tumblebrown bix!

I made bikkies! I went to the library! Apparently I am four years old, because this was enough to make me twinkly-cheeked and rosy-eyed. If you are feeling at all ennui-ed, perhaps a little pallid or blue with the ongoing round of daily life, may I suggest a visit to a library and some bikkies to stir your cockles? Sure, it won’t cure your cystitis, but it’ll put a positive spin on it.

Which do you want to hear about first? The library, you say? Huh, I would have thought the biscuits, but okay, whatever. (Here’s another picture of biscuits to keep you going.)

See? Bikkies! Lovely! Keep reading.

To the library! I loved the local library when I was a kid. It was a high point of the school holidays when Mum would take me and my brother there: you had ten books for two weeks. Decadence. I usually had them all bowled over in the first few days, some a few times, and then we’d have to go back for a refill about halfway through the school holidays. This experience was repeated often enough that, in my head, library = magical free book world. So today I went to the library I haunted when I was at uni, reactivated my card and presto! Magical free books! I got a buzz akin to that which I felt as a wee tacker on school holidays — which exploded into a Festival of Wow when the dude at the library desk explained to me that, as a grownup, I was entitled to forty books at once, for up to six months! (Unless someone else puts in a request for one, in which case I have a fortnight to get it back to them.)

I am a happy little camper/clam/Vegemite. Imagine a world where you can just waltz in and borrow books and then, when you’re done, you can give them back. You don’t have to worry about finding room on your bookshelf, or packing them when you move, or anything. SPREAD THE WORD! PEOPLE MUST KNOW!

People must also know about these biscuits.

See, I told you there were bikkies.

Perhaps this was another nostalgia thing? Probably not. Date and ginger biscuits are pretty timeless. My demands: they had to be not-too-sweet, chewy, and totally loaded with ginger. Chewy Spicy Ginger Cookies? Touché, Internet. This recipe has exactly what I want, plus awesome pictures.

Only I couldn’t leave it alone. Two reasons: I lacked molasses and crystallised ginger; I wanted dates. Here’s the recipe, revised for spoonfully tastes (and reflecting gaps in my pantry as I discovered them).

Date and Ginger Chewy Bikkies

What you use:

• 2 ¼ cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 2 tsp ground cinnamon
• ¼ tsp ground nutmeg
• ¼ tsp ground ginger (desperately wanted more: alas for an ill-stocked spice box!)
• ¼ tsp salt
• ⅔ cup dark brown sugar
• ⅓ cup honey
• 1 large egg
• ¼c canola oil
• 2 Tbs fresh grated ginger
• 90g dried dates, finely chopped

What you do:

• Turn the oven on to 180°C/350° F.
• Whisk the honey, brown sugar and oil until it looks thick and mixed; add the egg and ginger and whisk until it’s frisky and foamy.
• Pile the flour into the middle of the wet ingredients, make a little divot in the top, then pile in the dates, baking soda, salt and spices. Mix these into the flour in some sort of half-arsed attempt to make up for your reluctance to comply with the instruction to mix your dry ingredients in a separate bowl. C’mon, we’re not here for a washing up party.
• When you’ve convinced yourself the flour, dates, soda, salt and spices are all properly mixed, get gung-ho and mix them into the wet ingredients waiting below.
• Roll your biscuit dough into wee balls (you may need to dust your hands with flour), put them on a greased tray and flatten slightly. When cooking, they’ll puff up but not spread much, so if you don’t like high-dome bikkies, flatten them more. Shove ‘em in and cook ‘em! Mine took about 12-15 minutes.
• Optional step before putting them in the oven: roll balls in sugiaar, or cinnamon-sugar mix, for crunchy goodness.

What you get:

You will need to provide your own whiskey and pencil.

What you will say:

“Mmmm! Mmmmfff, mmyeah, mmm. Mmm. S’good. Mmmnother, pleeff?”

What I will do slightly differently next time:

• Crystallised ginger. The original recipe has the crystallised ginger mixed through and sprinkled on top, and frankly I think that is the best thing in the universe. Delicious.
• More powdered ginger in the mix — not my fault, but still.
• I overcooked some slightly. I won’t do that again. That should go without saying, but I wanted a third thing so that my “what I would do different” list didn’t contain just “add more ginger”.

I have tasty sexy delicious chewy ginger biscuits. I have library books. I am one happy, if dorky, individual.

WIP and WIPs-in-waiting

I brought my nearly-done WIP, plus notes on how to finish it, plus notes on the next project to cast on, plus a sack of yarns I had vague plans for. I’m daydreaming about thick, striped socks. Long car trips can be teh total suck, and I was proud of myself for making the most of a crappy situation.

O grab-bag of wonderment!

But as the drive rolled along and I knit happily, it occurred to me that this wasn’t a case of life giving me lemons and me making lemonade, as I had previously congratulated myself. This was a case of life giving me lemons and me eating the lemons with surprising satisfaction. Goddamn it, when life gives you lemons, eat the fucking lemons, because life knows what it’s doing. While I dreaded the prospect of hours of idly waiting for the road to be used up and our destination to appear, the reality of sitting quietly for a few hours, knitting, occasionally writing, and thinking, was fantastic. Not something I do very often, sitting and thinking. I knit while I’m reading, or talking, or watching awesome videos online. Thinking quietly while knitting was novel.

A short thought tangent, but bear with me: yesterday I wrote a to-do list of all the things I really felt like doing. It grew and grew, and then it started to bug me, and I recognised all the signs of setting myself up to fail. There’s only so many hours between breakfast and bedtime, and my list was getting seriously epic. It had chapters. It would make me sad to try and do all the things on my list, because there were too many. So I forced myself to take a deep breath and choose just four things. Less than half the original. And, in keeping with my Do The Fun Stuff First approach, I chose the funnest things on the list. It was awesome: working on each thing was relaxing because, seeing how I only had a few things to do, I could take my time and focus. I did fewer things, and better ones.

I thought about this again today, while confined to the car for a few hours. My options for amusing myself were reduced to writing, knitting, and thinking. So I did those, and they were awesome. I wrote and thought and knitted and thought and wrote some more, and by the time the car trip ended, I felt clear-headed and introspective. Like my brain was a birdbath scrubbed free of poo and the world a curious and thirsty wren alighting on its rim. (As you can tell, I’ve been working on my metaphors. I think this one is better than the pony float one above. Discuss.)

This is one of those revelations I have to have every couple of months or so, because I forget it and slip back into old habits. The old habit I’m thinking of is the one where I decide if a day is “good” or “bad” based on how much I feel I’ve achieved, how productive I am, etc. Not a totally muddle-headed approach, but mean I tend to undervalue chillaxing and resting, and treat doing the fun stuff as somehow less of an achievement. I am happier when I do less and do what I enjoy.

How many times can I have the same revelation and still call it an epiphany?

Aunty Wikipedia tells me it is “also spelled hamos, hommos, hommus, homos, houmous, hummos, hummous, or humus”, but I’m happy to say that searching for “hummus” took me to the right page and that page was titled “hummus”, so from now until the day I die, that is how I shall spell hummus.

Toasting sesame seeds is easy. Burning sesame seeds is mega easy. You wouldn’t believe how mega easy those suckahs burn. Turn your back for a second and they go dark. Plus, what you or I would think of as “burnt” is waaay too late when it comes to sesame seeds. They can only be slightly browner than when you put them in: any darker than slightly-brown is too-brown. Once they’re too-brown, the roast-nutty flavour becomes dark and bitter and that will carry through to the hummus, my friend, I assure you.

...a post-roast boast!

Housemates are not mollified by the argument “I was trying to take photos for the blog” if you spill a galaxy of toasted sesame seeds because you were trying to get a photo of them tumbling into the food processor.

Some photographers can successfully photograph a food processor in motion. You are not one of them.

Smoosh, whirr, whirr, smoosh...

Fortunately, you have many other fine qualities to compensate for this regrettable lack.

...splat, whirr, smoosh, plapp...

A head of roast garlic smells incredible, tastes sublime, and looks like a weird alien flower with finger-nipples…

Not pictured: beauty.

…a blurry weird alien flower.

The glorious afterglow when you have successfully produced a litre of the finest hummus humanity has ever beheld is very rarely captured in photos:

You'll just have to take my word for it.

There are really not very many things that don’t make excellent hummus transport vessels. Toast, pita pockets, tortillas, tortilla chips: all fine contenders. Carrots, capsicum, celery, broccoli: brilliant. FACT: Hummus is a STAR at every meal. On toast at brekkers, with tomato and maybe a little avocado; in a wrap with roast pumpkin and capsicum and rocket for lunch; for entree as a dip; with a plate of salad and felafels; man, are you hungry yet? I totally am.

I made hummus today. (Oh, really, bethini, do go on!) (Thank you, I shall.) I love this stuff. I have a clear memory of tasting it as a kid and deciding it tasted like dirt — and I don’t mean that in a euphemism for shit, I mean I thought it had a wholesome, soil-ish taste. Not necessarily awful, but not to my liking, you know. So I ignored it for many years. Come adulthood, come conversion, come happiness. I love it so much: on raw veggies, on crackers, on toast, in wraps, in sandwiches. M had the mighty brainwave of using it as a pizza topping one tomato-lacking evening, and it was spectacularly good.

Spices of choice, spices of reflection.

Hummus embodies the best, awesomest things about cooking. Allow me to elaborate. It is easy, simple, nourishing, tasty and you can use it just about on/in/at anything.

• Easy: you just sling it all into your mixer and puree it.
• Simple in the sense that the list of ingredients is short and not particularly exotic: chickpeas, sesame seeds, olive oil, garlic, salt, lemon. (Spices optional.)
• Nourishing because chickpeas are loaded with protein, fibre and (to a lesser extent) zinc, calcium and iron. Olive oil is, of course, totally awesome for your heart (note: I lack formal nutritionist qualifications).
• Tasty because it just is.
• You can have it with/on/under anything, as listed in the preceding paragraph.

Cooking is that process of taking the time to produce something awesome. It reminds me (or you, if you’re paying attention) that I’m (or you’re) (or we’re) worth nourishing. To me, home-made hummus is a kick-arse answer to “why wouldn’t you just buy it?”, a question a lot of people still feel compelled to ask. It’s as easy as sneezing, completely delicious, and you can tailor it to suit your tastes (if you’re me, that means shitloads of lemon, cumin and chilli). You can start with canned chickpeas, bottled tahini, garlic from a jar and bottled lemon juice, and you’ll still come up with something pretty spesh, but if you’re really committed, you start from scratch (though I personally draw the line at planting and harvesting fresh chickpeas/lemons/garlic, etc.). Fresh tahini is ridiculously delicious, and brings a freshly-roasted-still-warm-nuttiness to the party that rocks one’s socks. Since you’ve got the oven going anyway, you might as well throw in some garlic and roast that too: roast garlic is the bomb.

Thick, juicy philosophy.

The Internet doesn’t need another hummus recipe. I don’t think it needed the first one, since the recipe is: purée. Google is your friend here. (You could argue that the Internet doesn’t need more philosophy either, but my counter-argument is that the Internet needs more GOOD philosophy, and luckily, I’ve got that in buckets.)

Hummus embodies the best things about cooking. I can buy some pretty damn awesome, locally-produced hummus around here from the local Turkish takeaways, but then I’d have to go outside. And I wouldn’t get the chance to waffle lyrically about the magic of cooking for oneself, would I?

Up close. Philosophically close.

Cool thing the first:

For the vegan death metalhead: the black carrot.

None more goth

I’m a bit late to the blue/black/purple carrot (or potato, while we’re at it) party. I’ve seen plenty on food blogs and admired them from afar, with fascination writ on my dribbling lips and awe shining from my glistening eyes. They haven’t shown their goth faces around the farmers’ markets, so I assumed they were a distant and exotic dream. Then, M’s Dad procured a bagful from a little out-of-the-way indie grocer called Coles (you may have heard of it) and ceremoniously presented me with a single specimen. I took it to work for show-and-tell on Black Friday and impressed my coworkers with my hardcore-ity. Yesindeed.

But lo! When you snap it open (see above) they are not black to the bone! Shocking! This, combined with a resistance to change and novelty in vegetables, lead to speculation from some quarters of the family that they had, in fact, actually, truly, really, been dyed. I cannot stomach the idea of carrot fraudulence, so, weeping, I turned to The Googles. The Carrot Museum site reassured me. It turns out that the dark-coloured carrots are a true, noble and ancient specimen and not some new-fangled modern foodie craze. (I mean, they are that, but they weren’t invented for food bloggers or anything: they’ve just been rediscovered.) The orange carrots that we all know and love were bred from the yellow strains, and earnestly cultivated by the Dutch (oh those crazy Dutch) — so earnestly that they eventually became the norm and we, as a culture, forgot there was ever anything but the bright orange carrot. Oh, and the fact that they aren’t dyed at all: in fact, the extract can be used as a vegetable-based food dye for other things. I didn’t think carrots needed to get any more awesome, but now I know that they come in black, purple and red, I can only shake my head in awe. I should try making a purple carrot cake! I hope the farmers at the farmers’ markets from whence I buy my fresh produce catch on soon.

Cool thing the second:

HAHAHAHAH!

I’m so happy. A tea-infusing duck!

WHEE HAHAHAHAH!

I’m not much of a one for plotzing, but plotz I did. The ducky has a little mesh nest that you fill with tea leaves and screw onto the ducky’s underside, then as the ducky gleefully swims around your teacup, it infuses the water with your delicious tea.

eee heee hee heee!

Then, when you’re sufficiently thirsty or bored with ducky shenanigans, you take ducky out and perch it in the little blue pond stand (you can see it behind the cup in the second picture) — which has a basin to catch drips! Ducky is so thoughtful!

I love ducks; I love tea. This wee tea ducky made me more happy than I care to admit. I’d like to pretend I’m above such twinkly giggles, but life makes fools of us all. And frankly, I don’t want to be above this ducky. Me and ducky: we tight.

Awwwww

This is my first autumn in my new house. I’m a wandering fool: I keep stopping halfway through pegging out the washing or making a cuppa to stare, slack-jawed, at the specific hue of yellow leaves against a specific hue of late-autumn-blue sky. Then I try and take a photo of it and decide it only just barely approaches the awesome and philosophical beauty of what I actually saw.

Now imagine this but, like, a million times more beautiful...got it?

The photos I churn out certainly don’t trigger the kind of chest-swelling, breath-quickening, tear-invoking rapture that the sight itself actually produces. Which is probably for the best: this intensity of response is hard to maintain. And it makes it hard to get the washing up done when I have to stop and compose myself every two minutes because of all the beauty…

I also fail at fully communicating the beauty of it: I say stuff like “oooh, I saw the most beautiful thing today: there was this stick of mint that had lost nearly all its leaves, except for like the second-last or maybe the last one, and there was a tiny bead of dew sitting on it…” and then I trail off, gesticulating, and my listener kindly changes the subject or pretends to have a paper cut so we can move on.

Every single thing seems to have shed its leaves overnight. As I kid, I would have picked up every pretty leaf and put it in the box I kept found feathers and pebbles in, until they dried out and crumbled and fell through the cracks in the cardboard. This sounds like I’m leading up to something poetic, poignant and…(trying to think of another p-word)…pensive about my childhood, but I’m not. I just liked holding on to things I thought were pretty. The urge is still there, even if I act on it only to take photos.

BYO philosophical insight

I think I let autumn take me by surprise because I love it so much. It smells good, the weather rocks, and I strongly associate it with the start of the uni year. As soon as the world smells like autumn, I’m back in my undergrad pants and giddy with potential and reading lists. As a result, I don’t think of autumn as a turning sleepy, winding up the year kind of time: I think of it as a turning inward, knuckling down to work kind of time. Girding up one’s loins surrounded by autumn leaves and rolled oat biscuits. Oh, dude. My heart just skipped a little oat-loving beat. I should be baking rolled oat biscuits. (I give up: I can’t call them that. “Oatmeal” and “cookies” are both from American English, and therefore I feel a bit weird saying them, like everyone who hears me is mentally correcting me to “porridge” and “biscuits”, but chewy, lush biscuits based on rolled oats are definitely oatmeal cookies and there’s no getting around it.)

Pretties everywhere!

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Holy cow this one is good. I understand it’s Tartt’s first novel and it’s incredible. Six elite Classics students (passionately committed to Ancient Greek) at a Vermont university are involved in an accidental death and then a murder: that seems like such a bland and glib summary, but I don’t know how to convey to you the sheer richness and involvement of this book. The characters are living, laughing, weeping people; the locations are vivid and the action is gripping. But above all that, the atmosphere is flawless. It moves between melancholy, funny and frightening, from scene to scene, while always building the sense of menace and unease in the background, culminating in the students’ ultimate downfalls. This isn’t a murder mystery, it’s a tragedy. And it is magnificent: strong and beautiful and moving, as a tragedy should be.

There are themes of falling from ideals; what happens when literary adoration meets reality; individual tragedy and grief, whether as a result of the actions of the self, the actions of others or circumstance; the truth behind relationships and their destruction by horrific events — oh, this is a helluva story. This story is powerful, exciting and moving and I loved every minute of it: I think I finished it in about four days, but time grows fuzzy with a book this involving.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt

Another murder and another book lush with atmosphere: but they are entirely different worlds. Moving from The Secret History to Midnight triggered a bit of atmosphere whiplash, but I recovered quickly. The atmosphere in Midnight is as rich as that in The Secret History, but completely different in feel. It’s set in Savannah, Georgia, and explores the full spectrum of emotional and cultural colours such a setting implies: there’s hoodoo, there’s forceful, aggressive, joyous sexuality, there’s heat and insanity, there’s death, insanity, history, feuds and rigidly observed social rituals. The book is soaked in Savannah’s cultural vibe and you really feel like it couldn’t be set anywhere else. The murder doesn’t take place until halfway through the book, with the first half made up of character studies and vignettes. And, despite the current trend of advice to writers, which seems to say over and over “anything that isn’t plot is pointless!”, it works brilliantly. It feels like a murder story that gradually reaches boiling point and then charges on for the rest of the book.

This isn’t really a murder mystery, and, it turns out, it isn’t really a novel, either; apparently it’s based on fact. (I love reading books and then discovering that about them.) But it is exciting and engrossing, funny in places, dark in others, and so, so vivid that if you read too much in one sitting you’ll find yourself thinking with a Southern twang. It’s great.

Short summary:

Bill Bryson’s “The Lost Continent” (1989) recounts Bryson’s road trip around small towns in America. In his mum’s car, prompted by childhood reminiscences, he trundles from town to town, looking for the embodiment of the values he associates with small town America. He describes his fantasy small town and calls it Amalgam, USA.  He never finds it, of course, although he comes close a few times.

Kerouac’s “On the Road” (1951) is a stream-of-consciousness book (everyone used to pretend it was novel, but I don’t think anyone bothers anymore) describing the author’s road trips around the US, with friends and lovers. For publication, Kerouac changed the name of his friends to pseudonyms, but you can find a character key online easily. The version I have is a Penguin Modern Classics release and is a transcription of the original scroll, so all the folks’ real names are used.

Similarities (Compare)

Well, there’s the obvious one: they’re both about road trips. But that’s a bit like saying “King Lear” is about some dude. Technically not false, but not really grasping the full picture. So both books are about driving around America, looking closely at specific elements of American culture and searching for something.  In “The Lost Continent”, Bryson is looking for the America promised to him in his boyhood. He’s looking for the the beauty, harmony and community-minded tenderness that he felt must be there in small towns in America, if only he could find it.  Instead he finds malls and mass chains, tourist traps and highways. “On the Road” tells the story of Kerouac’s journeys, mostly by car — driving, hitchhiking, carpooling — with friends, major figures of the beat generation, in the 1940′s. They drink, they take drugs, they fuck, they write, they play music and go to jazz clubs, they take short-term crap jobs to scare up cash for the next round of travelling.  Wait, this is meant to be the similarities bit.  Okay: the big similarity is that both Bryson and Kerouac are looking for something. Bryson is looking for Amalgam, Kerouac is looking for life beyond the default.

Differences (Contrasts)

Where do I start? These books are so different in voice, style and attitude.

I liked Bryson’s book, but there’s a grumbling cynicism to it that made me gave me indigestion. There’s an underlying sadness to his perpetual astonishment that small towns he visited as a boy aren’t the same anymore, while ones he’d never visited before varied from depressing to interesting. The trip seemed to go from disappointment to disappointment. When I finished it, I didn’t want to visit any of the places he’d mentioned (now, when I read Bryson’s “A Walk in the Woods”, his account of trying to walk part of the Appalachian Trail, it left me hankering for boots and bears and looking up the prices of flights to the US).  Kerouac was the perfect antidote to Bryson’s grumbliness: “On the Road” electrified me. Kerouac’s stream-of-consciousness writing is so vivid it sucked me in like a whirlpool. The push of his voice is exciting and made me want to get over to the US and follow his trail: there’s an excitement and enthusiasm for everything. Even when it isn’t Kerouac’s excitement, but the excitement of his companions — even when you can see the excitement is short-sighted or unjustified because you know they won’t follow through on their plans or promises — it gets to you and whips you up.

Another similarity

I mentioned that there’s an underlying sadness in Bryson’s book; similarly, there’s a strain of sadness in Kerouac’s, too. It starts small and builds towards the end: you can sense the conclusion coming that their road tripping times are getting harder for them, because they never find the meaning or the life they think they’re going to find at the other end.

Conclusion

What’s to conclude? I was never very good at compare-and-contrast essays. I don’t think “The Lost Continent” is Bryson’s best work; I think “On the Road” is one of the most inspiring and exciting books ever.  It has also put me on a bit of an Americana jag: I’ve just started “The Catcher in the Rye”.

Postscript

I originally typed “whirlpool” as “whirlpoop”, a phrase I shall try and incorporate into my day-to-day speech.

I finished some books recently and had been planning to talk a bit about them, but I haven’t been sure what to say, so I’m going to talk more generally about reading and books and casually interweave some comments about the books in question.

There are so many books to read it blows my mind. Even when I prune away all the books I will never want to read (I’m not listing any titles because I don’t want to foster genre-ism), even when I discount all the worthy-but-dull books I’ll never open, and even when I reluctantly admit the many books I would like to read but won’t get around to, my to-read and to-reread lists are substantial. And geographically diverse: there’s a bedside reading stack; a book-in-progress in the kitchen (handy when stirring! ideal when waiting for something to reach a simmer! wherever good times are had!); and usually a couple beside the couch. Then there’s bookshelf — theoretically, only a select few graduate to those lofty shelves of permanent possession — and the two satellite reading piles: the on-top-of-the-study-drawers pile and the pile on my desk at work. I read fast, but there’s still a lotta books to get through. Occasionally I feel a bit overwhelmed and worry I have too many — but then I think “fuck it, I like reading”. This is liberating and empowering, even though I’m only arguing with myself.

I finished Wade Rowland’s “Ockham’s Razor” and it left me, well, a bit lukewarm. I may be either too daft to appreciate what Rowland was up to in this travelogue/history/religion/philosophy book, or it may be that I was put offside by what felt like an anti-science vibe. When I reached the end, I felt a bit embarrassed because I didn’t feel like I really got the point. It wasn’t a bad book, but I wasn’t sure what to do with it.

So I hastened on to Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters, a series of essays about life, art and computing. I really like Graham’s writing style: he writes clearly and with a clean, strong forward momentum that carries you along his ideas. I got to wondering why I like some books and not others. Rowland’s book discussed some interesting themes and historical stuff that I enjoyed, but at the end of it I felt like it was a mid-life crisis masquerading as a philosophy text. Upper-middle-class Canadian lecturer takes his artist/photographer wife, his model daughter and his student son to Europe and they tour around France while he engages his children (interestingly, almost never his wife) in Socratic dialogue to teach them about some of the major science versus religion debates that took place during history. I don’t really like Socratic dialogue. I also wonder if the author is a huge pain in the arse to travel with if he insists on recording every conversation in minute detail for the purposes of later em-book-ening.

Each essay in Graham’s Hackers and Painters was tight and to the point, and I felt less like I was being taught and more like I was listening to someone’s ideas: the author was excited by what they’d discovered and wanted to share — but there wasn’t a sense of preaching, which I sort of felt while reading Rowland (probably due to the Socratic dialogue thing).

From the long-term to-read list, I bowled over The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which has been nagging at me for a long time. The second in the Narnia series and probably the most famous. It’s a really good book and I loved it as a kid, but reading it as an adult, I kept thinking “Jesus story, Jesus story, Jesus story”, which a big chunk of it is. Anyway, I’ve pushed on to The Horse and his Boy, the third in the Narnia series. Someday I’ll get through all seven — I was given the boxed set as a gift, so I feel like I have to.

Speaking of books, I’m also on the other end of the pen: it’s NaNoWriMo time! I jumped in with both feet and a packed lunch, but I’m not sure what it’s doing for me. In days leading up to it, I was writing heaps of short stuff and NaNo feels like an intrusion. I’m impatient to finish the NaNo novel so I can get back to the other stuff. I’m writing at a cracking pace to rack up the word count, and if your only metric is the number of unique words you’ve strung together, then I’m on fire. I’m resorting to cheap tricks like way too many adverbs, and lots (LOTS) of “he grumbled”; “she moaned”; “they whimpered”, and characters with double-barrelled names. There’s a cohesive plot thread running through it, but when I’m done, I’ll probably rewrite the whole thing as the extended short story it is. Having said all that, I like NaNo. It’s fun: it’s play, it’s flexing your fingers, clearing out the brain dust, and, as every year, it’s a reminder of what I can do when I do shit (deep). While I know 50K isn’t really novel-length, it’s a pretty impressive word count for a month’s work and it’s very exciting to remind myself that I can reach that if I show a bit of oomphalaboomph.

Well, it’s time for me to put in a bit of that oomphalaboomph and get to the writing of the NaNo for the day.

Take reading. Three examples of habits in reading:

Anyone who has spent feverish hours racing through a book for an exam or essay — mining for quotes, gorging your short-term memory on major themes, protagonists, plot devices and metaphors in setting — knows there are different ways of reading. Ah, the feeling of holding it all in short-term memory like a drug mule holding heroin balloons in the stomach for prompt regurgitation. Maybe not the best way to cultivate an appreciation of some of the nuances of modern European fiction, but it passes the exam. But there’s a risk of habit: you find that when you’ve got time for some recreational reading, you apply the same practices. Skimming, making mental bookmarks of the major plot points and characters, but disregarding the peripheral characters, ignoring some of the subtler aspects of dialogue, and coming away with something of a caricature of the real book.

While studying for my Masters, nearly all the reading I was doing was articles, essays and single chapters. Very little extended reading (I think the only novel I read over the course of my Masters was The Princess Bride, and I’d already read it). By the time I got to the end of those studies, I felt like a novel was a huge undertaking: I’d formed the habit of reading only chomp-sized, digestible-within-an-hour pieces. It took a while to work my way back up to book-length texts. (I was shocked to find that a 5,000-6,000 word article in The New Yorker, while completely gripping, required lots of hydration breaks and took me nearly a whole morning.) I had fallen out of the habit of sustaining focus and interest over a long reading period.

I edit legislation for a living, which involves another specific type of reading: the way I read legislation when I’m editing it is vastly different to the way I read a novel or a blog.  When I’m editing, I’m looking for errors; I’m looking at sentence structure, order of words, formatting, punctuation, etc. Additionally, I don’t have a legal background, so sometimes the topic of the legislation doesn’t hold my interest and I don’t take in meaning as well as I otherwise would. These two factors mean that I’ve developed a habit of reading in such a way that part of my mind can, to a limited extent, wander off and do its own thing while the other parts are skimming text and superficially absorbing it. I hadn’t realised how pervasive this habit had become until I caught myself doing it while reading in bed. Reading in bed! A book I genuinely wanted to absorb and learn from and drink in, and only 1/5th of my brain was bothering to show up for work!  The other 4/5ths were thinking about groceries, singing some tunes that had gotten stuck in there, asking dumb questions and generally putzing about pointlessly.

Three habits of reading, each carefully refined by circumstance. My brain had been all “right, so this is what we do all the time now, so this is what I’ll get good at!”.  Clever little brain. Have a treat.  No, not on the…oh, never mind, I’ll clean it up later.

While these three habits were useful — they wouldn’t have developed if I hadn’t needed them at the time — other reading habits deteriorated: picking up a novel put aside for a few days, it was hard to remember what happened previously and why the characters were in the situation they were in. The third habit — skimming and not concentrating — is the most powerful one at the moment, and so the one I want most to push aside. Still, awareness is the first step to correction. Now I know I do it, I notice when I’m doing it and pull myself back into line. If I get to a point in a book and think “when did she become El Presidente?” or “who was that guy again and why is he holding a donkey’s head?” it’s time to flip back and retry those couple of pages.

All three of these habits formed out of circumstance, but I don’t want them anymore. My favourite reading habit is sustained reading, where I absorb the text, learn about people, ideas and events (fictitious or real), and maybe even grow a little as a result. This is the habit I want to preserve: happily, the best way to sustain it is to keep doing it.  That’s something I can get behind. I’m a greedy reader (a greader!) and there are so many things I want to read, but if I’m skimming, not concentrating, or data-mining, I’m kidding myself. I’m not listening to what the book’s got to say, and when I get to the end of the book, all I’ve got is a deceptive sense of conclusion. Reading is a lot like listening, I think: people assume they’re good at it because they do it all the time, but most people aren’t doing it at all. They’re just looking at words.