My Brain On Books XXXXII
Be sure and see my tribute poem to Dewey and the Thon she birthed at the bottom of this post
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| Riddle in my Readathon Nest Also featuring my Kinde Fire on a stand, headphones, a small stack of tree books I'd like to spend time with and over on the shelf my Library of Congress talking book machine |
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11:22 PM = The Culting of America is too info packed to read in one go
I set it aside after reaching 23% 111 pages in. As much as I would like another finish for the thon, I'm happy with proving that I've plenty of time to finish before it's due just after next weekend. But I'm glad I started it this weekend and did not leave it until next weekend when I would not have had a choice but to cram it into 1 or 2 days. I try to spread my Libby due dates out with no more than 2 on a given day and no more than 3 over 2 days. But with my 2 cards nearly always tapped out at 20 total with 21 days each I'm constantly having to my next choice pushed by the next due date rather than my mood. Not to mention that my KU books get neglected and I'm actually paying for the privilege to borrow them. If I'm not going to read at least 2 per month I might as well cancel the service. 3 or 4 would be better. I need to shift my priority to KU or give it up.
So my plan is to go spend the next 2-3 hours with Atwood's The Testaments and if I can reach 20% I'm going to allow myself to close off the thon with Flavia De Luce. Because I either have to have a palette cleanser before thon end or after since if The Testaments are anywhere near as intense as The Handmaids Tale, it is NOT a bedtime story. I suffer from anxiety induced insomnia and I just reread The Handmaids Tale recently so I'm not just guessing.
Right now I seem to be going strong and expect to finish strong but I do have a circadian rhythm low point between 3:30 and 4:30 which I may not survive. Which migh also prevent me from updating again before I sleep.
5:00 PM - Second Finish
Just finished the sequel to Chasing Eden which I finished this morning. How To Uneat an Elephant. I read it in nearly one sitting. The only thing preventing it being a single sitting was the need to put my Kindle on a charger for 20 minutes while I fixed food which gave me enough charge to finish.
It was a kind of blessing that silly graphic fought me when I tried to place it inside a paragraph below, because now it sits atop the whole post and, as long as I don't open a book below the second shelf or something non-Kindle, the cover image is right there.
I wasn't intending to finish the sequel today since it doen't have a due date and so many others are due on Libby in the next wee. Some as early as Monday. But I could not find a place to stop for long. Clough seems to be a master at pacing. I was thinking around the hafway point that she had the novelists eye and ear and wondered if she would write a novel. I got my answer on the page that pops up when you cross the finish-line. She has already published two in a series set during the era of immigration between Europe and America. They are both available on Kindle Unlimited like Eden and Elephant are. Alas! My KU limit is tapped. Well it was until I finished Elephant but I have a long line of books in my KU wish list and several I've been hankering after. But I will keep her novels in mind. Besides, I have too many series in progress already: Earthsea, Flavia DeLuce, Seven Sisters, Louise Penny's Inspector G., The Three Body Problem, Disc World.
7:44 AM - First Finish
Just finished Cherielynn Clough's Chasing Eden. It only took about one of the last three hours to finish it. The rest of the time was used up in editing this post, posting on the Dewey fb page, making coffee and organizing the top two shelves on my Kindle to reflect my priorities for today.
...
And now I've just spent another hour taking a screenshot of my top two Kindle shelves, thinking it would be easier than going after book covers every time I finish a book. Ha! Tech, that thing that held so much promise for efficiency and productivity now eats up our time with hoop jumping.
Simply emailing the screenshot or sending to my email was stymied by their claim to have lost access to my google accounts due to faulty password. But an attempt to fix that included a request for permissions that I thot excessive. Sending via Bluetooth would not work. There were no image editing aps on my Kindle Fire except the offer of Microsoft 365 which I don't have and won't pay for. So finally I gave up and moved to my android tablet with a Kindle app on it and organized those top two shelves to look the same (which meant locating in the random mix on the shelves each book in the right order and opening them to send them to the top) then take the screenshot, share it to my Google Drive, move to my laptop, locate the screenshot in File Explorer, return to my Blogger post and mark where I wanted the image to be placed, find the image displaced a dozen lines down, try to move it to the spot under the first paragrap in this update only to have it jump two lines above this update. Several attempts to move it back failed so I gave up and started writing this paragraph of whine.
It's just that I get so frustrated when a task that I once could do in 3-5 minutes takes me an hour! I can blame some of it on my eyes but a lot of it is because the pompous programmers and owners of the platforms have been whittling away our options for years hoping to suck more of our dimes and our data out of our dominion. They are rich enough to buy private islands, politicians, and pardons but they keep picking the pockets of those of us on fixed incomes who are soon going to have to give up our streaming services to keep the temps in our home livable, not long after that we'll have to start choosing between our Amazon Prime and our Google account. At that point we might as well give up our ISP.
UGH! I just lost another hour to that rant.
5:00 PM - Second Finish
Just finished the sequel to Chasing Eden which I finished this morning. How To Uneat an Elephant. I read it in nearly one sitting. The only thing preventing it being a single sitting was the need to put my Kindle on a charger for 20 minutes while I fixed food which gave me enough charge to finish.
It was a kind of blessing that silly graphic fought me when I tried to place it inside a paragraph below, because now it sits atop the whole post and, as long as I don't open a book below the second shelf or something non-Kindle, the cover image is right there.
I wasn't intending to finish the sequel today since it doen't have a due date and so many others are due on Libby in the next wee. Some as early as Monday. But I could not find a place to stop for long. Clough seems to be a master at pacing. I was thinking around the hafway point that she had the novelists eye and ear and wondered if she would write a novel. I got my answer on the page that pops up when you cross the finish-line. She has already published two in a series set during the era of immigration between Europe and America. They are both available on Kindle Unlimited like Eden and Elephant are. Alas! My KU limit is tapped. Well it was until I finished Elephant but I have a long line of books in my KU wish list and several I've been hankering after. But I will keep her novels in mind. Besides, I have too many series in progress already: Earthsea, Flavia DeLuce, Seven Sisters, Louise Penny's Inspector G., The Three Body Problem, Disc World.
7:44 AM - First Finish
Just finished Cherielynn Clough's Chasing Eden. It only took about one of the last three hours to finish it. The rest of the time was used up in editing this post, posting on the Dewey fb page, making coffee and organizing the top two shelves on my Kindle to reflect my priorities for today.
...
And now I've just spent another hour taking a screenshot of my top two Kindle shelves, thinking it would be easier than going after book covers every time I finish a book. Ha! Tech, that thing that held so much promise for efficiency and productivity now eats up our time with hoop jumping.
Simply emailing the screenshot or sending to my email was stymied by their claim to have lost access to my google accounts due to faulty password. But an attempt to fix that included a request for permissions that I thot excessive. Sending via Bluetooth would not work. There were no image editing aps on my Kindle Fire except the offer of Microsoft 365 which I don't have and won't pay for. So finally I gave up and moved to my android tablet with a Kindle app on it and organized those top two shelves to look the same (which meant locating in the random mix on the shelves each book in the right order and opening them to send them to the top) then take the screenshot, share it to my Google Drive, move to my laptop, locate the screenshot in File Explorer, return to my Blogger post and mark where I wanted the image to be placed, find the image displaced a dozen lines down, try to move it to the spot under the first paragrap in this update only to have it jump two lines above this update. Several attempts to move it back failed so I gave up and started writing this paragraph of whine.
It's just that I get so frustrated when a task that I once could do in 3-5 minutes takes me an hour! I can blame some of it on my eyes but a lot of it is because the pompous programmers and owners of the platforms have been whittling away our options for years hoping to suck more of our dimes and our data out of our dominion. They are rich enough to buy private islands, politicians, and pardons but they keep picking the pockets of those of us on fixed incomes who are soon going to have to give up our streaming services to keep the temps in our home livable, not long after that we'll have to start choosing between our Amazon Prime and our Google account. At that point we might as well give up our ISP.
UGH! I just lost another hour to that rant.
4:44 AM -
Intro Meme
I'm prepping this ahead of time and setting it to publish at 4:44. It will probably be an hour or two before I update with commentary on my first one or two reads. Tho I may check in over on the Dewey fb page.
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. I really need to update on the photo essay. There was a significant change last spring when my brother donated three large pieces==two bookcases and a tall cabinet.
So this is my 15th thon in my own home, counting the Reverse Thons in August 2021 & 2023 - 2025.
2) Which book in your stack are you most looking forward to?
Non-Fiction: The Culting of America by Dannielle Mestyanek Young
Fiction: The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
3) Which snack are you most looking forward to?
Savory: Sushi rice rolls
Sweet: Chocolate cake (made by my neighbor) with fresh strawberries found on my readathon finger-food shopping trip yesterday
4) Tell us a little something about yourself!
- Riddle (featured in pic above) joined me last December as a 2 mo. old.
- 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 and insomnia since grade school
- Diagnosed with high functioning autism in 2015. In my 50s!
- Have a caregiver who comes in five 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 triple.
- 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. But if all the ebooks and audio books loaded on my devices were tree books there probably wouldn't be room for me let alone my yarn and clothes, beanbag chair or bed...
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 42nd Dewey thon so there aren't many variations I haven't tried.
Partly by accident and then by intention, my TBR for today has a theme:
#deconstruction
Both the fiction and the nf relate to being raised or otherwise commandeered into a cult or high-control social group. There are several memoirs, several novels and several expository nf that fall into categories like explanatory, history, psychology, theology, culture. It's a selection that's probably double what I can expect to dip into let alone finish. But I hope to finish at least one each of memoir, novel and expository.
This is all about the path I am on myself and I'm thinking about returning to blogging on a regular basis with the theme of #deconstruction predominating, starting with book reviews of the dozens of books on the theme I've finished in the last decade interspersed with my own story while I explore the idea of writing my own memoir. Hopefully this will morph into returning to work on my Fruits of the Spirit Storyworld which is all about the impacts on several generations of women in one family by a fictional cult founded in the 1880s.
#deconstruction
Both the fiction and the nf relate to being raised or otherwise commandeered into a cult or high-control social group. There are several memoirs, several novels and several expository nf that fall into categories like explanatory, history, psychology, theology, culture. It's a selection that's probably double what I can expect to dip into let alone finish. But I hope to finish at least one each of memoir, novel and expository.
This is all about the path I am on myself and I'm thinking about returning to blogging on a regular basis with the theme of #deconstruction predominating, starting with book reviews of the dozens of books on the theme I've finished in the last decade interspersed with my own story while I explore the idea of writing my own memoir. Hopefully this will morph into returning to work on my Fruits of the Spirit Storyworld which is all about the impacts on several generations of women in one family by a fictional cult founded in the 1880s.
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Ode to Dewey by Joy Renee We Miss You Dewey |
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