

I sat in the dark with Beorn, who whimpered inside his hiding house for hours. He wouldn’t even come out for a cookie, and there is nothing in life that Beorn loves more than alfalfa cookies. When Josh came home, we assessed the power situation and crawled into bed because it was getting cold. There was nothing we could do until morning, though the power came on a little before 1 am, which woke us up, and we returned the food we had moved into the freezer back into the refrigerator.

It felt a bit like the universe delivered a metaphor for everything going on in our country right now. A big storm causes enormous damage without any indication of when it will end or if the power will come back on. Standing by the window, assessing the damage, and making calls to try to get someone to help us. And then, hoping that everything will work out and that help will arrive, we’ll look back on this moment two years from now, knowing whether the damage was fixed.

In third grade, my class read The Hundred Penny Box by Sharon Bell Mathis about a boy whose great-great aunt has a penny for each year of her life, a physical object representing the stories that capture a life lived.

We started the book a few days after I returned from my great-grandmother’s funeral. I hadn’t attended; I had stayed back with my mother’s cousin’s wife and her children, and she had taken my sister and me to Don’s and allowed us to choose a cookie from the bakery, which was exciting but also filled me with shame to be so happy about that when I didn’t have my great-grandma anymore. And as we read this book, I started crying during the reading group. I was never going to see my great-grandmother again.

I had forgotten about that until I saw the announcement that the mint was ordered to cease creating pennies. All of the news stories focused on what this would mean for pricing or how pennies would still be around for many years, even if they weren’t creating new ones.

But I was thinking about the hundred penny box and how the character’s great-great aunt wouldn’t have been able to have a 2025 penny to mark this year of her life. How each change has an impact we can’t always predict, bumping life out of place.

Beyond some halfheartedly-watched cooking competitions ten years ago, I’ve never gotten into reality television competitions, but I had read about the Traitors, and when we walked past a billboard advertising the show while in Norwich, I asked everyone if we could try it the next night.

We were coming in mid-season, and I couldn’t connect with it. The people were overly enthusiastic about some pretty annoying tasks and overly dramatic in the face of non-danger. When we turned it off, I said that I didn’t need to give it a second chance.

But then I couldn’t stop thinking about it the next day, and when someone suggested we give it another try, we ended up watching another episode. And by that point, I was invested. I wanted to see who won.

When we got back to the US, we bought a year of Peacock so we could watch through past seasons while waiting for the current season to reach the US. Once again, I started out feeling pretty meh about the whole thing and then convinced Josh we should give up our afternoon plans and watch three episodes in a row. Plus a little of the next episode because we couldn’t end on the cliffhanger.

I’m unsure what appeals to me because I would never want to be on it myself. I wouldn’t want to be a faithful OR a traitor. Maybe it’s just interesting to watch truthful people have to convince people they are being truthful, sort of like the opposite of the Turing test, where humans would have to convince people of their humanness. Which, now that I think about it, is going on now as people are not using AI but are accused of using AI, and they have to prove a human wrote something.

We haven’t tried the US, Australian, or New Zealand versions yet, so we have many seasons to get through before we run out of Traitors episodes.

Whenever we go anywhere far away — let’s say an airplane ride away — I feel the need to do all the things. See everything. Go everywhere. Check it all off the list in case we don’t have a chance to come back.

It’s an impossible task unless there are very few things you want to do in a place.

This past trip to the UK, I quickly became obsessed with trying to fit in a few days in Cornwall. If we were going to be in Cornwall, I wanted to also go out to the Isles of Scilly. And if we were doing all of that, we might as well slip into Wales. (Oh! And throw in Tintagel Castle on the way there.)

Josh kept saying, “Okay, but what are you taking out?” Nothing. That is what I am taking out. I am going to do everything we have planned, AND I’m going to somehow traverse several more areas.

We ended up not crushing several more places into a packed schedule, but it hurt my heart to be so close and miss out. Who knows how the world will change? What if I never get back there?

I get that is just life. Life is a series of things that are left undone.