I read the concluding story in Ben Shattuck's The History of Sound, "Origin Stories," this morning and am counting it as my first read of 2025. The collection covers a lot of the same territory as North Woods, although I prefer this one to that, and has a structure faintly reminiscent to Cloud Atlas. I listened to several chapters while traveling in December and read the remaining on the kindle. I gave it five stars on Goodreads, which indicates that I want to read it again at some point. Perhaps I can convince book club to read it since everyone loved North Woods.

I'm starting the year surrounded by stacks: of scifi/fantasy informed by Jo Walton's list of iconic books of the 21st century; of a selection of Tournament of Books shortlist fare; of Jane Austens to read with Bluestalking's Austen 250 in 2025 project; and random other books I'd like to read sooner than later. I want to reread Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground before reading Edwin Frank's Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel. 

I read a few novels back to back last year that either had a dead narrator or dead main characters; I'm intending to repeat that experience this year just for the fun of it. I'm hoping I won't encounter as many endings that simply didn't work for me as last year--really, authors, don't write yourself into a hole and go all Alice In Wonderland on us instead of having the guts to just let the chips fall where they may.

Happy reading, everyone.

End of the year recap

 Let's attempt a return to blogging, shall we? I know I've tried this before, particularly at this time of year, but perhaps it will stick this time.

I'm dividing this post into four parts because most of the past year, outside work, fall into these areas.

Reading

I spent so much time at the end of 2023 compiling lists and organizing books so that I could have a meaningful reading year. I intended to participate in several slow community reads of books I already owned but had never gotten around to (or needed to revisit). Alas, I fell behind before the first week of 2024 had ended, abandoned lengthy books throughout the year, whenever I felt particularly panicked about falling so woefully behind on my Goodreads goal, and told myself I'd have time for these books once I retire. I bought too many and left them to languish while I read library books and galleys.  

My favorites, the books I finished feeling that I would happily read them again:

I am Homeless if This is Not My Home. Lorrie Moore

James. Percival Everett

Julia. Sandra Newman (I recommend interleaving its chapter with those of 1984 for an incredible reading experience)

During the Reign of the Queen of Sheba. Joan Chase

The Sum of Trifles. Julia Ridley Smith

Three Days in June. Anne Tyler

Orbital. Samantha Harvey

Enlightenment. Sarah Perry

Chouette. Claire Oshetsky

The Ministry of Time. Kaliane Bradley

The first time I pulled even with my Goodreads goal was on December 15. I finished my 101th book for the year earlier this morning--David W. Blight's bio of Frederick Douglass, which I started back in June!

Renovating

We started with the basement windows in my childhood home and the fascia and soffits outside in September 2023. In November, our contractor suffered a brain bleed, and no one knew if he'd recover. He did, and on January 1, 2024, he started demo in the basement so that we could transform space there into a studio apartment and bathroom, with a long, wide hallway that's going to serve as the home library once L.'s built the shelves. I spent too much of the year being told I had to make a decision NOW and actually believing it. The bathroom counter was finally templated yesterday and will be installed next Monday. That will mean the bathroom will be finished one complete year after work started. We still don't have the floor installed in the studio and hallway although we've had the planks on site since the summer. Because we are idiots, we decided to start another project before the basement was finished: enclosing the carport into a sun room, a half bath, and a tiny pantry/scullery. The contractor convinced us we needed a deck before the windows were installed because labor would be easier/less expensive than using scaffolding. Despite being told several times since late May that the windows are on order, we still don't have them and feel confident the contractor used our money to pay other bills (he had "Christian" insurance when he had the brain bleed; I am sure he didn't receive much help beyond a few thoughts, prayers, and casseroles). So in theory we have rudimentary walls that can't be finished until someone else pays the contractor for their project and he uses their money to order our windows. And Trump's tariffs are on the horizon! Whee! I suppose we will wind up ordering the windows ourselves to avoid the tariffs and trust we can get enough labor out of the contractor to pay back what we've given him. 

We have two to three more years of renovations to go. Plus all the work to get our current house ready to go on the market. I'm very much tired of it all.

Rescuing

In the past five years we've adopted three abandoned cats who've shown up in our back yard and lucked into rehoming a fourth. Our established cats (five of them) refused to accept any of the newcomers and L. keeps them at the house under renovation where they're happy to be inside but not confined to a bedroom. In January this year I took in a young female who we bonded with over the last month of her pregnancy. We are so so fortunate that we were able to get her and her five adorable babies into an actual rescue and that they were all placed in good homes. A month later another female cat started showing up for meals and since she was feral, not abandoned, I attempted to trap her and failed. It was the end of the summer before she brought two tortie kittens around to show them where the meals come from. These feral kittens I've had tnr'ed. They sleep in the crawl space and hang out on some shelves outside the patio doors most evenings, where they observe us and play with us through the glass. Right now we have a pseudo colony of five regulars and a couple of others who come and go. I spend way too much time fretting over these cats but who else is going to do it? 

Retiring 

Not from the library, but after 32 years of working at the polls, I've had enough. I'm tired of the insomnia of worrying over staffing. And I'm tired of feeling that my efforts to provide the precinct with a smooth-running experience are all for naught. We had a good turnout for November's election, but I don't understand why so many of our voters, voters who didn't vote for their party's candidate, threw their votes away on third party candidates or write-ins. One curbside voter filled in every bubble on her ballot in the president's race except Trump's. Anybody but Trump, right? But the tabulator won't count over votes, so she effectively didn't vote for president. A mentally handicapped man who couldn't wait for me to exit the voting panel pushed the button for Trump: why? Has his mother never told him what Trump thinks about the handicapped? A woman in a Christian tee shirt came in crying and saying she was afraid the candidates were demonic. She wanted me in the booth with her as she voted. Actually, she wanted me to vote for her, but I demurred. She calmed down after I told her she didn't have to tell anyone who she voted for. And then she voted for Harris.

A bang, not a whimper

 

Two months into L.'s retirement, and I'm finished with the stockpiling of books. No more book purchases! Or at least, no purchases until I am ready to start the book instead of having it on hand for the future. 

The books that I succumbed to before transitioning totally into this new stage:

The Novel: A Biography by Michael Schmidt. A 700-year history of the novel, this tome concerns itself with "the creative dialogues between authors and between books, and suggests how these dialogues have shaped the development of the novel in English." 

The Way the Day Breaks by David Roberts. Mental illness in 1980s Yorkshire.

One Afternoon by Sian James. This first novel won the Yorkshire Post Book Award in 1975 and has been reissued by Persephone Books.

Space Crone by Ursula K. Le Guin. Somehow I've allowed Le Guin to be a gap in my reading. Must remedy that.

The Love of Singular Men by Victor Heringer. The latest title from my Peirene Press subscription by a Brazilian author who died in 2018 at the age of 30.

I am Homeless if This is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore. Moore's a favorite, an automatic buy. Between the subject matter and some of the reviews, I'm almost afraid to read it.

To Battersea Park by Philip Hensher. A novel set in London during the pandemic.

Cousins by Aurora Venturini. An Argentine novel published when the author was 85 and had already published more than 30 books; it's her first translated into English.

Still Life at Eighty : The Next Interesting Thing by Abigail Thomas. These days I'm interested in books with elderly narrators/protagonists, so when Stephen King himself raved about this memoir on Twitter, I was quick to both order and read it.

The Lie of the Land and The Three Graces by Amanda Craig. I'm currently reading The Three Graces, the story of three women in their 80s living in Tuscany, and The Lie of the Land, an earlier Craig, features some of the same characters.

Windmill Hill by Lucy Atkins. Elderly main characters who live in a windmill. I've already read it and it was delightful.

Who's Your Founding Father? by David Fleming. An exploration of how Thomas Jefferson plagiarized the Declaration of Independence from the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence. Local history!

The Blazing World : A New History of Revolutionary England 1603-1689 by Jonathan Healey. Heavy sigh. I have so many history books stockpiled I should really try to schedule a year when I read nothing but.

The World : A Family History of Humanity by Simon Sebag Montefiore. I read the sections on Oliver Cromwell in conjunction with Robert Harris's Act of Oblivion last month. 

Oblivion : An After Autobiography by Robin Hemley. Hemley's memoir about his sister, Nola, is one of my favorites. The only reason this joined the stockpile instead of being read immediately is I don't want to subject it to my usual a-bit-here-a-bit-there reading approach. I want time to read it without interruption and it's hard to manage that.

The Lola Quartet and The Singer's Gun by Emily St. John Mandel. I started reading Mandel with Station Eleven and need to loop back to her earlier novels.

Mischief Acts by Zoe Gilbert. English folklore.

Reynard the Fox by Anne Louise Avery. French folklore. 

The Year of the Cat by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett. Yet another pandemic novel set in London.

Under the Henfluence : Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People Who Love Them by Tove Danovich. There's a country store within walking distance of the house we're renovating that sells baby chicks; I can't wait until we can put together our flock.

Beaver Land : How One Weird Rodent Made America by Leila Philip. There are beavers in the creek on L.'s mom's farm and I think they're awesome.

At the Table by Claire Powell. I think this is supposed to be in the vein of Meg Mason's Sorrow and Bliss.

In Ascension by Martin Macinnes. I love literary science fiction and I am very much looking forward to this.

Big Swiss by Jen Beagin. I read this one right after purchasing. I enjoyed it, but should probably have waited to get it from the library.

The Woman Who Climbed Trees by Smriti Ravindra. An impulse buy from an actual trip to an actual bookstore instead of my usual online method. The author went to NC State.

Forbidden Notebook by Alba De Cespedes.  I help select popular reading titles at the university library and I put this one down to order in January. It is still yet to be purchased and that's why I obtained by own. I hope to have it read before Her Side of the Story comes out in October.

Humanly Possible : Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope by Sarah Bakewell.  This will join How to Live and At the Existentialist Cafe on the shelf and perhaps they can work it out among themselves which one I should read first.

The Stone World by Joel Agee. The first novel by James Agee's son. For when I'm tired of reading about old folk.

 

 

 

 

The penultimate stack post

Let's be dramatic about it: we are entering the dark wood of a transitional stage of our lives. L. is retiring in six weeks! (Unfortunately, I am still close to four years out from my own.) He's been on the verge of retiring for at least a couple years now, but the ability to work from home and the bear market kept him going. His employers now insist on half time in the office and between that absurdity (everyone sits at their office desk to zoom into meetings with people) and his age (68 this summer), he's said enough, and we will just have to hope for the best when it comes to the sequence of returns risk. Perhaps deferring social security until 70 will help offset any financial chaos enough for us not to run out of funds in our later years. I will admit to being quite paranoid about money and the state of the world, now and in the future, and did a bit of lobbying for him to postpone the loss of his reliable paycheck until after we knew if the Republicans would default on the debt, but he's eager to work on home projects, not computer code, and I can't blame him even if I am awfully worried about our 401(k)s.

Anyway, the plan is to completely renovate my parents' 1958 ranch house between now and when I retire. I was adamant that I would never even consider moving back to my home town until we became caregivers for my sister after she was diagnosed with ALS and I had to face some hard facts. We live in a two-story house, on a hill, and even if we put in a stair lift, and added a downstairs bedroom suite onto the back of the house, continuing to live here would be complicated. And there's the change to the traffic flow on the highway our neighborhood feeds out of which stresses me to no end! There are days I drive miles out of my way to avoid it altogether. Let's move where we can hear donkeys and cattle and see the mountains when we look out the windows. Let's raise chickens and have a garden. Let's finally have a basement.

Another thing I've been adamant about: I'd quit stockpiling books when L. retired. Most of my reading consists of library books and Netgalley fare anyway; yet the fact that I've been freewheeling through the 21st century buying books whenever I found something the library didn't have, or couldn't get to me soon enough (usually to sit unread on my shelves long past when it did become readily available), makes this change one that's apt to prove difficult. The books above were supposed to be the last purchases of the year except for a couple automatic buy items being published later in the year and yet I already have another even taller stack with three books still en route. 

I am returning to blogging to bring some accountability to my reading life. Read what's at hand. Plan some projects to counter the urge to buy something new.

Now for the books above:

The Lioness by Mark Powell. Eco-terrorism in the Appalachians. I want to pair this with Eleanor Catton's Birnam Woods.

The Guest Lecture by Martin Riker. I intend to read this along with Sigrun Palsdottir's History. A Mess. and Lucy Ives's Life is Everywhere for an academic life project.

The Bethrothed by Alessandro Manzoni. Reading this now with A Public Space. Somehow I'd never heard of this classic before. It's good!

A Good Horse Has No Color and Song of the Vikings by Nancy Marie Brown. Because I love Iceland and Icelandic horses and horses in general. I probably won't read these until after I retire.

The Deluge by Stephen Markley. I am considering devoting my summer to reading nothing but science fiction and dystopian fare. This would be one of the first I'd tackle.

Collected Works by Lydia Sandgren. A Swedish addition to my Scandinavian shelf. I'm reading A System So Magnificent It is Blinding now, so maybe this one should be next?

Reading by Year, 2023

Keeping a Reading Record

Books Read in 2025

(in backwards order)

A History of Sound. Ben Shattuck

Books Read in 2024

(in backwards order)

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. David W. Bight

Liars. Sarah Manguso

Exordia. Seth Dickinson

The Anthropologists. Aysegul Savas

Hackenfeller's Ape. Brigid Brophy

All Systems Red. Martha Wells

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Screenplay. William Goldman

Brightly Shining. Inguild H. Rishoi

I Hold a Wolf by the Ears. Laura van den Berg

The Ministry of Time. Kaliane Bradley

Margo's Got Money Troubles. Rufi Thorpe

The Book Censor's Library. Bothayna al-Essa

Chouette. Claire Oshetsky

Monsignor Quixote. Graham Greene

The Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus. Sophocles

Way Far Away. Evelio Rosero

Aura. Carlos Fuentes

Toward Eternity. Anton Hur

The Caretaker. Ron Rash

The Wood at Midwinter. Susanna Clarke

Creation Lake. Rachel Kushner

Odes to the Ordinary. Emily Benson-Scott

The Year Without Sunshine. Naomi Kritzer

Stone Yard Devotional. Charlotte Wood

Ever After. Fred Chappell

The Alternatives. Caoilinn Hughes.

State of Paradise. Laura van den Berg

Everyone's Happy. Rufi Thorpe

Secrets of the Sprakkar. Eliza Reid

Penelope. Norman Thelwell

Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People. Tiya Miles

Story, Misty's Foal. Marguerite Henry.

North Woods. Daniel Mason

Time's Agent. Brenda Peynado

The Vaster Wilds. Lauren Groff

Misty of Chincoteague. Marguerite Henry

Enlightenment. Sarah Perry

Bright Objects. Ruby Todd

The Strange. Nathan Ballingrud

Sipsworth. Simon Van Booy

Haunt Sweet Home. Sarah Pinsker

Getting to Know Death: A Meditation. Gail Godwin

2001: A Space Odyssey. Arthur C. Clarke

Orbital. Samantha Harvey

The Employees. Olga Ravn

All the Horses of Iceland. Sarah Tolmie

Walking to Aldebaran. Adrian Tchaikovsky

Three Days in June. Anne Tyler

Town Parrott. Penelop Bennett

Notes from the Henhouse. Elspeth Barker

A Game of Hide and Seek. Elizabeth Taylor

Interesting Facts About Space. Emily R. Austin

Martyr! Kaveh Akbar

The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe. Laura Gilpin

The Weight of a Soul. Laura Gilpin

What is the Slave to the Fourth of July? Frederick Douglass

Practice. Rosalind Brown

Wandering Stars. Tommy Orange

Stories are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. Annalee Newitz

Moonbound. Robin Sloan

Playground. Richard Powers

The Sum of Trifles. Julia Ridley Smith

Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin. Jill Lepore

Even As We Breathe. Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle

Landscapes. Christine Lai

During the Reign of the Queen of Persia. Joan Chase

1984. George Orwell

Julia. Sandra Newman

The Sleepwalkers. Scarlett Thomas

Quarter Moon. Preston Ford

I Cheerfully Refuse. Leif Enger

The Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45. Milton Sanford Mayer

A Wild Swan: And Other Tales. Michael Cunningham

Watership Down: The Graphic Novel. James Sturm

Sula. Toni Morrison

The Cemetery of Untold Stories. Julia Alvarez

James. Percival Everett

Lincoln in the Bardo. George Saunders

Oblivion. Robin Hemley

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home. Lorrie Moore

It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over. Anne de Marcken

World of Trouble. Ben H. Winters

Countdown City. Ben H. Winters

The Librarianist. Patrick de Witt

The Auburn Conference. Tom Piazza

Dayswork. Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel

The Last Policeman. Ben H. Winters

The Bee Sting. Paul Murray

Him. Geoff Ryman

Mortality. Christoper Hitchens

The Long Form. Kate Briggs

Beautyland. Marie-Helene Bertino

All My Cats. Bohumil Hrabal

And Person is the Only Self. Elsa Babbert

Old Crimes: And Other Stories. Jill McCorkle

Aug 9 - Fog. Kathryn Scanlan

The Tusks of Extinction, Ray Nayler

Bad Animals. Sarah Braunstein

In Universes. Emet North

We Loved It All: A Memory of Life. Lydia Millet

Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. Heather Cox Richardson

Books Read in 2023

(in backwards order)

The Dark is Rising. Susan Cooper

The Matisse Stories. A.S. Byatt

We Are Too Many. Hannah Pittard

People Love Dead Jews. Dara Horn

Terrace Story. Hilary Leichter

The Moviegoer. Walker Percy

Fifteen Wild Decembers. Karen Powell

The Book. Mary Ruefle

Open Throat. Henry Hoke

Minor Detail. Adania Shibli

Night and Day. Virginia Woolf

Necessary Trouble. Drew Gilpin

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. James McBride

Day. Michael Cunningham

Went to London, Took the Dog: A Diary. Nina Stibbe

Wellness. Nathan Hill

A Few Rules for Predicting the Future. Octavia E. Butler

In the Valley of the Kings. Terrence Holt

Doctor Glas. Hjalmar Soderberg

Arboreality. Rebecca Campbell

The Private Lives of Trees. Alejandro Zambra

The Haunting of Hill House. Shirley Jackson

The English Experience. Julie Schumacher

"Bloody Summer." Carmen Maria Machado

The Fraud. Zadie Smith

"What's Expected of Us." Ted Chiang

"A Visit." Shirley Jackson

The Mysteries. Bill Watterson

A Council of Dolls. Mona Susan Power

Prophet Song. Paul Lynch

The End of Drum-Time. Hanna Pylavinen

Normal Rules Don't Apply. Kate Atkinson

Exadelic. Jon Evans

Half Life. Krista Foss

The Deluge. Stephen Markley

The Great Transition. Nick Fuller Googins

A Far Cry from Kensington. Muriel Spark

Pete and Alice in Maine. Caitlin Shetterly

The Birds Tarjei Vesaas

Mobility. Lydia Kiesling

The Survivalists. Kashana Cauley

Far Creek Road. Lesley Krueger

In Ascension. Martin MacInnes

Inseparable. Simone de Beauvoir

Trust. Heran Diaz

A House With Good Bones. T. Kingfisher

Streaming Now: Postcard from the Thing That is Happening. Laurie Stone

Sun House. David James Duncan

A Man Called Ove. Fredrik Backman

The Fish. Joanne Stubbs

Professor Hudson Finds a Home. W. K. (work in progress)

To The Lighthouse. Virginia Woolf

The Three Graces. Amanda Craig

The Forbidden Territory of Terrifying Women. Molly Lynch

Commitment. Mona Simpson

A Very Easy Death. Simone de Beauvoir

A Novel Called Heritage. Margaret Mitchell Dukore

Act of Oblivion. Robert Harris 

The Parrot and the Igloo. David Lipsky

Still Life at Eighty : the Next Interesting Thing. Abigail Thomas 

My Stupid Intentions. Bernardo Zannoni 

Windmill Hill. Lucy Atkins

Uncommon Kitchens. Sophie Donelson 

The Years. Virginia Woolf

The Future. Naomi Alderman

Big Swiss. Jen Beagin

Beyond the Burn Line. Paul McCauley

The Dog of the North. Elizabeth McKenzie

Delta Wedding. Eudora Welty

The Last Animal. Ramona Ausubel

Birnam Wood. Eleanor Catton

Let Us Descend. Jesmyn Ward

Games and Rituals. Katherine Heiny

Welcome Home, Stranger. Kate Christensen

The Terraformers. Annalee Newitz

The Vulnerables. Sigrid Nunez

Biography of X. Catherine Lacey

The Betrothed. Alessandro Manzoni

All of Us Together in the End. Matthew Vollmer

Strong Female Character. Fern Brady

The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. Jeff Sharlet

Decent People. De’Shawn Charles Winslow

A System So Magnificent It Is Blinding. Amanda Svensson

Call It Horses. Jessie van Eerden

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. Shehan Karunatilaka

Barbara Isn’t Dying. Alina Bronsky

Diary of a Void. Emi Yagi

Reproduction. Louisa Hall

What You are Getting Wrong About Appalachia. Elizabeth Catte

Take What You Need. Idra Novey

The Latecomer. Jean Hanff Korelitz

Generations. Lucille Clfton

Mouth to Mouth. Antoine Wilson

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Gabrielle Zevin

Psalms for the End of the World. Cole Haddon

Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night. Jon Kalman Stefansson

Babel, or the Necessity of Violence. R.F. Kuang

Looking for the Hidden Folk: How Iceland’s Elves Can Save the Earth. Nancy Marie Brown

Singer Distance. Ethan Chatagnier

My Volcano. John Elizabeth Stintzi

Delphi. Clare Pollard

Coronavirus Chronicles, Entry 1

I've spent a bit of time today trying to piece together when we began to take Covid-19 seriously. L. ordered elderberries to make into syrup to boost our immune systems as early as late January. Tornadoes touched down near us in early February and as warnings continued to pop up on all campus screens and sirens screamed the library dean ordered staff back onto the public desk contra university policy to seek shelter in the basement away from windows. Essential personnel equals expendable personnel, I began to think then, and have had no reason since to modify my opinion.

Not that it was anything I particularly brooded over that month (the dean is now aware of and in line with university policy where tornadoes are concerned); I was busy. I went on an otherwise lovely writers retreat mid-month with WMK where I was attacked by an escaped ram while on a walk down a country road and came home bruised, achy and swollen; friends' parents were ill and required much discussion; Millay's vet saw fit to prescribe her an Albuterol inhaler and I had that to fret over. It was late February, the week of an extended family gathering and an Old Crow show with a friend (we took light rail uptown, something I cannot imagine doing again in 2020), that L. finally pushed me into paying attention to the spread of the virus.

I resisted at first; we'd stockpiled canned food against a coming apocalypse once before and I had no desire to repeat that particular bout of nonsense. Then L. said he had no problem with us starving but he didn't want to live in a house full of starving cats. That was a point I could concede. By Feb. 23 I was placing large orders for food and litter on Amazon instead of purchasing it all locally. I spent $300 at CVS on March 1, although most of that was spent on Millay's inhaler meds. That same day I did the same at Food Lion.

Already too late to buy hand sanitizer, though.

And I was reading more about it. I made my first Facebook post about coronavirus--a link to the Atlantic's "You're Likely to Get the Coronavirus"-- on February 24 and a high school classmate (the one with the inactive medical degree) commented by saying Corona beer was an "affective" vaccine.

I'd concluded that North Carolina would have its first case by the end of the first week in March. I glanced at my phone while working at the polling station Tuesday, March 3, and saw that a case had been identified in Raleigh. That was the point when it felt real, not a mere hypothetical to run through in my mind.

L. worked from home that Friday and had a week of vacation carried over from 2019 scheduled for the following week. His boss told him by the time he'd be ready to come back to work, he wouldn't be coming. (He's still home, working out of our upstairs study.)

Still halfway in denial, I sent a link touting low airfare to London to WMK Friday evening. We closed on a home equity loan before work on Monday, March 9, and by then I was astounded that the closing officer offered his hand to shake. I took it, though. I scrubbed my hands thoroughly once I reached the library.

Oh, the library. The library with its book dust and the students who make me sneeze. I'd stockpiled tissues since I knew I couldn't stop touching my face. We had one container of Clorox wipes out at the desk and we'd been told to make them last since the next shipment was backordered to July. I knew that everyone in admin probably had an unopened container in their office, but it took another week, after admin was sent home to work remotely, for a full box of them to make their way downstairs to the front desk.

Wednesday, March 11, the university community was told we'd be moving to online instruction "wherever possible," beginning March 16 and continuing until the end of the month. Public services had been asked the previous day who'd volunteer to come in if we moved to online classes. The old essential/expendable situation, when everyone else got to stay home. One of my co-workers cried frequently; she didn't have leave to take if she refused to volunteer and wanted to stay home. Another, of the age and with the health problems that indicated she ought to stay home, hated to use her leave when she needed it to visit family over the summer. Our supervisor put together a schedule where no one would have to come in more than twice a week; we'd work from home the rest of the time.

I'd requested Monday off so that I could take my sister, who lives back in our hometown, to a doctor's appointment. Spent the weekend questioning whether we should go out to lunch prior to the appointment with our cousin and a couple of friends. In the end my sister and I met my best friend from high school at 11 am to limit any possible contact with other people. We didn't hug.

My daughter had phoned over the weekend to say she was coming home. Then I talked to her again and she'd said she was staying in NY. By Monday night she'd gotten spooked and had decided she would leave her apartment, but would stay with friends at a lake house outside the city. She's still at the lake house.

Monday night the dean sent an email saying we would no longer process physical items for ILL. When I got to the library Tuesday morning and saw that circ desk was still accepting returns, I got a co-worker to help me move a return bin out in front of the desk so that we wouldn't have to touch them.

That Tuesday would be my last day at work. The number of employees going in constricted, as did the library's hours. Gov. Cooper issued an executive order to close sit-down service in restaurants. The next day the public libraries in Mecklenburg closed at 5 pm.

Our small crew was still expected to provide services for the students who remained on campus. When Mecklenburg issued its stay at home announcement on March 24, the provost said at first it didn't apply to us and that the students on campus and those who lived in the surrounded community needed a place to go. Our dean didn't send the letter saying we would indeed close until 10 pm.

The state stay-at-home order went into effect on March 30.

Learned in an online meeting last week that all instructors are being told to plan to teach their classes online again in the fall. On April 2 we were told that six dorms on campus are to be used as a pandemic field hospital.

I think we're going to be home for quite some time.

***blows off the dust***

Oh, dear. I'd forgotten all about my attempt to return to blogging last January. Let's hope I'm more successful this time!

Reading plans for the year, I have a few. I completed my 60 by 60 challenge last week. Yeah, I'd wanted to complete that five-year challenge by my 60th back in October, but I procrastinate and I get distracted. I'll continue drawing from the list for suggestions over the next five years instead of coming up with an entirely different pool of books and authors because my real challenge will be to read all 11 volumes of Will and Ariel Durant's The Story of Civilization before I retire. I read the introductory chapters in the introduction on "the nature and foundations of civilization" in December and am ready to devote the next nine weeks or so to the Near East.

I would like to read more non-fiction, particularly history, and more science fiction over the next year. I need to branch out beyond the time travel/parallel universe and the post-apocalyptic fare that I reach for when I do read sf.

Late last January I decided to embark on another long-term reading project, one I'm calling the Decades Reading Challenge. My intention was to read ten previously unread classics published within a particular decade within a calendar year and I started with the 1850s since that would give me a century of books to draw from before my birth at the tail-end of 1959. I was on track until I hit Little Dorrit over the summer, and my dithering on whether to force myself to finish the book or to move on to another brought me to a standstill where the 1850s were concerned. (I do not understand my difficulties with Dickens.) I'm now sporadically reading Trollope's The Three Clerks, published in 1858, but I only finished eight books from the 1850s last year. Henceforth I will consider the Decades Challenge a success if I finish a mere seven books and I will also allow myself a couple of rereads.

I've completed two books since January 1: Hope Jahren's Lab Girl (now anxiously awaiting the release of The Story of More in March) and Elizabeth Gaskell's Lois the Witch, an 1861 novella about the Salem witch trials. I am totally absorbed in Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport and I'm a few pages into Dominic Brownlow's The Naseby Horses. I've also just started Katherine Mansfield's Selected Stories. I have a slew of books on hand that I'm champing on the bit to start, but I can save those for another post.