So, Here We Are In 2020

It's a very science-fictional sounding year, but haven't they all been, for the last couple of decades? At least for us relics of the 20th century, anyway.

So. I'm still here, obviously. At least right now. I'm dropping the "currently" format, though, I think. It's served me well over the years as a prod to keep me posting at least something, and to open up a topic or two for discussion. But it's all feeling very old and creaky now. I may just check in here once in a while with whatever I have to say about how life's been going. Or I may not.

As for how life's been going right now, well, 2019, a year of considerable ups and downs, ended on a sad note for me. I lost my cat, Vir, right before New Year's. He was 14, and, honestly, I'm not sure I ever expected him to live this long. He's had health problems all his life. His diabetes, at least, was nicely under control, but then he started showing signs of kidney problems, and went downhill very rapidly. A couple of months ago, it was "Hmm, the blood test results are slightly worrying." A few weeks ago, his appetite started to diminish and he seemed slightly under the weather, and the blood test results were worse, so they gave me some medicine for him and told me to come back an have him rechecked in a month. A week later, he'd stopped eating almost entirely and looked very tired. They took him in and treated him with fluids -- a three-day process to relieve the symptoms of kidney disease, including the nausea that must have been keeping him from eating -- and reported after day two that he seemed to be doing a lot better and had cleaned his food dish, and I should be able to take him home the next day. Except the next day, they came in, and he was gone.

To be honest, while it came as a shock how quickly it all happened, it was also a very real relief. I was bracing myself to deal with a long, slow decline that would have been kind of awful for both of us, and for having to make a horrible decision for him at some point, and I'm glad we were spared that. And, I won't lie, on a practical level my life just got a lot easier. Keeping him on the feeding and medication schedule he needed was extremely hard on me, what with my shifting work hours. Not to mention all those vet visits.

But it's very strange, not having him around. This is the first time in over twenty years that I haven't had a cat in the house, and it's astonishing how much emptier the place feels. And it's going to take a while before I'm able to come home from work and not, for a moment, expect there to be an animal greeting me on the other side of the door.

So, yeah. It's sad. Not least because I knew him literally from the day he was born. I saw his entire life span play out in front of me, and thinking about that sort of thing can really make one feel the concept of mortality in one's bones.

One request, after all of this: Please, please, please do not attempt to engage me in a conversation about whether or not I should get another cat and whether I'm in the right mental place to make decisions about it. I have had this conversation enough in the last week that it's starting to make me angry, especially what seems like the constant parade of genuinely well-meaning people who seem determined to believe that I don't know my own mind on the subject. Thanks.

Ahem. Right, well, other than that unhappy news? I don't have much. So I'll just leave you with my traditional link to the list of books I read in 2019. Which is fewer than I would have liked, honestly, but I'm looking forward to more in 2020.

May you all have a bright, warm New Year, one that you will look back on when it's over and smile. I think we all deserve that at this point.

Happy New Year!

I may not be posting here much, but I could hardly neglect to check in on the last day of the year, could I? I hope everyone out there has been having a warm and lovely holiday season, and I'd like to wish you the very best in 2019.

As far as my personal life goes, I don't know that 2018 seemed like an exceptionally eventful year. To be honest, I think it mostly passed in kind of a blur. Far and away the most significant thing is that I got my new fake tooth properly installed, and eventually even got to the point where I could confidently chew on it without thinking about the fact that it was fake and worrying about something going wrong with it. And very glad I am to have that whole dental saga behind me.

I did accomplish a few things, too. Like finally getting my aging sewer pipe replaced. And the skylights, once they started leaking. And I made it out to California to visit my mother, for the first time in a decade or so. (Not that I hadn't seen my mom plenty of times during that decade. But, well... Let's just say that I very much owed her a return visit.)

Yes, well, I never claimed to have the world's most exciting life.

One thing I do claim to do, though, is to read a lot of books, which brings us to the traditional end-of-the-year book roundup. You can see a list of all the books I read here. There were actually fewer of them this time than in other recent years. But, despite that, the one-in/two-out method of trying to tame my out-of-control TBR has been working quite well: I now have 34 fewer unread books on my shelves than I did at the start of 2018. Admittedly, at this rate it'd still take me about 27 years to get it down to zero, but I'm counting it as progress.

As is also traditional, here's a list of the best books I read in 2018, or at least which ones I gave at least 4.5 stars out of 5 on LibraryThing:

FICTION

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore by Matthew Sullivan
The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip bu George Saunders
Fierce Kingdom by Gin Phillips
Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor by Steven Moffat
The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

NON-FICTION AND HUMOR

The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande
Science: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness by Zach Weinersmith
Big Mushy Happy Lump and Herding Cats by Sarah Andersen
The View from the Cheap Seats by Neil Gaiman
M.C. Escher: The Graphic Work by M.C. Escher
The Habit of Turning the World Upside Down by Howard Mansfield
But What If We're Wrong? by Chuck Klosterman

Which I swear is an even more motley assortment of books than my usual.

Anyway. That's it for 2018, for me. I'll be back sometime in the next few days with the usual monthly thingamajig. I'm figuring on continuing to do that for the foreseeable future, if only because I'm far too lazy to think of anything else to do with this blog.

Until then, and once again: Happy New Year to you!

2017: The Year In Books

Happy New Year! It's become traditional for me, on the first of the year, to take a look back on the previous year's reading. And it is now the first of the year, even if we're only a couple of hours in. So.

I read a total of 138 books in 2017, a bit less than the previous year, but a respectable total nonetheless, I'm sure. You can see a complete list here, if you're interested.

As is also traditional, I offer a list of the best books of the year, based on which ones I rated 4.5 or 5 stars on LibraryThing at the time I read them:

Fiction:
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
On the Beach by Neville Shute
Tinkers by Paul Harding
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 edited by Joe Hill
Ethan Frome & Other Stories by Edith Wharton
Guards! Guards!, Men at Arms, Feet of Clay, Jingo, and Night Watch by Terry Pratchett
All Grown Up by Jami Attenberg
City of Miracles by Robert Jackson Bennett
Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine
Dragon Springs Road by Janie Chang
The Great Glowing Coils of the Universe: Welcome to Night Vale Episodes, Volume 2 by Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor
Places No One Knows by Brenna Yovanoff
The Mothers by Brit Bennett
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
The Country of Ice Cream Star by Sandra Newman

Non-fiction and humor:
Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman by Lindy West
What Language Is (And What It Isn't and What It Could Be) by John McWhorter
Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan
Star Trek Cats by Jenny Parks
Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years by Geoffrey Nunberg
Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?: A Memoir by Roz Chast
Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History by Bill Schutt
How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson
Religion: Ruining Everything Since 4004 B.C. by Zach Weinersmith
Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things by Jenny Lawson

Some really good stuff there, although I'm a little surprised by how many of them were re-reads. The Prachett, of course, as re-reading the Discworld City Watch books was a year-long project for me, but also Slaughterhouse-Five, On the Beach, and Ethan Frome. Which, now that I think about it, is a really depressing trio of books. Depressing, but excellent.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go and get started on 2018's reading...

Go, Endurance Readers!

So, today is the day of Dewey's 24 Hour Readathon, an internet-based challenge in which, as the name implies, participants read for 24 hours straight. Every time this comes to my attention, I think, oh, it would be really cool to do that sometime. And every time it actually happens, either I've forgotten all about it, or my work schedule doesn't remotely permit such shenanigans.

This time out, it actually would have worked with my work schedule, but, alas, I'm still not doing it. Partly because I didn't want to get up a 6 AM, but mostly, I think, because I only realized it was this weekend a couple of days ago. If I'd had more time to psyche myself up, and to stock up on snacks, well, maybe.

As it is, though, I think perhaps I will engage in a show of solidarity by spending a good-sized chunk of today sitting around and reading. It's the least I can do, right?

Two Wrongs Don't Make A Right, But Two Wrights Make An Airplane.

Speaking of books, I'm now reading a biography of the Wright Brothers, and I'm enjoying it well enough. But I can't help thinking that maybe there need to be more biographies of dumb losers who never do all that much with their lives, because reading about hyper-competent history-making people only brings home to me the fact that I am not someone who ever would have been capable of inventing an airplane.

I Sort Of Love How Ridiculously Low-Tech This Is.

My attempt at the "two out, one in" method of controlling my TBR shelves seems to be going pretty well so far. Those book subscription services I signed up for aren't helping, but avoiding the library sales definitely is. Here's what the book log I've been keeping looks like right now:



Although possibly the only thing to really be concluded from that is that I have books with odd and interesting titles.

All It Takes Is One Step Forward And Two Steps Back! That's Usually Easy.

In non-cat feces related news, I've decided I'm going to give this method of reducing one's TBR pile a shot. It looks so simple, so easy, so mathematically inevitable! How can it possibly fail? Well, knowing me and my slightly worrying book-buying habits, probably fairly easily. But I'm trying it, anyway. I really don't want to face the shame of my unread books total hitting quadruple digits.

2016: My Year In Books

Well, here we are, all crossed over into the new year and still hurtling forward in time at the dizzying rate of one second per second.

As I alluded to last time, at this point I traditionally like to take a look back at the previous year's worth of reading. I read 146 books last year in total (although a few of those were re-reads), which is respectable number, but one that's pretty much in line with the last few years. We, uh, won't discuss how many books I now have on the To Be Read shelves. Let's just say that if I'm making any bookish New Year's resolutions, one of them ought to be trying to keep that number from hitting quadruple digits. Um.

If you're interested, you can see the complete list of what I read this year here, or, if you prefer a pretty parade of covers, here.

As usual, I have a list of the best books I read this year. Or, rather, the books I rated 5 or 4.5 stars out of 5 after I read them, which is the only way I can compile a list like this without going completely nuts with indecision about it. Although, even so, I can't help feeling that I'd like to add Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky as an honorable mention, despite the fact that, for reasons that made sense to me that the time, I only rated it four stars. Because that's one that's really sticking with me.

Anyway. The Strugatskys aside, here's the Best-Of list for the year:

Fiction

The Nobodies Album by Carolyn Parkhurst
Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances by Neil Gaiman
City of Stairs and City of Blades by Robert Jackson Bennett
The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz
Mort, Reaper Man, Soul Music, Hogfather and Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett
The Girl With All the Gifts by M. R. Carey
Don't Breathe a Word by Jennifer McMahon
Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro
Railsea by China Miéville
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
Carry On by Rainbow Rowell
The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex
Nimona by Noelle Stevenson
Skippy Dies by Paul Murray

Non-fiction and Humor

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Adulthood is a Myth: A Sarah's Scribbles Collection by Sarah Andersen
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Let's Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir) by Jenny Lawson
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick
As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride by Cary Elwes
Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words by Randall Munroe
The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison
Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths
The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap by Wendy Welch
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi


Which is a pretty substantial and nicely varied list, and a bigger one that I might have expected it to be. So, whatever else one might say about 2016, at least it was a good reading year for me. Which, of course, is what's really important.

Anyway. Happy New Year to all of you! And may you also have a great year of reading, or of whatever else it is that brings you joy.

Now, if you'll excuse me, my first book of 2017 may be calling my name...

Admittedly, I Read This Book 20+ Years Ago, So Mostly All I Remember Now Is That It Was Great.

Not much to talk about today, this being one of those weekends where I don't really have much time to do anything but sleep and work. But I figured, for anybody who might be interested and hadn't heard this yet, I'd pass along this recent bit of news that made me happy: Neil Gaiman has said he'll be wring a TV adaptation of his and Terry Pratchett's novel Good Omens. That article also talks about some other Pratchett-based adaptations currently in the works, which I am feeling pleasantly optimistic about.

Now, I just need to do start that Discworld re-read I keep saying I'm going to do sometime...

I May Feel Less Self-Conscious About People Looking At What I'm Reading Now.

And today's random thing, just because it made me laugh way more than it probably should have: fake book covers on the subway. (Warning: some of these are pretty crude.)

Welcome To My Library

This is pretty cool! LibraryThing, where I catalog all my books -- because how else am I going to keep track of them? -- just came out with a spiffy new interface that makes searching through a collection of books really simple and easy. It's mainly aimed at lending libraries of various kinds, and they have to pay a fee to use it, but they've made it available for free to people who use the site to catalog their personal book collections. Which means that if you want to search through my books, say to check if I have a particular volume you'd like to borrow or to make sure I don't already own a book before you get it for me for Christmas, you can go here and pretend I'm an actual library!

Almost But Not Quite As Good As Finding A Big Stack Of Money

Story of the day: Mysterious Stacks Of Books In NYC! Well, they're not all that mysterious. I mean the article includes the name of the guy leaving the stacks of books around and some quotes from him about why he did it. So... Kind of the opposite of mysterious, really.

Anyway. My bookish heart finds this utterly delightful and is thrilled to know that there are such things in the world. My practical brain, however, can't help kind of agreeing with the people in the comments suggesting that leaving books sitting around outside is probably not the best thing in the world for them.

Yes, The Eggplant Thing Is A Real Book I Actually Bought.

Yesterday was the local library's big (well, big-ish; it's a small library) Friends of the Library book sale. As always, I told myself I was going to be restrained, and mostly just look for stuff that was already on my wishlist, and, as usual, I left with a big pile of books I had no intention of buying, anyway. There's just nothing like a $2-a-bag price tag to make you suddenly convinced that if you don't go home with a copy of something called Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant, you will somehow regret it for the rest of your life.

Well, at least I can say that my books acquired total for the year is still smaller than my books read total. So far. I did intend to help that along by spending the rest of the day reading, but I was so tired from getting up at noon to buy books after working all night that I had trouble keeping my eyes open. Ah, well. I have the rest of the year to spend working on it, right?

2015: The Year In Books And Other Stuff

Happy New Year to all! I hope 2016 is bright and happy for all of you, and brings you many good things.

2015 was, I suppose, a messy, turbulent year for the world at large (although I'm not sure if there are actually any years that aren't), but, looking back, it seems fairly sedate for me, personally. The big event of the year for me was having family visiting and doing the Balloon Fiesta and various trips around New Mexico, in October. Well, that and rain flooding in through my floor again during the summer. Looking back over the blog, I'm not sure I even talked about that here... It was extremely annoying, although fortunately not too difficult to fix: I just had to caulk up a crack in the concrete slab floor. Also on the subject of water being where it's not supposed to be, I think my roof might finally be fixed for good this time, so that's definitely a plus for the year. I also got a new oven, a new dryer, and a new couch and loveseat, so my house is overall a nicer place to be now than it was at the beginning of the year, even if it is continuing to age. Oh, and, yes, I am going to brag about winning that Doctor Who trivia contest forever.

I also read a lot of books, as always. My total for the year was 137 books. Interestingly, 2014's total was 138, and I have no idea how the heck I manage to be that consistent about it. I'm not consciously trying to be! You can see my whole year's worth of reading here.

As is traditional, I include here a list of my favorite books of the year, or at least the ones I gave the highest star ratings to on LibraryThing. It's a pretty good list this year, I think:

Fiction

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Promise by Gene Luen Yang
Sweetland by Michael Crummey
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin
Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie
Tenth of December by George Saunders
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
Putting on the Ritz by Joe Keenan

Non-fiction

What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe
Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight by M. E. Thomas
I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande
Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thomspon
The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession by David Grann
Size Matters Not: The Extraordinary Life and Career of Warwick Davis by Warwick Davis

A little of both

The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012 edited by Dave Eggers


We're not going to talk about how many books I acquired in 2015, though. Not at all.

I Hope It's A Good Book.

I just took this Do You Have A Book Hoarding Problem? quiz. It told me "SEEK HELP NOW. You are becoming a book."

Is that bad?

Book People Problems

A video I thought I'd share, because I know at least one person out there will understand:

I May Have Already Added At Least One Thing To My Wishlist Because Of This.

Today's book-related link: Whichbook, a site that invites you to move some controls around to tell it what kind of book you're looking for -- happy vs. sad, for instance, or easy vs. demanding -- and recommends things to you based on your input. I haven't played around with it too much yet, in part because more book recommendations is probably the last thing I need. But based on some of the results it gave me, I'd say it seems to know what it's doing. It's also coming up with lots of stuff I've never even heard of, too, which is nice.

Whining And Linkage

Ugh. I'm finally approaching the end of a long, looong week of night shifts, the last couple of which have involved dealing with some annoying middle-of-the-night problems. I've been getting even less sleep than is usual for me when I'm on nights. And this chest cold, while not as bad as it might be, is showing no signs of departing. Basically, it's been a bit of a rough week.

So, clearly, it's time to share a silly link that made me smile: 14 Classic Novels Rewritten With Clickbait Titles. Although, honestly, #9 just tells the simple, unvarnished truth.

My Big, Nerdy Day Out

Yes, this has been quite the day of nerdy indulgence for me! First, I went up to the big semi-annual book clearance sale at the Albuquerque public library. And, man... Every time I do that, I remember how much I love the thrill of the hunt and that squeeful feeling of having big piles of newly acquired books. But I tend to forget the stressful, claustrophobic feeling of being in that room full of people, all of whom appear to be trying their best to stand directly between me and whatever books I might be trying to look at at any given moment. Still... Boooooks! I ended up with a total of, uh, 22. Which is actually a small haul for me for one of these things. And you can't beat the price: it comes about to about 23 cents per book.

Traffic downtown was kind of a pain, though, because there was a chunk of street closed off for some unadvertised reason. I'm not 100% certain, but it looked like they were filming something. I was wondering if it might be Better Call Saul, since I know they use a lot of downtown locations, but I don't think they've started filming season 2 yet. Which is good, because otherwise I would have confusingly mixed emotions, since I really hate backed up traffic, but I really like Better Call Saul. If it was just some random movie, though, I can just feel annoyed. Still... I guess it's a sign that New Mexico's film industry really is taking off, as that's not something I've ever encountered before.

Anyway. After the book sale and navigating the downtown streets, I went to see The Avengers: The Age of Ultron. Which I enjoyed. Maybe not quite as fun as the first movie, but entertaining. Especially as I've always had a soft spot for anything involving AIs. Someone told me yesterday, though, that the director's cut is supposed to be three and a half hours, and I can totally believe it, because a lot of the plot, while it worked OK, did feel like it could have been fleshed out more.

And now, I am about to watch the season finale of Once Upon a Time. I've had somewhat mixed feelings about this season, to be honest, but I'm still ludicrously into this show, so I'm looking forward to it.

Oh, and, yes, somewhere in there, I did find time to call my mom. (I also tried to call my dad, since it's his birthday, but I didn't get an answer. So, if you're reading this, Dad, happy birthday!)

The Person With The Camel Is My New Hero.

Today's just-because-I-liked-it random link: The World's Weirdest Libraries.