May I Just Say . . .

books make me happy :)

Math I Understand

Unlucky Arithmetic

Thirteen Ways to Raise a Nonreader

by Dean Schneider and Robin Smith

1 Never read where your children can see you.

2 Put a TV or computer in every room. Don’t neglect the bedrooms and kitchen.

3 Correct your child every time she mispronounces a word.

4 Schedule activities every day after school so your child will never be bored.

5 Once your child can read independently, throw out the picture books. They’re for babies.

6 Don’t play board games together. Too dull.

7 Give little rewards for reading. Stickers and plastic toys are nice. Money is even better.

8 Don’t expect your children to enjoy reading. Kids’ books are for teaching vocabulary, proper study habits, and good morals.

9 Buy only 40-watt bulbs for your lamps.

10 Under no circumstances read your child the same book over and over. She heard it once, she should remember it.

11 Never allow your child to listen to books on tape; that’s cheating.

12 Make sure your kids only read books that are “challenging.” Easy books are a complete waste of time. That goes double for comic books and Mad magazine.

13 Absolutely, positively no reading in bed.

http://archive.hbook.com/pdf/articles/13ways.pdf
Text © 2001 by Dean Schneider and Robin Smith. Reprinted from the March/April 2001
issue of The Horn Book Magazine. For ordering information about The Horn Book Magazine and The Horn Book Guide, visit www.hbook.com or call 1-800-325-1170.

While I Wasn't Looking

Disappointed today to find out that while I wasn't paying attention, my six-week old hold request for Broken Harbor expired. So now I've started back at the bottom of the list. Maybe I'll get a copy by December.

Free is Good; or, Fairies Read Too

A co-worker and I are talking about writing a grant proposal to set up some Little Free Libraries in our area.  I'm personally hoping for a library with a fairy door. After all, fairies read too, don't they?

More on Books

M asked about books my group just chose to read. They are:

• Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand (my choice)
• Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Burns
• Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie (I wanted Portrait of Dorian Gray)
• The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
• The Christmas Box by Richard Paul Evans
• Heaven is Here by Stephanie Nielson

I Liked Things the Way They Were

Our (my?) book group has been hijacked by a new member who told funny stories all through the last meeting and has now exploded our FB page with inside jokes and asides about everything except the books.

I never thought I'd be a diehard book group member, but I'm kind of irritated. I'm all for having fun and talking about non-book stuff, but I'm also tired of hearing about tube socks, neighborhood prostitutes, and Halloween photographs. What happened to my sweet little group?

Who Knew?

I just read the first few items I posted over six years ago. Some make me cringe, but I think it would be fun to read back over everything--I've never done that. One of my first posts was, interestingly, a bit of foreshadowing: What's an Agar Plate?

I was reading Emerging Infectious Diseases then (I'm sure I Googled something or used a library database to find that one article) and now I'm reading an epidemiology textbook to prepare for the first semester of public health classes!

The Truth Will Set You Free

If you read this blog at Blogger rather than through a feed, you may have noticed my Goodreads "currently reading" shelf in the sidebar. See how leanly stocked it is these days? I'm listing only three books as being currently read, quite a reduction of the nine or ten titles that languished on that list for months, or even years in some cases.

No, I didn't suddenly finish all the books I started reading two years ago (that's how long Little Dorrit has been on that shelf). After agonizing for months about the sheer messiness of it all, the light bulb came on and I realized the solution was another shelf--"read most of it"--which allowed me to move titles like Stiff and The Book Thief, books I didn't read 100% of but I don't intend to go back to. I then quickly purged the "currently reading shelf," sending things to the new "read most of it" shelf or to the existing "may finish someday" shelf if I had read only a third of the book or less.

I feel like a huge weight has been lifted from my life and am glad my "currently reading shelf" now honestly reflects my book-reading activity (magazines, blogs, catalogs, knitting books, cookbooks and cereal boxes are another matter altogether).

As for Little Dorrit, I renewed my attentions to it about two weeks ago, and I'm nearly finished. Maybe this is a sign that I'm mature enough to tackle Bleak House and David Copperfield for real this time around.

Something to Pique Your Interest?

I was unenthused by BookPage's September bestseller watch post, though I saw several gift ideas there. I'm more interested by their list of 25 most anticipated books for fall. Top of my list is Roger Ebert's Life Itself.

I've been in a reading funk lately. The only print book I'm actively reading* is The Hippopotamus Pool (Amelia Peabody) for the ?th time. But I'm hoping to break out of the doldrums with Before I Go to Sleep this weekend and I'm looking forward to Laurie R. King's Pirate King, out next week.

What's on your reading horizon?

*I'm also listening to Blue Blood in the car and loving it.

State of the Monday

• I arrived at work at 10 am today. Not as early as I hoped, but not terribly bad (10:30 is my official start time).
• I'm going on vacation in two days. A real vacation. At the beach.
• My toenails are painted for the first time this summer. Mrs. O'Leary's BBQ
• I brought my Primary bag to work today by mistake. This will necessitate a trip home pretty soon to retrieve the correct bag.
• I'm reading The Snake, the Crocodile and the Dog as part of my ongoing bid to once and for all reread and then finish the rest of the books in the series. It really doesn't get much better than Amelia Peabody. She's a great mood lifter.
• In other nail lacquer news, I can't find my bottle of Caffeine Fix. Hmmph.
• I watched the second episode of Zen on Masterpiece last night. Great! I'm now eager to read one of Michael Dibdin's books. If they're as good as Donna Leon's books, I'll be in heaven.

What's going on in your Monday?

A Post

I'm embarrassed to post after a three month absence, particularly because I don't have much to say, and that's why I stopped posting in the first place. I actually have had some meaningful observations lately, but posting about them seemed like such work that I didn't do it.

Perhaps I'll get around to talking about one or two of those ideas sometime soon. In the meantime, the news of my life is:

My new Kindle has cracked my literary world wide open. I've only bought two full-price books*, but I'm downloading oodles of samples. For those who wonder, I chose the Kindle over the Nook (the only two readers I considered) because the page refresh is faster and I found navigation on the Nook to be difficult. I do wish I could put library downloads on my Kindle without hacking it, but the page refresh issue was a deal-breaker.

I went to Cub Scout Day Camp again (last week), this year as the camp administrator. It was a nightmare job involving 2+ weeks of little to no sleep every night. In fact, I'm blogging right now as a way of procrastinating some camp paperwork I need to do tonight. I think if I do it again, my parents will disown me and my friend Gwen will have me committed to a mental institution.

I'm growing vegetables (and fruit) for the first time, all in containers. One tomato plant appears to have been struck down by blossom end rot, but the other two plants look good. All three pepper plants have fruit, though only one plant looks healthy; the other two look anemic, or whatever is the plant equivalent of anemic. Two of the six strawberry plants are dead, but the others are alive, if in varying states of health. The strawberries are all fruitless and growing at microspeed.

I'm taking a break from British crime drama and British period drama miniseries on Netflix to watch all of The X Files. What a great show.

I'm in a book club that is about to have its 5th monthly meeting. So now I can say I have a social life.

I finally have a go-to meal for taking to sick families: cheese lasagna with green salad and (store bought) bread. I'm no longer in fear of having to take a meal to someone. It isn't the most economical meal, but it's fairly foolproof and simple.

Yours in shallowness,

Auntie K

*The Price We Paid: The Extraordinary Story of the Willie and Martin Handcart Pioneers

Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice

Leave Request

Dear Boss,

I have a lot of things to do at work this afternoon. However, I respectfully request permission to leave early in order to address a real emergency.

You see, I borrowed the new Charles Todd novel at the public library two weeks ago. I didn't start reading it, however, because real life intruded (and I was depressed and busy solving crosswords). Now, the book is due today and I can't renew it because two other patrons submitted holds.

I am sure you will recognize the gravity of my situation and allow me to go home and start reading.

Thank you,

Auntie K, dedicated reader, if not a dedicated employee

Speaking of Books

The local library's OverDrive site needs an advanced search option that lets users exclude erotic romance novels from the search results. I like to browse the lists of recently published e-books and audio books, but do not like scrolling through page after page of newly acquired titles like Her Texan Temptation or Cinderella & the Playboy. Ugh.

My latest book blog discovery is Chamber Four. Any site that claims "Dan Brown is a hack" is part of its constitution is A-OK!

Comfort Reading

We all know about comfort food (yum), but do any of you comfort read?

When I'm depressed, I often don't feel like reading (real bad for my library account), so I end up doing a lot of crossword puzzles instead (Four-letter word for "copycat" is APER).

There are, however, a few titles I can turn to that always appeal.

• Persuasion (read this last week)
• The New Testament (3 Peter and 1 John last night)
• Mary Poppins (haven't read this in a while)
  

You Know It's Bad When...

I've fallen into the disconcerting habit of being unable to leave the public library empty handed.

After wandering aimlessly for a few minutes and inspecting the same new books I inspected on my last visit, I walked out with PHP: The Good Parts. Nonfiction, so it would help even the balance of power on my reading list, but not exactly riveting reading. The only plus is that it's a brand new copy, so it doesn't smell like stale tobacco smoke and it doesn't have scary stains on the inside.

By the Numbers

I noticed the "50 Books in a Year" group on Goodreads, and it got me wondering how many books I've read this year. A quick Goodreads scan shows 77 to date, a far cry from the 44 I read in 2008.

Aha! So that's why I never get anything done.

Leisure Reading is Alive and Well!

I'm so pleased that a very nice young man stopped in at the reference desk this morning to ask how to use the library catalog. On this, the first day of class, he wasn't looking for a textbook or a course catalog. No, he wanted some Clive Cussler. Now that's a student who has his priorities in order.

Self Sabatoge

After a lovely catching-up with M tonight, I decided to (re)join Goodreads as a way to keep in touch with her and a few other friends who are there. I can think of only a few combinations better than good friends and good books. I say (re)join because I joined last year but forget under what name or address.

Anyway, I'm back on Goodreads, and thanks to the text-based reading list on my wiki, I can add to Goodreads the books I've read in the past 18 months. But that's where my split personality tendencies take over.

I'm the person who is perfectly content to dump a bag of (nonperishable) groceries on the floor by the front door when I come in and then and walk by it for several days before putting away the groceries. But I feel compelled, as I add books I've read to my Goodreads account, to add the specific edition I read, not just another edition of the same title. Since my wiki list doesn't include ISBN's, it's going to take a bit of time to add each book.

I AM my own worst enemy.

Enough is Enough

I love* my public library, but three trips in one day is a bit much, even for me. Here's how it went down:

I stopped at lunch time to pick up a hold (Blue Balliett's The Calder Game), and at the same time returned two audiobooks (visit 1). Then I motored on down the street to UPS and the post office, where I opened another book in the car and discovered one of the discs from a book I had just returned.

So, after the post office I headed back to the library for visit 2 to return the errant disc. While there, I decided to ditch the J.A. Jance I was listening to (terrible narrator, stiff writing and boring story) in favor of another Val McDermid.

However, while later ripping the cd to put on my mp3 player, I found that half of disc 3 is unplayable, thus necessitating visit 3 to pick up the print copy (we don't have it at work).

I really can't complain much, however, since on all 3 visits I managed to snag a precious spot in the curbside 30 min parking, rather than having to venture into the dreaded parking garage (had to go around the block once on visit 3 to wait for a spot to open).

BTW, I finished 8 books in July, the most in a month since I started keeping track again last year. It helped that two of them were short YA's and one was Eclipse, which I started a long time ago. But still...


*Well ok, I love the idea of a PL. My feelings for my current PL are firmly in the "like" zone.

Answer Revealed

I guess the reader quiz was a dud. It's my fault for either posting about something unpostworthy or acting like a smartypants. Or both.

So, SST, Ishtar, Erno, Eire, and era are all frequently used crossword puzzle solutions. Yes, really not that interesting now that I think about it. (Erno is Mr. Rubik's first name, and an SST is an aircraft). And we all know what Ishtar was, right?

I am by no means a super puzzle solver (like Rex Parker who solves seven major puzzles every day). But I do enjoy the activity. For several months I've been working through Harder Wednesday Crosswords, a collection of Wednesday puzzles from the New York Sun. Non-puzzlers may not know that in most major papers, the puzzles get harder as the week goes on. I like the Wednesday book because everything is not a total breeze, but if I think about things and look up the fact-based solutions, I can usually solve a puzzle, though not always in one sitting. I guess purists would disagree with looking up solutions, but it doesn't bother me for things like South American capital founded in 1956 or 1933 Nobel Prize Winner. I would never be able to finish a puzzle if I didn't look up those things.

I usually work the crossword right after work (before the after-work nap) or right before bedtime (after the after-work nap), which is also my time to read. So my reading has suffered lately, though haven't been too interested in it anyway--go figure. I did just finish three juvenile and YA books right in a row, however, so maybe I'll put the puzzles aside for a bit and work on my backlog of library books. Plus, I'm about to take vacation (!), and I have some juicy titles saved up just for the occasion (In the Woods, The Dive From Clausen's Pier, and Change of Heart).