Author: Charity

Bookends: May 2020

Posted on by Charity

Late May involved a convergence of paradigm-challenging elements.

There’s COVID-19 and the ongoing stay-at-home order coupled with the gradual easing of restrictions, which brings both a sense of hope that we’re safe to move about more freely and anxiety that we’re no more ready than we were three months ago and the worst is yet to come.

There are the demonstrations in our city and throughout the country in support of addressing and moving towards ending endemic racism and the violence it perpetuates, which brings both hope that there’s the energy and will to bring lasting change and anxiety that the path there will reveal things about ourselves as individuals and as a society that are difficult to reconcile with the stories we’re used to telling ourselves.

And in the midst of all of this, our family has begun a new homeschool history and literature curriculum that brings a more balanced view of the founding and evolution of the United States than I received in school. So for us these real-world events are happening against the backdrop of increased awareness of our country’s history of settler colonialism, enslavement, and genocide alongside our stated ideals of democratic rule, civil liberties, and equal application of justice. On the one hand, it’s comforting to see our current situation in the context of an ongoing development of democratic ideals. On the other, I am more acutely aware of the precariousness of our institutions and the vulnerabilities of our species and I’m adjusting to a new foundation of understanding, which is welcome in the long-term but unsettling in the short-term. Hope and anxiety once again.

It’s unclear to me how my children are seeing the situation given that the narratives that underpin my worldview haven’t had as many years to cement into their consciousness. I’m hopeful that this unique education will free them to envision and realize futures that previous generations have been unable bring about. I hope that this exercise of doubt and reflection will help me better myself, but I also hope that I’m providing my children with the tools and background that will help them navigate the world they’ve inherited with passion, perseverance, and resilience.

As I read back over this, I realize it sounds a little like a prayer. So be it.

Visual Interest: Interdependent web

Finished in May (13):

Although I didn’t read all 20 books on my #bookspinbonanza list, the challenge went much better than I expected. I finished 10 books from the list with two more in the works, and I finished a couple off-list as well.

The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami

Caesar’s Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us by Sam Kean (R.A. with my son)

Black Mad Wheel by Josh Malerman

Pet by Akwaeke Emezi

Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All by Laura Ruby

Gaia Girls: Enter the Earth by Lee Welles

Wonder by R.J. Palacio

Nightfall by Jake Halpern

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin

The Fountains of Silence by Ruta Sepetys

A Whale in Paris by Claire Polders and Daniel Presley

The Office: The Untold Story of the Greatest Sitcom of the 2000s by Andy Greene

Louisiana’s Way Home by Kate DiCamillo

Currently Reading:

Periodic Tales by Hugh Aldersley-Williams (R.A. with my son)

The Children of Jocasta by Natalie Haynes

Renegades by Marissa Meyer

Children of the Longhouse by Joseph Bruchac

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Debbie Reese, and Jean Mendoza

What the Eagle Sees by Eldon Yellowhorn

Becoming a Citizen Activist by Nick Licata

Different Mirror by Ronald Takaki

American Colonies by Alan Taylor

A Kid’s Guide to Native American History by Yvonne Wakim Dennis

To-Read for June:

A lot of my reading time will be devoted to books from the history/literature curriculum we’re doing, but I hope to get some titles from my Litsy #bookspin list finished, too.

At the very least, I want to read Docile, The Regrets, and Cantoras, which are the three titles I got for this round of Tailored Book Recommendations.

You can see my Litsy profile for status updates throughout the month.

What’s on your TBR stack for June?

Bookends: April 2020

Posted on by Charity

Over the course of this first full month of California’s stay-at-home order, I’ve grown accustomed to rolling with whatever emotions come up for me each day. Not that I’m adept at it, but at least I expect it. Some days it’s just the constant low-level anxiety about food supply chains and asymptomatic transmission and armed protesters, but most days there’s some Big Emotion that pops up, like “persistent-panic-attack” or “crying-because-the-coffee’s-so-good” or “dear-god-have-you-always-chewed-so-loudly?” Knowing this is coming helps, even if I’m not sure what it’s going to be.

Having a routine also helps, which is nearly a cliche, but it’s totally true at our house. Every weekday at 7am, my kids and I take turns cajoling each other into our makeshift exercise room to do a Fitness Blender video together. It’s rare that we’re all excited about working out, but so far there’s always been at least one of us enthusiastic enough to pull the other two in.

Then there’s the morning block: feed the sourdough starter, wipe the front of the fridge, coffee on the patio, breakfast, fight about homeschool. Lunch is at noon, then more homeschool and/or music lessons, maybe a jog around the neighborhood, and dinner prep. Dinner’s around 5:30 or 6, followed by Mad Libs, kitten videos, or an episode of “The Office.” Bedtime routine starts around 7:30 with read-aloud during toothbrushing, then we gather for “grateful, sorry, and intend.” Lights out at 8:30 for the kids and around 9:30 or 10:00 for the grownups, although I’m contrary and fudge my bedtime a bit to get more alone time.

Weekends are for housecleaning and watching movies and social visits via videoconference and scrapping the routine for two days so we’re grateful for it come Monday morning.

My spouse and I asked the children at dinner last night how they felt about not doing all of the things outside the house that we used to. Both said they don’t really miss their outside activities. They still have their music lessons (virtual now) and online classes and virtual get-togethers with friends and family, only now they have more time to play or write or put together scavenger hunts or make LEGO stop-motion videos. They miss going to play basketball at the park and seeing their friends at P.E. class, but overall they seem happy. They’re creatures of habit, though, and I’m a little concerned about how we’ll all adjust in June when online classes and orchestra wrap up and we still (probably) can’t or don’t feel comfortable traveling.

But like we do with the emotions that shift day to day, we’ll take that as it comes.

Visual Interest: The cat’s getting photographed a lot more these days.

Finished in April (9):

April brought a little more concentration and a little more reading, thankfully. Things don’t feel right at all if I can’t read.

Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips

Mockingbird by Kathryn Erskine

Napoleon’s Buttons by Penny Le Couteur and Jay Burreson (R.A. with my son)

Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich (audio)

The Broken Girls by Simone St. James

The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune (R.A. with both children)

Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver (audio)

Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO by David Halperin

The Dollmaker of Krakow by R.M. Romero

Currently Reading:

Periodic Tales by Hugh Aldersley-Williams (R.A. with my son)

Caesar’s Last Breath by Sam Kean (R.A. with my son)

To-Read for May:

For May, I’m doing something that’s probably silly. On Litsy, there’s a #bookspinbonanza challenge, which involves making a list of twenty books on your TBR and then attempting to read them all, in the order drawn by the host of the challenge, before June 1. Given the weird time-compression thing that seems to be happening for me during stay-at-home, I know already that this has a very small likelihood of happening for me, but I really like the idea of trying.

You can see my Litsy profile for the whole list.

What’s on your TBR stack for May?

Bookends: March 2020

Posted on by Charity

My spouse likes to tell the story of the day he, our toddler, and I were driving home from an errand and we saw a van hit a pedestrian. My emergency training clicked immediately. I grabbed my phone, checked for traffic, and hopped out of the car, dialing 911 as I called over my shoulder to my spouse to pull our car over. At the scene of the accident, I calmed the woman who was hit, checked on the driver, and gave what information I could to the dispatcher on the phone.

I am good in a crisis. Or rather, I am good in an acute crisis. Something happens; I deal with it.

I am not so good at this prolonged, amorphous kind of crisis. I was good at planning for it, and I am glad to have something to do to protect both my family and my community (i.e., stay home), but the daily, incessant anxiety around simple activities that now carry an unknowably greater amount of risk, like procuring food, walking around the neighborhood, and getting the mail, wears on me. It leaves me very tired.

The piece that works for me, though, is the government-mandated separation from humans outside of my household. I know a lot of people, including my spouse, are feeling stir-crazy, and I do miss the ocean and hanging out at the library, but overall, I kind of welcome the excuse to avoid everyone. I can do things slowly these days. I can keep a regular schedule. I can think before being expected to speak. I can avoid small talk. We’re only two and a half weeks in so far, and I might feel differently by May, but for now, I’m enjoying the freedom to be quiet.

Here’s some visual interest (my morning ritual: locally roasted coffee on the patio) followed by what I read this month.

Finished in March (4):

I thought with shelter-in-place, I’d get a lot of reading done, but I’ve found concentrating a little challenging this month. Maybe April will yield more reading time. But if it doesn’t, that’s cool, too.

Crossing by Pajtim Statovci

Shylock is My Name by Howard Jacobson (audio)

The Overstory by Richard Powers

In Such Good Company by Carol Burnett (audio)

Currently Reading:

Napoleon’s Buttons by Penny Le Couteur and Jay Burreson (R.A. with my son)

Periodic Tales by Hugh Aldersley-Williams (R.A. with my son)

Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich (audio)

To-Read for April:

Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips

Thirteen Doors, Wolves Behind Them All by Laura Ruby

Ten Years in the Tub by Nick Hornby

Pet by Akwaeke Emezi

The Fountains of Silence by Ruta Sepetys

and whatever comes up for the #bookspin on Litsy.

What’s on your TBR stack for April?

Shelter-in-Place Recipe: Egg-Free Sourdough Discard Chocolate Cupcakes

Posted on by Charity

A couple of weeks before the COVID-19 stuff became disruptive locally, a friend gave me some sourdough starter. I read up and bought flour (just in the nick of time) and messed around with it and managed to keep it alive, but I had no idea when I’d have enough time to babysit dough long enough to bake bread.

Then came shelter-in-place, and suddenly there was that time I was looking for. (Silver lining?)

I used the Beginner’s Sourdough Bread recipe from The Perfect Loaf but because I can’t not mess with things, I made it 75% whole grain (whole wheat and spelt). The crust was a little darker and more assertive than was optimal, but my family loved the flavor of the bread and ate it happily.

All was going along swimmingly until I realized that I was very quickly using up flour and that I had a major sourdough discard problem. My family loved the pancake recipe from The Perfect Loaf, but it calls for 1 1/2 cups additional flour and two eggs per batch, and flour and eggs have become very dear in these pandemic times. Plus, the sourdough discard was adding up faster than my family wanted to eat pancakes, so I needed another solution.

First, I decreased the size of my starter (named Jameson by my ten-year-old). Instead of 20g starter/100g flour/100g water each feeding, I’m doing 15g starter/20g flour/20g water, which gives me enough for a new levain when I want to bake bread and enough left over to replenish my starter.

Next, I created an offshoot test starter (Jameson, Jr.) to keep in the fridge. I’m new enough at this that I’m not entirely certain about my ability to remember to feed it once a week, so I didn’t want to commit my whole starter to fridge fermenting. Jameson, Jr., is the same size as its parent.

Now instead of using 100g of flour and producing 200g of discard per feeding, I’m only using 20g flour and producing 40g of discard, and one only needs fed once a week. This rate of increase is more easily managed, but I still had a quart container of discard in the fridge.

(This photo was taken after I made the cupcakes.)

There are lots of ideas online for using sourdough discard, but none used enough and all wanted additional flour and/or eggs. With the empty grocery shelves in mind, I wanted a recipe that used only the discard (just flour and water, after all) and that didn’t use any eggs.

So I made up my own.

Using “Your Basic Chocolate Cupcake” from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World (by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero) as my starting point, I devised a recipe that uses 2 cups of discard, no additional flour, no eggs, and any type of milk, so it’s easily vegan. And I make my starter with whole wheat flour, so they’re whole grain, too.

My three family members tested the results and gave the cupcakes six enthusiastic thumbs up. (I can’t eat gluten or dairy, so I rely on my family for reviews of my glutenous recipes. They don’t mind criticizing me, so I trust their opinions.)

The cupcakes didn’t crown as much as I’d have hoped, but it’s pretty typical, for vegan cupcakes in my experience. My spouse and both children agreed that the sweetness was just right, the texture was good (my daughter said it was a little firmer than a standard cupcake, but that wasn’t a negative), and the sourdough taste was subtle. My son said, “It tastes like a chocolate cupcake with just a hint of sourdough fruitiness.” Kid needs to start a food blog.

Having declared the experiment a success and noting the dearth of online recipes calling for a whole bunch of discard and no eggs, I decided to share the recipe here.

The amount of liquid you will need to add will vary based on the consistency of your discard. I needed about 1/4 cup of added liquid to get to the right cake-batter consistency. I used cow’s milk, but you could use any milk.

If you try it in your kitchen, let me know how it goes and any modifications that work better for you!

Egg-Free (Vegan-Optional) Sourdough Discard Chocolate Cupcakes

makes 12

Ingredients:

3/4 c granulated sugar

1/3 c oil (olive, canola, etc.)

1 t vanilla extract

1/3 c cocoa powder

3/4 t baking soda

3/4 t baking powder

1/4 t salt

2 c sourdough starter discard (mine was 50/50 flour/water)

up to 1/2 c milk of your choice

-Preheat oven to 350°F.

-Line muffin tin.

-Combine all ingredients except discard and milk and stir well.

-Add discard and stir well.

-If mixture is too thick, add milk of your choice a little at a time, stirring well after each addition, until the batter is the consistency of thick cake batter.

-Fill muffin cups about 3/4 full or more (whatever it takes to distribute the batter evenly among all 12 wells).

-Bake for 18-20 minutes until a toothpick inserted in the center of a cupcake comes out clean.

-Transfer to cooling rack and cool completely.

-Top with frosting, whipped cream, jelly/jam, or just eat straight-up.

Bookends: December 2019 – February 2020

Posted on by Charity

Mid-December through mid-January were weeks spent coming down with, fighting, or recovering from various colds and flus (or maybe just one month-long ebbing-and-flowing virus). I did a lot more reading in bed than I usually do, and because I’ve built up some impressive whining skills in my 43 years, my family gave me more space than they usually do. Not all bad, but I’d prefer to be well.

These past few months saw a lot of books, both fiction and nonfiction, about violence (war, murder, sexual assault), suicide, mental illness, and adoption. I tend to gravitate towards darker books, so part of this is my doing, but several came to me from the list of National Book Award finalists, which was a pretty bleak collection, subject-wise, this year. Made for some interesting reviews for my Christmas reading challenges.

But now spring is almost upon us and there’s nothing but puppies and picnics in the park and sunshine and rainbows on the horizon (provided I don’t look at the news).

Visual interest:

 

IMG_20200215_100628

Finished in December (8):

The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter by Theodora Goss (audio)

Death Is Hard Work by Khaled Khalifa

The Barefoot Woman by Scholastique Mukasonga

Idaho by Emily Ruskovich (audio)

Women Talking by Miriam Toews

In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson (audio)

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

The Existentialist’s Survival Guide by Gordon Marino

Finished in January (8):

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

Sorry to Disrupt the Peace by Patty Yumi Cottrell (audio)

Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood by Lisa Damour

Heretics Anonymous by Katie Henry

Differentiating Instruction with Menus: Literature (Grades 6-8) by Laurie E. Westphal (ARC)

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

The Art of War by Sun Tzu (Cavalcade of Classics)

The Library Book by Susan Orlean

Finished in February (7):

Scythe by Neal Shusterman

Emily of New Moon by L.M. Montgomery (audio, re-read)

The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa

The Wild Robot by Peter Brown (twice, once on my own and once aloud to my kids)

Sabrina & Corina: Stories by Kali Fajardo-Anstine

The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell (audio)

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng (audio)

DNFs (4):

White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn

A Short History of a Small Place by T. R. Pearson

Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult

Currently Reading:

Crossing by Pajtim Statovci

Shylock is My Name by Howard Jacobson (audio)

Napoleon’s Buttons by Penny Le Couteur and Jay Burreson (R.A. with my son)

Periodic Tales by Hugh Aldersley-Williams (R.A. with my son)

To-Read for March:

In addition to the books I’m currently reading, I also have out from the library:

Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips

Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All by Laura Ruby

Ten Years in the Tub by Nick Hornby

And two titles from my physical TBR to read for #bookspin and #doublespin on Litsy:

The Overstory by Richard Powers

The Fountains of Silence by Ruta Sepetys

What’s on your nightstand this month?

Are you on Litsy? So am I! Come visit! @ImperfectCJ

Sorry to Disrupt the Peace by Patty Yumi Cottrell

Posted on by Charity

wp-1579981352326.jpgHelen Moran is in her shared studio apartment in Manhattan accepting delivery of her roommate’s new IKEA sofa when she gets the call telling her that her brother is dead. She packs a few things and flies home to Milwaukee to try to make sense of his suicide. “It’s just the three of us now,” her parents say, as they each try to interpret the shifting constellation of their relationship.

Helen is difficult to be around, trapped inside her own mind, alternately highly empathetic and completely clueless about other people’s perspectives, but I like her. I don’t know that I’d want to hang out with her, but I admire that she’s found a way to (mostly) get by in her world.

Being inside Helen’s head is similar to being inside Eleanor Oliphant’s head. Each has her own logic and mechanisms to cope with reality, and each is challenged to realign and reevaluate when reality no longer lines up with her understanding of it. But I like Helen more than I like Eleanor. There’s no miraculous recovery for Helen, no key to unlock her difficulties with life and free her from herself. She doesn’t find sanity and equanimity after three visits to a therapist. Helen’s adjustment to her world is more nuanced, more flawed, and more realistic than Eleanor’s. Her demons are still there, she just finds a new perspective from which to confront them.

This novel feels like a truthful portrayal of the experience of living with mental illness, including psychosis, which continues to be something of a third rail in discussions around mental illness even as it’s becoming more acceptable (bordering on trendy) to be open about depression and anxiety. Even aside from issues of mental illness, this novel illustrates well the ways in which we each live within our own heads and according to our own logical framework and how difficult it is to reach across the divide between our reality and someone else’s.

One of my favorite quotes from the novel, albeit one that doesn’t have much bearing on the plot, is this one about Helen’s experience living in New York City:

“Someone will pay me one day to divulge how I lived so frugally, elegantly, and sanely in that glittering, amorally rich, and enormous hellhole.”

Side note: Somehow, I’m reading three books at the same time that deal with adoption and mental illness: a memoir (Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson), a middle-grade novel (Ghosts of Greenglass House by Kate Milford), and this novel. It’s an odd coincidence, but one that I’m enjoying.

 

The Art of War by Sun-Tzu

Posted on by Charity

The Art of War is the first of the titles on my Cavalcade of Classics, Round 2 list that I’ve finished this year. Making progress!

Filled with guidance about war strategy that is surprisingly detailed, this book is more practical and less philosophical than I expected it to be. It provides interesting insights into warfare in China during the Warring States period, but I would hesitate to use it as a business or personal guidebook as some have suggested in recent years.

Some quotes/passages that were particularly interesting to me…

This one reminds me of the adage about putting one’s own house in order instead of worrying about someone else’s:

The Skillful Warrior

Can achieve

His own

Invulnerability;

But he can never bring about

The enemy’s

Vulnerability.

And this one sounded to me like a list of New Year’s Resolutions for an aspiring bad-ass:

wp-1578623562337.jpg

Playtime is Over: The Odyssey, Emily Wilson translation

Posted on by Charity

My children are studying ancient history this year, and as part of that—and as part of my Cavalcade of Classics—we read The Odyssey aloud together.

Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey is awesome. Odysseus is such an arrogant jerk. He caused so many of his own problems yet Homer seems to love him all the more for it. My daughter said at one point, “This is a really Odysseus-centered book, isn’t it?” which is kind of an obvious statement given the title, but I get what she means. It’s not just a book about Odysseus, it’s a book that’s devoted to portraying him as a hero even when he makes really stupid mistakes or lies for no reason, although I suppose that those things just make him more god-like, at least from a Greek Mythology standpoint.

One of our favorite sections:

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My children and I laughed at so many parts of this book, but naked Odysseus jumping on the threshold to announce his killing spree really cracked us up. Playtime is over, indeed.

Bookends: November 2019

Posted on by Charity

Our November was filled with mad science, unexpected reunions with family, and more rain than we usually see around these parts. With all of that going on, December snuck up on me, but there’s still time for a November Bookends post!

Visual interest: Stop chasing the birds!

IMG_20191114_150833.jpg

 

Finished in November (11):

The Girl in Red by Christina Henry

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

The Devil in Silver by Victor LaValle (audiobook)

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

A Nearly Normal Family by M.T. Edvardsson (audiobook)

A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay (audiobook)

The Other Americans by Laila Lalami (DNF)

The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay (audiobook)

The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson (DNF)

Recursion by Blake Crouch

The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson (audiobook)

Currently Reading:

In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

Black Ships Before Troy by Rosemary Sutcliffe (I was reading this aloud with my son but he finished it on his own one afternoon. Now I need to finish it and give him some language arts assignments about it.)

To-Read for December:

All of my library holds came in at the same time, so here’s what I’ve got to read this month, not counting the ebook and audiobook holds but including a grapefruit:

image.jpg

And I have some middle-grade novels I’d like to work on. And my spouse is getting me a stack of library books for birthday/Christmas. I appear to have my work cut out for me this month.

What’s on your nightstand this month?

Are you on Litsy? So am I! Come visit! @ImperfectCJ

Bookends: October 2019

Posted on by Charity

Ah, October! Santa Ana winds, a three-day jaunt to the desert (the “real” desert, not the coastal Southern California desert), taking my kids to the thrift store to buy costume components…and reading a few books, including a decent stab at the October Dewey’s Readathon. I posted on Litsy during the Readathon. That’s where you can find most of my updates between Bookends posts these days, if you’d like more of that kind of thing.

A little visual interest before the book lists. This is The World Famous Crochet Museum in a converted drive-thru photo developing place in Joshua Tree, California:

IMG_20191030_095204

Finished in October (12):

The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

Chime by Franny Billingsley

24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day a Weekby Tiffany Shlain

The Farm by Joanne Ramos

Ohio by Stephen Markley (audio)

The Changeling by Victor LaValle (audio)

Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James

The Odyssey by Homer (Emily Wilson translation, read-aloud with my children)

Less by Andrew Sean Greer (audio)

Uprooted by Naomi Novik (audio)

Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty (audio)

Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo

 

Currently Reading:

The Girl in Red by Christina Henry

The Existentialist’s Survival Guide by Gordon Marino

Black Ships Before Troy by Rosemary Sutcliffe (read-aloud with my son, who will still snuggle with me on the couch if I read to him)

To-Read for November:

Subject to change, as always, but here are some I particularly want to hit:

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

The Overstory by Richard Powers

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

And I have some middle-grade novels I’d like to work on.

What’s on your nightstand this month?