I don’t normally talk about sports. I don’t know much about them and am generally confused when I watch them on television. The athlete will do a thing and the score will change, and I generally don’t know why unless it’s something really obvious. For example, I once walked into the living room while my Mom was watching a football game. The scoreboard said the teams were NE and SD, and I wondered why the Netherlands were playing South Dakota, and how South Dakota ended up playing internationally. I learned later that it was New England vs San Diego.

Derp.

So sportsball isn’t my thing.

Except….

The University of Nebraska’s Cornhuskers volleyball team won the National Championship last night!!!!  They beat Florida three sets to one, and proved wrong all the naysayers who said that they weren’t good enough. Because they obviously were.

Go Huskers!

Ahem…

No back to your regularly scheduled book blog, already in progress.

I finished two books this week! I really should know better than to attempt heavy or difficult books in December, because it never works. I need to pick lighter reads that take my mind off dealing with people and all the stress that goes along with the holidays. So the library had fortuitous timing when it automatically downloaded Jenny Colgan’s The Bookshop on the Corner to my phone. The waitlist was rather long and I had forgotten I’d requested it, so good timing, Public Library! It was exactly the sort of book I needed this week- light, full of quirky characters, and set in Scotland.

And I finally finished The Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavić. It’s a strangely story told in a non-linear fashion, with three viewpoints- Jewish, Christian, and Muslim- that come together to tell the full story. There were many things I missed, I’m sure, because I’m not particularly well-versed in Jewish, Islamic, or Eastern Orthodox lore. While it was a fascinating way to tell a story, I often had trouble following the storylines because they were so broken up. Perhaps it’s another one I should have waited to read in January.

My current read is Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own  by Kate Bolick, because who doesn’t want to read about oneself? Ha! But seriously, while I’m only about fifteen pages into it, this book promises to be an interesting exploration into the nature of ‘spinsterhood’ and what it means to be a single woman of a certain age. There’s a particular passage that sticks in my head when Bolick discusses how marriage rates have changed across the decades, reaching a high of 82% in the 1960s:

“To further thwart self-knowledge, there’s a theory that we as humans lack the imagination to ‘remember’ any further back than the generation or two that directly precedes us, limiting our historical memory to the eras of our parents and grandparents. This may be why the so-called ‘golden years’ of the 1950s and early 1960s loom so large in our contemporary consciousness, bullying many of us into believing that the institute of marriage was always thus, and will be evermore. We simply can’t see through that dense hedge of norms and expectations to the decades that came before.”

So even though I’m not far into it, I’m finding Spinster to be a fascinating read, especially this time of year when, despite the ‘everything’s so happy!’ vibe the commercials like to show, people are terribly stressed out and you can find a million articles advising single people on how to stay upbeat when everything seems geared toward families. Singletons like myself are often overlooked, and when we’re not, the popular opinion is, ‘how terribly lonely single people must be!’. Yes, many singletons are lonely. Especially this time of year. But many of are perfectly happy on our own, thankyouverymuch, and it’s good to see someone writing about single women as other than desperate seeking a relationship or crazy cat ladies.

 
Aside from last week’s Sum-Up, I haven’t done much here on this blog, aside from filling out an Unpopular Opinions Tag a couple of days ago. I have one more week of my crazy schedule wherein I have to go to the dentist for a general check-up and take my car back to the mechanic (on my only day off) to fix a lingering issue that they think they’ve finally pinned down, so this week is hardly going to be relaxing. Fortunately, I’ve already purchased and wrapped most of the gifts I’m giving, so there’s no stress on that end!