Back in February, when I presented at Life, the Universe, and Everything, I had a very clear winner for Favorite Book I Read: After the End​, by Amy Plum. It is the first book in a two-book series, and yes: I loved it even if it did break my read-no-unfinished series rule. (It helped that the sequel was only a few months out.) To sum up After the End:

It tells the story of Juneau, who grew up in a clan of people who survived a nuclear war that left most of North America inhabitable. The clan lives in Alaska, with a few leftovers from the days before the war, but mostly survive by hunting, fishing, and farming. They also have their ability to connect to the Yara, which is sort of a mother-earth, all-living-things-are-connected power. Juneau's mom used to be the spiritual leader of the tribe, but then she died, and now Juneau is being trained to take her place.

Until she finds out it's all a lie: there was no nuclear war and society is doing just fine. She has to head out into the world to find out answers, both about herself and her clan.

One thing I loved about this is how different it was. I can sort-of compare it to a couple of books—it reminded me a little bit of Epitaph Road by David Patneaude and of Half Lives by Sara Grant—but the connections are tenuous at best. It felt like an original idea, not derivative of anything. Plus, I loved that it is full of outdoor adventures all the way from Alaska to L.A., with a stop in the downtown Salt Lake City library. Also, Juneau is a strong female character without ever being unstoppably or inexplicably strong; she has a history behind her strength.

So I expected quite a bit from the sequel, Until the Beginning​, and it didn't fail to deliver. It picks up right where the first book left off and then barrels forward, with outdoor adventures and Juneau slowly figuring things out and a tense (and a little bit open) ending.

I am being vague on plot details because really, anything I said about the second book would ruin the first one. It's a great little series that I would highly recommend if you like adventure, a little bit of romance, girls who make actual choices that influence their lives in both negative and positive ways, and something a little bit unusual. 

One of my clearest reading-associated memories has to do with summer reading. For a few summers at the library in my little town, you could go in once a month and talk to a librarian about the books you'd read, and then you'd get something—a coupon for a shake at the Polar King, maybe, or one for a donut at Happy Days Market—for reading over the summer.

My first grade teacher, Mr. Averett, was a librarian there one of the summers, and that is my memory: the papery smell of the library and how cool it was after the heat of riding my bike there; the relief of taking off my full-of-books backpack and then sitting together with a tall stack to talk about. He always stopped me after three or four because of course, I'd read too many to talk about them all.

I read a lot of books.

I wish I'd kept a list of the books I read as a kid, because most of them have faded into general reading memories. But a few stick out and will never be forgotten, so long as I have a memory, and one of my favorites was The Golden Name Day ​by Jennie Lindquist. It tells the story of Nancy, who comes to the country to live with the Bensons when her mother is ill and in the hospital. Grandma and Grandpa Benson, who emigrated to America from Sweden many years ago, take care of Nancy, making her a part of their lives with their extended family. They share their animals (Karl the Twelfth and Whoa Emma!, both horses, and Oscar the dog and Ciciley Ann Waterspout the cat), wallpaper her bedroom with little yellow roses, and teach her about their Swedish traditions.

The one Nancy falls in love with is the Swedish Name Day.

Every day in the Swedish Almanac has a day associated with it. On a Swedish name day, the honoree bakes a cake, and then there is a party with friends and family. There are some surprises or gifts, too, and singing of traditional Swedish folk songs. Grandma's name day is just a few days after Nancy arrives, and she is enchanted by this idea. She decides immediately that she wants to find out when her name day is—except "Nancy" isn't a Swedish name. How her new friends and family try to come up with different ways to give her a name day, but none of them quite work. The name-day problem and how the solution is found is the book's main plot line.

But it is such a delightful story.

Truly a girl book, I have to say, even though Nancy becomes friends with a boy named Alex. It is a story about a girl from the city discovering what living in the country is like, and what it feels like to be an only child but suddenly be included in a family. It is about Grandma's unconditional love for Nancy (even when she is being difficult). It is about flowers, and friendship, and family traditions and history. It's also about reading and how stories influence our choices.

I've sort-of wanted to reread this for ages. "Sort of" because I was worried. It is out of print (even though it was a 1956 Newbery Honor book), so I wasn't sure: what if there was something in it that I hadn't noticed as a child but that would make it offensive to me as an adult? Or what if it just wasn't as good as I remembered? Plus, since it is out of print, it seemed impossible to get a hold of a copy without spending a bunch of money.

But then I had the brilliant idea of using inter-library loan. (I know! It only took me seven years of being a librarian to think of this.) One of my library friends processed my request and voila: a few days later, I had my hands on a copy. It was perfect: just like I remembered, with the same end papers as my childhood library's copy and the same cover (there is also a red cover, but red is entirely the wrong color for this book).

And rereading it was not disappointing.

Revisiting childhood favorites is sort of strange for me. I love re-discovering the details I'd forgotten, but I also am surprised by how certain parts of the books have influenced me. Rereading The Golden Name Day reminded me of what a flighty, flower-loving, prone-to-looking-for-fairies-in-the-morning-glories kind of little girl I was. I wanted to live inside of Nancy's world, which is grey when she arrives but slowly changes color, via flowers, as the spring progresses. Reading about a girl who was so influenced by flowers reinforced my love of flowers, and I think there is a tiny bit of Nancy and her adventures in my yard. But the flowers weren't the only thing. The Golden Notebook introduced me to several of the tropes that still influence my life:

• A love of pretty fabric. Even though there's not any quilting that happens in the story, Nancy does have a pretty quilt, made by Grandma, in her room, and then there is the violet fabric in Wanda's sewing box. Just a hint...but I already loved fabric so reading about it made me feel like I wasn't the only one.
• Old treasures. Nancy finds an old, worn-out book in a box in an attic one day. Ever after reading that, I wished for an attic with boxes I could search through. I loved snooping and sifting through old stuff when I was a kid.
• Poetry. The book Nancy finds is a poetry anthology. She reads Nashe's "Spring, the Sweet Spring" and is never the same. I don't remember when I discovered poetry, but not many children's books mentioned poems. Reading about Nancy reading poems helped me to be ready to read poems.
• Family history. Nancy has a conversation with Aunt Martha when she realizes that Grandma actually left​ Sweden, a place she loved, to come to America. She looks around and realizes that without Grandma's choices, she couldn't have the experiences she was having. Those ties to places where my ancestors lived—England, Scotland, Ireland, mostly, but I do have one line from Sweden—tug at me. They are the places I most want to visit, partly because they are not here. Nancy's moment of realizing that Grandmother's life was completely different before she came to America was a little ah-ha moment for me, too, when I read it as a kid.

 I loved rereading this, and am now on a hunt to find my own copy.

 In homage to how I used to read when I was a kid—entire afternoons spent outside on a comfy chair—I read the book outside.
Of course, I didn't ever have entire afternoons, but I did sit out in my backyard, reading in the sunshine, quite often. In fact, I confess to rereading it several times before the ILL due date came up. It added a series of peaceful, introspective, happy moments to my summer.

Have you ever heard of The Golden Name Day?​ Or do you remember a book from your childhood that you'd like to own a copy of?

I work in a library.

Which means a big part of my job is knowing about books: what is popular, what is unknown but incredibly good, what is good for people with very different reading tastes. ("I want to read a romance" is answered fairly differently, based on the reader's age, gender, reading history, and reading aesthetic.) That means I read a lot about books. I read VOYA and School Library Journal and Horn Book Reviews; the NYT Book Review and Publisher's Weekly and Amazon's Best Books of the Month. Lists—I read a lot of lists. And I pay attention to book awards, too.

And I think I know 1/5 of what some of my colleagues do. There are just so many books!

I love being a librarian, but sometimes I get frustrated. Because: there are just so many books. You know what all that reading about books does to your books-to-read list? Turns it into a monstrosity of 512+ fiction titles, that's what. That's not even counting the nonfiction and essays and poetry and how I'd like to catch up on some feminist literary theory and how I'd like to reread some classics and how I still haven't even read all of Shakespeare and...

I can't read all day every day. But there are so many I want to read! I'll never get to them all, which is what frustrates me. I want to live but I also want time to read more books. There just isn't ever enough time.

So I just keep adding to my list, in the futile hope that, I don't know, perhaps I will discover the entrance to a bubble in time, where I can step in and read for hours, read for days, but pause time outside the bubble. Until that happens, here's a list of the books I most recently added to my to-be-read list, which I might never actually read, even if I check them out and take them home:

1. Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff 
A book about marriage, told first from the husband's point of view but then from the wife's. Plus it's got some bits that refer to Antigone, my favorite Greek tragedy. How can I resist?

2. Orphan Train by Christina Kline.
A girl who is almost ready to age out of the foster care system befriends an elderly woman and helps her clean out her house. I imagine this is about the power of memory and the influence of friendship.

3. A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman.
Four people—each friends from different circles in my life—have recommended this to me. Which feels like the universe saying "you should read this."

4. Leaving before the Rains Come by Alexandra Fuller. 
A memoir about the ending of her marriage and how she figures out how to save herself.

5. H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald. 
Another memoir, this one about the death of the writer's father and how, after he died, she started training a goshawk, one of the deadliest and wildest birds in the hawk family.

6. Uprooted, by Naomi Novik. 
Novik's Temeraire series is one of my favorites. This is a different kind of fantasy, about a corrupted Wood, a wizard know as the Dragon, and a woman who must serve him for a decade.

7. The Book of Speculation by Erika Swyler. 
A librarian and a rare book and a mermaid for a mother, plus color illustrations. Yes, please.

8. Did you Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg. 
June Reid is utterly changed when her daughter and other family members are killed in a fire the day before a wedding. She drives cross country from Connecticut to California (I might want to read it for the same reason as I read Kissing in America) to figure out what to do next.

9. Bohemian Girl by Terese Svoboda. 
I am just discovering this writer but I think she might be just my style. This is about a woman who is sold to a Native American to pay a gambling debt.

10. The Daughters by Adrienne Celt. 
An opera singer, haunted by a family curse, loses her voice.

11. A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson. 
I loved Life after Life so much. This is the same family, only from Teddy's perspective; I don't know which life.

12. The Marriage of Opposites by Alice Hoffmann. 
I like Hoffmann's recent turn to historical fiction. This tells the story of the family history of the painter Camille Pissarro, namely his mother.

13. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Days by Salman Rushdie. 
I feel a little bit weird about this: but I have never read Rushdie. This book, about New York City being overtaken by jinn, is just the one to start with I think.

 14. A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler. 
A multi-generational family drama. I heard her talk about it on NPR and have wanted to read it ever since. Plus, it just made the short list for the Booker Prize.

15. The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood. 
OK....you know I am a staunch Atwood fan, yes? But I'm only sort-of excited to read this. (I feel a little bit apologetic saying that, like she cares what one solitary reader from Utah thinks.) It's about Stan and Charmaine who, homeless and jobless, turn to the Positron Project, where on month they live and work, but the next month they have to be prisoners in the Positron prison. But it's Atwood so I'll read it!

16. The Secret Chord by Geraldine Brooks. 
Her novels The Year of Wonders and People of the Book are two of my favorite pieces of historical fiction. This is a retelling of the story of David.

17. God Help the Child by Toni Morrison. 
This came out in April and then I forgot I wanted to read it. How could I forget a new Toni Morrison novel?

18. Transatlantic by Colum McCann. 
Because I am a sucker for almost anything set in Ireland.

19. The Oregon Trail: a New American Journey by Rinker Buck. 
The writer travels the Oregon trail in contemporary America. After reading Under a Painted Sky last week, I am starting this next.

20. The Fire Sermon by Francesca Haig.
Except, I also just checked out this one! Four hundred years after a nuclear war, humanity is divided. Everyone is born with a twin; the Alpha twin is perfect, while the Omega twin is flawed and so sent away to live in segregation with all the other Omegas. My only hesitation: first book in an unfinished trilogy. Totally breaks my rules. 

So tell me: What have you recently added to your to-read list?

Yesterday I was lamenting the withering of blogging. I miss the days of reading the blogs of people who became friends, many of them scrapbookers. I miss reading scrapbooking blogs that were about scrapbooking instead of about design team or kit club assignments. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that…I understand that the industry has to function somehow.) I miss reading about one of my favorite subjects without feeling like I was being sold something. So I complained about it a little bit, on a Facebook group I belong to.

And then I remembered that I, too, have a blog. And I don’t write about scrapbooking very often anymore either!

Partly this is because I have let go of my scrapbookerly ambitions while I focus on writing. I’ve never wanted to be on a design team (because designing layouts with the goal of showing how to use products does not sound like a thing I’d be good at) and I don’t subscribe to any kit clubs (because the longer I scrap, the pickier I get about what products I will use). But it’s also because of low blog stats in general, and fewer comments. And because there aren’t a lot of other bloggers anymore to share the scrapbookery blogging camaraderie with.

Still.

I found myself thinking of Toni Morrison’s advice to writers: write the book you want to read. The same can be said for blog posts! So I decided that I’m going to start blogging more about scrapbooking. About the process, or about journaling, or about using supplies. Share tips or suggestions or journaling prompts. Or just my thoughts. Because after all, it is one of my favorite topics, regardless of who reads or not.

Today I’m thinking about an essential part of your patterned paper arsenal (wait? is it an arsenal? Well…I probably could cause quite a few papercuts if I started flinging paper around. I have a lot.) and that is multicolored stripes.

I learned the power of the multicolor stripe from quilting. It’s quite often what quilters use to bind our quilts (although I’m also fond of little polka dots). For me, it’s nearly always the thing I buy after my quilt is entirely finished. And as it generally takes me years to finish a quilt (not kidding!), there’s no way I could buy any of the same fabrics I used in the quilt. The key to finding a good binding is to look for a stripe that has the same neutral base (white, cream, or grey) as the neutrals in your quilt, and some (but not necessarily all) of the same colors in the same hue. It’s amazing how the striped multicolored binding pulls everything together!

The same thing goes for scrapbooking. I almost never use multi colored striped papers in big chunks, but as smaller accents that are there to tie all the colors together.

Take this layout:

When I first started chosing supplies, I didn’t even know where to start, because there are so many colors in the photos. I almost went with yellow…but decided on light blue and light turquoise. I pulled these supplies:

(I almost always pull WAY MORE STUFF than I could ever use on one layout. Then I have to put it all back when I'm done! Also, I took this after I made the layout...so some things I put on the layout couldn't be in this photo.)

But everything felt a little bit blah. So I riffled through my multicolored pattern drawer and came across this (very old…I think it’s from 2010) My Mind’s Eye stripe (from their Fine & Dandy line…I loved that line!) It had the turquoise/blue feel of what I’d already pulled, but it added brow and orange into the mix, and it was just the right amount of snap. Since everything I’d already pulled was mostly monochromatic, I added some brown and tan and got to work. (I didn’t add any orange because I didn’t want the layout to “read” as orange. Even though I love orange! It just wasn’t the feel I wanted.)

Without that stripe, I never would have added orange and brown to turquoise and light blue. But the stripe pulls everything together. And I absolutely never, ever would have thought to add brown and tan to an Easter layout. But the turquoise and blue keep it feeling springy.

That’s one way you can use a multicolor stripe—to add something extra while simultaneously pulling everything together.

You can also start with a stripe that goes with the feel of your photos, and then pull other supplies that work with the stripe. Usually I use the stripe in small pieces, so it doesn’t overwhelm the whole layout. But I have a bit piece of that stripe left. I think I’m going to challenge myself to use a good portion of it in a different way.

Maybe that will be my next scrappy blog post!

Do you like using multicolored stripes on your layouts?

Last week wasn’t a good running week for me. I did a lovely run on Monday morning—a bit longer than I planned because I did a new route and totally missed a turn, and I was too blissed out to notice for a good half mile or so!—but on Tuesday, I woke up to an aching adductor. Even though I wasn’t sure if it was strained or just sore, I learned my lesson last year: back off if there’s muscle pain. So I didn’t run for the rest of the week. (It felt better by Friday but by then the week was so busy I couldn’t fit in any running time.)

What is interesting about not running is how much bigger my sugar appetite is. Chocolate-covered pretzels, fall M&Ms (the pecan pie ones aren’t very good. Which didn’t stop me from eating them, alas), chocolate chip cookies, a pumpkin spice frapp, hot chocolate several times, salted caramel chocolate squares. If I’m not running regularly, I find myself just constantly shoving sugar into my body, even when I know I’m not hungry and part of me doesn’t even really want it. I still eat sugar when I’m running, but I think about it less.

At any rate, it wasn’t a good week for my health, so I was happy to hit the road this morning.

It was raining when I got to the parking lot near the trail where I wanted to run. Not a light little drizzle, either (which I actually love running in), but a heavy downpour. Since I was ready to go though, I just waited in the car for twenty minutes or so, and was out the door the second it stopped pouring.

I ran four miles on a middle-of-Provo section of the Provo River Trail. I’ve recently discovered this part of the trail and am loving it. It has lots of bridges and tunnels and it is right next to the river in many places. Today I went north, and the day was perfect. The mountains here are dotted with red and a few swaths of yellow. The sky was heavy with clouds. It sprinkled off and on; there were puddles to dodge or jump over and just the lightest chill in the air. Plus, every curve in the trail seemed to have some little reminder that fall is very actively arriving: purple chrysanthemums on the stoops of apartments, a few leaves turning on the trees near the river, the grasses tall and golden.

Plus, over it all, my favorite scent, the smell of rain, which is always better in the fall because it has a slight undertone of fire.

As I ran, I thought about a conversation I had with Kendell recently, where I said “but I’m so happy when I’m running” and he said “running isn’t happy, it’s torture” and I laughed. I really do understand why it feels painful to run. Especially when I first start, when lungs still have to open up and muscles warm, when it feels a little bit awkward to be moving like this. Or when you’re almost to the turn-around point—nearly halfway done, but not quite, and it suddenly feels like you will never be able to make it back to the car. Muscles tug, joints ache a little, the mind rebels. Running requires movement to continue even when the desire to stop is nearly overwhelming.

I get it.

But for me, the happiness of moving overwhelms the negatives. The pain almost becomes one of the reasons to run in the first place. It makes me feel stronger to know that I can keep going anyway. It is the way my mind both wanders and settles, a mental experience that brings me a deep sense of calm. It is the connection with the body, pushing my legs along, feeling my muscles work. And it is always, always being outside, in any weather, but forever best in the autumn.

One of the highlights of my life was the day I stood on the Oregon trail.
(I am wearing pioneer clothes because...well, you know. Pioneer trek reenactment. And people say Mormons are weird.)

 This was when I went on a pioneer trek with the youth in my church. It was a highlight because I have always loved pioneer stories, but before doing research for the trek, I had no idea of just how many people I am descended from who crossed the country on the Oregon trail. Those rare times when it seems that history and my life right now overlap are moments that are full of meaning to me; they are memorable and change my focus in ways I didn't expect. Walking on the exact same ground that my great, great, great, great grandmother also walked (as well as many other great-something grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles) felt holy to me. They became much more real to me.

But even before I knew so much about my ancestors, I was drawn to trail stories. Not so much Westerns (in the Louis L'Amour tradition) but novels about people traveling across the country in epic journeys. Come to think of it, the only Western I really love, Lonesome Dove, really is more of a epic pioneer story than anything else, even though the "pioneers" aren't a traditional family.

At any rate, when I read about Under a Painted Sky after a patron suggested we get it for the library, I wanted to read it immediately. It is the story of Samantha, who is living in St. Joe, Missouri, with her father. They moved there after her mother died, when they left New York City to start over. Half Asian, half French, Sammie seemed to fit in OK in New York, but in St. Joe she is an anomaly, viewed with suspicion. When her father is killed, she has to flee St. Joe.

Luckily, she meets Annamae, a run-away slave also trying to escape from St. Joe. Striking up a fast friendship, the two decide to travel to California together on the Oregon trail, pretending to be boys—named Andy and Sam—in order to escape suspicion. (They are both likely to show up on "wanted" posters.) A couple of days outside of Missouri, they strike up a friendship with a group of three cowboys, Cay, West, and Peety, and conspire to stick with them in order to learn the skills they need to survive on the trail.

I loved this book.

Sure—one might complain that Andy and Sam don't really make convincing boys, and it's a little bit far-fetched that they aren't immediately uncovered. But I just chose to go with the conceit because I enjoyed the story so much. It is a plot made richer by interesting characters and the addition of Andy's straightforward faith and Sam's intricate knowledge of literature, music, and Asian philosophy. (Her father insisted she be educated while they were living in New York.) They characters have all sorts of adventures, from surviving a cattle stampede to crossing rivers to saving their horses from wild mustangs.

But my favorite part of the book was Sam and Andy's friendship. If you are lucky in your life, you come across two or maybe three people with whom you immediately connect, and this is how their friendship is. It starts with a mutual need (escaping St. Joe) but grows into something much deeper and valuable. They have to learn how to trust each other and how to communicate around their cultural differences, but each girl has something the other can lean on. As I think more YA novels need strong girl friendships, I loved this.

It's also a book full of adventure, history, and (yes, or course) romance. I gobbled it down in less than two days and I've found myself falling into good memories of the story as well. It felt like it ended with the possibility of a sequel—it wrapped up well and didn't leave me hanging, but I can see the story continuing on. (In fact, I really hope it does!) It reminded me of that day I walked along the Oregon trail and of the sacrifices and hardships so many people went through to build our country. I loved it and can't wait to recommend it to other readers of historical fiction. 

​One day during the late autumn when I was 16, I was hanging out on the couch and watching MTV (which is what I did instead of going to school), and a piece came on about the new album by The Bangles, Everything.​ I started paying attention because even then I couldn't get enough music by women (even though at that point i was deeply entrenched in my Depeche Mode fangirlyness) and I'd very recently bought my own copy (a cassette tape which yes, I confess to still owning; it's in my box o' tapes in the closet under the stairs). At one point, the VJ (I'm pretty sure it was Martha Quinn, but I could be mixing up memories; I watched a lot of MTV back then, when it was good) started talking about the song "Bell Jar," which I already loved because it had the line "she dresses in black because sorrow is a magnet." I just didn't really know what it was talking about. (Other than the obvious, which is suicide.) Who was the girl, why was she one of the world's seven wonders, what was a bell jar anyway?

The VJ (let's just go ahead with my Martha Quinn image) asked the band about the song, and Vicki Peterson explained. (At least, I'm pretty sure it was Vicki. It definitely wasn't Susanna Hoffs, who sort of annoyed me.) The song was a tribute to the poet and novelist Sylvia Plath, who had committed suicide, I learned, in 1963.

Maybe because there was also sadness hidden in my bizareness, I was immediately intrigued. I checked out The Bell Jar (Plath's novel) and Ariel (her second book of poetry and the one she is known for). I didn't understand the poems, although the last two stanzas from "Edge" lodged themselves irrevocably in my memory ("The moon has nothing to be sad about/Staring from her hood of bone.//She is used to this sort of thing./ Her blacks crackle and drag.") But the novel—I read it straight through, two times, before returning it, and it, too, lodged itself into my psyche.

Reading The Bell Jar at sixteen just when I was transitioning into my life's darkest period? Totally changed everything for me.

I read everything I could find by her after that, into my twenties. Which means I've read her short story collection, her children's book The Bed Book (acquired through an interlibrary loan when I was in college, as it is long out of print, sadly enough), her journals and her letters. Plus various books about Plath and her works. I understand her poetry better now and tend to re-read The Bell Jar every five years or so.

I love other writers, but Plath holds a special place in my heart. (And yes, before you point it out or even really think it: I am aware that this a totally cliched part of my life. Depressed, wears-all-black, poetry-loving teenage girl adores Sylvia Plath. I know. It's a weakness. But it's also undeniable that her writing changed me.)

All of which is a super-long explanation for why I was excited to read Meg Wolitzer's YA novel, Belzhar. I enjoyed (but never finished) her novel The Interestings​, but what grabbed my attention was its connection to Sylvia Plath. It tells the story of Jam Gallahue, ordinary (and maybe slightly boring) 16-year-old who has a short but intense relationship with a foreign exchange student from England, Reeve Maxfield. Short because 41 days in, he dies. This sends Jam into a tailspin that eventually lands her at The Wooden Barn, a private school for teenagers suffering from emotional difficulties.

One of Jam's classes is Special Topics in English, which only a few students each year are allowed to take. She didn't request it and isn't sure why she is enrolled. There are only four other students, and this semester they will focus exclusively on one writer: Sylvia Plath.

Special Topics in English is a sort of a legendary class at The Wooden Barn. All of the students who take it grow extraordinarily close, and even though they won't tell the other students how or why, they talk about how it changed their lives. Jam is reluctant, but as she's out of places to start over, goes to class anyway.

How and why it changes her life—a slightly magical and mysterious process—is why you read the book.

I want to give this a glowing review. And I did love some of it, especially the overarching concept. Especially watching Jam as she transforms and finds her footing again. Part of the process of healing is being forced to re-experience what really happened to her, and what that was surprised me. It made me look back at my own experiences and wonder how much perception influenced them. I loved the mini-rant that Wolitzer, channeling Jam's voice, takes about the decline of studying English and the focus on STEM. I loved the setting (boarding schools always get me).

But what disappointed me is that they don't really ever talk much about Plath. There's an excerpt from "Mad Girl's Love Song" and some references to The Bell Jar...but not enough. Maybe Wolitzer was trying to avoid that teenager-girl-loves-Plath cliche by not bring up Plath's actual work, but then why bother including Plath anyway? Without some specific pieces of her writing, the fact that they're studying Plath almost doesn't matter to the story, aside from some general thematic connections. The poem is an obvious choice, but there are so many other snippets that could add depth. How, for example, can such a book not reference "the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am."

Of course, it could just be me and my historical connections to Sylvia Plath. Maybe if you were never a Plath fangirl, it won't be a thing for you. I just...I really wanted to see the characters truly interacting with her writing, because I think it is powerful and life changing; I think there are reasons that teenagers of a certain persuasion are drawn to her. Partly it is the drama and darkness of the story. But that would eventually lose its appeal if the writing didn't also resonate. So to include almost none of it in a book about how studying Sylvia Plath (among other things) changes a character? Well, it's very nearly obscene to me.

Ridiculous at the very least. Or just not very brave. (Because it does take a certain kind of courage to include lots of poetry in a YA novel.)

The New York Times says that Belzhar "celebrates the sacred, transcendent power of reading and writing." It does​ do that, and that is its transcending grace. But I couldn't love it. It disappointed me by feeling cowardly. 

One of my goals this year has been to scrapbook less.

Which sounds like a really odd goal, until you realize what its counterpart goal is:

Write more.

And not just write, but polish. And be brave enough to take the next step, which is finding markets and submitting.

Part of the “scrapbook less” goal has been a massive purge of supplies. I got rid of so much stuff. I was brutal in answering the question “do I really need this?” I did this in an attempt to streamline my process, so anything time consuming—painting, stamping, embossing—is mostly gone. (I did keep my alphabet stamps and some of my favorite designs.) I want to use the supplies that make the process simple and quick, so that I can focus on what feels most important to me, which is the story.

Then summer happened, and I definitely achieved my “scrapbook less” goal. I also wrote less, and left my room only partly-finished. This is because I need solitude to feel creative and I wanted to spend time with my kids while they were home from school.

Once September came, though, I have done a little bit of scrapbooking. And I am finding that I have a new question. With each layout I make, I find myself thinking does this matter? By which I mean, does this matter? In thirty or fifty or one hundred years, will this story or photo be important to anyone?

This question is changing my focus.

I am asking myself—what is the most important thing? If scrapbooking is my hobby, the thing I spend time on if I’m not with my kids or working on my writing, I want that time to be well-used. Out of the random ramblings of thought, I have made a list. For me, the things I want most to scrapbook are:

1. Everyday stories. The family lore that might be forgotten otherwise. This includes “life right now” style layouts and personality snippets.
2. Holidays and events. Maybe this isn’t the coolest or hipster-ish scrapbooking thing. But for me, it’s important that I record some details about Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween, birthdays, first and last days of school, and vacations.
3. The love I have for my kids. I want to leave a record so they never have to wonder.
4. My own stories. This came as a surprise to me. I love the concept of scrapping about myself but I rarely do it.

In essence, this means no fluff. Fewer layouts that are about just one pretty photo. It means layouts that always have a story; it means spending my time on the story instead of the embellishments. It means I want to be specific and informative.

This felt like a good direction for me.

So I’ve been working my way through the pictures I printed at the beginning of the summer. I got to this one

which I love. It tugs at my heart pretty hard, and I wanted to put in Jacob’s book. It’s just one picture, though, and I didn’t really have a story to go along with it. As I pondered, it started to feel like the fluff I wanted to avoid. I looked at it and felt so much conflict, because I loved this phase of my motherhood, the very end of my kids’ childhoods before anyone had turned into a teenager. When Jake felt like he still was firmly Jake. Sometimes I want to leave the mess and negativity and stress of parenting teenagers. I want to go right back to the days this photo represents, the days when I felt like I knew my children and when I knew myself as their mother.

When I didn’t question everything.

And yet, doubting myself so much, I still look at this photo and can see the future Jake in 10-year-old Jake’s face.

And I remembered I still love him. Despite the mess and negativity and stress, the arguments and the tug-of-war and the worry.

So I took a deep breath and I tried to put into words what I remembered about that Jake on that day, about the person he used to be. It isn’t the most amazing journaling ever. It isn’t prize-winning writing. It’s just me getting my feelings out. It might even be fluff.

It might not matter in a decade or two.

But as I wrote, something happened in my heart. Or maybe in my throat, where the lump of fear and worry might have shifted just a bit. Might have shrunk. Because as I wrote, I began to understand that he is still that person. It might not be as easy to see now, in the muddle of adolescence, but he is still himself.

I wrote the journaling, and then I went to bed, and I couldn’t sleep for a little while because I was filled with something strange…something I remember feeling but haven’t for a while. A lightness. Could it be hope?

Yes, that is it. Hope.

And how magical is that—that after all these years of scrapbooking, after writing journaling for thousands of layouts, I can still be impacted. It still brings me joy, it is still a process that helps me and makes me a better person and teaches me things I couldn’t learn otherwise.

So I am adding a fifth thing to my list. It can’t always be practical and future-based. Sometimes it can still be about the process:

5.   Photos that tug at who I am right now. That photo grabbed my attention because it held something more than what I could see. It wanted to lead me to a little piece of knowledge. And that is important too.

I want to pursue my dreams of being a real writer. Along the way, I’ve let scrapbooking fill up all my time, and I can’t do that if I want to fulfill my goal. Bu moving forward, I know that I will never not scrapbook. It is an essential part of who I am and how I process my world, and will always be one of the things I do.

When Kendell and I were in southern Utah this summer, we hiked for a little while with a young couple from Wisconsin. They were on a cross-country road trip, with Seattle as their ultimate destination, stopping at whatever national park, monument, or mountain that caught their eye.

(I am jealous of young couples who can have adventures like that. When we were young and childless, Kendell still had his bad hips so we didn’t have many spontaneous hiking adventures.)

We immediately told them that they should stop in Utah County on their way north, so they could hike Timpanogos. We gave them all the waypoints: Timpanogos Highway to the Alpine Loop to the Timpanokee trailhead. “Bring water and trail snacks and strong legs and your camera,” we told them. Go any day but Saturday, but go.

Later, I thought about my recommendation. Do I love Timp (as we affectionately call it) because I know it? Or because it really is beautiful and can compare to any other 11,000+ foot mountain on earth? Would it really be worth that couple’s stop? Especially compared with national parks and monuments?

Of course, I think so, but it’s hard for me to be objective.

I love Timp. Every morning, I look out my window at the mountain; it gives me a hint, sometimes, of the weather, but mostly it is my daily greeting, my peaceful moment, my deep, cleansing breath before I start my day. From my kitchen I can see the west face of the mountain, which is covered with ridges and smaller peaks, but mostly flat. I love that I know how the east side (the back) is creased, folded, textured, a wilderness like a secret when you only see the west side.

It is the mountain I have hiked the most. I still haven’t been on all of its trails, but most of them. I’ve hiked with friends, neighbors, my sister, my kids, and my husband. I have hiked along its back, its western face, its tallest ridge. I’ve been undone by its lingering snows and the roar of its temporary waterfalls. In spring, summer, and fall I’ve summited its highest peak and its smaller sub-mountains. Some parts of the trails are as well-known as the lines on my palm: the stone that is shaped like a scapula, the shady glen with a log shaped like a wolf, the tight, hidden curve that makes my heart beat harder every time I take it. And there are places—where I dropped my camera once, where I bandaged up Kendell’s blistered feet, where Becky and I sat for a snack, where the kids left their jackets on the way up (which they regretted at the windy, cold top). The place that is like Lothlorien to me, the place where, if I decide to be cremated, I would like my ashes scattered.

So maybe it is personal, my connection to Timp. But all of it is full of beauty: meadows of wildflowers, soaring, jagged cliffs, valleys and distant views and rivulets of water. Enormous pines, scarlet oaks, yellow quaking aspen; sudden curves that surprise you with moose or mountain goats or a single, solitary hawk floating the rising air currents.

Today, it is burning.

(Right now, as I write this, the Wheeler fire on Timp is only 5% contained.)

And I know—sometimes the woods need fire. It isn’t necessarily the enemy.

But while everyone is complaining about smoke, I feel—odd and overdramatic, but true—like I am mourning for a friend. 

There has been so much fire in America this summer. So far, Utah had been lucky enough to escape it, but I know there are many people in the world like me, right now, who love a mountain, love it in very specific ways, who feel the same way. Helpless as the damage mounts.

All of the news reports talk about the fire threatening homes, or turning away from homes. This fills me with a sort of anger, because if the fire doesn’t go towards the homes, it is still burning the mountain. This idea—that people are the most important—is the root of what damages our world the most. Reportedly, the fire started by an ATV burning on private lands and then quickly spreading, and it is that arrogance (the private land on the mountain, the ATV) that I despise. Houses, gondolas, ski runs, fancy restaurants: none of these belong on the mountain anyway. There should only be cliffs and peaks and valleys and meadows. And trails.

To me, Timpanogos isn’t just a mountain. It is a presence. A place I have a relationship with. It is my solace, my sacred place. “There are no unsacred places,” a line from a newly-discovered Wendell Berry poem says, “there are only sacred places and desecrated places.” I am powerless to stop the many ways that places are desecrated. All I can do is look, observe, love, hold up in my memory.

And pray the fire is put out soon. 

I tend to skip most YA romances. Well, nearly all romances in general, on principle, because I get frustrated and annoyed by romance-novel endings, which are nearly always super-happy and super unrealistic. So I confess: I read the YA book Kissing in America with deep misgiving and ulterior motives. You see, in the novel I am slowly plotting, one of the main characters takes a road trip from Colorado to California. (One day, in the name of research, I will need to take the same drive. Who wants to come?) I read this book, in which two of the characters take a road trip to California (but all the way from New York City) solely as research: how would another author handle the travel?

So I went into the reading with absolutely zero expectations except for the blurb on the cover from Elizabeth Gilbert—she loved it—which did, I admit, make me a little bit suspicious. (I get annoyed just thinking about Eat, Pray, Love, because yes, it was a good book and highly successful, but really, how many of us have lives that can afford a year off from reality? Where's the book that might teach us how to rebuild our lives, however they're broken, in, you know, actual life? With mortgages and jobs and car payments and kids? When is that going to be on the NYT Bestseller's list? Rant over.)

Zero expectations? Maybe that's the key to loving a book, despite the Elizabeth-Gilbert misgivings. It tells the story of Eva, whose father (who was a British man) died two years ago. To cope, she takes up reading romance novels. Bodice rippers and westerns and objectified Scotsmen. She likes how romance novels always work out in the end, unlike her life. Things are OK living with just her mom, a professor who's taught Eva all of the tenants of feminism. (Romance novels=not usually included in said tenants.) But she's overprotective to the extreme, especially since the plane crash.

Still, Eva's life is OK. She has a great friend, Annie, and is doing well in school. So well that one of her after-school jobs is working at her high school's tutoring center. That's where she meets popular (but in a quirky, rebellious sort of way) Will Freeman. He asks for help with his college admissions essay, and their friendship grows from there. Friendship, and then a romance, and then Will, whose own life is complicated by his parents' divorce, moves to California.

Eva, convinced that she's found True Love, just like in her romance novels, figures out a way to visit him in California after school ends. This involves her friend Annie entering a contest and, more importantly, convincing her mom (who knows nothing about Will) that she can ride the bus to California on her own (with Annie, of course).

I liked so many things about this book. Not, alas, the cover—when Jake saw me reading it, he said "Mom, that looks like a really dumb book" and I explained that it is about a teenage girl coming to grips with her father's death by traveling across America. That sounds smarter than the cover makes it seem.

Anyway.

I liked the romance novel angle, because it is about Eva exploring just how not like a romance novel real romance is. Eva's relationship with Will is one that started with friendship and built from there, instead of the I-saw-him-and-it-was-instant-love motif (which makes me nuts). It also has a great friendship. So many YA novels have friendships that implode, and while I like that story line, it was refreshing to see a good, strong, real friendship. What I totally did not expect--but did, of course, love, is that many of the chapters are given titles that come from poems. And not just any poems, but those that I think of as Really Good Poems. Works I would have happily taught my high school students. Also, before her dad died, Eva also wrote poems, and read them with him. None of that poetry angle is mentioned in the book copy, I think because it might scare off some readers, but honestly: it is a book with poetry in it, but it isn't a poem-y book. I think if you don't like poetry, you'd still like this book.

The only thing I didn't like was Eva's relationship with her mom. First off, it seems strange that she is a strong, feminist woman who doesn't encourage her daughter to do strong, feminist things. Her near-hysterical overprotectiveness, even with the fact that her husband died in a car crash, felt more like a caricature than a real reaction. Casting the parent as the character who makes the wrong choices and who eventually have to apologize to their teenager is a thing that I hate in YA books. (Unless the wrong choices are really ugly wrong choices, not just usual parent/teenager interactions.) I think most YA authors remember being teenagers but haven't parented them yet, and so they do this thing—the same thing teenagers do—where the parents are the villains in the story, or at least one of the major obstacles to the characters getting what they want. A teenager would totally think it was fine to go cross country on a bus without any adults, but as a parent I can see why Eva's mom wouldn't go for it, even with her extreme reactions.

(Maybe I need to remember that I'm not exactly the intended audience for these books anyway. But still: do all YA authors need to reinforce teenagers' ideas that they are the victim in the parent-child relationship? I want a YA novel wherein a teenager realizes that his/her parents are doing their best.)

(And yes, that is totally because I want my own kids to realize I am doing my best.)

Still, I really, really liked this book and am excited to share it with teen readers at the library.

And my ulterior motive was actually fairly rewarding. I figured out that the main character in my novel needs to have a traveling companion. But she won't be taking the bus, I'm pretty sure!