Books for brain breaks and one for pencils
My brain is mush.
I have read 4. FOUR. Ruth Ware books over the last year week of my life. They are:
I also have One By One that I bought in the kind of shop that sells mostly mints, flowers, and paperbacks and is staffed by volunteers. On Libby there is Zero Days, but that won’t last much longer because it was only a 7 day loan.
Honestly, I don’t even care anymore. My eyes go back and forth. Someone is dead or dies, there is a shitty best friend, a rude ex, and some people stay dead but things still work out in the end. It’s a comfort I guess. Something to engage my mind when I can’t sleep.
I don’t read with a pencil and a notebook, I just exist. A spectator. It came be nice sometimes.
For more intentional, pencil in hand reading I’ve got Sanctuary by Emily Rapp Black. Her words require underlines, notations, and copying down in my commonplace book. I had avoided her work when it was in my face years ago. (I’m not proud of this.) I carry Tay Sachs. My Great Aunt lost two babies to the disease. I wasn’t ready to look. Now, today, when she came up somewhere sometime I went right out and bought this, her most recent book.
From Goodreads:
"Congratulations on the resurrection of your life," a colleague wrote to Emily Rapp Black when she announced the birth of her second child. The line made Rapp Black pause. Her first child, a boy named Ronan, had died from Tay-Sachs disease before he turned three years old, an experience she wrote about in her second book, The Still Point of the Turning World. Since that time, her life had changed utterly: She left the marriage that fractured under the terrible weight of her son's illness, got remarried to a man who she fell in love with while her son was dying, had a flourishing career, and gave birth to a healthy baby girl. But she rejected the idea that she was leaving her old life behind--that she had, in the manner of the mythical phoenix, risen from the ashes and been reborn into a new story, when she still carried so much of her old story with her. More to the point, she wanted to carry it with her. Everyone she met told her she was resilient, strong, courageous in ways they didn't think they could be. But what did those words mean, really?
Being a carrier for Tay Sachs is confusing to people. “But you’re not Jewish” is the typical response and then there is a need to explain, something she had to do after losing a child to it. For me it’s rote, thankfully.
Then there is her experience of existing in a body that is different. Same same but different, as the kids say these days. I could write for hours about my body and children and pregnancy and birth and MS, but I’ll save it. Next week maybe? I have to go order the rest of her books…