Welcome to Litsy!

Did I learn more about hammers, saws, shims, & — weirdly — pig‘s genitals than I ever wanted to know? Yes. Am I still unable to identify a Phillips-Head Screwdriver? Also, yes. But I‘m glad I read this wonderfully-written memoir about a woman‘s professional, emotional, & intellectual journey from journalist to carpenter. Her yearning for transformation, self-knowledge, & tangible reality all shines through.👇🏻

“Now and then, the bullshit gets stripped away, and the accumulated anger and hurt and confusion give way for a glimpse at a different truth. And what I saw was that [my Dad] was trying his best like all of us, eager and excited to share his enthusiasms about birds and fish and books, keeping the feeders stocked with sunflower seeds, fumbling like all of us to bring himself and his distracted love into focus.”

“There is a dullness in all forms of work, a “violence — to the spirit as well as to the body,” as Studs Terkel put it in Working. There are repeated tasks and empty time and moments you wish you were swimming. These are unavoidable, even in jobs we love and feel proud to have; these are natural, even if you‘ve found your calling.”

“In Ovid‘s Metamorphoses, the gods are the reigning agents of change, and repeatedly “give and take away the form of things.” People are transformed into owls, bears, horses, newts, stones, birds, and trees. Without the gods to guide us, to cast their spells of transformation, how do we become something other than we were?”

1. Tagged book is part memoir, part carpentry handbook, and part love letter to the city of Boston. It‘s especially a good read if you‘re thinking of changing careers.
2. Mystery! Though she has some clunky moments, for me right now it‘s Louise Penny.
3. Thomas Friedman, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Rachel Held Evans (RIP 😢)
#wondrouswednesday

Loved this short memoir about a woman who quits her day job to apprentice as a carpenter. Loved its nods to Boston neighborhoods and housing.

Choosing my next read. Which would you pick?

I‘m *sort of* reading the top one...& sort of not. I took a break to read a quick YA book & now I‘m not 100% sure I‘m in the mood for such intellectual, snappy metafiction.

Fun pick on #read99women today from AN UNKINDNESS OF MAGICIANS author Kat Howard: the carpentry memoir you didn't know you needed. Love it! http://www.greermacallister.com/blog/2020/3/7/read99women-kat-howard

These are unavoidable, even in jobs we love and feel proud to have; these are natural, even if you‘ve found your calling. It‘s when those meaningless moments pile and mount, the meaningless moments that chew at your soul, that creep into the crevices of your brain and holler at you until ignoring them is not an option. Deadening moments that lead to the hard questions, the ones that swirl, in the broadest sense, around time and dying.

As Virginia Woolf wrote, “It is fatal to be a man or a woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.” This feels deeply true to me, an abiding desire to have both sexes mingled in one body and one mind, a mental fertility.

The poet Jon Cotner pointed me to a Korean proverb “Knows the way, stops seeing.” It‘s not an argument for getting oneself lost, but a nudge to stay awake, stay focused, alert even when time and experience have dulled us.

At book club last night we all gushed about this slim, poetic memoir and we ran out of time before we had finished talking about the issues raised, such as:
-Work satisfaction
-Knowing when to quit
-Trust
-Clothes & self image
-Gender bias in the trades
-How we learn & the joy of learning
-Comparing our own responses to wooden things vs high tech materials
It‘s also a book brimming with gratitude & fun facts.

(Author photo by Beowulf Sheehan)

I hung the clamps on the pegboard wall, let them dangle with the rest of the tools. The word comes from the ancient German word klam, which meant to press or squeeze, and the tight-closed shells of the bivalve, like hard lips locked in silence, got its name from there.

Inertia and fear and laziness, the three-headed dog that keeps us from leaving situations that have passed their expiration date, growled around me for months, the way Cerberus allowed souls to enter the realm of the dead, but allowed none of them to leave.

This book was even more interesting than I was expecting. She talks about tools, the carpentry profession, families, career change, the city of Boston, moving on from mistakes, and other subjects. It‘s a quick read, with easy going and accessible writing and occasional nuggets of literary references.
#bookaweek #bookclub #memoir

I solemnly swear that I will probably read at least three of these books for the September book-a-week challenge.
#readathon
#libraryhaul
#mysterybookclub
#audiobook

From journalist to carpenter. Really liked this memoir.

1. Rugrats
2. I love so many, but the tagged book means a lot to me!
3. 🥥 🍍 🍒
4. Hopefully no more freezing weather so I can get my garden started early this year!

I really enjoyed this memoir - Ms MacLaughlin drops her job as a journalist in Boston as she's entering her thirties, realizing that the clicking of a mouse isn't the hands on physical work her heart craves. She applies to work with a female carpenter on a whim, and captures in a really lovely way how the career path changes her.
Having grown up in the Boston area, I have a soft spot for the people you typically find there 😉

Saturday morning 🛠

My non-fic shelf. Still have few spots left. #SPACEJAM. @Liberty

I finished this one up during this lovely rainy/snowy 38 degree Minnesota spring day. Loved it. It reminded me of watching New Yankee Workshop with my dad. Plus now I want to go build my own bookshelves and use some power tools🛠⚙️🔌
Took advantage of Louie being awake (thanks to me😉) and used him as a bookend.

First book of the new year. And then off to sleep. Happy New Year everyone!

Lots of good reading this month, including The Clothing of Books, Seeing Red, and Seating Arrangements.

Also, Happy New Year!

You might think you don't want to read a book about becoming a carpenter, but you do.

Book 7 of my winter break #bookgasm. #flashreadathon

Also I'm starting this book and it's so excellent so far.

I enjoyed reading this - it made me want to build myself some bookshelves. 😉 I liked the way she would end paragraphs with sentences that seem like non-sequiturs, but really aren't. Lovely, engaging writing. Solid recommend.

"...what we know is these hours are our only ones. They are finite and will be finished. A girl I knew once went around to all the guests at a party and told them, one by one, 'This is you real life, you know. This is your REAL LIFE.' What a thing to be reminded of-and how easy to forget. I liked how the tiles looked on that floor."

My #recommendsday is a book I just started but can already tell I am probably going to love.

Book two for #24in48. This was great. Quick read, ladies doing cool things, I just wish it had MORE. A solid 4/5.

On to book two! I've only done about three hours for #24in48 (oops) because of a lazy morning/errands. Also, so many of you are posting beautiful plates of food with your reads but here is my aesthetically unpleasing Chipotle burrito.

I think I'm an ageist when it comes to memoirs, but this had enough to hold my interest. I would have liked more about the jobs and honestly a little less about her internal life, but hey, it's a memoir. Overall, a good read.

Women make up only 1.6% of trade professions and carpentry is 90.9% white? Wow.

I haven't been awake for an hour and I've already added two books to my TBR pile.

"...an old man appeared - he looked a hundred years old... "Good to see women on the job." I didn't know what to say. It would be clumsy to explain that I wasn't really on the job... It would be clumsy to say it was good to see a hundred-year-old wizard on the job, too."

A few other choices...

Walls speak to an emotional need as much is a structural one. They protect us from wind and rain and strangers. They protect our private acts and parts. They protect us from our shortcomings and our fears. A wall broadcasts: I am vulnerable.

this is today

"This book is a story, a simple one, of things becoming other than they were. It's a story, like all of them, of transformation."

The nail on the spine is just perfect 😍