As I say every month, I’m shamelessly stealing this idea from Jessica Lahey. She has a recurring monthly date where she reviews all the books she reads that month. Book reviews are important for authors, and I want to get better at doing this.

So. I’m going to review them here and also online, but I’m going to do it a little differently. I’m only going to review the stuff I really liked. I don’t see a reason to spend my time writing about something I didn’t love; it’s just using up more of my energy. So only positive reviews.

These are the books I liked (or mostly liked) from August.

The Compound (Aisling Rawle): Like a new season of Traitors, it was hard to get into it until the numbers dwindled down and you knew the contestants better. And then I was all in. A character asks a question in the book that I’ve always wondered – why would anyone be a participant? It is so far from what I would choose that I would just love to hear why someone chooses to go on a show. In any case, it is a reality television competition in book form.

Vera, or Faith (Gary Shteyngart): I wanted to read this book so badly, but I didn’t enjoy it when I started it. But then I kept reading and it took awhile but it grew on me. So I ended it happy that I stuck with it. There are some gorgeous thoughts and phrasing in the book, and Vera is delectable, as she would say. So happy I read it, even though I was a little sad through the whole thing.

Mean Moms (Emma Rosenblum): A mindlessly fun book with a strange structure. You know the person behind everything halfway through the book but the characters don’t. It took a little of the tension out of the end of the book. But still a good summer read about terrible people.

The Collectors (Philip Pullman): A brilliant short story from the world of His Dark Materials. You can read it without reading the books, but you’ll get more out of it if you’ve read at least The Golden Compass. I’m rereading the books before the publication of The Rose Field. Love being in this world – it stays with you long after you close each story.

The Golden Compass (Philip Pullman): A second reading of this book in the same year. Or maybe last year? It is so nice to back in Lyra’s company. It’s like entering Narnia or falling into Wonderland. And I probably related to the story, especially the pain of separation, in a different way than I did so many years ago. Again, part of the re-reading before The Rose Field is released this fall.

The Marble Hall Murders (Anthony Horowitz): There is no such thing as a bad Anthony Horowitz book. I save Anthony Horowitz books for when I need a solid, perfect book — think of it as literary rainy days. And I needed to end summer on a high note. This one did it. I guessed a few things correctly but didn’t care. I just liked being along for the ride with Susan.

What did you read last month?

There is a commercial that keeps airing on one of the streaming services that shows a man standing teary-eyed in a house, and the voice-over talks about how he thought he would never be able to afford a home, but a loan from X place made his dream possible. It’s not that I don’t want the nice actor to have a house; of course, I do. It’s the point that housing, food, water, utilities, health care: These necessities should be affordable. Having a place to live is a basic human need.

Of course, it doesn’t have to mean home ownership. It could be affordable rent with a fair lease and stability.

If you don’t know the musician Erin McKeown, you’re missing out. She is a hugely talented singer and songwriter, but she’s also just a great writer.

In her recent Substack, she talks about losing her home for the last 20 years, a cabin that has featured as a character in her casual YouTube videos. She tells the story about how this cabin became her home, and then how it came not to be her home. She writes about trying to buy a house a few years ago (in lowercase):

the last few years, approaching age 50, i made a decision to change my priorities. reading our current cultural landscape, looking at my shifting physical and mental health, i decided to try to buy a house. to spare you a long and humiliating story, its not in the cards for me. … in this moment, i viscerally get why the mirage of homeownership is so potent. why people do crazy things to achieve it or keep it.

She ends with important questions: “what does it mean to say goodbye to a house? was it ever mine? what does a place mean to creativity? what happens to your art practice when you change your home?”

I think about this a lot. A friend of mine moved recently, and while the act was hard, the end result was freeing. She no longer has moving anxiety, even though the idea of saying goodbye to her space felt enormous.

Deep questions.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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Someone shared this older list of words you may not know, and… the author was correct. Most of these were words I didn’t know. I knew (and use) three: tine, petchichor, and interrobang. How about you?

And what is another word that you know that I may not know? Teach me a new word.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts connected to businesses or sponsored posts.

I am here, though I feel a little less myself without the kids here. So maybe a version of myself is back. A slightly different version than the person I am when they’re home.

While I was away, a person liked a comment I made on a friend’s Substack many years ago, so it sent me a notification. I left it about a year before the twins left for college, about the college drop off:

I don’t see myself being nearly as okay with the moment. We’re a year away. I cry now. I think about it now. I sense that it will intensify when we actually reach the moment. I don’t know how I’ll step back into the car, even though I also rationally know that I will need to do it. I need to know how to let that rational side of my brain (I prepared them, they’re ready for this, it will be good for them) can be louder than the emotional side of my brain.

Side note: I never learned how to let that rational side of my brain be louder than the emotional side of my brain.

It is still impossibly hard. I feel something ripping inside of me when we drive away, and it comes with physical pain. It’s so strange; I can stand there and calmly say goodbye to them, thinking I’ll be okay this time. And then the moment the actual separation begins, when they walk away from the car and I am alone with Josh, it feels like something internally explodes, rips… I lack the perfect term to describe how it feels. Just that it is physically and emotionally painful.

I was talking to Mali after she left a comment on one of the blog posts I re-posted while away. I don’t see the grief — even the pre-grief — as necessarily a bad thing. I don’t want to cry earlier than necessary or worry constantly, and I certainly don’t want to feel the explosion of physical and emotional pain when I separate from them.

While I can never know about joys that I missed out on (in the same way that I can never know any of the things that didn’t happen), I would guess that I ended up having more joy due to the anticipation. It made me mindful of grabbing the moment. Of doing things together. Of being present. It made me volunteer for things so I could be involved. It made me come up with projects we could do together, such as volunteering with animals. And they acknowledge and appreciate their childhood and can see from friends how lots of parents are otherwise. So it was mostly a good thing even if the anticipation made me sad.

That’s what the separation pain is — an inverse of the joy felt by being with them.

So I am back. In a way.

Okay and now something different. I have no clue why I wrote this and never posted it, but I found this in the draft folder from December 2009. Enjoy. I’ll be back to writing this weekend.

This is what happened on Wednesday night.

The twins and I were at an old community center where I used to take art classes. We were visiting a friend at her office, which was located next to the pottery studio. After I pointed out this room as we were exiting the building, the ChickieNob asked if the ballet studio was nearby too because she knew I had taken a multitude of dance classes at this center as well.

We poked around until we found the dance studio which was inhabited at the time by two women in their sixties or so. I showed the ChickieNob the room and told the women that I had danced at that studio back in the early ’80s. One of the women began reminiscing with me about old dance teachers I remembered and a performance of Peter Rabbit I was in with my sister when we were little.

She turned to the twins and said, “would you like to see a picture of your mommy and aunt dressed like rabbits? Follow me!”

So we followed her. Except the first thing she did was walk into the women’s bathroom in the hallway. Which sort of gave me pause. I mean, did she honestly want an entourage as she peed? It’s a little awkward, you know, following a sixty-year-old woman into a bathroom just to see a bunny picture, but we’re not faint-of-heart. So after a pause, we went in after her.

Except like the White Rabbit, she was still moving, not pausing (oh her ears and whiskers!) as she cut through a back entrance to the bathroom. We were now in a different hallway and we caught up with her, chatting about the various classes I had taken over the years.

We walked for about ten minutes, trailing down stairways and through long wings of buildings until we came to a security door in the underground passageway. The woman used an electronic key to wave us in–and I’d like to pause for a moment to admit that I thought this was crack assward and strange. I mean, why would they place a dance studio director’s office so far from the dance studio. But we followed her anyway.

We walked a bit further, chatting about my mother, old teachers, this absolutely strange underground area that felt like the crypts beneath St. Peter’s in the Vatican (oh…and yes…I’ve been beneath St. Peter’s, but that is a different insane story involving myself getting swept up with a bunch of priests). Finally, she paused outside a random door that looked like it led to an aftercare-type classroom. We could definitely hear children inside.

We followed her into the room at which point she turned to us and said, “is there something you need?”

“Um…,” I said. “We’ve been following you because you told my children that you wanted to show them a picture of me dressed like a bunny.”

“What?” the woman admonished. “They’re not here. They’re at my house. I keep those photographs at my house. I was asking if you wanted to come to my house to see them.”

Everyone in the room stared at us.

“Um…,” I continued. “You actually said, ‘follow me’ which is why we have been following you.”

“How did you get in here? This is a security-protected area.”

“You let us in,” I pointed out. “With your electronic key. We’ve been talking this whole time…no?”

I bowed my way out of the room and waited until we got in the hallway to start muttering to the twins, “that was strange, that was so strange, that was really really strange.”

Except we didn’t know how to get out. Because we were underground. And we had been talking through a multitude of passageways and through doors and up and down stairs for 10 minutes. So we had to figure our way out of the building and finally found our way back to the school that is on the main floor.

“I am buying myself a cup of coffee after this,” I told the twins as we passed the cafe in the front lobby.

“I have no energy,” the ChickieNob announced, spying a display of muffins as I waited for my coffee. “I cannot even stand anymore because I am so tired from that strange walk. I’m just going to lie down on the floor.”

And she proceeded to lie down on the floor of the cafe.

And her brother joined her.

And that’s how I ended up buying them a blueberry muffin because I literally couldn’t handle embarrassing ourselves one more time that day in that building.

We finally exited to the parking lot, almost 45 minutes after we meant to leave. When we got in the car, I buckled them in and said, “you know how I once told you that when you’re older you can take a dance class there? Well, I take it all back.”

And no one needed me to explain why.