Time // About noon… we had friends over late last so it’s been a slow Sunday.

Place // Sitting in my favorite chair, getting ready to watching the Vikings-Bears game… and the Vikings just returned the opening kickoff for a touchdown. Wow!

Eating // Nothing yet, but I have some leftover homemade pizza from last night that I’m looking forward to grabbing in a few minutes.

Drinking // Water

Reading // As you can maybe guess from the photos at the top of the post (no books), I haven’t done much reading this week. I can’t seem to settle into anything that I start. I’ve read a few chapters in Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, and about 2/3 of What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast by Laura Vanderkam. I tried starting an ARC of The Goldfinch, but it was late at night and I got sleepy. This week I need to decide on a book to blurb for October for Bloggers Recommend, but otherwise don’t have many reading plans.

Watching // The Boyfriend and I got caught up with a couple favorite shows, The League and Breaking Bad. The last season of Fringe is (finally) on Netflix, so I’ll be watching that the next couple of weeks.

Listening // I impulsively bought a wireless bluetooth speaker while I was out shopping yesterday, which was amazing to set up in my kitchen while I was cooking. I got basically caught up with my favorite podcast, Pop Culture Happy Hour.

Cooking // One of the ladies in our office brought in a huge bag of tomatoes she didn’t want, so I got to bring a ton home on Friday. I spent yesterday afternoon prepping, cutting, and freezing a few pounds. I also made some tomato sauce that we used on a pizza, and plan to use the rest to make some pasta for dinner tonight. It was fun to try something new like that.

Blogging // Inspired by a great Twitter conversation on Friday afternoon, Jennifer (Literate Housewife), Shannon (River City Reading) are working on putting together a survey for book bloggers about longevity, inspiration, and blogger burnout. We’re still working on questions — suggestions more than welcome — but I will be sure to let you know about it when we’re ready.

Promoting // Related to blogging, there have been a bunch of great posts from bloggers I admire about why they blog and the future of blogging: Necromancy Never Pays, Beth Fish Reads, and The 3R’s Blog. There have been others, I think, but I can’t think of them at the moment.

Hating // I don’t like feeling as unsettled as I did this week — I miss reading! — but I think I turned a corner yesterday.

Loving // One of the best pieces of advice I got from What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast (which includes advice on improving mornings, weekends and work)  is that the best way to have rejuvenating, fulfilling weekends is to make plans to do things you love or are excited about. I tried doing that this weekend and really did feel better about how my Saturday went. I can’t wait to finish that book and write more about it. Also, I love that having friends over got me to clean my house — it looks so nice in here right now. Oh, and I got a haircut this week. It’s a bit shorter than usual, but I’m really starting to like it.

Wanting // I want to go shopping for some new clothes. I sort of hate everything I own at the moment… I may splurge a bit on a shopping trip next weekend.

Anticipating // We got some very fall-like weather this week, which has been great. I can’t wait to wear scarves and make soup and maybe experiment with baking my own bread.

Earlier this week I stumbled across the A to Z Survey on Megan’s (Leafing Through Life) blog, and it looked like fun. The survey is the brainchild of Jamie at The Perpetual Page-Turner, so thanks for coming up with this idea. Happy Friday, everyone!

Author you’ve read the most books from: I think this is a tie between J.K. Rowling and Margaret Atwood.

Best Sequel Ever: I’m not sure if it’s the best ever, but I really loved The Magician King by Lev Grossman

Currently Reading: Lady Catherine, the Earl, and the Real Downton Abbey by The Countess of Carnarvon

Drink of Choice While Reading: Generally, I like tea. But I’ve been trying to drink more water recently.

E-reader or Physical Book? I still like physical books, but I’m starting to like reading egalleys on my tablet because it’s pretty convenient.

Fictional Character You Probably Would Have Actually Dated In High School: I think Iwould have gotten along with Wade/Parzival from Ready Player One — I was into nerds.

Glad You Gave This Book A Chance: I didn’t think I would like epic poetry, but I really enjoyed The Odyssey by Homer.

Hidden Gem Book: My favorite hidden gem from this year was Ten Letters by Eli Saslow.

Important Moment in your Reading Life: I read Heart of Darkness my junior year in high school. That book changed my ideas about what great literature could be.

Just Finished: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling

Kinds of Books You Won’t Read: Generally speaking, I don’t read horror — I’m not that interested in being scared!

[continue reading…]

Parts of this post originally appeared on Book Riot. 

In 2002, Papa Pilgrim, a reclusive, ultra-religious family man, purchased a 420-acre mining area in the middle of an Alaskan state park. Ignoring the cautions of local park officials, Pilgrim bulldozed a 13-mile road through the park to the small town of McCarthy so that his wife and 14 children could get to their home.

At first, many of his rural neighbors sided with Pilgrim when the National Park Service came down on his little improvement project. As time passed, however, it became clear that life at the Pilgrim family compound was not as rosy as it appeared. In Pilgrim’s Wilderness, journalist Tom Kizza reveals the story of a charismatic outlaw and his eventual feud with his neighbors, the government and his own family.

The blurb for Pilgrim’s Wilderness described the book as a mix between Into the Wild and Helter Skelter, which were comparisons that I couldn’t ignore — I’m a total sucker for oddball true crime books, especially those written by journalists. The setting of the book, the very edge of one of the final frontiers of America, was another appealing piece of this story.

Although the ultimate reveal of Pilgrim as a physically, mentally and sexually abusive psychopath is what makes this book scandalous, there’s also a ton of interesting back and forth about property rights and life at the edge of the frontier. I was fascinated by the tension that arose between the government and the citizens of McCarthy over issues of resources and private property. In some ways, I wish that the central antagonist, Papa Pilgrim, hadn’t turned out to be such crazy dude because it distracts from that conflict. But I’m a government nerd, so of course I’d think that.

The story of how Pilgrim’s children, especially his oldest daughter, finally escape from him is incredibly brave. I can’t even imagine their lives, although Kizzia does an amazing job setting the stage and telling their stories sympathetically and honestly. If you like true crime and can handle a story about a major sociopath, then Pilgrim’s Wilderness is a book you’ll want to pick up.

I have been waiting a long time to read this book.

Katy Butler first came to my attention when I read 2010 New York Times Magazine piece called “What Broke My Father’s Heart,” a look at medical interventions and our path to death. In the article, Butler told the story of her father’s life after a severe stroke, focusing on the way that a medical culture of over-treatment extended his life well past the point where most people would consider his quality of life good. The major event was fitting Butler’s father with a pacemaker as a condition of a doctor completing a relatively simple surgery. The pacemaker kept his heart beating even as his mind and the rest of his body began to fail.

The article was beautiful, sad, and frustrating. It also led to some really interesting conversations with my dad, a design engineer with a major medical device company. He had a different perspective on the issues that Butler raised and helped provide a different side to this story. I brought even more baggage to this boook because of my grandfather’s death last summer. Our family’s experience with a medical emergency and the reality of making end-of-life decisions for him gave me a new frame for the issues that Butler raised in her article.

By the time I got my hands on a review copy of Knocking on Heaven’s Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death, this summer, a memoir based on the 2010 article, I was excited and curious to see how Butler would expand and reframe a situation that had already given me so much to think about. Happily, Knocking on Heaven’s Door did not disappoint me in the slightest:

Like so many of us, award-winning writer Katy Butler always assumed her aging parents would experience healthy, active retirements before dying peacefully at home. Then her father suffered a stroke that left him incapable of easily finishing a sentence or showering without assistance. Her mother was thrust into full-time caregiving, and Katy became one of the 24 mil­lion Americans who help care for aging parents. In an effort to correct a minor and non–life threatening heart arrhythmia, doctors outfitted her father with a pacemaker. The device kept his heart beating but did nothing to prevent his slide into dementia, incontinence, near-muteness, and misery. After several years, he asked his wife for help, telling her, “I am living too long.”

When doctors refused to disable the pace­maker, sentencing her father to a protracted and agonizing death, Katy set out to understand why. Her quest had barely begun when her mother faced her own illness, rebelled against her doctors, refused open-heart surgery, and instead met death head-on. Knocking on Heaven’s Door, a revolutionary blend of memoir and investigative reporting, is the fruit of the Butler family’s journey.

There are so many things to say about this book, but I think the most important is that Butler gives a voice to the feeling that there is more to medicine than just extending life. As we age, each intervention takes its toll, and the costs of those interventions don’t always match their ostensible benefits. For example, Medicare spent about $30,000 on Butler’s father’s early interventions — the stroke, the pacemaker, and a hernia surgery — but only $7,300 in total on speech therapy. In the grand scheme of things, Butler argues the speech therapy did more to contribute to quality of life than the most expensive interventions, but our medical system isn’t set up to support those treatments fully.

Although it seems, to the best of my estimation, that this book is impeccably researched, you can definitely feel the understandable sense of outrage and frustration that Butler still feels about the way her father’s life ended. It sort of simmers beneath the surface of many of her stories in a way that will feel familiar to anyone who has helped an elderly relative navigate end of life care and the medical establishment. Her outrage gives the numbers and investigating the personal touch that makes it stick.

Knocking on Heaven’s Door is really an incredible piece of work that I can’t recommend highly enough, especially for people who anticipate caring for a relative in the near future. The difficult situation that Butler’s family faced can offer some instructive lessons for the rest of us and important issues to think about as we try to fix the American medical system.

From Bloggers’ Recommend: After a stroke, journalist Butler’s 80-year-old father was given a pacemaker, which kept his heart pumping while his mind and body shut down, impeding his natural death. Butler looks at the personal toll of a medical system incentivized to treat patients at any cost. With frustration and love, Butler exposes her family’s struggle to help her father die with dignity.