Book Report: Volume 20

During quarantine/lockdown, I was looking around for more book recommendations. Hard to believe that I was hard up for ideas about what to read next, since I was already getting deluged with emails from Goodreads and Amazon's Kindle Unlimited touting new releases,  plus picking up the free Bookpage at the local library branch every month, discovering classic mysteries featured on the Shedunnit podcast, and following a handful of book blogs via Feedly. (RIP, Google Reader!) 

 

I could've tackled some of the titles I'd already bookmarked in my accounts with three local library systems, or picked up any of the dozens of physical books I have bought on the cheap at the local used bookstore over the last decade, but noooooo.... I wanted something new and different. 

I came across a title by Kelley Armstrong in one of the mystery book blogs I follow, Criminal Element. The blog entry was for the latest in the Rockton novels, and the whole setup sounded intriguing. 

I always like to start a series at the beginning, and I was able to get City of the Lost,  the first book in the Casey Duncan series, as an ebook from the library right away. I read it right away, too, and right away I wanted to know what happened next. These novels are potato chips, and all the popular slogans apply: Betcha can't eat just one. Once you pop, you can't stop.  

I was too impatient to place a hold and wait for the dozen people to ahead of me to read each 300+ page book, so I broke down and requested physical copies of the entire series. Those came in pretty quickly, so I've happily spent the last week plowing through the whole series. Can't wait for the next installment!

 

 

Resuming Old Habits

Thanks to the pandemic, I've been getting a lot of reading done. Most of it isn't worth talking about -- which is why I never leave reviews on Goodreads or Amazon, despite the many, many pleas that appear not only as suggestions from the sites/apps themselves but also as requests from the authors at the ends of the ebooks.  

Speaking of ebooks: I spent some of my Christmas money in 2019 on a Kindle Paperwhite.

I didn't really need it, but it was on sale and I was testing out a theory that I was ruining my eyesight by spending too much time looking at devices that have a backlight *cough* iPad *cough* and this e-ink display may be less strain on my eyeballs. After extensive research during 2020, I've decided that my eyeballs are probably in general decline overall, so who's to say whether the switch in devices has had that much effect either way.

Besides, from time to time I still go completely old school and get physical books. I was using physical books as a last resort, checking three library systems and Kindle Unlimited (also paid for with some Christmas money) for an electronic file before requesting an actual book from one of the aforementioned library systems. I think that's how I ended up with the hard copies of the mystery series I'm reading now, the Josie Prescott Antiques mysteries.

I'm fairly certain that I saw something somewhere promoting the newest title in the series. I like to start a series at the beginning, though, and then read straight through. I couldn't get all of the books in an electronic format, so I've been requesting them (three or four at a time)  to the local branch. 

However, since I set myself another annual reading goal in my Kindle (but not on Goodreads), I'm also checking out the Kindle editions when I can, just to get credit in my app. Yes, Amazon has gamified reading, and I'm a sucker for playing along. Taking positive reinforcement for my habit where I can get it, I guess.

The Latest Snowpocalypse

 Welcome to northeast Ohio in February..... 

While not quite the frozen tundra of harsher climes, it has been pretty snowy and cold around here for the last few days, and conditions look to be the same for the coming week. I have no need to leave the house during the worst of it, thankfully, so I have plenty of time to look out the window, drink some hot tea, and then resume reading my latest library book.  

My mother has been updating me about the various weather people going bonkers over how cold and snowy it is in Texas. That makes me laugh, because I remember how people acted when I was in Austin for a friend's wedding in early December 2016. I thought it was pretty balmy that weekend (highs in low 50s / lows in high 30s) and thus I was fairly comfortable with a fleece sweatshirt as a jacket. However, a few of the locals would not shut up about how freezing cold it was as they yanked on their mittens, scarves, hats, and heavy coats. I guess that weekend was a little unseasonable for that time of year, because it warmed up a bit for the next few days as my sister and I did some sightseeing in the area:

Flipping through some of the photos from that trip, I realize that I still haven't finished the book I read on the plane:

I suppose I can add it to the stack of reading material to tackle as I'm snowbound. 

Feeling Nostalgic

I'm listening to the audio version of Word by Word * and binge-watching  Detroiters via Comedy Central On Demand** and they're making me miss my old day job.

Kory Stamper describes the quiet hush of the editorial offices at Merriam-Webster, and I'm jealous that the marketing and sales staff are sequestered on a separate floor there. I remember the major shock to the system that occurred when those departments were added to the editorial and production departments' office space after the nuns retired and a new CEO came on board. Stamper also describes the antiquated technology and odd policies, especially with regard to coffee and to the procedure of circulating a memo instead of going over to speak with someone directly.  I remember my first months with the publishing company as being very similar.

I had another hit of déjà vu when I saw the office furnishings on Detroiters. One of the main characters has taken over his dad's advertising agency, and the office decor and amenities seem stuck in the '70s.... much like things at the Center when I first arrived. I would swear that the visitor chairs opposite the main desk (shown behind the characters in this GIF) are the same style and color as the visitor chairs in the front reception area where we were expected to take our morning and afternoon breaks from precisely 10 to 10:15 a.m. and 3 to 3:15 p.m.

@whoisJJSimmons pic.twitter.com/IuM0sFXCtQ

— Detroiters (@Detroiters) March 8, 2017

The credenza and some of the lamps in the background of this GIF also strike a chord.

West Coast, are you locked in?! #Detroiters is on right...NOW. pic.twitter.com/dfu4EWWJ6s

— Detroiters (@Detroiters) February 8, 2017

I'm sorry that I missed Stamper on her book tour, — the closest she got to me was Columbus earlier this month. She'll be in Pittsburgh in a few days, but I've got a trivia championship game that day, so I'm probably not going to make the road trip. Instead, I'll just do some discreet online stalking and catch up with news articles/radio appearances/her Twitter feed, etc.  The TV show has been renewed for a second season, so I guess I can look forward to more "I used to have one of those in my office!" moments next year sometime.




* It's read by the author, which I love in an audiobook.
** Not simultaneously. I multi-task, but not that much.

Natural, Schmatural

On the way to and from work I'm still listening to Carole King read her autobiography, A Natural Woman, but I don't know if I can take it much longer.

I mean, her insistence on using this supposedly correct pronunciation of Boise as Boy-see  is already nails on a chalkboard to ears that are used to hearing Boy-zee, but the story she's telling is prompting more audience reaction than a horror movie at an urban theater.

I just got finished hearing about her abusive relationship (!) with husband number 3 (!!), who conveniently died from a drug overdose (!!!) before she could wise up and leave him (!!!!).  During those chapters I did a lot of talking back to the stereo, expressing my, uh, intense disagreement with her life choices and subsequent rationalizations of said choices.

I've only gotten more outspoken now that she's waxing poetic about the joys of her ultra crunchy-granola/"low carbon footprint" lifestyle in Idaho in the late 1970s. The guy in the next lane looked at me strangely this morning, possibly because while I was stopped at the light I was yelling, "Noooo! Baby girl, you have money. You do not need to be living in the middle of nowhere for three years with some hippie loser you just met, milking goats and washing your clothes and dishes in a stream. WTF is wrong with you?!"

Oof. Her poor kids. Whom she had to home-school because they were living in such an isolated area, one where mail had to be delivered by friendly randoms on skis and supplies had to be hauled in by snowmobile. Theoretically the summers were better, but still: Ugh.

Anyhow: Can't wait to find out who husband number four is, but I'm trying to avoid spoilers on her Wikipedia page. If it's this Teepee Rick character she's been shacking up with, expect a lot of screaming from the driver's seat.

Summer Update

So, we've passed the unofficial midpoint of summer 2012: The Fourth of July. I took a few days off of work and went down to my parents' house to hang out in their air conditioning, because it was super-ultra hot and icky outside.

Now that things have cooled off slightly, I've been trying to make myself get outdoors a little bit each week. I've been taking one of those collapsible camp chairs and a library book up to the lake a few days a week after work. It's nice to catch a breeze up there and enjoy looking out over the water. 

As a result, I've been plowing through my reading list. I finished Rolling Thunder and   The Year of the Gadfly yesterday. Thunder is part of the John Ceepak mystery series that I've been reading for a while. Gadfly is something I picked up at random from a display in a CCPL branch I don't usually go to and then turned out to be really good. I'm also working my way through the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes books by Laurie R. King. 

What else have I been up to? Oh, I figured out how to sync my iPod & iPad over wifi. Last night I was unreasonably excited to be able to transfer a playlist from the laptop in the bedroom to my iPod without having to go to the living room to dig it out of my tote bag and then rummage around for a cable.

I'm listening to said playlist now -- it was just a "recently added" playlist that included two albums I downloaded via Noisetrade: live sets from Rhett Miller of the Old 97s and Red Wanting Blue, a band that started in Athens about three months after I left town. I'd heard of them, but never really heard them. They sound okay so far — I haven't skipped any songs yet, but I haven't been impressed enough to hit "repeat" on one either. I have a hunch these are the kinds of songs that grow on you as opposed to being immediately catchy and hummable.

Conversely, I can't stop humming after I've been in the car, because I'm listening to Carole King read her autobiography, A Natural Woman. I'm at the point where she's in California, recording Tapestry and hanging out with James Taylor and Joni Mitchell, so as she mentions the different songs she was working on, I start singing them to myself. I need to load them (and the songs she wrote that were recorded by others) onto my iPod so I can listen to better singers than me. Maybe I'll start working on that playlist this weekend.

Like Christmas Every Day

I went on a bit of an online shopping spree lately, and now the packages are starting to arrive.

My copy of Stephen Colbert's book for kidz arrived last week and made for some fun lunchtime reading.

Coincidentally, I actually ordered a flag pole, but I forgot about it. When the giant box arrived I did a double-take and almost said "That's not mine!" Then I remembered that I finally sucked it up and ordered one of those tailgating poles so I can fly an OU flag at our outdoor events — of which we might actually have a few this summer.

Luckily for me, the box fit in the trunk of my car. I haven't taken it out of the trunk yet, but I will eventually. Probably.

What else?

Oh: I need more notebooks like a whole in the head, but these come with this adorable box and cute poster and fun patch . . . and they were on sale (sort of), so why not.

Plus I got these snazzy red ones with the debossed logo.

In the suggested practical applications section, it mentions "Lists of Suspected Communists."  which fits right in with the social studies unit on the 1950s that I should be proofing . . . right after I finish proofing the social studies unit on the Civil War . .  which I had to set aside so I could call Alaska and give some archivist up there a credit card number to  buy an image for the 1950s unit. Fun!

Google Books, I Heart You

So, I'm trying to track down a bunch of sources for this project at work, and it mostly entails clicking on a link to see on what Web site someone else found a historical document, looking at that site's source information to figure out what the true source of said document is, and finding a copy of said source online or at the library.

This morning I was looking for a copy of Julia Ward Howe's memoirs in Google Books. That brought me to this page:

First I started laughing because I'd never really seen a picture of Howe before and she struck me as resembling a basset hound. (The other editor concurred: "She does have a bit of the Deputy Dawg look to her.")

Then I said, "Oh my!" when I spotted this book cover in the Related Books section:

How can you see that and not click on it?! And then not click on the "read more" option?!


After I cracked up about what actually seems like a tough situation ("Howe wrote The Hermaphrodite when her own marriage was challenged by her husband’s affection for another man"),  I opened the downloaded PDF of the memoirs and was delighted to discover the fingers of whoever digitized that volume:

Finger condoms FTW!

Could It Be ... Murder?

Note: I wrote this last fall and never got around to pressing "publish." I'm not sure what stopped me — apparently I was looking for a big finish, but couldn't come up with anything.

Well, guess what? Nothing has occurred to me in the last four months, so instead of letting it linger in the limbo of the draft folder (or, probably better yet, hitting "delete" and moving on), here goes.

Awful Library Books featured Dressed Up for Murder  [last October], and mostly mocked the  horse chipmunk — Really? OK. If you say so. — on the cover. I was freaked out and intrigued, and I immediately began searching for it in a local library.

I found it and two more books in the series of ten in the system in Toledo. When they arrived, I was underwhelmed. They were in almost pristine condition, and the actual story in and of itself made sense, in a cheeseball 1980s  Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine short story kind of way.

What I didn't get was the intended audience for this series. It's small, so you think it's for kids. There's reading comprehension questions on the last page, so you think it's for kids. The fact that the guy in the chipmunk costume is murdered because he's fooling around with his boss's wife ... is not exactly for kids.

The other two books are about an attempted robbery with a Willy Loman–type as the chief of police in a small town and a spoof of 1940s noir featuring a cheating husband who gets his girlfriend to give him an alibi for his wife's murder. So, it's like Encyclopedia Brown meets Silk Stalkings.

I Come from a Long Line of Hoarders

Spotted on the bookshelf at my parents' house:  A 1966 edition of the Turabian manual.

  

I love that cover artwork!

Book Report: Volume 19

I haven't been doing too much worth blogging about this summer, but here are a few comments on some stuff I've read lately.




A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin




A little like Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth and World Without End — a fantasy time period/location that feels vaguely similar to the England of the Middle Ages; a cast of dozens, following several generations of the same families; many evil characters whom you hope get their come-uppance ...

What does the grandpa say about The Princess Bride? It has everything: "Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Revenge. Giants. Monsters. Chases. Escapes. True love. Miracles."? That's pretty much true of A Game of Thrones.

Someone I know won't start reading sci-fi trilogies until the author has completely finished the series, but I decided to take the plunge anyway. I finished the first book over Easter weekend, and I've downloaded and read the second, third, and fourth books since then. I've downloaded the fifth book, but I'm trying to make it last because I know it's going to be a while before the next installment comes out.





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Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs




I was impressed. In junior high, I participated in a writing competition where you had to write short stories/essays based on randomly assigned scenarios/topics; this guy constructed an entire novel around a handful of strange photos.



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It Does Exactly What It Says on the Tin

I'm kind of a latecomer to Good Reads, and I'm not connected to that many friends on there at the moment. However, since the people I am connected to are librarians, I get e-mails practically every day to update me on what they've added to their "To Read" and "Reading Now" lists.

This is fine, except that the e-mails arrive at about the same time as when I should be buckling down and doing some actual work. Instead, I want to find out more about a book on Brian's list, or post a comment on Mary Lu's list about how great I thought that YA novel was when I read it, blah blah blah, et cetera and so on.

So, full marks for Good Reads for inspiring in me the exact outcome it wants; a massive FAIL on my part for not being able to delay gratification for a few hours. (Noooo: The message indicator pops up, and I must read it right now! And respond!  Yahoo Mail  is Pavlov and I am its bitch, apparently.)

Oh, and then whipped cream and a cherry on top of my massive FAIL by blogging about it instead of getting back to work. (Can you tell that I'm really not all that jazzed at the prospect of tackling any of the projects on my desk right now? I'm cross-checking an inventory report against our production database and a list of titles sold by a distributor, and when I finish all 39 pages of that, I get to mark up a book with some content updates so it can go back to layout for corrections. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. . . .  I'd better get cracking, though, because I have a short week pretty much every week in May.)

Book Report, Volume 18

I love Connie Willis's books, which usually involve some kind of time travel. These books by Jack Finney, Time and Again and its sequel, From Time to Time, are a fair substitute. Not as good as hers, of course, but they fill the void until she does something new.

My favorite line in Time and Again:

It was an ordinary day, a Friday, twenty minutes till lunchtime, five hours till quitting time and the weekend, ten months till vacation, thirty-seven years till retirement. Then the phone rang.

I'm hard pressed to explain exactly why that cracks me up — maybe how everything seems as though it's going to progress as usual until the guy dies contrasted with the phone call that changes everything?

Anyhow, these books are set in New York City. I've been there a few times, so I had a general sense of the geography. Although this knowledge is certainly not required for reading the books, I think it added to the reading experience.

I also enjoyed the vintage photos that illustrate some of the settings the time-traveling character described. While I was reading the second book, especially, I was pulling up a lot of sections of midtown Manhattan in Google Maps to see at how the streets appear today. (I confessed this nerdy tendency at Pub Quiz last month, and was reassured that at least one other person did a similar thing while reading a book set in London.)

Guilty Pleasure

I set my VCRs yesterday to tape American Idol tonight and tomorrow. Squee! Of course, I also had to set it to tape the finale of Life Unexpected. I'm kind of glad to see that show go, though. It started out okay, but then some of the plot lines/characters got a bit annoying.

I'm actually using my VCRs less now that I have Hulu Plus via Roku — I can subscribe to a bunch of shows and watch them either on TV or online. Some shows, however, it's still easier to tape.

In other news, I think I bit off more than I can chew in terms of library books. I put in requests for about 30 books from my could-be-fun-to-read list — you know, fluff:

• some YA novels, like the two sequels to Adam Canfield of the Slash
• some mysteries, like Michael Connelly's Reversal
• some light nonfiction, like We, Robot: Skywalker's Hand, Blade Runners, Iron Man, Slutbots, and How Fiction Became Fact

and about 20 of them came in at once. Doh!

Plus, last week I went to a different CCPL branch than I usually do (Somehow it feels like cheating or being otherwise unfaithful to my usual branch, but then again sometimes I like it when the checkout clerks don't know me.) and they had a bunch of DVDs and graphic novels on display, so I ended up with a handful of those, plus two more volumes in a YA series I had been reading and then lost track of: Shadow Dragons and The Dragon's Apprentice. (I talked about the first book in the series in Book Report: Volume 5.)

One of the DVDs I picked up was the second season of Frasier. Hi-larious! I especially enjoyed the translation scene in "An Affair to Forget" that was stolen from an homage to the "Paris At Last" episode of I Love Lucy. Now, of course, I have to request the complete first season and then watch all the rest of the complete seasons because I'm apparently a bit of a compulsive completist with too much time on her hands. But I think you already knew that.

Keith Richards Says Kids Should Not Do Drugs

I kind of want to get the audio version of Keith Richards' autobiography, because I want to hear Johnny Depp read it. But it's 16 discs long; will I really be in the car that long over a three-week period?

Besides, I probably won't be able to drown out the Denis Leary routine running in my head:

Keith Richards! Says that kids should not do drugs! Keith, we can't do any more drugs because you already fucking did them all, alright? There's none left! We have to wait 'til you die and smoke your ashes! Jesus Christ! Talk about the pot and the fuckin' kettle.

Monday, Monday

I should be getting my act together since I'm going to Athens for Homecoming this weekend  (and there was much rejoicing. . . ) but after two straight days of banging my head against the wall that is the first proof of the last history unit, I think I've earned some chocolate ice cream & pleasure reading.

I'm in the middle of Enchantment by Orson Scott Card. I happened to come across it while randomly browsing the shelves at the Bay Village branch a few weeks ago, and I'm enjoying it immensely.

Book Report: Volume 17

China Lake

Last week I tried listening to China Lake, but I couldn't stand the premise and had to give it up after the first disc. The plot involves some kind of wackjob cult, and the descriptions of all the nutty things they believe were depressing me. I mean, it was bad enough that I was listening to it on the way to and from work; I didn't need anything else to bum me out.

I'll Mature When I'm Dead

So, going in the opposite direction, I selected Dave Barry's I'll Mature When I'm Dead, which is hi-larious and awesome. My dad and I are fans of him anyway; my mom thinks he's dumb. I'm going to assume that my sister agrees with my mom, because that's usually how these pop culture things go in our family. 


After I finish the Barry book, I have Al Roker's Morning Show Murders, which I believe is read by Roker. (The Barry book is read by Barry — which is another point in its favor.) Then I've got the audio version of one of my childhood favorites, The Great Brain. I wish that the other books in the Great Brain series were on CD, but if they are, the Cuyahoga county system doesn't have them. Bummer.

Telephone Conversation

I'm on the e-mail list for the Indiana University Press, which is apparently having a summer sale. I thought I'd browse around and see what was on clearance, and thus came across this gem:

Telephone Conversation - Google Books

I mean: First of all, awesome cover. Then I read the table of contents and introduction via the Google Books preview and could not stop laughing at chapter titles like "How Do I Know When It's My Turn?" and statements in the introduction like "I hope you enjoy reading my long-distance call to you" and "Every sentence in this book has been simmered in the soup of class discussion."  

I decided I had to have my own copy, but since the shipping costs would effectively double the purchase price, once I discovered that I could get it via interlibrary loan — Would you believe that ten college libraries in Ohio own this book?! — I abandoned my shopping cart in the middle of the store and came over here to continue mocking. Further mockage as events warrant.

Book Report: Volume 16

I have about thirty things checked out of the library, but given all the overtime I've been putting in for the last week or so, the only one I've been able to make any headway on is the audiobook I've been listening to on the way to and from the office:

The Real All Americans was excerpted in Sports Illustrated when it first came out a few years ago, and I checked it out in hardcover at the time. It sat in my apartment, mocking me, for three weeks; I might have renewed it, but even if I did, I didn't get farther than skimming the first few pages and looking at some of the photos. It's hard to get into nonfiction in my off hours, given all the nonfiction I read at the office, so having it read to me is a nice switch. 


Listening to the descriptions of the battles between the U.S. Army and the Native Americans made me think about how the more things change, the more things stay the same. After rounding up some of the Indians who were involved in attacks on the military and civilians, the government came up with an "extralegal solution": "The combatants would be held indefinitely as prisoners of war, without trial, at a remote prison site" (page 40).  Hmm. Where have we heard this idea before?


The other book I'm in the middle of is My Name Is Memory by the woman who wrote the Traveling Pants books. 

It's your classic boy-meets-girl story, except that the boy met the girl thousands of years ago and then keeps meeting her as they are reincarnated; fate usually prevents them from being happy together, but maybe this time will be different. I'm only halfway through, but her take on the concept of past lives, while not completely original, intrigues me — probably because it reminds me of a story my mom likes to tell.


At some point, when I was, say, two or three years old, she and I went someplace and I announced that I had already been there. (I wish I could remember off the top of my head where we went; I'll have to ask her again this weekend.) She knew that she'd never taken me there, and when she asked me if I was sure, I said that my other mother had taken me. She thought maybe I meant the babysitter, so later she asked the babysitter about it, but the babysitter had never taken me there either. (Cue Twilight Zone theme music!) Apparently that's a common thing that little kids do, though: Have knowledge of a place even though they've (seemingly) never been there before. Spooky. 


Anyhow, I just noticed that this is the first book in a planned trilogy, so even when I get around to finishing it, I won't really be finished. That may be a good thing, though.

Book Report: Volume 15

This Fake AP Stylebook tweet  made me laugh because (a) it's funny and (b) it reminded me of a book I just finished listening to the other week: Christopher Buckley's Supreme Courtship.

First of all, it's Christopher Buckley in his usual hi-larious form. And, now that we're in the process of replacing another justice, it's a fun what-if exercise. Plus, Anne Heche does a surprisingly good job with the accents.


I'm not entirely sure why, but I'm on some kind of a Buckley kick lately. Last month I finally got around to reading (well, listening to him read) his book about his parents' deaths, Losing Mum and Pup. After I finished that, I listened to the one about the Supreme Court. Then I couldn't remember whether or not I had already read No Way to Treat a First Lady, so I scooped that audiobook off the library shelf as well. Tim Matheson narrates it, which is fun for fans of West Wing and/or Animal House and/or the original Yours, Mine, and Ours. (And by "fans of," I guess I mean "me.") I'm inclined to think that I read the actual book when it came out, but that was a few years ago and it's funny, so I won't mind hearing it again while I'm driving to and from the office.