Library Loot June 9-15, 2010

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Eva and Marg that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. This week Marg has the Mr. Linky where you can link your own Library Loot post anytime this week if you wish to participate.

Between last Thursday and Monday this week, I had to send back a huge bunch of books and DVD whose due dates had been my task master for the past couple weeks. On Monday another largish batch came home to take their place along side the others whose due dates are approaching with the steady clop-clop of Clydesdale horses pulling a hearse.

In a sense I have a bit of a breather because the upcoming due dates are spread a bit thinner than usual with fewer items in each batch. Still way more than I can finish with in the time allotted tho. That's the way I've always been with library books.

As I was unpacking the newest batch from the bag on Monday, preparing to create the bib slips for each book and the list for Batch 34 in my notes ap on which I will keep track of due dates, renewals and which items are returned over the next, potentially, nine weeks, I realized that the previous several batch lists were a bit of a jumble being not entirely up to date and the long original lists containing both items still here and those returned with the returned item grayed out by highlights and scattered willy-nilly so that it was impossible to tell at a glance what was where, and I knew that I need to make a compact list of all items currently here with due dates and page numbers for books and running times for DVD so that I could have an accurate overview in order to establish priorities and expectations.

Having decided to do this, I thought I might as well prepare that list for a Library Loot post since I had been eying this meme for some weeks now. I know it is more typical to discuss only the most recently acquired library loot in these posts but I hope you'll forgive me if I share with you the master list of everything currently in my possession which have been checked out in the last nine weeks or so. Well a bit less than nine weeks since there is an atypical lull between the books that ween back Monday and the next zeroed renewal due date. Nearly two weeks.

Please excuse me for not fixing the capitalization of the titles and replacing the / with 'by'. I copy/pasted from the library catalog

June 8 overdue Queued item won't renew

• Changeling [videorecording (DVD)] 2hrs 22min watched
• The beach [videorecording] 119 min watched
• Captain Corelli's mandolin [videorecording (DVD)] 2hrs 9min
• Monster-in-law [videorecording (DVD)] 100 min

• Map of the invisible world : a novel / Tash Aw.317 p. Thought about trying to read this between Monday afternoon and Thursday dawn but decided not to subject myself to that pressure again right after doing it last weekend for The Girl With Glass Feet which had been due last Thursday.

June 10 Queued item won't renew

• Adam [videorecording (DVD)] 99 min features a protagonist with Asperger's.
• Push [videorecording (DVD)] 111 min

• Teach yourself visually Microsoft Office 2007 / by Sherry Willard Kinkoph 415 p

June 14 Queued item won't renew

• Don Juan DeMarco [videorecording (DVD)] 92 min
• The penguins of Madagascar. Operation, DVD premiere [videorecording (DVD)] 130 min Ed's the one who wants to see this but I'm willing to watch it. Looks funny.

The picture to the right of the next paragraph is of my desk with the short stack of books I'm putting fierce focus on this week sitting left of my netbook. The DVD are in a makeshift 'shelf' seen above the screen.

June 22 Queued item won't renew

• The national parks disc 3 of 6 [videorecording (DVD)] : America's best idea

June 24 0 Renewal

• Braids : 250 patterns from Japan, Peru & beyond / Rodrick Owen.159 p have spent a whole lot of time perusing this one over the last year. I think I need my own copy. I haven't started making the braids yet because I haven't decided what kind of card or stand I want to make. Need to stop dithering and just do it.
• Losing my religion : how I lost my faith reporting on religion in America--and found unexpected peace / William Lobdell. 291 p. I gravitate to autobiographies about spiritual quests especially those where someone has come out of fundamentalism as I have. I'm about 50 pages into this, having started it Monday evening.

• The girls [text (large print)] / Lori Lansens. 581 p. (large print) Started this Monday and am nearly 60 pages in right now.
• The hour I first believed [text (large print)] : a novel / Wally Lamb. 1121 p. (large print) This is probably the next novel I pick upl. If I can finish The Girls by Saturday. This is the second or third time I've had this out.

June 28 Queued items which won't Renew [part of this week's loot]

• Q Emergence : labeled autistic / Temple Grandin and Margaret M. Scariano. 180 p. Just had the third book of her memoir's out but didn't get far before it had to go back. There are queues for all of them since the HBO movie was on a couple months ago. I'd been planning to 'give' a high-functioning version of autism/Asperger's to one of my young characters so I've been reading a lot about it for several years.. But since the recent diagnosis of a close family member with Asperger's I'm not sure if it is in good taste to go forward with that plan. But since it would be quite difficult to re-envision the character with a different condition, I'm afraid the story will just not get written now and that would be a shame.
• Q The way I see it : a personal look at autism & Asperger's / Temple Grandin. 260 p.
• Q T The lacuna : a novel / Barbara Kingsolver. 507 p. ; 24 cm. [762 p. (large print)]

The picture below is of my Library NF shelf. It was overstuffed a week ago. This picture below it is the library fiction shelf and will be overstuffed once I place this week's loot in. If I even can get them all in.

June 29 0 Renewal [This batch were all pulled off the shelve in a spontaneous visit to the Ashland Library six weeks ago.]

• Thank God for evolution! : how the marriage of science and religion will transform your life and our world / Michael Dowd. 411 p. The topic of evolution and especially that of the conflict between the religious fundamentalists and the secular scientists has been a pet research project of mine ever since I was in high school when I was still in the thrall of the fundie sect I was raised in and aimed to prove the 'devil-blinkered Darwinists' wrong. When I began to question and then reject many of their teachings, this was one I put in the 'I don't know' category but my fascination with it has never faded.
• Come home, America : the rise and fall (and redeeming promise) of our country / William Greider. 328 p. I've read parts or wholes of several of his books. He is one of the writers on economics which I both understand and trust. Paul Krugman is another. Along with David Korten and John Kenneth Galbraith.

• Haunting Bombay / Shilpa Agarwal. 362 p. I love novels written by or about people with different ethnic backgrounds to mine. This one also appears to have elements of the magical realism that I loved in Isabelle Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
• How I became a famous novelist / Steve Hely. 322 p.
• Hunger's brides : a novel of the baroque / Paul Anderson. 1358 p. Read over a hundred pages into this one when I had it checked out of the Longview WA in April of 2009 while helping with the post surgery/stroke of my mother. Have had it checked out of our system twice before since I got home last summer. This is the third time and I just used it's second and final renewal. What are the chances what with the rest of this list? It is not the fault of the story. If anything it is that the story was so good that I know that once I pick it up again a zillion other things are not going to get done. [read, watched, written, crocheted, cleaned, typed, commented on, exercised, and lets not forget sleep.]
• The New York trilogy / Paul Auster.580 p. Three short novellas in one volume.

June 14 1 Renewal

• James, the brother of Jesus : the key to unlocking the secrets of early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls / Robert Eisenman.1074 p The history of Christianity and the Church(s) is another of my pet research projects. Along with comparative religion.
• Patience with God : faith for people who don't like religion (or atheism) / by Frank Schaeffer. 230 p. Another one who came out of fundamentalism. I used to read his father's books like they were footnotes to my Bible.

June 22 1 Renewal

• Resurrecting Eve : women of faith challenge the fundamentalist agenda / Roberta Pughe, Paula Anema Sohl. 236 p One of the authors is an Oregonian and the book was published by a small Ashland press just down the highway from me about ten miles. Guess it should be obvious why I'm interested by now. Studying the effects on the spirit of women of the fundamentalist doctrines regarding their roles and rights is another of my pet research projects.
• Homer's odyssey : a fearless feline tale, or how I learned about love and life with a blind wonder cat [type (large print)] / Gwen Cooper.449 p. (large print) I love cats and I'm legally blind myself so how could I resist this when I pulled it off the shelf three weeks ago.
• Myths and legends of the Pacific Northwest / selected by Katharine Berry Judson ;144 p. Have loved the myth and legend and fairy tail story forms since before I was able to read them for myself. But this is also related to research for one of my characters.

• Anagrams : a novel / Lorrie Moore 225 p.
• The blessing stone / Barbara Wood 450 p. Started this one the first time I had it checked out last April but couldn't finish it. Really hate to have a story interrupted like that.
• The evolution of shadows / Jason Quinn Malott.253 p.

June 24 1 Renewal

• The family : the secret fundamentalism at the heart of American power / Jeff Sharlet. 454 p.

• Lost : a novel / Alice Lichtenstein. No, not remotely connected to the ABC series. An Alziemer's inflicted man wanders off.

The picture on the right is of Monday's library loot not yet shelved. And I do need to get them off that ledge which our cat Merlin thinks is his private bird watching roost (both the tweety birds and the furry female birds) and he has no compunction about shoving them off in his pursuit of comfort.

June 28 2 Renewals maybe [the rest of this week's book loot]

• John Adams [text (large print)] / David McCullough. 1123 p. (large print) Ordered this a couple weeks ago after watching the first few episodes of the HBO mini-series based on it.
• Girl, interrupted [text (large print)] / Susanna Kaysen. 207 p. Yes, I've seen the movie. Several years ago. Did not realized that it was based on a memoir.

• Blindness [text (large print)] / Jose Saramago ; translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero. 540 p. (large print) Found this on a list of Dystopia novels and was intrigued by its description. So many elements of it are automatic draws for me. The author's ethnicity/nationality; blindness as reality and as metaphore; dystopias. Am thinking of joining the dystopia reading challenge I spotted online.
• A gate at the stairs [text (large print)] : a novel / Lorrie Moore. 321 p. |517 p. (large print). Waited in Q for the regular print edition for months then didin't get to it when my turn came. When I was trying to decide whether to keep it over the weekend past due week before last, I discovered there was now a large print edition in the library and no queue for it. Amazing considering the queue for the other is in the 50s.
• Leviathan / written by Scott Westerfeld ; illustrated by Keith Thompson. 440 A YA fantasy. Have read his Pretty series on the recommendation of my niece and am willing to give this alternate history steampunk story a try.

Waiting for me at the Library to be picked up Thursday or Monday: Books due in 3 wks DVD due in 1 wk

• Up in the air [videorecording (DVD)] 109 min I go in queue for this while watching the Oscars. That's how long it took for my turn to come around.
• John Adams [videorecording (DVD)] 8.5 hr mini-series of which I've watched the first three episodes a couple weeks ago. This is probably the only one of the DVD which would renew.
• Bones. Season two. Discs 1 & 2 [videorecording (DVD)] 349 min When I finished season 1 several months ago I discovered that the season 2 set was no longer available. It had been lost or damaged. As soon as I discovered they had replaced it I sent for it. Unlike season 1 tho, 2 is split up into three boxes of 2 discs with disc 6 being bonus features. I never watched this series on TV but I saw trailers and teasers for it and knew I would probably like it.
• The West Wing. The complete second season [videorecording (DVD)] 7 videodiscs (954 min.) Watched season about 10 days ago and the season finale is still haunting me. This arrived at the library late last week but I elected to wait until sometime this week to pick it up. Thursday for sure now. Barring something unforeseen. Like Ed not getting off work in time or something.
• The West Wing. The complete third season [videorecording (DVD)] 7 videodiscs (ca. 1000 min.) I did not intend for both seasons to arrive within a week of each other. I'll probably let this one wait until until after the weekend to bring home. It just arrived whereas the season 2 arrived nearly a week ago.

• The book thief [text (large print)] / Zusak, Markus. 757 p A book about books. A story about story. A WWII setting. So many many things about this story are draws to me. I don't understand how I missed out on this one for so long. I have a faint memory of the librarian asking me if I'd read it yet a few weeks before the libraries closed down in 2007. I may have even gotten in queue for it but there was a huge queue for it then and no time for my turn to come around. The I guess it went off my radar.

Regarding books about books--I was delighted to discover there was actually a reading challenge for books about books but then disappointed to learn that the deadline to enter had passed January 31. It makes me tempted to start up another one for the last half of the year.