Housekeeping

Two kinds of housekeeping today: Laundry & Blogging

Laundry was easy.

As for blogging, I spent some time figuring out how to add labels to my posts. It turned out to be much easier than I thought it would be. Wish I'd known this three years ago when I started. I'll try to add some retrospectively, working backwards from this month's posts.

The difficult part will be deciding how detailed to get. Mostly this is to help me find past posts.

Do I want to do authors? That could be time consuming and the search box seems to be adequate for that.

How about challenges? just a general "challenges" label? or specific challenge label? How effective is the search box for this???

Right now I'll work with some general ones. So far I have:

architecture, blogging, challenges, cover design, illustrated works, poetry, short stories

Note: illustrated works will include picture books, comics, & graphic works. Not using "graphic novels"
I'll probably have a bunch more by the end of the week.

It's a work in progress, will try to do several back posts a week until I catch up.  How's that for a vague goal?

It's been a long winter--taking a break from blogging. Not taking a break from reading.

A Year in Books Timeline

  A month long  blog event hosted by

Estella's Revenge,

Girlxoxo, and Traveling with T

Prompt: {Which month did you … read the most, the least, read the book you liked LEAST for the year, read your longest book, tried a new genre, fell hard for a book boyfriend, re-read a favorite, finished an epic series, read something you’ve been wanting to read for a long time etc. } – link-up hosted at Girlxoxo


January: Started this blog! Read 33 books, the most for year. Threw The Goldfinch across room in frustration at page 200. Sent it back to library undamaged  and unfinished. Most Hyped/Least liked.
My first Goodreads win  Andrew's Brain (I liked it.)
Began exploring new genre format: graphic novels. Exploring Graphic Novels



February: 1st LibraryThing win: Snow in May by Kseniya Melnik. Happy to give it a good review! 

March: Won Mr. Loverman by Bernardine Evaristo on LibraryThing. Significant because it was a great book and it also introduced me to a new (to me) publisher: Akashic Books.  They have a great list. Lots of  diversity. 

April: Finished longest (a Goodreads win) took me 2 months to read this rewarding book: A Taste for Intrigue: The Multiple Lives of François Mitterrand by Philip Short. 640 pages. 

My first ever online Readathon--Dewey's 24 hour. Lasted the entire 24 hours. Read 5 books.

May: Set up My World Of Reading map.

June: A Drifting Life by Yoshihiro Tatsumi 856 pages--More pages than the Mitterrand book but this was graphic--not a lot of words.
Participated in Dolce Bellezza's Japanese Lit Challenge 8.

July: Read for both Spanish Lit Month and Paris in July 

August: A quiet month, with lots of reading.

September: Only read 9 books. Maybe because I got bogged down in The Bone Clocks (624 pages). Also read a dense chunckster Traveler of the Century by Andrés Neuman (576 pages), Battle Royale by Koushun Takami (608 pages), and The Hidden Child by Camilla Läckberg (528 pages). (Number of books read statistics can be misleading.)

My first ever participation in crowd sourced funding! I contributed to What if the Queen Should Die? By John-Paul Flintoff at Unbound

October:  My second Deweys Readathon. Crashed during hour 17, with 3 books read.

Had birthday--got books.

November: Read & reviewed 5 books and read umpteen blog reviews for German Lit Month IV. A great event.
Added German Lit Page to my blogs.
Changed  templates so I could do a little more with blog.

December:  It's probably going to be my "Read the fewest" month because I'm spending so much time (and having so much fun) with the Faves.

Read The Good Life Elsewhere  - one of the funniest books I've read this year.
What book made you laugh this year? 

Getting started--Again!

Why do I keep doing this?  I just deleted two previous attempts at blogging on this site alone.  Then there were the two (or was it three) on LJ, a few on now defunct sites.  (I've been using the Internet since 19idon'twanttosay.)  The only ones I stuck with were work related obligations.  Those were quite successful.

What do I want to do here?  Write about my reading adventures.  Not necessarily book reviews.  I don't like writing reviews.  It takes too much time away from my reading.

Not a log of what I'm reading.  Goodreads is fine for that.

It's other stuff about reading.  Things like:

Today I found out that it is Robinson Jeffers' birthday.  So I pulled "Not Man Apart" from my little library to re-read.  I haven't looked at it in years.  There's always something new to discover when you re-read poetry.  This was promising because the pictures would take me back to California and Big Sur.  Nice, because it's snowing here in New England.

Midway through the book  I came to the poem "Gray Weather" which concludes with the Lines:

             In the cloudy light, in the timeless quietness,
             One explores deeper than the nerves
                    or heart of nature, the womb or soul,
             To the bone, the careless white bone, the excellence.

I stopped reading and looked out the window to the field  beyond my house.