More on this later, my dumplings, but for the moment I just wanted to alert those of you who don’t know: It is DWJ March once more! The lovely Kristen of We Be Reading is hosting. Readalongs of Howl’s Moving Castle and A Tale of Time City will be occurring in the first and second halves of March, respectively, so feel free to join in on that. As for me, I will be doing the former but not the latter, because I have my copy of Howl’s Moving Castle with me in New York (duh, like I could ever live…
4 CommentsReading the End Posts
Today we are (more correctly, I am) worrying about whether it is more important to have self-control, something I sort of pride myself on having, or to pursue my lifelong, but sort of ridiculous, quest for the One Best Copy of Every Book I Love. These exist and I do not need them because I own several of them already, do not like a couple of them, have not read several others, and would not exchange my current copy of In This House of Brede for anything. But these concerns are subsidiary to the very strong part of my brain…
26 CommentsTa-da! At last I have read this book and can proceed, like a year later, to Gone Girl. Seriously, it is almost a year later. You would not believe how long it takes for a hold on a Gillian Flynn book to get in at the library. Dark Places is about the only survivor of a massacre that killed her whole family. At the age of seven, Libby Day testified that she saw her older brother Ben murder her mother and two older sisters. Now she’s in her thirties, running out of money left her by sympathetic well-wishers, and searching…
15 CommentsI stealth-borrowed The Age of Miracles from my friend the Enthusiast on a day when he wasn’t at work and I forgot my Nook at home. The subway ride with nothing to read was so unbearably boring I wanted to rip all of my hair out of my head just to have something to do. The Enthusiast has one and a half shelves full of readable books at his cubicle, but I didn’t want most of them. I almost borrowed Coetzee’s Disgrace, but luckily Lil Liv Tyler, who sits at the desk across from the Enthusiast, warned me that (spoilers,…
34 CommentsI am pleased with myself in re: this book because I placed an e-hold on it before my library actually acquired an e-copy, which means I got to check it out as soon as their e-copy arrived. I don’t know how long I’d really have had to wait for it if I hadn’t done this, but I choose to believe it would have been, like, months. And that I am a genius for placing an early hold and getting my greedy paws on it early. But you are not reading this post because you want to know what process I…
27 CommentsIn this installment of Stuff to Worry About, we are going to worry about jellyfish. I recently read (and aggressively loved) the Best American Science and Nature Writing book that Mary Roach edited, and one of the essays was about jellyfish. Did you know you needed to be worried about jellyfish? You need to be worried about jellyfish. They can survive anything. They proliferate in water with insanely high acidity levels. They are the cockroaches of the sea, basically, except unlike cockroaches, they also sting you. Places that never used to have jellyfish now have jellyfish. There are trillions of…
30 CommentsTo be clear — because I got confused about this — this is not Best American Science Writing 2011, which is a whole other thing. It also does not feature the best of American science and nature writing published in 2011. The book is from 2011, the writing is all from 2010. I think that could be made clearer, but whatever, I am not the boss of this series. I got this because, please don’t judge me, I did a search on OverDrive for “science” and this is one of the things that came up. I just felt like some…
26 CommentsNot to blow my own horn, but I totally nailed the first work book club meeting of the New Year. Work book club has been on a hiatus, and we decided in December to reconvene it, so I felt some pressure to make reconvened work book club awesome for everyone. I tried to go with a book everybody would both enjoy and have things to say about, and this book by Joanne Harris felt like a good choice. I know that she’s an enjoyable writer, because I liked Gentlemen and Players, and I also know that she can leave things…
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