This year has been hard for pretty much everyone, but for the first time in a long time, I feel like the end is in sight. We just have to hang on a little while longer. In the midst of this challenging and sad time, though, I found a bright spot – a supernova really – of happiness: my partner and I got married. The necessary restrictions were actually pretty great for us, since I’m not one to spend a lot of money on a single day, nor do I enjoy many of the trappings of a traditional wedding ceremony. So we got married by a judge in our home (masks included), and we zoomed the 30 second ceremony to our families. (The brevity also helped ensure the safety of the judge, who was in our home for probably less than 5 minutes.) Here’s a screenshot of us showing off the marriage license to our families:

 

I’ve been thinking a lot about something the writer Connie Schultz wrote recently: future joy often exceeds our imaginations. I feel fortunate to be a generally happy person with a lot of dreams fulfilled: a rewarding career, friends I love, a close family, a comfortable life that allows me to see the world. But then there are the dreams I didn’t think were possible until they happened. Sometimes, future joy exceeds our imaginations. Nothing has made that clearer to me than this man and the joyous life we share.

And now for the books!

In my third quarter roundup, I wrote a bit about how my reading had really taken a hit this year (as you can also see from my blogging, which I’ve only done intermittently the past few months). I’ve read even less since then, finishing about a book a month (if that). I like the idea of curling up with a good book more than the actual act lately; I usually end up watching the Great British Bake Off instead of opening the book I deliberately brought with me to the living room to read.

That said, I do have a couple that I’m working on.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

This is a long book, particularly for someone like me whose reading diet has consisted mainly of children’s and teen books the past few years. It’s 800 pages with small type, and I’ve only made it about 50 pages so far. But those 50 pages have been fascinating. The basic premise of Pinker’s argument is that humans, on the whole, are remarkably less violent than we were millennia, centuries, and even decades ago, and that this trend will likely continue. In the first section of the book, he does a quick rundown of the history of human violence, beginning with what we know of prehistory, continuing through the eras of the Old and New Testaments, and well beyond, until at least the 1950s. The purpose is to show that despite the violence we are all aware of in our current world, it’s actually much less severe and widespread compared to human violence in the past, even the recent past. Knowing how violent humans still are, that makes the recitation of the violent acts – both individual and collective – in our past particularly hard to stomach at times, but interesting nonetheless.

 

Guardian of the Horizon by Elizabeth Peters

This is the 16th book in the Amelia Peabody series, and the first one that jumps back in time and tells a “missing” story from between two earlier books. I’m finally into the part of the series that I’ve never read before, either in print or on audio, and it’s been fun to see where the Emerson family went after I stopped reading years ago. This particular story takes the Emersons back to the desert oasis where they first found Nefret. It’s a fun adventure that deviates from the standard mysteries of most of the other installments, and I appreciated the change; it’s kept the series from feeling stale.