What I Read in April 2022
Well, I hit a record in April, reading 20 books over the course of the month! It was definitely an unprecedented month - I didn't go back to work until the end of the month, and I had to isolate at home for several weeks for my IVF procedure, so there was a lot of bored time where I buried myself in books. I don't anticipate to be able to hit this volume in any future months, but it was a good way to catch up / get ahead on my 100 book goal for the year. 4 stars: With Love from Wish & Co., by Minnie Darke: This reminded me a lot of a Liane Moriarty novel, with all the interesting family dynamics, and I really enjoyed it! Marnie owns a small boutique, and her specialty is not just curating interesting items, but providing personal gift buying services for her clients. One of her clients has her regularly buy gifts for both his wife AND his mistress... and one disastrous day, Marnie mixes up the gifts, blowing up her client's marriage. In spite of that excitement, I found the book started a bit slow, but a midway through, it picked up and became hard to put down. (I actually had the same feedback about Darke's last book, "The Lost Love Song"... perhaps she could benefit … [Continue reading]
Stuck in a Liminal Space
I'm now more than a month post-egg retrieval, but the truth is that I've spent several months feeling like I'm in a "liminal space", just sitting and waiting for things to happen. It's not my usual MO - I'm someone who likes to be busy, busy, busy, and it's taken a lot of urging from my therapist to remind me that refusing to slow down is what burned me out in the first place. But while my new "get comfortable with not achieving things" philosophy worked well for me in January (and maybe even part of February), by March, I was itching to get back to normal. Unfortunately, March is when I started taking hormones in preparation to freeze my eggs - and that's when things went really haywire. At first, it was minor discomfort - some rapid weight gain that made me feel kind of gross, but that I knew would go away once the process was all over. I mentioned to my nurse that I was a little surprised by how poorly I was tolerating the "priming" meds they put me on before the real "stimulation" meds to grow my eggs, and I asked if that meant I was going to have an extra hard time with stims - but she said no, they expected me to be just fine. In retrospect, I think that was the start of … [Continue reading]
Planning for More Time Doing Nothing
I recently read and loved this article by Nir Eyal on how Planning Ahead Is the Key to Living With More Spontaneity. The title is intriguingly contradictory, but it's something I've known about myself for a while: if I can strictly plan everything I have to do (with the help of a to-do list or calendar), I can comfortably waste some time, even if everything else isn't done yet. Timeboxing makes it a lot easier for me to enjoy the time I'm wasting, rather than worrying about "goofing off" and doing something unproductive, and it's part of why I love jotting down schedules of when I'll get to which chores, even if I don't need to be accountable to anyone but myself. I'll admit, my therapist probably wouldn't like that I'm still concerned with wasting time. One of her assigned goals for my leave from work was to get more comfortable not having a plan, and to get more comfortable doing nothing. ("What you call frittering away your time is actually building a different muscle.") Anytime I do something I think of as wasting time, like scrolling social media or watching TV, I feel horribly guilty afterward, and end up judging myself for not doing something productive. I end up not even … [Continue reading]
What I Read in March 2022
In March, I finally got back on track with my reading, and read 10 books. I've really enjoyed carving out more time for reading, and I was happy that I included a few nonfiction books instead of all light escapist novels (even though I still love those). Looking forward to keeping up with these posts more regularly going forward! 5 stars: The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward, by Daniel H. Pink: In researching this book, Daniel Pink conducted the "World Regret Survey", capturing more than 16,000 regrets from people of all nationalities; using that data, he categorizes the different types of regrets and explains how you can minimize your regrets and/or use them for good. I found this book really interesting and easy to read, and loved the positive message that regrets can be a good thing and it's better not to have "no regrets". Although I see how people might feel the book was repetitive, I thought Pink did a good job of using new examples to drive home the key points so they really stick, so I didn't feel like it was too long. At the end of the book, I love how Pink provides guidance on avoiding logical fallacies that shape your decisionmaking and … [Continue reading]
