Novel Readings

This term is the first one since I began posting about ‘this week in my classes’ in 2007 that I haven’t posted at all about my classes. What’s up with that, you might wonder? Well, more likely you hadn’t noticed or wondered, but I’ve certainly been aware of it and pondering what, if anything, to do about it.

There is at least one very dull pragmatic reason why I haven’t been blogging very often, about anything: along with my chronic shoulder pain, which (despite my best efforts to address it through ergonomic adjustments and to improve it through physiotherapy) persists and is notably exacerbated by computer use, particularly lots of mousing, I have also developed lower back pain that is also clearly related to sitting at my desk. I am working on solutions for this, but in the meantime I have been trying to spend less time at my computer. That said, one of the odd features of my back pain is that it gets better when I’m very absorbed in something. To me, this suggests that posture and ergonomics are only part of the picture and that stress may be another part of it. Often, for me, it’s precisely blogging that has this distracting effect—mysteriously (ha!) it doesn’t work out that way when I’m grading online exams or wrangling Brightspace settings. So there are definitely other factors at play in my blogging slump.

It certainly isn’t anything to do with this term’s classes. At least from my perspective, both of them—Mystery & Detective Fiction and The Victorian ‘Woman Question’—have gone very well. Of course there have been the occasional sessions that dragged a bit, and we had an unusually high number of snow days that created a lot of logistical headaches, but in general discussion was both substantive and lively. I continue to try to wean myself from my lecture notes. This gets easier and easier in the mystery class, as I am pretty confident now both about how I want to frame the course and readings in terms of ‘big picture’ issues and about the specific readings. (I mix in new options quite regularly, because for various reasons I have been teaching the course basically every year for ages, so this definitely keeps it fresh and interesting for me: I just finished reading Dorothy B. Hughes’s The Expendable Man and I’m 90% certain I’m putting it on the reading list for next year, for one!) The ‘woman question’ class is a seminar, so I don’t lecture there anyway; I so looked forward to our class meetings all term, both because the readings are all favorites of mine and because we always had such good conversations about them. The only slight exception was with the excerpts from Aurora Leigh, from which I learned both that assigning excerpts is a bad idea (something I already believed but overrode, for practical reasons)—when it comes to long texts, do or do not, there is no try!—and that narrative poetry is hard, or at least it takes a different kind of preparation and attention than fiction, and that if I’m going to assign any of Aurora Leigh I need to take that into account.

Anyway, it’s true that these are courses I have taught and thus blogged about with some regularity, but that doesn’t usually stop me from reporting back and reflecting on how things are going. To the contrary, really, as I still believe what I said after my first year of blogging about my teaching, which is that

taking this extra step each week not only helped me identify the purpose, or, if writing retrospectively, the result of each class, but it made each week more interesting by giving me an opportunity to make connections or articulate puzzles or just express pleasure and appreciation in ways that went beyond what I had time for in class

I have become a better teacher because I kept this up: I learned so much from it, about myself, about teaching, and also about the subjects I teach, from writing to contemporary fiction.

So what’s my problem this term? I think it is rooted in my uncertainty about how to address some big changes that have taken place in my personal life. When I wrote up my year-end post for Novel Readings in December, I remarked that the last months of 2023 were particularly frantic, “about which more, perhaps, some other time,” I said then. Novel Readings has never been—or at least has never been intended as—a really confessional or intimate blog, though over the years I have certainly written about some personal things. The most personal it got was in the immediate aftermath of Owen’s death: I felt compelled, in ways I still can’t really understand, to write about it, maybe because finding words for what had happened and what I was feeling seemed essential to coping with it, to giving that experience a shape that I could live with. (I have since read a lot about the importance to trauma recovery of developing a “bearable narrative,” which seems on point, if not altogether sufficient to what I was and often still am seeking when I try to find words to express my grief.) I was always very conscious, though, that I didn’t have the right to speak for other people or to violate other people’s privacy, including Owen’s, in those posts. In a more general way, I would say that the value of Novel Readings to me, and also of all social media, lies in its authenticity: I don’t have to reveal everything about myself and my life, but what I do talk about should (I believe) honestly reflect who I am and what is going on with me, if only so that any interactions I have with other people are similarly authentic and thus meaningful. Yes, we all “curate” our social media presence—and a blog is essentially long-form social media, right?—but then, we do the same IRL, picking and choosing what we share, and the relationships that matter the most are the ones in which we are most fully ourselves.

In my current circumstances, this principle, if that’s what it is, runs up against the principle that I shouldn’t talk about other people’s business here: it feels wrong not to acknowledge that my life has changed significantly, but I have felt—rightly, I think—constrained from going into any detail that might cross the line, which has also meant I have felt constrained from talking about some of my recent reading as frankly and completely as I would have liked to, because I couldn’t address how something like, say, Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful resonates, or doesn’t, with my new circumstances—which, in a nutshell, are that my husband and I separated shortly before Christmas and I have since moved into my own apartment. The first part of this term, then, was a chaotic combination of “downsizing” (and what a euphemism that is for the hard physical and emotional labor of clearing out a house you’ve lived in for over 20 years!), packing, and moving, all while also, of course, carrying on with my classes and other work. Even setting aside the inhibitions I felt about breaking this news or integrating it into any reflections on my reading and teaching, no wonder I didn’t have much time or energy for ‘extras’ like blogging, right?

Obviously I have reached a point at which it seems fine and reasonable to say what has been going on, though I don’t expect I will ever consider Novel Readings an appropriate place to talk about how or why things have unfolded in this way, or even how I feel about it all! That’s nobody’s business but ours, by which I mean mine and my (truly excellent) therapist’s. 😉 Seriously, though, I do believe we bring our whole selves to our reading, so what I want to work on is how to acknowledge how my new reality sometimes does affect my engagement with books. I can say already that nothing about Diane Johnson’s Le Divorce, which I just read for my book club, seems relevant or resonant at all in that way (though I did enjoy it on its own terms)—though there were moments in The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith that definitely struck a chord.

Sorry if this seems like a long way around to nothing in particular. Writing is thinking, or so those of us for whom words really matter usually believe, and I guess I needed to figure some things out—while also (I hope) breaking the habit of not writing here as fully and frankly as I can. With the term now wrapping up, I am looking forward to turning my attention back to some larger projects I was making decent headway on last summer, before things went . . . the way they went! And I am planning to get back into the blogging habit, because I enjoy it and it is good for me in so many ways, including but not exclusively as a writer. A new chair, some exercise classes, and perhaps (sigh) more physiotherapy will hopefully resolve the physical obstacles, leaving only the psychological ones to be overcome. In the meantime, I still have exams and final essays coming in, so if Novel Readings stays a bit quiet for a while, that will be why.