Reading, with twins?? Yes! During naps, in the evenings, on weekends.
Here are some of my favorite books from my posts. If you wind up clicking one of the links and buying a book (via Powell’s or Amazon) you help support this blog / the twins’ college fund. Thanks!
Short stories (great when you’re constantly interrupted!):
A collection of stories that capture the end of innocence or the end of eras, but beauty and mystery tinge the darkest moments.
If you prefer to look at this book on Amazon (especially if you’re an Amazon Mom and need good reading — stat!), click here.
Odd, quirky, realistically-supernatural stories that invoke a sense of wistful nostalgia even when set in the present time.
If you prefer to look at this book on Amazon, click here.
Novels:
A fifteen year old girl, leaving her already troubled past behind, navigates the Stark River with little more than a rifle and a fierce desire to live on her own terms.
If you prefer to look at this book on Amazon, click here.
The Appalachian woods can give privacy to a life … or concealment to a grave.
If you prefer to look at this book on Amazon, click here.
Nonfiction:
The title almost says it all … but with an otter pipe, a rhinoceros woodcut, a Hawaiian feather helmet given to Captain Cook, a Victorian tea set, a contemporary credit card — the pleasure is in the details.
If you prefer to look at this book on Amazon, click here.
Academic(ish):
Explores the silences in literature — how gender, class and race can stop the flow of words for a time, or a lifetime. Stunning.
If you prefer to look at this book on Amazon, click here.
Super-fun:
Henry VIII: a king who would bow to no one’s authority — not even the Pope’s … until the next full moon.
If you prefer to look at this book on Amazon, click here.
Katniss Everdeen takes her sister’s place in the Hunger Games, a punishing contest in which two teenage “tributes” from each of the 12 Districts are forced to fight to the death.
If you prefer to look at this book on Amazon, click here.
Katniss’s survival of the Hunger Games is seen as an act of defiance against the Capitol. Can she survive the Hunger Games again?
If you prefer to look at this book on Amazon, click here.
The mockingjay: a hybrid of government-spy jabber jays and naturally occurring mocking birds. Who’s mocking who? Rebellion is spreading …
If you prefer to look at this book on Amazon, click here.
A wall of ice, the threat of invaders, gigantic wolves, evil twins, questionable heirs — and Sean Bean plays Eddard Stark on HBO. What’s not to love? The first book in an on-going series.
If you prefer to look at this book on Amazon, click here.
Looking for something else? Try here:
Or, for Amazon, here: Amazon’s book page
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This is the book that started me thinking, years ago, about drawing room life, the dangers of television and some long-forgotten lessons from The Age of Reason:
Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future.
And this is the first book I’m going to read during my new drawing room evenings! Stay “tuned” …
***
In my last Downton Abbey post I wrote about being a mother to baby twins, and how it felt like living in another, slower century — not much happened, but there was lots of time to ruminate about what did. It reminded me of drawing room life, which is what I propose to return to — at least a little bit — in honor of dear Downton.
But I don’t have sisters or servants and I don’t play bridge. So I think I’ll curl up on my non-silk sofa with a good book instead.
Perhaps I’ll choose …
The World of Downton Abbey. If you right-click on the cover or the link (for this book or any other), you can “Look Inside” this book on Amazon. A little bit of history, a little bit of cast interviews and lots of lush photos — the perfect transition from the small screen to print.
Or I might go with
Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey: The Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle. This is NOT a book about Downton Abbey, but the place — and some of the people — that inspired the series. Highclere Castle is where the series was filmed, and Lady Almina has much in common with Lady Cora. See what life was like upstairs for the Carnarvon family, as written by the current Earl’s wife.
Then, of course, there’s downstairs …
Below Stairs: The Classic Kitchen Maid’s Memoir That Inspired “Upstairs, Downstairs” and “Downton Abbey” This is Margaret Powell’s first-hand account of being in service starting as a kitchen maid (like Daisy) in the 1920s. Sometimes funny, sometimes bitter, Powell offers a valuable view into life below stairs.
***
Housecleaning with E.B. White:
Moving always makes me think of E.B. White’s essay “Goodbye to 48th Street” (which can be found in the Essays of E.B. White). In this essay, White tries to send some of his worldly goods back out into the world before a move to Maine. If I’m troubled by a plastic skull and a glass Last-Supper platter, White is confounded by such objects as an academic trophy and a wood chip that a beaver has gnawed on. He tries taking one object a day out to a street-side trash can but soon realizes that a “man could walk away for a thousand mornings carrying something with him to the corner and there would still be a home full of stuff.”
***
Years ago a friend loaned me this book, which I just rediscovered while purging my library:
Clear Your Clutter With Feng Shui
It’s a little hokey in spots, but we became so into its basic tenants (although not so much the last chapter, about a different kind of cleanse) that neither of us really owns it. We pass it back and forth, whenever one of us needs a cleaning pep talk, or the other feels like the book is taking up too much space.
Kingston reminds us that the root of the word “clutter” comes from the Middle English “clotter,” which means to coagulate. Yuck — all kinds of junk clotting up your space, leaving you stuck and stale. I don’t know how much I believe in “energy flow” (or feng shui) but I do know that clutter seems to attract more clutter, and a clean and spare house makes me happier than a dusty junky one. And Kingston’s main point makes all kinds of sense: if you clear your clutter you have more room for your actual life.
***
What a terrific book! It tells the story of Thomas Cromwell, who rose from obscurity (he was a blacksmith’s son — his enemies at court never let him forget it) to be Henry VIII’s chief minister during the king’s turbulent divorce from Catherine of Aragon, his subsequent marriage to Anne Boleyn, the execution of Thomas More and various misadventures after that.
Usually More is painted as the hero of these stories — a Catholic martyr to his conscience, which wouldn’t allow him to name the King head of the Church or grant his right to divorce his wife — but Mantel makes Cromwell, who I always saw as simply a tool of Henry’s, a full-fledged person: husband, father, guardian, admirer of women, of fashion, of food, of learning, a man committed to his his work, his faith, his king.
Thomas Cromwell by Hand Holbein, 1532-3
It’s a difficult book — in a way. Mantel is slippery with pronouns: sometimes it takes a quick backtrack to figure out which “he” is speaking. But at the same time, I couldn’t put it down. Even when it was past my bedtime, even when exhausted by my one-year-old twins. I was pained, last night, to have the book end long before his story ends.
But then, this morning, on Amazon, I discovered Bring Up the Bodies: A Novel (Wolf Hall Trilogy). A trilogy! There’s more!
Soon Henry’s marriage to Anne falters and she becomes nothing but in the way. Cromwell is called upon to try her for treason. And another lady-in-waiting is waiting — for Henry — in the wings.
It releases on May 22nd, which is a very good thing for me. Now I can’t stay up past my bedtime — unless it’s with anticipation …
***
… when the twins were around nine months old, I thought: enough. And I started to carve out writing time. Three books helped.
The first book was The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron.
There’s a lot in this book that strikes me as hokey, but there’s more that feels useful. The book’s two main prescriptions, so to speak, can change your creative life:
- Every day, first thing, write “morning pages.” These should be handwritten in a notebook. It doesn’t matter what you write in your morning pages as long as you write them. Three pages. Every morning. (My own suggestion: if three pages seems like a lot, get a smaller notebook!)
- Every week take yourself out on an artist’s date. This should be done alone (not with your significant other — even if he, too, is an artist). This date can be as elaborate as flying to New York City to tour the Met, or as simple as poking around the used book store up the street. Again, it doesn’t really matter what you do, as long as you’re doing something that’s fun and in some way supports your creativity and/or your identity as an artist.
The second book was Writing Motherhood by Lisa Garrigues.
This book also prescribes writing daily pages — mother pages, Garrigues calls them. (If you are already writing morning pages, trying to fit another set of pages into the same day may be impossible — especially if you’re, like, actually a mother! I recommend alternating — or saving one set of pages for a weekend outing to a cafe or some other writer-friendly place.)
What I like about Writing Motherhood is that it prompts you to think primarily about your story as a mother — not your children’s stories (shrimp curls, head lifts, push-ups, etc.). Stories of motherhood are surprisingly — and sadly — few and far between; this book helps change that.
The next book wasn’t what I expected — not even what I wanted, really — but it turned out to be a very good thing: Writer Mama: How to Raise a Writing Career Alongside Your Kids by Christina Katz.
This is a more practical, less reflective book. If you want to publish your writing in magazines (parent-y or otherwise) this book gives great advice — how to sketch a feature article, how to write a query letter, how to conduct an interview, etc. This becomes highly useful if you’ve been writing morning or mother pages and find you have something you want to revise for publication.
In my earlier post Blogging moms = happier moms, I wrote that I’ve started to see blogging as its own form of writing — not something all that separate from, say, essay writing. If you’re a writer and a mother, writing is no less important than mothering.
Some days are harder than others. Some days my writing has to take a backseat. Or be chucked in the trunk. Or left behind entirely.
Some hours of those hard days I wonder what I was thinking, trying to write through this first year of the twins’ lives. But then I remember the motto that my husband and I came up with when the twins were only a few months old: It can be done!
It can, and these books can help.
***
I’ve been reading Bitter Fame, a biography of Sylvia Plath.
This is not a very smart thing to do — read anything about or by Sylvia Plath — when you are feeling a bit imbalanced yourself. I remember reading The Bell Jar while staying with my then-boyfriend’s parents in Phoenix, a city I had never been to before, which I found ordered in its geography but almost anarchic due to the heat: big mistake. Reading the story of Esther Greenwood’s encroaching madness made me almost as anti-social and rude as Plath was said to be in her last few years.
… Perversely, I’ve been stalling over unpacking — the one thing that would get me settled and balanced — by reading Bitter Fame. I knew this was rather unwise, but I was still in the early stages of the book, when Plath launches herself first at Smith and then at Cambridge, her suicide attempt at the age of 21 soon eclipsed by her writing successes and her dramatic meeting with Ted Hughes. Of course I knew how the story ended, but I was transfixed by her journal entries, how raw and tumbling they were, how … writerly and poetic. Here is an excerpt about that first meeting with Hughes:
Then the worst thing happened, that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room, but no one told me, came over and was looking hard in my eyes and it was Ted Hughes. I started yelling again about his poems and quoting: ‘most dear unscratchable diamond’ and he yelled back, colossal, in a voice that should have come from a Pole, ‘You like?’ and asking me if I wanted brandy, and me yelling yes and backing into the next room . . . and bang the door was shut and he was sloshing brandy into a glass and I was sloshing it at the place where my mouth was when I last knew about it.
We shouted as if in a high wind … And then it came to the fact that I was all there, wasn’t I, and I stamped and screamed yes . . . and I was stamping and he was stamping on the floor, and then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hair band off, my lovely red hairband scarf which had weathered the sun and much love, and whose like I shall never again find, and my favorite silver earrings: hah, I shall keep, he barked. And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face.
Pow.
Now. This is not how I want to live — or write — not now. But in my 20’s? Hot damn, yes.
(Plath and Hughes married within months and, depending on which biography you read, were very happy for quite some time.)
As her story progressed, though, I found myself surprised that she was struggling with the same issues I’ve been struggling with — how to balance writing with small children, even how to settle into a new apartment while balancing writing with small children. Yes, she had wild mood swings, yes she had a damaged and damaging past (including the death of her father when she was only eight) and yes, she had the kind of psychological make-up that pushes for suicide, which, in the end, won out over her bang-smash love of life.
But. Throughout her 30 years she also had a remarkable capacity for resurrection. She could take a broken leg from a skiing accident, a slow recovery from the flu, a change in season — or even the weather — and treat it as the sign of a new beginning.
And that is what I will try to distill from Bitter Fame — at least while my house is in chaos and my twins are pillaging. There is always the capacity for reinvention and resurrection — on Easter Sunday (today) or any day, particularly in spring … no matter how chill the breeze.
***
… The poems take us through his first meeting with Plath, all the way up until the days after her death. They don’t lay blame or seek exoneration. They are the poems of a man haunted by a woman — once loved, possibly once hated — a woman he can never free himself from, a woman he might not want to free himself from.
Here is an excerpt from one of my favorites, “The Shot.” It, like nearly all the poems in Birthday Letters, is addressed to Plath.
… Your Daddy had been aiming you at God
When his death touched the trigger.
In that flash
You saw your whole life.… inside your sob-sodden Kleenex
And your Saturday night panics,
Under your hair done this way and that way,
Behind what looked like rebounds
And the cascade of cries diminuendo,
You were undeflected.
You were gold-jacketed, solid silver,
Nickel-tipped. Trajectory perfect
As through ether. Even the cheek-scar,
Where you seemed to have side-swiped concrete,
Served as a rifling groove
To keep you true.
Till your real target
Hid behind me. Your Daddy,
The god with the smoking gun. For a long time
Vague as mist, I did not even know
I had been hit,
Or that you had gone clean through me –
To bury yourself at last in the heart of the god.In my position, the right witchdoctor
Might have caught you in flight with his bare hands,
Tossed you, cooling, one hand to the other,
Godless, happy, quieted.
I managed
A wisp of your hair, your ring, your watch, your nightgown.
And I’ll leave it at that.
Sylvia Plath
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