My Brain on Books XX

I am reading for The Office of Letters and Lights the folks who bring us NaNoWriMo today as I love what they are doing for literacy with their Young Writer's Programs and because I've participated in NaNo every year since 2004.  I have been blessed to have it in my life and would like to give something back if only kudos and link love.  I'm putting this plug at the top in hopes some who stop by will check out their site and see all the great things they do to foster love of reading and writing and story in kids. 

This post will be organized like a blog inside a blog with recent updates stacked atop previous ones. I may be posting some updates on Twitter @Joystory and the Joystory fb fanpage. But this is where I do anything more than a line or two.  Including mini-challenges that don't require a separate post..   

Monday-- Ok.  so I've updated with bookcovers and number of pages.  Except for those three chapters in the two novels I 'test drove' the first hour.  The total number of pages read from the six books I read cover to cover = 1274


Sunday 4:44AM: - I'm too wiped to add the book covers right now so I'm going to edit this tomorrow.  

Audio sped up is a miracle.  I haven't read more than one short book cover to cover in a single day in years.  And all six of these were started and finished inside the thon hours.  I'll add the true hours and the page numbers of the tree books when I add the covers so the extent of the miracle is more evident.

4:22AM: - 6th finish. Bernie Sanders Guide to Political Revolution by Bernie Sanders.  (Audio via BARD ) 226 pages

  Bernie was my favorite for the 2016 election. It's amazing this is the only political book I got to this thon as they represent over 50% of my reading since the summer of the primaries.

2:22AM: - 5th finish. Keeping the Faith by Carol Clewlow.  (Audio via BARD ) 119 pages

  A novel featuring a teanage girl coming of age in a Plymouth Brenthren assembly in Britain.

11:22PM: - 4th finish. The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd.  (Audio via BARD ) 304 pages

  Kidd had a spiritual awakening in her forties after witnessing two men oogling her 14 yr old daughter as she kneeled on the store floor stocking shelves.  She overhead them joking that that was how they liked their women--on their knees.  This forced her to take a closer look at the damage patriarchy was having on the hearts and minds and lives of women in our culture--Western culture in general but most disturbing to her was its entrenched influence in the Christian churches.  Her spiritual journey led her to learning about the female mystics in Christian history and the Goddess myths going back past Greek civilization.This reflects my own path since my journey began in 1994.

6:22PM: -  3rd finish. In the Days of Rain: A Daughter, a Father, a Cult by Rebecca Stott.  (Audio via BARD ) 320 pages  

 I started this shortly after posting the last update.  And 'read' this 9 hr BARD audio in just over 3 hours by listening ate 175$ and 200%.  Listening at light speed.  LOL.  This was the third time in 15 days that I've listened to this book from start to finish.  The first time alone and the second time with Mom.  Did not listen fast either of those times as this memoir was read by its author so I considered the value of the author's personality and emotion being undistorted higher than the value of speed.

It is rare for me to read a book twice inside a single year let alone three time inside a month.  That's a measure of the importance this book has for me.  It has had one of the most profound impacts on me of any book in the last decade at least.

It is a memoir of a woman the same age as my sister who was raised in the cult known as The Closed Brethren in Scotland in the sixties, which imploded over doctrinal disputes and a scandal involving it's leader in the early 70s.  It is about a rocky father/daughter relationship over the several decades after their family abandons the Brethren and they individually struggle to figure out how to conduct their lives after their understanding of God, faith, meaning, reason and the role of community and family has been shredded.

Not only is this similar to my own experience, her childhood was the same decade as mine but the troubles in our sect/cult that led to its implosion began around the same time as her family walked away it just took ours two decades to play out.  Probably the fact there was no sleazy scandal splashed across the international media.

The similarity of my experience to Rebecca's doesn't end there.  The reason I've read this three times in two weeks is that the cult itself is the same one ours splintered off of before WWII and i have only vague understanding of that history and crave any facts I can get and have had little luck finding reliable sources.

Our assembly broke away from one of the Plymouth Brethren assemblies in Texas that had been one of the many planted across the US and Canada in the late 1800s by John Darby himself after he'd splintered the Brethren assemblies in Britain which had had a fairly stable existence for over a generation before he joined them.

Rebecca Stott wasn't just any ex-fundie writing a memoir.  She is a professor and thus trained in research and had access to primary sources that enabled her to trace her family's involvement with the Brethren back five generations to it's founding in the 1830's.  Both of her parents' ancestors were there at the beginning.

As you can imagine I could go on and on about this story making connections to my story but that doesn't belong here.

12:22PM: - 2nd finish. Knowing Your Value: Women, Money, and Getting What You're Worth by Mika Brzezinski  (Audio via BARD ) 208 pages

Also listened to 50% of The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd

Both books deal with the cultural patriarchy and its effect on the minds and lives of women.  MIka's focus is on equality in the workplace--especially parity in pay between men and women.  Sue's focus is the marginalizing of girls and women in the church community and the confining role definition imposed by doctrine and the effect that has on the spiritual life of a woman.

I love it when the ideas in two or more books are having a play date in my head.

While listening listening fast (150% +) I was busy transferring stuff out of drawers into boxes and  schlepping boxes of stuff between my office/crafts room and the room across the hall I share with Mom, Piling them on her bed.  Then with the room to move around the room that created and the sorting stations in the bedroom I proceeded to sort through all the jumble for the items I needed to have available whenever the need for them arose and putting them away in old or new 'homes'.  One of my goals for today is to move my printer from the cubby desk across the room to the desk beside me so it will be easier to access and the cubby desk will be available for a small sorting station I can use during the week when Mom is home and I can't pile her bed with stuff.

7:22AM: - First finish.  Scriptorium by Melissa Range.  A talking book via BARD 'read' on my Kindle Fire.  The blurb on Goodreads says it's 97 pages.  Must have been a lot of white space around these poems on the theme of meaning that combines deep theological and metaphysical musings with piquant prose renderings of the people and landscape of her Appalachian childhood. This will definitely require repeated readings to glean its full measure of goodness.  Especially since I was listening fast.

As a bibliophile I found her vivid descriptions of old pre-Gutenberg books and illuminated manuscripts fascinating.

Before I started listening to Scriptorium at 6AM I started two novels unintentionally.  I was scrolling through my GDrive with my Moon Plus reader ap on my Zen Pad, looking for a particular book I thought was already there and twice opened a book accidentally.  Both times I had to 'test drive' before deciding whether to unload or not.  The first one I read one chapter with my eyes and the second one I read two chapters with text-to-speech, increasing the speed by increments until I sensed comprehension suffering.  I backed off of 200% to 175% and listened to two chapters.

I don't usually listen that fast to fiction and probably won't when I return to the book.  That was an experiment which convinced me I could nearly double-time non-fic that wasn't too complex.  That's still far from as fast as I read when my eyes were younger.  Normal speech averages 240 wpm so at 175% it's probably still under 500 wpm and that is less than half the speed I was clocked senior year.  But 400+ is much better than the 120-150 my Kindle and Zen Pad have been measuring me at for the last year or two.

The two books were, in order, Sea Creatures by Susanna Daniel and Our Daily Bread by Lauren B. Davis.  The latter I may return to before the end of the thon as it fits one of the themes I'm currently focused on as related in the intro meme below.

4:44AM - l am prepping this ahead and scheduling it to post at 4:44 AM which is also when my alarm is set.  That gives me time to get up and take care of biological business including fixing coffee and water bottle.

Am including the intro meme here so I don't have to spend the first hour preparing it as so often has happened before.  In fact much of it is copy/pasted from previous Thons.

I'm going to spend the first hour actually reading!

Intro Meme:

1) What fine part of the world are you reading from today?

Longview, Washington USA.  On the north side of the majestic Columbia River approximately 25 miles from the coast and 50 miles from Portland, Oregon as the crow flies.

From my Mom's house.  The house I lived in from age 18 to 21 and again since January 2013.  See earliest posts under the label Lifequake for explanation.

2) Which book in your stack are you most looking forward to?

For fiction: The Miracle Life of Edgar MInt by Brady Udall

For nonfiction: The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd


But mostly I'm looking forward to free range reading.  The most important part of my plan for this thon is to not have a plan.

3) Which snack are you most looking forward to?

Spicy Avocado Humus and Chili w/tortilla chips
And Chocolate. Anything chocolate.  Even if it has to be chocolate powder out of the can.
Not at the same time!

4) Tell us a little something about yourself!

I was raised in a cult that imploded over doctrinal disputes in the early 90s as I neared 40.  I then began to teach myself to think for myself.  The last few years there has been an internal struggle between the need to own my own thoughts by speaking them and the fear of doing so.  The fear has been winning.  First my blog posting fizzled out then all my other writing.  This is not sustainable.  Without my writing I am not I.  What's the use of knowing how to think for myself if my self won't own herself.  Several of the books on my stack today address these issues--fundamentalism, thinking, selfness, courage, activism, writing....

I'm legally blind from RP aka Tunnel Vision with less than 2 degrees of vision left.  I can no longer read even large print with my left eye.  I now prefer ebooks for the ability to enlarge fonts and control line width so I don't loose my way between end and beginning of lines.  I used to read nearly 1K words per minute but now read slower than I talk.  Very discouraging.

But in the last year I've started listening to audio books via my access to LOC Talking Books and BARD.  And also via text to speech.  And often I speed up the delivery to between 110-175%.  I discovered that I listen better when i listen faster--better focus, comprehension and retention.

I intend to use audio predominantly this thon as I am in the middle of a huge sort and organize project that I can only work on when Mom is away on weekends so, as I've been doing a lot lately I'm going to listen while I work.

I've had a mood disorder since childhood featuring depression, anxiety, panic and insomnia.  Several times professionals have considered the possibility of bi-polar but finally ruled it out definitively in late 2015 when they diagnosed me with High Functioning Autism aka Asperger's.  Over fifty years of feeling 'wrong' and not knowing why.  I've spent the months since reading nf about the autism spectrum and novels and memoirs featuring autistic individuals which has gone a long way toward helping me understand much that once confused and shamed me.  Since I have several of those books in progress I'll probably dip into them today.

5) If you participated in the last read-a-thon, what’s one thing you’ll do different today? If this is your first read-a-thon, what are you most looking forward to?

The most important difference after actually sleeping the night before is to go with the flow--less plan more fun.

Stay hydrated!
Get up and move once an hour.  You can read while you pace you know.
Blink.  Seriously.  Dry eyeballs can't see.  And the hands rubbing them can't hold books.

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