New year, same old me

with some new ideas for All By Our Shelves

Photo by Robert Anasch on Unsplash

In December, my kids come running when they see me hauling the giant Rubbermaid bin of ornaments out of the storage room. They put on music and Santa hats, then fling open the lid, looking for their favourite baubles and last year’s candy canes. The appearance of that same bin in January, though, makes them disappear. They hide out in their rooms or the basement, waiting for the all-clear signal—the sound of my vacuum running over the bit of floor where the tree once stood, picking up all the fallen needles and glitter.

Now that they’re nine and almost twelve, they had the grace to look a little sheepish, shuffling past me into the kitchen after the job was finished. I let them feel a little guilty for not offering to help, because they should have done. But the truth is, I would have turned them down.

Those hours I spend taking down the tree, are quite often the first—and sometimes the only—consecutive, quiet, uninterrupted hours of daylit solitude I get during the holiday break. No way am I exchanging them for even more hours in the company of grumpily compliant children.

This year, I used the tree time to reflect on my reading life in 2022, especially as it relates to this newsletter. I loved many of the books I read and wrote about this year, and liked or admired the rest enough to include them. I read as many books as I wanted to read, which is to say, as many as I could physically manage to fit into my life without giving up (too much) sleep. And yet.

There was a little something amiss, a little buzz of dissatisfaction running through these contented musings on quality and quantity. A tiny but persistent whine, impossible to ignore once I heard it, like a mosquito in a tent. It followed me around as I circled our ridiculously oversized tree, an empty ornament box in one hand and deepening frown lines across my forehead, until it finally bit me.

I didn’t read deeply enough.

I thought I could easily read two or three books every two weeks. And I can…but only once through. Which is long enough for me to decide whether or not I liked a book well enough to recommend it, and to breezily summarize it for that purpose, but not long enough for me to really absorb it, to ponder its themes and characters in the wider context of solo parenthood, how it is represented in books and how it is, to live it.

To do that, I generally have to reread, take a few notes and some long walks. I don’t feel the need to do this with every book, of course, but I want to be able to indulge this impulse when it arises, without feeling like doing so will make me ‘fall behind’ on my reading. I need to build some time into my reading life to accommodate the occasional deep read—and also, to build some more time into my writing life, to finally get over myself and finish some essays and pitches for other publications.

So, in order to do those things, I’m going to make some changes to All By Our Shelves.

This year, instead of recommending 2-3 books in every post, I’m going to do this every other post. In between, I’m going to do a bunch of other things, including:

• revisit a handful of classic novels featuring solo parents as protagonists or minor characters, titles I read as a pretentious 20-something who wasn’t sure she ever wanted kids, and see what I make of them now (first up: The Bell Jar and In Pursuit of Love);

• read about (and report my findings on) writers who raised children alone, because I need to know how in the hell they managed it;

• talk to some real live solo parents on the inherent creativity of doing, alone, so many of the things that are typically done by a couple, and about the books they’ve turned to during the inevitable hard times; and

• every so often, in place of a post, I’m going to open a discussion thread, because honestly, the conversations we have in the comments are what keep me going.

I hope all (or even most!) of you will stick with All By Our Shelves as it continues to evolve but also, I understand, this new content isn’t exactly what you signed up for, when you subscribed. Thank you so much for being here, reading these very words, even if you don’t choose to continue on this journey with me.

But if you are planning to stick around—I’d love to know which of these new topics you’re most interested in, and if you have any leads for me on points one or two, please don’t be shy.