I decided that I liked the “bullet journal” format I used for my last Salon post, so I’m bringing it back this week.
- I’m drafting this post on Saturday afternoon after finally getting my Book Talk post on The Teacher Wars done. I’m hoping to get one more review written up this weekend, but weekends just don’t seem long enough sometimes! I finished listening to Rainbow Rowell’s Landline at the end of the week, and my thoughts about it are simmering. I don’t know if they’ll do much more than that today.
- I started reading Eula Biss’ On Immunity: An Inoculation at breakfast on Saturday morning, and I’d really like to spend more time with it this weekend. It’s so thoughtful, and the writing is gorgeous.
- My plans today include breakfast with my sister and a showing of Gone Girl (with her–we’ve both read the book, my husband’s not interested at all, and her husband can’t stand Ben Affleck). There may not be much opportunity for writing or reading after that.
- I don’t have a “next” audiobook lined up yet, because I think the upcoming week’s commute listens will be mostly podcasts. I’ve had those piling up for a couple of weeks now, and since most of my podcasts are television-related, they’ve been busier. Some have recorded extra, and/or extra-long, episodes, with the start of the new TV season, so I’ve got some catch-up ahead of me.
- This may be the most positive framing of a “reading slump” I’ve ever seen:
“There were sunny days and rainy days, active days and quiet days, and on none of them did I pick up a book. I didn’t even want to! To be honest, after the first few days I didn’t even really think about reading. I wasn’t choosing not to read so much as it wasn’t a choice I was considering at all.
“It felt a little weird not to be reading all the time, sure, but I didn’t particularly miss it. I was doing other things. I was doing nothing at all. In the truest sense of vacation, I was getting away–from work, from my daily life, from my regular habits and routines, from the way I fill almost all of my spare minutes with words. I went away. I was not myself. I did not read.
–“Vacation Reading, or A Vacation From Reading” by Rebecca Schinsky at Book Riot
- And this echoes some of my own conflicted opinions about diversity in reading (emphasis added):
“While lately there has been a big push on diversity and reading diverse books, there have also been moments that have made me uncomfortably aware of my privileged life as a straight, white, middle class, woman. Well, nevermind on that whole woman thing, but that’s another story. The point I want to make with all of that is I don’t always feel comfortable or qualified to talk about race or diversity…
“But, I’ve stumbled into a couple of different troubling articles and instances lately that have me wondering about diversity. In particular there was a rather lengthy article in the LA Review of Books called “Why am I Brown? South Asian Fiction Pandering to Western Audiences.” I read the article a few days ago and was immediately discouraged. Many of the books that author Jabeen Akhbar references are ones that I’ve read and recommended as sources of diversity. So I’ve been doing it all wrong? Because I’ve been reading books by people of color who are writing a more sanitized version of diversity because it’s what the white publishing houses will publish?
“Ugh.”
–Trish at Love, Laughter, and a Touch of Insanity on “Authenticity and Diversity in Literature“
- And speaking of conflicted, this week’s Gratuitous Photo features two scenes from the first Saturday in October here in Southern California. The top photo was taken at my local Target in the morning; the bottom is a screenshot from the Yahoo Weather app in mid-afternoon.
