Different Kind of Fighter
Title: The Immortal Class
Author: Travis Hugh Culley
Publisher: Random House
Genre: Memoir
Length: 324 pages
My bike club went camping this weekend. I love bikes and I love camping, so it was excruciating knowing I had a pre-Halloween event at my store, bills to pay, and a general inability to leave my husband and child to go on a frivolous trip that would inevitably involve a lot of drinking and riding.
I love books more than anything, and I adore Chris Rogers (the author we had in the store Saturday), but my mind was off in the distance with my new friends – family really – their tents, their bikes, and the dirt and grit far away from my rows and stacks of books.
This isn’t about me whining about not getting to go on a camping trip, though. This is about the discovery I made because of where my mind was not and my body was… in the city, longing for my cycling friends who were partying it up and having a blast.
The stars aligned, the shelves at the store all seemed to point me in one direction, and a copy of The Immortal Class seemed to fall from the heavens.
So overly marketed as to appeal to the counter culture, zine reading crowd, The Immortal Class is one of those small square-shaped trade paperbacks. With phrases like “adrenaline-spiked” and “frenzied rawness” slapped across a black and grey jacket in egg-yolk yellow.
Months after becoming obsessed with the world of cycling and setting goals to really hunker down, figure it out, and join this world – I discovered this weekend why it appeals to my soul so completely.
“[T]he world down here was remarkably organized. Even if it was loud and bombastic, rebellious and unconventional, the people were often fixated on levels of personal status. With one another, messengers were highly cooperative, and yet competing against one another, they were fighters to the bone. It was a tight society where one could promise lasting respect and recognition for what one could offer to the community.” – pg. 230
Of course this appeals to me – this whole world of simultaneous independence and camaraderie. I grew up in a Kung Fu studio. I trained, I relied on muscle memory and instinct. I know so well the feeling of not remembering what it feels like to not be sore somewhere. I built very specific familial relationships that were directly tied to how much blood, sweat, and tears were spilled in each others’ presence.
I still do my work outs. I still teach occasional students. But I am no longer that kind of fighter. I remember when I knew I would never go back in the ring – at least not in the way I used to. It wasn’t the hairline fracture on my sternum. It wasn’t the broken and busted fingers. It wasn’t even the shin injury that twelve years later hasn’t seemed to heal just right and still swells up when it rains. It wasn’t any one thing, really. It was actually before I got my third degree, something I only got because I promised myself I would. It was actually a summer before that when after working out no less than 55-60 hours a week for months on end, after more than a decade in uniform and sash, I realized I was tired – mentally and physically. My mind was ready for something new and my body needed a break from the routine.
I love hitting the streets at night!
I started running more avidly. For a few years I ran 3-5 miles a day. I enjoyed that thoroughly, and I still run periodically. (You may remember a post about Born to Run, a book on barefoot running that kick started the running bug again recently…) But there’s always been something missing from my running – speed. A rush I can’t manufacture on my own two feet, that I used to get in the ring, has been absent. Running didn’t fill the void Kung Fu, my years of being a tournament junkie, and finally the days of bleeding for money had left behind when I said ‘Enough.’
Cycling, though, cycling has suddenly lit up my world and started to warm my soul in a way I haven’t been warmed in a long time. Probably since I fell in love and got married… yes, it’s that good of a rush! Seeing all that I have to learn excites me. Inspecting bruises from crashes and the act of getting to know my bikes (or loaner bikes until I own my own, rather) fills me with the pride that though I am a far, far cry from being any good at this sport – like a white belt dropped in the midst of advanced ninjas – I am at least one step, one bruise, and one fall closer to the perfection I seek.
I have no illusions of grandeur. No presumption that I will be great at this. I’m pushing 30 and my body feels 50, but I’m sure as hell going to try.
Inevitable black eye commencing in one… two… three… GO!
Haven’t felt so myself in a long time.
I dare you to read The Immortal Class and not get the urge to hop on a bike. I dare you. And just remember this: The more you ride, the more you’ll want to ride.
The Evolution of Everything
Title: The Evolution of Jane
Author: Cathleen Schine
Genre: Fiction
Length: 210 pages
The perfect fall day in Texas: a spinach and onion soup with lots of cheese mixed in, coffee gone cold, Huckleberry Sage in my Scentsy Warmer, all the windows open because it’s so nice outside, Tethered by Sleeping at Last playing softly on repeat, and The Evolution of Jane in front of me.
In a week of epiphanies, nostalgia, cold fronts, random spurts of rain, and recuperation after sheer emotional exhaustion, Schine’s novel is perfect and lovely. Soft and defined at the same time. A little more perfect than I expected.
It’s supposed to be a comedy… “A cerebral comedy of manners,” the Boston Globe calls it. I find that in itself humorous, as I haven’t laughed since the first page. Instead, it feels (oddly) exactly like life. It’s a mish-mash of inappropriate feelings, unexplained drama, stress where there should be none, and complete nostalgia.
It even has a delicious quote that made me swoon as it so much reflects how I feel about my own life. “I loved my job, for it allowed me to rub shoulders with ideas, to listen without having to retain, to gather information like flowers.”
My job, this job that is part author, part homeschool mom, part event coordinator, part reader and reviewer, part so many things… this job feels like that… like gathering flowers. My life feels like that in general. I am a forager, I pick up and discard things as I go, looking for any bit of nutrients and beauty I can get along the way.
I bought this book years ago at the height of my Darwin and Evolution studies. When I was trying to squeeze every bit of information on anything that briefly fascinated me. When I was trying to retain everything. How appropriate that I wait to read it now, when I can read it with more of a passing fancy, where I can absorb a story without trying so hard to remember it all.
Life isn’t meant for you to remember every single moment. If we were meant to remember it all with such clarity, I think that we would. Some things are best left discarded. This book, however, is not one of those things. If you buy it, you should keep it. It will get added to the re-read sometime pile.
Magical Thinking and the Vortex
Title:The Year of Magical Thinking
Author: Joan Didion
Publisher: Knopf
Genre: Memoir
Length: 227 pages
‘I want to go to Malibu. I would have especially loved to be there in 1976… but alas, I am not a time traveler,” I think as I look at the black and white photograph of Joan Didion with her family on the jacket of The Year of Magical Thinking.
I’m holding a first edition, twelfth printing from December 2005. It’s a hardback and does not yet feature the gold emblem in the upper right hand corner you see there. I’m assuming where it announces that Didion won the National Book Award for her memoir about grief.
Didion describes ordinary moments when lives change with such detail and such sadness. All I can think is that I find people who go out of this world in ordinary moments sort of blessed.
I know too many who have departed at the height of some drama or another… a gun to the head, horrible bodily functions that caused them to drown in their spit, people who spent their last moments screaming in horrible pain of the body or the mind.
These other people who depart happy… well, let’s just say I hope I go out that way.
Reading this book brings back the nausea of my own grief. Every description she offers sounds familiar in some way. No, I haven’t lost a husband, or a child, but I’ve lost. And I anticipate their loss every day.
Grief comes to you in a number of ways. One of which is the way you find yourself trying to fill in the hole that missing person left behind. And doing it badly. Leaving not a filled in hole, but nauseatingly burning questions you can never get answered. Song lyrics you can’t un-hear.
When someone dies you are to be there for the family. You are in no way to interfere with their grief. You provide. You silently help. You be there. You do not intrude. I was taught this. I was taught not to draw the attention away from the people in real pain – just as Didion describes.
But reading this, I weep.
What about the people who have no rights? No claim? The person sitting there who viewed the deceased like family but clearly meant less than the real family?
What do you do when one of the best people you have ever known is dead and you have no claim?
You stay silent. Or have inappropriate anger toward the deceased.
You find yourself trying to make new friends to fill their place, only to realize the relationship was entirely unique and can never be replaced. Because they were unique.
Didion speaks of the Vortex – of memories – in a way I know so well. Her vortex are stories of her daughter – her husband – snippets from their lives.
Mine is my own private cage. That world of private thoughts that I don’t have. Mine come in deja vus and too much whiskey. Mine come in always hearing the right thing at the wrong time and the wrong thing at the right time. Mine come in conversations that remind me of silences, and silences that echo long gone conversations.
My Vortex is the panic attack that starts in my pinkie and the moment in which I forget something I used to remember… or suddenly remember something I forgot.
The Year of Magical Thinking is a bit of a Vortex too… best kept under wraps in a comfy chair, with my journal nearby for the uncontrollable vomit of thought and tears that will arise as I turn the page to the next chapter.
To Be Released October 15th 2013!
Title: Just One Evil Act
Author: Elizabeth George
Publisher: Dutton
Genre: Crime Fiction
Length: 723 pages
Elizabeth George has the uncanny ability to spend pages detailing the aura of even the most minor characters. I admire this ability to dive into hefty and lengthy character developments, no character too small for complete notice (“A persons a person no matter how small” if I may quote Dr. Suess!). It reminds me of when I read Karleen Koen, different genre, same attention to characters, same knack for writing tomes.
I was pretty excited that Dutton chose to send me a second Elizabeth George book. They sent me Believing the Lie before it was released, and now I’ve been gifted a chance to read and review Just One Evil Act prior to its being available in stores. Naturally, I procrastinated and didn’t start reading it until the other day. Good thing Inspector Lynley and Detective Barbara Havers are quick to digest.
The book will be on shelves everywhere tomorrow, October 15th. It’s a good one to read if you’ve never read an Inspector Lynley novel before because George goes outside her comfort zone and finally leaves the UK. So it’s new and different whether you’re new to George, or have been following her stories for years.
“You’re a stay-at-home mom? What do you DO all day?”
I love this.
It’s happened twice in a week, and they were both women. Anyone ought to have more class than this, but women — especially women — should damn well know better.
Last week, I was at the pharmacy and a friendly lady approached me.
“Matt! How are those little ones doing?”
“Great! They’re doing very well, thanks for asking.”
“Good to hear. How ’bout your wife? Is she back at work yet?”
“Well she’s working hard at home, taking care of the kids. But she’s not going back into the workforce, if that’s what you mean.”
“Oh fun! That must be nice!”
“Fun? It’s a lot of hard work. Rewarding, yes. Fun? Not always.”
This one wasn’t in-your-face. It was only quietly presumptuous and subversively condescending.
The next incident occurred today at the coffee shop. It started in similar fashion; a friendly exchange about how things are coming along with the…
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A Look at My Life This Week
I’m almost always cycling in my spare time these days. That sounds like I do it way more than I actually do. I’m a mom, so I live in a limbo of down time that’s not down time. When I am child free, however, I ride my bike.
And here’s a visual update on how that’s going…
Photo taken by Elizabeth. Click to see her blog.
I look forward to Thursdays every week. Taking a load off life on my bicycle with friends is so freeing.
Not that life is so hard… I work with books, which really doesn’t seem like work at all. For instance: today, I met a really cool author named Wayne Basta.
Jason of Grey Gecko Press with Author Wayne Basta.
But of course, while doing all this, I’m still a reader at heart. So, during the signing today between photos and customers and whatnot – I read a book.
Totally unrelated to the really cool science fiction that was happening around me, I read a little book called Going Native: Biodiversity in Our Own Backyard. I’ve been foraging for produce lately, and I found this book really interesting as it featured a section on wild gardens in Texas (Dallas to be more specific) with American BeautyBerry plants.
All about maintaining more natural landscapes with plants native to your area, Going Native encourages the act of relaxing in your garden rather than working in it all the time. Easier said than done, you say… well, there’s also lists of plants for various regions that are recommended with blueprints of how to set it up on certain properties. It’s a neat little book and I enjoyed reading it for the few hours I was hanging out at Half Price Books today.
I found reading this book especially amusing today, because – allow me to come full circle here – my bike club people in that fabulous photo at the top were giving me all sorts of grief Thursday night about being a hippie. Playful grief, of course, as I nibbled – you guessed it – BeautyBerries out of a median we were stranded in while a fellow repaired a flat tire.
Welcome to my life… this week anyway.
Random Post on Random House
Normally I post on the quality of the topic of a book, not the quality of the book itself. Sometimes I mention these factors, but usually only a line or two within a rant about how impressed I am with the content.
I’ve been reading Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power
I didn’t notice it right away. It took me holding it for hours to truly appreciate the matte finish of the dust jacket. There is a lot of feeling missing from my fingertips from years of me abusing my own hands with activity; but during rare moments of my hand brushing against the jacket just so or turning the page and letting the weight fall in my left hand just right, I felt with pleasure the smooth grit of a not entirely slick dust jacket. I love that feeling.
The binding is nothing special. I’d like to report that it is sewn AND glued just how I like it, but it’s just glued in sections. But the classic photograph and illustration pages in the center found in almost all history books and biographies, they are lovely. They aren’t the typical glossy finish ones that you find in most biographies. They are not the twelve year old girls’ room poster quality. Instead, they appear to be printed on acid free paper. The ink quality is something to behold while the pages maintain a slightly matte appearance as well. It’s pretty gorgeous. It is the book I’ll use to show my daughter pictures of many of the men who laid the framework for our independence. It’s where we will look to see a depiction of the surrender of Cornwallis.
I read a lot and I acquire a lot of books, but not everything I acquire are good quality copies. I am notorious for reading coffee stained, marked up, dog eared paged crap that someone else was throwing in a recycle bin. It does not phase me to peruse something that smells like my grandmother’s attic (or your grandmother’s attic, or my dog’s grandmother’s attic…). So it was a little different and refreshing to read something so…. nice. And it sounds silly to be saying this to such a large publishing house, but: Good Job, Random House.
We’ll be discussing the actual content of the book tonight at the Half Price Books Humble book club meeting at 7:30 pm. Come join us.
Eratosthenes
Title: The Librarian Who Measured The Earth
Author: Kathryn Lasky
Illustrations: Kevin Hawkes
I stumbled on this book by complete accident. Most my homeschooling tools I seek out or find while searching the non-fiction section with a thought in mind. This book I merely acquired and had no idea it was going to be added to our core curriculum.
Although I love the Sir Cumference books, I often wondered how I would properly include those books into a classical education for my child when studying the circumference belongs in the times of Ancient Greece. Now I have my solution. Sir Cumference will be fun re-iteration of facts learned. Where The Librarian Who Measured will definitely be a part of our first years of school.
I’m sure I learned about this guy at some point in school, but it didn’t sink in. His name didn’t even sound vaguely familiar when I started reading this story to kiddo before bed last night. But as I read, my mind raced to the day we will sit and discuss Eratothenes in context. We will talk about Ancient Greece and the ancient libraries. We will discuss oranges and circumferences. We will talk about the planet and maps of the world. We will study things in a manner in which she will remember it – as opposed to a passing one liner in a text book. This book made me happy for days of school in our future.
October 2013 Events
ALSO, Don’t forget to check the Good Books in the Woods Event Page… That place has some nifty stuff going on this month too. http://www.goodbooksinthewoods.com/news/
Anakalian Whims 