Brandi Carlisle and Rufus Wainwright do a magnificent cover of Sandy Dennis’ “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?”
It feels like the right question to ask as we approach day 300 of life being off-kilter.
Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share ten books we’re excited to see coming out in the next six months. I don’t tend to have my finger on the publishing pulse, so this topic is always fun as I scroll through upcoming new releases.
Here are ten that I’m looking forward to:
How about you? What books are you looking forward to seeing on the shelves between now and June?
This week kicks off Bout of Books 30, and I’m going to join in as a way to ease into 2021. What is Bout of Books and why should you join in?
The Bout of Books readathon is organized by Amanda Shofner and Kelly Rubidoux Apple. It’s a weeklong readathon that begins 12:01 a.m. Monday, January 4, and runs through Sunday, January 10, in YOUR time zone. Bout of Books is low-pressure. There are reading sprints, Twitter chats, and exclusive Instagram challenges, but they’re all completely optional. For all Bout of Books 30 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. – From the Bout of Books team
I’m going to share my participation a couple times this week. There are no blog challenges this time around, but since I’m not on Instagram, I might just put my answers here anyway.
For instance, I’m currently listening to Samantha Irby’s hilarious collection of essays, Wow, No Thank You. On paper I’m reading One Day in December by Josie Silver, but I might put it aside in favor of something else this week.
I finished a book this morning. It was a cute, holiday-themed romance that was perfectly adequate — too many characters left underdeveloped, but generally a feeling of coziness and caring even among the ones who should have been edited out.
But its ending annoyed me, because there was a proposal, and it involved all the secondary characters knowing before the main character, as well as the casual comment about the love interest having asked the father for his permission or blessing or whatever.
I recognize that both those things happen in real life. Proposals, like so many other events, have become an opportunity for grandiose public gestures. There is intense pressure on the person being queried for an affirmative response, and unless that person has already confided that a) they’d like to marry you and b) they’ve always hoped to be proposed to in front of a million strangers, I’d suggest you keep your important questions to a more intimate setting.
But the part that more sets my teeth on edge is the asking of parents (particularly fathers) for permission to marry their daughter. It smacks of old-fashioned patriarchy and transactional relationships (“I will marry your daughter, as long as you include three cows and a hectare of land”), and I find it a wholly offensive gesture, rather than a romantic one. If you’ve already spent any significant amount of time with your love’s family, you know whether they like you or not. And, at the heart of it, it’s really not about them. It’s about the person you actually want to spend the rest of your life with, and their opinion should matter most of all. For the record, I told Rudi early on in our relationship that should he ever feel the need to propose, if he asked anyone else about it before me, my answer would automatically be no.
I recognize that not everyone feels this way, including some of my close friends. And in the end, marriage — and how you get there — is one of personal preference. So, you do you. But every novelist that includes that scene as something they feel is to be admired is getting knocked down a star in my rating book.
My dear acquaintances, I wish you laughter and music in 2021. I wish you time in the company of friends and loved ones. And I wish you confidence that the coming year will be better than the departing one.
Thank you for your companionship on our journey around the sun. You helped make a challenging year easier and I’m grateful for your company.
Postmodern Jukebox songs are always fun, and adding Olivia Kuper Harris and Rayvon Owen on vocals for “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” does justice to the Frank Loesser tune.
Rudi and I are still trying to figure out how to ring in New Year’s Eve this year. Like everything else in 2020, our decade-plus-long-tradition of a movie marathon at the cinema and dinner out with friends is obviously off the table. Cases are on the rise here, as well as everywhere else, so I put a hold on our plan to watch Wonder Woman 1984 with friends sometime this week until the numbers start going down again. We can most certainly watch movies online, which would make the last night of 2020 … just like every other night. I guess what I really want — a bonfire or a physical dumpster fire to go along with the metaphoric one we’ve had this year — isn’t really possible. But I want one anyway. I wonder if the neighboring businesses would mind if I borrowed their trash facilities for the night…?