We had a family dinner today to celebrate my niece, who came home from her LDS mission last week. My sister-in-law asked me to bring soup, so I made a big pot of cream of broccoli. When we all got home, Kendell and I had to run back out again, and when I came home from our errand, I found the pot—which had quite a bit left—like this:

Guess those teenage boys “put it away” in their bellies instead of the fridge!

My mom used to make cream of broccoli soup when I was a kid, but she put little noodles in hers. I loved it, but the one time I put noodles in mine, my kids freaked out. They did not like it! So whenever I make it, I pause for a second and wonder if I should try it with noodles again. I never do though. It’s still delicious! Here's how I make mine:

Cream of Broccoli Soup (for a crowd…adjust proportions if you want less, but it makes good leftovers!)

2 pounds broccoli crowns (I just use about 2/3 of the bag from Costco)
2/3 stick of butter
1 onion, diced small
½ cup flour
2 cans chicken broth
4 ½ cups milk (plus extra)
½ cup heavy cream
1 cup half & half
chicken base
black pepper
white pepper
garlic powder
onion salt
cheddar cheese, grated

Measure the milk/cream/half & half in a large measuring cup, and let it sit out for about 30 minutes, until it is no longer chilly. (This keeps the milk from curdling later. If you forget to set it out, just put it in the microwave for 3-4 minutes.) Steam or boil the broccoli until crisp-tender; save the cooking water. In another pan, melt the butter and then sauté the onions; let simmer until soft and translucent. Sprinkle the flour over the butter and onions, then stir until the flour is incorporated into the butter. Then keep cooking for another 3-4 minutes over medium heat. Pour in the chicken broth, whisk until creamy, and then bring to a boil. This mixture will be fairly thick. Once it is thickened, pour in the milk. Stir over medium-low heat until heated through, almost boiling but not quite. Add the chicken base, black and white pepper, garlic powder, and onion salt. I totally don’t measure the spices, I just keep adding until it tastes right. The chicken base is pretty salty, so start with about half a tablespoon and then add it in smaller amounts. While the soup is still hot, add some cheese. Again…I don’t measure how much, just add some handfuls until it tastes like you want. (I want mine to taste more like broccoli, with a hint of cheese.) Let simmer. Meanwhile, pour the steamed broccoli into a strainer, reserving the liquid. Pick through it to find any pieces of stem and whatever bigger florets you have, and put those in the blender (about 1 ½ cups of broccoli and 3/4 cup of broth) with some of the left over broccoli cooking liquid. Process those until they are completely smooth, then add to the soup and stir again. (Or use an immersion blender. I don’t have one!) Chop the rest of the broccoli as small as you like (I do mine pretty fine, but also try to leave some chunkier pieces for Kendell to find), add it to the soup, and then make sure it is heated through again. Taste and adjust spices. If it is thicker than you like, add more cream, half & half, milk, or broccoli broth. 

I have a theory: the next literary mini-trend is going to be the post-plague novel.

OK, my theory is pretty shaky. It’s built on three things:

1. Ebola.
2. How much I loved Station Eleven. And not just that *I* loved it, but many other readers did too. It was nominated for the National Book Award!
3. The fact that I have two other post-plague novels checked out.

See. Totally a trend.

I finished the first one, Find Me by Laura van den Berg, today, sitting in my car during my lunch break. (Reading + eating=perfect combo.) It tells the story of Joy Jones, who was abandoned as a one-month-old baby on the steps of a hospital. After years of foster homes, she’s living on her own, working at a grocery store and nursing a dextromethorphan addiction. Then a sickness that causes rapid memory loss before death sweeps through America. Lucky enough to be immune, Joy is discovered by a researcher who is trying to find a cure for the sickness. She’s taken to a hospital in Kansas where her immunity (and that of roughly two hundred other people) will hopefully be used to make an antibiotic. Part of the story is about Joy’s experiences in the Hospital, part is what happens after she leaves, and part is flashbacks trying to puzzle out her faded memories of a bad foster home.

I’m still trying to decide how I feel about this book.

There are things that I loved. This is an observant book. It pays attention to how things might really feel in the situations the plot presents. Not just the plague itself, but Joy’s days in the hospital, her time outside, and her experiences in foster care. Also her emotional state—how does a person process the fact that she was abandoned by her mother? (In Joy’s case, she keeps a sort of running mental list of worse things a mother could do.) The way the characters explore how the sickness has influenced their lives resonated with me, too. Everyone seems to have a theory of what caused it. Joy, who has lost months of memories from her childhood, starts to believe that she is immune because of those gaps, that the sickness didn’t need to harbor itself in her because her mind was already doing to her what the sickness might.

I was also fascinated by the philosophy that guides the doctors at the Hospital. Their procedures are guided by the idea that our unconscious mind controls our health. If our unconscious mind wants us to be sick, we will be, and if it wants us to be well, we will be. The leap is to make a sick body well by healing (or even tricking) the unconscious mind. This idea guides the entire novel, in fact. It is an intriguing concept—what control do we have over the outcomes? Can we will ourselves to survive?

Where the book fell apart for me was when Joy left the Hospital. She has figured out some information about a woman who is possibly her mother, so she heads for Florida. Of course, any book with a journey requires some wandering, some mistakes and wrong turns and broken-down vehicles. It wouldn’t be a journey story without them. But where Joy went and what she experienced on the road just felt…thrown in. As if the author knew something had to happen in those 150 pages, so she made up some stuff to happen to Joy. I actually did enjoy this second half, too, but it was so entirely disjointed from the first part that it didn’t make sense. It felt like two different books that happened to be under one cover. Yes, “united” by one character…but the two settings are so dissimilar, it just doesn’t work.

Still, even though I didn’t love it, I was so moved by it. Especially by its ponderings on memory. And this sentence: “What is a baby but a ghost turning real inside you?” And this idea:

I imagine Current Me sitting next to Stop & Shop Me on the MBTA bus. Current Me looks at her with tenderness, touches her cheek, tuckers her hair, her still beautiful hair, behind her ear. There is so much this Stop & Shop Me does not yet know. Together the Mes look out at the other passengers and the construction rising from the ground and the people playing pool in Laundry World and the evangelical church, swollen with song. They stop at a red light and that is where Current Me leans in and whispers, One day all of this will be gone.

This is something I do, too. Imagine Past Mes and what I might say to them. How I might feel if I could see a Past Me—the Amy who I used to be, before ____ or _______ or even _______________. The things that changed me, for good and bad. How heartbreaking it is, that we can't ever go back, that we can't ever be the Me we used to be. Even though I didn’t thoroughly love and adore Find Me, I think it will still stay with me, because I found that little bit of similarity. That connection. 

I loved Holly Black's book The Coldest Girl in Coldtown so much. (It was my third-favorite teen read in 2013.)  It was a memorable take on the vampire ethos, haunting and gritty and unique. So when I read that she had a new teen fantasy novel, I was so excited to read it. Especially as it is a remodeling of the Snow White fairy tale, with a fairy prince standing in for the maiden sleeping in the glass coffin and a dash of the changeling myth thrown in—well, maybe I built up my expectations too high. 

Because while The Darkest Part of the Forest wasn't a bad book, it was just sort of...middling. Medium. OK. Definitely not memorable like Coldtown was. Good, but not awesome.

It tells the story of Hazel and her brother Ben, who grew up in the small town of Fairfold, which lies just on the borders of Faerie. Under the haphazard care of their artist parents, they grew up telling each other stories about the horned boy, who lies in a glass coffin in the woods; as they get older, the stories change into fairy-slaying adventures. The horned boy is never supposed to wake up, nor his glass coffin ever break—but one day, both of those things happen. One night, actually, and then next morning Hazel wakes up in dirty sheets, her feet pierced with glass shards, which is just the beginning of her most dangerous experiences in Faerie.

Which sounds awesome, right?

And really, I'm not sure if I'm being fair. It was pretty awesome. The way the plot unfolded and the secrets were revealed was clever. I liked the characters and the romance.

It just felt like...just another teen book, I guess. Whenever I have a reaction like this to a teen book, it makes me think is it because of the book itself? Or because I'm not the intended audience? I think a specific type of teen reader really would love this book. I just can't imagine it sticking around in my brain for very long. Except to recommend to those certain types of teen readers who will like it.

So yeah: The Darkest Part of the Forest.​ A fun read. It kept me entertained, but it didn't change my life. 

Maybe I just don't get it.

Maybe it's not part of my movie-going aesthetic. Or I'm the wrong gender for such things.

Or maybe it's because I never saw the original Mad Max movies. (You know...the ones that came out 30 years ago.)

But despite its 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, I hated the movie Mad Max: Fury Road. (Fair warning: there are spoilers ahead. Actually, I'm assuming you've seen the movie while I write this.)

First off, there isn't any back story. You're just plopped right down in a desert, with some hairy guy in an old car, eating a two-headed lizard and then getting back in his car to flee across the desert from a bunch of other guys in old cars, all of them steam-punk, hot, grungy, and apparently indestructible. (The vehicles, not the men.)

As I watched the chase I thought, hmmmmmmm. Why did he stop to pause and peruse the surrounding desert in the middle of a car chase? Was it the lizard? Thus setting the tone for my entire viewing experience, which was mostly questioning what was going on.

Anyway, he crashes the car. Undaunted by flipping 87 times in a car that can't have airbags, let alone a seat belt, he crawls out and then gets caught and hauled into some sort of underground cavern. He gets a tattoo and tries to escape from a bunch of scarred albinos. Then he gets caught again.

I don't know. Maybe I didn't pay close enough attention to the opening monologue (it sounds like it was voiced by Judi Dench), but I just didn't get enough context to understand the world. Why were they chasing the hairy guy? Who is bad and who is good?

Once he's in the Citadel, who are all of those albinos? Who are the creepy children with big eyes? Why does the warlord, Immortan Jo, wear his creepy mask? (And, what's that? What did he say about half the time he was talking?)

I just kept having a bunch of unanswered questions as the film progressed. How did the desert urchins manage to save any of that splashing water? How do they all stay alive if the water is entirely controlled by the Citadel? Where does the gas come from to run all of their war machines? (Of course, we can presume it comes from “Gas Town,” which is mentioned but never seen, and OK, but where does Gas Town get gas in a world that’s run out of gas?) Why are all of those women locked up like cows—why have a human milk factory in a desert?

(No really...is there a reason they want to only drink breast milk? There CAN be a reason. Their wacked-out bodies can't process anything else? It is a sign of the luxury of the wealthy? It makes excellent cheese? Is there an economy built on breast milk? I can totally buy it—if it serves a purpose instead of just being a random detail.)

That is, in fact, one of the biggest problems I had with this movie (aside from its frenetic pace and absurd CGI). I'm all for making inferences, but come on. Some story​ needs to be made from all of the details, and yeah, I can make my own story and the dude sitting next to me who kept rubbing his date's shoulders can have make his own story, but that isn't really the point of going to a movie, is it?

Why does Imperator Furiosa have black stains on her forehead? What is wrong with Nux—why does he need to be hooked up to his human blood bank, Max? WHY DOESN'T MAX EVER RUN OUT OF BLOOD? Why do the War Boys keep talking about dying and then living again—are they zombies? What is with the silver paint?

Judi Dench told us at the beginning that the world was ruined because we ran out of fossil fuels. How, then, can a society with a scarcity of gas traipse for days across the desert in innumerable gas hogs? Without ever filling up? The vehicle that was created just to drive around speakers and drummers and the guitarist hanging on the front (his instrument is apparently a fossil-fuel guitar that spews fire when he's really rocking out) was the thing that made me give up entirely on finding any pleasure at all in this stupid movie. I mean…I understand. Armies have always had drums. But that vehicle is hardly fuel-efficient. A fossil-fuel depleted society that runs on "guzzoline" doesn't make any logical sense.​ I gave up on logic entirely at that point.

By the time the movie was finished, I still had questions. Where did Max come from before the start of the story? How did the War Boys find him and start to chase him? How did Furiousa's tribe, the Vulvani, survive in the desert after The Green Place was ruined? Who are those ghost-memories that Max keeps seeing? Why does Furiousa want redemption? What happened to her in the time between when she was kidnapped and when she linked up with Max? How did she get powerful enough to be assigned to drive the War Rig? What happened to her hand? What happened at the Citadel to connect her with the breeders? (How do they survive the entire experience without losing their babies or at least finding some damn clothes? How did they keep their white shifts/togas/expertly-crafted-from-gauze underthings white? Where did they come from anyway?) Why are all of the other warlords and soldiers men—how did Furiousa ever gain any trust or power in that community when there is not, literally, one other woman with power?

Yeah.

Really, it's a shame this movie has such thin storytelling, because it's a good premise. An action movie with a woman's story as the major plot line? Tell me more! (It really shouldn't be named after Max, who to me was sort of superfluous. Just there for more blood.) That she is trying to save other women from slavery and rape is even more compelling. That is a story I should have loved, and honestly it is the only reason I didn't just take a nap. But the story itself felt like a veneer. An excuse to make all of those CGI battle scenes. Sure—Fury Road attempts to create a female superhero savior-of-the-world. It passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors. But it doesn't do a whole lot to further progress women in movies because it still only offers up a frail story for our fearless heroine to bring to life.

I'll go along with you into almost any post-apocalyptic (no matter what the critics tell you, this is not a dystopia) landscape you can invent, but only if you make the world believable. The interminable vehicular desert battles took up time that could've been spent giving depth to the story and making the setting feel real. One reviewer said that men might be "duped by explosions, fire tornadoes and desert raiders into seeing what is guaranteed to be nothing more than feminist propaganda, while at the same time being insulted AND tricked into viewing a piece of American culture ruined and rewritten right in front of their very eyes.”​(I refuse to link to the review, which I'm only using to make my point, because the writer seems to be a sexist dirtbag. But you could google it if you want.)

I think it's the other way around: by developing a quasi-feminist story line, the writers duped us into watching a movie that really is just an excuse to create explosions, fire tornadoes, and desert raiders. It pretends to be a movie that tells a story about survival, but really it's just a ridiculous excuse to mod cars and blow stuff up.

Right now, I am working through an enormous purge of my scrapbooking supplies.

my very messy writing desk that I want to clear off entirely. I want to find a good home for the paper sorter, as it is a functional piece, I just don't need it anymore!

This is partly because I just really have too much stuff that I’m never going to use, but it is mostly because I want to streamline my process. I want to spend less time scrapbooking (so I can spend more time writing) and so I want to use my time more wisely. For me, “wisely” means less time on complicated techniques and more time on getting stories down. So I’m in the process of getting rid of lots of stamps, punches, and any left-over decorative scissors lurking in the backs of drawers.

I also need to reorganize my bookshelves. And put about 200 layouts into albums.

Plus, I want to be truer to my own aesthetic. One of my old scrapbooking friends, a long time ago, told me that she thought I had an Edwardian style, which is the opposite of Victorian: clean lines, simple patterns, and not a lot of embellishment. Sort of a modern neoclassic. I still think she was brilliant in her assessment because that is exactly my style (except for my tendency to love paisley and swirls, intricate script fonts and abstract but textural swashes of watercolor), but it isn’t always what is on trend in the scrapbooking world. Still, staying true to my style means I’ve gotten rid of anything superfluously cute or decorative.

Throughout this process, I’ve been thinking about scrapbooking in broad, sweeping terms. What value does it hold for me? Why have I continued scrapbooking after (literally) all of the friends I started doing it with have stopped? Will the effort I have put into it be something that is valued later, or will it just be junk someone has to deal with after I’m gone? What meaning does it have in my life? How much of my approach has been influenced by the scrapbooking industry and how much has just been me? Will my kids really care if all of their moments and stories are documented? Why am I sort of embarrassed to tell anyone that I am a scrapbooker?

Why do I scrapbook?

My most recent layout. That photo on the left isn't really so contrasty in real life.

I first discovered scrapbooking through my friend Teresa, who worked at WordPerfect with me and also did Creative Memories albums. She invited me to a party once, when I was pregnant with Haley; I looked at the catalog and both immediately felt in love with the idea and felt entirely overwhelmed. It seemed like so much stuff to buy! My sister-in-law started scrapbooking, and all of my bunco friends, and Chris, but I resisted because, gah. All that stuff! Then I had Haley, and I started taking way more pictures (with the horrible, awful, terrible camera we had then), and since I have always been a person who processes by writing, I was writing all of her stories down, and somehow I made myself be brave. I didn’t want to use Creative Memories, which seemed like it had too many rules. So I went to the scrapbook store, Pebbles in my Pocket, for a crop with my friend Chris.

And then I fell in love. Because, gah. All of that stuff! It was all so pretty and cute and colorful. I am not an artist, but I come from a line of artistic people. I can’t draw or paint or sculpt figures; even my stick figures are pathetic, even my handwriting is horrible. I never knew my grandpa, who died when my dad was a teenager, but I admired him because he had been a painter. My uncles and my dad dabbled in painting, too, and even though I was pretty awful, one of my favorite classes in high school was art. I grew up in a little town with a big art museum. I love art, but I can’t make it, yet scrapbooking feels sort-of like making art. So that was one of its draws.

Of course, the biggest appeal is the fact that on a scrapbook layout, you get to combine photos (I’ve liked taking pictures since I was on the 9^th grade yearbook staff) with words. I wouldn’t be a scrapbooker if scrapbooking didn’t include journaling. (Or I would have invented journaling!) I don’t have artistic skill, but I do have skill with words, so scrapbooking gives me a place to share what I’ve written.

Plus, there is a sort of virtuous appeal to it. The preserving of memories for people down the road. It almost feels like a responsibility, to be the family story keeper.

But I think my reason for scrapbooking goes deeper than the supplies, the creativity, or even the writing.

One of my earliest and clearest memories is of looking through an old check register, dated during the months just before and just after I was born. When I was a kid, one of my favorite things was snooping around in my mom’s bedroom. I liked looking through her jewelry box, and sifting through her drawers and under her bed, mostly in search of hidden Christmas presents (she shopped all year!), but what I loved most was drawers or boxes with documents of any sort in them, because then I might find stuff from before I was born. In my memory, I sat for hours on the floor of her closet, reading every item on that checkbook register. Seeing where they’d gone and what they’d bought in the time before I existed. It was both magical and deeply satisfying. It was a primal mystery for me: had the world really existed before I did? Also a primal need: I wanted someone to tell me the things about myself I couldn’t remember.

I was 21 when my grandma Elsie died. No longer a child, but I still had (still have, in fact) that itch to know the details of what happened that I don’t know. She was a reader, Elsie. My dad and I hauled out hundreds and hundreds of books from her basement after she died, and then sorted them all into piles: keep, throw away, donate. Except for an old, dusty, leather-bound copy of Tennyson’s Collected Works, I didn’t want to keep her books—they were mostly paperback murder mysteries and westerns—but I had another motivation for sorting through them. I was certain, absolutely certain, that we would find a journal. I thought if we did, then at last I could know her, my enigmatic grandma who loved cats and calendars and books and my cousins but not, I ever knew for certain, me. I wanted to find something she’d written so I could solve the mystery, know what was previously unknowable. I couldn’t imagine (I still can’t) that a person who loves to read wouldn’t also love to write. I was sure we’d find her stories somewhere within her books. Alas, we did not. No journal. No old check register. Not a single annotation in any of those books, not even a name plate. She died, and she took her story with her, and after we’d finished sorting her books is when I really, truly grieved for her. She didn’t leave any of herself in writing and so she took her entire self with her to her grave.

This seems like one of the saddest things a person can do.

(Also, if I am honest, the most selfish.)

Somewhere between those two versions of myself—the young child hunting in closets and drawers and cupboards for evidence of stories, the young woman wanting words from her ancestors—is the reason I scrapbook. Sure: I do it for my kids. (I’m not really sure, honestly, if they need me to; I don’t know that any of them have that same curiosity.) I do it so they will have their stories. I do it because I love writing and I love taking pictures and I love how, combined in one place, they tell a more thorough narrative. I do it because, yes! All of the pretty stuff!

But really I scrapbook because I wish the people who came before me had scrapbooked.

I do it to answer whatever person in the future comes looking for the old stories. Maybe she wants to find a piece of me, her grandmother or great grandmother or her third cousin once removed. Maybe she wants to find stories about her father or great-grandfather or famous great-great uncle. I don’t know exactly, except I know she has that same primal need I had—to know the past. To know how the world really was back then. To know what happened before she existed. To connect to the people who came before, whose lives made hers even though they couldn’t imagine her specific self or how her world would be. And in a strange way, I scrapbook for that kid I used to be, too. No one passed down their stories in writing for me, even though I desperately wanted them to, but scrapbooking—documenting the life my kids and I have lived—assuages some of the sadness I have for that lack. It’s a panacea handed backwards through time, an incomplete circle, going nowhere practically, but emotionally it is an answering echo.

I scrapbook because I don’t want anyone else to feel the lack of written stories.

I’m so ashamed.

Right now I have 26 books checked out from the library.

Twenty six!

(This photo would be better if I'd turned the titles the other way. Alas...all the books are returned! Too late to reshoot. Also, I think I'll write about the poetry books in the background another day.)

I want to read all of them. But of course: life. I don’t want to return them because once they’re returned, poof! They’re gone. Yes, I could check them out again eventually, but will I? Especially when I get distracted by even more books I have to read right now.

On the other hand, this pile is making Kendell crazy. And, being a librarian, I know I can’t indefinitely just keep a bunch of library books. They need to be around so other people can discover them. So, alas, I am making myself take most of them back today. But then I thought…why not make a list? So I don’t forget them and may, once day, actually, book by book, read them.

So here it is, the list of Books I Want to Read Right Now, But Can’t Because I Have To Be A Responsible Grown Up (the books with asterisks are the ones I kept):

• The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison. I read the first essay in this book, which is a long personal narrative about Jamison’s experiences as a medical actor for students in med school. I had no idea such a thing existed and was fascinated.
• How to be a Heroine by Samantha Ellis. A sort of literary memoir. She explores the heroines she’s mirrored in her life. There’s an entire chapter on her obsession with Sylvia Plath, which is in itself enough that I still must read this book.
• The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N. K. Jemison. A fantasy about a girl named Yeine, who lives in the north with her mother, until she is killed and the king summons Yeine to the capitol. This was easier for me to return because it’s a trilogy. It’s finished…but I’m not sure I’m committed to a long fantasy series right now, compelling as the story seems.
• Born with Teeth* by Kate Mulgrew. I’m not generally drawn to memoirs by actresses, but I want to read this one because her experiences as a birth mom are drawing my attention.
• It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War* by Lynsey Addario. I heard Addario talk on NPR and immediately put myself on the hold list for this. She writes about her experiences as a war photographer. It is a heavy book, printed on thick paper, which always makes me more enamored of a work!
• My Real Children* by Jo Walton. This one sort of reminded me of Life after Life. It is the story of Patricia Cowan, who is an old woman living in a care center because of her dementia. She forgets most of the present, but tells stories of two different lives—both of which she seems to have lived.
• The Gift of Stones* by Jim Crace. The oldest book on my list! A novel set in the time before the Bronze Age, about a group of stoneworkers. I am consistently drawn to pre-historic human time in novels. They put me in touch with my inner Ayla.
• Taking Flight: From War Orphan to Star Ballerina by Michaela de Prince. I read about half of this. It is a memoir about Michaela de Prince’s life. She was adopted from Sierra Leon and managed to become a ballerina. While I liked the story, I didn’t love the writing…it felt sort of “as told to” esque. Plus, what I thought I was checking out was Misty Copeland’s book, Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina, which I heard about on NPR and still want to read.
• Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi. A reimagining of the Snow White fairy tale. I’ve been dying to read this for more than a year. I’m still dying.
• The Blondes* by Emily Schulz. A total impulse checkout that I found when putting out new books at work. There’s a Margaret Atwood recommendation on the front cover so yes: I took it home based only on that. Forgive my fangirlyness. Anyway. It’s about an epidemic that is striking only blonde women; the rabies-esque disease makes blondes do violent things. It sounds a little satirical but also fascinating.
• The Last Policeman by Ben Winters. The world is about to come to an end—an asteroid has been spotted, six months out from earth, that will likely destroy the planet. So what’s the point in solving a murder? Yet Detective Hank Palace is still determined to figure out a suspicious hanging. I want to read this in an attempt to broaden by appreciation for mysteries; it sounds like the writing is decent. But it’s a trilogy. I’m not sure I’m ready to commit.
• The Forever Watch by David Ramirez. More branching-out into different genres, this time deep-space science fiction. The space ship The Noah is on a thousand-year journey to a new planet, but there might just be a serial killer along.
• I Was Here by Gayle Forman. A young-adult novel about Cody trying to cope with her friend Meg’s suicide. Another book to add to my Sad YA list? Yes, after I read it. I know. But there is something cathartic for me in other people’s catharsis.
• The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison. The half-goblin son of the king has always lived in exile, knowing he wouldn’t ever be a part of the royal life at court. Until the rest of his family is executed and he as to step into a leader’s shoes.
• The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne. I think that not many people will love this book, but it is totally an Amy-style novel. Meena is living in a post-global-warming India. When she wakes with snake bites on her chest, she knows she needs to leave, and she goes by way of the Trail, which is an energy-harvesting bridge that crosses the Arabian Sea. Working westward instead of east, Mariama moves across the Sahara, trying to reach a city in Ethiopia.
• The Visitors by Sally Beauman. A historical novel about the discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb in Egypt, told from the perspective of a young girl.
• Find Me* by Laura van den Berg. (Not in the photo because it is in my purse.) Post-epidemic seems to be the New Trend. In this one, those immune to the epidemic are gathered in a hospital where, presumably, scientists are working on an immunization. Joy is one with immunity. Although I’m not sure any post-epidemic novel could be as good as Station Eleven, I’m enjoying this one so far. 

Is there a book you are dying to read but haven't gotten to yet? Or have you read any of the books on my list? Tell me!

This morning, I slept in to a glorious 9:00 a.m., and then I got up to make breakfast for Kaleb. Jake and Nathan (being teenagers) were still asleep, and Kendell was working on homework, so it was just me and Kaleb in the kitchen. Scrambling eggs, cooking buttery hash browns, serving up orange juice. Talking about his favorite music (Imagine Dragons and One Republic) and the birthday party he went to yesterday and how excited he is for school to be out.

I feel like I’ve made great strides, lately (a lot of them since writing this post, which helped me process in ways I didn’t know I needed to process), in enjoying my teenagers. I’ve worked to stop referring so much to their younger years and to love them for who they are right now. I am happier as a mom and less acutely-tuned to my mistakes. I’m much more aware of the goodness that comes in having teenagers. We’ve had some really great conversations and I feel like things are more open and honest and healthy for all of us.

I have some great teenage boys.

But I am also grateful I still have a little one. I’m grateful to be reminded to play, to run outside, to fill every free second possible with kicking a soccer ball. Sure, he’s not little little anymore. He’s almost getting preteen-ish. But he still does some little-kid stuff. He’ll curl up next to me in bed sometimes. He tells me all of his stories. He says sweet and innocent funny things. (Like last week, when he was telling me what he learned in his language arts class about Greek myths, and I helped straighten out the details of the Persephone story. When I said, “so Persephone gets to spend the spring and summer with her mother, Demeter, and that’s why there are flowers then. Six months with her mom,” Kaleb said, “six months solid with your mom? That’s probably good enough” and it still makes me laugh.) Maybe that’s it—that he still has the innocence of childhood. He still loves gently and simply. It’s uncomplicated and sweet.

(I have a high forehead...but somehow in selfies it looks ridiculously, weirdly high)

There are five and a half years between Nathan and Kaleb. Sometimes this big age gap is a problem. Sometimes (OK, quite often), I wish I would’ve had one more baby, right after Kaleb was born, so that he could have a sibling his age. But sometimes the gap is perfect. Having a little one while you also have teenagers means living with feet in both sides of motherhood. It is a balancing act, but it keeps you even. It gives you perspective—the little one won’t always be difficult in the way that little ones are, the teenagers weren’t always difficult in the way they are now. It is a peace and a comfort having a little hand to hold.

One day soon, Kaleb himself will be a teenager. Considering that age gap, there will be a good long while when he’s the only kid in the house. The only teenager. It does make me worry: how will I cope with him being a teenager without having a little one to balance me out? Maybe I’ll have a grandchild by then. Maybe Kendell will just have to buck up and deal with me getting a cat. Maybe I will find something else I don’t know about that will make things be OK.

It won’t always be like this: high schoolers and grade schoolers, all in one house. It is a good, sweet, busy time of life. And it felt important this morning, while we cooked eggs and giggled because I spilled the orange juice, to put it down in words so I don’t forget. 

The New York Times gave it a lukewarm review, which I only know because Becky said so. (I'm glad I didn't read it, although after I write this post I probably will.) 

It sparked an argument between Ishiguro and Ursula K. Le Guin (who got annoyed with him for wondering if his readers would just say "this is fantasy?”, as if Ishiguro readers are too smart for genre reading, or as if literary fiction and genre fiction must always be divided into clearly separate categories).

Several of my readerly friends couldn't get through it, or if they did they didn't like it. Le Guin (a writer I highly admire) herself didn't like it.

But I still was anxious to read Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Buried Giant. In fact, knowing that the book had sparked such a debate in literary circles made me want to read it more. After all...I am kind of a book snob. But only against poor writing, cliched characters, and shoddy plots. Not genre (unless it is genre with poor writing, cliched characters, and shoddy plots). I think you can find good and bad writing in any genre, and I don't think that something being labeled "fantasy" (or "science fiction" or "romance" or whatever) means it can't also be literary fiction.

Those are my favorite kind of books, honestly.

So even without the debate I would've read this book. Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go is a book that has haunted me since I read it, and I think The Buried Giant will do the same thing.

It tells the story of Axl and Beatrice, an old couple living in post-Arthurian England. The small community where they live—formed as a series of hobbit-esque tunnels in a hill—is just marginally accepting of them, and they eventually decide they will leave it so they can go visit their son.

Axl and Beatrice—as well as most of the population of this version of Britain—are influenced by a mysterious memory problem. Memories come and go, shifting in strange patterns, and often they forget that they've actually forgotten most of their lives. Through this memory fog come just a few memories of their son and some very faint impressions of their younger years, just enough to send them on their quest.

As with most quests, this does not go as smoothly as planned. Axl and Beatrice first encounter a mysterious boatman, and the woman who is tormenting his steps because he did not allow her to cross the water with her husband, when they are taking shelter from a rain storm in a decrepit Roman villa. This is where they learn (or perhaps just remember) the story of the boatman who ferries people to a distant shore and how, on that shore, if a couple has been kind and good enough to each other that their memories are mostly good ones, they will be allowed to stay together.

This story drives the rest of their quest. They want to remember their relationship, even though people remind them that if they remember good things, they'll likely also remember hard things. As they travel through England, they strike up relationships with two knights —one of them a very elderly Sir Gawain—a boy who has had an encounter with ogres, and several other people. Plus pixies, and perhaps the dragon Querig, whose breath is the source of the memory problems.

To write what happens would be to ruin your enjoyment of the novel. Or maybe you'll read it and not love it. But I will write this: it is a slow, thoughtful book. It took me five weeks to finish it, and I read several other books in that time. But I could always pick it up and fall right back into the story. It is a fantasy in the sense of dragons and pixies and ogres, but is more, to my mind, historical. It really isn't even a fantasy at all, in fact. It is instead a story-style meditation on memory, love, forgiveness, history, war, and revenge. And the ending—it broke me right open.

So to answer Ishiguro's question posed theoretically to readers: Yes, I went along with you, even though it seems to be a fantasy. Because it isn't only about a quest and dragons and mysterious tunnels full of human remains. Because having watched someone lose their memory, I am on the side of Axl and Beatrice: if the price of the sweet memories is also the bitter, I will pay it. I want to hold on to everything, because all of it together is what made (and continues to make) me who I am. Without the knowledge gained by memory, who are we?​

It’s been a good week.

Well, of course, some strangeness and problems. My hamstrings have not been doing well; I’ve been exercising anyway but I’m hobbling instead of walking. I seemed to have developed a new stalker at work, and there’s this other patron who comes in to use our computer, who entirely creeps me out on a good day, but I had to get a little bit fierce with him this week to keep him in his place. (If ever there were anyone who would go postal in our library, it would be him. He makes me nervous.) I’m completely off the no-sugar wagon and have given up until after Mother’s day when I plan on starting again. I was up all night last night with my mom, who is back in the hospital with pneumonia. Oh how terrifying those 1:17 a.m. phone calls are! When Kendell’s phone rang and we startled awake, he said “That’s your sister calling, it can’t be good news. Are you sure you want me to answer?” and I was still sleep-groggy enough to think, just for a second, that not answering the phone would keep the bad news from being real. At least it wasn’t devastating. At least she’ll be OK.

Plus I’m fairly mad at the Gray’s Anatomy writers.

And then there was the vandalism incident with Kaleb, which is a whole other story.

(I always have to preface happiness with hardness, like it is a talisman or a sign to The Universe: I’m not too happy that I need to be reminded of anything.)

My good week started last Thursday, with a reunion of sorts. (I’m sorry…I’m going to be vague because I am not ready to blog about it yet.) I have wanted this thing to happen for decades but I couldn’t ever be certain it would. It is the answer to many hopes and wishes. One of the things I didn’t expect from this experience is how it has also reunited me with some lost parts of myself that I thought I had to put away in the name of adulthood, but maybe I didn’t. Plus the knowledge that sometimes, hard choices turn out better than you could imagine when you made them.

Then Haley came home for a few days, after she finished her finals, so we could celebrate her birthday. It hit me at her party: now that she’s twenty, I will never again be the mom of three teenagers. I should perhaps be melancholy about the passage of time, but instead I feel glimmery—I am excited to see their futures unfold.

(awful photo captured from Snapchat. awful quality, adorable image.)

We had dinner on Sunday with my mom (red bean burritos because Haley loves them and they’re one of the only vegetarian meals I make), who wasn’t sick yet and is doing remarkably well as she continues to heal from her back surgery.

I had some good and very needed conversations with all of my Bigs. There were a bunch of little things that happened that reminded me how much I love each of my kids and how blessed I am to be their mom. We listened to Hozier all weekend. We had some kitchen dance sessions and some interpretive rain dancing. We laughed and told jokes and stories, we had French toast for breakfast and midnight snacks of Scor cake.

Haley and I went to lunch and did some shopping (new running shoes for her birthday). She is turning into a grown up. We agree on many things and disagree on others, but it feels like our relationship is shifting in positive and healthy ways. More, it’s just good to see her living this part of her life with such determination, courage, and happiness.

I did a little bit of scrapbooking and my massive, ruthless reorg/purge of my scrapbooking supplies is coming along nicely.

Plus it has rained all week.

And when it wasn’t raining I was working in my flower beds, planting the rest of the astilbe, ferns, and hostas I’d bought awhile ago.

Perhaps from that reunion on Thursday. Probably, in fact. But also because of feeling surrounded by my family, by being able to see and feel and know how much I love them and that they love me back. For many reasons, this week I have felt such lightness. Light in the sense of not dark. Open and hopeful. The opposite of how I felt in January and February.

And as much as I am willing to acknowledge what is hard, I wanted The Universe to know I know: it was a good week and I am thankful to have received it. 

Whenever I am taking photos for someone else, especially engagement pictures, I try to watch out for the dreaded Zombie Hand. Zombie Hand (ZH) happens when someone has his/her arm around someone else; from the front, you can see the hand, but the line of the arm is broken by something else so the hand is just sort of there, but not optically connected to anything else. Just disembodied body parts. An example, from our 2010 Christmas photo shoot just because they're some of my favorite family photos:

I know this doesn't always absolutely ruin a picture. I mean, look at this photo:

Absolutely adorable picture, bad ZH! But I would love this so more without the ZH clawing towards Kaleb's cute face. It always bothers me. So when we're having a family photo taken, I always say "no zombie hand!" before the photographer starts shooting. But since our family photo shoots always nearly immediately devolve into something like this:

worrying about ZH is probably pointless. (I'm serious. 90% of all Sorensen family photo shoots look like this, except lately there has also been an influx of "OMG, I'm going to die if there is one more photo taken" faces.)

But I still have the habit. No zombie hand!

One kid in particular, lately, has hated having his picture taken. That'd be Jake. He just hates the whole experience. But come on...I need at least a few photos every couple of months, yes? So I told my boys this year that for my birthday, I wanted a photo of each of them and then one of them with me. We took the ones of Nathan and Kaleb on the Sunday before my birthday, but Jake was extra-grumpy so I decided to wait until this Sunday, when Haley would be home (she can always make him laugh!) to take them.

When she was about to take the photo, I could tell he was doing ZH. Totally on purpose. So I tried to play along, and we ended up with this photo:

not just zombie hand, but my attempt at zombie face, too. Sort of goofy, but I love this picture! It captures so many things about our relationship. Maybe not in an obvious way, but my eye can see them. 

When I looked at it tonight after downloading my memory card, it sort of took my breath away, in fact. It reminded me to worry less about trying to create the best images (technically) and more about creating the real images. The ones that say something true and real and honest and right now.

Don't get me wrong. I'll still say "no zombie hand!" whenever I'm in a picture I'm not taking. But I'm going to try to have more fun instead of being so worried about perfection.