Blog's Name in Books

I found this fun little activity here: match a book from your to-read list to each of the letters in your blog's name.

Tale of Genji (Murasaki Shikibu)
History (Elsa Morante)
Excellent Women (Barbara Pym)

Shirley (Charlotte Bronte)
I Capture the Castle (Dodie Smith)
Love and the Platypus (Nicholas Drayson)
Leaving Atlanta (Tayari Jones)

Only Yesterday (S.Y. Agnon)
Faust (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

Timeline (Michael Crichton)
Home (Toni Morrison)
Ella Minnow Pea (Mark Dunn)

Winter's Bone (Daniel Woodrell)
Ormond (Maria Edgeworth)
Rhinoceros (Eugène Ionesco)
Little Dorrit (Charles Dickens)
Dombey and Son (Charles Dickens)

Deal Me In 2017 - Short Nonfiction Version

Over at his blog, Bibliophilica, Jay has announced the 2017 "Deal Me In" Challenge.

Pick a bunch of short stories, assign each of them to a different card in a deck, and each week pick a card at random. Read the story and share your thoughts about it. (If you don't want to do this on a weekly basis, use only two suits from the deck or something like that.)

The thing is, I don't read short stories based on a pre-planned list. But I'd like to participate. Given that the challenge allows for variations, I'm focusing on essays, feature articles, letters, and speeches. I've been making a list of my own anyway as part of my effort to study more short nonfiction.

So here's my list. I plan to comment on these here or at Words in Bold, depending on the topic.

(If you're interested in participating in this challenge, whether with short fiction, short nonfiction or a mix, go for it, and let Jay know.)

18 songs that lift my mood

Not all of these are happy, but in one way or another they lift my mood. I've listed them with the preferred performer for each song.

Autumn in New York - Billie Holiday

Black Rat Swing - Precious Bryant

Brave - Sara Bareilles

Dance Me to the End of Love - Madeleine Peyroux

Don't You (Forget About Me) - Simple Minds

Feeling Good - Nina Simone

Goodnight, New York - Vienna Teng

Impossible Dream - Andy Williams

Jumpin' Jack - Big Bad Voodoo Daddy

Kind and Generous - Natalie Merchant

A Little Less Conversation - Elvis Presley

My Funny Valentine - Ella Fitzgerald

Nobody But Me - The Human Beinz

Non, je ne regrette rien - Edith Piaf

On the Sunny Side of the Street - Ella Fitzgerald

The Only Living Boy in New York - Simon & Garfunkel

Tightrope - Janelle Monáe

Upside Down - Paloma Faith

Image credit and license: Wikimedia Commons

The Classics Club Reading Challenge

A Room of One's Own is hosting a classics book reading challenge. [UPDATE: The original blog this was hosted on has been deleted, and it's now being hosted at The Classics Club blog.] For people participating, it's a commitment to read at least fifty classic books (and other works) in five years. What's a classic? Good question. It can mean books with some measure of greatness, resonance or influence. Books that can or probably will withstand "the test of time." There's no settled definition, and expressions like 'greatness,' 'resonance,' and 'test of time,' are fruitful sources of discussion.

In any case, I came up with a list of fifty books. There was an option to include short stories but I don't think I'll add short stories to the list; I already read them regularly, and I'd like to use this challenge as an opportunity to get to more books in my to-read (and to re-read) list and share my thoughts with others. Most of these I've never read before; some I read when I was a teen, so I'd like to revisit them. Each time I read one I'll at some point write about it on the blog. This post with its list will be linked to in the "Reading Lists" tab above (under the Books and Plays section), so you can look it up in the future.

My personal deadline for the challenge is 3/13/2017. (Pausing to imagine myself five years from now.) The sign-up page also asks me to mention prizes or rewards (if any) that I intend to give myself on successfully completing the challenge. Reading great literature is its own reward, so I don't intend to supplement it with additional prizes. But if anyone wants to send me an Amazon gift card I won't object. Other deadlines have taken precedence over this one :) But I'm still planning to finish the list!

Here's the list:

S.Y. Agnon: A Guest for the Night
S.Y. Agnon: Only Yesterday

Louisa May Alcott: Little Women

Jane Austen: Persuasion

Honoré de Balzac: Old Goriot

Saul Bellow: Humboldt's Gift
Saul Bellow: Mr. Sammler's Planet

Anne Bronte: Agnes Grey
Anne Bronte: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Charlotte Bronte: Villette

Willa Cather: Song of the Lark
Willa Cather: A Lost Lady

Anton Chekhov: Uncle Vanya

Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone

Charles Dickens: Dombey and Son

Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Idiot

Maria Edgeworth: Ormond

George Eliot: Adam Bede
George Eliot: Daniel Deronda
George Eliot: Silas Marner

E.M. Forster: A Room with a View

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude

Elizabeth Gaskell: North and South

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust

Oliver Goldsmith: The Vicar of Wakefield

Lorraine Hansberry: A Raisin in the Sun

Henrik Ibsen: A Doll's House

Sarah Orne Jewett: The Country of the Pointed Firs

Franz Kafka: The Trial

Kawabata Yasunari: Beauty and Sadness

Primo Levi: The Periodic Table

W. Somerset Maugham: Of Human Bondage

Molière: The Misanthrope

Elsa Morante: History

Lady Murasaki: Tale of Genji

Baroness Orczy: The Scarlet Pimpernel

George Orwell: Animal Farm

Fernando Pessoa: The Book of Disquiet

Sir Walter Scott: Ivanhoe

William Shakespeare: As You Like It
William Shakespeare: Twelfth Night

John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath

Laurence Sterne: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Italo Svelvo: Zeno's Conscience

Eudora Welty: The Optimist's Daughter

Dorothy West: The Living Is Easy

Edith Wharton: The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton: The Custom of the Country

Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Émile Zola: L'Assommoir

11 things I (re)learned in 2011

1) You can only fool yourself for so long.

Any part of your life feel like a sham? Answer that question honestly. You can't hide behind a job title or among other people. The turmoil and falseness will tear you apart inside, and cracks will form on the surface. It's best to have a reckoning with yourself, no matter how painful. What abilities, relationships and personal traits have you left untended? What fears and pains did you ignore as they festered? Did you manage to do some good? What don't you regret? And what comes next?

2) Don't expect too much from others.

I almost wrote this as "don’t expect much of anyone," but it sounded like a bit of grumbling misanthropy, which isn't my intention. What I mean is that people don't owe you things - not love or success or approval - and they're not to be confronted with a feeling of entitlement or burdened with too many lofty expectations. There might be people in your life who are generally much better than others at understanding you and treating you with love, care and generosity of spirit, but they're still human, and they can't read minds.  This isn't about accepting bad treatment from others; it's about seeing them as they are and not putting unreasonable burdens on them.  With an attitude of not expecting too much you're more likely to receive good things with gratitude instead of taking them for granted. And if you're in a bad situation or the target of toxic behavior you might be able to deal with it more effectively instead of spending a lot of time railing at everyone and everything about the unfairness of it all.

3) Demand the best of yourself

By"the best" I don't mean someone else's best or a set of superhuman expectations that you will either never try to live up to or will inevitably fall far short of if you do try, resulting in shame, guilt, inertia, melancholy, and perhaps an eensy bit of satisfaction that you managed to sabotage yourself so nicely. Don't set up your life so that you're spending most of your time licking your wounds and feeling sorry for yourself.  What do you love and hope for? What do you want to give to the world? How do you want to improve? Set goals, plan out the steps you'll need to take towards them, and expect that if you mess up or if things don't go your way, you'll pick yourself up, reassess, learn and keep going. Over and over.

4) You can't demand the best of yourself without being able to forgive yourself

A lack of forgiveness suggests little hope and faith.  Under these circumstances it's much harder to work well, live well, and see your own efforts as worthwhile because you're not really focused on the future (or on the present) anyway.  It's also much harder to avoid similar mistakes or poor choices in the future and to repair past wrongs, because you feel that your efforts will be useless.  Guilt and regret are meant to prod you towards meaningful change; they aren't signs that everything you do is futile and that there's no hope for you.  Don't be so hard on yourself.  Pining for inhuman perfection will keep you from being productive, loving, and engaged with life.

5) Figure out why you're procrastinating

It's not always easy to identify 'wasted time,' because 'wasted time' can give you inspired ideas and necessary relaxation.  Or it can wear you down and make you miss opportunities.  It's also a matter of attitude: you look at what you did yesterday or the day before, and you may see something good in it, some potential, or just dismiss it out of hand as lost time.  Either way it's not coming back.  Often it's a gut feeling: you know you're wasting time and putting off the important things, but you can't seem to stop procrastinating.  Why? Ask yourself what it is you're afraid of or what you hope to avoid.  Are you setting yourself up to fail? Maybe you think the work is fundamentally worthless or pointless; you can't think of a meaningful purpose for it.  Maybe you want to keep things exactly as they are and not face any surprises.  In any case, really think about why it is you're procrastinating (sincerely think about it, and don't just use it as yet another exercise in pointless procrastination).

6) An all-or-nothing attitude is counterproductive

One way to hold back from doing anything meaningful is by telling yourself that you won't bring about a perfect outcome or solution.  Either you want everything "just right" (whatever that means), or it's not worth doing at all: another example of superhuman expectations.  With that attitude there wouldn't be civilization.  No society can prevent or justly punish all crimes; does this mean we should stop writing and enforcing laws and stop fighting to redress judicial wrongs? Contributing to a charity won't prevent or stop every instance of hunger or sickness or pain in the world, but could it improve the life of at least one person? An all-or-nothing attitude is an excuse not to work towards anything worthwhile for yourself and others.

7) Instability is a fundamental part of life

Circumstances are always changing.  You're changing.  Life is fragile.  Living involves a series of adjustments, sometimes minute, other times huge and staggering.  If you pretend otherwise you will stagnate and be blindsided by circumstance.  There's a lifelong struggle for balance as you deal with all the shifts around you and in you.  You want to have a steady sense of self, a steady purpose, without being too inflexible or too changeable.  

8) There's no escaping from yourself

So don't be passive about your life.  And don't let others tell you what you should be; they're not the ones who will live every second of every day with the results of those choices.  Hear other people out, learn from them, value meaningful criticism, but ultimately make your own choices.  Words of approval and acceptance can feel like everything but they aren't, especially if they come from people who want you to compromise yourself.  They might have the best intentions.  They might think their advice will spare you from future pain and disappointment.  Their good intentions might also be mixed up with (or superseded entirely by) other motives: the need to control you, the need to live through you, etc.  If you're not what they want you to be then you become difficult and unmanageable.

9) Being kind is undervalued

It's seen as a weakness, or as a trait to develop in yourself if you aren't clever, good-looking, young, or rich.  There's a misconception that it's easy to be kind, because anyone can do kind things.  And it's true; anyone can.  But it's not always easy.  Not when you're having a bad day, when your temper is foul or when you're frustrated and other people are right there as perfect targets for your anger.  It's not easy when you're feeling short-changed and bitter, or when the people you're kind to respond rudely or ignore your efforts.  Part of being truly kind is also discerning the individual needs of different people, as opposed to pushing the same kind of charity or help on everyone regardless of who they are and what they really want or need; this can be very difficult to do well (and under some circumstances almost impossible).

10) Have patience

You will rarely get immediate results.  You will rarely get the exact results you expect.

11) "Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts."

You said it, Churchill.

Be well, and have a great new year.

Likes/Dislikes

Over at the bookworm blog I was tagged into participating in this likes/dislikes list; so, rarely one to turn down an opportunity to procrastinate on my work, I cut and pasted it from her blog and filled in my own answers after each like and dislike (if there was a line for something I both like and dislike it would be procrastination).

I like genuine happy laughter.
I like holiday meals, especially dinners that last late into the evening.
I like understanding people and why they do what they do, say what they say (think what they think).
I like walking outside right after it rains (and walking more generally).
I like water - streams, rivers, waves, droplets on a window...
I like old bookshops where the owner's cat sits in a corner staring at all the customers and old libraries where I'm too distracted to read because I'm staring happily at all the books and the architecture.
I like writing - quietly, without interruption.
I like finding a brilliant piece of music I've never encountered and thinking, "How could I have never heard this, ever?!"
I love my family.
Today was cool, pleasant, windy.
I dislike arrogance.
I dislike slander.
I dislike watching parades.
I dislike pettiness.
I dislike bureaucratic pointlessness.
I dislike shrillness.
I (secretly) like hording chocolate in a certain corner of a particular kitchen cupboard.

I have a moment's pause before posting this - for instance most if not all of the things in the like category could best be described with love of some kind, and some of the things in the dislike category I feel more strongly about than dislike... But I'm just going to go ahead and stop over-analyzing.

And because I have to enlist three more people into filling this in (it's the rules!)... I don't know, anyone who stops by and wants to do this is welcome to (just post a link to yours in the comments so I and others can go enjoy what you've written).