Here I go

Her I go again

Girls, what’s my weakness?

Well, chronic pain, crippling anxiety, and laziness*

I'm back.  I've decided to write about other things than reviewing books. I have so much brain fog, both from intense pain and the meds I take to take a slight edge off the pain that I have to take notes to review a book. That kinda takes the fun out of reading. I have trigeminal neuralgia, but more on that in another post. 
My therapist suggested I start blogging again for a creative outlet, so here I am. I will still review books, but I also will be writing about the daily minutiae of my life. My life is not particularly interesting, but it is strange and fairly weird. If you want to read about a cripple with a larger than average family and book and music reviews sprinkled in then I'm your girl. I am divorced and remarried and middle-aged (I'm almost fifty two, and I doubt I'll live to be one hundred and four, so do I really qualify as middle-aged?)
My kids are all in their twenties. I will be using they/them pronouns to protect their privacy. None of them are non-binary as far as I know, not that I would care if they were. Anything I share about them will be preapproved. Their privacy is paramount to me. 
That's about it for now.
My therapist will be so proud of me!

Happy living, y'all

*That line should be 'men.' My sincerest apologies to Salt, Pepa, and DJ Spinderella.  

My mama started reading aloud to me at night when I was so young that I don’t remember when she started, and she continued it well beyond when I could read for myself. Some of my happiest childhood memories are of her reading me Lois Lenski (most of her works are sadly out of print,) Little House on the Prairie, and Lassie. She tried to do the accents in Lassie. I’m rapidly closing in on 51, and we still laugh about that. I could read before I started kindergarten. I remember doing phonics lessons in kindergarten thru second grade and thinking, ‘Are the rest of these yahoos idiots? Why are my teachers spending so much time on this?’ I was a very judgmental six year old. I’ve since learned to be more compassionate, as my daddy and my youngest son are severely dyslexic. And I spell about as well as a particularly dense pigeon. Should have paid more attention to those phonics lessons, I suppose

In the first grade I wrote my first (and last) book of poetry. I wrote five poems, each on their own sheet of wide rule notebook paper. I carefully and horribly illustrated (I draw about as well as the aforementioned pigeon can) each one, and ‘bound’ the book with yarn that I laced through the notebook paper holes. I can only remember one of the poems:

The world is big/The world is round/I wish I lived in another town.

Stick that it in your pipe and smoke it, Mary Oliver.

Around the third grade, I discovered Harriet the Spy. I quickly decided to spy on my friends and classmates, but they were so boring that I turned them into Russian operatives in an activated sleeper cell. I came of age in the 70s and 80s. The Cold War was heavy on my mind.

My fourth grade teacher, Ms Gainey, was the greatest, most life changing teacher I ever had. She introduced my to Shel Silverstien (the poetry books, not the man himself, unfortunately.) My mama bought all of his books, and we read them over and over. And I read them over and over to my own offspring. My teacher had several fun activities we could do on Fridays once we finished our school work for the week. She had this amazing pillow fort. It was surrounded on three sides by bookshelves and full of giant throw pillows. While most of my classmates raced through their final lessons of the week and fought over the domino run, I was all about that fort. Maybe it was because I am autistic and love cozy little spaces, but to me it was heaven. I still love to be surrounded by pillows. My husband tells me we are one throw pillow or Squishmallow away from rendering the bed unusable due to lack of space.

Around the same time, I became obsessed with S.E. Hinton. I think I read The Outsiders at least fifty times. Then the movie came out. My BFF and I went on opening night. Although I don’t think cosplay was a thing back then, I cosplayed. I wore a black muscle shirt with a denim jacket with the sleeves ripped off and ratty jeans. I also slicked back my hair. My BFF was probably embarrassed to be seen with me, and my mother can best be described as “long-suffering.” I was, and still to this day, can be described in one word. That word is dorky.

Then came Judy Blume. Oh Judy, I could write a ten page essay on how much I love you. Instead of boring you, dear reader, with that, I highly recommend that you look up the song Judy Blume by Amanda Palmer. If you are a woman of a certain age and can listen to that song without crying I’ll eat my hat. I read Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret till it quite literally fell apart. I wish Ms. Blume would dust off her typewriter and write Are You There God? It’s Me, Wendy, and it could be all about going through menopause. If anyone knows how to contact her, tell her she’s free to steal the idea.

I read constantly. I was the kid who would hide a book behind a textbook during class. I mean, why learn how to multiply fractions when you could stay gold with Ponyboy? I should note here that I am REALLY bad at math. In fact, I suck at pretty much anything covered by STEM.

I’m not mentioning any of this to brag about my early reading skillz. I am a one trick Pony(boy). Reading is all I’ve got.

With that, I’ll wind this up. Stick around. Maybe next Monday I’ll talk about reading in middle and high school. The excitement never ends around here.

Happy Reading Y’all,

Wendy

yo

It took me three and a half months, but I finally slogged through Infinite Jest. Now I’ve got the howling fantods. Adding the phrase ‘howling fantods’ to my vocabulary was the only good that came out of forcing my way thru this infinite book.

Infinite Jest is pretty much summed up with North America entertaining itself to death. The title of the book refers to a film that is so utterly captivating that the viewer literally cannot stop watching it. The viewer will pee and poop in their seat and quit eating and drinking until they ultimately die. Rescue workers come in and get enthralled to the point that they are drawn in, too. Then you end up with a whole room of people who have entertained themselves to death. A group of legless men in wheelchairs from Quebec are intent on tracking it down. (?)

DFW hammers in our addiction to constant entertainment a bit heavy handed. The film maker is named J. O. Incandenza. Canada, the US, and Mexico has formed one country called O.N.A.N. (if you are familiar with the Old Testament you will get this reference.)

Infinite Jest takes place mostly at an elite tennis academy and a halfway house for recovering addicts. I found the halfway house to be slightly more entertaining. Some of the tennis sections got so bogged down that, as someone who knows virtually nothing about tennis, I could feel my brain oozing out of my left ear.

DFW is hailed as predicting the future with this badonkachonk of a book. The main one being Don Gately, with his square head, predicting Minecraft Steve.

Oh, and the footnotes. Dear lord the footnotes. There are hundreds of them. Some of them are up to five pages of tiny print long with sub footnotes. Having to constantly flip back and forth was a major pain. Allegedly this is supposed to give the reader the feeling of the back and forth of a tennis game. I just found it to be a little too pretentious. In fact, the book should be called Pretentious Jest. By the last hundred pages or so I, in an act of rebellion (or plain exhaustion), quit looking at the footnotes.

I swear for every fifty pages I read, I think the ghost of David Foster Wallace past sneaked in and added ten more pages.

You may be asking yourself, “Wendy, why do you do this to yourself?” In short, it’s the same reason former Libertarian Presidential Candidate Gary Johnson feels the need to climb every mountain in the world: we both smoke a lot of weed. It’s made us not right in the head.

To keep myself sane I made IJ my book on the side. I read about twelve other books while I tackled this doorstop.

Infinite Jest is the Marmite of the book world: You either put it on everything, or you think its the creation of Satan’s anus. In this case, I’m on team anti-Marmite.

I’m sure there are a slew of dude bros in the world who will say that my delicate little female mind just didn’t get it. Maybe they are right. Maybe it went over my head. Or maybe, just maybe, the book is a pile of shizz.

My next challenge is to read Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady by Samuel Richardson, published in 1748 and clocks in at 1533 pages. Hopefully I won’t break my foot by dropping Clarissa on it. I can’t afford a trip to the emergency room.

Happy reading y’all,

Wendy

The Rose Code is about three very different women who work at Bletchley Park starting in 1940. Osla is a debutante dating the future Prince Phillip. Mab is on a path of self-improvement to overcome her East End roots. The family Osla and Mab are sent to live with includes a spinster named Beth. Beth is completely dominated by her overbearing mother. Her role in the family is to be at the beck and call of her mother, and her father is a Milquetoast who won’t stand up to his wife. Needless to say, Beth is more that a little overwhelmed by the outgoing Osla and Mab.

As Osla and Mab try to break Beth out of her shell they realize she is a genius with crossword puzzles and get her a job at Bletchley Park. Beth eventually becomes one of the only female cryptanalysts at BP.

Jump forward seven years, and we find all three women enemies. Beth has been committed to an insane asylum and gets a coded message smuggled out to Mab and Osla. The three must come back together on the very day of the wedding of the century : Princess Elizabeth’s wedding to Prince Phillip.

The Rose Code is a solid five star read.* The plot moved just fast enough to keep me up way past my bedtime but not so fast that it felt rushed. The research Kate Quinn put into The Rose Code is amazing. I was totally immersed in the story. Be sure to read the author’s note at the end. Some of the women were based on real people, some characters were composites of several people.

The Rose Code has a satisfying ending, and sometimes you just need that.

If you like well-written historical fiction about strong women, this may be the book for you. I’m also a sucker for a good WW2 yarn.

Happy Reading y’all,

Wendy

*I’ve, ahem, been accused of being a five star strumpet.

This is an absolutely fantastic book. It’s got a sentient animal familiar, political intrigue, light romance (including sapphic), and many twists and turns.

The Bone Shard Daughter is told from the point of view of four protagonists: Lin, Jovis, Phalue, and Sand.

Lin is the emperor’s daughter who has lost the last five years of her memory. She is in competition with her foster brother to inherit the throne, but Lin soon discovers not all is as it seems.

Jovis is a smuggler turned reluctant hero. He is wanted by the Empire, with wanted posters of him posted everywhere. He’s quite the con man, but all he wants to do is find his missing wife. After he rescues a few children he becomes a folk hero, complete with songs written about him. I can’t say what he rescues the children from; that would give away too much.

Phalue is a governor’s daughter. Her girlfriend, Ranami, wants to overthrow the governor leaving Phalue torn between loyalty to her partner or loyalty to her father. I liked the romance was handled. Phalue and Ranami are already a couple when they are introduced, and their romance is fraught with tension.

Sand is on an island with several other people. The have no memory of their former lives and believe they have always lived and worked on the island. Once again things are not as they seem.

Around the halfway point of The Bone Shard Daughter I thought I had guessed how things would end up. I kept reading anyway, because the book is so well written. Boy howdy were my assumptions wrong!

Out of all the characters, Jovis was my favorite. I enjoyed the POV of all four characters, but I just fell in love with Jovis.

I really can’t go too far in the plot without giving away spoilers. I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I loathe spoilers.

I opted to listen to the audiobook when I saw Emily Woo Zeller was one of three narrators. I will listen to anything she narrates. Seriously, she could read the phonebook, and I would listen. (Am I showing my age by mentioning the phonebook?)

I recently reread this delightful book so I could read The Bone Shard Emperor, even though I read The Bone Shard Daughter less than a year ago. My mind is more sieve than steel trap.

I would 10/10 recommend The Bone Shard Daughter. I will be an Andrea Stewart evangelist to my friends and loved ones.

Five stars

Happy reading y’all,

Bookish Wendy

Every year for the past decade or so I have set a weird reading goal for myself with varying results. The first year it was to read The Wheel of Time, then I decided I needed to kick it up a notch. One year it was reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. At the time, I thought it was a dud. I wondered why so many scholars mentioned that they reread it every two years. Well, now that some time has passed, I get it. It has stuck with me, and I want to read it again. Maybe next year.

Another year it was tackling the major Russian classics. This one came about in a perfectly normal way. I had disco hit Rasputin by Boney M stuck in my head. That lead to me reading a bio of the mad man himself, and it was downhill from there. So, Boney M, y’all were my gateway drug to Tolstoy.

During a fit of lockdown madness in March of 2020 I decided I would read every book that ever won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. I managed to get through over half of them. This idea was sparked by that fount of all good things: Keanu Reeves. I watched an interview where he was asked what his favorite book was. He didn’t answer that question, but he did mention what he was currently reading The Overstory by Richard Powers. I fell over myself to get to my phone to order it. The book arrived with one of those stupid unremovable stickers (I hate those almost as much as movie adaptation covers) proclaiming that The Overstory had won the Pulitzer. In typical Wendy fashion, I thought, ‘I need to read all of these.’ I’m not one for half-measures.

Last year it was Ulysses by James Joyce. That was a big fat failure. It was so torturous that I realized life was too short to waste my time with this nonsense. I mean, I could be reading The Wheel of Time for the fourth time. Or scrubbing out my toilets. With the pages of Ulysses.

This year I’m going to tackle Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. It is described as the latter half of the twentieth century’s Ulysses. Ugh. I am armed with a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow, a companion study guide, and the audiobook. I’m a bit worried about the audiobook after reading a review on Audible. The actual book is 792 pages long. A reviewer going by Jefferson left a glowing 793 page review. They described the narrator as, “(the narrator) reads the audiobook with a wry and moist enthusiasm……But he voices a great sneeze, American chuckle, perky band of Mickey Mouse fat cells, and every other outre job with aplomb.”

What does that mean? Is it a cipher? Do I need to get my hands on an Enigma Machine to figure out what you mean, Jefferson?

I think I can handle this book, though. I mean Lisa Simpson read it, and she’s, what, eight?

Either that or my toilets will be squeaky clean.

Happy reading y’all,

Wendy

You may be asking yourself: Why should I care what this yahoo has to say? It’s a valid point. Sometimes I ponder why I listen to my own self. So now I find myself in the unenviable position of hyping me.

I read between 150-200 books per year, and I have strong opinions about each and everyone of them. But, obviously, taste in most things, including reading, is very subjective. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and all that tosh. See fact number 19.

I mainly read fantasy, but I dabble in most genres. Lately I’ve on an all gothic all the time kick. I also enjoy murder mystery, contemporary, literary fiction, classics, nonfiction, manga, and ‘women’s’ fiction.

Now a list of things about me.

1 I love books. (obvi)

2. I love all kinds of music.

3. I have strong opinions on the Oxford Comma.

4. I almost always blast music when I’m writing–I’m listening to The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance rn.

5. I love knitting, but I only knit socks.

6. My mama instilled a love of reading in me from a very early age.

7. Three chickens and a sulcata tortoise live in my backyard.

8. I live in the deep south.

9. Just because one has a southern accent does not mean one is an idiot. Idiocy exists all over the world.

10. Even though I’m fifty, I still call my parents mama and daddy (see points six, eight, and nine.)

11. My all-time favorite band is The Avett Brothers, but my all-time favorite album is Life’s Rich Pageant by REM. I will die on this hill.

12. I was married for twenty years, and we produced five children (all adults now) that I (secular) homeschooled.

13. My favorite book is A Tale of Two Cities by my dude Charles Dickens. I’ve read it at least ten times since high school.

14. I have aphantasia, which basically means I don’t have a mind’s eye.

15. I’m on the autism spectrum.

16. I’ve been dating the most wonderful (also autistic) man since 2017, and we got married this past September.

17. I am a recovering Southern Baptist.

18. I have a chronic pain condition called Trigeminal Neuralgia. It is also delightfully known as “the suicide disease” because the pain is horrific and unending.

19. I’ve read The Wheel of Time three times. Keep that in mind if you disagree with any of my reviews.

20. My favorite books I read in 2021 were A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, and Sonju by Wondra Chang.

I’ll stop at twenty facts. If you’ve made this far then congratulations are in order. I will generally post three reviews a week, plus some bonus posts about movies, tv, and my (not so) endlessly fascinating life.

Happy reading, y’all,

Wendy