My Brain On Books XXXIII

  

 

 

I am reading for The Office of Letters and Lights the folks who bring us NaNoWriMo today as I love what they are doing for literacy with their Young Writer's Programs and because I've participated in NaNo every year since 2004.  I have been blessed to have it in my life and would like to give something back if only kudos and link love.  I'm putting this plug at the top in hopes some who stop by will check out their site and see all the great things they do to foster love of reading and writing and story in kids. 

This post will be organized like a blog inside a blog with recent updates stacked atop previous ones. I may be posting some updates on Twitter @Joystory and the Joystory fb fanpage. But this is where I do anything more than a line or two.  Including mini-challenges that don't require a separate post..   

Be sure and see my tribute poem to Dewey and the Thon she birthed at the bottom of this post

Meet My Reading Buddies:
Grace and Jolly
They are my sleep buddies and live on my bed but today they join me on my beanbag reading nest

5:00 AM Sunday - update composed and postd at 5:55 PM

so i crawled into bed with my Kindle Fire before 4 and spent the last hour reading The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick as an ebook on my Libby Ap.  For more info about the book see the top entry of my October 22 Brain on Books post as I closed out the Fall thon with the same book as a tree book only i never got around to finishing it.  I had to start over and i was pretty much flipping thru the illustrations faster than I could focus on them just to get to the text sections.  I caught up and passed where I'd left off and nearly reached the half way point before i quit at about a quarter after 5.

Then I slept until 3pm and watched the movie Where'd You Go Bernedette over my coffee and breakfast.  Fun watching the movie the day after reading the book.  They did well telling the story but I liked the book better.  Movie left much out as usual but they did the visual stuff well and I was so taken by the scenes set in Antarctica that I'm tempted to look for a documentary on Netflix or Prime to get more of it.  Awe and Wonder.

2:22 AM Sunday - I got so wrapped up in reading, I lost interest in updating.  I finished Where'd  You Go Bernadette around 11 PM after two more two hour sessions with it interspersed with two more hour plus sessions with book hopping non fict.  The list of the non fic in no particular order:

Writing for You Life by Deena Metzger

Being Seen by Elsa Sjunneson

27 Essential Principles of Story by Daniel Joshua Rubin

Modern Tarot by Michelle Tea

Aging with Agency by Sandi Peters

We Are Electric by Sally Adee

How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa

Write for Life by Julia Cameron

The Poetics of Wrongness by Rachel Zucker

Pugetopolis  by Knute Berger

Grieving the Write Way by Gary Roe

Grief Dreams by T. J. Wray

Becoming Heroines by Elizabeth Cronise McLaughlin

Jung and the Tarot: An Archetypal Journey by Sallie Nichols

Tao of Chaos: DNA & the I Ching

Again, Again and Again by Mathias B. Freese

Yep this is the way I like to read non fiction.  Dip in for fifteen to fifty minutes and move on to another.  In this way I advance my bookmark in several dozen non fic per year, finishing at least a dozen.  Sometimes I drop one for weeks or months and have to start over but usually that means a quick scan of the chapters already read.  It isn't typical for me to dip into this many in a single day tho.  I average about three per day and often it will be a different two or three the following day.

Today tho I gave myself the challenge of opening every single non fic in my Libby ap that I have currently checked out.  There are more than usual because in late March I happened on the new arrivals list right when there was a whole bunch of them some of them available, some needing to be put on hold and some of those not due to be published until early May.  So for a month now I've had two Libby cards tapped out on both loans and holds and my turn is coming up on several more in the next two weeks and several more in the two weeks after that and so forth thru the next ten weeks.  When I do this with so many library books that are high demand it usually means that I won't finish many of them before my turn is up and I have to go back on the hold list for weeks or months.

A few in that list above are my own tree books that tend to get neglected when I have tapped out library cards.  So I made a point of picking them up if only briefly today.

Well there is a bit over two hours left and I'm going to dedicate it to fiction.  I haven't decided which or if more than one.  I could do a graphic novel and return to Cloud Atlas which I've been reading for a month.  Or I could start a new rom com or fantasy in Kindle or Libby. Or short stories on one of my android aps.  or...  the choices are endless.  But I think light and easy.  Cloud Atlas needs more focus than I can give after over 24 hours awake already.

So I'm going to grab a snack and while I'm prepping it I'll decide but I may not update again until after 5am and maybe not until after I've slept. Because I'm actually thinking of settling on the bed after I eat so I can just put the book down at 5 and zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

7:55 AM - Six Hours In So I forgot to look at the time when I started reading again but I was at it more than 90 minutes and less than 180.  In that time I read a chapter each in five Non Fiction.  All but one started from days to weeks ago.  They were all in my Libby Ap.  In No particular order:

Once Upon a Tome by Oliver Darkshire

Sacred Nature by Karen Armstrong

Love, Nature, Magic by Maria Rodale

Poet Warrior by Joy Harjo

The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.

I love reading Non Fiction this way. Book hopping makes it seem like the authors are having conversations with each other if only in that space between my ears.

I once wrote an essay about this phenomenon called Emerson Whispering Sweet Somethings In Einstein's Ear.  I thought I'd posted it on Joystory but I just wasted an hour looking for it and found only a post in which I teased it and linked to my first website from the late 90s called Joyread it had a companion site called Johwrite.  When I discovered blogging I named my blog Joystory with the intent to combine the two themes along with personal essay but I saw blogging as a way to promote the web pages something like social media is used today as a promotion tool.  Instead Joystory took over and I stopped adding content to the web pages and then the site where I posted Joywrite went dark taking my content with it and I somehow assumed that so did the site where Joyread sat.  But to my amazement it is still there.  But I have lost access to it as owner.  I think maybe I will bring some of the content--the reviews and musing about reading over here but that is a project for a day NOT a Thon day.

Where'd You Go, Bernadette
by Maria semple

7:55 AM - First Reading Sprint Plus One Hour.  Thus two hours invested in first novel of the day.  Only 28% in after two hours.  I blame that more on the frequent forced pauses to LOL while squirting tears.  I can't read even the fat fonts I use in my Libby Ap thru tears.  So funny!  I can see why it won Goodreads humor awards in 2012.  I remember seeing it all over the book blogs around then.  Why did it take me so long to get to it? Maybe if I'd known it was a coming of age story I would have gotten to it sooner as that is my fav genre.  If you can call that a genre.  Well I do so there.

I'm tempted to stay with it but I'm also wanting to do a Non Fic meander where I open and read the next chapter in a plethora of NF in my currently reading collections in multiple aps.  I love the way the ideas bleed into each other between books with seemingly no commonality.

4:44 AM - Intro Meme I'm setting this to go live at 4:44 AM but it may be well into hour 2 before I check in again.  I'll be joining the first sprint with my first pick sitting in my beanbag chair nursing my first thermos of coffee and eating a protein bar....

1) What fine part of the world are you reading from today?

Kelso Washington USA.  Across the Cowlitz river from Longview where I grew up and had been living with my elderly mother between January 2013 and late July 2021.  I moved into my 400 square foot efficiency unit in late July 2021.  This  post was a photo essay of my new space.

So this is my fifth thon in my own home, counting the Reverse Thon in August 2021.  The second Spring one.  I completely spaced out the August Reverse Thon last year and was so sad when I realized it.

2) Which book in your stack are you most looking forward to?

Non-Fiction: Once Upon a Tome by Oliver Darkshire

Fiction: Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

3) Which snack are you most looking forward to?

it's a tossup between Garlic Chicken Pizza and a rich chocolate coconut brownie with a scoop of vanilla bean ice cream.

4) Tell us a little something about yourself!

• Widowed September 2020  It still smarts at unexpected moments.  But at least it is usually only several times a month now instead of constantly.  But September brought it back to several times a day.  September was his birthday and the anniversary of his Mom's and my Dad's deaths as well as his.  So it was still a rough patch two years out.
• Living alone for the first time ever.  Closing in on two years but it still feels new.
• Legally blind with RP aka tunnel vision.  Have only a sliver of vision left in center of right eye.  The rest is shadows and shimmers.
• Have struggled with mood disorder of Anxiety and Depression since grade school
• Diagnosed with high functioning autism in 2015
• Have a caregiver who comes in four days a week to help with chores and errands I can't do alone.
• I proved during this move that I have more volume in fiber art supplies than in clothes by at least thee times.
• I probably have double the volume of clothes in tree-books but since I still haven't got them all moved over I can't be sure.

5) If you participated in the last read-a-thon, what’s one thing you’ll do different today? If this is your first read-a-thon, what are you most looking forward to?

This is my 33rd thon so there aren't many variations I haven't tried. Or so I thought before today.  I've had a habit of such heightened anticipation that I sleep poorly or not at all before my 4:44 am alarm goes off. This time I gave into a late afternoon nap attack yesterday and woke at midnight knowing I was up for the duration.

Doing anything but especially reading or writing for a full 24 hours used to be my superpower but not so much anymore.  Now that I'm in my mid sixties the price I pay for that self abuse is significant as all my systems are less forgiving. 

Also hope to da a better job than in the past of staying hydrated and getting up to move regularly.

I may be reading more than usual with my LOC talking book machine and BARD my library of congress talking book android ap as I am working a crochet project with an early July deadline: two lacey baby blankets for a set of twin girls and don't want to loose two days effort.

Ode to Dewey

by Joy Renee

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We Miss You Dewey