First lines: January 2025 edition

Einstein keeps watch at the Jersey shore.

Below are the first lines of the books I finished reading in January, this month that has lasted 27 months already.  A lot of this was tough reading for me.  I engaged in skimming.  And had one DNF because it was just too difficult.

One memoir, two fantasies (unusual for me, and both also count as children’s lit), two mysteries, one classic, one which read as sort of poetry, and one nonfiction on sexism.

 

 

Book 1

Early on, I could see.

 

 

Book 2

An Unexpected Party

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

 

 

Book 3

Our troubles began in the summer of 1914, the year I turned thirty-five.  The Archduke of Austria had just been assassinated, the Mexicans were revolting, and absolutely nothing was happening at our house, which explains why all three of us were riding to Paterson on the most trivial of errands.

 

 

Book 4

Up the stairs they raced, taking them two at a time, trying to be as quiet as possible.  Gamache struggled to keep his breathing steady, as though he was sitting at home, as though he had not a care in the world.

 

Book 5

You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” but that ain’t no matter.

 

 

Book 6

A Brief Introduction to the World of Aerwiar

The old stories tell that when the first person woke up on the first morning in the world where this tale takes place, he yawned, stretched, and said to the first thing he saw, “Well, here we are.” 

Book 7

Blessing for Waking

“And what I say to you I say to all:  Keep awake.” – Mark 13:37

This blessing could

pound on your door

in the middle of 

the night.

This blessing could

bang on your window,

could tap dance

in your hall,

could set a dog loose

in your room.

…

Book 8

The Problem That Has No Name

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women.  It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States.  

Did not finish

On a bright, humid evening in early August 2019, ten Honduran migrants met to pray in the basement of a Mexican housing complex called Solidarity 2000.

 

The titles and authors revealed:

 

 

Book 1

Vision: a Memoir of Blindness and Justice, by

David S. Tatel

352 pages • first pub 2024.  

I found this a fascinating memoir.  Painful to read the final chapters because of, well, everything that is now happening.

 

 

Book 2

The Hobbit: or There and Back Again (The Lord of the Rings #0)

By J.R.R. Tolkien

365 pages • first pub 1937 

Maybe I just don’t like fantasy.  This is yet another book that everyone raves about, and it is called classic.  I tolerated it.  I was much more charmed by it the first time I read it.  This time it just seems to be a lot of tromping through dark places with little food.  The lack of women characters is disturbing to me.  (I have the same assessment of the first part of the bona fide LOTR books, of which I only read a few chapters.)  

I am not sure what this book says about the human condition but maybe I’m just being dense.  If you love this book, please enlighten me.  

I read it for book club, and felt a wee bit more favorable towards it after our discussion.  Book club folks said it is partly an analogy for the first World War, which makes sense.  And it does have a good examination of greed, and the meaning of “burglar.”

 

 

Book 3

Girl Waits with Gun (Kopp Sisters #1)

By Amy Stewart

408 pages • first pub 2015.  Based on a real person.

I really liked this mystery.  Just the right balance of peril vs ridiculousness.  Loved the characters.  I hope I can read more in this series.  Is this the only book I have read that takes place in New Jersey?  Yes, it was set in rural Northern New Jersey, and there was ( and maybe still is) such a thing.  I spent a small portion of my life in Southern New Jersey, because that’s where my mother was from.

 

South Jersey's claim to fame

 

Book 4

Bury Your Dead (A Chief Inspector Gamache Mystery #6)

By Louise Penny

371 pages • first pub 2010.

According to my kindle, this book was 511 pages.  And seemed like it.  There were three story lines, including a revisiting of the mystery in the previous book in the series.  I enjoyed the mystery of the books & historical dead bodies, including some amusing spots.  But the story line about the terrorists was too fraught for me, although I thought it was told well.  I liked all the characters (which can be sad when the killer is revealed and it’s someone I liked) and the descriptions of cold and snow, but two mysteries would have been enough for me. 

 

 

Book 5

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Adventures of Tom and Huck #2)

By Mark Twain

327 pages • first pub 1884

I was re-reading this in advance of reading "James" by Percival Everett.  Twain is a master at portraying Huck Finn's "voice".  I found the first part highly engaging, as Huck and Jim make their way down the river.  I tired of it sometime after the Duke and the Dauphin showed up.  So after their second caper, I just skimmed it.  The consistent use of the n* word was difficult to see past.

 

 

Book 6

On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness (The Wingfeather Saga #1)

Andrew Peterson

290 pages • first pub 2008.  Children’s (middle grade) lit.

The writing style is quirky fun, but I quickly tired of it.  Silly footnotes, similar to a Terry Pratchett book.  Clever, perhaps, but I wasn’t in the mood for that.  I did finish it, because I quite liked the child characters. But I did not read the footnotes.   I thought the disability of one character was thoughtfully portrayed.

 

Book 7

Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons

By Jan L. Richardson

180 pages • first pub 2015

Just what I needed.

An excerpt from the introduction:

A blessing will not fix us.  It will not, of itself, resolve the difficulty we are in or undo harm we have caused or received.  Instead, a blessing is a channel of the Divine, a profound means of grace that has the capacity to open our eyes so that we might recognize and receive the help of the One who created us in love and whose deepest desire for us is that we be whole.

….

A blessing speaks from God’s mysterious heart into our own heart, meeting us in our ache for connection and presence.

…

Rather than being an indicator or measure of God’s favor, a true blessing most often meets us in the place of our greatest need, desperation, pain, or lack.

And here is one of the blessings, one that is challenging for me.

Book 8 

The Feminine Mystique

By Betty Friedan 

562 pages • first pub 1963

Often dated, but at times gives a description of today’s America, point-blank.  Brutally honest and correct in some instances.  Terribly wrong in at least one instance.  I skimmed and skipped parts of it, and yet it still took me 2½ months to get through it.  But I respect this book: I can only imagine that when it was published it was a society-changer.

I put a lengthier review on storygraph.  

 

Did not finish

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

By Jonathan Blitzer. 534 pages • first pub 2024

nonfiction history politics

This is a timely topic, for sure, but the events were too fraught for me right now.  Graphic description of torture.

I hope you are finding some pleasant reading material!  I will be purposefully seeking out some lighter reads in February, although book club selections might make that tough.

Rough seas ahead

Book Review: A Midwife's Tale

 A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.  

464 pages (main text is about 400 pages; the rest is appendix and notes) • first pub 1990.  Pulitzer Prize winner in 1991 in the History category.

(For the full First Lines May 2024 edition, follow this link.)

When our children were ages 7, 5, and 1, we all accompanied their Dad (the Common Household Husband) on his business trip to Toronto, Canada.  Daddy went off to his scientific conference all day, while I attempted to drive around an unfamiliar city to take the kids to museums.  We converged as a family in the evening, lining up in our one hotel room like sardines, with no energy left except to watch TV.   The family-appropriate show that we found was a reality-type show (maybe this one?) about a family that lives for a year in a house without any modern conveniences.  The women spent all day just trying to keep the dust at bay.  I can’t remember what the men did.  The family’s existence seemed exhausting and bleak.  

This is the closest I have come to being
a Pioneer Housewife.

The book A Midwife’s Tale, which my sister-in-law, a midwife by training, recommended to me, had echoes of that TV show. 

It's a historical treatise, meaning that the author examines a primary source, the diary of a midwife in (what would become the state of) Maine in the late 1700s-early 1800s.  The historian is able to take the terse diary entries, amplify them with the history of the time, and weave it all to tell the story of a strong, hard working woman.  

The historian author, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, was the first to publish the now-famous phrase "well-behaved women seldom make history," writing in a scholarly journal in 1976.  In 2007 she published a book with that title (it’s now on my reading list).  She is a Pulitzer- and Bancroft-Prize-winning historian, a feminist, and a Mormon.

A Midwife’s Tale shows that in late 1700s America, a midwife provided not only her medical skills at a birth, but also her skills generally as a healer.  Martha Ballard attended to many ailments in her community. There was no shortage of additional non-midwife tasks – combing flax, weaving cloth, raising crops, managing livestock, giving birth to and raising her own children, and all of the management of the family and household.

 

In that era, extramarital sex (as evidenced by the resulting pregnancy) was a common thing and not as severely dealt with as I would have thought.  The knowledge of the time said that if a woman pregnant out of wedlock was asked, during the process of giving birth, who the father was, she was incapable of telling a lie in that moment.  It was part of the midwife’s job to ask this question and record the answer.  Often, the birth occurred and then the named father married the mother.

 

Midwives had dominion over the birthing process until forceps were invented, and then doctors (men) horned in on the process.  Doctors (men) also invented the latest up-to-date medical techniques, such as bleeding a patient.

Men working in the kitchen.
My father (on the left) is squatting Pakistani style
(a skill he learned as an infant and child) and
my brother is attempting the squat.
They are shelling nuts or cardamoms
or something for the biryani.

 

I was surprised not to find more in this book about abortions, but that might be for several reasons:

 

The illnesses are sometimes described obliquely.  Often Midwife Ballard would write that the person was “feeling unwell” which could mean: in labor, sick with a sore throat, infested with worms (yup – trigger warning!), or sick with just about anything.  There could be a number of euphemisms used to describe abortion.  (But Ulrich does not say anything about abortions or contraception.)

 I didn’t read the appendix first.  There are 8 pages listing the medicines used by Martha Ballard.  Some of these have uses listed such as

Hops: “bring down the courses”;

Pennyroyal: “deobstruent, particularly in hysteric and other female complaints”;

Rue: Used to promote menstruation;

Maybe the use of such herbs could denote an attempt to end a pregnancy?

 

The late 1790s to early 1800s in the territory of Maine was an era of contention over property rights (between factions of White people – the native population had already been forced away) with some shocking violence, as described in this book.

 

A few other tidbits: It seems that the Boston Tea Party was not the only instance where white men dressed up as natives in order to cause trouble.  Debtor’s prison was a thing, but the debtor could roam the town (to work, eat, drink etc) as long as he stayed the night in the prison.

 

When quoting the diary, the historian maintains the variable spellings of the original text, which makes for slower reading, but at least I didn’t have to try to read 18th century handwriting.  The prose sometimes got a bit dry, but overall I found it to be a fascinating portrayal of a woman important to her community.

Me doing my bit for women's well being. 
Can you tell I was (and still am) furious?

Suburban Housewife Retelling of the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard

The Suburban Housewife Retelling of 

the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard

from The Book of Exertions 20:1-16

The kingdom of heaven is like a parent of teenagers who got up early in the morning to oversee the task of painting the deck.  It was an odious task, involving nasty-smelling paint and working out in the hot sun all day.  The parent decided she wanted someone to help her.  At first the parent woke her son out of a sound sleep.  He got up and, lo, readily agreed to help paint the deck, after the parent promised him ice cream at the end of the day.  By nine o’clock, the parent inspected the work, and saw that the son had painted one-fourth of the deck.  The parent went inside and found her daughter lounging around watching a movie on her ipod.  And the parent said to her, “You also go outside and help paint the deck.  Ice cream at the end.”  

At noon, the sky clouded over and the parent saw that the deck-painting would have to be speeded up.  The oldest daughter woke up (she had gotten home in the wee hours of the morning, after going swing dancing all night). The parent told her, “You also go outside and help paint the deck.  Ice cream will be involved when you are done.”  At about five o’clock the parent saw that, despite the hard work of her three children, the task was not finished, and rain clouds were fast approaching.  She went inside the house, only to find her niece, who was visiting for a month, sitting on the couch reading a book.  The parent said, “Niece, I’ll give you ice cream when you are finished, if you will go out and help your cousins paint the deck.”  

As evening came, the teens finished painting the deck.  Fortunately for the parent, the rain never materialized (this story does not take place in Pittsburgh). And the parent said to her husband, “Call the teenagers and take us all out for ice cream.  We’ll get in line, beginning with our niece, who started working last, and ending with our son, who started working before 9 AM.”  And they each got one scoop of ice cream in a sugar cone, even the son who started working at the crack of dawn.  Even the parents, whose waistlines showed that they seriously didn’t need ice cream at all, got ice cream.

The son grumbled against his parents, saying that he deserved the banana split, because, lo, he had arisen at dawn and worked all day painting the deck.  But the parent said to him, “Thank you so much, son, for painting the deck.  We really appreciate all your hard work.  We promised you ice cream, and here we all are, getting ice cream.  We chose to reward you not by paying you all an equitable wage, because we know it would have cost us at least $300 to hire someone else to paint the deck for us, but by buying $20 worth of ice cream.  That was our choice.  We’re the parents, and this family isn’t a democracy.  We hope we can all enjoy our ice cream together.”

Alternate ending

Because the teens had all studied economics and understood the principle of marginal rates, none of them complained.  They were also extremely grateful teens who recognized all the gifts their parents had given them over the years: teaching them to tie their shoes, putting them in their car seats, making that birthday cake in the shape of a train, buying them Harry Potter books, paying for a Netflix account, and, most of all, driving them all over God’s blessed creation, dag nab it.  In fact, in gratitude to their parents, these teens were overjoyed to paint the deck and viewed the ice cream as an extra.  Now THAT would be the kingdom of heaven.

About this parable, my husband said:

One person started complaining, and began asking questions about the staff:  Have they done what they actually were supposed to do, for their pay?  Where are the performance evaluations for the staff, and why aren’t they being followed?  That same person who went around and complained about everything went around to everyone, explaining how the leadership is messing everything up because they bollixed up their hiring system and payment system.  And then somebody says, “Why do we have a vineyard anyway? We should have a basketball court!”

***

For the record, the Common Household Son never grumbles against his parents.

***

The original scripture

Matthew 20:1-16

“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. 2 After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. 3 When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace; 4 and he said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went. 5 When he went out again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same. 6 And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, ‘Why are you standing here idle all day?’ 7 They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard.’ 8 When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, ‘Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.’ 9 When those hired about five o’clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage. 10 Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage. 11 And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, 12 saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ 13 But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? 14 Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. 15 Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?’ 16 So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

Evisceration

Five-gallon bucket with motivational message.

Last Saturday our house had an emergency colonoscopy.  Dr Roto-rooter determined that the house needs a full intestinal replacement.  Disembowelment.  Evisceration. 

Nasty house abdominal symptom, found
in our basement last Saturday. This is
Not Good.

During the past two weeks some things have happened that make me feel that I and my loved ones have been spiritually eviscerated.  Basically, it’s been a truly shitty two weeks.  I’m devastated, angry, perplexed, and appalled. But I am not going to say anything more about that, because:

"I've been dying to tell you what I thought of you!
And now... well, being a Christian woman, I can't say it!

After we handed over large suitcases full of money to the plumbers, the process of disemboweling our only abode began on Tuesday with the jack hammering of large portions of the garage floor.  It took the workers all day.  I discovered that jack hammering affects things in other rooms.

This is what I found in the basement, which
shares a wall with the jackhammered room.
This is where I store extra food, which just
 leapt off the shelves!  Fortunately nothing broke.

Our jack-hammered garage floor

I am really glad I didn't waste any time sweeping
 the garage floor this spring, because they just turned it into this.

The project has proceeded apace.  It seems if you pay people enough money, they will do the job quickly, using space-age techniques where possible.  It’s Friday morning, and we have all new sewer lines in the garage.  We did not find any interesting things, such as casks of Amontillado, beating hearts, or cats, under the floor of the garage.

New sewer line in this direction

And new sewer line in that direction

A photo showing how thick the garage floor is,
with (given the week I have had) what might become
 my new morning beverage, included for size comparison.

Also, there is a new sewer line running from the powder room to this main sewer line.  That job was done without digging, using a technique involving a cloth sleeve impregnated with alien sinews.  The sleeve is inserted in the existing pipe, inflated and then some alien juice is added at which point the alien sinews become as strong and as solid as iron or PVC pipe.  This new pipe can never be destroyed because it is from outer space.  Or maybe it lasts exactly five years, which is what the length of the warranty is.

Today, they are doing a similar alien material procedure on the sewer line leading from the house to the municipal sewer.  I will bet that in five years we will be looking for Sigourney Weaver to help us fight the aliens that will be born in this sewer line. 

I left the house this morning before the plumbers arrived, but came home while they were working on this.   The process apparently requires that the cloth pipe be ironed before being installed.  This is the first time in six years that an iron has been used on our property.  The length of cloth pipe they need ran the entire length of the driveway. 

The neighbors are all highly amused by all this
drama.  Just wait 'til it's their turn!

Dalek in our basement.
Run, before it exterminates you!

The procedure also required them to bring in this Dalek, which I found sitting in front of the clothes washer.  Since Dr. Who is unlikely to show up anytime soon to protect me, I am clearing out and taking myself to a place where I can finally get a cup of hot tea, a mark of civilization which, for me, requires the presence of another mark of civilization, that is, a working bathroom.

Dr Roto-rooter called the substance “resins”.  But I am pretty sure the material is alien.