Category Archives: Buying Books

Support Your Public Library

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I am reading a library book! That’s right…a public library book that I will have to return in two weeks. Of course, I’ve already had to renew it once but I’m confident in my ability to finish it this time. I checked it out along with another book and a music CD when I attended a Civil War presentation held at the library. It had been so long since I had been there that I had to update my card information!

I have nothing against public libraries and, in fact, think they are one of the best institutions. During our travels in early Internet days, we often found access at libraries. I volunteered in the public library in my home town when I was a teenager, shelving books and cutting out name tags for the pre-school reading circles. Actually, I even volunteered at THIS public library during their summer reading program. And, in the days before I controlled my own money, I was a public library user.

But I’m not any more. I like owning books and being able to come to them in my own good time. I may think I want to read a book right away when I’m holding it in my hands at the library, but who knows what might happen by the time I get home. That book may have reminded me of another one that needs to be read first. And, if I really want to read a book immediately, I won’t wait to go to the library to check it out: I’ll just buy it on one of the two ereaders I now own. If it’s not available digitally, I would just as soon buy it from Amazon than drive to the library. Sad, but true. I have joined the “buy it now” generation, unable to postpone pleasure. And, even sadder? When I do buy a book, I almost never read it right away. It goes on the shelf and waits its turn, which may come sooner or later. So, I could certainly allow the library to store it for me and then go get it when it gets to the top of the list.

This year, I am going to try to become a public library user. As I clean out my books for the move to the farm, I’ll donate some to the library for their book sale. And, I certainly don’t want to buy any more analog books since I will just have to move them, so I’ll look to the library. Of course, there are plenty of unread books on my shelves but there’s something about knowing I have wider access that comforts me. I just like having books around me, endless possibilities for learning and laughing, musing and marveling.

New Year, New Books, New Pictures

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It’s January 1st, otherwise known as Resolution Day. According to every show I’ve seen, we put too much pressure on ourselves at the beginning of the year so maybe we should rename it Guidelines Day. In general, what would you like to accomplish this year in general and then more specifically without turning it into the pressure of the every day? I’m using this profundity to justify not joining groups this year.

I am going to continue to post pictures to flickr from both the past and the present, but without the pressure of having to take a new picture every day.

As for books, I made it to 72 this year. That includes analog, digital and audible. And, with the snow, I finally dove into John Adams, the book that I had planned to read first last year.

What I haven’t counted are the number of books I purchased this year. I do hope it wasn’t 72 😉 I do want to try to avoid buying books this year. Learn to love the library and just plow through all the books I own but haven’t read. Catalog the ones I already have as I pack them for the move to their new home: a REAL library room in a 19th century farm house. I really can’t wait to have them displayed and be able to browse. I know there are books I have completely forgotten as well as plenty just begging to be read.

Then there’s blogging: for once in my life, I am free to write about what I would like. The trick is to find the discipline when there are no deadlines other than those that are self imposed. I suppose that’s what the daily challenges are all about. We tend to work better when there are expectations and deadlines. Is it possible to just weave these things in our lives without having to make them a daily regimen. I’m going to experiment with that idea as the new year begins.

Book Therapy

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With the state technology conference just a few days away, I am a little busy.  But today I just needed a break.  I used some minor conference related errands as an excuse for a little book therapy and slipped into the local Books A Million.  There I found As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child & Avis Devoto.  This is a book that makes connections: I am a Julia fan, having grown up watching her shows.  I read My Life in France earlier this year after being charmed by Meryl Streep’s portrayal in Julie and Julia. And I’m a Lewis & Clark fan.  What’s the connection?  Avis Devoto was married to Bernard Devoto, who edited the versions of the journals we carried with us on our 1998 trip out west.  We visited the DeVoto Grove in northern Idaho, one of the most beautiful parts of the country, in my humble opinion.  I couldn’t find a good picture of the grove itself.

MVC-013FI’ve just started uploading pictures from that trip.  You can take a look: no captions or dates or locations yet.  But not bad for an old Sony Mavica.  We loved that camera and created webpages and uploaded them to the web by buying time at Kinko’s. $12/hour!  The good old days!

A Day Without a To Do List

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128/365 for 2010 Strawberries!A breezy sunny Saturday with no plans. In the words of Annie Dillard, I’ve really “spent” the morning, wandering through the woods with the dogs, then touring the yard, picking a nice big basket of strawberries, and taking some photos. The strawberry photo is my flickr photo for today.

Other chores are done…the sheets are on the line and, with the brisk breeze, are probably already dry. I’ve cleaned up the kitchen and the bedroom. Doggies are all settled into morning naps after their breakfast and walk. I’m relaxing in the my favorite chair with a latte. The house takes on the air of a monastery this time of year as we close the windows and drop rattan shades over them to keep out the sun. We don’t have central air conditioning and hate to run the window units too much so we capture the cool air of the night time and then trap it inside during the day.

I’m planning afternoon reading…I’m about half way through two books: Wendell Berry’s Life Is a Miracle, which I’ve already blogged about a bit, and Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom: The True History of Shakespeare and Elizabeth by Charles Beauclerk.  It’s an extended argument for Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, being the real Shakespeare, otherwise known as the Oxfordian theory.

The book came from the Barnes and Noble in Denver which was tantalizing visible from my hotel room window.  I made it in and out once without buying anything except a latter but the second time was not so lucky.  I never made it past the first table of new nonfiction.  Besides the Beauclerk, I bought The Blue Moment: Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and the Remaking of Modern Music by Richard Williams and My Empire of Dirt: How One Many Turned His Big-City Backyard Into a Farm by Manny Howard. I bought the latter because I was reminded of our own suburban farm: from my chair in the front room, I can see my own front yard, which is where the strawberries are growing.  There are raspberries, onions, garlic, and more and we’ve eliminated enough grass that I should be able to maintain it with the John Deere push mower this summer.

Capital Hill BooksMy regret here is that I couldn’t wait until I got to the local bookstores in Denver to start buying.  I did buy The Landscape of Home at Capitol Hill Books, a wonderful used bookstore across the street from the capitol with its shining gold dome.  It’s part of a series about the west and includes essays by Stewart Udall  and others about life in the Rockies. Tattered Cover The series was begun by what the book calls the “legendary” Tattered Cover Bookstore, but by the time I got there on Monday, I knew if I bought one more book, I would have to mail them home.  I did get a latte and relax on a comfortable sofa in the store and am already planning to head there first when I get back to Denver in late June.  Bookstore tourism at its best.

Reading Update: April 18, 2010

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I took some time to update my reading list on LibraryThing and discovered that I’ve reached 25 books.  One third of my goal!  I finished The Age of Chivalry, a National Geographic book from 1969.  I’ve got a volume about the Renaissance that I dug out of the linen closet.  But first there are books to finish: the essays about the Civil War and Bound for Glory.  I have an early reviewer book, too, and it’s on my tablet PC as a pdf file.  Books everywhere…analog and virtual! I’ve abandoned Jimmy Carter for now.

I’ve been so busy reading analog books that I haven’t turned on my Kindle for awhile and when I tried today, the battery was dead.  Out of sight, out of mind.  The analog books are much more visible!  And my goal was to work through the pile in the bedroom.

I started a new audio book as I gardened and walked today.  Blood in the Cotswold is part of Rebecca Tope’s British mystery series.   I would highly recommend the Alan Bradley books in audio: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie and The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag.  Great narrator, wonderful prose, written somewhat tongue in cheek.  I looked forward to a couple long drives to I could listen to big chunks of them.

A Slightly Disturbing Coincidence

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On April 2, I posted to this blog that I had started reading Rebel, the first book in the Starbuck Chronicles, Bernard Cornwell’s Civil War series and decided to make Civil War books my theme for April.  Later that same day, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell declared April to be Confederate History Month and set off a firestorm over his failure to mention slavery.  He has since apologized. I’m sticking with my plan although and have read two books so far.

I sort of feel sorry for McDonnell.  I think he really was interested in promoting all the Civil War history that can be found in Virginia.  Just today, I was in Spotsylvania county and right along Route 3, in amongst the commercial district, is Old Salem Church, site of a Civil War battle that was part of the Chancellorsville Campaign.  The Civil War Album has good pictures, including the monument to a New Jersey unit that overlooks busy Route 3.   There are signs of the war everywhere in that part of Virginia.  I’d be happy if people did come and visit them because it might mean they will continue to be preserved.  In a rapidly expanding section of the state, it’s harder and harder to justify saving fields and viewscapes so any focus on the war would mean more preservation.  It’s a piece of history that is essential to an understanding of contemporary events.  According to historian Shelby Foote it changed the verb tense from the United States are to the United States is.  A defining moment.

In addition, the battefields are cemeteries as well.  I just finished Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, a fascinating examination of a rather odd topic.  Many bodies were simply never recovered and ended up victim to spring plowing. A culture in which death was a marked event–women wore mourning clothes for a year after the death of their husbands–was stunned by the sheer carnage of the war.  Yet they tried to maintain their practices, and after the war was over, the Union made a concerted effort to locate, identify, and, if at all possible, return bodies to their families, a massive, expensive undertaking.  The victors made no such efforts for Confederate soldiers, leaving it up to southerners to make efforts to bring their loved ones home.  The prodigal sons were not welcomed home with great rejoicing and, even though slavery ended, essential questions about states’ rights were never resolved.  There are places where the whole thing still rankles a little even after 145 years and a monument to the victors forever overlooks the defeated land.

Today, I picked up the Hornet’s Nest by Jimmy Carter, which I found at the Book Exchange, my paperback book exchange store.  I guess I missed the subtitle or was in a Civil War fog because I thought the book was about the Battle of Shiloh.  Turns out it’s actually about the Revolutionary War with a focus on a battle in northern Georgia.  A quote from The Wall Street Journal says that the book is about a piece of history “overlooked by Massachu-centric historians.”  There’s another bit of North/South rivalry.  Jon Stewart can make fun of it being so long ago but you know what they say about forgetting history.

I’m not sure I’m going to keep reading Jimmy Carter’s book.  Frankly, so far it’s not very good historical fiction.  There’s a lot of friendly lecturing from a Whig about the political situation.  I know that he needs to fill in the context but good historical fiction manages to do that in a more subtle way than simply having a character parrot definitions and describe situations.  I almost never abandon a book once I’ve begun, but I’m not that far along and I have a collection of Civil War essays along with two more Cornwell novels that fit the theme.

April also includes Earth Day and I’ve got several environmentally themed books including Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard and Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition by Wendell Berry on the pile.  There’s also Whose Woods These Are, Michael Frome’s history of the national forest service and Mountain in the Clouds: A Search for the Wild Salmon by Bruce Brown.   Both of these came from Moyer’s Book Barn in Strasburg, PA.  I grew up nearby and when I was home in March, my parents and I took a tour of our old stomping grounds.

Mosaic Friday

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So, how did it get to be Friday again?  We lived through the snow storm over the weekend and the rest of the week just flew by.  I have been taking pictures for Project 365 at flickr.com and here’s a sampler:

My Flickr Mosaic

1. 01/365 for 2010 Star Light, Star Bright, 2. 02/365 for 2010 Little Birdie, 3. 03/365 for 2010 Paramount Avenue, 4. 04/365 for 2010 Swem Window, 5. 05/365 for 2010 Tina Turner, 6. 07/365 for 2010 A Beagle in the Sun, 7. 08/365 for 2010 Snow on Azalea, 8. 06/365 for 2010 Stonewall Jackson Shrine, 9. 09/365 for 2010: Let me out!, 10. 10/365 for 2010 Homage to Andy Warhol, 11. 12/365 for 2010 Decoy, 12. 11/365 for 2010 Reclamation, 13. 13/365 for 2010 The Greenhouse in Winter, 14. 14/365 for 2010 Signs of Spring I, 15. 15/365 for 2010 Ice and Leaves, 16. 16/365 for 2010 Woods in Winter, 17. 17/365 for 2010 Along the Winery Road, 18. 18/365 for 2010: Pinhole Camera Before, 19. 19/365 for 2010 Pinhole Camera After, 20. 20/365 for 2010 Waiting for Morning, 21. 21/365 for 2010 Waiting for Spring, 22. 24/365 for 2010 The Old Shed III, 23. 23/365 for 2010 The Old Shed II, 24. 22/365 for 2010 The Old Shed I, 25. 25/365 for 2010 Perfect Half Moon, 26. 26/365 for 2010 Muddy Day Walk, 27. 27/365 for 2010 They Don’t Make ‘Em Like They Used To, 28. 28/365 for 2010 My Girl, 29. 29/365 for 2010 Downy Woodpecker, 30. 30/365 for 2010 Decorations

Friday Finds

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I added a few new book blogs to my aggregator including Should Be Reading.  I like the way the MizB has weekly topics including Musing Mondays and Teaser Tuesdays along with a few others.  Fridays are dedicated to “finds”: books you’ve heard about or discovered during the week.

I wandered into my Books A Million on Wednesday mostly to get a latte but walked out with Alison Weir’s latest about Anne Boleyn, The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn and the new Jasper Fford, Shades of Grey. Looking forward to reading both of them.

But, considering I have only gotten 60 pages into Girl Mary over the course of the past week, and I just got the email with the link to the nearly 100 lesson plans I’m analyzing for a research study, I’m not sure when that will be.  The semester has begun in full force and free reading time is getting a little less available.

On Track for the 75 Books Challenge

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As of today, I have either read or listened to six books:

1. The Cart Before the Corpse by Carolyn McSparren
2. Scandalmonger by William Safire
3. The Mosaic Crimes by Giulio Leoni
4. The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk
5. Blood on the River by Elisa Carbone
6. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz – audio book

I have written reviews for most of them at LibraryThing.  As indicated in the last post, I have a higher opinion of the McSparren book than most of the other readers.  Maybe it’s because I’m so grateful to have time to read anything that I’m happy with even the fluffiest of books.  It might also have to do with my expectations going in: it’s a chick-litty murder mystery…were you expecting Dickens?  It entertained me for the few hours it took me to read it and that makes me happy.

I went to LibraryThing to post to the “What Are You Reading Now” forum but since I’m really not sure what to read next, I had to leave without posting.  I started The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber but have not completely committed to it. I’ve also made a little progress on In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace but again, am not completely committed.  Finding the next book is certainly not a problem with access.  There are piles of books in the bedroom and the linen closet.  I’ve got five or six pages worth of books on the Kindle.  So, how to decide?

For one, I’m looking for something a little lighter.  While I enjoyed both The Fifth Sacred Thing and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, they were somewhat depressing and violent.  The first one presented a grim view of the future and the second one presented a grim, but evidently quite true, portrait of life in the Dominican Republic.  Both books included somewhat explicit descriptions of torture and murder.  Both books showed human beings at both their best and their worst, but mostly their worst.

So, no torture, please.  And, with the beginning of the semester putting pressure on my schedule, I guess I want something that doesn’t make me think too hard either.  Any suggestions?

On a side note: Carbone’s young adult fiction book about Jamestown was terrific!  It was historically accurate but its focus on the young Sam Collier made it engaging.  The character of Samuel was well-developed.  The author will be attending the weekly Monday evening meeting of the Virginia Society for Technology in Education that takes place on VSTE Island in Second Life, beginning at 5 PM SL time.  Hope to see you there!

A Year of Reading

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Since I’m not going to finish another book between now and midnight tomorrow, I can report my book count for 2009: 51. That includes both text and audio. The first book I recorded in LibraryThing was A Secret Rage by Charlaine Harris. And the last was Why We Believe What We Believe by Andrew Newberg. My favorite audio books were The Bartimaeus Trilogy, written by Jonathan Stroud and read by Simon Jones. Just wonderful!  You can view the whole list here.

The last book I read was actually My Life in France by Julia Child.  Excellent…you can hear her exuberant voice although it sounded like she was sometimes tough on her collaborators.

And the book that will take me into the new year is Scandalmonger by William Safire who died in September.  It is set in late 18th century America, which so far seems much like early 21st century America at least in terms of political practice.  I’ll use it as a lead in to McCullough’s biography of John Adams, which has been laying around for awhile.  It’s dauntingly long and I have watched the series so I haven’t been in a hurry.  But I have some time before the semester starts and thought I would tackle it.  Then, for fun, I’ll follow up with the mystery I found that features Abigail Adams called The Night Daughter. I found it at a Barnes and Noble in Annapolis, Maryland, during a day-after-Christmas shopping spree with my family. I have a basic understanding of this time period but am looking forward to learning more.

A Christmas gift from a friend may lead to more reading…The Bibliophile’s Devotional has an entry about a book for each day of the year.  What a lovely gift!

Happy Reading in 2010!