My So-Called Reading Life: 2022 Wrap-up

I read 92 books during 2022, which will seem like a lot to some of you, and laughably few to others. That's about the same as last year, but there was a major difference: in 2022, I did a lot of re-reading, especially during the summer. I was stressed about the wedding and I didn't have enough energy to tackle anything new or challenging, so I fell back on books I already knew I would love. 

So it was kind of a strange reading year. Another way that it was strange was that I didn't read anything that had that immediate knock-your-socks-off this is one of my all-time favorites feeling. Last year there was Deacon King Kong. The year before that, there were a bunch. This year, there were several good solid reads, but no real standouts. 

For the record, probably my favorites were The Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, Olympus, Texas by Stacey Swann, The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich, and Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Apparently I just read what everyone else is reading. Honorable Mention to What are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez, Hell of a Book by Jason Mott, and No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood.

Maybe the best book I read in 2022 was an oldie, A Visit From the Goon Squad (Jennifer Egan), that I finished about two days before the year ended. I didn't think I was going to like it because I'd heard so much about it and it didn't seem like my kind of book. But the sequel, The Candy House, came out in 2022, and it sounded intriguing. So I decided it was time. To my surprise, Goon Squad was great. Then I proceeded on to Candy House, which I didn't like quite as well, but they're both good. 

And the two of them together are astonishing. You can just breeze through them, and they would be great that way, but being as obsessive as I am, I spent a lot of time tracing the connections between the two. There are a lot of them. I have no idea how she kept track of everything while she was writing. I would have needed color-coded spreadsheets and half a dozen poster boards. (I just finished Candy House yesterday, so officially speaking it is on my 2023 list.)

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When I started this blog back in 2015, I was determined that it would not be a book blog. At the time, it seemed to me that there were thousands of bookish-women-of-a-certain-age who were writing book blogs. I haven't exactly avoided writing about books, obviously, especially not recently, but for the most part, I've stuck with my determination to keep the book talk to a minimum. 

Almost eight years later, hardly anyone is blogging about anything anymore, let alone books. And most of the writing I've done in the last few months has been the brief reviews I write on Goodreads for (almost) every book I read. 

They're only "brief" in that they aren't full-scale, professional-level book reviews, because some of them have ended up being pretty damn long, at least compared to the average Goodreads review. Since I haven't had all that much to post about here recently, I think I may back off on my determination to avoid being the stereotypical book blogger and start posting some of the more interesting ones here. You've been warned.

I was talking to some other book lovers last fall and mentioned that I review the books I read on Goodreads. They were a little put off by that, partly because Goodreads is owned by Amazon and we all know how problematic that is. But partly also because, as one of them put it, "I could never believe that anyone wanted to read my opinion about a book." 

Which is also true of me. I can never believe that either. But that's the thing about both Goodreads and blog posts--you're not forcing anyone to read them. I'm not even really expecting anyone to read them. I just like writing them. 

That Reminds Me of a Story™: about ten years ago, I was chatting with a woman sitting next to me at a writers conference. She told me that she was about to start a blog and she had a professionally designed logo and a tagline and a marketing campaign all lined up. I told her that I've had a blog since 2003 (there were three before this one), and she eagerly asked me for advice. Since my blog (and my Goodreads reviews) have never really attracted much attention, I was pretty sure I shouldn't be giving anyone advice, but I told her, well, it helps if you like to write. And honestly, from the look on her face, I'm not sure it had ever occurred to her that she was going to have to actually write posts if she wanted to have any content on her new blog.

I think I might have told you that story before, and come to think of it, she is probably killing it as an influencer on TikTok these days. 

I didn't quite make it through all the reading life topics I had in mind, so this may be continued next week. Or maybe we will move on to bigger and better things. Have a great weekend.

Reading Report 2020: part two, book report

At the end of the year, I always have a few books that stand out in my mind as the "best" books I read-- and "best" just means the ones that meant the most to me, or had the most effect on me, or that I was still thinking about days or weeks after I read them. Those books for this year:  

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo
Caste by Isabel Wilkerson
How to be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi
The Lager Queen of Minnesota by J. Ryan Stradal
The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune

Then there is a new-to-me category this year, books that I'm thinking of as "quirky-nerdy" that are my new favorite kind of book. They're smart and layered, but they have a sense of humor and a bit of optimism about the human race. I'm happier than I can tell you that I found books that were both literary and fun this year, although a bunch of them are not recent (which tells me maybe I've just been reading the wrong books).

Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson
Bellweather Rhapsody by Kate Racculia
The Grammarians by Cathleen Schine
Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem
Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple
    (I know, everyone else has already read it)

And there's always a few Sci-Fi/Fantasy:

The Wayfarers series by Becky Chambers
The Fifth Element by N.K. Jemisin
The Library at Mt. Char by Scott Hawkins
Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames

And then the promised romance novel titles. If you're not familiar with the terminology, m/m is male/male, m/f is male/female. (if you're searching for romance novels, you can use any combination of those to find what you want. Just so you know.)

The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJKlune, m/m
Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall, m/m
The Flatshare by Beth O'Leary, m/f
Red, White, and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston, m/m
Love Lettering by Kate Clayborn, m/f
Take a Hint, Dani Brown by Talia Hibbert, m/f
The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren, m/f
Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli, m/m

The re-reads that kept me going through lockdown: a half dozen Georgette Heyers, the first three Murderbot Diaries, and the Earthsea trilogy. And some good mysteries: Attica Locke, Elsa Hart's Li Du series, and I finally read a couple of Vera Stanhope mysteries and loved them. The classics I finally read this year: Mrs Dalloway, Go Tell it on the Mountain, Sister Outsider, This House of Sky.

I'm looking over my big list and realizing I could go on and on. So many good books this year. But that's enough. Check my goodreads page for more (if that link doesn't work, just search for Barb Nelson in Montana on the community page), where I write short reviews of every book I read (usually).

Reading Report 2020, part one: to read, or to watch? that is the question

Reading at the laundromat (RIP dryer)

(This post is about my reading year, a topic that sounds boring to me before I even start, and the next one will be actual book recommendations. You've been warned.)

One good thing about 2020--I read a lot more books than usual. The previous two years I'd been right at a hundred books; in 2020, I read 120. That might sound like a lot, but I've heard plenty from people who read two to three hundred during lockdown. That doesn't include the many that I started and didn't finish (was I the only one who couldn't settle on what I wanted to read? I feel like I bailed on two for every one I finished, but I don't know for sure since I don't usually track DNFs). 

During the spring, Doug was working longer hours than ever. He and the pandemic team at our hospital spent 10-12 hours a day, seven days a week, figuring out how our hospital would respond to COVID-19. Which meant that I was home alone, like a gazillion other people, for weeks on end. So I read.

I'm not sure I can explain why I prefer to read than watch TV. Since it's what I like, of course I think it's "better," but objectively, there's no reason for that. Plenty of people who are way smarter than me have said that the best writing and creative work of the past dozen years have been in television-- more than in movies (taken over by blockbusters and superheroes) or print (because serious literary fiction has become so dense and impenetrable that nobody wants to read it). 

TV feels like too much to me. It might even be a neurological thing. The way my brain is wired, the combination of visual stimuli and music and characters coming to life on the screen feels overwhelming, especially if those characters are being bullied or tortured or oppressed. It feels like I'm handing control of my brain over to someone else, opening the door and inviting in images of devastation and despair. It's too much. Things inside my brain are dark enough without inviting that stuff in.

So I'd rather sit with a book, preferably not one of the dense/miserable/despairing types. And anyway, it seems to me that there's been a movement away from literary despair in the past year or two. I read a handful of books this year that were intelligent, self-aware in literary terms, and fun to read. Ten or fifteen years ago, you couldn't claim to be a serious writer if your book ended in anything other than hopelessness. I think that's starting to change.

Of course, that has never been true of romance novels, and it's one of the reasons romance has been derided as frivolous and negligible. (It's also a typical strategy of the traditional patriarchy-- restrict women to the world of home and relationships, and then define any art that deals with home and relationships as unimportant or silly.) 

I've told you before that I am an ardent defender of people's right to read whatever the hell they want, whether that is a steady diet of romance novels or anything else. But I haven't been entirely forthcoming with my own reading of romance novels, because tbh I haven't read a romance published in the last few years that I liked. Readers of romance get enough criticism without me piling on, and if it's what you like, then it makes no difference what I think. So I just didn't say anything.

It seems to me that the current trends in romance are either to concentrate on the sexual attraction between the two characters almost to the exclusion of anything else (like a plot), or to use a strange type of narrative that irritates me no end-- there will be one line of dialog, then several paragraphs of interior monologue, then another line of dialog and a page and a half of interior monologue, and then another line of dialog.... etc. 

The first time I read one, I thought it was kind of odd, but okay, I can go along with this. But now it seems like every one I pick up is that way, and I am so done with it. Sometimes it feels like you've read a dozen pages for a five-minute conversation. Yawn. Other than the occasional novella that bucks the trend (for example), until recently it had been years since I read a currently published romance novel all the way through. It's really disappointing to me, because it used to be a reliable way to cheer me up-- a fun rom-com about people figuring out their relationship, with a happy ending. What's not to like? 

That seems to be changing, though. I read several romance novels I liked this year, and three that I loved. Two of them were by British authors (is that relevant?) and two of them were LGBTQ romances (is that relevant?). Titles to come. Stay tuned.

7ToF: an update on my efforts to de-plastic and de-Amazon my life, and a brilliant travel plan

1. You remember my New Year's resolve to cut down on single-use plastic (see the end of this post)? I'd give myself a B- on this so far. I've found some replacement products that are working well, and I've found them at Target, so you know that means that the anti-plastic movement has hit the middle class mainstream. So now I can usually (not always) avoid using ziplock bags. I'm partial to these brown paper sandwich bags because I can toss them and not have to bring home a dirty bag, but MadMax likes the reusable bags better (see photo).

I'm pretty consistent about using reusable bags for shopping and carrying my own water bottle. But that's about all I've done. I need to get back to putting energy into this. I confess I bought some reusable produce bags that are still in the box.

2. I'm not doing so well on disentangling myself from Amazon (if you missed the post on why I'm trying to avoid Amazon, it is here). There are so many things that we just can't get around here even when there's not a pandemic, and the shutdown definitely made it worse. I buy local when I can, and I've ordered stuff from Target, Wal-Mart, etc. when I can't. But I've also ordered stuff from the Big A. ("A" can stand for whatever you want to insert there, depending on mood.)

3. On the other hand, I am doing much better about not buying books from Amazon. I think I've only ordered one physical book from them in the past six months. Bookshop.org is great, and they've become my go-to for ordering actual physical books. They redistribute their profits among independent booksellers. It's not as fast as Amazon, but I rarely need the books on my doorstep in 48 hours. 

4. I was so committed to cutting back on my reliance on Amazon that I bought a refurbished Nook, Barnes&Noble's e-reader, in an effort to quit buying new books for my Kindle. It works fine, but I have to tell you there is no comparison between a Nook and a Kindle. The Kindle is more thoughtfully designed, has better back-lighting, and feels about three times faster. So I'm conflicted about this. Kindle e-readers are a good product that I really enjoy and use the heck out of. I'm hoping that recent pressure from publishers and maybe even some thoughtful legislation will level the playing field so that I can keep using my Kindle without feeling guilty about it, because I do love it. It's complicated.

5. One of my Instagram friends posted a picture of a trip to Barbados that she took a couple of years ago, mourning our inability to travel. I was suddenly struck by an intensity of longing to go somewhere that was so strong it was almost physically painful. God, I miss traveling. SO. MUCH. But then I had a brilliant idea. For me, about half the fun of travel is planning the trip, so what if I go ahead and plan a trip? Maybe we'll never actually do it, but I can order the books and do internet research and make a plan. I'm so excited about this. It is actually pretty difficult to get to the Caribbean from here (as opposed to Hawaii or Mexico, which are two short plane flights away), so maybe I will even take advantage of the fantasy aspect and plan a trip to Barbados. Or Turks & Caicos. Or St. Lucia. I don't know. I'm just getting started. 

6. A friend of mine told me recently that her GI doctor told her she should be taking a probiotic. I nodded along, half-listening, because I've been taking a probiotic off and on for years. I even buy the refrigerated kind. But then she said he told her it has to be a particular brand, Culturelle. And then she said, I've been taking it for a month now and it's like my metabolism is working again. Well, enough said, because we all know what it feels like to have your metabolism slooooooooow doooooown. Good grief. So I trotted off the next day to Target (they also have it at Costco, I haven't looked anywhere else), and I've been taking it for three weeks now, and I have to agree. I have no studies, nothing but my friend's anecdotal evidence and my own. But it's definitely worth a try. Also, it doesn't have to be refrigerated, so I actually remember to take it since it's in the same place as my other meds/vitamins.

7. This week's movie worth re-watching: Galaxy Quest. If you didn't like it the first time, re-watching won't change your mind, but it's one of our family favorites and it had been too long since we'd seen it. By Grabthar's hammer, what a savings. oh lord, do I love Alan Rickman. I could go on and on about lines that have entered our family conversations, sometimes without us even remembering where they came from. Those poor people. Could you fashion some sort of rudimentary lathe? Hey, I'm just jazzed to be on the show. That was a hell of a thing. And of course, Sigourney Weaver's classic, Look, I've got one job to do on this ship. It's stupid, but I'm going to do it.

Have a great weekend.

Day 18: in which I bore you because I am bored: Georgette Heyer, audiobooks, and free samples

After a quick scroll through bookstagram, it's obvious that almost universally, book lovers are having trouble reading anything but comfort reads. A few people are looking for thrillers or true crime to keep them sucked into a story, but most of us just want to read something that feels positive and leaves us feeling uplifted instead of despairing.

In the past few weeks, I've re-read a favorite series from childhood (Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula LeGuin), Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell, and a couple of romance novels (Red, White, and Royal Blue and Love Lettering) that worked for that. Also The Lager Queen of Minnesota, which isn't exactly a comfort read, but has lovable characters who have to deal with a variety of different (occasionally hilarious) life situations, and resolves in a thoroughly satisfying way.

But really, what I'm mainly doing is re-reading Georgette Heyer. You may remember my first obsession with her if you've been around for awhile. She's not a perfect writer-- you have to forgive her inordinate love of exclamation points, and you have to be able to skim over her sometimes excessive use of period slang. But once you get past those flaws, they're so much fun. Some of them I would say even qualify as romps.

Stack of books by Georgette Heyer

This time around, I started with Black Sheep, which wasn't one of my top favorites, but I remembered liking it. It worked so well that I moved on to Reluctant Widow. Now I'm reading Cotillion, which is one of my top faves of hers. Maybe my #1 favorite.

The problem with Cotillion is that there's vast cast of characters, and it takes awhile to figure out who's important and how they are related to each other. Kitty, an orphan who has lived for years with her miserly, wealthy guardian, is outraged when he more or less puts her up on the marriage auction block to his grand nephews. Since she is penniless on her own, she comes up with a plot to get at least a month in London, a last moment of freedom, before she has to accept the inevitable and figure out what she's going to do. Of course that gets more and more complicated, and then she meets other people and gets involved in their complications, and the whole thing is just a delight.

Spoiler alert: it ends happily for everyone; well, except for the people who deserve what they get.

And, bonus: the audiobooks are fabulous. The narrator of Cotillion, Phyllida Nash, is a genius. I made Dean listen to it the other night while we were working on a jigsaw puzzle, and he was so hooked that he ended up reading the whole thing. Just give it time, because it takes awhile to get oriented to all the characters, and Kitty's complicated plans.

And here is a clue for taking advantage of Amazon. Amazon has always allowed you download a free sample of a kindle ebook or an audiobook (through their subsidiary, Audible). The audiobook samples stream, and even if you don't have a kindle, you can download the kindle app and take advantage of the free samples. It usually amounts to about 20 pages of an ebook, or about five minutes of an audiobook. Why not use them?

I've had it work both ways--sometimes the five minute sample of an audiobook helps me get into a print book I'm having trouble with (for example, Gods in Alabama). Sometimes the 25 page sample of the ebook helps me get a complicated cast of characters straight when the audiobook feels like chaos (for example, And Then There Were None, which is ably read by Dan Stevens, but introduces so many characters in the first chapter that I was bewildered until I was able to read the print version).

That's it for me today. Thank you for letting me go on and on, since I am now considerably less bored than I was yesterday. Did I tell you yet that MadMax came home on Friday? Our internet may not be up to the task of his online classes, but he had had enough of living alone in an apartment during shelter in place. It's nice to have some company.

The Amazon dilemma

I'll admit it, I started out as a huge Amazon fan. When they first opened in 1994, they sold books, every book you could imagine, and that was all they sold for a few years. We did have a local bookstore back then (in fact, we had two, a B. Dalton at our tiny mall and an indie) and I bought books at those places, too. But as a nerd and a night owl, with small children to boot, I was so happy to have a place that was available 24-hours a day where I could browse books, order them at a discount, and read other people's opinions and reviews.

Back then it was a brand new thing that people could post honest reviews about what they were reading, and they did. A quite fervent bookish community built up--it was as if all of us introvert nerds had been waiting for Amazon. And then they came out with the kindle, and even though it took years, eventually I became a kindle convert (I've written about that before).

Our B.Dalton closed in the 90s at some point, and the indie soon after (I'm terrible at remembering dates, so that may not be exactly right). A lot of indies closed around that time, and although that gets blamed on Amazon, in my personal experience, a lot of them were on the verge of closing anyway, and they just used Amazon as the big bad guy excuse. I never got the sense that Amazon was purposely undermining local retailers. They offered a service, and made it convenient, and I used it.

But gradually that started to change. First there started to be fake reviews. Amazon changed the rules so that you had to admit it in the review if the review had been solicited, but still. There was no real effort on Amazon's part to stop people from gaming the review system, and as far as I can tell, there still isn't.

Then there occasionally started to be small "mistakes," like recently when the rating for a book in a popular author's catalog was incorrectly linked to a highly rated unrelated product. Oops! It was obviously a "mistake," but if you saw the 4.8 star rating and didn't click on the link and scroll down to read the reviews, you'd have never known. You'd just assume the book had a 4.8 (out of five) rating. Maybe it was an honest mistake. Maybe it wasn't.

And then last fall, Amazon "accidentally" shipped Margaret Atwood's new book a week early. Oops!! they said. Blush!! We screwed up! Technical error! But come on. They shipped thousands of copies of a highly anticipated book--possibly the most highly anticipated book of last year-- and nobody noticed that they were shipping it a week early? I don't believe it.

And they didn't stop shipping it, either, once it became clear what had happened. People who were anxious to get their hands on it canceled their local indie order and got it early. I know that happened at least once because I heard a woman sheepishly admit on a podcast that she had done it. (It was a podcast that I was trying out for the first time, and it was one of the hosts, and between that and the constant fake laughing, I've never listened to it again.)

Finally, I'm done giving them the benefit of the doubt. That was clearly an attempt by Amazon to undermine local independent booksellers. It made me a little sick to my stomach.

So what to do. I still live in a town without a bookstore. We have a wonderful local library, and I use it, but it's a small town library and their selection isn't always the greatest. I make my semi-annual trek to the bookstore in the next town over, and even though they rarely have what I want, I buy stuff to help keep them in business. I also buy books from indie bookstores when we're traveling.

But I read a lot. My current solution has been to order from other retailers. Powell's is good, and they ship promptly. Like Amazon, they stock both new and used books. I also paid the annual membership at Barnes&Noble so I could get free shipping from them. (How crazy is it that buying books from Barnes & Noble now seems like a subversive act? I seriously do not want Barnes & Noble to go out of business.)

When I use up my current Audible credits, I'm probably going to switch to Libro.fm, an audiobook site that allows you to buy through your favorite independent bookstore. (Audible is owned by Amazon.) Since I don't store audiobooks on my phone the way I store ebooks on my kindle, that won't be a difficult switch to make. And over a year ago, I stopped buying anything else (besides books, I mean) from Amazon unless it was something I couldn't get locally.

But I still buy kindle books from Amazon, mostly when they're on sale. I've got too much invested in my kindle to stop doing that, and I've never seen another e-reader that I like as well.  And honestly, I still sometimes buy other non-book things from them, too. It's convenient when you live in northwest Montana.

I guess I've reluctantly, imperfectly joined the #notAmazon crowd. I'm so disappointed in them. They used to be the shining beacon of what an internet retailer could be, but they've turned out to be just as coldly money-hungry and profit-maximizing as everybody else. Maybe they were always that way and I was just naive, but I'm telling myself that it's only been the last half-dozen years or so and I've just been slow to realize it. Good-bye, Amazon. I loved you while it lasted.

7ToT: Bouchercon trip report

1. Bouchercon 2019 was fun. In fact, if you're a book lover, there's probably not much that's more fun than going to a book convention. Everyone around you is as big a nerd as you are. Bouchercon is devoted to the world of mysteries, which they define broadly as anything that involves a crime. So there were authors and readers of everything from thrillers to cozies, and a broad array of panels to match.

Convention Pro Tip #1: Know how to pronounce the convention name. The "boucher" in Bouchercon rhymes with "voucher." It is named after a devoted mystery writer, editor, and critic named Anthony Boucher. Fortunately, I heard someone else say it before I embarrassed myself too badly.

2. It was in Dallas this year, so I spent the first half of the week in East Texas with my mom and sister, and then drove to Dallas on Thursday (because, like a dummy, I didn't read the schedule ahead of time, so I didn't realize there was a full day of activities on Wednesday). 

Convention Pro Tip #2: Look over the schedule before you go. Duh.

3. It was really remarkably well-run, especially since it is done entirely by volunteers. My only complaint is that there was no way you could get to all the panels you wanted to hear. There were seven or eight going on at any given time, and you can only go to one at a time. I think my favorite was the one with a retired trauma surgeon, a forensic scientist, a molecular biologist, and a cop, who talked about things that writers get wrong in books and movies/TV. They were great--very funny, very talkative. That one could have gone on for a couple of hours, easy.

4. Book conventions are great if you want to meet authors. Sandra Brown was there, and Charlaine Harris, Elizabeth George, Rhys Bowen, Laurie R. King, Sherry Thomas, Kellye Garrett, Julia Spencer-Fleming, and dozens more. Of course, you already know I'm way too shy to approach an author on my own, so I only met two.* My friend Karen introduced me to Laurie R. King, author of the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series, who is just as lovely in person as I expected from reading her books (I'm on #8). And I bolstered my courage and stood in line to meet Christine Carbo, who lives one town over here in Montana. I don't know why I'm so scared to walk up and introduce myself, because both of them were very nice.

* three, if you count Julia Spencer-Fleming, who struck up a conversation with several of us in the elevator while I tried not to hyperventilate. I managed not to squee until I got back to my room. But we didn't exchange names, I only knew who she was because I could see her nametag.

part of my #bookhaul

5. At Bouchercon, you get four coupons when you check in, and then you get to go to the Book Bazaar and pick out FOUR FREE BOOKS. Pro Tip #3: get there early on the first day. I didn't get there until late afternoon the second day, so it was a little picked over. But even then there were two books that I really did want, and somehow I managed to pick out two more. Then I bought three more at the paid book area, and bought three more at Half-Price Books (the flagship Half-Price Books is in Dallas, and it is huge). I could barely get my suitcase shut, even with the extension unzipped.

6. Which means that all that good work that I did at the beginning of the year with not buying new books is now shot to hell. Especially because I bought two before I even made it to Dallas, and three a couple of weeks ago in Phoenix that I haven't found shelf space for yet. Oh, well. I'm not feeling particularly upset about it, as you can tell.

Most Memorable Line of the Weekend: Sherry Thomas, in a panel on Women in Sherlock: "Let's face it, the original Sherlock stories are competence porn." 

7. There were plenty of breaks in the schedule, including an hour-long lunch break, so it wasn't nearly as exhausting as it could have been. But at lunch time, everyone wants lunch, and the restaurants in the convention center were packed. This particular hotel only had one nearby restaurant, and everybody knew about it, so it wasn't much better. Next time I do this, because I definitely want to do this again, I need a better supply of snacks. I ran out by my second day. In fact, since there was a fridge in my room, I should have just brought some food. Pro Tip #4: Bring snacks, more than you think you need.

That's everything I can think of about Bouchercon. Hope you get to go some day!

7ToF: BETWEEN TRIPS, which means I am both happy to be traveling, and also completely nuts

Very cool succulents at Desert Botanical Garden

1. We went to Phoenix last weekend for a trip that was business for Dean, and nothing but fun for me. I wish we could do that more often-- Dean's air fare, the rental car, and the hotel room were paid for, we just have to pay for my airfare, food, and all the books I bought. Then on Monday, I'm headed to Texas to spend a few days with my mom and then go to Dallas for the big mystery readers/writers convention, Bouchercon. I've never done anything like this and I'm really excited about it. I will report back.

2. Highly recommend Washington Black by Esi Edugyan. It's the story of Wash, a young boy who starts life as a slave on a sugar plantation. The brother of the plantation owner takes him on, and then the two of them are forced to flee when Wash is implicated in the death of a white man. It obviously has some parts that are difficult to read, but for those of us who are Highly Sensitive Readers (a title I claim with some embarrassment), it's readable. You can do it. Edugyan's writing is wonderful, the voice of Wash is mesmerizing.

3. But I was struck by something that I guess is a sign of the times. (Minor spoilers ahead) Wash starts a relationship with a young woman several years after his escape. Even though they are clearly living together, at no point do they worry about getting pregnant. I've noticed this in various historical romances, too. Even though there weren't really any effective methods of birth control in the nineteenth century, somehow the author projects her own lack of worry about pregnancy back onto her characters. It is so weird. In my generation, as soon as you became sexually active, you worried about getting pregnant. Even when I was married, I worried somewhat obsessively about getting pregnant when I didn't want to. But apparently, today's young women are so confident in their birth control options that they don't know what that obsessive dread of getting pregnant is like.

4. On the one hand, I'm really happy about this. Women will never achieve economic stability if they can't control when they get pregnant, and this tells me that we're getting there. These young women don't seem to know the psychic burden of worrying about getting pregnant. That is great. But on the other hand, it's so not accurate. The consequences of an accidental unwanted pregnancy back then would have been enormous.

I guess it's the same argument as using a Bible that has the pronouns updated to be more inclusive, or Hamilton, where we are reimagining the past the way it should have been. And I am entirely in favor of both of those, so I think I am deciding that this is a good thing.

5. You know what I am tired of? (this is starting to be a regular topic: things that make me grumpy) I am tired of obsessing about skincare. MY GOD. I have a skincare routine--it even has several more steps to it than it did when I was in my 30s and all I had to worry about was preventing breakouts. So it's not that I'm completely uninterested in the topic. But suddenly it seems to have become The Thing to obsessively listen to skin care podcasts and read blog posts and spend hundreds of dollars on trying out new products. It's ridiculous. There are no men who are doing this. It is just women. What is it with us?

6. But now that I've said that *blush* I have to confess that I did a three-week test of a new skin care product someone raved about on buzzfeed. The skin of my chest, which I think we are supposed to call our décolletage, is covered in moles, age spots, dark patches, and red dots (yes, the dermatologist did tell me the technical name and no, I cannot remember it). The dermatologist told me that it's just the joys of aging, and we have to claim our wisdom and our years and whatever other bullshit they tell you, and there was nothing to be done. The downside of a northern European gene pool, I guess. I don't very often envy younger women, except when I see someone with a perfectly smooth décolletage. Then I want to scratch her eyes out.

7. So anyway. I tried Stila's One Step Correct ($36 at Ulta) for three weeks. I even took before and after pictures so I could tell what really happened, and as you might be able to predict, there is not a chance in hell I am posting them. But you know what? While it made zero difference in the number of moles/spots/skin tags, it made a huge difference in how my skin looks. I was, honestly, kinda shocked, because I am a pretty big skeptic about skin stuff. I'm going to keep using it. That particular product may not work for you, but I guess I can't turn my nose up at people who are trying different things, because sometimes you find something that helps.

That's it for me. Have a great weekend.

My So-Called Reading Life, Part I Stopped Counting: Bookstagram and Reading Challenges

I've been on Instagram for awhile now. I like it better than Facebook, because for people my age--or at least, among my friends-- it isn't about presenting your best fake self, it's about pictures of grandkids and craft projects and vacations. And we don't usually write long captions, so there's not much in the way of opinions and rants. In other words, it's the way FB used to be.

Matilda, for a book and ice cream prompt

Then last year I discovered #bookstagram, which isn't a separate app, it's just a hastag within instagram. People post pictures of their books or their bookshelves or their bookish stuff. For booknerds, it is totally fun.

I've enjoyed it enough that I've created a separate account for it (@bookspate). Finding people my age with my interests is not exactly easy, but I've found a few who are my age-ish and who love to read. Some of them take amazing photos, and some just snap a pic of what they're reading next to a cup of coffee. It's fun.

And I've discovered to my surprise that it's really fun to mess around with my way-too-many books and my way-too-many tchotchkes and take pictures of them. (The photos in this post are from my bookstagram account.) Weird, yes, but I suppose there are stranger hobbies. I just don't know what they are.

Reading challenges: In a reading challenge, someone comes up with a list of somewhat arbitrary categories--a book with a blue cover, a book set in Asia, a book that was published in the year you were born-- and challenges you to read something in each category within a certain amount of time, usually a year.

The first one I ever saw, maybe four or five years ago, was PopSugar's (their most recent challenge is here), and I thought it was a great idea. I printed out the list at the end of December, set it on my desk, and promptly forgot all about it.

The whole point of a reading challenge is to get you to read more, and since I already read plenty--some might say, and do, too much-- I then decided that I wouldn't do reading challenges.

But somewhere on Instagram I found Book Challenge by Erin. Twice a year, you're supposed to read ten books in four months. At the time, I was looking for a way to motivate myself to read some books that had been on my shelves for far too long, so I decided to try it.

I'm in the middle of my second time, and it is working well for me. It's run through Facebook and I know that's an immediate no for several of you. But if the idea of a book challenge appeals, there are dozens of them out there (google "reading challenges"), so keep looking until you find the one that works for you.

Favorite books-into-movies prompt

I think a year was too long a time frame for me. Ten books in four months is do-able, but it's a short enough time period that I have to get to work on it. Having an accountability system to get specific books read has worked great.

The only problem is that there are sometimes categories that are (for me) a little obscure, so I end up picking a book that I don't really care about just to finish the challenge. For example, in the current challenge, one of the categories is "a book with 'rain,' 'lightning' or 'thunder' in the title," and I don't have a single unread book on my shelves that meets the criteria.

I picked up a used copy of James Lee Burke's Rain Gods, but it is now my tenth book of the current challenge, and I cannot get excited about reading it (unlike several other non-challenge books I have on my TBR pile).

Should I read it and finish the challenge? or bag the challenge and read something I really want to read? There's no penalty if I don't finish, of course, just my own personal need for completion.

Black and white #bookstack prompt

I'm going to start it next weekend and see how it goes. Maybe I will discover an untapped love for James Lee Burke, who lives part of the year near Missoula and is considered one of our own around here. I just don't usually read thrillers. (Is it a thriller? police procedural? I actually don't know. I guess I'll find out.)

Every time I write the last 'reading life' post, I think up six more things to say, so I think I will stop numbering them as part 4, part 5, etc. and post them occasionally.

Have a great day.

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

My So-Called Reading Life, part 2: ratings

There has been a push recently among some readers to stop rating books. It's not fair to authors, the argument goes, because ratings have become disproportionately important in determining all kinds of things in this age of data mining--things like product placement and print runs and search result standings.

What could mean nothing to you-- a bad rating that you gave on a day when you were already in a bad mood-- could mean all kinds of dire things for a self-published author who is trying to make a living in competition with publishing conglomerates.

And also, if you find someone who is clever enough to know how to get away with it (they're definitely out there), and you can afford to pay for it, the system can be gamed by posting fake reviews--either positive for your own products, or negative for your competitors.

They have a point. But with all the book ratings I've seen and reader reviews I've read, I've only seen one example where I felt like there was a serious misuse of the system.* I've read about a few others, but overall, I'm not convinced there's a problem here. Generally speaking, good books have good ratings.

So I use the star rating system on Goodreads. It's useful to me. At the end of the year when I'm trying to remember my favorite books, or when I'm having coffee with a friend and she wants to know what's the best book I've read in the past couple of months, I can just scan down the list on my phone. Otherwise I'd have to go through and read the individual reviews to remember what the book was about.

And if you're thinking, if you can't remember the book three months later, it must not have been that great, you have a point. But I also think that if you thought that, you are under the age of fifty. Half the time I can't remember my children's names and birthdays if I'm put on the spot, let alone the name of that great book I read a month ago.

The Goodreads system is one star (not good) to five stars (great). The stars, of course, mean different things to different people and I'm no exception. My concession to the people who are worried about authors' feelings is that I almost never give below a three-star rating.

My rating system is: three stars=meh, four stars=liked it, five stars=loved it. It works for me. For the most part, if I don't like a book, I stop reading it, so those books don't make it onto my Goodreads shelves anyway.

When I first started using Goodreads, I thought I needed to give low star ratings to lower quality books because I had to prove to the world that I have good taste. But a couple of years ago I realized how nonsensical it was to give a three-star rating to a book I loved just because it was genre fiction.

So, now my ratings are purely based on how much I liked the book-- although I'm unlikely to enjoy a really dumb book, so there's that. In my last three books, I gave a four-star rating to both Evvie Drake Starts Over (a rom com) and Life After Life (literary fiction), and a three-star rating to The Idiot (brilliantly intelligent, but tedious to read and ultimately--in my opinion--clichéd). If that offends your literary sensibilities, you are welcome to not look at them.

(My Goodreads page, which I forgot to give you in Part One.)

* it was a YA book published by a Big5 publisher that had a suspicious number--like hundreds-- of short five-star reviews like "Loved it!" or "Great book!" compared to dozens of one- and two-star ratings with long, passionate reviews by readers who felt betrayed by the author over a controversial ending. It was hard not to think that the publisher had somehow used a bot to stack in the positive reviews in an attempt to gloss over an almost universally reviled ending.

My So-Called Reading Life, part 1

I kicked off the summer with a bunch of 4- and 5-star reads-- in fact, if you go back to the last week of May, there have been TEN. That is unheard of for me. I was thinking smug thoughts. I've got this book picking thing nailed!!

But then I read four that weren't so great, three of them back to back, so it must have just been coincidence. That sounds like a lot of reading to some of you--doesn't she have anything real to do?  (hey! I've been on vacation! and there were four days of airports and planes!). Others are thinking only a dozen books so far this summer? slacker!!  

Whichever category you fit into, this post and the next one or maybe two are about reading, tracking your reading, reviewing books, figuring out what to read, bookstagram, etc etc. You've been warned.

Years ago, I spent quite a bit of time agonizing over the "right" way to do book reviews. One of the main reasons I started blogging lo, these many years ago, was because I wanted someplace to write about my reactions to the books I read. I don't know many readers around here, and even fewer who share my tastes.

But I got a fair amount of pushback when I posted negative reviews. And since it was much more fun to snark about books I didn't like than prosing on about books I did, the negative reviews tended to be longer and funnier and more numerous.

But what about the author's feelings? I heard. Don't you need to be respectful of the author and all the hard work they put into writing a book? And honestly, I have to say that had never even occurred to me.

First of all, in my mind, authors were godlike creatures that exist in some kind of Elysian Fields where they are far too lofty to notice individual book reviews. And secondly, if they did happen to read my review, why would they care what I think? I'm just a lone reader in the hinterlands of Montana. What possible difference could it make what I think about their book?

But once it was pointed out to me, I got it. If I were an author, I could scan through thirty positive reviews and smile, but it would be the one negative review, no matter who wrote it, that would stick in my craw. So in spite of the unlikelihood of an author running across something that I wrote here in this little space, I quit reviewing books-- other than telling you when I read something I loved, like Less or The Intuitionist.

Unfortunately, reviewing books in my blog was how I had been tracking my reading. I needed a replacement for that, so after trying several different things, I've ended up using Goodreads. I signed up for it ages ago but never did anything more than poke around until a couple of years ago. At first I just marked the books I read and gave them a star-rating (more about stars in Part Two).

Then last year I started adding short reviews. I'm pretty sure that no one reads them, but it helps me to remember what I read and why I liked it (or didn't). No matter how negative I am, there are always a bunch of reviews that are far more negative (Goodreads reviewers can be vicious), so I don't have to worry about posting negative reviews anymore-- although I do try to be polite and respectful.

A quick review only takes a few minutes (usually), and I love being able to refer back to them. Since the Goodreads app is on my phone, it's easy to do no matter where I finish a book (on vacation, sitting in a doctor's office, in bed in the middle of the night)--unlike a journal or notebook or a file on my laptop. I can mark a book as read and give it a star rating in less than a minute, and seeing it there reminds me to write a review later.

I know some of you refuse to have anything to do with Amazon, and Goodreads is owned by Amazon, so there's that. But you don't buy anything on Goodreads, so I think their profit is mainly from advertising. Presumably they're hoping you'll learn about great books on Goodreads and then buy them on Amazon, but for the most part, I no longer buy books on Amazon.

Yep, you read that right. I check out kindle books from my library, and I buy books at indie bookstores when we're traveling, and at Target and Costco when we're not-- they're not indies, but they are local and create local jobs, etc. (We don't have an independent retail bookstore in our town, as I've told you a bazillion times now, although we do have a lovely, very good used bookshop.) The only exceptions are for gifts, and also I subscribe to a couple of "kindle deals" newsletters, so I buy kindle versions of books I want when they're on sale for $1.99 or whatever.

This is entirely too much on this topic, but believe it or not, I'm not even close to done. Enneagram 5: loves to go on and on about topics they're interested in, even if their listeners' eyes are glazing over. I will move on to more interesting things soon. (More interesting to you, but probably not to me-- I can't tell you how much time I spend thinking about this stuff.)

7ToF: Dooooo Yooooour Ears Hang Low, do they wobble to and fro?

Can you tie them in a knot, can you tie them in a bow?

It's possible I spent too many years at camp.

1. This is a No-Shame Zone (NSZ) for people with weirdly shaped ear canals. I can't possibly be the only person that can't keep earbuds in their ears, can I? I look at people wearing $200 airpods and think, well, that would be $200 down the drain for me. I'd lose them in twenty minutes. Maybe five.

2. But you know-- bluetooth listening is pretty appealing. I like listening to audiobooks and podcasts while I'm doing stuff around the house, and it's a lot simpler with something I can wear rather than something I have to carry around from room to room. So, as long as I'm not being too active, these work (they're wired to each other, but not to my phone). The rubber inserts keep them in my ears in a way those slick airpods can't match (and they're one-tenth the price, too). The link is to Amazon, which I know some of you don't like, but the only other place I can find them is on eBay.

(For the record, I am not an Amazon affiliate, I've never had the patience to sit down and figure out how to set it up. In other words, I don't make any money when you click on a link in my blog.)

3. Let's talk about Amazon. The more I find out about their business practices, the more disturbed I am about supporting them. But on the other hand, I can't tell you what an amazing resource Amazon has been for someone who loves to read but lives in a town without a bookstore (I've talked about this before, here). When my kids were little, and Amazon only sold books (remember way back when?), it was a miracle for me to be able to get online, scroll through a practically infinite number of books, and have what almost felt like a conversation about books by scrolling through reviews.

4. But I get it. Amazon is changing retail on a global level, often in ways that are destroying other legitimate businesses. I stopped buying anything from Amazon that I could get locally over a year ago, and I check our library website first for Kindle books. I do my best to support independent bookstores whenever I can (including the snobs at the bookstore in the town to our north, and the used bookstore here in our town, neither of which ever seems to have the books I want).

5. TV report: I've watched a few Dr. Who episodes over the years, but I've never really qualified as a Whovian. But we caught the pilot of the new series last fall, with Jodie Whittaker as the first female Doctor, and really liked it. So I set our DVR to record any Dr. Who episode it could find, and we now have over 140 episodes to watch. We're slowly working our way through them and becoming bigger fans with every one. I need a Tardis.

6. I went to Texas last week for my mom's 83rd birthday and my older sister's 60th birthday. I'm only two years younger than my sister, so 60 is definitely on my horizon. I can't say I'm exactly happy about it, but I don't think it will bother me as much as 50 did. If you've been around for awhile, you lived through that with me so I don't think we need to go there again. Anyway. The trip was fun and it was nice to be out of winter for a few days. It wasn't exactly tropical down there but there was no snow and the sun came out enough times to make me happy.

7. One midlife topic we haven't discussed much around here is caring for aging parents, and it's because I haven't had to do much of it. My dad passed away in 2011, well-cared for by his wife. My mom still lives independently, and although I can tell she's slowing down a bit, she's still sharp enough to be writing books. She's getting ready to self-publish her fourth novel. She's amazing. But she's not very mobile. She can still walk short distances, but she uses a cane. And I think she's in a lot more pain than she lets on. The last morning I was there, I asked her what hurt the most, since I know she's had trouble with her ankles, knees, and hips. She paused a minute, and then sort of laughed a little and said, "Well, you know, really I'm just kind of miserable." I'm a little self-conscious when I'm with her to be able to stride along, moving fast, walking and walking and walking with no conscious effort.

So our moment of gratitude for this week is for walking. If you can still walk with ease, don't take it for granted. Enjoy every minute.

Have a great weekend. It's good to be back, although I'm not promising to post regularly.

7ToF: make it so, number one

1. We've all sometimes seen the disconnect between someone's online presentation and their real life. Some present a carefully curated front to the world, some seem to be genuinely themselves, although I suppose you can never really know how real it is. Here, in this blog, I hope you can tell that I make no claims that this is an accurate representation of my life-- it's just whatever I'm thinking about at the time I'm writing.

2. But in case it isn't obvious, I have bad days. Weeks. Dean and I have rough patches in our marriage, more often than we probably should after 34 years of marriage. I sometimes lose sleep worrying about my kids. I can drive myself to distraction obsessively trying to figure out what I'm doing next-- back to work? more volunteer work? three months in the UK? (you have no idea how much that last one tempts me). There are days when I have a hard time thinking of a reason to get out of bed.

3. Some people-- for example, the Bloggess-- can turn their bad days/weeks/childhood into hilarious, touching, meaningful posts, but when I try to do it, it turns out maudlin and boring. It bores me, so lord knows I'm not inflicting it on you. At least not very often. But in case you can't tell, it seems important to put it out there. I don't think I'm projecting an image of a perfect life here, but if I am, now you know. Things can be (and often are) a mess around here. So there. That's enough about that.

4. I don't do New Year's resolutions because I can never keep them, but having a theme, something I want to work on, has been a good thing in the past. My word/theme for 2019 is action. Be active. Take action. Participate. Engage rather than observe. Do instead of think. Or at least, don't just think. Maybe engage is a more succinct way of putting it, and it has the additional benefit of invoking Captain Picard, which is never a bad thing, right?

5. About this time last year, I read Dan Harris's book 10% Happier, where he describes how he has used meditation to cope with anxiety and stress. He talks about one of his mentors, Mark Epstein, in a way that intrigued me, and I just finished reading Epstein's book Advice Not Given. I'm gradually becoming convinced that a more serious meditation practice than my usual half-assed attempts would be a good thing for me, but I think I need a little more structure than just thinking, hey! I should meditate more often! So I've been poking around various meditation apps and I downloaded Dan's 10% Happier app a few days ago. So far, I like it. I'll let you know how it goes.

6. I think I told you awhile ago about hearing Whitney from the Unread Shelf Project on Anne Bogel's podcast What Should I Read Next. I think last year when I started on Bookstagram (a subset of Instagram found by following the hashtag #bookstagram), I became much more aware of new books that were being published, and pretty editions of old books, and instead of buying fewer books last year I think *cringe* I actually bought more. So inspired by Whitney, I'm renewing my intention from last year to not buy new books and instead read the ones I've got.

7. Because I have lots of good books sitting on my shelves that I want to read. Step one of the #unreadshelfproject2019 is to count the number of unread books you have. So I did this yesterday. I didn't count books that belong to other family members, and I didn't count ebooks. My number: 172, which is considerably fewer than I thought it would be. Which makes this seem like a much more doable project. I'm not going to get them all read this year, of course, but I can cross a few off the list. And I can use the money I would have spent on books to save for the trip to the UK, right?

What are your plans for the new year?

Previous posts about New Year's:
be forewarned that as long and wordy as my posts are now, they used to be worse.
New Year's Not Resolution (2010)
Six Days into 2014
Last year's offline experiment (2018)

7ToF: recreation of a post that disappeared

I got my Seven Things on Friday post done down through #6, and then I lost it. This has happened once or twice before, and I do not understand it. It is so frustrating, because I've been sitting here for over an hour and I thought I was almost done and now I have to freaking start over. UGH. This was worded more gracefully in the original.

1. It's fall. It's gorgeous. I like it.

2. A woman on Instagram posted that sometimes with book-to-film adaptations, when she isn't sure if she wants to read the book, she goes to see the movie first. Thus breaking the ancient law of all book snobs: Read The Book First. I had Crazy Rich Asians in my To Be Read (TBR) pile and I wasn't sure if I wanted to read it, because maybe it would reinforce Asian stereotypes.

3. So I decided to try her idea and go see the movie before I read the book. The movie is fun-- both Dean and I enjoyed it. And I see her point, because now I feel no need to read the book. And since I always have too many books to read, that is a good thing. New opinion: sometimes it is OK to see the movie first.

4. blah blah blah about how painful the issue of body weight is for women our age.

5. This week's interesting thing around the internet: an article that rounds up a bunch of research and makes a pretty clear case that our current thinking about obesity is counter-productive, although the title is a little exaggerated: Everything You Know About Obesity is Wrong. He rightly calls out the medical profession for fat shaming. Worth reading.

More about the Enneagram ahead, leave now if you're not interested, and have a great weekend!

6. (this part existed elsewhere, so I could just cut and paste it again) I saw a post by a person of color last week that dismissed the Enneagram as something for white people with too much time on their hands. Point taken. I can't think of anything to say in defense. I'm Caucasian/cis/straight, so there is an entire universe of challenges I don't have to deal with, challenges that would be both energy draining and time consuming. Just thought I should acknowledge that for the record.

7. However. Being white/cis/straight is not something I can change, and at the moment I am finding the Enneagram to be extremely helpful. The "path to growth" for Type 5 is yielding insight after insight for me, and since we all have elements of all the types within us, some of the other types (esp 9 and 4) are helpful, too. So I'm going to continue to work on it for awhile. There will be at least one more post next week, apologies to those who aren't interested, although I guess you've quit reading if you're not, so never mind.

OK, I hope this made some sense. Maybe I will come back later and work on it some more when I'm not so pissed. Although maybe it makes more sense like this than it did when it was way wordier. Have a great weekend.

7ToF: This one really is short. Sort of.

1. If you see me going into an office supply store or turning down the office supply aisle at Target, could you please just go ahead and whomp me with one of those Loony Tunes baseball bats? Every time I open another drawer there are more pens and markers and tape and post-it notes and pads of paper. It’s a disease.

A small selection of the pens available at our house. Want some?

2. I spent twenty minutes today trying track down the Summer Off Right reading challenge on Instagram before I figured out that it was actually the Summer of Fright reading challenge (hard to tell when the hashtag is #summeroffright) and therefore not something I am interested in. Horror is the one type of book (and movie) that holds no interest for me. I value my sleep, thank you very much.

3. I really do try to support independent booksellers as much as I can. Just last week I had a shopping accident in UTown at one of their two indies. I make a point of seeking out independent bookstores and buying books from them when we travel, too.

4. But they can be so annoying. Not long ago I went to the indie that is in the next town north of us, about 12 miles away, and asked if they had Strange the Dreamer. The woman got a smirk on her face and said, "I'm sorry, we don't carry that kind of book." I realized that a) she had never heard of the book, in spite of it being a prizewinner and NYT bestseller, and b) she thought I was asking for a romance novel.

But isn't a romance novel (although as I told you last week, I haven't finished it yet, so maybe it turns into one, but it sure didn't seem like it at the place where I stopped). The main character's last name is Strange, and he is a dreamer. And anyway, would it be so hard to carry it even if it was a romance novel? If you're the only bookstore local people have, can't you carry what they want to read? Apparently not. So in spite of it being the only retail bookstore in a hundred mile radius of my house, I haven't been able to bring myself to go back. Snobs.

5. All of that was in preparation for telling you that I had a major book shopping accident on Prime Day at Amazon. Oh, my. As if I didn't already have a stack of forty books to read. At least. But I am such a sucker for a bargain, and they had all kinds of buy this book and get a credit toward another book deals going and so even though I bought about eight books (several of them for kindle), I think it ended up being less than $40. Speaking of sicknesses. Books and office supplies.

6. So tonight I get to do every reader's favorite part of planning for vacation: figuring out what books to bring. Because yes, next week we are on our way to Southern California for Dean's big family reunion. We get together with his immediate family (siblings and dad) every year, but we haven't been to the big aunts-uncles-and-cousins version in a long time. None of us are big fans of Southern California, but it is supposed to be gorgeous next week and the kids are all old enough that no one will expect to go to the (hot, crowded, expensive) theme parks, so maybe it will be OK.

7. Next week was the week I was planning to re-post a bunch of old posts in preparation for new discussions, but I'm not exactly sure I'll have time to get it set up before I leave. If posts start appearing next week, you'll know I got it worked out. If not, I'll be back again soon.

Have a great week, and think of us sweltering on 12-lane highways. Or alternatively, hanging out with a good book at the beach. :-)

My mini-reading challenge, cliffhangers, and the thing I apparently can binge on

Well, you may just get Seven Things posts for the rest of the summer. It's all I've got the energy for. Because summer. And who's going to complain about that?

1. Dean and MadMax are on a week-long fishing trip in a remote location that involves a 22-mile hike from the trailhead to the river they're planning to float. Yikes. But they're experienced backpackers and floaters, and they're well-prepared, and they're part of a group of five, so I'm assuming that no news is good news.

2. This will be by far the longest I've ever been home alone. It will be interesting to see how I respond. I know I'm good for a few days, but it's entirely possible that by Wednesday or Thursday I will start hanging out at the mall just to see people. And the dog is already driving me crazy. She wants her boys back because they are way more fun than I am.

3. I've set up my own mini-reading challenge for the week. I want to see if I can read seven books in a week. I'll let you know how it turns out. They're mostly books that have been on my TBR list for months (even years), but I admit that I went through and picked books that were less than 300 pages, so it's not all that many pages, really. *cough*

4. How do you feel about books that end on cliffhangers? I've been burned by them often enough that I decided several years ago that I would not start another trilogy-or-similar until all the books were out. Which is why I still haven't read Game of Thrones, in spite of the rest of my family getting into regular conversations about various characters and plot points.

Or Patrick Rothfuss, who published the second book of his Kingkiller trilogy in 2011 and still hasn't announced the publication date of the third (or at least, not that I could find with a brief google search). Dean loves those books, and I'm pretty sure I will, too, once they're all out.

5. So before I started Strange the Dreamer (by Laini Taylor) last week, I checked for a cliffhanger, since the author has written a trilogy in the past. I couldn't find anything that said first in a new series, so I thought I was safe. Authors who write series also write stand-alone novels, right? But about halfway through, I saw someone on Instagram had posted a picture of it with the caption #worstcliffhangerever, and a several comments agreeing, and I dropped it in mid-read. Even though it was shaping up to be one of the best books I've read in a long time, with genuinely interesting characters and premise.

Fortunately I discovered a few days later that the next book in the series is going to be published this fall, so I can figure out what to do about it then. If you don't mind cliffhangers, highly recommend it. And if you read it, let me know what you think.

6. I read Zealot (Reza Aslan) last week, a book about trying to understand who Jesus really was. It's been out for several years, and at the time it was published (2013), it made a big splash as being boldly controversial. To be honest, I didn't think it was all that wild, but I didn't agree with him, either. If it's a topic that interests you, I wrote a review on Goodreads that you can read here.

7. Remember a couple of weeks ago when I wrote an entire post about how I can't binge read/watch books or TV series? Yeah. Well, be careful what you say. Just about every time I make a lame statement like that, I end up finding out it's not true shortly after (what do you want to bet that I end up reading a doozie of a cliffhanger by the weekend?). Because I discovered something I apparently can binge on, and it's podcasts. I've listened to so many in the past month that they're cutting into my reading time and everything else, and also I'm getting sick of them. So I think I'm going to stop listening to back-episodes and just listen to new ones as they come out.

And I really wish I had thought of something interesting to say..... maybe a few days from now when I'm desperate for conversation I will write a long post about something fascinating. Or not.

7ToF: Nerd Central

1. I thought it would be so fun to do book puzzles on my bookstagram account. The first one was books with numbers in the title, and I spent hours gathering up the obvious ones (1984, Fahrenheit 451, The Two Towers, Station Eleven) and combing my shelves for less obvious ones (The Thirteenth Tale, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Tenth of December, Hyperbole and a Half). I even created rules: the number had to be in the title, not in the subtitle; collections like Best American Short Stories with the year in every title didn't count; Stephanie Plum didn't count, because it would have taken all the space.

2. Perhaps not surprisingly, no one else thought this was as much fun as I did. Only two people bothered to respond, and no one took up my challenge to think of more (although I have to admit I took all the easy ones). When I told MadMax about it, he started laughing and said affectionately, Oh, Mom, you are such a nerd. (I'm sure he meant it in the nicest possible way.) I already had a list of possible future puzzles going before I posted, though, so I will probably keep doing it. I may put less time and effort into future versions, though.

3. Best outcome: I re-discovered Eight Cousins, by Louisa May Alcott, which I adored as a child and read several times. I always liked it better than Little Women, which-- to be honest-- I never read all the way through until I was in my twenties. But now I can't really remember either one, so I'm in the midst of a re-read. Thirty pages in, all I can say so far is that Rose (from Eight Cousins) is more of a prissy snob than I remembered, sort of like Amy in Little Women, but we'll see.

4. Not long ago I wrote about my obsession with finding the perfect tea. I mentioned that I always warm the cup before I put tea in it. My reasoning was that if my tea was made in a warmed cup, it would stay hot longer than it would if made in a cold cup, and I lose interest in tea (or any hot drink) once it's cold.

I decided to put that to the test. We have a motley assortment of mugs, but we do have two that are the same. So I pre-heated one with hot tap water, then heated water in the electric tea kettle and poured it in each cup. After one minute, the water in the pre-warmed cup was four degrees warmer than the other cup; after five minutes, the difference was three degrees. Not as big a difference as I would have thought. NOW YOU KNOW.

But being a creature of habit, I still made my cup of tea the same way this morning.

5. Once again I got in a discussion with some friends about genre fiction. It just astonishes me how anti-romance people are. And honestly, I think it's a completely false opinion. I'm pretty sure if I handed them one of my favorite romance novels and actually forced them to read it, they'd come back and say, that's not a romance novel! It's just a good story! And yet it IS a romance novel, and the problem is that they don't know what they're talking about because they've never read one. Or maybe the problem is, as one Book Riot editor realized in this week's Interesting Read, our culture's misogyny has created a disdain for romance.

6. But having said that, I have to say it's been a long time since I've read a current romance novel (published in the last couple of years) that I finished. I'm all in favor of occasional escapist reading, but all of the ones I've read recently have been of the fantasy type-- the hero is fabulously wealthy, drop-dead gorgeous, and his only faults are the adorable sort. And/or they're so insanely attracted to each other that there is almost no story besides their physical attraction. I'm good for one or two of those a year--they can be fun to read-- but that seems to be all that's being published these days.

7. Summer is here. I lose faith every single year--winter lasts so dang long, and then spring never really seems to come, and then suddenly it is gorgeous and I almost get teary-eyed when I go outside to feed the chickens. We had record breaking heat and then wildfires for most of last summer, so this year is especially appreciated. Here is the picture I snapped this morning, strategically aimed so that you don't have to look at chickensh!t (you're welcome)(Past the fence is our neighbor's field).

And that's it for me. Have a great weekend.

7ToF: Will you help him change the world, can you dig it? yes I can

I've been waiting such a long time, for Saturday....
Listen children, all is not lost, all is not lost....

Love that song. Not feeling even slightly apologetic for putting it in your head, too.

1. I'm trying to stop reading on my Kindle. Only temporarily, because I love the thing, and there is nothing better for reading in bed at night. (We've discussed this before.) But I'm not reading the actual books that are sitting on my shelves, and there are a bunch I want to read. I'm so attached to my Kindle that this oddly feels a little scary. (how weird is that?)

2. My waitlist of e-books at our library's website has coincidentally come to a halt-- my next one is Amor Towle's Rules of Civility, which I'm supposed to get in six weeks, and the next half dozen are stacked up after that, so it's a good time to do this instead of rooting around for more kindle books to read.

3. This week's interesting column, from the UK version of Elle: I stopped eating carbs after 2:30, not because I think we should stop eating carbs at all, ever, but because of the discussion toward the end about how everyone processes carbs differently, and we each need to figure out our individual metabolism. I think this gets discussed way less often than it should be-- there is no one healthy way to eat that works for everybody. What looks like a healthy diet for you may not be healthy for me. And what worked for me twenty years ago is not going to work for me today. I guess the key is to pay attention to how my body responds to different things and figure out my own healthy way of eating.

4. Update: you may remember that a couple of months ago, I told you that I was going to try exercising more without dieting to drop the pounds I gained over the winter. I hate to weigh myself, but I thought this was working because my clothes fit again the way they did last summer, and I'm definitely stronger than I was when I started this. But then I had my annual physical this week, and not only had I not lost any weight, I'd actually gained some. I know, I know, muscle weighs more than fat and I can tell myself that the workouts are working and etc etc etc.

5. But at some point, I have to be shocked that I weigh within a few pounds of what I did when I was nine months pregnant with MadMax, and I gained forty pounds during that pregnancy. I am not a skinny person who is obsessing about a couple of extra pounds, I am a dumpy (plump?) 56-year-old who weighs more than 170. I really should not be carrying this much weight. So how can I work on this without a) obsessing about it, or b) beating myself up about it (because I got a thumbs up on everything else in my checkup, including all the bloodwork)(except I'm low on Vitamin D). I guess it goes back to the previous Thing: pay attention, and figure out what works for me.

6. And the most important Thing to remember: I have a basically healthy body that is taking good care of me. I need to continually remind myself of that-- to be gracious and thankful to my physical self for allowing me to be here--rather than to feel that stupid frantic sense of panic that I let myself feel all to easily-- how the hell did I get this heavy?? I'm a whale! I'm a disaster! No, actually, I'm not. On the whole, my body is coping remarkably well with the challenges of menopause.

7. I'm taking a Facebook vacation for the rest of the summer. I took about ten days off recently (partly because of being out of town), and when I went back to it, in ten minutes I was stressed and depressed. I do have my beloved groups there, so I won't be deleting my account or anything drastic, just taking a break.

Also due to my mental summer mode: I may not be posting regularly. Not sure about this yet, but I may ignore the usual Tuesday/Friday schedule, and get back to it after Labor Day. Also, at some point I am going to re-post the "Celebrating mid-life" posts from a couple of years ago (which, in spite of the name, are not always celebrations) so we can get started on that again.

And that's it for me. Hope you have a great weekend.

binging

Are you a binger? I keep reading and hearing about people who have spent the weekend binge-watching Scandal or Poldark, or binge reading everything by Maria de los Santos. Or they started with the first Louise Penny novel and didn't read anything else until they got caught up with the twelfth, or however many there are now.

Theoretically, I love this idea. I'm a bit obsessive, and I love to read and watch intelligent TV. But so far I have not been able to binge anything. (Well, peanut butter chocolate chip cookies, but that's different.)

In fact, I'm kind of the opposite of a binger. If I find a new author I like, I start picking up the books she or he has written (see Louise Penny example above). But I spread them out. I read maybe one every six months, or even one a year. I love, more than I can describe, knowing that I have a good, solid, reliable book that I know I will like sitting on the shelf or waiting on my kindle.

So I've read the first two Inspector Gamache novels, but the next two are on my kindle, deliciously ready when I am. I've read the first three Mary Russell novels, and O, Jerusalem is waiting for me. I've read two Kate Atkinson novels, and have three sitting on the shelf.

It's like people who stockpile food and water in case of an apocalypse. If everything in my life comes crashing down, at least I know I've got stacks of good books to read.

There is another side to this, though. Several times in the past, when I discovered a new author I liked, if I read a bunch of their books in a row I got tired of them and never went back. Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum novels are a great example. I loved, loved, loved the first four of those books-- they're not great literature, but they're a lot of fun to read. Then I read five, six, and seven, and suddenly I was sick of them and I haven't read another one since (what is she up to now, nineteen?).

I think if I had spread them out, maybe read one every six months instead of all at once, I would have kept going. I got tired of the Joe, Ranger, Joe, Ranger, Joe, Ranger schtick, and my understanding is that a dozen books later, she's still stringing that out. They're all bestsellers, so it must just be me.

This week I'm reading my first Anne Lamott book in ten years. It's an old one, Plan B, published in 2005. It is exactly, exactly the book I needed this week. But she has such a distinctive voice, and already I can tell I'm going to need to take a break for awhile before I read another one of hers.

And TV binge watching-- for some reason, I just can't do it. A couple of times over the past few years, I've set up the DVR to record a series recommended by friends. The episodes pile up and pile up, and I never watch them. I had over a hundred episodes of How I Met Your Mother recorded a while back, and I didn't watch a single one. I finally deleted them because I needed the space for something else. I guess it's just not my thing.

What about you?

And just because, here is your Anne Lamott quote of the day, about aging:

Look, my feet hurt some mornings, and my body is less forgiving when I exercise more than I am used to. But I love my life more, and me more. I'm so much juicier. And as that old saying goes, it's not that I think less of myself, but that I think of myself less often. And that feels like heaven to me.  --Anne Lamott, Plan B