Bibliomama

I don't really want to become a one-post-a-week blogger, but I'm not feeling inspired, so I'm going to just tell you some stuff that may or may not be of any interest. We had friends over on Sunday of the long week-end, had a non-barbecue barbecue (I did everything in the slow cooker because Angus and Matt were in town but were at double-headers on Saturday and Sunday and I still think I'm going to blow myself up every time I light the barbecue). We played board games, which some of our friends do regularly but I almost never do because I hate most of them. Games that involve strategy, like this one , or this one ? Hate them - I suck at them and find them tedious. Card games? Hate them - they make me wonder why everyone doesn't just read more. But I like trivia games and silly word games. My brother-in-law and his wife gave us this game for Christmas. This was extra funny, because I had already bought this game for our New Year's Eve party. We didn...

In my School Libraries course last term (the one with the instructor who annoyed me), I did a Book Talk project on five YA books that had been made into movies. I thought I did an awesome job, but of course the instructor found all kinds of nit-picky details that weren't in the assignment instructions but we somehow should have just guessed that she wanted. One of her comments was "you should be honest about whether or not you've read all the books - students will be able to tell if you haven't, and you'll lose their trust." SAY WHAT? As IF I'd do a book talk on a book I hadn't read. If I hadn't read it, I would just read it the night before. Okay fine, I can't read every single book in the library, but I can read all the books I do book talks about - are you saying you don't, Ms. Instructor, because maybe that's why I don't trust you. Hmph. So my course right now is called Genre Fiction and Readers' Advisory, and so far it ...

I struggle often with how to be assertive enough. I don't like feeling like a sucker, but I also don't like causing a scene or being obnoxious, and it can be difficult to find a balance between the two. When I'm in a store or a restaurant, I'm fine with someone complaining about bad service, but sometimes people are bitching out sales clerks or wait staff for things they have no direct control over, and that makes me want to sink into the ground and disappear. I also get that people make mistakes, so if something is done wrong, my first step is to nicely point it out, and if they apologize and fix it, then I'm their customer/best friend for life. Some people are good at calling attention to themselves in order to get extra attention or privileges in any given situation - I sort of admire this in a person, but not in the way that means I wish I could do it.  I'm sure everyone remembers me bitching about  mentioning my course on school libraries last term where...

Does it sound weird if I say I think of myself generally as a happy person? I know I complain a lot. I know my serotonin and dopamine levels are frequently recalcitrant. But I also know I have a really great life. Parents, sister, husband, kids, friends - all pretty much beyond reproach (not that I don't reproach the heck out of all of them on occasion). Food, shelter, clothing, more books than you can shake a stick at. So if I'm feeling a little flat this week, and I can feel the cancer-thoughts sparking like malevolent little fireflies in my head every time I feel an ache or pain, and everything I'm reading seems dumb, and things are just kind of lustreless and wearying, I know it will pass. And so as not to let the whole week go by post-less, I'm concentrating on the things that have made me happy instead of surly recently: My Dad and Lucy: "I always said I didn't like little dogs. Guess I have to eat my words." Happily, the words taste like puppy ...

Angus is fifteen years old today. Fifteen. Three whole hands. So much has changed. Wait. What?

I keep trying to assure myself that when my reading focus goes off it's a temporary thing, but sometimes I worry that it's just an increasingly present phenomenon related to aging. Today I've decided that it's cyclical - even if the scatterbrained cycles come around more often, they will always pass. That's what I'm sticking with for now. So, as I mentioned in  this post , I've been having trouble finishing books. Starting them comes easily enough, middling them consists of bits of reading interspersed with other books, too much Netflix and lurking on social media, and then I realize I haven't marked a book as read on Goodreads for way too long, panic slightly, sit my ass down and finish something. Lather, rinse, repeat. I showed at book club with the book unfinished TWICE already this year, which is very unusual for me (I'm still working on digesting The Inconvenient Indian in small, spaced-out bites). Sometimes I'm not-reading for more defen...