My So-Called Reading Life, part 3: choosing what to read, podcasts, and the tyranny of my library hold list

Figuring out what to read next has always been a random process for me (in other words, if you're trying to figure out how to choose books, I'm not going to be much help).

Back before the internet, there were libraries and bookstores. There were certain authors I would always buy if they had published something new, but for the most part, I figured out what to read based on reading jacket flaps in a bookshop, or because of something I overheard or a friend's rec. Choosing a book because of a cool cover illustration was not unheard of.

Now there are more online ways to indulge my love of find books than I could possibly exhaust. There are email newsletters, blogs (yep), vlogs on YouTube, browsing online bookstores (besides Amazon, Powells, Page1, The Bookshelf, and Alibris are ones I've used recently), the bookstagram hashtag on Instagram, and my favorite-- podcasts.

Podcasts are great. I just enjoy listening to people talk about books. I have three that I listen to devotedly-- So Many Damn Books, The Front Porch, and I've told you before about What Should I Read Next-- and half a dozen more that I listen to occasionally (Reading Glasses, Currently Reading, etc.).

So Many Damn Books is two guys, Christopher and Drew, in NYC, I think in Brooklyn (although I'm always a little fuzzy on the boroughs having only been there twice). They love to read, and even though they're the age of my daughter, I love listening to them talk. If I were their age, I think Christopher would be practically my reading twin. On a recent episode, their guest asked what was the first book they stayed up all night reading. I think she was expecting them to say some amazing, life-changing work of art, or at least a thriller, but Christopher sheepishly said it was probably Redwall, and Drew--equally sheepishly--agreed. I heart those guys so hard.

And for the record, I've never stayed up all night reading, even when I was young. Which is weird, because on average, I stay up way later than anyone else I know. It's just never all night. I'm usually asleep by 12:30 (a.m.). And even when I'm reading something I can't put down, somehwere around 2:30 or so, my need for sleep is greater than my need to find out what happens. (or *blush* I flip over and read the end so I can sleep.)

The Front Porch is Annie, owner of The Bookshelf in Georgia, and her friend (and possibly bookshop employee??) Chris, who is a recently minted PhD in (something humanities). I rarely agree with them, but they are interesting and engaging and like I said, I love listening to people talk about books. In a recent episode (which had guest host Hunter instead of Chris), they actually convinced me to give The Goldfinch a try. I've heard so many negative reviews that I had decided it wasn't for me (even though I loved Secret History). But now I think I'm going to try it. Just not any time soon because my library hold queue is already full.

I've already told you about What Should I Read Next so many times that I'll just say I still listen and I still love it. Anne, the host, is not an exact match in taste with me-- she tends a little more toward the soulful, all-the-feels type of book. But there's enough overlap that I can usually figure out from the way she describes something whether or not I will like it. She recommended Good Morning Midnight, To Night Owl from Dogfish, and Less, among recent favorites.

Honestly, the real way I currently figure out what to read next is by my library hold list. Our library allows you to have up to ten ebooks on hold, and I usually have eight to ten books on there. Then I read whatever book becomes available next. It's pretty simple.

About a year ago, I decided I should try to be more intentional about what I'm reading, but now I've decided it's actually a pretty good system. As with everyone who uses their library queue, that means I have the occasional unfortunate problem of three books I've had queued for weeks becoming available within two days of each other, but I suppose there are worse crises.

Oddly, I've had several experiences lately of unintended similarities in the books I'm reading. I've read three books this summer that had to do (loosely speaking) with time travel or the ability to pursue alternate timelines (Dark Matter, Life After Life, and Doomsday Book). And I just finished a book about life in a great English house between WWI and WWII (Remains of the Day) only to find that my next book, a mystery novel called Justice Hall, is also set in a great English house between WWI and WWII. How odd is that?

I've rambled on long enough that I'm even boring myself. As far as I know, everybody who reads this blog is also an avid reader, so you probably don't need any advice about how to pick books. So, one might ask, what exactly was the point of this post? And I can't say I know. But now that I've typed it out, I'm posting it.

Because it's 12:15 a.m. and it's time for bed.

Other posts in this series:
My So-Called Reading Life, part 1: writing book reviews
My So-Called Reading Life, part 2: rating books

7ToF: keeping the beat

1. Last time I told you about my foray into playing percussion, I was in the early stages of learning to play the concert bells. I'm way better at it than I used to be, but still not great-- probably I'm at about the skill level of a high school sophomore. We've had two concerts this summer, one on the Fourth of July, playing patriotic tunes at a local historic landmark, and the other one was this morning at the Northwest Montana Fair, playing some of the same patriotic stuff plus medleys of Sam Cooke and Tijuana Brass, etc.

Bells' eye view of 4th of July concert

2. Aside: I love the fair. Dean is not a fan. He thinks it is dirty and the people who work there are a bit questionable and it's often hot and dusty. But I grew up going to the fair and it is so fun. I used to take the kids every year, and we'd visit the draft horses and the goats and the chickens, and then go to the arts and crafts building to see the quilts and the photography. And of course there's the food. How can you not love fair food? Corn dogs and elephant ears and huckleberry milkshakes, barbecue sandwiches or noodles crisped up in a wok-- and that's only scratching the surface. Totally miss having kids the right age for going to the fair.

3. I'm still the only person in our community band that's willing to play the bells, so that is my main job. But I've also been drafted by another group to play the actual drums, so I've been learning-- snare drum and bass drum, and most intimidating of all, the drum set. I am not a good drummer. Or at least, not yet. I've been working my way through various rudiments, and I'm probably about as good as the aforementioned high school sophomore on snare. On drum set, I am kind of a disaster.

Last week, the dog. This week, the cat.

4. It is entirely different than playing a melodic instrument. In fact, it requires not just different physical skills, but an entirely different way of listening to music. Since I was a flute player and a member of a choir, I've spent my entire life listening for melodies and harmonies. PellMel played the bass, so I made a stab at learning to listen to a bass line, but even so, that is different than listening for the drums. Try it sometime. Drummers are amazing-- frequently their hands and feet are doing entirely different things. Sometimes it's hard to believe it's one person.

5. Honestly, every time I sit down at the drum set I am terrified. (We bought an ancient set for $250 that had been sitting in someone's garage and it is crappy, but sufficient for learning to push foot pedals at the same time that you are playing snare with one hand and high-hat cymbal with the other). I'm so afraid of the damn thing that it's hard to make myself practice. Progress has been slow. I think the people who asked me to play drums with them are starting to regret it-- even though I told them! I told them I was a rank beginner! I think they thought I was just being modest.

6. But I have come far enough that I no longer think of myself as a flute player, and that is cool. I'm not quite to the point where I think of myself as a drummer, but the days when I sat under the director's nose in the front row seem like a distant memory. There I am in the back with the drummers, hanging out in the percussion section. I love that.

Cool nest spotted right at eye level

7. OK, I think we've exhausted the topic of my drumming skills. Or lack thereof. What else can I tell you about for one more thing? Best books I've read this summer? Well, that's easy: The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai, is probably going to be my top book of the year. It's a heartbreaker (in the best sense) about the AIDS epidemic in Chicago in the mid-80s. It's a slow start, but once you get immersed in the story, it's terrific. My other two five-star reads probably aren't going to be for everybody-- The Friend by Sigrid Nunez will probably only work for people who have taken a creative writing class or hung out with creative writing students (??? not sure about that, I just know that reviews on goodreads are pretty evenly divided between people (like me) who found it thought-provoking and occasionally hilarious, and the people who thought it was a dead bore). And I just finished Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, a time travel novel published in 1992 that feels a bit dated (she couldn't imagine cell phones in 1992?), but still has Willis's trademark lovable characters and absurdist humor, even though reading it is sometimes like wading through jello.

OK, that's more than you wanted to know. Drum up a storm this weekend. (Not literally. Dean and MadMax are on a three-day float trip, so no storms allowed.)

7ToF: it's hot and I'm in a gripey mood

Black-eyed Susans
 from our garden

 1. Do you remember the months when I was griping about how cold it was and when would the weather ever get better? Yeah, well, now it's hot and I'm griping again. Dean says I have a two-degree range of comfort temperature-wise, and I suspect he's right.

2. A few weeks ago, when the weather finally got nice, there were a bunch of movies that I wanted to see, but it was so beautiful out after that long winter that we couldn't stand to spend our precious summer hours in a dark movie theater. Now that it's beastly hot and I would actually enjoy sitting in an air conditioned theater, there's nothing I want to see. Darn it.

3. I'm completely opposed to piracy of music, movies, books, and any kind of art. Use it legally. Pay for what you want to read or watch or listen to, or rent it or borrow it from a library. I've said it here before, and I'm saying it again.

4. But you know what makes me gripey? The assumption on the part of people who are outraged about piracy that every time someone illegally reads a book or downloads a movie or a song, it's a lost sale for the artist. I don't know that I've ever illegally downloaded anything, but back in the dark ages when we were making mix tapes on cassettes and passing them around, I wouldn't have bought that music. If I didn't have the tape, I would have just not had the music. I couldn't afford to buy that stuff. Sometimes I even recorded things off the radio, and I would be so mad when the DJ talked over the beginning or the end of the song. But I wouldn't have bought it. A pirated copy isn't always a lost sale.

Can you see what Sadie is staring at?

5. Speaking of legally listening to music, my kids convinced me to abandon Pandora and move over to Spotify. It's way better, mom, they told me. So I cancelled my Pandora membership and transferred over to Spotify. And I tried to like it, I really did. But either I never really figured out how to use it (entirely possible), or I am just a Pandora person. So I am back on Pandora.

6. Pandora lets you start a channel of music by choosing an artist or a song that is in the style you want, and then it magically plays other similar songs. If it plays one that you don't like, you press "thumbs down," and if there's one that you especially like, you press "thumbs up." So over time, Pandora learns what you like, and really it is kind of astonishing the way it chooses music to suit the channel you've created. For example, I have a channel that I started with James Taylor and Bonnie Raitt that plays 70s/80s soft rock, one that I started with the Oasis song "Wonderwall" that plays all my favorite 90s music, and one started with Lorde's song "Royals" that plays a really surprisingly good mix of music from when MadMax was in high school. #Pandoraforthewin

View through the binoculars

7. Back in the 80s, independent coffee shops and sandwich shops were springing up in college towns and tourist towns and it was something new and different. The menu was always on a chalk board, and there were quirky things on the menu that you'd never tried. Now that kind of place is practically a cliché, but once upon a time, they felt cutting edge. Anyway. Once in about 1985, we were at a café in the mountains in Vermont, and the chalk board menu described a sandwich called the "Four Fat Sandwich" that had bacon, cheddar cheese, avocado, and mayo. Possibly the best sandwich I've ever had. Thirty years later I still think about it --although now I would sub deli mustard for the mayo. #foodmemory

Huh. Well, that was a strange mix of stuff. What weird things have you been thinking about? Have a great weekend!