See that green thing? It’s an ivy plant — the one and only living green thing in our house. I don’t do plants. They give me anxiety. Yet another thing to take care of. But this guy refuses to die despite my abuse. I do better with books. Here’s what has been on the shelf in September.

• Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, by Cal Newport — I heard the author of this book on a podcast and was intrigued. He said that people are losing their ability to spend extended periods of time on focused activity. Constantly responding to distractions is reprogramming our brains and robbing us of our capacity for deep work. Newport offers four startling rules to recover from this malady. I’m not going to list them, because then you might not want to read the book. I have implemented one tip: instead of planning my periods of focused work and filling up every other space with distractions (email, Instagram, Facebook, etc.), I schedule my time on social media (half hour in the morning and half hour in the late afternoon) and stay away the rest of the day. I dare you to try it.
• Giants in the Earth, by O. E. Rolvaag — I read this book as a senior in high school. When picking out a read-aloud for PB and myself, I thought this would fit the bill. It’s about Norwegians homesteading in South Dakota in the 1800s. It’s a lot longer than I remembered. After renewing the book twice, I still had to photocopy the last 30 pages so we could finish it. My Norski husband would have been just fine out on the prairie, living in a sod house. I might have gone off the deep end, just like the wife in Rolvaag’s story.
• A Place in Time, by Wendell Berry — Reading this was bittersweet as it is the last title from the pile of the Port William series of books I got for Christmas. I expect to read these again someday. After spending ten months living in the pages of 11 books, the characters are like family. Wendell Berry has renewed in me the love of story.
• The Complete Book of Home Organization, by Toni Hammersley — This book was a feast for the eyes with so many beautiful pictures. I stuck post-it notes on all the pages that had ideas I liked. Then I took off all the post-it notes and returned the book to the library. Sigh. That’s what people used to do before Pinterest.

“I do not want to just read books;
I want to climb inside them and live there.”
~Unknown