New bookshelves!

Right, right, so the hubris of painlessly shifting the periodicals at work has been paid for.  The new bookshelves (Billy, from Ikea) are heavier than the old ones, and assembly, placing, moving the filing cabinet because they're also an inch wider, and moving stuff where the filing cabinet had to go, and shelving all the books was... a bit much for one day.  One of the height extensions was missing a pin, so that will be remedied when it gets here, but they're otherwise done, and things are back (mostly) in LC order.  I've been getting through today on ibuprofen.

Bookshelf preparations

The new bookshelves should arrive tomorrow, so I have spent much of the evening preparing as best I can.  I don't have room to just pull everything off and leave it on the floor or a bed right now, so I've pulled off all the fiction and done so with that.  That was relatively quick; I didn't finish the LP I was listening to before I had that done.  Then I put the rest of the books in rough LCC order.  Since everything will be moving again tomorrow, I focused on getting it by the primary letter rather than anything more granular; I can do that when I reshelve tomorrow.

I used to shelve in Dewey, but I've worked in an LCC library for twenty years, and after a while, it became more intuitive to switch.  I do the fiction alphabetical by author, in publication order, but I'm considering splitting out the juvenile books into their own section.  There are some exceptions to shelving in LCC order: oversized books, TTRPG books (they are too heavy and need to go on a bottom shelf), knitting and sewing books, cookbooks, the Zane Grey books, and The Pianist's Guide to Standard Teaching and Performance Literature.

With the new shelves, I will have six additional shelves' worth of space, and I should be able to mostly avoid shelving items two deep.  I'll still need to keep the oversized and TTRPG books on a bottom shelf for weight considerations, and I'll probably put the Zane Grey books on a bottom shelf, as well.

I've also discovered that I can use TinyCat for free as a personal library, so once the bookshelf project is done, I can try to reconcile my Goodreads (1190 books tagged as owned) and the import into LibraryThing (1188 books tagged as own) and the actual collection, since I keep finding things on the shelf that aren't in either.  (I have been told we had a CueCat barcode scanner at some point, but it is either gone or buried in the attic.)

Hopefully once the bookshelves have all been swapped, I can find things more easily again, since everything won't be buried behind other books.  I'm apparently up to two full shelves of foreign language learning books, and that's one thing I'd like to get back into. 

Strength training

Back in 2023, I kept seeing things about strength training or resistance training being especially important for women over 40 to help maintain bone density.  Someone on one of the menopause forums I was lurking on recommended Strong Women Stay Young by Miriam E. Nelson, so I borrowed it from the public library.  The first half of the book is devoted to convincing women that strength training will be beneficial for them and won't make them bulk up, which I didn't care about, because I already knew I wanted to start doing some strength training.  So I skimmed ahead to the actual how-to.

The book covers several basic exercises one can do with free weights or ankle weights to help with maintaining strength and balance, and I found them easy to get into.  The only thing I found difficult was finding sufficient ankle weights that were both comfortable and able to scale up enough as I progressed; it's been almost 30 years since the book was originally published, and the equipment brands she recommends aren't still readily available.  At this point I've given up on the ankle weights and substituted other exercises for leg work.

At the moment, I'm doing:

• Biceps curls
• Triceps... I don't know what it's called, but I lift my arms overhead and then bend at the elbow to dip the weight behind me
• Upward rows
• Floor press
• Glute bridges
• Goblet squats
• Romanian deadlifts
• Kneeling wood chop
• Single-arm rows

I'm mostly using 8-lb. weights for everything at this point (including, as of last week, triceps, which had been plateaued at 5 lb. for over a year).  I like this routine because it's something I can do at home with not a lot of equipment that doesn't take up a lot of space.  At the time I was pricing out dumbbells, it was cheaper to buy each weight individually than to buy the set that lets you adjust the weight on a single pair of handles.  I've got 3, 5, 8, 10, and 12 lb. weights right now.

In November 2023, I got tendonitis in my right shoulder, and I thought it was because I'd gone up in weight too fast on the upward rows.  Spoiler: it was not.  Anyway, it took four months for my shoulder to get better.  Then in November 2024, it started up again!  That was when I figured it out: apparently putting a 2nd blanket on the bed for the winter made the blanket too heavy to pull up regularly when it would inevitably start sliding off the bed, probably partly because I have a woven cotton blanket as the bottom layer, and it created too much friction.  (Physics!)

So I've been doing my weights routine since then, twice a week, and this summer I got the first real payoff: I moved the bulk of our print serials at work, and nothing hurt.  I shifted or moved 1,250 linear feet of materials, over the course of about two weeks, and while it was gross and sweaty because our air conditioning wasn't on yet for a lot of it, I came out of it with nothing sore.  This means that none of the muscles I needed to do the work were getting neglected in my weights routine, and even though I'm only using 8-lb. dumbbells, that's enough.

If you're looking to get started, Strong Women Stay Young is a great introduction, and once you get comfortable with that, it's easy to change up some of the exercises either to keep things interesting or to find alternate ways to work muscle groups that you like better. 

Another round of weeding

I'm getting new bookshelves next week, which means everything is going to have to come off the old ones so they can be removed.  In preparation for this, I've been taking another pass at thinning out the collection, and I'm still finding books that somehow aren't on my list of books we own.  I took about 80 books off the list of books owned, dropping us down to about 1200, but give how many knitting books I put in the donation pile that weren't on the list, I don't even know if 1200 is accurate.

I have one bag full of knitting books and one bag full of cookbooks.  I haven't thinned out either in a while, and they were both fairly easy to once I actually looked at them.  The cookbook criteria was basically do we actually cook anything out of it, and are we likely to?  Knitting books took more looking through, but if the patterns weren't written a size I could wear, they were easy picks to go.  Most of the remaining books are patterns I want to make that will fit, some planned gifts, and some aspirational crocheted doilies.  (I'm not really sure what I'll do with doilies, but they look interesting to make.)

Overall I think I've freed up about two and a half shelves' worth of space.  I've scheduled myself to empty and sort the books on Friday (probably back into LC since I should have the room), and the new bookshelves will arrive sometime Saturday.  I've got some miscellaneous tchotchkes to redistribute, as well, but since I moved the collectable tins into the living room, I've got some room for the stragglers there.

Hopefully when this is all done, I will actually be able to access all the TTRPG books without doing minor excavation to get to them.  And now that I've thinned out the knitting books, maybe I'll finally learn to make socks.

Best Books 2023 (that I read)

I'm going to go ahead and put this list up now, partly because I don't have a lot of stuff slotted to read the rest of the year that I think is going to add another entry to the list, and partly because I can always edit the post.

I haven't read as much this year as I did last year; I've felt busier, but I don't know that that's objectively true.  I have been consciously making an effort to play piano most days, but I don't know if that's where the time is going.

Anyway, I've still read some good stuff this year; this is basically everything I've read from this year that I actively recommend to people.  I'm linking out to Goodreads for them since that's where I track my reading.

• The River of Silver (the Daevabad Trilogy #4) S.A. Chakraborty:  This is an epilogue to the trilogy that gives most of the main characters a chapter or two.  It was an extremely satisfying read after the trilogy, because it wrapped some things up for some characters that there wasn't room to in the trilogy itself.  You'll definitely want to read the trilogy first, or a lot of them won't make sense.  The trilogy itself starts off like you're going into a historical fantasy (French-occupied Egypt with some subtle magic undertones) and then tilts full into fantasy by like, chapter 3 (djinn kingdom political intrigue).
  
• The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, Shannon Chakraborty:  This is the author's next series after the Daevabad trilogy; it's about a middle-aged retired pirate who gets pulled back into the pirate life by a mystery that involves her old crew.  I'd still call this historical fantasy, but the layer of magic isn't as thick as it is for the other series.  This one is independent of the other books in that you don't need to have read them for it to work, but there is a character who appears in the later half that makes you realize it's the same setting (but about a thousand years earlier) if you have read it.
  
• The World We Make (Great Cities #2), N.K. Jemisin:  The second half of the Great Cities duology (I've started reading the afterwards in books, which is weird to me? But she explains why it's a duology and not a trilogy in it), this was a solid and satisfying follow-up to the first.  The general idea of the books is that cities, at a certain point in their development, become living entities, embodied in avatars, and since this is about New York, it's somewhat complicated in that each borough has one.  I think I've mentioned before that I love the way the author draws off Lovecraft for this while acknowledging and critiquing the racism in his work.
  
• Strong Women Stay Young, Miriam E. Nelson:  I heard about this book from the menopause subreddit, where I've been lurking for a while now as I approach the age where perimenopause could just show up one day and not be unexpected.  They recommended it because strength training is especially important for countering some of the loss of bone density from aging, and I had been looking for a sustainable weight training program I could do at home, so I got a copy from the library to see if it would work for me.  The first half of the book, originally out in the 1990s, is just trying to convince you with the author's scientific research that weight training is beneficial for women's long-term health, with some of the how's and why's that she had discovered.  So that part I mostly skimmed because, yes, I know I need to do this and it's helpful, just tell me how.  The second half of the book is how.  It is, indeed, an easy weight training program that I can do at home.  I've been getting pairs of dumbbells off Amazon as I work up to them, and I finally picked up a single adjustable 20-lb. ankle weight (they're expensive!).  The copy I got from the library was the original edition, and the paperback I got used for like $4 was a revised edition with updated exercises.
  
• His Majesty's Dragon, Naomi Novik:  I forget where I heard about this book, since it is not new, but it was only recently on my radar.  It is basically the Napoleonic wars, with dragons.  So I read it, and then I realized, crap, this is like, a nine book series, which I do not currently have time for.  So I've only read the first two so far, but I'll probably get through the rest of the series sometime next year.
  
• The Singing Hills Cycle, Nghi Vo:  I got the 2nd book in this series free from Tor in one of their ebook giveaways, and as I was working through my ebook backlog last year, I realized it was the second book and got the first one from the library.  It was, easily, the best book I had read in at least two years, and it felt like I was exactly in the middle of whatever Venn diagram of target audience groups the book might be considered for: the main character is a historian; it's somewhere on the line of fantasy history/magical realism (it's in a fictional empire with the essence of parts of south/east Asia, but not Earth, or at least, not our Earth); and it looks at the blurred lines between history and legend that I have an unwritten essay about floating around in my head.  I read the first two last year and pre-ordered the third (and sent in my pre-order receipt to get the pre-order incentive pin of the bird character in the series), then pre-ordered the fourth after the third came out this year, and then I read the fourth the day it came out.  I've pre-ordered the fifth book.
  
• System Collapse (the Murderbot Diaries #7), Martha Wells: I got the audiobooks of the Murderbot Diaries this summer (I had read them all before, from the library), and I don't know how far down the hold list I am for the print copy of the seventh book, but my husband pre-ordered me the audiobook of it, so I listened to that rather than wait for the print.  (I'll still read it in the print, again, when my hold comes up, partly to clarify the internal monologue/dialogue distinctions that are sometimes confusing in a first-person perspective book.)  The short version of "what is Murderbot" that I've been giving is that it's about an android with anxiety that works security.  It is far-future space-based sci-fi (Earth doesn't ever come up as far as I recall) which is more in the speculative fiction realm of "what does it mean to be human" than it is in the crunchy sci-fi realm of "how does terraforming work" and the like.  Eventually I'll get print copies of this series, too, but most of the books are novellas and only 3-4 hours in length, so I can easily listen to one in a week of commuting.
  

What to do with Lovecraft?

As I've been building a 1920s-era Pathfinder campaign with eldritch horror undertones, I have been debating for a while what to do with Lovecraft, specifically the multifaceted bigotry that's interwoven in a lot of his work. Several events in the past couple weeks have given me some ideas on how to handle it.

Regarding Lovecraft in particular, I recently finished reading N. K. Jemisin's The City We Became.  Jemisin incorporates Lovecraftian elements in the book in a way that acknowledges his racism without absolving him of it.  Indeed, the way she uses it to build a character that embodies this year's apparent theme of "disappointed but not surprised" was really well done.  There may be layers of nuance that I'm missing as a white person or as a non-resident of New York City, but even without those lenses to read through, it's a great book.

So what I took from her treatment of Lovecraft is that you can draw on racist sources to reflect some of the tradition of a genre, but you need to acknowledge its problematic elements, as well, in a way that does not hand-wave away the harm those problematic elements create or reflect.

Having been thinking about this for a while has also been helpful for parsing some of the recent rounds of "these authors whose books you've enjoyed are, in some way, assholes."  This issue has cropped up fairly often in the past several years as people who have been harmed have been emboldened or empowered to speak up.  It's part of the theme of "disappointed but not surprised" that's been going on.  Since I'm just a reader and not hooked into any active writing groups, I only hear about it when it hits the news or the social media circles I'm in, so I will continued to be disappointed but not surprised when I find out someone has been causing harm in some way.

As a reader, I have to decide how I want to engage (or not) with work by authors who are, in some way, problematic.  One thing I am certain of is that I won't recommend an author's work once I find out they are causing harm.  I don't recommend Lovecraft unless someone is doing background reading into the history of science fiction (which is basically why I read his work - to understand references to it in other works), and I do it with warnings about the blatant bigotry.  I have read plenty of other great books that I can recommend instead.

If someone is actively causing harm or an unrepentant bigot, I'm not going to read their works once I find out.  For example, I loved Orson Scott Card's Ender's Shadow, but then I found out about his homophobia and stopped reading the series.  If someone stops causing harm (it generally seems to be some kind of  bigotry or harassment that makes the news), atones, and actively works to not do harm in the future, I would consider reading their work again, but I don't know that that happens very often.  Everyone has a personal comfort level regarding redemption and forgiveness, but redemption requires atonement, and I'm not optimistic that I'll be able to pick back up a lot of the authors I have recently been disappointed by as a reader.

Another recent topic I saw come across Twitter was writing POC main characters as a white author.  (I'm pretty sure I only saw tangential pieces of what was a broader conversation because, again, I'm just a reader and not hooked into any writer networks.)  A lot of my early writing is, frankly, naive when it comes to issues of race, because I grew up naive about issues of race.  I'm not published, so my ignorance is not hanging out there for the world to see, but the discussion has made me think about my capabilities regarding writing diverse characters, what kind of work I need to do to include them in stories without doing so in a manner that would be offensive, and the best practices for writing outside one's own experiences.

This leads me back to The City We Became; I've become someone who reads the acknowledgements section at the end of books - I don't know how, but it's only been within the past year.  Seeing the extensive list of sensitivity readers Jemisin consulted for her diverse cast of characters really drove home how important that kind of feedback is when working with characters whose experiences may be different than your own.  Research can only get you so far, and sources can be biased.  If I want to eventually put some of my work out there, I need to put in the effort to not be someone creating harm, even if it's through ignorance.

A musical interlude

I'm not doing a post on the racial tensions or police brutality in the U.S. mostly because listening rather than speaking is more appropriate to my knowledge level on the topic, so here's some (non-paywalled) lists of books from Book Riot if you, like me, need to be more educated on the topic:

• 35 Must-Read Books About Racism
• So You Want to Be Woke: A Reading Guide for White People
• 8 Nonfiction Reads About Social Justice

What I can do instead if you need a break from the news right now is tell you what I've been listening to this spring.  (List is alphabetical by artist.)

• AJR - Bang!
• Ashe - Moral of the Story
• Benee - Glitter
• Billie Eilish - No Time to Die
• Dolly Parton - Jolene
• Finneas - Let's Fall in Love for the Night
• Glass Animals - Tokyo Drifting
• Henry Mancini - Peter Gunn
• Hozier - both his albums, but especially Nina Cried Power (feat. Mavis Staples) and Work Song
• Journey - Don't Stop Believin'
• The Killers - Land of the Free, Wonderful Wonderful, The Man, and The Calling
• King Princess - Ohio
• Lil Nas X - Old Town Road (Remix) (feat. Billy Ray Cyrus)
• Mark Ronson - Uptown Funk (feat. Bruno Mars)
• New Order - Blue Monday
• Rye Randa - Finding Balance (this is from the ny.gov online press room hold music playlist)
• Saint Motel - A Good Song Never Dies
• Thierry David - Timeless Journey (another ny.gov press room selection)
• Upsahl - 12345Sex
• Weezer - Can't Knock the Hustle

Cheap & Free Ebooks

A while back there were news reports about a free ebook repository that is basically flouting copyright law.  While I love a free book as much as the next person, I also want authors to be paid for their work.

So!  Here's where I've been getting free/cheap ebooks recently.

The free:

• The library.  This should be a no-brainer, but if you have internet access, or can go sit in a parking lot or something to download them, a lot of public libraries offer ebooks now.  Most loan periods seem to be 2 or 3 weeks.  Look for Hoopla, Libby/Overdrive, or just ebooks on your library's website.  If you don't have a card yet, check and see if your library is allowing signup via email.
• The New York Public Library.  If you're in New York state, you can get a card from NYPL.  Then download their SimplyE app.
• Project Gutenberg.  This is your platform for public domain ebooks.  This is where I got the Jane Austen I've been reading, among other things.  You can download the epub or mobi version and upload it into your Google Play books or Kindle if you want to read it on those platforms.
• Google Books.  If you're looking for public domain stuff, you can often find a scanned version in Google Books.  When I was researching piano production, a lot of the works contemporary to my piano were available here.
• Tor's ebook club.  Tor gives away a free ebook monthly, usually (in the short time I've been getting them) tied to an upcoming release.  It's kind of a standard book marketing thing, give away the first book in a series to get you to buy the rest, but if you're not familiar with the author, it can be a nice way to try them out if you can't get them through the library.  (Other publishers may offer something like this, but Tor's catalog generally aligns with my reading interests.)
•  Amazon shipping deals.  If you're buying from Amazon anyway and can pick the deal shipping option, recently they've been doing $1.50 of digital credit.  Combined with the cheap options below, I've gotten some stuff free recently using the credits.

The cheap:

• Book Riot.  One of the mailing lists you can sign up for through Book Riot is a daily ebook deals email.  It's a selected list of ebooks on temporary markdown, usually $.99 to $4.99.
• Ebook sales.  Google Play has an under $5 this week category in its ebooks section, and Amazon has an ebook sale section, as well, but it's harder to find.  This is usually a mix of popular and obscure stuff, but sometimes I find interesting things buried in here.
• Stalk your wishlists.  I use Google Play's wishlist for this:  I add stuff I'm thinking about getting to it, or that I want to get with points when I have enough, and then I check it regularly (a couple times a week) to catch sales on stuff I've been looking at.  I've gotten six or seven books for $2.99 this way that were already things I wanted to get.
• HumbleBundle.  The book bundles range from programming to comics, but they're usually a good deal.  I've gotten a couple different sci-fi/fantasy and comics bundles from them.  (There's a D&D one up right now that's basically all of R.A. Salvatore's Drizzt books, but we've already got them.)

I still buy some ebooks at full price (or pre-order) if I'm impatient enough to read it not to wait for a sale (hello, Their Bright Ascendancy series), or if I have some Google Play credit to use.  I do still get stuff in print, too, but with seven full bookcases (and the paperbacks two deep), I'm a lot more selective about what I get in print now.  (At least until I win the lottery and can get a bigger house.)

I have definitely been feeling the pain of the public library being closed - I want to pick up the second season of Star Trek: Discovery, the rest of the Sailor Moon books, and the next Sebastian St. Cyr book - but I am totally willing to wait until it's safe to do so.  It's not like I'm lacking for books until then.

Five Favorite Books Read in 2019

I'm not saying that these are the best books of 2019, nor that they're my favorites published in 2019, but that they're my top five of books I've read this year.  That's only about seventy books, so it's not a huge pool.  Five is an arbitrary number - I read a lot of good stuff this year.  This list is alphabetical.  Four of these titles I first learned of the author through Twitter.


The Calculating Stars, Mary Robinette Kowal.  This was on my list for about a year before I finally got around to it, and the only upside of waiting so long was I was able to read the second one shortly thereafter.  I really appreciate how Kowal depicts anxiety/mental health issues, besides all the "breaking-into-a-man's-world" bits.

City of Brass, S.A. Chakraborty.  I picked this one up kind of blindly based on a Twitter recommendation, was expecting a historical fiction book based on the first chapter, and then it spins full-on into historical fantasy, which is totally a good thing.  This book made me rediscover my love of hibiscus tea.  This was the second audiobook I listened to, and the narrator (Soneela Nankani) is wonderful - enough so that, despite the frustration of not being able to easily binge the end of the book and needing to Google the map to figure out some of the locations, I read the second one via audio as well.  The third doesn't come out for another several months, and I have been super impatiently awaiting it.  The first one stuck in my head for weeks.

Hidden Figures, Margot Lee Shetterly.  This is the non-Twitter title; I (like many others, I'm sure) heard about this book because of the movie.  I was curious about the book partly because I wondered which pieces were changed for the film, and the book was amazing.  This book made me wonder where I'd be if I'd taken the math scholarship I was offered, and whether, if I'd been born a hundred years earlier, if I would have ended up doing math for astronomers.  It also has led to me added a bunch of Black-history-related titles to my to-read list, since I (like many white people) am rather ignorant of large parts of what this country has done to its non-white residents and citizens.

Seven Blades in Black, Sam Sykes.  This was the last book I read in 2019, despite it being the first book I've ever pre-ordered.  And then Google emailed me when it was available, at midnight of its release day, and it was a work night, and I was good and didn't start it.  This was probably a good move, since when I did sit down to finish it after our Christmas trip, I stayed up till 3 a.m.  I will probably pre-order the sequel at some point.  I really appreciated the way Sykes trickled out the pieces of backstory to build up the reason behind the revenge plot. Edit, 9/27/20: If you want a book in a similar vein whose author hasn't been accused of abuse, try Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir or any of the Murderbot books by Martha Wells.

The Tiger's Daughter, K. Arsenault Rivera.  The narrative structure of this book switches back and forth between a first-person backstory narrative and a third-person present-time perspective, which I found effective similarly to how Sykes used the same kind of structure in Seven Blades in Black, but I'm now really curious how the next two books are structured, based on where the two main characters end up at the end of the first one.  I also want to know so much more about the world Rivera is building in it.

Brain Energy

So I have like 27 draft posts here right now, and I haven't really had the brain energy to touch this place much of at all.  I've been... busy.

On the work front, being a librarian at a SUNY, we're in the midst of an ILS migration that's going to wrap up and go live this summer.  I am simultaneously more than ready for it to be done with, already, and occasionally terrified that I'm forgetting some integral thing we need to get done before we're live.  Maybe that normal for migrations?  Anyway, this has been the biggest brainsuck for the past eight or ten months.

On the school front - yeah, I'm in school again.  I probably (maybe?) mentioned I'm doing a certificate program right now for archives.  After the class this spring, I've got three more to be done with it.  I'm really enjoying the public history classes I've been taking as part of this, and it's been showing me that a) I miss history and b) I've been doing way more public history than I realized as part of what I do in the library.  The last paper I wrote was on the history of my piano (turns out it was built in Muskegon), and that has gotten me playing more, as well, so yay school.

On the reading front, I'm aiming for 52+ books again this year, with the additional caveat of not so many graphic novel/comic issues.  Not that I don't think they're reading, just that they're kind of cheating on the goal when the goal is to be reading more pages, not more titles.  The book unit is just convenient for articulating the goal.  I have been dabbling with audiobooks this spring (I had a coupon, and Hoopla is a thing), and made the mistake of starting a trilogy that the third book isn't out until 2020.  (City of Brass is the first one.  I really enjoyed the narrator in the audio.)

On the writing front... Okay, so like, I never really stop getting new ideas.  Characters, scenes, premises.  I just don't get them out on paper like I did twenty years ago.  So I've got completion/revision goals for this year, and the additional goal of getting stuff down out of my head.  Currently I'm working on finishing #208, my NaNo from 2013.  It's what I was planning to work on when I sat down in my recliner tonight and ended up updating my website and posting this.

On the gardening front, well, it's March.  The gardening front has been pretty quiet since tear-down last fall and planting out the onions.  But the garden & flower show is this weekend!  I will probably get whatever candy Uncle Sam's is selling; buy some bean, pea, and flower seeds; and enter to win a cubic yard of dirt.  (I've considered buying one but don't want to have to schlep it back to the garden from the curb.)  I need to prune the apple trees and the grape vine Sunday if the weather cooperates.  Then I'll probably do nothing on the garden front till the end of April, and hopefully the ground will be thawed and I can turn it over and plant out seedlings the second weekend of May.

On the other crafting fronts... knitting and sewing are mostly on hold this semester.  I'm doing a cupcake project.  I've got a list of cupcakes I wanted to try baking, and have six left on the list:

• Pineapple w/coconut frosting
• Carrot w/cream cheese frosting
• Devil's food w/chocolate frosting
• Lime w/lime frosting
• Churro w/cream cheese frosting (first recipe idea from Reddit)
• Lemon w/lemon frosting.

Oh, and my WoW guild is 2/9 bosses into the heroic difficulty of the current raid tier (which is so much better than the first tier this expansion).

Anyway, I've been busy.

Books I've read more than once

A conversation with a coworker made me think about this: just how many books have I read more than once?  I think Watership Down has the most read-throughs for something that isn't a kids' book, but I think that's just three or four times.  I think other than kids' books, it's the only chapter book I've read more than twice so far.  I'm not counting Romeo and Juliet, because I've only read it more than once because it was assigned in multiple English classes, and I don't really care for it.

As I'm scrolling through my "Read" list on Goodreads, I'm realizing that a lot of the stuff I read in grade school I probably read more than once, but that was partly limited access between library trips to whatever was already at home.  (That list is also short a ton of Bobbsey Twins books, since I don't remember which ones I've read, but I read a good chunk of the series.)  Most of the Walter Farley and Marguerite Henry stuff I've got I read multiple times; I was... a bit horse-obsessed as a child.

So here's stuff I've read more than once post-middle school, when I had regular access to new books and re-reading wasn't just because I had nothing else available.

• Watership Down (Richard Adams)
• Lord of the Rings (JRR Tolkien)
• The Hobbit (JRR Tolkien)
• The Elenium and the Tamuli (David Eddings)
• Small Gods (Terry Pratchett)
• Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
• To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee) - Okay, I may have read this three times too
• Selected Stories of Lu Hsun (Lu Hsun)
• The United States Navy in World War II (S.E. Smith) - This is another I probably read three times
• Guadalcanal: Decision at Sea (Eric Hammel)
• A Girl of the Limberlost (Gene Stratton-Porter)
• The Chronicles of Narnia (C.S. Lewis)
• The Last Unicorn (Peter S. Beagle)
• Crocodile on the Sandbank (Elizabeth Peters)

Summer Reading Update

Three new books!

Plague of Shadows by Howard Jones

This is another Pathfinder novel, set far to the east of the others I've read so far.  It follows an elven ranger, Elyana, who is trying to lift a curse on an old friend.  The plot revolves around her old adventuring group and where they've all ended up twenty years later, and the various loose ends that had yet to be tied up.  The characters were well done, and the story was engaging.

The Worldwound Gambit by Robin Laws

This is the fourth Pathfinder novel, dealing with the Worldwound, which is a spot in Golarian where the boundaries between the planes is weak, specifically with regards to the Abyss, where demons dwell.  The plot and characters in this were well done, but the combat was a bit more gorily described than I generally like.

Ms. Marvel, v. 2, by G. Willow Wilson

The price on this dropped to $10 today; I held out about five minutes before getting it.  The only bad thing about comics or graphic novels is how quickly one gets through them.  Kamela Khan is the new Ms. Marvel, fighting against the Inventor's schemes in Jersey City.  The story is engaging, with plenty of humor and action.  The next volume isn't out until July.

Prince of Wolves

Prince of Wolves by Dave Gross

Two books into the Pathfinder novels, they are proving to be quite good at fleshing out the campaign world while being entertaining.  I had started with Winter Witch since the next person running the game after our current adventure is planning to run something in that area; Prince of Wolves is set in an entirely different area of the campaign world, Golarian.

Prince of Wolves follows a Pathfinder, Varian Jeggare, and his bodyguard, Radovan, into the country of Ustalav in search of a missing member of the Pathfinder Society.  While the lands of Irrisen explored in Winter Witch were full of trolls and goblins, Ustalav's major threats are undead and werewolves.  D20 RPGs generally have one or more pantheons of deities, and different ones have stronger followings in different areas of Golarian, so the way the inhabitants of Ustalav interact with their deities, and which, was also different from those in Winter Witch.

Pathfinder anthropology aside, the story itself is told in first person, switching back and forth between Radovan and Varian.  This construction works fairly well for giving events from both's point of view, but it sometimes takes a paragraph or two to figure out whose perspective is behind each chapter.  (I don't know if this is an element of the ebook format, or if the print version has some kind of distinguishing cue.)  Radovan's storyline at the points the characters are separated is better structured; the segments where Varian is alone at a manor in Ustalav feel a bit rushed.  The separate paths weave back together coherently, however.

Thus far the series shows promise, with both books having compelling characters and enough plot twists to make them hard to put down.

Paris at the End of the World

Paris at the End of the World by John Baxter

I picked this up from the local public library's ebook collection partly because it's about World War I and partly because I mistook it for another book about Paris that someone recommended to me.  In reading this, I discovered the bad influence that the Kindle is likely to be.  "1 hour left in book" is not the kind of encouragement to stay up later that I need.

Regardless, about the book.

Paris at the End of the World explores life in Paris during World War I - being both removed from the war itself by distance and at the same time under constant threat, as it was a target of the German armies throughout the war.  Bombing from planes and zeppelins, and later the Paris gun, 40 miles away, lent some direct danger, but compared to what city bombing would become in World War II, the threat was relatively mild.

At the same time, Baxter is digging into his grandfather's service with the Australian army during the war.  The family knew very little, and talked about it very little, so he didn't have much to go on.  Through the course of the book, the emphasis on this part of the narrative increases, and it is, at least for me, the more interesting part.  As I got further into the book, I found myself occasionally skimming the descriptions of Paris life to get to where he's explaining what further information he's learned about Archie, his grandfather.

All in all, once it got going, the book was an enjoyable read, and Baxter sprinkles in enough current-day personalities involved in his research process to give that some flavor, as well.

Summer Reading Program

Okay, I'm trying the Summer Reading Program again!  I am going to aim for a book a week, so 12 books total, to be reviewed here, as I finish them.  A large number of them may be from the Pathfinder Tales, as several of the people in our D&D group have been running modules, and I know practically nothing about the campaign setting, so I want some background.  But I've got at least 400 other books on my to-read list, as well, so we'll see how it goes.

A Few Books for Today

Today is the 93rd anniversary of the armistice that ended the fighting in World War I.  That number seems huge to me now: all the veterans of the war, save one, are dead; in three years we'll see the 100th anniversary of the war's beginning; in seven years we'll see the 100th anniversary of its end.

World War I is one of the time periods that I feel I don't know enough about (along with the French Revolution and the Korean War); over time I've been trying to remedy that.  Here are a few books I've read on the era, and a few I've yet to read:

All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque:  I read this for one of my Western Civ classes (taught by Dr. Dan White, who was also my undergraduate adviser, and who assigned amazing non-textbook works for course reading).  It's set from the point of view of a young German soldier during the war.

Regeneration, Pat Barker:  This was assigned for a class on historical fiction I took during my master's program.  The story is set in a psychiatric hospital for British officers during the war.

The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman:  I picked this up to read during our trip to Washington, D.C., while we were taking the trains back and forth from our hotel to the Washington Mall.  She is one of the best writers I have read, and she tells how the war unfolded.

A Peace to End All Peace, David Fromkin:  One of the books I've bought but have yet to read, it lays out the effect of the end of the war on the Middle East.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T. E. Lawrence:  I'm not sure where I picked up a copy of this, but I've got it sitting on my to-read list.  It's Lawrence's description of the war in the Middle East.  (If you've seen Lawrence of Arabia, this is the Lawrence in question.)

On Bookstores

Going into a bookstore can be profoundly frustrating for me.  I don't know how much of it is because I'm a librarian, but one of the largest sources of frustration is because the books are never where I expect them to be.  Bookstore classification and whatever logic underlies it just don't mesh with my internal ordering of books.

This leads to other problems.  I wanted a book on making sewing patterns.  I had read McCunn's excellent How to Make Sewing Patterns, and I was hoping for something to expand on that.  Sewing, whether you're looking at Library of Congress (LC) or Dewey Decimal Classification, is in the technology sections - the same area as cooking, engineering, and so forth.  For LC, this is the T's.  Well, at Barnes & Noble, sewing is in the vicinity of neither the cooking nor the other technology books.  No, sewing is over by... the paper crafts materials they also sell.  That makes sense from a marketing perspective (hey, you're into craft books, here's the craft supplies we sell), but if you're looking for a book on handwork that they don't sell the resources for, the logic breaks.

I suppose part of the problem I have in bookstores is that I don't go in to browse.  I go in to find specific books or subjects.  Modern brick & mortar bookstores aren't really good for that unless you're looking for something recently published (say, the Dresden Files) or something in perennial demand (a dictionary).  I want a copy of McCunn's How to Make Sewing Patterns, but going to the bookstore in the mall probably isn't going to work.  (I've tried.)  It's in print, but they don't stock it locally.  Heck, Barnes & Noble doesn't even sell it new on their website.  Amazon it is.

I've been using the library as a reader again more recently - for the Dresden Files, for example.  But books I check out that I really like I tend to buy, especially non-fiction titles.  The gardening book I love (the Self-Sufficient Gardener) I borrowed several times from the library, then bought. I started reading Halberstam's book on the Korean War, got into a time crunch, and ended up buying it later from Borders when they were going out of business.  But just because I found it in the library doesn't mean I can find it in the bookstore.

To some extent interlibrary loan spoils me.  If I find a book I want to read that some library owns somewhere, as long as they're willing to send it, I can probably read it.  Unfortunately, if I really like the book, finding a copy to buy can be more complicated.  S. E. Smith's book on the history of the U.S. Navy in World War II has been available used on Amazon for a while; I read it three times in junior high.  But it was always more expensive on Amazon than I wanted to spend.  I ended up getting it in Delhi when we stopped for lunch in a cafe/bookstore on a trip for work.  (I may have, ahem, gasped when I saw it on the shelf, halfway through lunch.)  I could have gotten it easily through ILL (you can see in that WorldCat link that almost a thousand libraries own it), but purchasing it was a bit more complicated.  (That cafe has amazing sandwiches, and if I could find an excuse to go to Delhi again, I'd really like another tomato/bazil/mozzarella panini, hold the tomato and basil.  Yes, basically a grilled cheese with mozzarella.  It was awesome.)

Another problem I have in bookstores also stems from working in interlibrary loan.  If I don't have a specific book in mind, a bookstore isn't necessarily going to help.  Say I want to read a book on the Korean War.  Is the bookstore going to have anything?  Is it going to be a historical book, or something else?  Something as engaging as Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August is for World War I?  What got me about Borders was that they had sections - history, military history, U.S. history, politics - that broadly overlapped and required extensive browsing to find things.  Genre fiction?  Not generally a problem.  Non-fiction?  Well...

I think this is why Amazon has been getting so much of my book business.  If I want to read a book about, say, Secretariat, I can pop it into WorldCat, see what comes up, and see if there's anything local.  My local public library is pretty good about getting books on racehorses.  And then if I like it, I can pop the title into Amazon and buy it.  (There's a book I read a while back about the American Eclipse that I've been thinking about getting.)  Going to the bookstore isn't really the most useful way to find a book on a specific topic if nothing on the topic has been published recently.

It's been a long time since I've bought a book I didn't know anything about just browsing in the bookstore that wasn't either deeply discounted or... well, deeply discounted.  The last time I recall doing so was Robin Hobb's first Assassin trilogy, back when I was in high school.  (I read them in one night.  It was, perhaps, a mistake, given that I had school the next day.)  Nowadays I tend prefer to borrow before I buy.  For a while I was buying bargain books because they were a subject I wanted a book on and they were cheap, but they didn't necessarily turn out to be helpful.  I'm trying to make my book purchases more efficient, more meaningful.  Borrow it, read it, and if I want it to read again or for reference, then buy it.  If I don't get around to reading it when I borrowed it from the library, I probably don't need to buy a copy.  I don't gamble on authors by purchase anymore.  (A good thing, too, since I tried getting into George R. R. Martin's series that everyone is so excited about, and it just didn't work out for me.)

At this point I go to the bookstore a) if I'm looking for a book for someone else; b) if there's a book I want and I know it's in the building (and that it won't be cheaper to buy online, because someone with an Amazon app on his phone will point it out to me if it is); or c) if I've got a gift card or they've got a really good sale going on that makes it work buying a book I wasn't planning to.

For something new to read?  I'm back to the public library.  So that's at least one bad college habit crossed off my list.

Holy crap, I haven't posted since July

So, besides working fifty-ish hours a week, we're now house-hunting, sort of, I guess. The market is decent, and we've got a good chance of getting a house for about what we're paying in rent. I think I actually prefer living in city limits.

Yeah, working fifty-ish hours a week. I guess that's what happens when you more or less absorb 50% of the work of a position that wasn't filled. I know the state of New York has excesses somewhere, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't on our campus. Or at least, not in the library on our campus. I love what I do, but I'd kind of like to sleep sometimes, too.

Read Pratchett's Unseen Academicals last weekend. I would try to get a hold of his new one (another Tiffany Aching book), but I know what the odds of getting something new through ILL are.

I've been reading through all my scanned stuff - there's a couple I need to go rescan pages for, mostly stuff from the older scanner. The newer one, scanning into Adobe, I think I've caught when it misses a page. There are a couple things that I want to rework, and a whole lot of crap from high school. The painful-to-read kind of crap.

I'm kind of disappointed I haven't had time to do more with the reading projects, but when you get home at seven and try to get to bed by midnight, between chores and dinner and unwinding for a couple hours, you just don't get much done.

At least I'm getting some writing in on lunch.

Status of the Reading Project:

Oh God cleaning parents will be here in 8 days


Yeah, we'll do it for real when I finish that and inventory at work, because inventorying a library is exhausting. Hedging my bets that we'll have air conditioning when we come back up from our 2-week electrical shutdown.

Sorting yet more books!

Okay, so the fiction took a lot longer to get through. Part of it was the quantity of fiction compared to non-fiction; part of it was the location of the bookshelves. I had to move two racks of clothes, a computer table, a drawing table, and a rocking chair to get at them. Maneuvering those plus a pair of folding tables was... complicated.

End result: about 230 fiction titles to read. At a book a week, that's about 4.5 years. (Compared with about 2 years for the non-fiction.)

Discovered: we're missing one book out of the middle of the Blue Adept series. (Book... 4? How?) I also need to get the 3rd book of one of the Robin Hobb trilogies.

Other than laundry and dishes, not much else got done this weekend.

Reading for the coming week (hopefully):
Non-fiction: The Guns of August (started in D.C. back in June)
Fiction: Magic Kingdom for Sale (Sold!)
Textbook: Some book on logic whose title I don't remember at the moment
Journal: Reference & User Services Quarterly, Summer 2010 issue

My folks will be here in two weeks, so most of the rest of what I'll be doing outside work will probably be cleaning.