11 Books that Intimidate Me

On January 2nd, I posted on this blog for the first time after a lonnng hiatus. In that post, I asked if there were any topics y'all were personally interested in seeing, and two of you made suggestions in the Facebook comments: Danielle and Philip. I took up Danielle's idea in the very next post, but I have conveniently ignored Philip's until now, and here's why:

Philip, essentially, challenged me to tell you what books (or types/genres of books) I find intimidating and why...and then read those books and tell you if that feeling was warranted. So I figured this was a two-post type of endeavor. In this one, I'll tell you about 11 books that intimidate me and why. And then, at some unspecified time I will *mumbles* read those books so I can report back. 

Here are the books:

1. The Final Empire, Mistborn #1 by Brandon Sanderson

I find this book intimidating for really basic and boring reasons. It's quite thick. It's the first in a trilogy of equally thick books. And then there's another trilogy. And then there's another series with even thicker books. And then a smattering of standalones and novellas, all set in the Cosmere univere. It's not that I'm worried I'm not going to like it. I'm fairly certain I'm going to love it, and I'm going to want to read it all, and it's going to take over my reading life, and I'm just not sure when I'm going to feel ready for that. 

2. The Wise Man's Fear, Kingkiller #2 by Patrick Rothfuss

I'm also intimidated by this one for basic and boring reasons. It's over 1000 pages. The first book in this series was so engaging, I found myself in constant anxiety for Kvothe, which is something that's difficult to sign up for again. I've seen mixed reviews for this one in particular, and the third in the series isn't out yet, though it's been years and years in the works. It feels like a lot of uncertainty to take on, and I've tried twice in the past year and gotten only about 20 pages further each time.

3. Artemis by Andy Weir

I really shouldn't find this book intimidating. It is not long. The text is a bit small, which I find unappealing, but that shouldn't matter, considering the fact that Andy Weir's first book, The Martian is one of my favorites of all time. And honestly, I think that's the problem. The Martian was such an incredible experience both times I read it, I feel as if I'm nearly guaranteed to be a least a little disappointed, which is just not the emotion I want going into a read. And it's probably a little more about the small type than I think it is. I hate small type. Makes me feel like I'm bogged down and not progressing through my book. 

4. Universal Harvester by John Darnielle

John Darnielle has written several books, and they all intimidate me fairly equally, but this one I actually took out of the library and then returned without reading a word. I read John's first book, Wolf in White Van, and Wolf in White Van, like The Martian, is one of my favorite books of all time, but I haven't read it twice. I've read it four times. It's incredible, and I honestly don't think a human can produce something that incredible more than once in a lifetime, so again, nearly guaranteed disappointment. Wolf in White Van was also a difficult story with heavy themes, and I have no reason to believe this one won't be too. I'm just scared of it, okay?

5. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Anna Karenina is a tragedy, and I struggle to accept tragedies. I struggle to accept heartbreak in my entertainment without the consolation of a happy ending. And it's not as if I don't know what I'm getting into with Tolstoy. It's one thing to read a book you know will break your heart, and it's another to read a book that will break your heart in a familiar sort of way. 

It took me a year to read War and Peace. I read it off and on and slowly, looking up a lot of the French as I went, and by the end I felt as if I really knew the characters, and I really knew the life they lived and the bad decisions they'd made and the things that happened to them that were out of their control. The whole thing was mundane and happy and sad and good and awful. It broke my heart in that mundane way that real life breaks your heart sometimes. I finished War and Peace eight years ago, and I still feel it this way, and War and Peace isn't even a tragedy. I truly don't know what an actual tragedy by Tolstoy would do to me.

But. Lemony Snicket makes a very big deal of Anna Karenina in A Series of Unfortunate Events #10: The Slippery Slope, which obviously means I must read it and soon if I wish to remain a respectable member of the VFD, on the right side of the schism, and all that.

6. The Plague by Albert Camus

In college there were many intimidating professors, but arguably none so intimidating as Dr. Mitchell. At PHC, one does not simply get sick and skip class. You e-mail your professor directly and inform them that you are at death's door. So when I caught the flu that was going around campus, I e-mailed Dr. Mitchell, subject line: The Plague. 

He responded informing me that he had been very excited before opening the e-mail, having assumed I had picked up Camus for a little light reading and now wished to discuss all the burning existential questions with which I had undoubtedly been left. Dr. Mitchell was significantly less pleased to find I was simply not coming to class and proceeded to inform me that I Should read the book, and No he would not be giving extra credit. It's been on my list ever since. 

This book looks. Delightful. I mean just look at it. The cover. The title. Yuck. But. I've been thinking lately that reading it now, in the context of COVID-19, could be particularly interesting. I just haven't talked myself into it yet. 

7. Recursion by Blake Crouch

I really like science fiction, but I don't read much of it, which is a phenomenon in my reading that I do not understand. Recursion caught my attention when it won the 2019 Goodreads award for science fiction. Here's a bit of the summary: 

"At once a relentless pageturner and an intricate science-fiction puzzlebox about time, identity, and memory, Recursion is a thriller as only Blake Crouch could imagine it—and his most ambitious, mind-boggling, irresistible work to date." 

So um. Yes. I think this sums up why hard sci-fi intimidates me. What if. I am not. Smart enough for it?

8. Annihilation, Southern Reach #1 by Jeff VanderMeer

I would be similarly worried I'm not smart enough for the Southern Reach trilogy, but I have heard rumors that no one completely understands this story, and that is its charm. I've heard it's very weird. I'm worried it might be too weird for me. Not that I don't like weird, but I don't tend to like weird that defies understanding. I don't tend to enjoy chaos. I have no actual idea if this story is chaotic because no one I know who's read it has been able to describe it to me, and that's intimidating

9. Patient Zero, Joe Ledger #1 by Jonathan Maberry

Oh dear. Okay. My boss keeps telling me I absolutely must read this book and then, you know, hopefully the entire Joe Ledger series. Every once in a while he checks in and asks me why I haven't read it yet, and the answer is: It Feels Like There's A Lot of Pressure Here For Me To Not Just Like This Book But Love It. 

I could be wrong, but I don't think I've read a single adult action novel in my life. I'm probably wrong, but I can't recall any at the moment. I honestly don't know if it's a genre I'm into. This one is about zombies, and I do love a good zombie story, so I'll probably love it. I'm sure I'll love it. I'm definitely telling my boss I loved it. 

10. Safety Maid: Nancy Rose by William Wire

I'm not sure if intimidated is the right way to describe how I feel about this book or if mildly horrified would be more accurate. Why do I own I book I feel this way about? Ummmm. Well you see. My sister and I have this tradition. We give each other one self-published book each Christmas, but not just any self-published book, and certainly not one we think will be GOOD. No. We look for something extraordinarily bad. Last year I gave Liz a book called Harry Styles and the New York Apocalypse, and she gave me an annotated edition of Belinda Blinked #1 (if you know, you know). This year I gave her a work of "nonfiction" on QAnon (and how it's totally true), and she gave me Safety Maid: Nancy Rose. Thanks, Liz. 

11. A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken, with letters from C.S. Lewis.

I have read this book before. A long time ago. I think I was 17. My memories of it are somehow connected with listening to Taylor Swift's album Fearless for the first time. It's a love story. A true one. One that C.S. Lewis was involved with both before and after Mrs. Vanauken died. 

I remember deciding that this was the absolute standard in Love and Marriage. If I couldn't have this, I didn't want anything. Preferably minus the premature death of my one true love. The story was equal parts euphoric and horribly sad, and I really want to reread it, but I really want to reread it the way I read it the first time. I don't want to read it differently. I'm hoping my real life experience of true love will validate/mature/increase my experience of the book as opposed to dimming it in any way. But I'm scared.

I am, if you haven't noticed, frequently demotivated by my fear. And that's unfortunate. There's a lot about my life that I think would be better if I weren't so scared all the time of so many things. So, Philip. I'm going to read these books. And it'll probably take a while, I'm not going to lie to you. And at some point. I will come back and talk about them again. And I'm hoping that post will be rather  victorious. 

Until then readers, tell me what you think. Have you read any of these? Think I'm being silly? Or are you scared of them too? What books intimidate you and why?

Up next: I Invented and Completed an Advent Calendar Reading Challenge. In March. 

Cleaning House Postscript: Waste and Wishlists

 Hey friends! Thank you to everyone who stayed with me for the whole Cleaning House series. It's been really fun. That said, I'm excited to get back to bookish content next weekend, but there's just a couple things I want to share before we're quite done. There are two subjects I wanted to talk about in the series, but couldn't find a good way to fold them into any of the three parts. 

The first and biggest topic is Waste. I got rid of a lot of things on this little journey, and it naturally forced me to think a lot about waste: my own wastefulness, and waste in general. The second topic I want to hit is how I'm handling wants and needs as they arise now, in light of what I've been learning--using a Wishlist Hunger Games system in conjunction with my budget. 

Waste

Let me ask you a question: if you buy an item and then, at some later point, you throw it away before using it up or wearing it out, when was the waste committed? Was it A. When you threw it out or B. When you didn't use it before you threw it out or C. When you bought it. 

Throwing away things I paid for, when I know I've not gotten my money's worth out of them, hurts. That's something I feel pretty keenly, yet at the same time, I've been pretty vicious about getting rid of stuff that's just clogging and cluttering my house and life. How can I reconcile those two things?

Easily, and here's why. The answer is never A. Not unless you're throwing away something you consistently use that's not worn out that you will just have to buy over again. Which would be really silly. Not-rich people don't do that. No, you did not waste the thing when you threw it away, you threw it away because it was already wasted. 

The answer is B. or C., and it's usually not B. It's only B. if you bought something with an expiration date and then, even though you could have and would have used it,  you just didn't. Like when I buy special dairy-free cheese and then, in an attempt to savor it, use it so slowly that the last couple slices mold. That is stupid, and I need to stop doing that. Or you bought something for a purpose, but then something changed in your life like you moved to a place with no lawn and don't need your lawnmower anymore. 

Situations in which the waste is happening at point B. often require attention and thought and perhaps a giant spreadsheet like the one I made to deal with my grocery problem that I talked about last week, but ultimately they shouldn't be hard to fix...unless they're secretly situations where the waste is happening at point A., the point of purchase, when you buy and bring home something you have no business thinking you're going to use, at least not in that quantity. 

I could buy veggies from Costco and "save money" on the unit price, but Jon and I are only two people, one of whom is out of the house and unable to take food with him 50% of the time. If I buy a flat of tomatoes, I won't have avoidable waste happening between A. and C. I will have waste that was guaranteed from the moment of purchase.

And that is the case with most things we waste that aren't food and don't expire. When I buy clothing that doesn't fit quite right or doesn't match anything else in my closet or doesn't match my personality or doesn't match my actual lifestyle, that's a guaranteed waste from the moment of purchase. I probably don't know that at the time. I never buy something thinking: I'm going to throw this away in three months, but if, at point C. I take note of why the waste is happening and take note of the lesson, then I can start to avoid point A. completely. 

And when I do make mistakes, it's best if I admit it right away, instead of letting stuff sit and get old and dusty. The sooner I admit my error, the sooner I can donate it and add value to someone else's life who will be able to help the item fulfill its purpose. 

If you catch yourself saying things like: I know I never use this, but I just don't want to waste it, stop. You have wasted it! You've already wasted it. It's wasted. You're not going to fix that by keeping it around longer continually wasting not just it, but also your space. Let it go. Let the guilt of it go out of your life, and hopefully, someone somewhere will pick it up from the thrift shop you donated it to and give it a whole new life. They can unwaste it. You can't. Forgive yourself and move on. 

Wishlists

We all know impulse buying leads to waste: of both money and a majority of the things we impulse buy. This is not a secret. The commonly-given advice on the subject is to never buy an item you didn't already know you wanted walking into that store. 

"I've been wanting this," or "I've been looking for one of these," was my most common excuses for not-impulse-buying something. But then I'd get home and realize at some later point that, while I had been wanting that item, I had been wanting or needing something else more that I just didn't think about in the moment. This is a common problem for me in stores: all the visual input, combined with audio elements and all the humans around, compounded by the dampening effect of mask-wearing, creates confusion and overwhelm that commonly leads me to purchasing mistakes.  

So here's what I've found works for me: 

First, at the beginning of the month, I budget a certain amount to use for books, a certain amount to use for clothes, and a certain amount to use for other things. The budgeted amounts aren't the same every month, and sometimes I budget zero for clothes or books, it just depends.

Separately from my budget, I keep wishlists in each category: books, clothes, and other. 

Then I play Wishlist Hunger Games. 

Actually, I'm always playing Wishlist Hunger Games whether or not I have budget that month for that category. Here's how it goes: if I think of something I want, I put it on the list. And then I check the list frequently. I measure each thing against the other things on the list, and when I have a bit of money to spend on that list, only the things I want most or need most make the cut. 

So that works well in the way that you'd expect, but something else happens too, especially when I'm checking, updating, and evaluating my list often: things just naturally fall off or change. When I'm measuring several wants and needs against each other, each really comes into perspective. After not making the cut once or twice, sometimes I realize I don't really want that item after all. Or I want something similar but different that will add more value or serve more functions. 

This method is working really well for me. I know I'm pretty weird, so who knows if it would work for you, but if you try it, let me know! Or, if you have a different method, I'd love to hear about that too.

And that's it! Leave a comment on Waste or Wishlists or literally anything. I love to hear from you all. Up next: 

[TBD #] Books that Intimidate Me and Why

See you then!

Cleaning House Part Three: A Fridge and Pantry Overhaul and The Grocery Spreadsheet

When you move into a new house and into a new kitchen, you put all your kitchen things and pantry items in the drawers and cupboards you Think will work best. But of course you never know quite how something will work out until you try it, but at that point, inertia is not on your side. Things have a place. There is a status quo, and it takes time and energy to make changes.

When we moved into the Hillsboro house in early 2020, I did my best to put things in the best places, but I didn't get it right.  Did I fix it as soon as I started to note the friction in my kitchen flow? Nope. It took me a full year to finally get up the nerve to take every single thing out of the cabinets and try again. 

And honestly, it wasn't that hard. After a year of doing it wrong, it was pretty clear where each thing made sense to go. The harder part was space. I don't have as much kitchen space as I'd prefer. Pantry items compete for space with kitchen tools and implements, so for me, space comes at a premium and every item has got to pay its rent. It has to be useful more than once or twice a year, and it generally has to have more than one function unless that function is a super functional function. You know?

It took me a ridiculously long time to realize you can baste just as easily with a spoon as with a baster. In fact, there are very few kitchen tasks you really neeeeeed more than a fork, a spoon, and a sharp knife to accomplish. I'm not saying that's all I have in my kitchen. I do prefer using a whisk to a fork, but I did finally admit that a potato masher is just not worth the hassle. I prefer my potatoes creamed with a hand mixer anyway. It is a truth, not nearly acknowledged enough that a vast number of things advertised to make life easier really only make life more complicated. 

Here's what I had to remind myself (and if you think this is a repeat of some stuff I've said in previous posts, you're right): you don't have to keep something just because it was a gift. People constantly give mugs as gifts. You can get rid of the ones you don't use. It's okay. Me, I break mugs so regularly, that I almost never have to worry about this.

If you're not really into cooking, than having a a bazillion electric tools and schmancy implements doesn't make a lot of sense. And don't forget to get rid of things when a new, better thing makes the old one obsolete (I got rid of my slow cooker as soon as I got a pressure cooker with a slow cook setting, etc.). 

And above all: don't buy it or keep it if it only fits the person/cook you wish you were, not the cook you are or have any actual plan to become.

This goes for food too. How many of us buy aspirationally, thinking we're going to eat healthy if we just buy fresh veggies, but in reality, those veggies only come to our fridges to die?

And speaking of going to the fridge to die...

My main fridge problem, I discovered with the help of Youtube, was putting my veggies in the crisper drawers. They'd be out of sight, out of mind, and I'd just forget they were there. So instead of doing that, I put things in the crisper drawers that I'm never going to forget I have, like beer, and bought a couple clear, covered bins for veggies to sit eye-level in the fridge. Here's a link to those bins. They're specifically designed to extend veggie life, and nothing I put in those bins in the last few months has bypassed my mouth for the trash can. 

I also got a big egg holder bin with a cover so I can stack stuff on top of my eggs without squishing them. It's the best. I'm not for all sorts of bins and dividers in fridges and cupboards, but these couple items were Exactly what my little fridge needed to function optimally. There's a lot more space to see things and move them around now, thanks both to the reorganization and also to THE SPREADSHEET.

I had never even considered making a spreadsheet for groceries before both my mother-in-law and sister-in-law started talking about it over a holiday dinner. I grew up meal planning. We'd plan the meals and determine from the plan what groceries we needed for the week, but with Jon's crazy work schedule, meal planning just doesn't work for me anymore, and neither does shopping every week.

What works best in my house is shopping only a couple times a month (including once at Costco!) and keeping all the basics consistently on hand so that I can make any of our standard and favorite meals at anytime. 

The spreadsheet contains every single item I like to keep in the house, from ground beef to toilet paper, arranged by shelf-stability. The lists for more perishable items are shorter and more flexible. Most items on the sheet are specific like "jasmine rice" but others are broader to ensure variety like, "easy freezer meal" or "fish". I always keep Romaine lettuce, tomatoes and onions in the house because they all keep reasonably well and are quite versatile, but I won't buy another veggie unless I have a specific plan for it. The same goes for any other part of the spreadsheet. 

I can go outside of my spreadsheet all I want as long as I have a specific plan, and I often do, but that's the whole point. I don't have to have a plan. The spreadsheet ensures I will always have what I need in the house to make a wide variety of meals at any given time, but not so much of anything perishable that I ever have to throw stuff away. It also ensures that I don't get overwhelmed in the grocery store trying to make choices from the thousands and thousands of options. Wins all around.

Anyway, reader. That's what's been going on in my now highly-functional,  yet pedestrian kitchen. I am not even remotely confident this post will be helpful or even entertaining, so, as always, your feedback is much appreciated. 

Next Up: Cleaning House Postscript: Waste and Wishlists

and then back to bookish content. I've missed it.