Book Review of Emily Fox Gordon's Book of Days

I published my first short book review for a newspaper. I think it came out to under 600 words or about 2 1/2 mss pages. I actually filed a review that was over 1000 words (and I remember telling my students that I didn't think I could make it any shorter), but my editor was right about the changes and cuts. I tried hard in this review not to write about myself.

I'm fascinated that the review available online has stats--how many people tweeted it and liked it on Facebook. How did the link know this?

Nephew with his great aunt drinking a lemonade at the bar. 

My 4 yr old nephew went back to California. I called him and we reminisced about our times together, the books he'd borrowed from the library when he was visiting. I was missing him so I told him that he was always in my heart. He was silent so I asked, "Do you like that you're always in my heart?" And he said, "Yes." And he was still silent so I asked, "Do you understand what that means?" And he said, "Yes." He seemed like he really understood what I meant by that even though it's pretty abstract. I told his mother, my sister, this and she said, "I'm his mother and I don't even know what that means."

My Renaissance lit scholar friend told me once that in earlier times, love was not associated with the heart. I think love was embodied in the gallbladder.

This same friend asked what happened to my blog, why I wasn't updating regularly anymore. I was feeling self-conscious and unsure about why I was blogging and who I imagined I was writing to. I was feeling wary, especially after reading articles like this, The Web Means the End of Forgetting, about my online presence. Many years ago, I'd started this thing to get over my reluctance to share my writing and wanted to experiment with what it was like to have an actual audience instead of the imagined one in my head. But as my goals have changed over time so has being online. It's no big thing to have status updates and twitter feeds.

By the way, did you catch that story of the man who drove over a cliff while tweeting about his dog? That image comes to me and I'm still figuring out what I think of it. There's something about his tragic story--losing his life as a direct result of activities in his online life--that I keep thinking about. It's not a perfect comparison, but I wonder how much of my life that I lose by staring into a screen. I can't wait in a line for one minute without checking email and others around me are doing the same.

Tonight my mother, father, and I all sat in different rooms doing something on our computers. We could hear each other typing and clicking and breathing. Then my father sat down on the couch and ate two pieces of melon while I answered his questions about my farm share while also reading something, which I haven't retained, online.