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.

Random Sunday Morning Thoughts: Books, Blogs, and Bloggers

As I continue to clean up around Book Chase since my return to active blogging, a few things have jumped out at me:

• Like where did so many of my old book-blogging friends run off to?  I decided to clean up my "Blogger Reading List" yesterday afternoon by removing those blogs that have been dead for at least one year.  Now keep in mind that I haven't edited that list in about three years, so I did expect that several blogs might have disappeared by now.  What I didn't expect to find, however, was that 16 of the 38 blogs that I followed three years ago are no longer active.  Do the math along with me and you will see that's 42% of the bloggers I was following just three years ago.  Gone.  I had followed a few of them for close to ten years and lots of them for more than five - and saddest of all, some of them left just after reaching personal five-or-ten-year milestones.

• Like how much easier it is to remember details from the books I've read when I write something about them than it is if I know I won't be doing that.  I think it's a combination of me unconsciously paying more attention up front during the reading process, and that writing something halfway intelligible forces me to organize and solidly lock in my impressions and conclusions when I'm done with a book. 

• Like how so many of my blogging friends have moved from Blogger to WordPress in recent years.  I made that same move a few years ago myself but learned the hard way that the free Blogger platform could do some things for me that the paid WordPress could not do nearly as easily, if at all.  So I moved back to Blogger.  I realize that was four years ago, and I suspect that both platforms have changed for the better since then, but I will be sticking with Blogger unless some huge WordPress advantage makes itself obvious. 

• And finally, like how several of my longtime favorite book blogs are now just over or just under 15 years old and still going as strongly as ever.  Honestly, I don't know how they do it, but I love them for doing it so well for so long.

Louise Penny and Inspector Gamache Would Be Proud of This Duck

Just when you think you've seen it all, along comes a duck calmly sitting on top of a car and quacking at anyone who pauses for a second look - or in my case, a couple of quick pictures.

I admit to eating an Egg McMuffin for breakfast at least three times a week, and that's why I spotted this car in the side parking lot I use on the mornings I stop by a local McDonalds.  Since the duck showed absolutely no fear of humans, I suspected he/she was someone's pet, so I mentioned it to a couple of folks inside McDonalds hoping that someone could tell me why the bird was out there sitting on, and messing on, someone's car.

That's when the story got even stranger...turns out that the duck belongs to a fellow who was having breakfast in McDonalds, and that the big white bird is his daily companion as he runs errands around town.  The man even claims to have left that cup of on the car especially for the duck but I didn't ask him what was in the cup. Yes, you read that correctly: the duck rides around Houston all day long with his friend, the owner of the car.  

Louise Penny, who has created a wonderful old lady poet character  who carries her pet duck around with her everywhere she goes in the Inspector Gamache series, would be proud of this pair.  Whoever said that truth is stranger than (or at least every bit as strange as) fiction was right.

John Steinbeck's F-Bomb and Other Random Thoughts

It's funny sometimes how random, bookish thoughts pop into (and almost instantly out of) my head.  This has been one of those mornings:

I was reading John Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle last night and noticed a fully-spelled "F-bomb" in the dialogue of one of that novel's main characters.  That's no big deal today, of course, but it made me wonder what kind of reaction that word must have gotten from critics and readers back in 1936 when Steinbeck wrote this one.  Surely that kind of thing could not have been common in the thirties, could it?

I see that the largest bookstore chain in Japan is trying to corner the market on what will be one of that country's most popular books of 2015 by buying a full 90% of the book's first printing.  That decision has effectively limited Amazon Japan to about 5,000 copies, leaving about 5,000 copies for all other booksellers.  It's the bookstore's attempt to fight back against Amazon, and it might very well work in a country the size of Japan if bookstores can convince publishers to play along with the plan.  But Amazon, as we all know, is the 500-pound gorilla in any room it enters, and I wonder how the company will fight this.  Should be interesting.

People in Cleveland are talking about the city councilman who has taken self-publishing to new heights by charging the city for printing somewhere between 200 and 300 copies of a book he wrote - apparently, a book largely about himself.  The guy than "donated" the books to a select group of Cleveland students as a motivational tool of sorts.  He is now being accused of doing little more than self-promoting his image as an "educator" at the expense of the city.  Big ego, but short on ethics.

I have considered Houston to be my home since 1972 when we moved here a week before my official university graduation date.  But because I've always lived just outside the city's official borders, I have never set foot in one of the many libraries that make up the "Houston Public Library," instead always using the surrounding Harris County Library system.  Well, now that we are so into the digital age, I decided to go to the nearest Houston library location to me and get myself a "city" library card.  I drove the 16 miles there and got the card yesterday morning, in fact.  The well-kept little library is located in what seems to be a mostly black neighborhood, and I was disappointed by the amount of shelf space the building houses.  The library has only a tiny fraction of the number of books contained in my local county library, and that makes me sad for the neighborhood.  Now I need to visit other Houston Library branches to see how they compare.

Well, that visit got me wondering about other major city libraries in Texas and wether they offered free (or very cheap) library cards to other Texas residents.  Houston, I think, offers a card free of charge to all Texas residents who want to go through the process of acquiring one.  Other libraries, such as those in Dallas and Austin, offer cards but charge as much as $150 per year for them.  Some, like Fort Worth, do not make their system available to anyone living outside the city limits of that system - and even make residents jump through more hoops to acquire a card than Houston does for nonresidents.  Heck, even the Philadelphia Free Library offers a library card to anyone willing to cough up $50 a year for the privilege of accessing the system.  

I'm trying to force myself to sit down and write a review of sorts of John Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat...so I'm off to do that now.  I hope.

Calvin and Hobbes Discuss the Pros and Cons of Reading

Author Dave Fuller posted this old strip on his Facebook homepage this morning, and I could not resist sharing it with all my bookish friends around the world.  Enjoy.  


Post # 2,505

Random Thoughts at Mid-Year

Hard to believe that 2013 is already half way in the books, but in one more flip of the calendar that's exactly where we will find ourselves.  It's been a much busier year than I anticipated coming into it, but that's not all bad.  

1.     I wondered what retirement would be like, not really expecting it to live up to my hopes - and, frankly, it's somewhere between what I hoped for and the daily work grind that preceded it.  It seems that much of my free time goes toward helping out family members where I can, especially when it means they would have to take off work to get something done.  Throw in regularly scheduled tutoring hours I spend with a grandson, and I hardly know where the days go sometimes - but that's a good thing.  

2.     I do wish I had the energy to tackle a few longterm projects that I have in mind, such as learning the finer points of French and dabbling in Spanish a bit more.  Same with taking some formal classes in subject areas like Civil War history, American and World Literature, and enjoying more road trips (music, history, and baseball related), but I'm not giving up on any of that yet.  Just need to get more settled in to the newness of all this, I think.

3.     Much of the first six retirement-months have been taken up dealing with insurance companies, Medicare sign-up, simplifying our investment strategy, and the like.  Thankfully, that's all pretty much done now -  but what a chore it all turned out to be, and much more time-consuming and stressful than I ever imagined it could be.

4.     I see that Jane Austen is probably the frontrunner to replace Charles Darwin on the British ten pound note when the next change is made.  The Brits have been using historical figures on their banknotes for over 40 years, but only two women have managed to make the cut during that entire period - and one of those has already been retired, so I think this is a great idea.  I would guess that the tenner is probably one of the most heavily used banknotes in the country, so Ms. Austen's face would be virtually everywhere.

5.     Here's a rather neat site (Placing Literature) that lets you "map scenes from novels."  With a lot of user-help, the site is slowly accumulating maps that place scenes from novels into real maps that can be used for exploring a new city - or even your own. From what I can tell, there are something like 2,000 locations mapped now, and the database will continue to grow as word gets out.  Sounds like great fun...and perfect for some of you guys, I'm willing to bet.  (Houston, fourth largest city in the U.S. has only one map entry...I need to have some fun with this thing.)

6.     As you can see from the sidebar here, in addition to book news and reviews, I often write posts on libraries, bookstores, publishers, and authors.  I admit, that some of the posts are about outrageous failings on the parts of some of those institutions, especially libraries and bookstores (but, hey, that's half the fun).  Every so often I get some negative feedback but no one has ever denied the truth of something I've posted (well, at least with the exception of one Brit who wanted to sue me all the way from England because of something a commenter posted on Book Chase).  But here's the curious bit.  In the last week, I have had five different public libraries/library systems quit following my "tweets" on Twitter.  No big deal, I know, but I have to wonder which of my posts was the one that finally pushed them over the edge.  I'll probably never know.

7.     My goal, coming into 2013, was to read and review 135 books this year, but it doesn't look as if I'm going to make it because I'm going to finish June with only 62 books read and 57 of them reviewed.  I think I see my problem, though.  Now that I'm not commuting to work, I'm unable to work recorded books into my daily schedule.  Even though I only "read" five of those last year (and fifteen in 2011), they are the difference between reaching my goal and not reaching it.  I'm planning to travel a bit in the second half of July, however, and might be able to make up some lost ground on the trip. 

8.  Question: if new print books do ultimately become rare (and expensive) whose fault will it be?  Are readers really rushing to convert to e-books and e-readers, or are they being pushed in that direction by publishers who see electronic reading as the most cost efficient way for them to publish?  I've tried e-books, and have even owned a dedicated e-reader for several years - Sony's very first model, in fact, but I just can't make the transition comfortably.  For some reason, I find it difficult to concentrate when reading an e-book and often have to re-read whole pages after my mind has drifted.   Maybe it's because I'm always being tempted to check my email or twitter account...

So much for thinking.