that guilt trip? the world can go without me

my fave guilt-rejection read and a few cheering out-in-paperbacks you maybe missed

Last week, I rejected the Scolds. Today, I take my mighty keyboard in hand (oh, the lost poetry of pen and quill) to tilt against the windmills of the Shoulds.

Not long ago, I found myself in a conversation about Dry January, or Damp January—with the assumption that of course, I must be doing one or the other. My various outside world inputs are full of no-buys and low-buys, of 30 days to this bodily improvement and 4 weeks to that fresh mental strength. The list of things I should give up goes on: sugar*, bread, social media; the demands that I change myself to make amends for the ways the world refuses to change weigh on me with every single use plastic or web search (because apparently every time Google uses AI to tell me how to rent a car in Denver, it takes 8 bottles of water and approximately half of the energy of the sun).

And then, in the first 2 minutes of a podcast, the host declared that he and his guest would help us relieve ourselves of “bad” habits and addictions, like … Wordle.

There is no world, no universe, in which Wordle presents a problematic addiction. There’s one. ONE. One Wordle a day. You could, I suppose, spend… 6 minutes on it. Maybe 10. Maybe, on a really rough day, I don’t know, 12? And if you do it daily—which, as a terrible addict crushed by your craving, you presumably do—you’re gonna be faster, because it’s a skill like everything else.

The thing we should work on controlling is our addiction to the illusion of control.

Listen, if you want to give up Wordle, you do you. Thoughts and prayers on your struggle.But as we trudge slowly out of this long January, wearing our worries about our jobs and our health and our families wrapped around us like weighted vests, let’s take a moment to recognize that what we really want is to know what is going to happen next.

To sit in the driver’s seat, and also to be the one who decided where to build the road. To be certain that, because we have done all the things and jumped through every hoop and composted every eggshell, we will never get sick, never grow old, never lose our home, never watch someone we love die or disappear.

There are reasons to give up sugar*, change your alcohol habits**, exercise more or moderate your online purchasing or hours spent lost in the scroll. There are also reasons why we do these things, and why for some of us they are comforting and harmless, and the real harm comes from beating ourselves up over buying Furikake on Amazon when probably if we tried hard enough, and found that specialty store three towns over, we could keep our vow to shop local pure.

I’ve decided to go a little easier on these things. To ask myself if I am really bothered by a habit, and if the voice demanding that I change is really my own. To aim for “most days” with things I do want to do or change, and truly enjoy the things that bring me joy without applying the words of a Scold. These are not guilty pleasures or indulgences, they are things I want to do or eat or experience or own and I need no one’s permission but my own.

For a FANTASTIC read on a related topic, get ye down to to any book seller you wish and grab This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch—a book about how we pretend not to love things we love, and feel bad about loving them, and hide our real selves and what we think (sounding familiar?) and how those things are often devalued, especially if they are ‘girl things’. And also how we have a hard time doing things just for fun - things that make us happy, hello, again familiar - because we just don’t think we should. This book made me happy and I bet it will you, too.

While you’re grabbing This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch (and I’m afraid I really must insist on that one, it’s a book I keep copies of just to press into my friends’ hands), you might want to abandon the front tables for the moment and slip into the fiction aisle, where there are oodles of books you might have missed during their moment in the sun, now waiting for you in handy paperback format.

If you’re finding this to be a stressful season, these should help.

Ink Blood Sister Scribe - I don’t think this got the love it deserved. Magic spells written into books, sisters forced to keep secrets from one another, powers revealed… Another pleasure and not just if you like the genre.

The Road to Roswell - You only THINK you don’t like books with aliens. This REALLY should have transcended its genre, it’s funny and delightful and combines the whackiness of the best (non-conspiracy theory) X Files episodes with a really funny romance and a mad road trip. If you don’t like it I’ll… put a bumper sticker on my car that says The Truth Is Out There.

Small World, Laura Zigman - This had so much that I’d never been given in a book before. A family/sisters experience that was totally different. Older protagonists who were still just ordinary. Secondary characters who made me SO MAD and then ultimately just had to be dealt with bc life is like that. Also it’s delightfully wintry without being one bit Christmas and very, very Boston.

The Bandit Queens- This one is a romp, a true black comedy (with an EXCELLENT cover) with moments that approach slapstick and yet never feel anything but real, with a fabulous women-taking-back-their-own plot and characters who shift and change in the way of flawed humans, set in a village in rural India. The NYT review notes that it “covers a litany of grim realities” and this is true—but it is also hopeful and funny and triumphant and another story of friendship and the many roles it plays in our lives.

The Sweet Spot- Amy Poeppel Ok, here’s the note I took on this one: “The PERFECT multi-POV book. Every character’s anger (with each other) was all so justified and so satisfying. Every voice was so distinct (and yet sort of omniscient from-the-outside 3rd person kinda close) that you NEVER wondered whose chapter it was. Touches of slapstick, laugh out loud funny, people saying things you wish you could say.

I find myself suddenly DNF-ing things again. Y’all know what I like, any recs?

* An aside on the question of sugar: I can’t stop ranting about a frustrating NYT Magazine article by a writer who either paid for, or finagled, a $15K trip to a European wellness spa-type place in order to give up sugar, which she neither wanted to do nor had any real intention of doing, because she likes sugar. My editors at the NYT would have laughed me out of the room for that idea, or, if I’d managed somehow to sneak it by them, fired me for failing to grapple with ANY of many issues that piece skirts: the pseudo science of the spa, the motivations of its international clientele, why its author feels compelled to remind us all that although she likes sugar, she totally isn’t fat, not one bit, one thousand seven hundred times… It’s funny and I’m sure it was fun to write, but not very “Times”, which at least used to be a big deal around there.

**I know that alcohol represents a choice for some of us, and an addiction that requires treatment or action for others. If alcohol addiction is a part of your life in any way, I hope you’ll take this in the spirit in which it is meant—as a reminder that treating, say, Wordle as of equal seriousness as clinical addiction diminishes the reality of that lived experience, and is frankly silly.