Bibliomama

I'm not remotely surly today, but I also can't think of a post title (I suck so badly at SEO optimization, I might as well title every post DO NOT READ: DEVOID OF ANYTHING INSPIRING, ENTERTAINING OR REMOTELY TIME-WORTHY and have done with it). I've had the loveliest week, which is weird since it's January and typically I'd be eyes-deep in the Slough of Despond. It's been cold and the roads have been not great, so aside from grocery shopping and ferrying Eve to acting class and piano I've been mostly hermitting, while baking, cooking, hanging on Twitter with fabulous people, reading and making another embarrassing blunder in one of my courses but who cares? I blamed the children for my witlessness, and the instructor has kids too so she was on board with it. I read a couple of articles on Book Riot recently that referred to my issue   about Orson Scott Card and whether I should see Ender's Game: No, I Won't Read Your Book if I Think You're a Mon...

You expect the crying, crying is totally de rigeur. You even expect some laughing - there's a 'celebration of life' element in there, right? Maybe you don't expect the laughing to be occasionally so immoderate, but dammit, he was a funny man. You can see the twinkle, can't you? Then there's the awkwardness of "oh, it's been so long, it's wonderful to see you - uh, aside from the whole Grandpa-dying thing". Ack, this is worse than trying to put makeup on after a sun-lazy week on a tropical beach and then a low-grooming period of January hibernation. I kept burning myself on the straightening iron. I got mascara in my eyebrow. I fail at being a girl AND proper funeral conversation. The slide show. Geez, his hair was crazy when he still had it. That man could really wear a hat. As we were walking down the hill to the funeral home parking lot (me, Matt, his cousin and his brother), my brother-in-law said "Was this supposed to make me ...

Books 2013 - Final Total and Two-Star Books Here we go! Books I read in 2013 (that I remembered to record on Goodreads - otherwise they're quite possibly lost to the ether forever). 111 seems to be the grand total, compared with -- *clicks around madly looking for last year's post* -- geez,  144 last year . I've been positively slacking. I blame  baseball . I always pause and reflect on whether it's worth posting about the one-and-two-star books - if people are reading these posts for recommendations, it seems kind of silly. But then I looked at the Goodreads reviews for a book I downloaded to my ipad on a whim on New Year's Eve Eve and then stayed up way too late reading, and it really illustrated how different people can have completely different reactions to the same book, and it doesn't denote a lack of intelligence or one person being more right than another (unless we're talking about, say,  this , or maybe  this  - so many people, so, so wro...