…We have no time to stop and stare?”

It absolutely delights me that the MOOC I’ve anticipated all summer uses the W.H. Davies poem “Leisure,” the source of the opening quote, to make several points about mindfulness, the healing power of literature, and our need to clear a mental corner for contemplation. Said MOOC accounts for three of the books on this weekend’s pile: Some of My Best Friends Are Books, How to Read a Poem, and Stressed, Unstressed.

Liney’s Into the Fire is the second book in a trilogy, the first of which I read on vacation two years ago. I remember The Detainee as a gripping story that suffered from uneven writing. In the end, though, story won. I have, however, contemplated flinging the follow-up across the room, it’s that badly written. Is it vacation nostalgia that keeps me reading?

The Idealist ended up in the pile when I heard Rick Kogan’s interview with author Justin Powers two weekends ago. The book began as a long Slate profile of Aaron Swartz.

We visited our daughters this holiday weekend, which gave us time to listen to NPR and P.G. Wodehouse’s The Code of the Woosters, every other sentence of which I could press into my commonplace book. We also took two bike rides, the first of which was the most memorable: At the turnaround point, we paused for water, coffee, and some nuts. Swallows swooped and darted overhead. Prairie grasses and flowers bent in the breeze. The trees and underbrush thrummed with the sounds of animals and birds making the most of summer’s end. We had no choice. We simply stopped and stared.

Despite my best intentions, I have only finished four of the ten books I assembled for this post):

■ You Will Know Me (Megan Abbott; 2016. Fiction.)
■ My Name Is Lucy Barton (Elizabeth Strout; 2016. Fiction.)
■ A Study in Scarlet (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; 1887. Fiction.)
■ Eileen (Ottessa Moshfegh; 2015. Fiction.)

This puts me at only six books for August, a number that makes sense when I consider that (1) we spent most of the month preparing for our daughters’ departure; (2) we’re all adjusting to new routines and communicating (phone, text, email, packages, etc.) takes much longer now that we all spend most days apart; and (3) I’ve been under the weather for a week… which reminds me: When I was much younger, I had an idea — crafted from a complete misunderstanding of the subtext of stories about genteel characters recovering in sanatoriums — that illness translates into more time to read. I clung to this misinformed idea into my early twenties, when a bout with sinusitis and later with the flu (not a really bad head cold but influenza) taught me that I can’t read — At. All. — when I’m sick. This may be because I am the world’s worst patient, but it may also be that everyone finds it difficult to focus when feverish, congested, drowsy, in pain, coughing, or [insert symptom(s) here].

So, six books this month — although if I’m feeling particularly motivated later this afternoon, I may be able to finish Duhigg’s Smarter Faster Better. My current plan for September, though, is simply to return to reading at whim — hence, the rather anonymous-looking stack pictured above.

Regarding the only book I’ve finished this week: I understand how Eileen made the Man Booker Prize longlist, but it was a claustrophobic read for me — too small, too sordid. Two passages made it into my commonplace book, though:

p. 65
Nobody missed me. I know other young women have suffered far worse than this, and I myself went on to suffer plenty, but this experience in particular was utterly humiliating. A psychoanalyst may term it something like a formative trauma, but I know little about psychology and reject the science entirely. People in that profession, I’d say, should be watched very closely. If we were living several hundred years ago, my guess is that they’d all be burned as witches.

p. 256
I don’t know where we went wrong with my family. We weren’t terrible people, no worse than any of you. I suppose it’s the luck of the draw, where we end up, what happens.

Well, we’ve arrived at the month’s midpoint. My reading plans (described in this post) included:

■ A Study in Scarlet (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; 1887. Fiction.)
■ Letters from a Stoic (Seneca; 1494.)
■ A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Clinton (Carl Bernstein; 2007. Non-fiction.)
■ The Last Policeman (Ben Winters; 2012. Fiction.)
■ Shylock Is My Name (Howard Jacobson; 2016. Fiction.)
■ Eileen (Ottessa Moshfegh; 2015. Fiction.)
■ My Name Is Lucy Barton (Elizabeth Strout; 2016. Fiction.)
■ You Will Know Me (Megan Abbott; 2016. Fiction.)
■ An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth (Col. Chris Hadfield; 2013. Non-fiction.)
■ Smarter Faster Better (Charles Duhigg; 2016. Non-fiction.)

From the above list, I have already completed:

■ You Will Know Me (Megan Abbott; 2016. Fiction.)
■ My Name Is Lucy Barton (Elizabeth Strout; 2016. Fiction.)
■ A Study in Scarlet (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; 1887. Fiction.)

Although I have not been following the Games, I couldn’t help but wonder, after reading Abbott’s novel, if I now understand the grim-faced masks women gymnasts don. As for questions about whether Strout’s novel deserves its place on the Man Booker Prize long list, I’d say yes. From My Name Is Lucy Barton:

p. 14
This must be the way most of us maneuver through the world, half knowing, half not, visited by memories that can’t possibly be true. But when I see others walking with confidence down the sidewalk, as though they are free completely from terror, I realize I don’t know how others are. So much of life seems speculation.

p. 170
When Chrissie left for college, then Becka the next year, I thought — and it’s not an expression, I’m saying the truth — I did think I would die. Nothing had prepared me for such a thing. And I have found this to be true: Certain women feel like this, that their hearts have been ripped from their chests, and other women find it very freeing to have their children gone. The doctor who makes me not look like my mother, she asked me what I did when my daughters went to college, and I said, “My marriage ended.” I added quickly, “But yours won’t.” She said, “It might. It might.”

I finished A Study in Scarlet well in advance of the online book club / MOOC outline because much of the rest of the month is already spoken for.

From A Study in Scarlet, Part I, Chapter V:
“It was magnificent,” he said, as he took his seat. “Do you remember what Darwin says about music? He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at. Perhaps that is why we are so subtly influenced by it. There are vague memories in our souls of those misty centuries when the world was in its childhood.”

From Part I, Chapter VII:
“All this seems strange to you,” continued Holmes, “because you failed at the beginning of the inquiry to grasp the importance of the single real clue which was presented to you. I had the good fortune to seize upon that, and everything which has occurred since then has served to confirm my original supposition, and, indeed, was the logical sequence of it. Hence things which have perplexed you and made the case more obscure, have served to enlighten me and to strengthen my conclusions. It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery. The most commonplace crime is often the most mysterious because it presents no new or special features from which deductions may be drawn. This murder would have been infinitely more difficult to unravel had the body of the victim been simply found lying in the roadway without any of those outré and sensational accompaniments which have rendered it remarkable. These strange details, far from making the case more difficult, have really had the effect of making it less so.”

From Part II, Chapter VII:
“I hardly expected that you would. Let me see if I can make it clearer. Most people, if you describe a train of events to them, will tell you what the result would be. They can put those events together in their minds, and argue from them that something will come to pass. There are few people, however, who, if you told them a result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were which led up to that result. This power is what I mean when I talk of reasoning backwards, or analytically.”

I think I will finish Eileen later today, after which I plan to carry on with Shylock Is My Name. Related aside: We saw the Shakespeare’s Globe production of Merchant at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater over the weekend. Haunting. Reviews here and here. And because I so thoroughly disagreed with Steven Franks, I appreciated this bit from Chris Jones’ review:

And yet, just last week, my own newspaper published an editorial, penned by a Washington attorney, arguing, in essence, that “The Merchant of Venice” should never be performed again, on the grounds that it is incurably anti-Semitic.

That’s ridiculous, of course, not least because it is only in performance that the play proves its worth. In the hands of a competent director like Jonathan Munby, “The Merchant of Venice” can and does play as a cautionary tale of the perils of anti-Semitism. His work here in concert with the designer Mike Britton is the best I’ve seen from this oft-in-Chicago director. Only in performance can this be a work about how hate can poison an otherwise prosperous and privileged community, extracting a price on victims and perpetrators alike, destroying all that is good, really. This particular production, which features an especially devastating coda, is especially rich in the painting of that picture.

The other books I have finished this month are

■ You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) (Felicia Day; 2015. Non-fiction.)
■ Injection, Volume 2 (Warren Ellis; 2016. Graphic fiction.)

Earlier this week, my daughters helped me with yet another large book reorganization project. For the last 5.5 years, the shelves in the master bedroom (three pine bookcases my husband finished for me — complete with our heart-enclosed initials on the back — in 1983, 1985, and 1986) housed my Joyce Carol Oates and Kurt Vonnegut collections, as well as the remnants of my Arthurian literature obsession and my stash of mass paperbacks. The remaining shelves held new acquisitions, which, after being read, would be sold, donated, or blended into the main library.

The obvious flaw in this system was, of course, that my acquisition rate continued to outpace my reading rate — this despite the radical reduction of the former and the uptick in the latter. We were, therefore, routinely shifting “new” acquisitions into the main library before a verdict (Sell? Donate? Keep?) had been rendered. Why? In order to make room for newer and newest acquisitions.

As we prepared to shift and file, my youngest suggested that the bedroom become a more static collection. Brilliant! Shakespeare, Sherlock, Melville, Fitzgerald, poetry, and the volumes of Lyttleton / Hart-Davies Letters joined Oates, Vonnegut, and Arthur; the smallest (and oldest) of the original bookcases, which serves as my nightstand, became a true TBR station; and the main library, which stretches from the living room, over to the piano room, down the hallway, and into the so-called “girl cave” (essentially, a second living room) was shifted to accommodate all of the rest. Several boxes of books were donated, and we brought three large bags of books and movies to Half-Price Books over the weekend.

Between that project and preparing my daughters for their move to university, I haven’t read as much as I had planned this week, but I will be able to post some notes tomorrow.

■ A Study in Scarlet (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; 1887. Fiction.)
■ Letters from a Stoic (Seneca; 1494.)
■ A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Clinton (Carl Bernstein; 2007. Non-fiction.)
■ The Last Policeman (Ben Winters; 2012. Fiction.)
■ Shylock Is My Name (Howard Jacobson; 2016. Fiction.)
■ Eileen (Ottessa Moshfegh; 2015. Fiction.)
■ My Name Is Lucy Barton (Elizabeth Strout; 2016. Fiction.)
■ You Will Know Me (Megan Abbott; 2016. Fiction.)
■ An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth (Col. Chris Hadfield; 2013. Non-fiction.)
■ Smarter Faster Better (Charles Duhigg; 2016. Non-fiction.)

Although I prefer to, as Sheila says, “read at whim,” I have had some luck this year with assembling small stacks and making my way through them. This one seems built to work.

Some notes: The Doyle is for the online book club / MOOC in which I participate, and I am already halfway through the Duhigg. (In 2012, I received a review copy of Duhigg’s The Power of Habit and thoroughly enjoyed it. While somewhat engaging, this latest effort seems slapped together from research assembled when that earlier book was being written.) I’m motivated to complete Jacobson’s entry in the Hogarth Shakespeare series before we see The Merchant of Venice. The Last Policeman, Eileen, My Name Is Lucy Barton, and You Will Know Me were shelved in my bedroom, which is as good as saying, “They were already on a TBR stack.” My youngest maintains that Astronaut’s Guide will be the perfect antidote to the angsty whine of Lab Girl. I put Seneca’s Letters and the Clinton bio on my summer reading shelf in May, then promptly forgot they were there! The former will be perfect for the drive home from university, eh? And the latter will probably be read in bites over this month and next.

Sigh. How to explain How to Be Your Dog’s Best Friend and The Other End of the Leash, the first of which I am nearly halfway through? All right. My daughters head off to university next month, and it seemed like as good a time as any to investigate adding a dog to our little company. A project (e.g., training a new companion) would certainly keep me from dwelling on the girls’ absence (overmuch), and multiple daily walks would burn off (some of) my tendency to worry. I had thought I wanted a puppy, but at the shelter, I fell in love with a young new mother whose adorable puppies are about to be put up for adoption. Maybe she and I will work through our separation issues together. We will see….

Speaking of mothers, Cindy Rollins kindly linked my old blog several times back in the day. Her memoir of homeschooling her eight children was released last week, and I wanted to return the favor. Congratulations, Cindy!

And speaking of memoirs, my daughter and I are about halfway through Jahren’s Lab Girl. Given how busy she is and how many books I am reading, that should serve as a recommendation, but if you need more, I tweeted a Los Angeles Review of Books review earlier this week: “A Lab of Her Own.”

The MOOC / online book club in which I participate will complete Dubliners this week. In August, we tackle A Study in Scarlet. With all of the Sherlockian studies our family-centered learning project has undertaken, it’s difficult to believe I have never read this, but I haven’t.

At the bottom of the pictured stack are my flute books. I’m nearly finished with Rubank Intermediate Method, a fact that stuns me a bit, actually. I am on songs 25 and 26 in Forty Little Pieces in Progressive Order, and my teacher has begun adding assignments in the Pares Scales book.

From The Elementals:

There’s no point in advertising a circus when everybody hates the clown.

McDowell’s The Elementals, which appeared in last week’s stack, will likely make my 2016 “best” list. When I was younger, I devoured horror fiction: With my first paycheck I purchased two paperback novels, Stephen King’s The Stand and The Shining. Eventually, I believed I had outgrown the genre, but looking back, I think I had simply been selecting from too shallow a pool. The familiar writers became repetitive, and I moved on. The Elementals, with its engaging dialogue, place as character, and a pervasive sense of danger, has reminded me how good a horror novel can be.

Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents’ divorce.

So begins Richard Yates’ The Easter Parade, a novel that is by turns wry and bleak. Here are two more passages for the commonplace book:

p. 47
But there was more to being an intellectual than a manner of speaking, more even than making the dean’s list every semester, or spending all your free time at museums and concerts and the kind of movies called “films.” There was learning not to be stricken dumb when you walked into a party full of older, certified intellectuals — and not to make the opposite mistake of talking your head off, saying one inane or outrageous thing after another in a hopeless effort to atone for whatever inane or outrageous thing you’d said two minutes before. And if you did make a fool of yourself at parties like that, you had to learn not to writhe in bed afterwards in an agony of chagrin.

p. 79
[B]esides, college had taught her that the purpose of a liberal-arts education was not to train but to free the mind. It didn’t matter what you did for a living; the important thing was the kind of person you were.

This week’s reading in Dubliners yielded a commonplace book entry, too:

From “After the Race”:

Rapid motion through space elates one; so does notoriety; so does the possession of money.

From “Two Gallants”:
Though his eyes took note of many elements of the crowd through which he passed they did so morosely. He found trivial all that was meant to charm and did not answer the glances which invited him to be bold. He knew that he would have to speak a great deal, to invent and to amuse, and his brain and throat were too dry for such a task. The problem of how he could pass the hours till he met Corley again troubled him a little. He could think of no way of passing them but to keep on walking.

This coming week’s reading for the Dubliners MOOC / online book club comprises “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” “A Mother,” and “Grace,” which leaves “The Dead” for the fourth and final week. (And, yes, that is a different edition than was featured in the picture in last week’s post. What can I say? I wanted endnotes and Colum McCann’s introduction. Totally worth it.)

Later this year, I have a MOOC about the healing power of literature, a topic that has interested me for more than fifteen years. Jonathan Bate, who will lead the course, served as one of the editors of Stressed, Unstressed, a volume that posits that reading poetry (here gathered under such categories as “stopping,” “grieving,” and “living with uncertainty”) acts like a readerly balm on emotional unease. Lab Girl moved from the shelves to a TBR pile because my daughter chose the title as her “prize” for the local library’s summer reading program. We’re hoping to shoehorn it into the four weeks before she and her sister depart for university. Fingers crossed! The Gaiman and Ackerman titles in the stack above are also recent acquisitions, and The Elementals (from the shelves) will be this evening’s companion, as I have already finished the following (unpictured) books from my (unpictured) stacks:

■ Wonder (RJ Palacio; 2012. Fiction.)
■ Fell, Volume 1, Feral City (Warren Ellis; 2007. Graphic fiction.)
■ Injection, Volume 1 (Warren Ellis; 2015. Graphic fiction.)
■ Trees, Volume 1 (Warren Ellis; 2015. Graphic fiction.)
■ The Curse of the Good Girl (Rachel Simmons; 2009. Non-fiction.)

Wonder, like Holes (Louis Sachar) and A Long Way from Chicago (Richard Peck) is one of those books for young-ish readers that begs to be a family read-aloud. Tender and touching, the story is being brought to the big screen next year.

Officially mad about Ellis, I am so looking forward to the second volumes of both Injection and Trees. Alas, there is no Volume 2 of Fell, which was easily the best graphic work I’ve read this year. (Speaking of graphic works, did you hear the nerd girl Squeeeeeeee! when I finished Issue #156 of The Walking Dead? “Wait until Rick gets a look at you…” Heh, heh, heh.)

More soon.

Here are a few from the piles, stacks, and shelves.

■ Shylock Is My Name (Howard Jacobson; 2016. Fiction.)
We will see The Merchant of Venice with Jonathan Pryce at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater next month, so I am reading the Hogarth Shakespeare retelling and rereading the play.

p. 16

He knew what she was nudging him about. One of the traits of his character she had always disliked was his social cruelty. He teased people. Riddled them. Kept them waiting. Made them come to him.

■ Dubliners (James Joyce; 1914. Fiction.)
I am rereading this for an online book club / MOOC and am once again reminded that many books were wasted on younger versions of me. Of the many valuable resources the club / course has provided so far, I thought the link to Mark O’Connell’s “Have I Ever Left It?” (Slate, May 2014) was particularly worthwhile.

From the conclusion of “Araby”:

Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.

■ Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (J.D. Vance; 2016. Non-fiction.)
I picked this up after reading after reading Vance’s piece on The Huffington Post.

p. 7
The problems that I saw at the tile warehouse run far deeper than macroeconomic trends and policy. Too many young men immune to hard work. Good jobs impossible to fill for any length of time. And a young man with every reason to work — a wife-to-be to support and a baby on the way — carelessly tossing aside a good job with excellent health insurance. More troublingly, when it was all over, he thought something had been done to him. There is a lack of agency here — a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself. This is distinct from the larger economic landscape of modern America.

p. 9
But I love these people, even those to whom I avoid speaking for my own sanity. And if I leave you with the impression that there are bad people in my life, then I am sorry, both to you and to the people so portrayed. For there are no villains in this story. There’s just a ragtag band of hillbillies struggling to find their way — both for their sake, and by the grace of God, for mine.

■ Fell, Vol. 1: Feral City (Warren Ellis; 2007. Graphic fiction.)