You were probably going to miss this one
but I think you'd like it
Mentioned in my January Reads as something I’d pre-ordered: A Physical Education: How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting from Casey Johnston.
I’m a big Casey fan, I love her weekly She’s a Beast email (this one’s fab) and I also love reading about bodies and change and the challenge of accepting our limits, pushing them but always recognizing our finitude, especially in a positive, this changed me for the better way.
And this is that! Casey was a freelancer and lived, as we all did have and do, in a world where the rewards for women go to the smallest and the slimmest and the most conformed-to-the-norm and she did all the things and hated the running and the dieting and the fitting herself in and then she found weight lifting and it changed her perspective on all the things—she broke up with the asshole and got louder and started her own thing and benched bunches of pounds and realized that the world was maybe not as unwelcoming as she thought and when it was, she could let that shit go.
Listen, I loved this. I do strength training, not exactly Casey style but not-not, and I’m not convinced everything that’s great for her is great for me (different life stages and bodies, and also, I’ve lived through “no fat” and “more fat”; “no meat” and “all the meat”; “drink wine” and “no alcohol” and “no bread” and “yay carbs” and I view the whole eat all the protein business with a jaundiced eye) but NEITHER IS SHE, she just wants us to question everything we hear about what women can and can’t do and should and shouldn’t be and maybe try listening to ourselves and what works for us and learning to fail and learning to rest.
Although if you want to start lifting some heavy stuff, she’s here for that too (and I’m changing a few things up after reading).
Kids, this was a good read if it’s in your wheelhouse, a nice change that got me ready to dive back into Gifted and Talented (jury still out here, don’t buy this one on my account…yet) and ready and raring to take on either the second Murderbot (which we have, and I’m caught up on the super-fun Apple+ series and waiting for tonight’s new episode and maybe I’ll just drop that in my feed), Tess Gerritsen’s The Spy Coast or maybe Heiress Takes All… or maybe something else on my still groaning #TBR shelves in spite of my actually managing to buy fewer books…
Which brings me to one last thing! Gretchen Rubin has declared this her summer of reading her #tbr (she found a lovely alliterative Japanese word, but I cannot put my finger on it) and that feels like a pretty grand idea. Well, until the next time I go in a bookstore, anyway.
What’s your next read?
Tsundoku! Good stuff.
Sounds exactly up my alley!