As a librarian, I read a lot of young adult fiction. I also read about a lot of YA fiction, as who can read all of it? I grow pickier and pickier, in fact, about what books I am willing to spend time on. Especially YA speculative fiction; so much is redundant or reminiscent of something else. And all of the dystopias! I am, in fact, a fairly intense fan of dystopias as done well they are a sort of warning about where we are heading, but I think it takes a genius to write an innovative, profound, future-changing dystopia, and so I get annoyed at all of the merely good or even decent ones.

So the majority of YA books I read about ever make it to the list of the ones I actually read. And the ones that will linger with me—that list is even shorter.

But I think Neal Shusterman’s newest YA novel, Scythe, makes that list.

(Part of my affection for this book is for its cover. The hint of an optical illusion of two faces made by the black scythe is perfect for the book's theme.)

I loved his novel Unwind. It was one of the first books I read after becoming a librarian, and it helped me to have a better grasp of how to make recommendations to teenagers. Can we, as librarians, even talk about novels that grew out of the abortion debate? Turns out, we could. (We even nominated it for a CLAU award here in Utah.) But even better, it was a fantastic, thought-provoking novel with an ending scene I hope to never forget. (If you’ve read Unwind you know what I mean.) I didn’t ever read the rest of the series, mostly because for me the first book felt like enough, but I have admired Shusterman ever since.

And the second I read about Scythe I requested the library buy it, even before it was released.

In the world of the novel, humanity, with the help of a cognizant AE called the Thunderhead, has eliminated all human problems. Poverty, hunger, illness, environmental issues, war, accidents, pain, emotional trauma, even death (in all forms except for burning): humanity doesn’t experience these things anymore. To compensate, there is a group of scythes whose job it is to eliminate people based on quotes of age, race, and gender. This is necessary because without scythes, a population who can live forever, as well as being able to “turn back the clock” and have their bodies reset to a younger (and more fertile) age whenever they want, would eventually become too large for the earth to sustain.

The story is about Rowan and Citra, who have been chosen by Scythe Faraday to become apprentice scythes. As they learn the arts of reaping, they are also instructed in history, art, and philosophy, especially of the mortal time. The scythes follow a strict set of commandments, some based on who and how they can reap, some based on how they should think. As they go deeper into their training, they learn that not all scythes are stoic, ascetic people like Scythe Faraday; some take advantage of their position and work around the scythe commandments to gain wealth and power. Which kind of scythes will Citra and Rowan become?

While it has plenty of the earmarks of the YA speculative fiction genre (but not, thank goodness, a love triangle), Scythe turns all of them on their head by the ingenuity of the original idea. It plays fairly intensely, in fact, with the dystopia/utopia concept. The world is seemingly a utopia, a place of peace and happiness for everyone, but can it be sustained? The dark side always seems to be hovering, even if only the scythes sense it. And can one truly be happy, when all opposition has been removed? When time is limitless (except for the unlucky few who are gleaned each year) and there is no threat of death, how can life itself have any meaning?

I loved this book so much!

Not just for the story or the characters or the questioning of humanity, but also for Shusterman’s sheer brilliance in writing. The pacing is perfect, the tension never gets frustrating, and the transitions between Citra’s thoughts and Rowan’s are elegant. Each chapter begins with a page from the gleaning journals of the scythes, which they must write in every day, so not only do you meet the two main characters, you begin to know some of the scythes as well. The sheer narrative skill to make so many characters believable in that world was just…gah. So good.

When I finished it, I did stop to ask myself: is this one of those rare, genius, future-predicting dystopias? I’m not 100% sure, because I think the best dystopias are warnings: if we continuing following this path (biological science taken to its extreme in Brave New World; social apathy against anything that requires thought and effort followed all the way to Fahrenheit 451, for example) where will we end up? Scythe’s technology seems to try to answer this question: If we continue with digital everything and storing all our memories, literature, art, history, and scientific advancements with computer technology, how will that technology change to influence us? At the end of that path he finds a technology that is able to create a perfect human society, and then he warns us about the dangers of perfection. If I did have a grapple with this book, it is that basic concept, because I don’t have enough faith in humanity to think that the end of our path will lead to anything but our own destruction. It’s interesting, though, now that I think about it, that while I disagree with the major idea of possibility behind the book, it was so well-written that I agreed wholeheartedly to follow the story anyway.

Scythe was the last book I read in 2016, a year that didn’t hold many books I absolutely loved. But I did love this one. In fact, I think it is my second-favorite book this year, following closely behind Neil Gaiman’s The Sleeper and the Spindle. It was memorable and powerful and so well-written I almost couldn’t stand it. My only regret is that I broke my read-no-unfinished-trilogies rule and, unlike Unwind, this definitely didn’t feel like enough. I’m looking forward to the rest of the series. Hurry, Neal Shusterman. Write faster!

(This is more of a book response than a review. You've been warned, it gets a little bit dramatic.)

It’s always strange to me how different parts of books impact different readers. Take Alice Hoffman’s newest novel, Faithful. It tells the story of Shelby Richmond, who is growing up on Long Island with her best friend Helene. All is normal adolescence until, on a cold night in February when Shelby is driving, the girls hit an icy patch and get in a wreck. Shelby is barely injured, but Helene barely survives; she ends up in a coma, being taken care of at home by her parents and thought of as a local miracle. If you touch Helene, the idea goes, she will be able to heal you, make your dilemmas turn around, or somehow save you.

Shelby is completely undone by her experience. She spends some time in a psychiatric facility and more time—months, in fact—just living in her parents’ basement, smoking weed and unable to move forward. Why, she wonders, should she get to have a normal life when her best friend does not? A sort-of relationship with the boy she buys her pot from eventually helps her start living again. They move to New York City and she finds a job at a pet store, which sets her moving forward.

Hoffman’s novels are usually in the “magical realism” genre (except for her newest historical novels). This one felt far more real than magical, and I kind of missed the magic. There is some almost-magic in the notes that someone leaves her, and the timing of when she receives them, but as the story goes, the writer is revealed. Without that little magic sparkle, the story felt the tiniest bit flat, but likely that is because I expected what Hoffman usually includes.

This isn’t a book with a dramatic denouement. Instead, as with life, Shelby takes a gradual path in her healing. I think what I will remember the most is reading this so soon after our trip to New York. It was—is thrilling too strong a word?—to read about a place in a novel and not just imagine it but picture it.

But what I will never forget is how it made me feel about my mom.

I carry quite a bit of guilt around with me about what my mom calls “Amy’s black years.” For nearly three years of my adolescence, I was a complete mess. Pretty much every bad thing a teenager could do, I did. Now that I have teenagers, I can finally imagine how my mom must’ve felt during those years. Her quiet, ambitious, fairly-normal daughter all of a sudden exploded and was replaced with a wild, angry, rebellious goth girl.

So as I read Faithful, the character I resonated with the most was Shelby’s mom. We’re never inside of her head…but I have empathy for her. It is terrifying and painful to be unable to help our children when they are stuck in darkness. There is only so much we can do, as mothers, and a large part of it is that we can never stop telling them we love them.

There is always a resonance with how mothers and daughters hurt each other.

In one scene of the book, Shelby thinks about her mother’s death, and how she felt blessed that she had the chance to tell her “thank you” before she died.

It made me think about what I should tell my own mom I am grateful to her for. But “thank you” feels impossible without first saying “I’m sorry.” I’m sorry I did all of those wrong things. I’m sorry I made you worry. I’m sorry I quit gymnastics and disappointed you. I’m sorry I didn’t let you see your first grandson grow up. I’m sorry for all of the pain I caused.

Seriously…I was reading this scene in the bathtub. I set the book down, put my head on my knees, and wept. Thinking about all those days I made unhappy for her.

But I also found myself realizing something, perhaps because as I read this book, my own son was also struggling with his own dark place and time. Still is struggling. I thought of what I looked like from the outside when I was in his shoes, finishing my first semester of college. I looked like a failure, a person who would never amount to anything. But you know who never gave up on me?

My mom.

If she ever despaired at my future, she never showed me. She encouraged me, she reminded me that I had value. Perhaps she even was able to take a breath and let me flounder. I don’t think she saved me. I think I had to save myself, but she did always give me a safe place, and in that way, yes: she helped save me.

Some books come into your life at exactly the time you need them, I think. That moment of reading in the bathtub led me to a little piece of knowledge from my past that I could use to help my son in the present.

Isn’t that strange?

And magical?

I love books.

A few weeks before his surgery, Kendell asked me if I’d picked out my hospital book yet. This question made me pretty happy, as he’s A—not a reader and B—traditionally adverse to buying books. But we’ve done this hospital-stay thing so many times, he knows it is important to me and helps me during the surgery (which is a long time waiting in uncomfortable chairs) and his days in the hospital (which are full of naps for him and me either watching him sleep or reading in other, yet still-uncomfortable, chairs).

You can’t take just any book to the hospital. You have to choose carefully. First off, it can’t have anything too traumatic, as your real-life trauma is enough to be getting on with. It needs to have a story that’s got some familiar tropes, something that’s gripping but not too intense, intelligent but not too complicated, because you want to be able to both be caught up in the narrative but also able to put it down at a moment’s notice. The setting is important—you really want to forget you’re sitting in a hospital room with someone you love who’s gone through something terrifying. Finally, you need characters you can love because there is something that happens when you love fictional characters: somehow, your affection (and patience! very important, patience!) for the real people in your life increases.

I always turn to fantasy for hospital reading, as it fills all of the necessities.

For the surgery Kendell had in November, I picked Dreamer’s Pool by Juliet Marillier, and it was just about right. Her book Daughter of the Forest is one of my favorite fairy tale retellings, so I already trusted her, and this new series (called Blackthorn & Grim) seemed intriguing: a wise woman who is imprisoned receives a boon from a fey on the day of her execution. She can decide to let the execution take place, or she can make a promise to the fey that she will not seek revenge against the man who put her in prison and she must help anyone who asks her to.

She chooses the latter. Without ever telling us her real name, she chooses another one, Blackthorn, and then, along with a man named Grim who was in prison with her, sets off across Ireland to the little settlement the fey told her to seek out. She lives in a small cottage on the edge of a forest near a pool that is rumored to be enchanted; she begins helping the villagers and even strikes up an agreement of sorts with Oran, the prince of the area. When she saves his bride, Flidais, from drowning in the Dreamer’s Pool, he seeks out her help, as the woman he wooed through letters is not the same woman who has arrived at his castle.

I liked many things about this novel. Blackthorn was a character I could connect with, as she is troubled by her past and it is easy for her to slip into darkness, and plus, I almost always like books with wise women (that goes all the way back to reading the Clan of the Cave Bear series when I was a teenager). I liked Prince Oran, too, who reminded me a little bit of Faramir from Lord of the Rings. I always love books set in Ireland, and the subtle magic of the fantasy was perfect.

And really, it was almost the perfect hospital book.

Except, the main conflict started to annoy me. Oran is trying to figure out why the Flidais he is meeting in person is so different from the one he met through the letters they wrote to each other. Was it just that she misrepresented herself to win the engagement? Or is it something more sinister? Mostly I found this extremely frustrating. It made me think of Shannon Hale’s Goose Girl, which has something similar, but in that case you’re experiencing the conflict through the characters that also experience it. In Dreamer’s Pool, you experience it partly second-hand, as some of the story comes from Oran but much of it through Blackthorn. I kept flipping to the back of the book to gather a few clues as to when they would finally figure out what was going on.

But that could’ve been forgivable, if Marillier hadn’t done something I can’t abide: putting modern sensibility inside the heads of historical characters. The setting of this novel is Ireland in medieval times—a time period not known for its liberal thinking. Characters overlooking homosexuality with a shrug and the idea of letting people love who they love—I don’t have a problem with that idea, but it is not how people thought during that time period. And while Oran’s proto-feminist perspective is refreshing, it also felt inauthentic to the setting.

I probably won’t pick up the rest of the books in the series, but I didn’t hate this book. I just didn’t love it as much as I wanted to—but in the end, it was a good choice for a hospital read.

I tried all day yesterday to write about our Christmas. Mostly because I wanted to get the details down, but also because I wanted to write a blog post with some new ideas for journaling about Christmas.

In my scrapbooks, I don’t only tell the happy stories. I am OK with documenting what was hard, or difficult, or even downright painful. Some scrapbookers see this as sort of…strange. Or even damaging—does the future really need my record of imperfections? But for me, I feel like only scrapbooking about the positive is inauthentic. I wish I knew how my grandmother or great grandmother struggled with her marriage or her mothering, what she learned from her disappointments, what dreams she didn’t achieve and how she dealt with it.  (I would like to read any of my ancestors’ thoughts but, alas, almost none of them were journal keepers.)

I tend to joke around Christmas about how I have offended the Gods of Christmas. (By which I don’t mean Christ, by the way.) We seem to always have something difficult or problematic happen right around Christmas: stitches, puking, step throat, a few really ugly arguments. One year I nearly burnt the house down; one year we couldn’t get out of the garage because the spring on the door broke. Kendell and I always have holiday tension because our ideas about Christmas (especially Christmas spending) are so different, so he’s usually mad at me because he thinks I spent too much and I’m mad at him because he can’t just leave it alone.

So I have stopped hoping for a “perfect” Christmas. One without any mishaps or sick kids or arguments. Instead, I try to celebrate what was good and fun and sweet. But when I sit down to write the stories of our holidays, it is impossible for me to only write the good stuff. Some years I can write the stories easily enough, but this year isn’t one of them.

Even though our Christmas disasters were mostly averted.

On Christmas Eve, for example, just as I was washing the last dish before I went to bed, I thought  wait a second…why is my foot wet? What is dripping on my sock? And then I realized I was standing in a puddle, because the garbage disposal sprung a leak. The cupboard under the sink was full of dirty water, all the way up to the lip, and it had started flowing out. So that was a giant mess, but at least I noticed before I went to bed—it would’ve been much worse if it sat all night.

(It did mean that, even though I thought this year would be the year that I managed to get to bed at a decent hour, I didn’t actually get to sleep until almost three.)

Nathan, Haley, and Jake have all been sick this month with colds; Jake actually had pneumonia. But they were all at least starting to feel better, so while there was coughing there wasn’t misery.

Until, at about 9:00 on Christmas morning (yes, I did sleep until he woke me up!), Kaleb came upstairs feeling like he was going to throw up. He spent a miserable hour lying in the bathroom…but then whatever it was finally passed; he didn’t actually throw up and he started feeling better. (If you knew our history of Christmas Stomach Flu you would realize what a miracle that was. I think that for at least half of our Christmases, someone has either been down with the rotavirus or just recuperating from it. It is the plague the Christmas Gods curse me with.)

So the Christmas disasters were manageable.

I think why I am having the hardest time writing about Christmas is because of how different this year felt. I just felt…sad. Sad all the time, in nearly undefinable ways. As if the fleeting quality of life had been drawn in sharp relief against my heart and that is all I could feel. It felt like a transition, somehow. Like next year will be different and so I needed to savor the end of what is usual for us. Even though Kaleb has joined the ranks of the unbelievers, and that’s already unusual. I decided to give myself a little break this year. Instead of putting most of the gifts under the tree on Christmas Eve (and spending an hour putting bows & ribbon on them, because you can’t put the bows on and then tuck everything into the various hiding places, right? The bows would be squished and squished bows make me sad.), I put them under as I finished wrapping them. I only kept one gift for each kid to be from Santa. I was sad about this non-believing state we are in this year, as playing Santa has been one of my favorite parenting responsibilities.

But I tried to remember to savor what this year brought, instead of focusing on memories, and that helped me notice how happy Kaleb was. He would take stacks of presents downstairs for me as I finished wrapping them, and kept everything arranged neatly as we added more. And in the end, after we’d opened presents (we didn’t even start opening till 11, mind you, because Kendell insisted on taking the disposal out that very morning), Kaleb told me “this is the best Christmas we’ve ever had.” And then he said “Thanks, mom, for working so hard to make it so nice” and then I managed to not cry when I hugged him because when you’re playing Santa, no one thanks you, but when you’re just the person who buys and wraps the gifts…someone thanks you.

I was worried about Jake, too. He’s had a harder first semester at college than he had anticipated, and is dealing with some depression and anxiety. I so wanted him to come home and have a really good, peaceful, happy experience. I watched him throughout the day (while trying to look like I was just Normal Mom instead of Worried Mom) and I noticed something: he has entered the phase of Christmas nostalgia. He said several times “remember the Christmas when…” and then, when we took a break from opening gifts to have some food, he took a dip sniff of the hot wassail in his cup, sipped it, and said “that. That is Christmas to me.” And then I had to try not to cry again because it felt like a message tossed back through time to all of the Christmas Amys I have been, exhausted from making Christmas: he noticed. The magic worked and he will be able to remember Christmas with happiness.

There were some other really good moments, like the joke they kept making about the paper that said “ho ho ho.” (Young adults make jokes like that despite my protests!) Or like when Haley (who’s “big” gift this year was new brakes for her car and so had fewer actual gifts under the tree) said “wait a second, I just realized that I won’t have something new to wear” and then the next present I handed her had a sweater in it—a sweater that she liked! And when I remembered that I’d also stuffed each of their little stockings (they have a small stocking that’s actually an ornament with their birth year on it) with one thing, and I had them find them on the tree. (That was Nathan’s idea, as a few years ago I’d put his much-coveted butterfly knife in his little stocking, and he wanted that to happen again; even though there wasn’t a knife in his this year he was happy I did it.) (Nathan loves knives. It’s one of his quirks.) Or when the kids sent me on a treasure hunt to find the gift that Kendell had got for me that they couldn’t figure out how to wrap. (New snowshoes!)

Writing this, I realized that maybe before I could write about my kids’ Christmas experiences, I needed to process my own. Christmas is joyful but it isn’t always perfect (wait! Is it ever perfect?), and working through whatever was difficult helps me to feel the joy more clearly. I can’t pretend it wasn’t there—but writing my way through it (instead of around it) feels the best for me.

So instead of giving you a list of Christmas journaling prompts, I only have one tip: just write something. Write the good details, the hard ones, the funny ones. Write about what felt real to you, even if it wasn’t perfect. This Christmas will never come again. It is in the living of it, good and bad, that we make the experiences we will remember but that are also so easy to forget, so it is in the writing of it that we get to keep them.

(But, this post HERE has a downloadable file with 31 Christmas journaling prompts if you want more suggestions!)

("In Which I Reveal Several Despicable Things About Myself" might also be a good title. Don't say I didn't warn you.)

I saw an old family friend at the library today, and we started talking about our families and how they’ve been since we last talked. When I told her about Kendell’s heart surgeries, she said “I bet you are taking great care of him.” She’s known me since I was three years old so perhaps she has some memory of me as a kind, nurturing, nurse-esque person.

I did not guffaw. At least out loud.

But I do have to tell you: this taking care of a post-surgical husband is hard work.

Don’t get me wrong. I love him, and I want to take care of him. But I am not, deep down in my nature, a natural caregiver. (There are many reasons I am not a nurse; poop is a pretty big one, but that lack I feel inside myself to want to rush to take care of someone’s physical needs is another.) I can fetch water and rub sore muscles and make sure the germy surfaces are de-germed, but I don’t intuitively know what to do. And during recuperation times, when I am needed much more than normal, I start to get a little bit resentful. Old arguments resurface, old frustrations reemerge.

Plus my natural need for solitude is interrupted.

(If you are still reading this after I’ve revealed my selfish coldness to you…thanks!)

Helping a spouse recuperate is not easy.

But do you know when it is especially hard? In December. (I know this for sure now, as we’ve done it for two Decembers in a row.) Because there’s so much other stuff that needs to get done. You know, like…buying gifts. Or at least a gift for my husband. My husband who wants to go everywhere that I go because he’s bored sitting at home. (Can you see me now? Purposefully not writing about how readers never get bored? Do I sound too proud of my ability to entertain myself? I’ll stop now.)

It’s hard to surprise a person who is always with you.

(In case you were wondering: this is what it looks like when I try to take a cute couple selfie just to celebrate the fact that we accomplished some Christmas shopping.)

And this year I didn’t want to get just any gift. I wanted to get him something awesome because holy *&*$#(@, this has been a rough year for him. A rough fifteen months. I wanted to find something that would be memorable and let him know he is loved and help him to feel that despite all the sucky medical experiences he’s had to go through, life is pretty awesome because look at that gift!

But not only have I been unable to go shopping without him…it hardly matters because I have had zero brilliant ideas as to what to give him. I mean, really. What kind of gift would make a person’s relationship with a rough stretch of life feel better? Is there any such gift?

Maybe I’m putting too much pressure on myself.

At any rate, I thought today would be my day to at least try to find something. I thought I had a window of Kendell-less shopping. We had a party today for work, which meant I went in at a different time than I usually do. And I might have just let him think that I was going back to work in the two hours after the party. And instead I would go shopping.

It would be the perfect time to find him a gift.

So I grabbed my opportunity.

And I totally failed. I didn’t find a damn thing to give him and I had no inspiration. But that’s not the worst part. Or maybe these are equally bad, but when I had about 45 minutes left before I needed to be back at work, I got a text.

From Kendell.

Asking me where I was.

Because he’d decided to come and visit me at the library. And the rest of the librarians who I work with were like, “ummm, we don’t know where Amy is, she’s not supposed to be here until 4:30” and yeah: totally busted.

And oh my gosh. I was so mad at him.

Which was probably more anger at the entire situation, at the fact that he’s had to do surgery recuperation for two Decembers in a row, and at myself for not being able to cope with a constant companion, and for my failure to find him the perfect gift.

But I was pretty pissed off.

And then I started feeling bad (but still angry and flustered), because I did just lie to my husband (even if it was for a good reason) and I really do want to find something that will remind him that life is fantastic. Or at least not entirely horrible.

So I started messaging him. I told him I was sorry for being tricky and that I hadn’t found him a gift, even though I really wanted to find something great.

And he texted me back and said “I have a new defibrillator and a new heart valve and a bitchin’ wife. What more could I want?”

So I guess I’ll have to forgive him.

(This post inspired by this one by my sister Becky.)

I have written more than once about how, for me, a large part of the pleasure of the holidays is memory. There is the remembering of childhood Christmases and, now that my kids have grown older, the remembering of their childhood Christmases which are, for me, memories of a different kind of mothering than I do now. It is a bittersweet remembering, these Christmas memories; each one reminds me of how much time is already gone and how fast an entire life can pass.

Memory is, in fact, my primary motivator for Christmas experiences. One of my greatest hopes is that my kids will all look back on their Christmas memories—when they are old enough to be nostalgic for them—with happiness. That some flavor or smell or texture will be a trigger and take them back to good memories. Thus wrapping all the gifts in coordinating paper, thus the prettiest bows I could find, thus Santa with his unique handwriting; thus baking and candles and traditions.

I hope their memories sustain them as mine do.

Last week, my sister-in-law came across some old photos, including this one of my little family in 1998:

I love that picture. Jake's wave, which was entirely spontaneous, and the way Haley is holding her hands, and the almost-pleasant expression on Kendell's face. I love that I can remember being that mom, with little kids, and how fun it was to shop for toys for them. I know I was also tired—I had just finished my next-to-last semester at BYU and was facing down 18 more credits the next semester; Jake had two ear infections and pneumonia that December and Haley had the stomach flu. But I was also happy in a different way from how I am happy now. I thought that the upcoming years (and years and years!) of having little kids at Christmas would last forever. 

It didn't, of course. Kids grow up and, one by one, mine have learned that Santa is helped out by their parents. (I haven't ever said "there isn't a Santa Claus" and I never will, because Santa is in our hearts as long as we keep him there.) Christmas started feeling stressful to me as my kids became teenagers, and while I hope I didn't ruin the magic...perhaps I did. I might have put too much pressure on everyone for the holidays to feel perfectly magical & memorable that I ruined the magic.

My relationship with Christmas is changing again. First Haley graduated from high school, so now she just comes home for Christmas, rather than always being here. This year, Jake will also need to "come home," even if he lives in the same town. For at least five years, Kaleb has been my only believer, but this year he, too, knows the truth about Santa. So I feel a little bit adrift: I have two adult kids and two still at home, and Kaleb still to make magic for even if he is 11 and knows everything.

As I looked at that picture from 1998, I had a realization: while we have traditions and while Christmas always feels like Christmas, no Christmas is ever the same. That long-ago Christmas when I bought Barbies for Haley and a Winnie-the-Pooh walker for Jake was never repeated; the next year Nathan had come along and we were on a different adventure. Every year is its own year, which means that never again will I have what I have this Christmas. Who knows? Maybe next year someone will decide to travel, or will be engaged or married. Or things could change in some way I can’t even imagine yet. I still have my mom down the street and my sisters and sisters-in-law down other streets (some longer than others) and nieces and nephews (and grands, too!) to visit with on Christmas day. Only this year will Kendell have survived this year, with his two new scars and an altered perception of mortality. (Please, God, may we get to next December with no more new scars!)

Sure: there are no believers anymore. There are no little ones bursting with irrepressible excitement. But this year will be good, too. This year will be so, so, sweet. Its pleasures and goodness will be unique to this year, it will add a new memory or two to all of the others, and I don’t want to be so caught up in remembering how it used to be that I miss what is right now.

So yes: memories. When I look at my tree, I remember the Christmases of my young motherhood; when I gaze at my white nativity I remember how it felt to be a child on Christmas eve again. When I look at my bowl of blue ornaments I remember Christmas Eves in my grandparents’ tiny, hot apartment and I miss them with an ache that has grown over the years rather than diminishing.

But joy in this year is the ultimate goal of right now. Savoring what is​, which is good, too.

And also, there is this. Over the past few years, whenever I decorate the banister in my kitchen, something new happens in my heart. I don’t remember, perhaps because I usually hang the snowmen and the snowflakes on my own;


I look forward. I can nearly feel a little spirit waiting to become my grandchild. I hesitate to even write that, as if putting the words into form will jinx it. And I am in no rush for my kids to become parents. But I do anticipate it. There will be children again, that little voice whispers. One day I’ll be there too. This has happened for the past three or four years and while, sure, you could argue it’s all in my head, I’m just imagining it, I don’t care. It has added another layer to Christmas: looking forward.

I love the remembering. I love the right now. I love the anticipation of how things might change. And even though I’m right now at the height of Christmas stress, I am also feeling joy and peace.

(Or, adventures in photographing desserts.)

(Actually, I think this cookie has four types of chocolate, but who's counting?)

This is my favorite cookie to bake at Christmas. It's got the best chocolate flavor and because it's not cocoa-based it doesn't feel brownie-esque. I always make it with some mint flavored chocolate chips so the cookies taste like Christmas. Yum. I've shared the recipe on my blog before, but I always have a hard time finding it because it's smooshed in with some other recipes. So I'm sharing it here all on its own.

And because Internet Blogging Etiquette requires a photograph, I took my cookie (the very last one!) outside to photograph. It was bright and cold outside; you can't really tell it's cold from the picture, but you can tell it's bright. I should've gone hunting for better light but it was too damn cold, so I took the cookie inside for a "natural, diffused light" photo in my front room instead. Poor cookie, placed here in unflattering, harsh light!

Ah, well, I did photograph it and then eat it, so it's OK.

Double Chocolate Cookies

1 1/2 cups bittersweet chocolate chips
1 cup butter, softened
1 cup packed brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla
2 eggs
2 1/2 cups flour
1 1/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2-1 cup roughly-chopped pecans (optional)
3 1/2 cups of chocolate chip combination (see instructions)

Melt the bittersweet chocolate chips over low heat until smooth. (You can use semisweet instead, but the bittersweet gives them more flavor.) Beat the butter and sugar (really: it's not a mistake, you don't need any white sugar, just brown) until pale; add vanilla and melted chocolate. Beat eggs in one at a time, until light and fluffy. Stir in flour, baking soda, and salt. Add the pecans if you have kids who won't freak out at the thoughts of nuts in cookies. Then add a total combination of  3 1/2 cups of a combination of chocolate chips—white, milk, dark, mini, or mint—or, if you're not like me and don't obsessively buy chocolate chips in every cocoa percentage, just use one kind. It's up to you. (I don't really measure this part.) The dough will at first seem too soft, but don't add any extra flour. Give it a couple of minutes and it will firm up all on its own. Bake at 350 for 10-11 minutes. Store in a covered container—these seem to dry out quickly if you don't.

And, in case you want to bake your own little delicious chocolate mouthfuls of heaven in cookie form, here is a printable PDF for fun:

Download Cookies double chocolate

Happy baking!

I think that Zadie Smith is one of those authors who really smart, literate, up-on-the-issues readers read. And while I'd like to think of myself as one of those readers...dare I confess I've never read one of her novels? I've been drawn to them, especially NW, but for whatever reason just never tried one.

When I read about her newest novel, Swing Time, though, I was determined that this was the one, because it is ostensibly about dancers. I tend to be drawn to novels about dancing, and this one also has a friendship theme, and it's set in London (I've becoming a little bit obsessed, after visiting London, with reading books set there). I've had a hard time writing about the book, however, because I both loved it and was disappointed by it (except...I loved it!)

The novel tells the story of two biracial girls, Tracey and the unnamed narrator. They meet at a dance class at their community center and form a close but complicated friendship. The narrator's mother, a black woman who is determined to raise herself up in the world by getting an education, is a different sort of mother; on one hand, she is fairly non-nurturing, but on the other she is determined that her daughter, too, fulfills her full potential instead of getting caught in the poverty cycle. So her daughter's friendship with Tracey, whose father makes brief, chaotic stops into her life, is not one she encourages.

Still, the girls dance together; they watch videos about dancing and dancers; they grow apart and come back together as they enter adolescence and young adulthood. Tracey is a talented dancer whose home situation makes it more difficult for her to be dedicated; the narrator loves dance as an idea and an art form, but her flat feet and lack of natural talent mean she will not be involved with dancing as an adult, as Tracey is for a while. Instead, the narrator ends up working for a pop star named Aimee, traveling around the world and managing the details of the musician's life.

The two girls' friendship forms a sort of reference point for the narrator; she both despises Tracey and is envious of her successes. It is an underlying presence in her adult life, even though she sees Tracey very rarely. Aimee becomes interested in the poverty in Africa and decides to build a school for girls in a village there. So the story is constantly moving, between the London of the 1980s and contemporary London, New York and Paris and Africa. The tension in the novel builds from the prologue, where the narrator, who has been recently fired from her job assisting Aimee, hints at something horrible she did to get fired, summed up in a short email from an old friend: Now everyone knows who you are. What did she do? That's what you wonder as the tale progresses.

My ying/yang response to the novel lies within the difference between what I wanted it to be and what it was. I wanted to—thought, as I began, that I would​—read a novel that was about dancing. Thought I'd read details about aching, exhausted bodies and the complexity of patterns and steps, about blistered toes and glittered costumes and the strange feeling of performing a dance on a stage, how it is both terrifying and exhilarating. The book has none of this. Instead, it is "about" dance in the same way that the narrator herself is interested in dance—as a concept. The dancing in Africa, the performance of dancers on New York stages, the dancers in the old movies that Tracey and the narrators watch: these things influence her just as much as (or perhaps more than) her own days as a dancer (which are never remembered). 

In a sense, this isn't a book about dancing or friendship or race or poverty or social status; it is a book about memory, or how it feels to remember experiences and then try to figure out what they mean from a different age. From this perspective, the pacing and structure and the told (rather than shown) feel of the details make perfect sense.

Still, if it is a book about dance as a concept—and that thread does run through the narrator's experiences as one of the ways she frames the world—I still wanted more of it. For example, in one scene the narrator is watching a production of Showboat​, which Tracey is dancing in, and as she watches she explains that "I felt my feet moving beneath me, trying to echo on the plush red carpet the complicated soft-shoe shuffle Tracey was performing right above me on the hard-wood stage. The steps were familiar to me—they would have been to any dancer—and I wished I was up there with her."

Just like with the steps...any dancer can relate to that. Or, likely, anyone who has been submerged in something for many years during their childhood, dance or basketball or gymnastics or whatever. It doesn't last forever and eventually you stop doing that thing you used to do well and love and live for. Your body stops doing it, stops, usually, being able to do it, but your psyche—your soul. Something inside you never stops wanting to do it.

I wanted more of that, wanted a book that helped me remember dancing. The fact that Swing Time doesn't do that, however, doesn't make it a bad book. That's just not what it is, despite what the reviews and press copy say. I still loved the novel, however, especially because it has one of those personal, serendipitous reading moments, wherein an answer you are looking for is found in a novel.

November (when I started this book) was a hard month for me. (Thus the silence on my blog.) Not just because of Kendell's surgery and recuperation. That, in fact, has been the least-hard thing. Instead, it was the U.S. election. It has made me feel completely undone. I have stood in front of my clothes in my closet and wept because I wish all of it, every single thing I own, were black. I can't do color. I can't find hope. I haven't felt this dismal in decades. But something that the narrator writes in Swing Time helped me just a bit.

Near the end of the novel, the narrator is in Africa, and she travels to a place that was historically significant, a spot on a river where slave ships would stop to gather slaves before heading for the coast. She wants to feel a connection here, to her long-lost tribe or her deep roots or something, but it doesn't move her. Instead, she says 

I experienced it not as an exceptional place but as an example of a general rule. Power had preyed on weakness here: all kinds of power—local, racial, tribal, royal, national, global, economic—on all kinds of weakness, stopping at nothing, not even at the smallest girl child. But power does that everywhere. The world is saturated in blood. Every tribe has their blood-soaked legacy: here was mine.

Power does that everywhere. Even though this election has felt, to me, like nothing that has ever happened ever in the history of humanity, and that it is the start of the downfall of contemporary times, Smith's words (brutally true words) helped me have a spark of hope. Every generation, every society, has its violence and wrongness and bloodshed. Perhaps this is just my generation's time. That realization doesn't change or fix anything, but it does at least give me the tiniest bit of hope that, like slavery and past genocides and the brutal machinations of historical figures with power, a way will be found. Not to fix what cannot be fixed. But at least to survive inside of the awfulness.

So, despite what I wanted to find in this novel that I didn't, despite being disappointed by it, I also loved it. I think it will linger in my reading memory for a good long while.