7ToF: appropriately enough for the dog days of summer, I'm trying to bore you to death

1. We have reached a new milestone of senior citizenship: we went to see a movie this week and we both fell asleep DURING THE PREVIEWS. Not gonna lie, that's a little scary, but we were both tired from a busy day, so maybe not really a surprise. We woke up for the movie, fortunately. It was Inside Out 2, which was good--if you liked the first one, you'll like this one, too. It's a kids' movie, but it's also a decent approximation of how our brains work, so it's kind of fascinating. The first Inside Out was about a little girl who has to move away from her friends and her hockey team, the sequel is about her transition to being a teenager. Thumbs up from us.

2. I'm still trying (not always successfully) to cut down on plastic use, so I am happy that we've found an alternative to the big orange bottle of laundry detergent. I've been loyally using Tide since Melanie was a baby and it was the only thing that would get the formula stains out of her clothes in one go. But those big orange bottles were becoming more and more disturbing to me. I tried some Earth Breeze detergent sheets once a couple of years ago and they left some kind of residue on the clothes, so I gave up on that. 

But then over the winter I read that no matter what it says on the package, if you're going to use detergent sheets, you have to dissolve them first because they don't have enough time in water to dissolve during a normal wash cycle. 

So, in case you want to try it, here's my method: I keep an empty salsa jar by the washing machine, fill it about 2/3 full with warm tap water, tear up a detergent sheet and drop it in, put on the lid, shake it up, and let it sit for at least ten or fifteen minutes. Then pour the mixture straight into the bottom of the washing machine and proceed as usual, but with no detergent in the dispenser. 

It works great. And of course, once you get in the habit, you can go ahead and refill the salsa jar right after you empty it, so then by the time you get to your next load, it's ready to go. Other than a couple of times I needed to remove some grease stains, I haven't used Tide in months. I'm still using Earth Breeze, I haven't tried any of the other brands since these seem to work just fine.

4. So in my reading report post last week, I started off with a description of how bad my taste is. I was mainly just making myself laugh, but also trying to defuse the whole I AM A TASTEMAKER thing, because it just seems so pretentious. I don't know what I'd write about if I didn't tell you what I've been reading, but it also seems kind of presumptuous to assume you want to know. 

What I didn't notice until after it was published was that it was kind of a backhanded insult to the books I then said I loved-- hey, I have terrible taste, and these are the books I like. I’m kind of an idiot.

5. Which brings us around to the #top10books thing that has exploded on Bookstagram this week (and probably Threads and X, too, I'm just not on those platforms anymore). The New York Times polled a bunch of TASTEMAKERS and now they're publishing their list of the Top 100 Books of the Twenty-First Century, and since you already know I am sideways making fun of the whole book snob thing, you may be unsurprised that I rolled my eyes so hard when I saw the article. Also, they're posting them twenty at a time every day this week, and I just....... *shrugs* It just seems like such blatant click bait for book nerds and wannabes, and also for people who feel guilty that they're not reading the "right" books or enough books or whatever. Like you're supposed to create a checklist and read all the books "they" have determined are the best ones to read. (I just sound grumpy, don't I.)

6. AND IT WORKED, because probably all book lovers, including me, love book lists, and I am following avidly. The first twenty included a bunch that I'd never heard of, but that's actually a good thing because they're including books besides the American prize winners and bestsellers that we already know about. I'm writing this on Wednesday, so the first sixty are out. I've read exactly thirteen of them, which seems a little sad, plus a few more that I've read by one of the authors, but not the particular one on the list (like Wolf Hall instead of Bring Up the Bodies). Three more of them were already on my TBR list for this summer.  

See? I'm doing it. I sound like the kid in the front row of English class, trying to prove that I'm a good reader because hey, I've read some of these books!!! I really have!!! Now I'm rolling my eyes at myself.

7. So of course, *she says sheepishly* I made my own list. They asked over 500 people involved in writing and publishing to give them their top 10 books published since 2000, and then created their list from that. Here are my top 10, in no particular order, with the caveat that I can just about guarantee that by the time their list is finished, I will remember some others that I will wish I had chosen. In fact, this is already slightly different than the list I posted on Instagram. So maybe next week I will update. Or maybe not. How much (virtual) ink has been spilled on this already?

Deacon King Kong by James McBride
Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton
Caste by Isabel Wilkerson
All Systems Red by Martha Wells
The House in The Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune
A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

I'm tempted to list the ones I almost included but lucky for you my inner editor is yelling no! just stop! (but they're Less, Station Eleven, and The Great Believers). I'm reading Americanah right now and it very well could bump one of the others off my list, but I still have over 300 pages to go, so hard to say. 

I'm so curious to see if Harry Potter is included in the NYT list (the first couple of books were published in the 90s, but all the rest in the 2000s), because I almost included Goblet of Fire in mine, and certainly that series permanently changed the shape of publishing. JKRowling has earned a lot of enemies over the past few years, but just about all the young families I know (in person, not online) are still reading them with their kids.

Yeah, I know, sometimes I even bore myself. This is so long, I deleted #3, did you notice? It was about brownies. Not kidding. 

Have a good weekend. We're headed to central Montana to see the grandbaby, so I'm writing this early and scheduling it. Stay cool. At 8pm, it's still 91 degrees here. *gasp*