Sunday, June 16, 2019

Random Sunday Evening Thoughts - Mostly Bookish


This has been one of those weeks that thankfully come around only once in a great while.

  • Precisely seven days ago (I am writing this at 9:00 p.m. local time) my wife had just been delivered to a hospital emergency room by ambulance to deal with back pain so severe that she literally almost could not move.  Nine hours later she was transferred to a local rehabilitation hospital for treatment that lasted until noon today when she was released from the facility. (She is much, much better but still in considerable pain.)  Let's just say that I now fully understand what a combined effort it is to keep a household functioning smoothly - even one of only three people - because I've taken up the slack, and let's just say that I am exhausted.


  • I did manage to post several book reviews this week, but never did find the energy for anything else.  By the time I squeezed in a few dozen pages of reading, it seemed like the day was over and it was time to start planning for the next one.  I suppose the only bright spot to my change in schedule is that I was on the road so much (trips to the hospital and carting my grandson to and from his summer classes) that I made some great progress on a couple of audiobooks - finishing one completely and getting halfway through Beartown by Fredrik Backman.  Backman is a Swedish author whose books are all being translated and published in the U.S. now, and I'm a big fan.  Beartown has, in fact, turned into a big surprise.  What I thought was going to be a rather ordinary coming-of-age novel about a youth hockey team in Sweden, took such a drastic right angle turn about a third of the way through, that I can't wait to get back to it.  
  • For some reason my library holds often all decide to show up within a few days of each other...nothing for a couple of weeks and then five or six show up in the same week.  It's happened again, and now I have so many library books in the house that today I had to resort to creating and printing a special calendar just to keep up with when they all need to be returned.  I already suspect that at least a couple of them are going to have to be returned unread so that I can start them through the cycle again.  Counting Beartown, I now have eleven library books on my desk and another thirteen still on hold.  I'm at the top of the queue for at least three of those thirteen, and with my luck they will all show up next week.  I'm about done with How to Read Literature Like a Professor and Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home, and I've started The Man from the Train and The Sympathizer, but the clock is ticking on the other seven.
  • Some of the books I have on hold are really intriguing and I know that I'll be tempted to start reading them just as soon as I get my hands on them (partially because they have dozens of people lined up behind me and I will only be able to check them out for two weeks).  Included is the the first book I've seen on the Bill Cosby trial, a book by Nicole Weisensee Egan called Chasing Cosby: The Downfall of America's Dad that I'm hoping can explain this man to me.  Among the others is another of my "books on books" titles, The Library of Lost and Found by Phaedra Patrick and some popular titles like Big Sky (Kate Atkinson), The Lost Girls of Paris (Pam Jenoff), Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee (Casey Cep), and On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel (Ocean Vuong).
Sometimes it seems that the faster I read, the further behind I get - and when I combine that with a period in which I spot new books that I want to read everywhere I look, this is what happens.  Oh, well.  As far as problems go, this one is kind of fun.

8 comments:

  1. I'm sorry to hear about your wife's dreadful experience. Hope she continues to improve, Sam.

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    1. Thanks, Jenclair. She's considerably better this morning and very relieved to be back home. More testing is scheduled because they still have not determined the cause of the problem.

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  2. Library holds always show up when you've already got too many other books checked out. It's like some bookish twist on one of Murphy's Laws. I hope your wife gets to feeling all the way better soon. Back pain is the worst. And good luck reading all those books. :D

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    1. It really does seem to be one of Nature's laws, that they show up in bunches. Even when I'm on the list near the top, about 10 down, or even 30 down, they are just as likely to show up on the same day as not. I wish I could figure it out.

      Thanks, she is doing better, but now we wish we knew what caused it so that we could keep it from happening again. That's going to be the real trick.

      In addition to these 24 books, I'm a couple behind on NetGalley, too. Plus there's all those books that are still sitting on my shelves glaring at me for lack of attention. Readers have such wonderful problems, don't they?

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  3. Really sorry to hear about your wife, Sam. I do hope she's now on the road to recovery. Horrible experience.

    I'll be interested to hear about the Cosby book when you get to it.

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    1. Thanks, Cath. I appreciate your kind thoughts.

      I'm number 2 in line for the Cosby book and have been in that spot for a month, leading me to believe that it's still on order at the library (haven't checked the official publication date but I think it's been published now). I'll let you know what it's like.

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  4. Oh no! How horrible for you and your wife. I'm glad she's feeling better and pray that that trend continues.

    My library holds seem to do the same thing! Why does that happen?? My library just did away with fines, though, so now I can hold on to some of my holds longer even if someone else requests them. Mwahaha!

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    1. Thanks, Susan, she had an even better day today. And I am just about fully trained now is several household tasks I had somehow avoided up to now.

      My library only charges ten cents a day on overdue books so I'm not sure why they bother. I had an email today that another one is ready to be picked up, but I'll delay that for a few days in order to buy a little time. I did finish two of the twenty-four library books, though, in the last two days, so that's SOME progress.

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