Existing Between Lists

Part of the reason I keep so many lists for everything, beyond my memory not being as great as it used to be, is that I feel very unmoored lately when I am not doing a task to check off, even if it's something silly like "watch The Bachelor (Tuesday)." I realized this today when I completed a couple chores and had a few hours before I needed to leave for my book club lunch. I didn't feel like starting another book (I have been reading a ton and just finished one this morning); I don't really like watching TV; I have no craft projects in progress; I wasn't in the mood to begin a new painting; etc. I was like OMG what am I going to do? I felt a bit dizzy and weird. Like do I even exist if I'm not doing something I had planned in writing? It was a very scary feeling. 

Then I remembered I needed to reorganize one of my Spotify playlists, whew. If I add songs to a playlist on my phone app, Spotify sticks them at the end of the list, which is unacceptable. Sometimes I want them arranged alphabetically, and other times I like to group them by theme. I can only move the songs around if I log onto Spotify on my laptop (logging into the website on my phone does not work as far as moving songs within a list).

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Anyway, I finished Voices in a Haunted Room by Victoria Holt, which I enjoyed very much (four stars). It was a typical family drama/political intrigue story that I am becoming (re)familiar with from this author. Then I gobbled up Victoria Holt's The Spring of the Tiger, which wasn't about Spring or a tiger, but about a woman who travels to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) with her new husband and ends up fearing for her life, from humans not tigers. The title is actually a quote from a poem by Lord Byron about a woman's revenge when she loses her love. I also gave this book four stars. 

Although I am having fun rereading these novels and intend to continue until I can't easily find more, I am getting slightly tired of the Holt standard trope of a 10-20 year old girl enmeshed in a complex family structure who grows up, finds love, loses love, travels to an exotic land, blah blah blah, not necessarily in that order. Each book contains a romance, but they are not necessarily formulaic. We don't actually know who the hero is at the start or even halfway through ~ the narrator may or may not end up with the first man who interests her as she would in a traditional romance where the first man to arouse a woman's sexual desire must be her mate for life. Sometimes the hot guy turns into a bad guy as the mystery portion of the story untangles itself. There's a lot more physical coercion happening in the Holt novels than I remembered from when I read them as a teenager. It's "behind closed doors," in the sense that nothing explicit is said and no below the neck body parts are mentioned, yet the reader understands exactly what is going on. I used to think of Victoria Holt books as tame compared to the bodice rippers, but they aren't tame... they're euphemistic. 

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I used to blame romance novels for my screwed up ideas about relationships, but I don't know anymore if they had anything to do with it. Assigning blame to something outside my control was a convenient excuse and allowed me to avoid working on myself to improve as a potential partner in order to attract and be attracted to the kind of partner I needed, as opposed to jumping into whatever shiny new thing that came along. Luckily, none of that matters now, and I can keep gobbling up romance novels without worry of brain warpage. Someone I know has begun a relationship at a "mature" age, and while she seems happy about it, her convos make it all sound like an enormous amount of effort, especially all the compromises one constantly must make in order to keep the thing from going off the rails. I don't think I could do any of that in my 60s ~ it seems so pointless.

This week, I plan to read The Last Sane Woman by Hannah Regel and The Color Purple by Alice Walker. As always, I won't force myself to continue on with any book I dislike, but I think these two will be good. Tonight, I might try to find a movie because my eyeballs are saying enough reading for one weekend!