I’ve talked before about spending years (not, you know, full time or anything) fruitlessly searching for something on the internet (the particular elusive title from an elusively named series of middle-grade fiction, the theme song from a vaguely remembered childhood TV favorite) and then, suddenly, finding it, without fully realizing what (if anything) I was doing differently in my search. Of course, as my boyfriend pointed out, the internet has been changing over those years, filling with new information and potential leads.

Yesterday’s search was one that I’ve thought about for – truly – more than 25 years. According to my memory, when I was seven years old my dad and I watched a news program about children in South America who had pinkeye, recovered, and then a few weeks later turned blue and died. This TERRIFIED me until I was 12 (because that was the age of the oldest child who succumbed), and maybe through force of will I avoided coming down with pinkeye for those five years (I don’t think I had it again until I endured it concurrently with mono and a sinus infection my junior year of college). It’s an episode I’ve written about in my manuscript and in an essay I’ve been working on recently, so over the past month it became more urgent to figure out what, exactly, I had watched.

I wasn’t positive that I was seven – I could have been eight. I know it was the fall of either second or third grade, because my best friend was Vanessa, and it was Vanessa’s mom who pulled my dad aside after a play date at their house to warn him that I seemed to have some unresolved fears (AKA all of Vanessa’s baby dolls had come down with cases of “death pinkeye” that afternoon). My mom was in Florida at the time, visiting her parents, and it was November. At least, I thought it was November, but that may have been only because November was always the scariest month for me. But I started to doubt that, as well as my recollection of where the mysterious deaths took place – for some reason South America seemed right, but could it have been Southeast Asia instead? Somewhere else?

“pinkeye deaths 1990s” is not a particularly useful search, but in searching for “children pinkeye deaths” I found several articles about a recent (2014) adenovirus outbreak in New Jersey that killed several children. Pinkeye didn’t seem to be a particular symptom, but I filed “adenovirus” in my mind as a potential culprit. Then I set about trying to determine what the television program had been. Dateline? 60 Minutes? Not the local news, surely. I quickly learned Dateline only started airing in 1992, so it was out. I found a list of 60 minutes episodes, but they were hard to comb through and missing most of 1991. Was it Nova? Scientific American? I Googled “adenovirus outbreak south america 90s” and landed on a scholarly article about deaths in the “cone of South America” in the 1990s, though pinkeye didn’t seem to be prominent. I also texted my dad. His response: “I’m either an inattentive dad or have a dose of creeping dementia,” AKA no recollection of either the show or my response to it.

By that time, though, I had started looking at a list of NOVA episodes, helpfully listed on a Wikipedia page. And lo! There it was, not in November but December 18th of 1990 (so I was seven): “What’s Killing the Children?” (Side note: What a title – no wonder I was terrified.) Googling the exact title turned up a summary that confirmed my suspicions: the show had focused on the deaths of children (mostly under age 10) who had exhibited pinkeye, recovered, and later died of pulmonary distress due to Brazilian Purpuric Fever. As an adult sifting through the vast garbage heap of the internet looking for my grain of sand, I was operating under the assumption that the disease had been, in reality, something rare that simply presented with conjunctivitis as a symptom, that the children who died were probably a minority of those who’d had the illness in the first place, and so forth, but what I didn’t expect was to discover that all of those deaths (okay, all 18) had occurred not in 1990, but in 1984! I don’t think that would have allayed my (symptomatic of OCD) fear back then, but when I watched the show as a child, I took the title literally: I assumed that children my age were dying of this mystery disease right as I sat on our living room floor watching, and that no one knew, in fact, what was “killing the children.”

I was so pleased with my search engine tenacity that I may have made a bit of a scene in the coffee shop where I was working, and also tweeted about it. I just can’t believe I found it after all these years, or that, had my dad and I chosen two weeks earlier (the previous episode of NOVA, which was on biweekly*), I would have seen a program titled “In the Land of the Llamas.” How different could my life have been??

*I cannot get over how phenomenally stupid it is that biweekly can mean either every other week or twice a week. THOSE ARE OPPOSITES YOU JERKS.

PS: What are the chances I can go to the museum of TV and actually WATCH this episode? (I say this having not even done a youtube search yet…) I know they only have representative episodes of each program in their archives, but…

PPS: One of my students had pinkeye last week. I used a fair bucket of hand sanitizer, but only because I didn’t want to catch it and then have to make a doctor’s appointment to get eyedrops.

PPPS: Not to get too high on my internet capabilities, but I feel like I should tutor “google searching,” because most of my students seem convinced you have to type in every single word of the question you’re asking (and spell everything right…and put it in the right order…) if you want results.

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Come With Me, by Helen Schulman: The description for this pushed a number of buttons for me – nuclear radiation! near-future technology! – but I was expected something that veered more speculative than this ended up. That in itself I didn’t mind, and I generally enjoyed reading this, but…it felt like a draft to me, one that, were I the editor, my comments would have been along the lines of: 1. Too many components that aren’t given their due because the book is so crowded with them; 2. The characters’ voices lean towards parodic in their combination of whine and self-awareness, but it doesn’t seem like an intentional choice (for them to be insufferable – at least, it seems like the husband, Dan, is supposed to be to some degree sympathetic); 3. In addition to the crowding of ideas and plots, there are characters whose voices are heard once and never again – in a way that felt like filler rather than commentary. I like the idea that a novel can have an excursion into a minor character’s life without having to explain itself, but this felt like digression.

Turtles All the Way Down, by John Green: As someone who has OCD/writes about OCD, I was really happy to see a portrayal of OCD that takes the form, primarily, of obsessions. Not to say there isn’t room for the more visible forms of OCD – the compulsions – but sometimes, it seems like that’s all there is. I happened to be reading this when my boyfriend wanted to show me a video of John Green (on CrashCourse: Philosophy) talking about free will and hard determinism vs. libertarianism, and the next passage in Turtles All the Way Down referenced Godel, so it was all quite synergistic.

Sounds Like Titanic, by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman: Jessica and I were in the same MFA program and had several workshops together, so I saw the very nascent beginnings of this more than a decade ago. It’s fantastic, and as soon as I bought it I started reading it. There is nothing I like so much in nonfiction as a writer who can weave multiple threads of plot and theme together in a way that illuminates all of them more brightly – synergistically, more than the sum of their parts – and Jessica does so deftly.

A Really Good Day, by Ayelet Waldman: My only exposure to Waldman’s work was her NYT article about loving her husband more than her children. Which…although it isn’t something I would personally write about (unless under a pseudonym), doesn’t seem like the Most Terrible Thing That Has Ever Been Said (but I’d like to hedge my bets and point out that I do not yet have children, so maybe I’ll feel differently when I do!) It certainly seems less egregious than writing, under your real name, about having a favorite child (again, what do I know – but while it seems like an important conversation for parents to have amongst themselves, and I’m not trying to shame anyone…it seems unnecessarily cruel to write about it in such a way that your kids could read it). (Sidenote: A memoir I read over and over as a child, titled Karen, includes a scene in which the author (Karen’s mother) prays that God won’t let her husband die of…I think it’s TB or measles or something like that…because she could bear losing one of her children, but not him.) Anyway! The controversy over Waldman’s article seems sillier after reading her work, because she’s so clearly prone to exaggeration for effect, facetiousness, etc. I found her wildly entertaining, personally, and although I doubt I’ll be microdosing with LSD (or anything other than gummy vitamins with very low percentages of your daily recommended allowance) any time, soon, it was pretty fascinating.

The Tangled Tree, by David Quammen: I have to admit that as I read this, I frequently wished I were instead reading Spillover for the first time…but that’s no fault of Quammen’s; zoonotic diseases are inherently more dramatic than Carl Woese and archaea. Also, there’s a certain amount of background material common to lay science books, and I’ve read so many recently that I found it hard to get excited about another overview of gene transfer, or narrative of Darwin’s background. That said, I like Quammen’s voice and the attention to lesser known figures like Woese and Lynn Margulis.

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I Contain Multitudes, by Ed Yong: Microbes! I started this before January 1st and thoroughly enjoyed reading it on the cold, quiet days following.

Sick, by Porochista Khakpour: Super engrossing and beautiful in its structure. I’ve read a few books that investigate or narrate experiences with the long-term effects of Lyme disease (see, I’m even afraid to say chronic Lyme because it’s so controversial!) I’ve read intelligent, considered arguments on both sides and my only certainty is that it would be terrifying to have a disease or condition with clear and extreme health effects and to have your experiences dismissed. That, and you will not find me anywhere in the northeast outside of the city without long pants and high socks.

In Order to Live, by Yeonmi Park: I started and finished this on the same day, which is to say it’s a quick read. It’s very compelling, though it’s a book you read for the story rather than the writing. There’s some controversy about Park’s memory and/or retelling of her escape from North Korea and her two years in China, but that really doesn’t make a difference to me–yes, if her story somehow undercut the stories of others who have fled NK (AND it were untrue or embellished), that would be problematic, but if she has inconsistencies in her memory because of trauma…well, that frankly makes perfect sense.

She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, by Carl Zimmer: I hadn’t read any Zimmer before, and his voice quickly became one of my favorites among science writers. This is a delightfully huge brick of a book that I persisted in taking on the subway anyway. Parts of it engaged me much more than others–the history of how we’ve misperceived and misunderstood heredity, studies of human behavior, chimeras and DNA tests were high points, while more general information on genes, the microbiome, and botany covered material that’s been thoroughly covered elsewhere and could have been condensed.

Concussion, by Jeanne Laskas: It’s easy for me, as someone with no interest in the sport, to criticize football. Not that I think it’s wrong to criticize it – it seems obviously, unbearably damaging. And a third adjective: inevitably. That’s the one – in conjunction with the sheer magnitude of the damage done to a person by CTE – that really makes carrying on with football inexcusable to me. Any sport has a risk of injury. The only sports I have any kind of entertainment investment in are gymnastics, tennis, and large swaths of the Summer Olympics. Let’s look at gymnastics, which currently clearly has numerous problems beyond injury, but let’s focus on injury. It’s common in gymnastics, yes. Occasionally gymnastics injuries can be severe: paralysis, even death. More frequently, they’re inevitable (or close enough – there will always be gymnasts whose body composition/conditioning regimen/sheer luck will save them from chronic pain later in life). But the middle of that Venn diagram is virtually empty. The inevitable injuries are not life-threatening, and the life-threatening injuries are vanishingly rare. Even so, we should continue to evaluate skills that are too dangerous (like roll-out double flips on the floor exercise, which are banned for both men and women) and to improve the equipment for better safety. But with football, it’s become increasingly clear that a significant percentage of professional and college football players (and even younger players…) WILL suffer devastating effects from repeated concussions and “subconcussions,” and it doesn’t seem like there’s a way to prevent that via equipment. I’m not trying to take football away from those who enjoy it if there’s a solution, but frankly it seems to me that a true solution would involve flags. And as for the book…I didn’t dislike its focus on the issue via the story of the forensic pathologist who played one of the most significant roles in discovering and publicizing it, but I didn’t love the way it was implemented. There are passages in the subject’s own voice, and that’s okay, but sometimes the author seems to write half in his voice and half in a more distanced voice. I wouldn’t have minded more history and background on concussions and the football industrial complex, also.

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When I taught English to Thai speakers, one of the more difficult concepts (not necessarily to teach, but rather to introduce the topic in a way that made it through my limited Thai and their limited English as something coherent), was that of countable and uncountable nouns. (Another was whether to use “more + ______” or “______er” for comparative adjectives – mainly because the rule relies on how many syllables the adjective has, and I had to a few semi-acrobatic and very noisy examples in order for one student to catch on and provide the rest of the class with the Thai word for “syllable.”

Last night as I did laundry I was thinking about chores as countable and uncountable. Though I don’t have a preference for countable or uncountable nouns (I do like it when they combine and you get to put an uncountable noun into a countable one, almost literally, as in “a glass of water” or “five grains of sand”), I definitely have a preference for countable chores like doing dishes and folding laundry. “Discrete vs. continuous” may be a more precise analogy, but I like the idea of countable chores, and I prefer a linguistics metaphor to a math metaphor (in this particular case…don’t hold me to it on a global level!) Uncountable chores, like vacuuming or cleaning the bathroom, are my least favorite and most avoided (because I find them, to choose one-syllable adjectives, the hardest and the grossest).

Granted, you could recategorize some of what I’ve labeled “uncountable” by saying “I need to clean one toilet and two sinks,” but I think I have a reasonable argument for my designations. For laundry and dishes, items of clothing and cutlery are countable. Dust is decidedly not, and even the dusty things, like the floor, are often uncountable themselves.

By the same token, it’s hard to break habits that have to do with time-wasting than it is to break habits that are easily quantifiable. And…this is kind of a cop-out for me, really, because most of those time-wasting habits ARE now quantifiable with things like phone tracking (I don’t know the technical term – I just know that I don’t have it because I haven’t gotten the new iOS update for my phone, and I may be a little too happy about not having it/being required to face how many minutes I spend on each app). And, of course, one could track one’s time (am I distancing myself from this issue by not using “I”? Probably), or at least estimate it, without fancy technology, but it’s so much easier not to. I can say “I’ve done pilates 3 times this week,” without expending any mental energy, but how much time I’ve spent on the internet this week? Forget it. Also, when I’m doing pilates, or practicing harp, I’m only doing that one thing (oh yes: this is where the dread not-really-effective multi-tasking comes in). If I’m on the internet, I’m probably eating, or talking to someone, or (yikes), um, also on my phone.

Yes, I have a problem and I’m kicking and screaming trying to avoid having that problem taken away from me. But in the spirit of the recent NYT article, I may be at a point of needing to reset/rewire my brain. And the way to do that (okay, a way to do that) is by quantifying my time-wasting habits. Making them countable. You might be thinking “deleting the apps that waste your time is a much more effective way to do this,” but I can’t hear you because 1) not psychic, and 2) the aforementioned kicking and screaming is too loud.

So, will the iOS update kill my phone? It’s old and I’m probably able to get a new one for free in about 2.5 weeks. It already throws up its hands and says “NO NO NO NO” when it’s below 20 degrees out (it’s just imitating what it’s seen me do, I guess).

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There’s nothing to make you realize what a charmed and easy life you’ve led like the various mail delivery systems.

At least, if you get as aggrieved (and insist on using aggrieved and only aggrieved, and possibly swan around your home wailing, “I’m so aggrieved!“) as I do by the UPS, USPS, and…generally I don’t think I’ve ever had a problem with FedEx, or if I have I’ve forgotten it in the way people forget the pain of delivering a baby.

It just doesn’t seem like it should be so difficult. We received a notice at our apartment the other day – and I think I’ve probably written about notices like this before, because it’s not the first – that stated a delivery attempt had been made and the package was at the post office. It helpfully listed our home address, but not, you know, the NAME of the person the package was for. At least this time it gave the tracking number! And that’s nothing compared to the email I got from Amazon today cheerfully telling me that a delivery attempt had been made, but no one was home, and the delivery person didn’t want to leave it unattended, so…

So?

So, joyous be! It’s ready for pickup!

Great! Pickup…where?

Wouldn’t you love to know!

Don’t even get me started on the “Look for a delivery notice on your door!” that was in the email. Yeah, I looked. On the door, in the mailbox. You know where I would love to be able to look? ONLINE, USING MY TRACKING NUMBER. Which, when entered, tells me “no such tracking number exists.”

I have recourse: my last Amazon package, when delivered, was intercepted (okay, received) by someone who had my cell phone number (but not vice versa) and who texted me to say they’d left it at the business downstairs from me. So…maybe my wayward package from today also ended up there.

If it didn’t, though, I’ll be VERY–okay, you get it.

<SO AGGRIEVED>

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Why do I keep getting calls from a doctor’s office in my neighborhood that I’ve never been to?

This is actually a fairly easy question to answer: equal parts 1) I’m reasonably certain that this particular doctor was the doctor randomly assigned as my primary care physician (by my insurance), though I changed it pretty immediately; 2) This office clearly REALLY wants patients.

Their approach is pretty off-putting and has gone through a few permutations since September. Why September? Maybe to precede open-enrollment period. The first message the secretary (I assume that’s who he was) left just asked me to call them back. No thanks! Two weeks later he called back to say, “the doctor would like to speak with you and see you.” I’m sure she would…but again, no thanks. I don’t mean to sound totally dismissive, but by this point I was also having to call people to question why I was suddenly enrolled in Medicaid, so I was already making more phone calls than I wanted to make regarding services I never requested.

I believe I grumpily deleted the voicemail I received in December, but it included the laughable tidbit, “The doctor needs to see you for a follow-up appointment.” Following up, I suppose, on the ghost of an initial appointment that they really would have liked me to have. In January he upped his tactics further by cautioning, “We received a letter from your insurance that we need to do a physical check on you.” And, actually, I find that fairly believable, because my insurance is just as likely to have lost my change-of-PCP or whatever. However, if I check my insurance’s website, it lists the provider I requested, NOT this doctor whose secretary is so relentless. And this week, the voicemail said, “We received a letter from your insurance and we have to do some tests on you,” and I’m really tired of it. But too stubborn to try to stop it by calling them and saying “Stop calling me; I have a PCP and it’s not Dr. ______.” Also, I want to see if he’ll escalate further and tell me that my test results don’t look good or something along those lines (I don’t actually wish that – it’s depressing that this series of calls seems to be an unethical way of increasing business – but I am curious).

So what kind of tests do you think I “need” to have done, per my insurance (“”)? I can almost guarantee that I’ve had more tests done over the past few years (come on, I had my immunity titers checked!) than most people in my demographic, although, given that this office has never had me as a patient or received any kind of information about me (except, apparently, my name from my insurance or perhaps through some sort of black market data sale), they wouldn’t know that.

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When I was twelve I had a water bottle purse. This is a difficult-to-describe contraption, but it was essentially a sling for a regulation size bottle of Evian or Dasani or what not, with a clear plastic strap to hang on your shoulder and three elastic circles to hold the bottle in place. Another twelve-year-old at my summer theatre camp had one, and I was exceedingly jealous. She not only had a lead role in the play but also looked like a real-life version of the American Girl doll Samantha, and for some reason the water bottle purse was the third part of the holy trinity of jealousy for me.

I was thinking about my water bottle purse (can it really be called a purse if it’s mostly made up of empty space? But then, aren’t *all* purses primarily made up of empty space and formed by the things that go inside of them? I suppose the difference is that a traditional purse in which you can carry more useful and necessary items like money and tissues, and it has enclosed sides. Are enclosed sides a distinguishing feature of a purse? What are the features that we would use to teach AI how to recognize purses?) for two reasons: One, because I was thinking about the books that people my age would likely have as common childhood memories, and unlike 90s classics like tamagotchis and slap bracelets, I don’t know that “water bottle purses” are a nostalgic memory I can easily find anyone else to, you know, nostalge with about. And now I need a purse to put all of those prepositions in.

The second reason I thought fondly about my transparent vinyl strap of a tote was that my boyfriend was telling me about how, in Taiwan, people carry their own contraptions to house cups of bubble tea. I just tried to google image search this, after quickly realizing that my secondhand description was going to utterly fail, and unfortunately, my image search also failed. My understanding is that the contraption cuts down on some small amount of the plastic involved in drinking bubble tea, but doesn’t include a reusable cup? It has the top, or the top and the straw, or something along those lines…but it sounded like it might look like this only with a plastic top attached…?

Clearly, more research is needed. I’m a fan of bubble tea more in theory than in practice, but I think I finally threw out my water-purse (believe me, I kept it for years, until the plastic was looking a little less than transparent) and I really could get behind another mobile cup holder.

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As a child, I was really into the Cotton commercial jingle. That’s not really what I set out to write about, but it is related. I’d imagine most people of a certain age (and I say that because…I really have no idea how long the Cotton jingle persisted as central to its branding; I seem to remember a Zooey Deschanel version, which suggests that it lasted pretty far out of my childhood, but…who knows) would recognize it, or be able to supply it based only on a prompt of “The touch/the feel/of ….”

I keep fumbling on the keyboard–let’s blame the polar vortex for stiff fingers–and typing “cotton jungle,” which is not a terrible image. I mean, I would walk through one, at the least. I imagine it referring to the clothing displays at department stores, those racks that kids always find their way into the center of, amidst the curtains of shirts. I assume that kids still do that because, duh, ready-made fort, but I also assume it’s a fairly universal cultural touchstone for people my age. It usually held a pretty low penalty, too, unlike running around on the furniture at Olan Mills while your parents pored over the photos of you they were paying for. Not that I know any ill-behaved former children who did that.

After my roommates stopped questioning why I had shipped 200 pounds of middle-grade fiction to our apartment (I’d like to add a middle step here of them admiring my speed and impressive arranging abilities in getting them all shelved, but alas), they started looking at the spines of the books in the living room and exclaiming, “Hey! My Teacher is an Alien–I remember that! I read that whole series…Oh man, Jeremy Thatcher Dragon Hatcher?” (they were in the Coville section). “When we were kids and we had no internet, I kind of thought I was the only one reading these…”

While it’s not true that you can find any book/video/cassette/tv show from your childhood on Amazon or eBay (I had to deflect the argument “but you can find anything…” a number of times when justifying my book shipment), it is true that it’s much easier. I wrote years ago about the eidetic memory of YouTube, where I was able to find all of the cartoons I watched as a child, and I brought this up to my roommates when we were talking books. They remembered Eureka’s Castle and Noozles and Little Koala but not Mysterious Cities of Gold, which I remember being called “Children of the Sun,” but I may have just been influenced by the theme song. I’ve watched snippets or episodes of all of these in the past decade, because they’ve been preserved indefinitely online. However, I only found out today that Mysterious Cities of Gold was based on a novel by Scott O’Dell–a novel that I’ve never heard of, called The King’s Fifth, which seems odd since I have Island of the Blue Dolphins, The Black Pearl, and Zia on the same bookshelf as my Bruce Coville books.

The Scott O’Dell IMDB page (which, weirdly, includes entries for the novels he wrote that DIDN’T get adapted for film or TV, like it’s a card catalog or something (ETA: I was incorrect; the two books that were listed were in fact adapted for TV–it’s just that Scott O’Dell’s entries specified “novel”) also informed me that there’s a second season of Mysterious Cities of Gold that was never released during the 1980s in America…and that it was released in 2012, 2013, and 2016. So…I clearly have more research to do.

I’m still waiting, though, for someone else whose favorite book growing up was The Mozart Season by Virginia Euwer Wolff. I know you’re out there somewhere…

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Two kids on the train who must have been 12 or 13, both engrossed in their cell phones.

Girl: Look at this! My aunt follows my instagram.

Boy: How old is your aunt?

Girl: Like, in her twenties

Boy: Okay, that’s reasonable. (Shakes his plastic Starbucks cup, which is full of ice.) Man, I need more ice drugs!

Two women in their fifties. One is consoling the other about a relative–mother, maybe?

Woman 1: Well, of course no one wants to upset her–

Woman 2: I DON’T MIND UPSETTING HER

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Since I had just begun Deborah Eisenberg’s Your Duck is My Duck when I included it in Part 3, I need to start by saying that the title story was one of my favorites and it contains the most genius description of a puppet show I’ve ever read. 

I read about 1/3 fewer books this year than I have in probably the past 10 years. Is it the internet? Planning on more reading in 2019, but here are the last 5 of 2018 (though I haven’t finished The House of the Seven Gables yet, because I left it at my friend’s aunt’s house over the holidays).

The Personality Brokers, by Merve Emre: I was never a huge proponent of Myers-Briggs, but I will say I thought it was more on the boundary of psychology and pseudo-science than it was straight up Jungian astrology. I also find it curious how putting your “Type” in an online dating profile has morphed into a bright red flag (no, I didn’t have ENFJ or INFJ listed on mine, but I didn’t really get it when my roommates would dismiss anyone who listed theres. Now I get it! It’s like listing your favorite book as The Fountainhead!). And now I know the history of the Myers-Briggs (formerly the Briggs-Myers, but…acronym trouble abounded)

Educated, by Tara Westover: Many memoirs written by authors who have great stories can be lacking in the writing itself (in another blog book list, several years ago, exists my reaction to A Child Called It, which I believe was “WTF did I just read??”) This is absolutely not one of them. The writing is excellent. I appreciated the way the author dealt with chronology as well–not utterly strict but episodic while adhering more to the importance of theme than to calendar year.

The Bodies in Person, by Nick McDonell: I found myself getting annoyed by the fiction-borrowed tics that the author employs. I’m not saying that a work of nonfiction needs to be straightforward, or that it can’t be lyrical. But when it’s as journalistic as this is, there are certain flourishes and trailings off and sentences without actual verbs that seem out of place. The premise of this is obviously sobering and I don’t blame the author for not being able to concretely answer large moral questions. I did admire the writing at times, but there was something that felt off about it to me. 

Contents May Have Shifted, by Pam Houston: I had started this, somewhat ironically, before getting on an airplane (which the title pertains to), but didn’t take it on the plane with me because I only walked with my Kindle that trip (on which I read Houston’s short story collection Cowboys are my Weakness). I enjoy the general conceit of the book’s structure–bouncing around from flight to flight, trip to trip–and Houston’s voice. At the time I started the book there was a possibility I would be moving to California, specifically where Houston lives half of the year, so maybe I was also looking for landmarks and/or gossip. No gossip, though I did find myself snooping on Facebook afterward to determine the identities of a few characters.

The House of the Seven Gables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne: I was going to read this with a student before she visited Massachusetts, but we didn’t have enough lead time. I had already checked it out from the library, though, and having recently revisited (and appreciated vastly more than I did in high school) The Scarlet Letter with a different student (and, I admit, based on its smallness and lightness making it appropriate for a subway read) decided to read it anyway. Hawthorne is much more playful than I remembered (I did not remember him as remotely playful).

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