​​Title: The Sanctity of Sloth (Seven Deadly Sins)
Author: Greta Boris
Genre: Mystery
 
Summary
 
Medieval anchorites hold a special fascination for Abby Travers. These pious women chose to entomb themselves in small cells built into cathedrals. In order to understand anchorites better--and write a best-selling book on the topic--Abby convinces her father to build her an anchorhold in Mission San Juan Capistrano (a famous historical landmark in California), where she will secretly hide for 40 days. This plan is ruined when Abby witnesses two men dumping a young girl right in front of her. When the girl dies, Abby is the only witness to the crime. But coming forward will mean sacrificing her book and exposing her family to ridicule. When Abby decides on a compromise, she sets in motion a series of events which will put everything she loves in danger.
 
Review
 
I’m not sure how I stumbled upon this book; I think it was a recommendation. Regardless, the sample intrigued me. I had never heard of anchorites, but I found the topic fascinating. From the first chapter, Abby finds herself in a moral dilemma, and I was interested to know how it would resolve. So I bought the book and read it during my long road trip to California.

​The Sanctity of Sloth delivered on what I wanted from this book. I learned a little about anchorites, and I watched Abby grow and change as she confronted the bizarre circumstance she found herself placed in. The story held my attention, and the prose was serviceable, if not super descriptive.

​In 2019, three popular fantasy epics “ended” (or so they claim). We had the final season of Game of Thrones, Avengers: Endgame, and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. All three of them disappointed me for largely the same reason. Previous installments had promised something new, but when it came time to deliver, they couldn’t. So they went back to old tropes common in fantasy and played it safe.
 
I love epic fantasies, but I haven’t been reading them lately, because it seems like all of them--even the ones I like--end in the same way. Kill the main bad guy and poof! all your troubles will be over. Enemy armies will die or be too demoralized to fight. You will never need to contend with a second-in-command or a sizable amount of supporters within the populace. Instead, you can throw a big party and celebrate that good has triumphed over evil.
 
If killing the Big Bad isn’t enough of a climax, there’s always the heroic sacrifice. The hero dies--or seems to die--to save the world. No surer way to evoke pathos than a tragic death. But the heroic sacrifice need not actually be done by the min character--that would be depressing. The heroic sacrifice can be committed by a character in need of redemption. A former villain, a traitor, a character who gave in to a moment of weakness, a person haunted by bloody deeds of the past. It doesn’t matter if they realized the error of their ways five minutes ago or spent ten years painfully trying to change the course of their life. The only true path to redemption is death.
 
I hate these tropes. I mean, I understand why they’re used, and I will be the first to admit that when done them well, they can be damned effective. When lazily and poorly handled, however, they can carry a dangerous subtext, one repeated over and over, until it starts to inform our psyches.

Warning: Spoilers and Strong Opinions follow the break. This isn't a review, just me getting some things off my chest.

Title: Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Author: D. H. Lawrence
Genre: Classic, Fiction, Romance (?)
 
Summary
 
When Constance Chatterley’s husband Clifford returns from World War I paralyzed from the legs down, the two try to make the best of a bad situation. Clifford throws himself first into a literary career and later turns an industrial eye toward the mines that pepper his land. Although Connie does her best to support her husband, she falls into a depression. Something vital is missing from her life. She meets the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors, a man who is reclusive and insolent, but who attracts Connie in a primitive way. They begin an affair, and through it, Connie finds out what it means to be truly alive.
 
Review
 
From its title, Lady Chatterley’s Lover sounds like a melodrama. It’s not. This is a novel of ideas, and the story is the canvas upon which the ideas are stitched. What D. H. Lawrence really wants to do is posit a thesis as to the ailments of the modern world, namely, the disconnect mankind has toward their fellow man and the natural and the physical world, due to materialism, industrialization, and over-intellectualism. The solution, he posits, is a return to a more pagan time of “real men and real women,” which means sex.
 
I like my novels to have ideas in them; however, these ideas come at the expense of the story. You might think that Connie cheating on her wheelchair-bound husband would cause drama. It doesn’t. And the reason is simple: no one cares. No one cares about Clifford. No one cares about morals. No one cares about what society thinks. And as such, there are no consequences, only inconveniences. I’d say that this is a comment on the disconnect of people, but I’m not sure it is. I think the problem is that D. H. Lawrence became so enamored with his ideas he forgot about the characters.

​
December has always been a reflective month for me. Blame the holidays. In the rush and chaos of upholding traditions--the gift-buying, the gift-wrapping, the gingerbread house-building--I find I cannot focus on writing. And once Christmas afternoon hits, once the presents are opened and the ham’s in the oven, then there’s nothing but a string of cozy, languid family get-togethers until New Year. By which time, it’s my birthday and I’m another year older. The shift of focus from work to family, followed by a period of lazy rest and the passing of another year (both the calendar and my own lifespan) naturally puts me in the reflective state of mind. And so, inevitably, I spend the bulk of December contemplating what I did in the past year and what I want to do in the next one.
 
This year, my process of reflecting started after Thanksgiving and continued up to… now, I suppose. And whereas normally I, very business-like, go to my list of stated goals I wrote the previous December and start grading all my tangible accomplishments, this time I didn’t. Because it didn’t matter. The important things of 2019 were not my accomplishments, but the mindsets I learned. It was a year of growing, not a year of completion.
 
This year, I learned how to take care of kids, how to drive a car, how to get stuff done without a plan or schedule, how to trust myself, and how to let go of the need for validation. For the past few years, I’ve had my ideas of how I should live and what it meant to succeed broken down and re-formed. Of course, I’ve done stuff this year, I’ve written well over a 1000 pages. But the pages are all over the place and the words haven’t yet coalesced into a solid thing, a thing I can show to others and be proud of. But that’s okay. Maybe next year.