Category Archives: Reading

About The Happiness Equation

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I’ve already said this: I am a fan of Neil Pasricha. My admiration started with his podcast Three Books and then I realized I had heard of him before – I had even slipped a copy of The Book of Awesome in one of my son’s stockings one Christmas. I fangirled so much over Neil’s kind and endearingly nerdy interview style on his podcast that I left a voicemail of appreciation. Then one day in the car, as I was catching up on episodes, to my surprise I heard my voice coming from my radio. If you’d like to hear it, check out Episode 89 after Neil interviews Zafar the Hamburger Man (at time 50:17).

It would make sense that I would then want to read all the books that Neil has written. But while The Book of Awesome and its spawn are New York Times bestsellers, I prefer to stick to his more prescriptive books, starting with The Happiness Equation: Want Nothing + Do Anything = Have Everything.

The book is full of good advice which humorously ends with the caveat: Don’t Take Advice. This is #9 – you need to read the whole book to understand why – but basically, the book is filled with information that resonates and makes sense. Although it seems weird in a book whose very title suggests it will teach you what you need to be happy, the very first section tells you to Be Happy First.

Wait, what? Is it really that simple? Think it, do it?

Actually, the important part of that mini-sentence is the DO. In the first few pages of the book, Pasricha outlines 7 Ways To Be Happier RIGHT NOW as verified by the field of positive psychology. Here they are:

  1. Three Walks – We all know that exercise makes us feel better, if not while we’re doing it, then for the benefits after. Research backs that as little as three 30-minute walks a week will activate pleasant feelings – a.k.a. happy feelings.
  2. The 20-Minute-Replay – If you’re happy and you know it, write it down! Writing about a happy experience lets you relive that experience as you write it down and every time you re-read it.
  3. Random Acts of Kindness – Hold open a door. Shovel someone’s sidewalk. Pay for coffee for the next guy in line. Five kindnesses like these a week help you feel good about yourself and thus, happier.
  4. A Complete Unplug – Periodically – be it after supper, for a weekend or during a vacation – disengage completely from social media, the internet and incessant texting. In fact, Pasricha is a proponent of landlines – if people really want to reach you, they can call you at home. (No one every does.)
  5. Find your Flow. Engage in a personally challenging activity that makes you forget everything else.
  6. Meditate – FOR TWO MINUTES. 2-minute-meditations on a regular basis increase compassion and self-awareness and decrease stress. All for the cost of TWO MINUTES.
  7. Be grateful. Once a week, write out three to five things you’re grateful for. As Pasricha says, “If you can be happy with simple things, then it will be simple to be happy.”

Sounds good to me. And easy. But hard. Because in the end it’s up to us to DO these things – no one else can make you happy. It’s all part of the equation.

About Vocabulary

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Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

Bamboozled. Flabbergasted. Discombobulated. Shenanagins. Lollygag. Malarkey. Kerfuffle. Brouhaha. Nincompoop. Skedaddle. Pumpernickel.

About three months ago my eldest son sent me a meme titled “some of the best words literally ever”, with the suggestion that they might come in handy for my blog. He sent my thoughts cattywampus as I took on his challenge and elbowed them in one (and once two) at a time. I had seen all of them before and generally knew what they meant, except for today’s word: I mistook cattywampus for a noun. After all, it sounds like some kind of trouble a Dr. Suess character would get into.

Vocabulary, along with Spelling (or Gnilleps, the more challenging backwards version from the board game Cranium), are some of my favorite things. Is that nerdy? I ask myself (also answering myself by unconsciously nodding my head). Well, yes, in fact it’s SUPERnerdy. But I choose to emphasize the SUPER. I mean, we all want to have a superpower, right? So what’s wrong with wanting to know All The Words? Maybe it’s not as handy as invisibility or shooting spiderwebs out of your wrists, but it’s the one I want to work on. Because no superhero was born in a day.

As much as I have aspired at times to read the dictionary cover to cover, I have never got past “aardvark” because reading the dictionary is actually (spoiler alert) Pretty Boring. I mean, the first page is a whole column of the different meanings and uses for the letter “A”. Who knew? (Well, Mr. Merriam and Mr. Webster, for two.) As handy as a dictionary is, or its online counterpart, it doesn’t serve well as a textbook.

So how do we increase our wordpower? The old Reader’s Digest quiz had it partly right: read an unfamilar word in a sentence and take a guess. Because the answer to that question is another of my favorites: Read, Read, Read. While entertaining my 7-year old niece this week (or rather, she was entertaining me), she read aloud for a few chapters from one of the classic Dav Pilkey books about Dog Man – the same Dav Pilkey who purveys Captain Underpants. (Is that the right use of the word purvey? I’m not totally sure. I’m just gonna go with it.) In this seemingly innocuous book for those in the 6+ set, Navy sometimes consulted me, sometimes barreled ahead and correctly pronounced such words as: obnoxious, consequences, humiliation and – my favorite – dopamine responders.

It reminded me of how I used to read everything as a kid, how I have sometimes consulted, sometimes barreled ahead without looking up a weird word because the story was just too darn good. Eventually, if you read and encounter sisyphean or solipsistic, perspicacious or pugillistic enough times, you’ll actually figure out what they mean. Or you’ll look it up. Or you’ll pick up an easier book – like Dog Man – where the known to unknown ratio is a little more palatable. But still challenging – and a darn good story.

About Nerds

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Photo by Ying Ge on Unsplash

I’ve been thinking about it lately – kind of nerding out about it, really – that my obsession with reading and writing and words and this blog and books and ALL THAT can only be summed up as truly nerdy behavior. So, I admit it – I’m a nerd.

It’s not that bad of an association, really. After all, nerds seem to have unlocked a new level in this video game we call Life. All the usual opposites now apply: nerds are cool, nerds are the best people, nerds are what I want my children to grow up to be. (Hello? Remember: we homeschooled them. They now love to read, play D&D and wear flood pants. Mission complete.)

My first memory of the moniker “nerd” goes back to Happy Days, one of my favorite TV shows of the ’70s. Sure, Fonzie was The Coolest with his leather jacket and ability to snap a jukebox into obedience. But it was red-headed Richie I fell for, both onscreen and in real life. (It’s okay, Rick – deep down, you always knew you were a nerd.) Fonzie figured it out pretty quick, too: nerds make the best friends. They invite you into their families and are as loyal friends as golden retrievers.

And then in 1984, the gauntlet was REALLY thrown down with the movie Revenge of the Nerds. We all went to see it, like it was field research: where did we fit? Were we nerds or were we – what’s the opposite of nerd? – A cool kid? Popular? A jock? Good-looking?

The truth is that most of us fall somewhere in between. While it’s hard to “cross over” in that brouhaha we call high school – like Drew Barrymore’s character in another of my favorite Nerd-Wins-Big movies, Never Been Kissed – graduation lets you leave the crowd behind and find your real tribe: other people who are passionate about things like dressing up their dogs, making sourdough bread from scratch, playing video games (or watching other people play video games), collecting atlases or antiques or just cramming your head with knowledge about (fill in the blank).

As an adult, I myself have been obsessive (or still am) about reading (surprise!), geography (I’ve colored maps to help me memorize where countries are), scrapbooking (I will never be finished), ancient history, Biblical history, future history (Ha! I made that one up!), the cartoon Peanuts, the TV shows House Hunters International and Clean Sweep, art journaling, the Newbery list, the Caldecott list, my TBR list on my computer and many, many authors and podcasts of which I strive to be a completionist. I could probably go on. But then, so could you. AmIright?

All of this qualifies as Nerdy Behavior. One of the cool/nerdy things about the internet is that we no longer have to do our research on TV or at the movies anymore. The World Wide Web can help us make contact with actual people who are obsessive about the same things that we are. Or who are – at the very least -interested/fascinated/approving/admiring of the things that we shielded from the eyes of the cool kids and our older siblings.

One of the best side effects of suffering from Nerdism is that you learn not to care about what is “supposed” to be cool and just to follow your heart. Nerdity gives you the obstinacy to be the human God meant you to be in all your nerd glory. You can even nerd out about sports or fashion or cars – traditionally non-nerd subjects.

To nerd is human. So embrace it – your nerdiness is your gift to the world.

About the Bookshelf in the Basement

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Recently I’ve been thinking about the first library I frequented when I was a kid: namely the bookshelf in the basement of my childhood home. There were books elsewhere in the house but the basement bookshelf held an especially eclectic mix of picture books, assorted novels, discarded textbooks, first free books of several encyclopedia sets and Readers’ Digest Condensed Books. Oh, and some MAD Magazines and maybe some old Chatelaines.

For some strange obsessive reason I’ve tried to recreate the contents of that bookshelf in my head. I certainly read enough of its books over and over again, because “back then” when school closed for the summer, so did the library. If you were lucky (and apparently, healthy), you might be gifted a brand-new book at the end of the school year for perfect attendance, or, maybe for some more scholarly achievement. That’s how Little Women came into my possession. But that book went to live in my room with the others that I could legitimately call MINE.

The first denizen of the shelf I remember was a worn-out copy of The Cat in the Hat Comes Back. With an innate desire to be a completionist, it bothered me to no end that there was a Part One to that story “out there” that I would ultimately read out of order. I remember that the cover was ripped off that one and only Suess that we owned, so there was no flyleaf listing the other myriad books that the good Dr. had penned under Suess or Geisel or LeSeig. Those listings in the front of books or the mail-order forms at the end of paperbacks were the only Google I had to inform me back then of what I was missing.

When it came to the Nancy Drews or the Trixie Beldens, (I eschewed The Hardy Boys because: Hello? They were for boys!) the covers were intact along with numbered lists of all the books we didn’t own. Of the Nancies, I remember we had 1, 2, 8, 21, 22, 23, 32 and 43 and of the Trixies, only 1, 5, 9 & 13. Clearly, there were gaps in my chronology of both of these heroines that I fantasized about emulating. Unfortunately, for ten-to-twelve-year-old me, there were no murders or robberies or plots to kill me (that I knew of, even though, I was kind of nosey like Nancy-Trixie) that were readily available for me to solve. Instead I contented myself with reading about their smarts and their tenacity to get in and out of trouble AND save the cat/the day/the whole dang town. There were other incomplete collections on the shelves: those shunned Hardies, The Bobbsey Twins – who were actually two sets of sibling twins – Donna Parker and – for some anthropomorphic fun – a few Thornton W. Burgess books. For some reason, those last ones are the only ones I managed to keep. They live on a shelf in my basement.

I did try to revisit Nancy a year or two ago when the audiobook for The Secret of the Old Clock (Nancy Drew #1) read by Laura Linney appeared in the “now available” feed of my library app. Although Linney made it bearable, it was clear that the bloom was off the rose for me. The formulaic fiction reads like a soap-opera for kids, with the beginning of every chapter recapping what just happened one page ago. I was content to return to my adult crime solvers like Cormoran Strike, Robin Ellacott and, my new favorite, Armand Gamache.

I never did read all the books of any of those series. Once I discovered that the library had complete sets, I quickly tired of the repetitive antics of teenaged detectives. There were other great books on our shelf to read and re-read: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Also a series! Did you know?), Clarence the TV Dog (We did own the sequel to that!) and The House at Pooh Corner (also a number two book – I didn’t read Winnie-the-Pooh until I had kids of my own).

It’s nice to know that for some of these books, I CAN go back and read them and they hold up. And for others, like Miss Drew, I can be happy to just revisit her – and our old bookshelf – in my mind.

About Some Picture Books & Their Authors

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P Is for Pterodactyl: The Worst Alphabet Book Ever by [Raj Haldar, Chris Carpenter, Maria Beddia]

I’m a huge fan of picture books, but I especially love picture books that aren’t necessarily aimed at their usual audience. Or, at the very least, clever books that have plenty of Easter eggs for the older person reading to their teeny tiny audience.

P is for Pterodactyl is the kind of book that a burgeoning reader might throw across the room. But it also might be just the thing for an ESL teacher to read to a graduating class – just to show them that the English language is weird and mean, even to us native speakers. It’s full of all the nonsensical words whose first letter doesn’t make a sound. (Whose idea was that, anyway? And how did it get such traction?)

One of the co-authors of P is for Pterodactyl is Raj Haldar, whose other occupation is: Rapper. a.k.a. Lushlife. Which makes sense, since songwriters are such purveyors of words.

A lot of picture books get written by famous people who aren’t known to be authors, per se. Your Baby’s First Word Will Be Dada (Jimmy Fallon), Outlaw Pete (Bruce Springsteen) and my favorite, which is sort of an anti-picture book, The Book With No Pictures (B. J. Novak) are all celebrity offerings. But it’s not like these people don’t regularly traffic in the currency of words in their primary professions: songwriters and actors and talk show hosts write stuff all the time.

The latest celebrity/picture book writer to hit my radar? The Edmonton Oiler’s new forward, Zach Hyman, who has penned three picture books now. (And only one of them about hockey.)

Zach Hyman’s latest book.

My favorite part? When I Google him, he shows up as a Canadian author, not a Canadian hockey player. I guess it depends on who’s writing the Wikipedia tags – there is after all, a lot of power in the written (another silent letter!) word.

About 3 Books

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Lately, all my conversations are interspersed with me saying: “On that great new podcast I discovered, I just listened to an interview with (fill in the blank with the name of a person who just discussed the very thing we are talking about.)” Or not. As a friend of ours says when she wants to change the topic at hand: “Speaking of something completely unrelated…”

You see, I get a lot of input from the outside world via podcasts these days. And not necessarily new ones either. I know some people who shake their head sadly at me when I demonstrate complete ignorance at what is going on in the world on a daily basis. But if I fall in love with a podcast, I will happily go back two, three, four years into the catalog and “catch up”.

I was thinking about my podcast history recently – basically trying to remember when I started downloading and binging. It was definitely over ten years ago when my sister-in-law and I discovered an iTunes show about – wait for it – scrapbooking. But I always listened to the shows on my computer and it was painful waiting week to week for the new episode, because there was “nothing to listen to” in between. It wasn’t until I got an iPhone that I figured out how to listen to more “iPod broadcasts” – hence podcasts – on the go and that’s when I discovered This American Life. And then the whole syncing with the car radio thing happened and voila! Here we are in 2021 with the serious problem of hundreds of podcasts and thousands of episodes to choose from. And I’m sure I’m being conservative.

That tidbit about where podcasts got their name? I just heard it on this great new podcast I discovered. It’s funny, because I’m actually kind resistant to adding new podcasts to my repertoire because I have my favorites and keeping up with all those episodes can be hard enough. Chances are you’ve heard of Neil Pasricha before – he started a blog counting down 1000 Awesome Things which then was turned into The Book of Awesome. And all that was to counteract some bad juju that happened in his life. I was intrigued by this approach which I first heard about when he was interviewed on another one of my favorite podcasts What Should I Read Next? which is “dedicated to the answer that plagues every reader” what they should read next. Which I was ALSO resistant to listening to until she was endorsed on yet ANOTHER one of my favorite podcasts – basically it’s the Faberge Organics Shampoo commercial for how I got here: “…and you tell two friends and they tell two friends and so on and so on and so on…”

What’s great about 3 Books with Neil Pasricha is 1. It’s about books. (Hello?) 2. He has really AWESOME guests (see what I did there?) and 3. He’s Canadian – which is just always a cool thing to be. The whole schtick that Neil promotes is to interview his guests about their three most formative books – in a somewhat personal quest for him to read the 1000 best books on the planet before his thousand months is up – the average lifespan for us humans. He touts it as “the world’s only podcast by and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers… and librarians.”

I think what I like so much about this particular show is the conversations (not interviews). Neil flies in to wherever each guest is located (Key West to talk to Judy Blume, San Diego for Frank Warren, New York to meet up with Mitch Albom) and they have a real sit-down-and-chat with the actual three books in their hands. Listening to Angie Thomas talk about reading Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Tupac Shakur’s The Rose That Grew From Concrete demonstrates a pretty straight through-line to her novel The Hate You Give. And I love sitting in on conversations and getting writing advice from the likes of Dave Barry and Tim Urban. Awesome.

Occasionally, one of those great guests has a great podcast, too. Sigh. I still have a couple years worth of 3 Books to go. I know I don’t have to listen to ALL the pods or read ALL the books. But I can just enjoy one conversation at time about 3 Great Books.

About One Crazy Summer

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My love for children’s books began – wait for it – when I was a child myself. Of course, when I learned to read I reached for those books that I could easily enjoy at first and then I slowly climbed the ladder to “harder” books. But I never left the love of those “softer” books behind. After all, my basic criteria for what I want to read is a good story, one where I can maybe learn something about the human story, about history (or “her-story”) and about ways to use the language. And there are many picture, middle grade (MG) and young adult (YA) that fit that bill.

When I first read the book The Happiness Project, I felt vindicated in my unabashed love of children’s literature when Gretchen Rubin expressed her habit of returning again and again to the books of her childhood to re-read – for comfort, for enjoyment and to learn something new each time about the book, the writing or herself. She even started not one, but two book clubs, centered on reading such books because she discovered that, once confessed, she was not alone in in her quirky affection and therefore needed two groups to hold all those as secretly passionate as her.

During our homeschooling season, we once went to a conference where an educator discussed the merits of using children’s books, not just for children, but for adults, too, as launching pads into a new subject. If you want to learn about how airplanes work – because I sincerely don’t understand such magic, do you? – you should go to the library and find a children’s book about it. And maybe, that might be all you need. Oh sure, I could ask Wikipedia or the Google, but it often doesn’t engage me the same way. I can still picture the illustrations of Wilbur and Orville Wright from the Children’s Encyclopedia that I read from our basement library as a kid (Volume A: because that was the free incentive to buy the set). And while I may not remember the mechanics of flight, I know that the Orville Bros. of Kitty Hawk did and they were persistent enough to make it happen.

I didn’t pick up One Crazy Summer because I wanted to know more about the summer of 1968 in Oakland, California or about the Black Panthers or because it was a “black book”. I picked it because it was on the Newbery Medal and Honor List, which is awarded to exceptional MG and YA books and, again and again, I have learned that the Newbery Committee (usually) knows what they are doing. That being said, after visiting the King Center in Atlanta in the fall of 2016, I found my knowledge sorely lacking for what went on in the sixties with the Black Panthers and the other side of the coin, Martin Luther King Jr.’s non-violent protests.

Without context, we often assign judgement to acts of violence or protest. One Crazy Summer gives that context, with its story of the three Gaither sisters who travel from Brooklyn to Oakland one (crazy) summer to live with the mother who abandoned them when Delphine, the oldest, was five. Told in her voice, Delphine is a classic oldest child, a protective rule-keeper, a paradigm that Cecile, their mother does not fall into. Arriving in Oakland, it is not the happy reunion that the girls maybe hoped for, with Delphine resigning: “I was happy to be there and that had to be good enough.” In the way of their mother’s working routine, the girls are sent to a day camp run by the Black Panthers where they learn about Malcolm X and color protest posters that demanded “FREE HUEY”.

Over the course of the (crazy) summer and the course of the book, Delphine, Vonetta and Fern do learn more about their mother, a poet, and what she stands for, in the author’s masterful “show-don’t-tell” way. At the end of the summer, Delphine has a completely new paradigm in which to view her mother and a promise of a relationship going forward – which you can visit in the sequels P. S. Be Eleven and Gone Crazy in Alabama.

About Poetry

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I’m not a poet.

Believe me, I know it.

I won’t even read it

Very much.

Exactly how did Shakespeare manage to write all those rhyming couplets? Or Emily Dickinson or Shel Silverstein or Dr. Suess? My one-minute feeble attempt at poetry is really about as good as it gets for me when it comes to busting rhymes. My admiration for those seasoned (and patient) poets goes up that much more.

Professional admiration is one thing. Reading and enjoying poetry is something completely different. Everyone knows that poetry is good for you like doing yoga or eating vegetables or wearing a toque in winter. But barely any slim volumes of poetry grace my bookshelf and none find their way to my bedside table to compete with my usual fiction picks. And yet, once in awhile, some random poetical lines will stop me short when I meet with them out in the wild like one of Mary Oliver’s geese.

During my first year university, I flipped open my Norton Anthology of English Literature and encountered the familiar “poem” Big Yellow Taxi by “author” Joni Mitchell. Ummm, hello? Mr. Norton? That’s a song. But noooo, I learned in class, actually, those are lyrics, which is a form of poetry. Adding music is what makes it a song. But the music in my head made the poem that much more palatable and understandable for me, adding that extra sensory experience. And poetry is supposed to be all about the senses, right?

I was reminded of this the other night while we were watching TV with the closed captioning on. The lyrics of an ambient song came up and I was struck at how much music plays a part in my being able to engage with the poetry. Suddenly, I felt deeply what the lyricist meant when The Faces sang, “I wish that I knew what I know now…” because I could hear it in the singer’s voice: there are some things you just can’t really understand until you’re older.

I’ve also discovered that I can enjoy entire novels in verse. When my online book club choice for the month was Elizabeth Acevedo’s YA novel The Poet X, I had my usual apprehension about reading poetry. My library solved that problem for me when only the audiobook version was available. Read by the author – without my botched Spanish pronunciations of her lovely dialectical additions – it was an immersive experience that would have lost something if told in prose.

Years ago at a writers’ conference I had a similar experience. At the closing banquet, I turned up my nose when I read that part of the entertainment would be someone performing Cowboy Poetry. How quickly I was schooled by the masterful recitation by an old gentleman cowboy telling his story by heart, in verse, with the mesmerizing lilt of an ambling horse. If I had read it for myself, I would not have done it justice.

In her book The Cloister Walk, poet-author Kathleen Norris advises against dissecting a poem in order to try and understand it, as if the parts are more important than the whole or “as if the purpose of poetry is to provide boring exercises for English class”: simile, metaphor, image. Maybe I need someone to read or sing poetry to me. My husband actually does a pretty good job of this when he gets into one of his let-me-read-you-all-the-lyrics-to-this-song-and-tell-you-exactly-what-it-means moods.

The whole act of writing is communal, after all. Unless it’s a diary (and even then sometimes), the transaction is only complete when someone reads it. It becomes that much more complex when someone reads it to you or an artist performs it, especially in person. I look forward to engaging once more in such communion of concerts and theatre, recitals and school concerts, hymns and choruses when this dang pandemic is finally over.

About A Strong Sense of Place

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In Japan, there are more than 300 versions of the Kit Kat bar…including a soy sauce version, a European cheese version and a wasabi version.

There is an 60-room hotel in Sweden that is built every year just 200 kilometers away from the Arctic Circle and, despite being made of frozen water, is required to have fire alarms.

When it comes to cities housing billionaires, Moscow is second only to New York City.

These statements all seem like something fun and obscure you would read in a quirky travel brochure or on a website devoted to interesting trivia about international destinations. And though they sound hyperbolic, they are all true.

Of course, it would be lovely to go investigate these things for myself – maybe some Russian billionaire could front me the $400 per night for a room in the ice hotel (plus the fare for a twelve hour train ride to get there from Stockholm) where I could eat some imported wasabi Kit Kat bars. Except, generous Russian billionaire friend or not, we are still not going anywhere anytime soon. Because: Covid.

Well, then gosh darn it, thank goodness for books. And podcasts. And the Interweb. And armchair travelers like Mel Joulwan and Dave Humphries who have made it their business to read books that boast a Strong Sense of Place and then talk about them on their aptly-named podcast. Although they transplanted themselves from mainland U.S.A. to Prague in the Czech Republic a few years ago with the aim of wandering more, they too are experiencing a travel hiatus. But that hasn’t stopped them from exploring the world through books.

They talk about travel books? Sounds boring, you say.

Oh, trust me – Mel and Dave aren’t a couple of stuffy professor-types discussing only books they found in the Travel Book Co. of Notting Hill – although if the shoe fit, they would. These podcasters are fun and funny and happy to regale their audience about fiction and nonfiction, new books and old, about books written for adults or for children – there are no holds barred. The determining factor is that the book has to have a Strong Sense of Place.

When I was homeschooling my boys a few eons ago, my favorite teaching tool that I hit upon over and over was the idea of unit studies, where everything we learned about revolved around a theme. Indeed, in Mortimer J. Adler’s classic How to Read a Book, he calls this the highest level of reading: syntopical – the reading of multiple books on the same subject. Maybe our reading of multiple picture books and chapter books about dinosaurs or pioneers or famous artists wasn’t exactly the highest level, but it sure did the trick of painting a fuller picture.

Oh! And pictures! This podcast has an affiliated website just bursting with the best photography – all curated for your easy exploring pleasure. Sometimes, because Mel is a Cooker, the photos are of beautiful food that she gives her tried and true recipes for. (She started out with another website Well Fed and some cookbooks of the same name and she never makes you read an 10-page essay before she gives you the recipe.) Dave is a artist who’s website design skills I covet. And – they have a cat named Smudge.

One of my very favorite things I have ever read about reading, I found on their website. Sometimes, even I think: I read too much and I ask myself: What good does it do anyway, this insatiable desire I have to read, read, read? Dave and Mel’s answer: Empathy.

Copyright: Strong Sense of Place

Well, okay then. And now, back to my pile of books.

About Alex Trebek

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It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

What is 2020, Alex?

Although living through a global pandemic that appears to be ramping up right now is decidedly NOT FUN, there are always silver linings to be found as we huddle, zoom and binge. Losing Alex Trebek, however, is not one of them. The beloved host of the popular game show Jeopardy lost his battle with pancreatic cancer last Sunday, November 8. It was the year 2020. In case you weren’t listening.

In the face of this great trial, Trebek was still such an optimist. When he announced on the show in March of last year that he had been diagnosed with Stage IV pancreatic cancer, he allied himself with the common man, saying he was just one of the 50,000 other people in the United States who were told the same news that year. And he said he would fight it.

So when Alex kept showing up for his hosting duties as if nothing was out of the ordinary, it really seemed like he was not only fighting, but beating it. He looked a little older when I tuned in to the new season of Jeopardy this fall, with contestants spaced out and separated by plexiglass shields. That didn’t stop him from chatting them up as usual, encouraging them to win big and teasing them mercilessly.

It was all in good fun, of course. Calling a contestant a “loser” when they described a dorky hobby or roasting them because they missed a clue that was right in their wheelhouse was part of the charm of Alex Trebek. If Alex corrected your pronunciation, you believed him. If he called someone a nerd, it was just him saluting one of his own.

If watching Jeopardy made you a nerd, well, so be it. My kids learned early that when Jeopardy was on, I might ignore them: I couldn’t risk missing the satisfaction of calling out the questions to the clues that I knew, which some days were not very many. Jeopardy was a trivia show, after all, and most trivia is, well, trivial. Nevertheless, if I could show off a little of my knowledge of biology or books that I had never read, of obscure definitions or even some math, it made me a little happy inside.

My son, Tim, is the one who asks me when I’m going to try out for Jeopardy and one of my first reactions when I heard the news was that now I never would get to meet Alex Trebek, at least not in this lifetime. But as much as I liked playing at home, I don’t think I would like the pressure of playing for real, of getting frustrated with my clicker not working when I KNOW the answer, and of ringing in too many “educated” guesses. One of my favorite stunt authors, A. J. Jacobs went on as a contestant after he spent a year reading the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica. And he bombed. Just sayin’ – I don’t think it’s that easy to not-bomb.

If Alex had been a contestant on his own show, I think he might have given Ken Jennings a run for most-winningest player. I remember an interview he did years ago where he was asked what he was going to do when he retired and he replied that he hoped to re-read all his favorite books. I resonated with that. I hope he had time to do some of that, but it was so obvious that he was a people person, that I suspect he spent a lot more time with the living than the dead while he could. When he got to where he was going, he could look forward to a Babette’s feast with his favorite famous people.

And maybe with some people that were not so famous. My sister texted me on Sunday that our mom would be happy to see him. What made losing Alex that much more poignant for us was that our mom fought the same kind of cancer – and we knew what a rough go that was. And also: she loved Jeopardy and she loved Alex. She maybe didn’t know that much about Greek mythology or African geography, but she knew a nice man when she saw one. I’m sure that she recognized him when he got there.