January 2021 Reading

I am doing my reading a little differently this year because I did not do a vision board or take a picture of all the things on my to-read shelf.  Instead, I am reading more or less without a goal to put the fun back in it.  And, to see what the results of this new method turn out to be, I will be doing my book blogs monthly with a photo of what I actually read.

 

So:  This month, I read five books, two nonfiction and three fiction and rejected one book as too boring to finish.  The first nonfiction book was Kyoto:  An Urban History of Japan’s Pre-Modern Capital by Matthew Stavros.  It was interesting, but not totally fascinating.  The bar for this kind of book was set pretty high by the Beijing book I read last year.  I’m glad I read it, but that’s all.  I don’t remember the title of the similar book I started about Korean urban history, but it was written in that impenetrable-because-I-want-you-to-know-I’m-a-scholar kind of prose that bores the pants off me.  (Digression:  it irritates me that “academic” books have to be written in jargon; if someone is that smart and educated, they should be able to get the bulk of their ideas across in clear English.)  I gave up after about ten pages and I am not sorry.

 

The second nonfiction book I finished was Peter Kropotkin’s book The Conquest of Bread.  I had been wanting to read it for some time because I was thinking about anarchism and he is The Guy.  It was a book that provided a lot of food for thought.  Some of his ideas were very… optimistic… but he writes from a perspective that is far more humane than what we have presently.  I liked it.

 

In fiction, I finished the last Tamora Pierce Circle of Magic book, Briar’s Book.  It was just as good as the others in the series.  Thumbs up.

 

Because I have a really cool kid (actually, I have two, but one is relevant to this topic), I get Terry Pratchett books for holidays.  Christmas brought me Raising Steam.  It was just as hilarious and deep and wonderful as all his work seems to be and I loved it.  I just like hanging out with the characters he creates and I love rolling around in his language.

 

Finally, I read The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern.  Talk about beautiful language!  The story was wonderful, the characters both lovable and compelling, and just WOW.  Go read it.

 

Spring Reading Total:  5

2021 Reading Total:  5

Eggshells

I have been drawing every day this year.  I am not good at it (yet) and I know it.  Most of the time, that is all right, but sometimes I have to talk myself down.  I am intimidated by my tools—what if I wreck the paper?  What if the pencils report me to the Art Police for excessive violation of all rules of taste and style or even for general incompetence?  I also know that I am learning in my own weird way.  I’m sure I would get better faster if I took a class, or read more, or even practiced with a sharper focus on improvement.  In a lot of ways, getting better at drawing is not the point.  It is learning to adopt a growth mindset and to increase my mindfulness around how I learn and grow.

 

Against that background, I have been seeing various threads on social media and I’ve been having conversations with people about how our cultural backgrounds influence our communication styles and how those backgrounds and styles interact with power structures.  People of color get called out as “aggressive” when they want to get down to the real issues that white people want papered over.  White women get tasked with smoothing things over at all costs.  People without tools don’t know what to do.  And, disturbingly, what I am seeing, from here, from this place in my development, is a refusal to adopt a growth mindset from the people in power.

 

It’s disturbing, but not surprising.  I mean, one of the privileges embedded in the whole idea of privileged people is the privilege of not worrying about some things.  Some of those things are practical:  where the next meal is coming from, how to pay the bills.  Some of it is more abstract—the privilege of not having to pay attention to other people’s needs.

 

I am a person of privilege.  And yet, for most of my life, I have been called “too sensitive.”  I personally hate the phrase “walking on eggshells.”  What I hear when I hear I am too sensitive, that someone has to walk on eggshells around me, is that they don’t want to learn how to avoid hurting me.  They are not willing to explore how I like to be treated.  They don’t want to undergo the sometimes painful process of trying things and screwing up and learning better.  I can only imagine the crushing disrespect involved for people who do not have the kind of privilege I do.

 

So I am starting with me, because really, I am the only one I can change.  I am going to focus a lot less on what I meant and a lot more on what someone understood me to say.  And I am going to practice and apologize and practice some more until I get better.