Review: Let Me Be Like Water, by S.K. Perry

I've been remiss in writing here, or sharing reviews, or doing much of anything. I suspect I'll pick this little blog up again eventually--I always do--but in the meantime, I'm hoping to at least share reviews I've written for other sites for the books I'm really loving lately. Here's the first of what I hope will be many more. Reprinted from Shelf Awareness with permission.

Let Me Be Like Water is a beautiful and heartbreaking story of young love and young loss. A meditation on grief and what could have been, S.K. Perry's debut offers glimpses of the sometimes magical ways the world works when life is shattered and we're left with nothing but the pieces.

#24in48: On Your Mark, Get Set...

We're coming up to the next round of the 24in48 Readathon, y'all! The goal: read for 24 hours over a 48-hour period (midnight on Friday to midnight on Sunday). 

Yours truly is excited to be back to co-host with Kristen and Rachel this time around, and while that means I'll be spending more time writing/social media-ing/monitoring than reading, I'm still so, so excited to tackle some of the books in my TBR and get a bit of non-assigned reading in.

Run the Mile You're In: Halfway Points, Intentions, and Presence

I have fallen into a questionably healthy habit (according to my hamstring, at least) of running for very long stretches at a time. Four, six, and eight hour runs have become fairly standard in my training cycles; I crave the opportunity to push myself, mentally and physically, to do more, just as I crave the exhaustion they bring. This habit has taught me many things, but of those things, this one stands out: Run the mile you're in. 

Halfway through a 50k is (approximately) 16 miles.

Here's the thing about 16 miles: it's a lot of miles, no matter how you look at it.

Spend too long thinking about how far you've already gone, and your mind and body become exhausted with recognition of what you've done. I've already run sixteen miles. Am I not done yet?

Spend too long thinking about how far is yet to go, and your mind and body become exhausted with the sheer weight of what's to come. I have sixteen miles left. I'll never get there.

It's a lesson I've found invaluable in life as well as running: presence is about more than attention. It's about recognizing where I am in a process, where we are in a process, acknowledging how far we've come and how far is left to go, knowing how to get to a finish line, whatever that may look like, all while holding on to what is immediate.

March: A Monthly Round-up

Cheers from California, friends, where I'm wrapping up the tail end of a solo vacation (the first of its kind!) after a five-day leadership retreat out here that stretched, pulled, and pushed me to be a better, stronger person in both work and life. The vacation part has given me space to think on what that better, stronger may look like. I'm still not sure I have the answers--certainly not enough to write anything coherently about them--but it's been a space I didn't realize I needed until I was within it.

Surprisingly, given the mass amounts of downtime structured into this 12-day trip, I've not been reading much. I've been sitting, and thinking, and walking, and writing, and hiking, and running, and stretching, and sitting again. I've been driving, and viewing. I've been reflecting and absorbing. I've been soaking in the literal sunshine (sorry, East Coasters, I understand it's snowing again back home...). There were some bright spots in last month's reading life, though:

Lessons Learned from *Not* Running an Ultramarathon

I was supposed to attempt my second 50k this past weekend, but due to high winds and a ridiculous number of downed (or almost-downed) trees, the race was cancelled at 4am the morning of.

To be perfectly honest, a small part of me was relieved; I'd been nervous about running under half-fallen trees (I watched a tree fall on the course during North Face last year, and it was no joke), and of all the possible weather conditions to run in, wind is hands-down my least favorite. I'll take snow, I'll take rain, I'll take heat. I hate the wind.

But once the realization that I would not be running my goal race this month set in, I was disappointed. I was angry. I was frustrated. I was wallowing in that when I got a text from another friend who was supposed to run that race: 9am. Local trails. Be there.

So I gave myself an hour to wallow, an hour to read The Pursuit of Endurance (if I wasn't chasing my own endurance, I could at least read about others' attempts), and then an hour to eat and change and get myself to the park. And then I ran for six hours, over hill, over tree--and over tree, and around tree, and through tree, and over tree, and over tree again.

February: A Monthly Round-Up

February has come and gone, ya'll, and with it that absurd holiday and the last of my pre-race taper. I'm gearing up for my first ultra attempt this weekend, and am battling a frustrated IT band and sore knee plus a forecast for 40mph winds all day. So, we'll see.

The upside of tapering is that it opens up a startling number of hours in each of my weeks (I went from an average of 5-6 hours/week of run time to an average of 1.5), which I filled with books as often as possible. Some were good. Some were... not so good.

You Are Doing a Great Job

Photo credit: Swim Bike Run Photo, 2017 EX2 Blue Crab Bolt 10k

I am in the taper weeks of training for my second ultramarathon attempt (the first was the North Face Endurance Challenge 50k in DC last year), which means I'm spending far less time running and far more time thinking.

People talk of "taper madness," and it's a real thing: runners (and other event athletes, I suppose, but I don't do other events) claim that in the weeks before a race, every little muscle twinge feels like the portent of a major injury, every day feels long and stretchy with elasticized time, every short run leaves your legs feeling like they are pulsing with energy, ready to go further, go faster, go harder.

Taper madness is a real thing. But what it fails to account for is the opportunity inherent in tapering. This is the time to think about what we are doing, and why. Why would anyone want to run more than a marathon? (Why would anyone want to run a marathon, for that?)

Reading Joyce for "Fun"

I had a dentist appointment a few weeks ago, and the doctor saw me a full 45 minutes late. I had rushed out of a meeting to get to the appointment on time, and forgotten my phone, and realized I left my wallet at home, so had 45 minutes of time to sit and steam a bit. But actually, I didn't steam. Because even though I'd forgotten essentials like phone and wallet, I'd managed to grab my current book, Dubliners. So I had 45 uninterrupted, unreachable moments to sit and read Joyce's short stories. What a gift.

When the doctor did finally come in, she apologized briefly for "running a bit behind," and struck up the requisite small talk when one has a book in her lap: Oh, what are you reading?

Dubliners.

Are you a student?

No.

Why would anyone read Joyce if it wasn't for school?

Book Review: Endure, by Alex Hutchinson

Ever wondered why you find yourself able to sprint the last hundred meters of a 5k race, when you spent most of the third mile feeling like you couldn’t possibly take one more step? Or why crowd support makes you run better? Or why people tend to collapse after they cross the finish line of a marathon, rather than before?

Alex Hutchinson, columnist for Outside and Runner’s World, tackles these questions and more in his new book, Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. Hutchinson organizes his research into the limits of human performance into three buckets: Mind & Muscle (with chapters on how the brain interacts with our muscle capacity), Limits (pain, muscles, oxygen, heat, thirst, and fuel), and Limit Breakers (the science of training the brain to go beyond what we think we can do).

January: A Monthly Round-Up

January came and went in a flash, as far as I can tell. I was sick for a solid chunk of the month, so maybe that's what made it fly by; something about losing two weeks to the couch and The Crown made my sense of time a little wibbly-wobbly.

Despite said setbacks, though, it was a good month for reading:

#24in48: Plans, Plans, Plans

IT'S 24IN48 WEEKEND, YA'LL. 

potential tbr for 24in48

I love books and I love bookish people, so a weekend of bookish people coming together across the world to read books is basically my favorite thing of all time. I'm excited to be joining Kristen in supporting Rachel with 24in48 activities again this go-'round, and I really really hope you all will come read along with us. (If a weekend of books with other bookish people isn't enough to sell you, will this amazing list of prizes tip your decision?)

My weekend is unfortunately slightly packed with non-reading activities (I'll be running most of the day Saturday, then attending a running club event Saturday evening), but I've got a stack of book set aside for Sunday nonetheless. As I mentioned on Instagram, the stack is born of indecision, not ambition; if I finish even one of these bad boys, I'll be a happy camper. Right now, Hearts Invisible Furies is at the top of my list, because SO many people have told me to read it now that I can't keep ignoring them all. But who knows; maybe something else will strike my fancy in the moment.

Are you participating? If so, let me know where you'll be updating and I'll do my best to stop on by as I am able. [It's not too late to sign up, either. Just head to 24in48.com to join in.] 

And I'd love to know which book from my stack you think I should start with!

30 Books I'm Grateful to Have Read by 30

When I made my 30 by 30 list a few years ago, I gave myself a bonus task of reading the 30 books Huffington Post recommended reading before your 30th birthday.

The short version: I failed miserably at this task.

The long version: By my count, I've read 7 of HuffPo's recommended 30 books. And of those seven, I read every single one of them because I wanted to anyway, not because it was on this list. I've come to realize that proscribed lists of books to read are just never going to work for me. There are books on this list I have absolutely no interest in, and books on this list I'm excited about, and books on this list that peak my interest but, if I'm realistic, I'll never actually read. So rather than calling this one a failure, I'm calling it a success: success in helping me realize that strict reading lists aren't my jam.

That said, I'm a sucker for a good list, and I love a milestone as much as anyone else. And so even though my 30th birthday was two months ago now, I'm sharing the 30 books I'm grateful to have read by my 30th birthday--even if they don't appear on anyone's master list:

The Classics Club, Redux(ish)

In September of 2012, a younger, more optimistic me joined the Classic Club, hoping to motivate myself to read 50 classics over five years (ending September 2017).

It's well past September 2017, and suffice it to say, I did not read 50 classics. I did read 24, though, so rather than calling this a bust, I'm readjusting my goals, and planning to read the remaining 26 over the next five years.

Here's what I've read so far:

1. Emma by Jane Austen
2. A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
3. The Sign of Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 
4. Middlemarch by George Eliot 
5. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
6. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
7. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood 
8. The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald 
9. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith 
10. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell 
11. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury 
12. The Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway* 
13. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
14. To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway* 
15. Don't Stop the Carnival by Herman Wouk
16. Diamond as Big as the Ritz by F. Scott Fitzgerald
17. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
18. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
19. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
20. Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
21. The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
22. Wise Blood, by Flannery O'Connor
23. The Moons of Jupiter by Alice Munro
24. Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov

And here's the list I'll be pulling from for the next five years:

1. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott 
2. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
3. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
4. The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
5. Odessa Stories by Isaac Babel
6. Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin 
7. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte 
8. The Master and the Margarita by Michael Bulgakov 
9. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess 
10. Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote 
11. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carre 
12. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carre
13. Collected Stories by Anton Chekhov
14. Woman in White by Wilkie Collins 
15. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens 
16. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
17. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas 
18. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner 
19. Light in August by William Faulkner 
20. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner 
21. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald 
22. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald 
23. Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert 
24. Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell 
25. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman 
26. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein 
27. Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway 
28. The Nick Adams Stories by Ernest Hemingway
29. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
30. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo 
31. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving 
32. Dubliners by James Joyce 
33. Lady Chatterly's Lover by D.H. Lawrence 
34. Death in Venice by Thomas Mann 
35. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez 
36. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez 
37. Bel Ami by Guy de Maupassant 
38. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier 
39. Lolita by Vladimir Nobokov 
40. At Swim Two Birds by Flann O'Brien 
41. The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien 
42. Collected Short Stories by Flannery O'Connor
43. 1984 by George Orwell 
44. The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker 
45. The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allen Poe 
46. Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allen Poe 
47. Pedro Parama by Juan Rulfo
48. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark 
49. The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
50. East of Eden by John Steinbeck 
51. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck 
52. Robinson Crusoe by Robert Louis Stevenson 
53. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson 
54. Dracula by Bram Stoker 
55. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien 
56. The Warden by Anthony Trollope 
57. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain 
58. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh 
59. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells 
60. Birds Fall Down by Rebecca West
61. House of Mirth by Edith Wharton 
62. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman 
63. A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

#SJBookClub: Retirement Edition

I started the Social Justice Book Club in 2016 after a semi-joking Twitter conversation with fellow non-fiction lovers Shaina and Shannon turned into a chorus of "I'd join that!" type tweets. We read our first book--Just Mercy, by Bryan Stevenson--in April of that same year, and things took off from there.

After the election in 2016 and inauguration in 2017, there was an even greater clamor to read more, to understand more, to empathize more with the issues at play on both the domestic and international political scenes, especially as those issues related to matters of social, racial, and economic justice. The club grew. We moved to Slack. The ever-incredible Janani joined me as a co-host in 2017. We developed a massive list of potential books to read some day.

But now, roughly two years after it started, it's time to close this chapter. As I wrote recently, 2018 is all about re-allocating my time and energy. And as much as I've loved #SJBookClub (and I think Janani would echo me here), I just haven't had the time or energy to do it justice of late. So it's time to say goodbye.

The archive of the books we've read will continue to live here, and I certainly don't expect to stop reading--or writing about--books centered on themes of social justice any time in the future. I hope you won't either, and I hope you'll continue to share your book recommendations and thoughts moving forward. If there's interest, we can try to share the list of potential books we worked up at some point in the coming weeks.

I can be reached at ofabookworm AT gmail DOT com, on Instagram or Twitter @kerrymchugh, on Litsy @kerry, or here on this blog. (I'm admittedly not particularly active on Twitter of late, and generally bad at answering emails. But I'm trying.)

Going Through the Motions, Getting Back in Gear: Intentions for 2018

sunrise over Cadillac Mountain, October 2017

After a year of fits and starts with this blog, I unofficially took a few months off (you may have noticed my last post was in September, and even then, I was just re-posting piece I'd been writing for Shelf Awareness anyway). In that quiet space, I walked away from most all of my writing projects and the computer and, as made sense for me, the internet (though I still overshare on Instagram, and I'm not even sorry about it). I contemplated giving this space up and calling it quits, weighing the amount of work it is to find the time and energy to write something meaningful against the ever-limited amounts of time and energy I seem to have these days.

But something in me couldn't let go. Because even though I haven't been the best blogger, or the best reviewer, or the most consistent writer of late, a not-so-small part of my heart loves this space I've carved out, the time I find to write about books and running and the things that make me excited.

In a world full of bad news, I want to make an effort to make space for the things I'm passionate about. In a life full of ups and downs--and 2017 brought quite a few downs, both personally and politically speaking--I want to have a space to think through my thoughts, and this is that space.