It's been ten years (!) since we graduated from college and got married and I have kept a fairly detailed book journal all ten years. I am in full nostalgia mode and recently looked back to see what I was reading during our first year of marriage. My past self was adorable really – so earnest and serious. The subsequent years and being married to Telfer have given me a better sense of humor and a lightened outlook but I so enjoyed reading about our first year of marriage intertwined with the books I was reading. 

We packed a lot in during that first year. We graduated from college and three weeks later we got married. We honeymooned in Seattle and the San Juans. We lived with our parents for about a month. We drove the U-Haul to Southern California listening to our first audiobook, From the Corner of His Eye by Dean Koonz (so awesome, thank you Chris, we still talk about Junior Cain every once in awhile). Our new apartment, rented sight unseen, was on a semi-scary street with a giant cactus and had red carpet. We loved it. It was so hot and we were too poor to turn on the air conditioning. Telfer didn't start medical school for a month and I didn't have a job yet so we sat around reading. Reading is so cheap compared to almost everything else.

I got a truly horrific job as a secretary at the Pool & Spa Outlet in Loma Linda. This says it all: the boss was having an affair with a twenty-year-old girl in the office and from what I hear, a few years ago ordered a Russian bride! NNU didn't quite prepare me for that! Good stuff. I read every spare moment to distract me from the knowledge that oh, this is my post-college life! Welcome! I quickly decided to go to graduate school and become a librarian. I quit my job and started graduate school in January. Telfer was eerily good at medical school. He would always want to watch a movie the night I had a twenty-page paper to write. We read and studied together in our apartment and "donated" plasma on Friday afternoons so we would have $40 in play money for the weekend. We went to the library a lot. One Saturday every month the library in Redlands had a book sale where you could fill a paper bag full of books for $3.00. Such good memories, all of it.

So the books (finally, right?):

Middlemarch | George Eliot | After four years of reading what I was told, it was so liberating to read whatever I wanted. I have great memories of reading Middlemarch in the first month or so we were married. On our honeymoon, sweating in our apartment. Dorothea Brooke is a heroine I really want to revisit.

A Wrinkle in Time | Madeline L'Engle | I hated this book when I had to read it in sixth grade but I reread A Wrinkle in Time at the Griffith lake house before we moved to California. My sophisticated, college-gradaute self couldn't believe her sixth grade version. Now I just smile. Different books for different seasons, right?

The Virginia Woolf Reader | I bought and read this on our HONEYMOON. Nice, light reading, eh? 

To the Lighthouse | Virginia Woolf | I love this perfect novel.

A Prayer for Owen Meany | John Irving | A guy named Marcus in my senior english seminar said this was his favorite book. So I put it on my list and scored the book in a $3.00 library bag. I think you either hate or love John Irving. Well, some of his novels are really terrible but A Prayer for Owen Meany is a beautiful thing.

Personal History | Katharine Graham | You don't read books like this in college and I am not sure why I picked it up. I had never read an autobiography like this before (the junior biographies of Narcissa Whitman don't count – I was obsessed with the Whitman massacre as a child) – an educated woman in a horrific marriage who finally takes over the family business (The Washington Post). 

The Poisonwood Bible | Barbara Kingsolver | This novel blew my mind when I read it. It would be interesting to read it again. Nathan Price, his wife and four daughters go to Africa as missionaries in the 1950s. It does not go well. The writing is sublime.

A Christmas Carol | Charles Dickens | I had never read A Christmas Carol until the first Christmas we were married. Now Christmas is not Christmas unless I have read it.

Cultural Crusaders: Women Librarians in the American West, 1900-1917 | Joanna Passet | Library school was, how shall I say it? Something I was blessed to be able to do but not exactly the most rigorous experience of my life. Lots of people complaining about writing papers. So exhausting. Just write them already! This was the best book I read in two years of library school and I think the only one I kept.

Persuasion | Jane Austen | I had read Sense & Sensibility and Pride & Prejudice in college and of course loved them but when I read Peruasion, during the first Fall we were married, I knew I had found my favorite Austen. Sigh. I wanted to name one of our girls Elliott Anne. Don't worry, we will not have a third child. Can you even imagine what a third pregnancy would unleash? But you know it would be a girl if we did.

I had such a run of lackluster books there for a few weeks! I am so glad the last four weeks have been better. Perhaps I just have an expansiveness of spirit due to the fact that I am getting more sleep (thank you JANE). 

Week 20/52: A Degree of Mastery: A Journey Through Book Arts Apprenticeship by Annie Tremmel Wilcox. 

I think most of you will think this hopelessly boring but I found Wilcox's long descriptions of working to restore damaged old books so relaxing and soothing. I would be a terrible archivist or bookbinder. I can't cut a straight line or sew on a button but I loved reading about the arcane details of the restoration process. I think it comes from the same place of my love of doing laundry. Through a task-oriented process, dirty clothes become clean clothes and old, damaged books become usable and lovely again. 

 
Week 21/52: Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Reading Uncle Tom's Cabin made me nostalgic for life as an English major. This novel cries out to be read in a classroom setting. So many layers. The obvious historical significance. Do you really think Lincoln told Stowe, "You are the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war." I think it's apocryphal. The novel as propaganda. Can't you imagine writing a term paper on that? The sentimentality but obvious effectiveness of the story. I cried! I was in the book's complete grip although the racial stereotypes perpetuated made me cringe. Obviously, Uncle Tom's Cabin is not a great work of art but it's an important novel nonetheless. Did anyone actually read this in high school or college?  

 
Week 22/52: An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir by Lillian Hellman

I have had this book since my freshman year of college (a gift from one of my sisters). I finally read it; mostly on our night away in Seattle for our ten-year anniversary. Hellman was a playwright working mostly in the 1940s and 1950s. She had a twenty-year relationship with Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon) but the two never married. Interesting memoir, interesting woman. I love reading about women who are not easy, who never do the expected. I am so glad they are out there.

Week 23/52: The Night Tourist by Katherine Marsh

I carted this book all the way to NYC and then never read it. But I loved it! Jack discovers the New York Underworld during a visit to Grand Central Station and finds himself mired in a ghostly in-between world. Good characters, good writing. 

This is one of my favorite pictures of Cate at almost six months – it's framed in our living room and I look at it all the time.

Jane is wearing the same outfit at almost nine months. I am thinking my girls look quite a bit alike, yes?

Beautiful weather + a few big events = little blogging. More tomorrow but my girls are pretty sweet these days. 

Jane. Jane is a champion slobberer (look for the rivulets of spit in the photographs) and seems to love swinging as much as Cate did at this age. She is also sleeping so much better due to medication that aids her digestive system. She feels better and I finally feel like a normal human being. Jane is sitting up so much better than a couple weeks ago. She still loves Cate a lot. Nine months is one of my favorite baby times. So cuddly, still a baby, but you can glimpse bits of personality and temperament.

Cate. Cate makes us laugh five hundred times a day. I must say though, she is most definitely 2.5. Her highs are high and her lows are low. She is delightful and frustrating and sweet and fun. I really wanted to take her picture tonight and literally the only way I could get a good shot was having her run toward me. She did it again and again, happy as long as she was running. Can you tell how much fun she is? How much she enjoys life? 

Seriously, if I had one regret in life it would be that I did not work at the Dairy Queen in high school. I really wish that I knew how to make a perfect soft-serve cone and a perfect no-drip blizzard. If that's my one regret…

It's been beautiful the last few days in Olympia so I promised Cate yesterday that we would go to ice cream after nap. Telfer was quite concerned over the whole cone issue. At first he wanted to get a cone and share it with Cate (picture Telfer carefully spooning out little bites). Then he wanted to get her a cone and invert the ice cream end into a bowl. We almost had words at the counter. I wanted to get Cate her own DQ cone. Side note: I love that there is now a mini-blizzard! The perfect size!

I obviously won and she did a great job. Ate the entire thing in like two minutes and wanted more: