Since my last post was in the midst of the Covid pandemic, with nothing since, readers may think I succumbed to the "plague" those nearly five years ago. Fortunately, that's not the case - I've had Covid twice during that interval, but thanks to the vaccine, both times my case was nothing more than a mild inconvenience.
However, I have suffered from a malady of sorts. I lost any motivation to write on the blog. I didn't stop reading (more on that later), and I sometimes had thoughts about what I read that could have made a blog post. But I didn't see the point of putting it out into the world. Who really cares what I think about Jane Eyre or my take on the myths of Latin America? It just seemed trivial and not worth the time at the computer.
Yet, I didn't forget about the blog, either. Lately I've actually missed writing out my musings about what I read. Even if no one cares, even if it's trivial, it's part of my enjoyment of reading to process the ideas through writing. And it's a way of "collecting" and remembering and reliving the pleasure of reading.
So, I'm back to try again. I'll start by briefly remembering/reliving the highlights since the last post in 2020.
2021 Flashback - Jeff and I had a trip planned to Ireland and Great Britain, so I read several books about Ireland or by Irish authors. Two highlights - Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt (finally! after a couple of attempts over the years) and Last Night's Fun by Ciaran Carson.
2022: The Year of Reading about Food and Farms - I started with In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan, and worked my way through several farm-related books, such as Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and The Dirty Life by Kristin Kimball (probably my favorite read of the year).
2023 My Last Year as a Professor - The book that most influenced my thinking this year was Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I've taken to writing down meaningful (to me) quotes as I read, and I have more than a page of them from Kimmerer's book. I also enjoyed So Much to Be Done, a collection of excerpts from writing by women in the nineteenth-century American West.
2024 I hit my reading stride! I read more books this year than I have in a very long time, probably because I bought a Kindle Scribe for my birthday. Some favorites: Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (I picked this up from a windowsill at a bed and breakfast in Thurles, Ireland, and read in the evenings until we left and I had to leave it behind. I was able to check it out from the library a couple of months later and finish.); A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella L. Bird (I have a hard time believing this woman rode a horse hundreds of miles around Colorado - alone!); and The Oregon Trail by Rinker Buck.
I'll close with one of the quotes from a little book I tucked in during the last few days of 2024, The Door in the Wall by Marguerite de Angeli:
"Fret not, my son. None of us is perfect. It is better to have crooked legs than a crooked spirit. We can only do the best we can with what we have. That, after all, is the measure of success: what we do with what we have."
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