January 4 bike report

The first workday of 2021 offered up a not-rainy interlude late in the afternoon so we took a break to go for a back-and-forth ride in the neighborhood for about five miles. So it goes.

January 3rd; sort of pathetic

Today looks like it's just going to be a quick trip to the farmers market and back for bicycle miles--meaning scarcely over two. It was a sleepy vague morning and Scott forgot to put the panniers on his bike. That meant that all the farmers-market-obtained goods traveled in Bessie's TARDIS-like basket. The baked goods, which came from Bakery Nouveau (where--oddly--I'd not been since before the pandemic started locally), since Stephane of All You Need is Loaf was not at the market, gosh darn it, were packed into my diminutive backpack which Scott kindly carried. Perhaps he thought baked goods wouldn't be safe with me.

Books of 2020

I'd really hoped I could just cut and paste my list from the side column but, of course, that didn't really work so goodness knows whether I managed to get all the proper links aligned here. If not, there's always google for the truly interested.

 It turns out I read more than I thought I might in 2020; like many people, I found I lacked focus at various parts of the year. That resulted in my not blacking out my Seattle Public Library/Arts and Lectures bingo card--or maybe it's just that I found some of the categories particularly uninspiring. But looking through the list now, I find that I remember a great many of these titles quite fondly; I read some truly excellent books in 2020! It shouldn't be a surprise, but--by gosh--The Grapes of Wrath is phenomenally good. Like amazingly good. I'm so glad Paper Boat Booksellers had a nice-looking edition that caught my eye. Other stand-outs of the year were Circe, Three Things About Elsie, A Burning, and As Always, Julia. Particularly surprising to find fine was Pasta for Nightingales--a Christmas gift that looked like it would fall into the "pretty pictures but not such fascinating text" school. The text turned out to be quite fascinating and weird. 

 I read quite a number of Louise Penny's "Gamache" series and, in fact, a Gamache is my first book for 2021 as well. They aren't profound but they are somehow comforting. I cheat by quoting the last bit of the Acknowledgments for Glass Houses (which will be on next year's list, should we all survive that long): Three Pines is a state of mind. When we choose tolerance over hate. Kindness over cruelty. Goodness over bullying. When we choose to be hopeful, not cynical. Then we live in Three Pines. I don't always make those choices, but I do know when I'm in the wilderness, and when I'm in the bistro. I know where I want to be, and I know how to get there.

 Some numbers: 54 books total including 11 re-reads, roughly 10 non-fiction (depending on how you want to categorize The Book of Mark, Maus II, and perhaps a few others), more or less 6 children's books.  Some books this year were admittedly very short indeed (Cat Heaven had perhaps the fewest words on the fewest pages); others were quite long (The Levant Trilogy and The Balkan Trilogy are, as their names imply, actually each three not-short volumes). 

As usual, the children's books were almost uniformly outstanding; Charlotte's Web never disappoints, though Jack and Jill was not exactly spellbinding. Anthony Trollope (Rachel Ray, The Claverings, and The Kellys and O'Kellys) is also always reliable and comforting. I admit Gingerbread left me a little baffled, How Long 'Til Black Future Month and My Purple Scented Novel were both a bit "meh," and The Thirteen Clocks was distinctly underwhelming, but there were very few outright stinkers this year. Utopia Avenue got some pretty lousy reviews, but it was a sweet, if predictable story (and oh! so much better than Slade House). I had some doubts about Piransi but it also turned out to be quite decent. Some of the books I've had to look at the links to remember--Homegoing, The Yield, Signs Preceding the End of the World--were truly excellent, but somehow just failed to stick with me; I blame my mental state, not the books themselves.

 In reverse order of reading, the books of 2020 (indents, if they survive, indicate re-reads):

France is a Feast

    The Father Christmas Letters 

Piranesi

Cat Heaven

    Black Hearts in Battersea 

Rachel Ray 

    Jack and Jill

Circe 

All the Lives We Never Lived

Zone One 

Homegoing

A Great Reckoning 

The Kellys and the O'Kellys

Esperanza Rising

    A Fine and Private Place

Just Us

The Long Way Home 

How the Light Gets In

Between the World and Me

The Beautiful Mystery

    The Gospel According to Mark

    Charlotte's Web

Nature Obscura 

 Between You and Me

Maus II: A Survivor's Tale

The Gardener's Year 

    The Mysterious Affair at Styles

The Yield

Utopia Avenue

The Thirteen Clocks

How Long 'Til Black Future Month?

A Burning 

How the South Won the Civil War

The Claverings

Signs Preceding the End of the World

A Trick of the Light

Happiness, As Such

    The Levant Trilogy

Un Lun Dun 

 Bury Your Dead

    Miss Bunting

A Chelsea Concerto

Gingerbread

The Brutal Telling

    The Balkan Trilogy

Unsheltered

The Nature of the Beast 

    Little Women 

My Purple Scented Novel 

The Grapes of Wrath 

A Rule Against Murder 

Pasta for Nightingales 

 As Always, Julia 

Three Things About Elsie

 

Wet and windy : January 2

Louise Penny and Magda Szabo are known quantities; I heard a snippet of Elif Shafek on NPR and it was intriguing. (Candle was an impulse buy at 40 percent off)

 

Today was, as the subject line suggests, ideal for cycling only if you're a little bit mad--or maybe if you live in Seattle and don't want to spend all winter indoors.  Paper Boat Booksellers had all three of the books I wanted in stock, and Scott was more than game for a ride in the wind and the rain so we headed out. The "drops" hitting our face as we headed south felt like handfuls of small gravel, but the tailwind made the return ride pretty easy and it felt relatively dry, though that's just because the wet was at our backs. As I noted yesterday, I really need to treat my cycling jacket with some sort of water-repellent; even on this short ride my arms got soaked.

It felt a lot more intense than this, I assure you.

For the year--woohoo!

Bicycling, 2021 edition

 

Scott, Bernardo, and Bessie at the misty overlook

I've no idea how long I'll keep this up, but today I'm posting today's mileage and a snap from the outing. The first day of 2021 was damp in Seattle. It was just starting to drizzle as we set out and developed into a serious downpour by the time we returned home. My coat is still drying. I need to find out how to re-waterproof it because my arms are just getting soaked when it rains these days.

New Year, New Start

 

Cycling Victories!

 

There's not a lot good to be said about 2020; in fact, I'm not going out on any limbs saying it's been one of the crappiest years of most of our lifetimes. But there have been some highlights: the outcome of the presidential election is one that far too many of us take for granted, perhap. Maybe we've been distracted from recognizing the actual results by all the idiocy emanating from what I follow Stephen Colbert's example in referring to as T****.  

But, far more personally, a few months ago I was looking at my bike mileage for the year and thinking that I had certainly chosen a bad year to set a public goal of riding 1500 miles. The second half of March, April, May, and June I rode a lot less than I had in most recent years. I wasn't commuting to work. There was no bookstore day. There was no garden tour day. There was no backyard farm day. There was no yard sale day. There were no tulip fields to visit. I wasn't even going to the grocery store. I'm not sure I  left West Seattle between mid-March and mid-July. My riding was essentially limited to deliberate exercise periods during which I anxiously worried about encountering anyone else on the street.

 Somehow, publicly declaring that I wasn't going to achieve the goal turned things around. After that we just started riding more. Oh, the week or more of the weather being "very unhealthy" thanks to wildfires threw a wrench into September and then we both got sick (not Covid) for a week in October, but after each setback we just got back out and biked. Still mostly in West Seattle and with only one serious all-day ride (to Whistling Train Farm in Kent). And so I rode just over 800 miles in the final five months of the year and--woo-hoo!--hit 1504 miles on Boxing Day.

 It's a tiny little thing, utterly meaningless in any way. But this year, I'm taking it as something to celebrate. 

The moon smiles sweetly and unperturbedly

"I blew out the lamp," wrote Rabindranath Tagore, "with the idea of turning in to bed. No sooner had I done so, through the open windows, the moonlight burst in to the room, with a shock of surprise . . . [I]f I had gone off to bed leaving the shutters closed, and thus missed this vision, it would have stayed there all the same without any protest against the mocking lamp inside. Even if I had remained blind to it all my life--letting the lamp triumph to the end . . . even then the moon would still have been there, sweetly smiling unperturbed and unobstructive, waiting for me as she has throughout the ages."
                           --from page 263 of All the Lives We Never Lived by Anuradha Roy

Rabindranath Tagore is an actual poet--many of the characters in Ms Roy's latest seem to have been real people--and I'm not sure if this is her own translation or someone else's. I just know that it's a fine bit of writing, as is the rest of the novel.