Category: Personal

Jesmyn Ward on Her Husband’s Death and Grief During COVID-19 | Vanity Fair

Post author By Mary Daniels Brown
Post date September 2, 2020
5 Comments on Jesmyn Ward on Her Husband’s Death and Grief During COVID-19 | Vanity Fair

Please read this piece by award-winning novelist Jesmyn Ward.

Source: Jesmyn Ward on Her Husband’s Death and Grief During COVID-19 | Vanity Fair

Birthday at the Zoo

My husband and daughter took me to the zoo yesterday for my birthday. It was the first time we had seen our daughter in 6 months. I felt especially celebrated because Mount Rainier came out splendidly.

The zoo is now offering timed entrance tickets and has done a good job of adapting to necessary COVID-19 restrictions.

zoo sign: welcome back — Safety measures at the zoo

zoo sign: keep your pack together — Safety measures at the zoo

We had a beautiful day for our visit: sunny and clear but not too hot. We got a good look at two of the zoo’s tigers, one lolling in the shade and the other enjoying a catnap in the sun.

One of the zoo’s biggest attractions right now is Trebek, the muskox calf born last spring. He’s named after Alex Trebek, host of the TV game show Jeopardy, whose favorite animal is the muskox.

You can read more about Trebek and his mother, Charlotte, here.

This was my first visit to the new Pacific Seas Aquarium, which showcases sea animals from the Pacific Ocean area. This building opened late last summer.

zoo: hammerhead shark — hammerhead shark

zoo: jellyfish in illuminated globe — hammerhead shark

I was happy to see lots of families with children enjoying the zoo along with us. Everyone wore their masks and did a good job of maintaining appropriate distancing.

Personal

Happy Cinco de Mayo!

Post author By Mary Daniels Brown
Post date May 5, 2020

Our great staff here at Franke Tobey Jones provided a Cinco de Mayo party at yesterday’s weekly tailgate happy hour. We are indeed lucky to live in such a caring retirement community.

woman wearing sombrero and carrying guacamole and salsa

Notes in the Margin Personal

The Glossary is Back!

Back in November 2019 I had to do a complete overhaul of my website. I started Notes in the Margin back in the mid 1990s, and I had accumulated a lot of content over the years. When the old website went down last fall, I had time to copy and paste a lot of that content into text files.

I’m now happy to report that one of my original website’s most popular features, the glossary, is finally back. I spent three solid days (Saturday through today, Monday) updating all the old glossary material I had accumulated over the past 25 years, then copying, pasting, and formatting it in WordPress.

Please take a look and let my know what you think.

Glossary

Discussion Personal The Classics Club

CC Spin #23: A Change of Plan

Post author By Mary Daniels Brown
Post date April 24, 2020
2 Comments on CC Spin #23: A Change of Plan

Thanks to these two bloggers for sponsoring the 2020 Blog Discussion Challenge:

Nicole at Feed Your Fiction Addiction
Shannon at It Starts at Midnight

You can join the discussion challenge at any time during 2020 by clicking on either link above.

Related Post:

Classics Club Spin #23

Earlier this month the Classics Club announced a return of its spin, in which we make a numbered list of books, then read the book on our list with the number chosen at random. Initially I welcomed the exercise, because I have been having trouble reading and writing in the current pandemic. I hoped this spin would help me break out of that slump by compelling me to read and write about a particular book.

But my heart sank when the lucky number was called because my book with that number is Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner. I originally put this novel on my Classics Club reading list because it is generally acknowledged as Faulkner’s masterpiece, the book that encapsulates his literary vision of the American South. I knew that reading it would be challenging yet rewarding.

And therein lies the problem with having Absalom, Absalom! come up for me right now. While this novel is acknowledged to be Faulkner’s masterpiece, it is also universally acknowledged to be a difficult novel to read. It’s dense with biblical and mythological allusions, a story peopled by archetypal characters comprising a multigenerational family saga of interlocking stories.

In other words, reading Absalom, Absalom! requires a lot of patience and concentration, two qualities that I’m still short on, although I have been slowly improving in those areas. I’m afraid undertaking this project now would be counterproductive because I can’t give it the extended, intense focus it requires. I’m afraid the effort would end up frustrating me enough to force me either to do a sloppy job with it or to give it up altogether.

I’d rather save Absalom, Absalom! for a time when I’ll be able to give this difficult project my best shot. For that reason I’ve decided that I’m not going to read Faulkner’s novel for this spin.

Instead, I’m going to read The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles, another book on my Classics Club list. I first read this book probably about 40 years ago, and I’ve been wanting to reread it for quite some time. I know what to expect and what I’m looking for in this book. I’m eager to reread this book and welcome the opportunity to do so now.

Book Recommendations Personal Reading

World Book and Copyright Day

Post author By Mary Daniels Brown
Post date April 23, 2020

Source: World Book and Copyright Day

For additional information, including the importance of April 23rd, free book offers, and events you can watch “from the comfort of your armchair,” see this article from Newsweek.

Personal

Last Night’s Super Moon

Here’s my husband’s photo of last night’s super moon over Tacoma, WA, USA.

We often can’t see the full moon here because of cloud cover, but the last couple of nights have been super clear for the super moon.

Here’s a photo I took with my phone to give you an idea of how big the moon looked. Of course the resolution of the moon itself is horrible, but you can see the moon in context.

And here’s an explanation of the super pink moon from The Seattle Times.

Book Recommendations Personal

5 Books to Keep You Company During Isolation

Post author By Mary Daniels Brown
Post date April 2, 2020
5 Comments on 5 Books to Keep You Company During Isolation

I recently came across the article “Kristin Hannah Recommends 5 Books to Keep You Company During Isolation.”

Since I’ve been having trouble writing much of anything at all, I decided to use the format of this post as a template for my own recommendations.

Here are the categories, Kristin Hannah’s recommendations, and my own suggestions.

One Book That Made Me Laugh

Kristin Hannah’s recommendation: This is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper

This is the hardest category for me, since I almost never read any book described as “comic.” In fact, I’ve had an adversarial relationship with comedy most of my life. As a kid I hated The Three Stooges and Marx Brothers movies. More recently, I tried reading Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons after a couple of cousins talked about how funny it is at a family gathering. I hated it and gave up after the first few chapters. I did read all 394 pages of A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole—it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981, after all—and still regret every minute of my life thus wasted.

But I absolutely loved The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams and still believe that the answer to The Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42.

One Book That Left Me Feeling Hopeful

Kristin Hannah’s recommendation: The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien

My recommendation: A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra. Who’d have thought a novel about the war in Chechnya could be so full of hope? But this one is, and it will make your heart swell.

One Book That Was a Total Escape

Kristin Hannah’s recommendation: Tell No One by Harlan Coben

“You can’t go wrong with Harlan Coben,” Hannah says. My thoughts exactly.

That’s why I’m recommending Coben’s most recent thriller, The Boy from the Woods.

A Book I Binged in One Sitting

Kristin Hannah’s recommendation: Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice

This category was also difficult for me because I read very slowly and therefore almost never binge a whole book.

But I did just that with Kent Haruf’s final work, Our Souls at Night. It’s a sorrowful story, but also compelling.

The Book I’m Currently Reading

Kristin Hannah’s: Mildred Pierce by James M. Caine

My current read is Before She Knew Him by Peter Swanson.

Personal Reading Writing

Reading & Blogging in the Time of COVID-19

Post author By Mary Daniels Brown
Post date March 26, 2020
7 Comments on Reading & Blogging in the Time of COVID-19

Thanks to these two bloggers for sponsoring the 2020 Blog Discussion Challenge:

Nicole at Feed Your Fiction Addiction
Shannon at It Starts at Midnight

You can join the discussion challenge at any time during 2020 by clicking on either link above.

Related Posts:

All of my recent posts have been lists of COVID-19—related links. I just kept collecting these links, almost obsessively. Now that we’re approaching the end of our third week of self-isolation and social distancing here in Washington State, I’m finally beginning to understand why.

When we first started this virus-induced cocooning, I was excited. As an introvert who likes nothing better than to kick back with a good book, I’ve been practicing for this my whole life. Bring it on, I thought. I’m going to get a whole lot of books read.

However, I wasn’t prepared for the emotional onslaught that accompanies this medical emergency.

And so I began curating those lists of links. For about 10 days I spent most of my time reading article after article about what was happening here at home and around the world. Every time I thought that I should start reading a book, I felt completely overwhelmed. I have so many books on my TBR shelves that I got flustered wondering which one to pick up. The more I thought about which book to select, the antsier I got.

I couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t focus on any one thing, so I just kept going from one article to another about the advance of COVID-19. Reading individual news stories and articles didn’t require the extended attention necessary for reading a book.

So I thought that, if I wasn’t going to read books, I should write. How silly that thought turned out to be, since writing anything more than the occasional Facebook post requires even more focused attention than reading a novel. For about a week and a half I did nothing but make those lists and wonder what was happening to me.

My life has been a series of research projects.

Ever since I was a child, my way of dealing with anything new and different—and therefore confusing—has been to read up on it. If I learn all about whatever it is, I can deal with it. In the past, knowing about something meant that I had some personal control over it, or at least how it affected me.

But of course there’s no controlling this virus. No matter how much I learn about it, it is still in control. And nobody knows how all this is going to turn out. We’re experiencing anxiety at a whole new level. In fact, anxiety doesn’t seem like the right word to use here. This situation requires a much stronger term.

I came across an article byScott Berinato in the Harvard Business Review called “That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief.” I found especially enlightening his concept of anticipatory grief, that is, grief in anticipation of how different our lives are going to be in the future than they were in the past because of this pandemic. There is definitely a grief component to what I’m feeling.

“There is something powerful about naming this as grief. It helps us feel what’s inside of us,” Berinato writes. But while I agree that just naming something helps us deal with it, I don’t think that grief quite tells the whole story by itself.

So for now I’m calling it generalized dread.

I did finally manage to break out of my reading slump, although whether the naming process or simply the passage of time is responsible I’m not sure. Probably both contributed. The book that rescued me is Long Bright River by Liz Moore. I hope to write a review of it soon, although I fear the ability to concentrate enough to do much writing is still a little way off.

I hope you are all staying healthy and dealing with this new reality. I’d love to hear how you’re coping.