I'm Rusty.

That's what I've learned about myself in 2012: I'm rusty in virtually every area of my life. Spiritually (I hadn't gone to church since Christmas, y'all, when I used to go every week and be actively involved), socially (I've been in Boston 2 years now and still barely have any friends), physically (thank you, YMCA gym membership, for illustrating so vividly how much a single 50-minute Zumba class can kick my behind), creatively (I haven't made a shred of headway in any of the 3 novels I started outlining last NOVEMBER) and... mentally. I'm pitifully behind in my reading. In fact, I haven't actually finished any books. I've started about 5 of them, but I haven't finished any of them. I KNOW, I KNOW. After all this fuss and I still haven't read any of them?

It's true. Part of the "problem" (disclaimer: not a real problem) is that my job has given me a promotion and a raise and it's just sort of avalanched. And that Queen Elizabeth biography, which ended up being not thaaaaaat bad, really did a lot to discourage me from my disciplined determination to read an hour a day; I just didn't want to read an hour of that for a week straight. Another part of the problem is that since I've been in total survival mode since I moved to Boston 2 years ago and things really only started settling down in the last few months, in a very different lifestyle than I was used to before, I think I've lost all touch with what's normal for me. How much should I be exercising? How much can I read in one day? How much time for church and spiritual life can I make? How do you even meet people in a new city when you work from home, anyway? And, hey, how come my "sexy" jeans have, uhhh, shrunk so much?

I've been slowly answering all these questions. I've joined MyFitnessPal and started actually using my YMCA gym membership; also signed up for rock climbing lessons and started looking into horseback riding in the area. I've started getting to bed on a regular schedule, even if it is crazy because I work the overnight shift. Going to church and getting involved - even taking the new member class to become an official member. Paying attention to the meetup groups I like in the area and going to more of those, even made a couple of friends! I gave up Fiverr since it took over my life with not enough payoff. And so on and so forth. I haven't been writing, but - baby steps, right?

Oh, yeah, and I've been reading more.

Realistically, though. I've figured out that, on average, it takes me about 2 minutes to read one page. I'm not good at skimming and sometimes I like to highlight and quote things on my Kindle. So, realistically, I can read about 30 pages a day, 45 TOPS, especially if it's engrossing. Realistically, this means I should have scheduled the Elizabeth biography over 2 or 3 weeks, not 1; realistically, this means that any book that has more than 300 pages or so, I'm going to need more than a week to get through.

Sooo I've decided that I'm going to do 26 books this year and 26 books next year. I'm wrapping up 3 this week (I've been reading them concurrently as the mood struck): finishing the Elizabeth biography tonight, and about halfway through both Dreaming in Cuban and Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, both of which I'm enjoying much more. After that, I'm going to tackle Iceland's Independent People. Coming in just under 470 pages, it's going to take me 2 weeks to finish.

And that is okay. :)

Happy Birthday, Charles Dickens: Some Free Books

Today is the 200th birthday of my favorite writer, Charles Dickens. My favorite is David Copperfield, with A Christmas Carol (which I try to read each holiday season, though I didn't this year), Great Expectations and Oliver Twist following closely behind, but I've read almost all of his books, most of them more than once. I was introduced to him as a junior high student and I remember being the only one in my class that really loved the book. I want to say it was Oliver Twist, but I'm not sure. Though he was a product of his time and I've found some of his themes problematic and troubling over the years, there is something rich, sublimely engaging and frequently gutting about his writing that still makes me want to reread at least one of his works almost every year.

A couple of years ago, when the Disney version of A Christmas Carol came out (it was the most faithful animated adaptation that has ever been made, IMHO), Disney sent out a traveling exhibit of Dickens memorabilia, such as his letters, desk and personal effects, which I also went to see. I'll have to dig up some of those pictures - they were pretty awesome.

Anyway, if you have an eReader or a Kindle, here are a bunch of free downloads of his books for you. They're free as of this writing and in the US; they may not be free when you read this or outside of the US (though the majority of these usually are free). Most of these are also available from Project Gutenberg and other sources, but these are specially formatted for the Kindle and some of them are very nicely so. It's not an exhaustive list, but it's pretty close. Enjoy!

• Great Expectations
• A Christmas Carol
• Oliver Twist
• A Tale of Two Cities
• David Copperfield
• Nicholas Nickleby
• The Pickwick Papers
• The Mystery of Edwin Drood
• Little Dorrit
• Bleak House
• Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings
• Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy
• The Uncommercial Traveller
• Wreck of the Golden Mary
• Master Humphrey's Clock
• The Chimes
• Our Mutual Friend
• Martin Chuzzlewit
• The Old Curiosity Shop (also one of my favorites)
• Doctor Marigold
• The Cricket on the Hearth (great shorter Christmas story alternative)
• The Poems and Verses of Charles Dickens
• Sketches of Young Couples
• To Be Read at Dusk
• A Child's History of England
• Dombey and Son
• Somebody's Luggage
• 
  
• 
  

First Week Check-In

Today is the end of the first week of 2012, and I think I've gotten a lot done despite having my grandma as an out-of-town guest. She came up from Miami, FL to spend Christmas and my birthday (which is Monday). Despite being 85 years old, her brain is sharper than mine and she's kept me laughing the whole time. We've had a great holiday season together, which is what I wanted for her this year. We've gone to Concord, MA where we visited the home of Little Women author Louisa May Alcott, which is the first "real" novel I ever read, thanks to my grandma, who gave it to me when I was 8, because in Cuba the Spanish translation was one of her favorite books as a girl. So the visit was meaningful to both of us as well as was fascinating. I now have a cute Little Women magnetic bookmark for my "real" books to remind me of the nice day we had. :)

I'm a little behind in my reading, partly due to an avalanche of orders for my services on Fiverr, and partly because, well, unfortunately I'm not enjoying Elizabeth the Queen very much. I'm finding it obsequious to the point of delusional, and in dire need of a ruthless editor. I mean, I just muscled through a whole 28-page chapter on the details of three parties. Every detail, down to the exact blend of tea the Queen ordered at one unremarkable luncheon (everyone cares, right?) and the myriad topics of banal conversations she engaged in (her Corgis, they are hilarious! And she loves Corgis! Which are hilarious! Which she loves!), is covered in excruciating detail. And I do mean excruciating.

This book is 537 pages long, and I'm slightly less than halfway through, and I'm not sure how much further I'm going to make it in. I like to finish books, even if I don't love them, but I'm also not entirely averse to just giving up when books get intolerable. A book simply being tedious isn't usually enough to get me to put it aside entirely, but a tedious book that is also written in a smug, self-congratulatory tone (see Founding Brothers, the only book I didn't finish last year) gets me there, and I'll just say... I'm getting there. I may stick it out, though, just because my next read (The Windup Girl) is much shorter, and may still average out to two books in two weeks, but we'll see.

Another reason I'm so behind is that my grandma, who has excellent taste in interior decorating, has been helping me redo my living room. I got a sweet annual bonus from my job, and I decided to use some of it to finally get rid of the used furniture I got for free when I first moved here two years ago from Craigslist and various other endeavors. I had really wanted to have a home office space in my weirdly shaped bay-window-having living room, but the couch was awful, the tables were dated, and my big-screen HDTV was teetering on top of a microwave cart. It served a purpose, but it was pretty dated and worn.

The "Before." Click to embiggen.

You know it's out of date when your 85-year-old grandmother tells you, "Honey, this furniture is too old-fashioned."

I'd never gone to an Ikea store, but we'd been drooling over the catalogue for a while, and my grandma and I both agreed that it would be a good place to fix up the living room in one shot and make it more modern and homey without spending a small fortune. So we went to the IKEA store in Stoughton, MA, which is so gargantuanly huge that, I am in no way exaggerating, the entire economy of the town of Stoughton seems to revolve around its existence. The first time I visited it, I described it on my Twitter as "A deranged Swedish strip mall in hell." My grandmother on our visit, her first time visiting the store as well, said, "Everything was beautiful. Great Prices. They seem to have something for everyone's tastes. Please NEVER BRING ME THERE AGAIN." LOL! However, the end result, I think, is really nice:

I rent an apartment, whose landlord is enamored with seafoam-green walls he won't let me change, so I picked a white and neutral palette for the furniture to tone down the greenness of it all. I kept my solid wood vintage desk. I think I'm going to add a couple of white book and media shelves around the TV and off the side of the desk, and some small track lighting under the shelf (and, well, photos in the photo frames!) but other than that, I'm pretty happy with the way it all came together. Even if it did TAKE FOREVER.

How I'm Scheduling My Readings

So I have these 52 books I want to get through this year, have I mentioned? I KNOW, I have indeed mentioned. My real problem is that I actually want to read MORE than 52 books. I have a huge to-read list, and I like to read non-fiction that isn't country-specific. Specifically, I want to make some headway into my sci-fi/ genre/ horror to-read stack, such as the Sookie Stackhouse novels, before attending DragonCon next year. Sci-fi and horror are actually my preferred fiction genre, and it was tough to get any that were set in other countries (I did manage to get a couple). I'm trying not to schedule these too far in advance, but it doesn't look like that's going to be possible.

Right now, it looks as though my January reading is largely taken up by the challenge.

• Week One: Elizabeth the Queen (United Kingdom) - 537 pages
• Week Two: Lone Survivor (Afghanistan) - 400 pages
• Week Three: Caribbee (Jamaica/Barbados) - 452 pages
• Week Four: The Windup Girl (Thailand) - 359 pages

I'm on track to finish Elizabeth the Queen by Saturday, so I'm feeling pretty good about that. The book has 21 chapters, each with approximately 25 pages, so I'm reading about 75 pages, or 3 chapters, per day. It's pretty time consuming, but I'm trying to get some reading done in the morning, some in the afternoon and some before I go to bed. The other books won't be as bad, requiring that I read only 57, 65 and 51 pages per day to finish in one week. So that's basically what I'm doing, is looking at the number of pages in the book and dividing them by 7, then reading that many per day. If it's on Kindle - which all but Elizabeth the Queen are for this month - then my aim is to read 15% per day.

This is because my goal is to read at least one book per week. That doesn't seem that ambitious until we're looking at a book like Russka, my choice for Russia, which is something insane, like 960 pages. That's about 137 pages per day, which is just not realistic. I could pair it up with something short like The Alchemist, my choice for Spain, which is a relatively slim 167 pages. The two books together make up 1127 pages.  Spread out over two weeks, that's about 80 pages a day, which is still a lot, but it's not nearly as daunting as 140 pages.

However, if I pair BOTH of those books up with Crocodile on the Sandbank, my choice for Egypt, for a third book, I get 1389 pages between the three books. Divided by 21 days (three weeks), that's just 66 pages per day, which is very doable. Then I'll pick a fourth book that I can get through in a week, probably Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (China), which is a mere 237 pages. I'll likely read that in less than a week, and then have a couple of days left over, so I may squeeze in a fifth book there, or I may spread out  read a second book in the evenings that isn't related to the challenge. I'm thinking I may go ahead and finish Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and/or the last Hunger Games novel, since the movie comes out in March, and I LOVED the first two. Shamelessly, I might add.

So even though I don't want to schedule things ahead of time and read whatever strikes my whim, I think I'm going to have to, just to be able to get through them all and not overwhelm myself. Oh, bother.

Why I'm Reading More and Writing Less.

First of all, my blog has gotten a makeover and it looks HOT, amirite? Many thanks to Smitten Blog Designs for the new hotness. I love it!

I've been entering some GoodReads Giveaways for advanced copies of books, and I've actually won a couple. My most recent win was So What? A Single Mom's Guide to Staying Sane in the 21st Century which I don't have too much interest in reading at this time, but I may get around to it sooner or later. I've entered a lot of giveaways with books that have an international focus. In case I win any of those, I'm going to swap out some of my selections for my Around the World in 52 Books reading challenge. Because I'm both cheap and lazy, and free wins out every time.

***

A friend of mine pointed out that this blog, on which I had originally intended to document my work as a freelance writer and indie book author, not only has no information about my writing, but instead has a bunch of information about the stuff I'm reading. So there are a few reasons for this, and I'm going to spell them out in list form. Because people love lists. And by "people," I mean "me."

1. I don't read enough. It's an old adage that to be a good writer, you need to be a good reader. The reality is that I used to be a voracious reader, reading books for hours every day. My participation in online sci-fi fandom shifted that a bit, but for many years, I still spent a lot of time reading fan fiction online. Some of it was really, really good, better than many published works I'd written, and some of it was terrible to the point of making me physically cringe. I also wrote quite a lot of it, and benefited from ongoing community discussions, feedback and analysis about writing with other writers, so I don't feel like my time with that was wasted at all. However, since I graduated college and, a couple of years later, stopped participating in online sci-f fandom so much (for various reasons I won't get into here, not the least of which was time management), I altogether stopped reading for a few years. I feel like that's created a sort of intellectual vacuum for me that makes me tremendously uncomfortable, and, I've found, has eroded my confidence in my writing abilities. So I'm reading more to fill up that vacuum again, to engage in "the great conversation" of literature and writing from which I currently find myself so profoundly disengaged.
2. I need more downtime. I work too hard, y'all, and that is a fact. Currently, I take on odd freelancing gigs through Fiverr, work full time for a mobile gaming startup, and work part-time for a search engine rating company. It's not an unsustainable schedule because it's all from home and I like it all, but I just don't have enough time where I'm sitting around doing nothing except unwinding. I enjoy watching TV, but  I'm a "two-screen viewer" that TV marketers are buzzing about lately. I don't enjoy watching television without also either live-tweeting about it, or chatting online with friends about it, and if I'm in front of my computer, I'm also usually working a little, too. And just being in front of a computer puts my brain in work mode.  So, sitting with a cup of tea or coffee and reading a book is an effective way to just spend some time by myself relaxing and unplugging from the stressors of my daily routine.
3. I want inspiration. I have the outline to two book series - one a steampunk mystery series and another a young adult novel - as well as three business and technology stand-alone books already written. I've had one done for months, and I just haven't gotten around to doing it. Partly this is because I'm not in the habit of carving out me-time (see #2 above). Partly this is because I'm just no longer in the habit of thinking about producing written works. I'm hoping that by reading and thinking about other people's written works, I can gird my literary loins and get some motivation going in that direction.
4. I'm so freaking sick of writing, it's not even funny. I've been writing for pay for nearly 3 years, and it's completely sucked the joy out of writing for me. I haven't written the things I like: reviews, entertainment analyses, philosophy, sci-fi, social and political discussions and fun how-tos. I've written for content mills (DemandStudios, TextBroker and others), local newspapers, paid blog posts, ghost-written eBooks, spiffied up people's resumes, wrote content for people's Web pages - you name it. If it needs writing on the Internet, I've probably written it, and I'm just tired of it. It's paid well, but I think I need to immerse myself in the pleasure of the written word again to re-invigorate my love of writing. I know it's in there somewhere! I just need to wake it up from the dead.

So, yes, the blog title still stands, because she still writes - right? But she's reading a lot more, because she wants to be a better writer and expand her horizons. And thinks it's fun to refer to herself in the third person. Also, writing about reading totally counts, so there. :)

My 2012 Reading Challenge Resolution: Around the World in 52 Books

In 2011, I got a Kindle, and as a result, I read nearly 2 dozen books. That's not a lot - I have friends who have read 3 times that many books this year, and more - but I work 50+ hours a week and for several years I haven't made a lot of time in my schedule for reading, so for me, it was a lot. Now that I've gotten into the somewhat regular habit of reading daily or nearly daily, I wanted to organize my reading efforts and become even more well-read this year, as well as increase the number of books I read from the year prior, and simultaneously learn a lot more about world history and current events.

The Around the World in 52 Books Challenge

Using my GoodReads account, I stumbled across a reading challenge called Around the World in 52 Books. The idea is that you read approximately one book per week, and each book must be set in a different country. The books can be set in the past, present or future; they can be of any genre (and, indeed, I have everything from non-fiction, to romance, to mystery, to historical fiction, to sci-fi in mine). Dozens of people have shared their reading lists, and GoodReads made it easy for me to find books tagged with specific countries as settings.

Criteria for Book Choices

I researched several books for each country, and read many book lists for many different countries of origin. For non-European books and cultures, I tried to avoid choosing books that were told from the point of view of a European visitor or outsider, i.e., no Out of Africa for Kenya, no Mosquito Coast for Belize, etc., with a few hopefully notable exceptions. For example, Egypt's book is the first of a series of plucky female European heroine mysteries. I happen to like mystery series with female protagonists, and this particular book was said by reviewers to include a lot of accurate detail about Egyptian history. Likewise, the book for Afghanistan is about a failed US mission in the war in Afghanistan. I chose it because it came highly recommended, was about current events, and presents a diverse array of local people on both sides of the war. Finally, I chose between books on the basis of genre-diversity, plot appeal and reviews from other GoodReads users.

Keeping Track of My Reading


I'm keeping track of my reading in several ways.

First, I have put all these books on their own shelf (category) on my account on GoodReads, which is a social network for bookworms.  I have many of these books already, and will try to read only one book per week. Some of these are quite short and some, like Russka, will likely take longer than a week to read, so I don't anticipate keeping to a very strict schedule, but the general goal is to average one book per week. Secondly, I'm keeping a travel map of all the countries I've "visited" in my reading using the mapping feature of TravellersPoint. You can see my bookshelf and my map with the details of the places I'm reading about and my "trip trajectory" on the 2012 Reading Challenge page on this blog. Pretty cool!

My Personal List


Below is the list I put together for myself. As you can see, Europe is slightly over-represented at this time. So I may tweak it a bit as time goes on and my interests shift.  This is just my own personal list, not intended to be definitive in any way. If this challenge sounds interesting to you, I recommend looking through the book challenge message board where people in the ATW52 challenge have posted literally dozens of lists.

Are you doing any reading challenges right now? Be sure to tell me about them in the comments!

Book Review: "Snodgrass Vacation" by Dave Conifer

Snodgrass Vacation by Dave Conifer

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is laugh-out-loud funny for anyone who's been to DisneyWorld more than once. You'll easily recognize all the thinly veiled people, places and things in DisneyWorld in the book, and the author does a good job of skewering them with a great deal of affection for all things Mouse-related. The characters are all engaging and the main mystery is well-paced against the backdrop of a relentlessly banal family facation.

However, I could only give it three stars for several reasons. First of all, the author is in dire need of an editor. There were run-on sentences on nearly every page, and he seems to have a rather weak grasp of comma usage. Secondly, the cast of thousands approach doesn't quite work here; many of the park employees have interchangeable personalities, and the dialogue is often contrived. Worst yet, there are several incredibly racist sequences in which the main character makes obnoxious assumptions about Latino characters, and then is shocked when the Latino characters can speak English and aren't complete and utter buffoons. We're supposed to think this is hilarious, because the author, presuming everyone reading this book is white, treats the reader as though we're in on the joke. I just ended up thinking the main character was really stupid and ignorant, and I don't think that's what he was going for.

I think with some really aggressive editing, this book could be excellent, but as it stands, it's quite unpolished and rough around the edges.

View all my reviews

Book Review: "Harvest for Hope" by Jane Goodall

Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating by Jane Goodall

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I want to preface this by saying that I'm a huge admirer of Jane Goodall as a person and as an activist. I'm also heavily invested in the idea that the re-examination of our societal relationship to food production is vitally important to individual and environmental health. Having said that, this book was a huge disappointment. I kept reading it, hoping it got better or more useful, and it didn't. Ms. Goodall is an incredibly admirable person who clearly has a lot to say on the subject, but the way she says it in this book is just a hot mess. She goes on irrelevant anecdotal tangents in every single chapter and, as many other reviewers have mentioned, she repeats herself continually. I felt like I read eight or nine entreaties to eat organically or buy at farmer's markets. We get it. These things are good, but did anyone picking up this book not already know this?

Furthermore, for such an acclaimed scientist, Goodall provides painfully little science to back up her claim. Despite quoting statistics and making dire ecological and biological predictions on nearly every page, her bibliography is non-existent. Worse still, a lot of her proclamations bear the rhetorical mark of people who have no scientific basis at all. There are many "It seems..." or "Some say" or "Experts think..." attached to extremely serious and debatable claims. She actually contradicts herself several times, initially saying that world hunger isn't owed to the fact that there isn't enough food, but due largely to government corruption in very poor countries; later she states that world hunger is escalating (no citation provided) because "experts say" (sans citation) that the world can't produce enough food.

Goodall also consistently presents her personal speculation as fact throughout the book; for example, she has had anecdotal experience with children preferring organic produce over nonorganic varieties of the same produce, so "it would seem" that children may be able to sense how harmful pesticides are. I'm not saying I disagree with the claim that pesticides are to be avoided - I don't disagree - but this is just sloppy for a well-respected scientist. I actually felt secondhand embarrassment for her at several points.

The last few chapters were where things got really painful. They're basically a plug for her Jane Goodall Institute and her personal political agendas. Example #1: she believes ALL governments need to "take steps" [none specified] to reduce the population. Example #2: she goes on a paragraph-long rant about how cruel the US has been to Cuba's communist regime, forcing them to encourage their people to have gardens to compensate for not being able to import stuff. Horrors! NOT GARDENS! Example #3: Multiple times, she presents an ecological problem - deforestation and its contribution to topsoil erosion - then illustrates how the Jane Goodall Institute's genius innovation has magically solved this problem in several areas of the world. How fortuitous.

Anyway. I was pretty unimpressed by this and it actually turned me off of Goodall momentarily. I still have mad respect for her work as an ecologist, animal behaviorist and general well-intentioned good egg, but this isn't a good book. Any reader would be better-informed by just reading her suggested resources titles instead. Seriously.



View all my reviews

Book Review: "Take Back Your Family" by Justine Simmons and Rev Run

Take Back Your Family: A Challenge to America's Parents by Rev Run

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I really enjoyed this book. It was like having a conversation with some really smart, non-judgmental, successful friends. Granted, Justine and Joey Simmons are both a little self-congratulatory about all their monetary and personal success - to be fair, they have a lot to be proud of! - and they brag on their kids endlessly throughout, which even they acknowledge is a little annoying. However, while the title of the book may make it sound as though they've written an instruction manual, nothing can be farther from the truth. The Simmonses are determined to lead by example. Rather than tell you what to do to "take back your family" - by which they mean, strengthen your family unit, no matter what it looks like, and regardless of what "strong family unit" means to you - they just show you how THEY do it. Then they suggest how this might work for you.

The writing style was conversational without being patronizing or pandering. The book covers several topics, such as building strong marriages, imparting your values to your children, growing spiritually as a family and raising kids who are both humble and have self esteem in abundance. Rather than write it as a omniscient voice, Justine and Rev (Joey) Run decided to each write individual vignettes and segments for each topic in his or her own distinct voice. This really worked for me, because I felt very included in the conversation, rather than people just talking at me from some ivory tower. It was nice to see where they disagree and why they disagree with each other - this leads you to ponder the issues yourself and clarify your own values, which is just how it should be. Also, Justine seems to be more sentimental and compassionate, while Rev is more logical and analytical, so I think the book really profits from having topics dissected from both angles.

The book isn't exactly a blueprint, but they do provide some really positive templates, conversation starters and values clarification exercises that I think would benefit any family with kids. A lot of what they wrote about doesn't really apply to me. I mostly read this because I'm a fan of Rev's and the show, and was curious about a behind-the-scenes look at it all. For people like me, there's still a lot there and it's still worthwhile. I'm not giving it five stars because I do feel that it meanders a little and that the couple comes off as inadvertently smug a few times (I lost count of how many times Rev gleefully mentions his INDOOR BASKETBALL COURT!!! etc) but I'm still glad I read it.



View all my reviews