A Small Paean to Libraries and a Book Review Tuesday Update Redux

Last week I made the grand pronouncement that I wouldn’t be doing book reviews every Tuesday anymore. I will be sprinkling them in when I have them, but am not going to be making a habit of forcing reviews onto the blog (or my writing life). I did come up with an alterna-idea that keeps the theme of Book Review Tuesday alive while freeing up some time/mental energy. I will now occasionally use BRT to talk about the books I’m currently reading and/or those on the very short-form version of my To Be Read list (i.e., things that are in the immediate queue and will be started soon).

Today I’m going to lead with library books.

I’m pleased as punch to announce that my local library has an adult summer reading program. I think it’s a fabulous idea to encourage people to read – be they kid or tween or adult. If it takes incentives like prizes and raffles and contests, I’m okay with that. The fact that I read anyway AND now am eligible for prizes for doing so only sweetens an already pretty damn good pot for me. So I am happily enlisted in the program – as are Step-Daughter (also fairly happily) and Step-Son (altogether reluctantly). The only requirement beyond the obvious (i.e., to read) is that the books you read/count have to be checked out of the library.

DOH.

This means that all the regular books I read from my personal ongoing TBR list (both on kindle and in “real” copy) won’t count unless I also check them out of the library – which I don’t want to do, because if I have a copy checked out, no one else can find it, and if I don’t intend to read the library copy, that seems rude. Don’t get me wrong – I do check books out of the library. I haven’t been doing so as much since we moved (we live farther away and I have a HUGELY GINORMOUS stack of books of my own to read), but it’s not like it’s a hardship for me to have to pick more books to read. Teehee. It does, however, mean I now have a third source of books that I have to get through. Teehee again – this makes The Husband laugh to no end, btw, because there are piles of books everywhere in our house, something I don’t think he quite counted on when he asked me to marry him. 🙂

So what am I reading right now? I’ll start with the library books. Just finished two that count toward my 6-at-a-time goal for the reading program: Connie Willis’s novella All About Emily (a fabulous spin on the “All About Eve” movie/story with a delicious Willisian sci-fi twist – she’s my new favorite find, btw, and if you don’t know you work you simply must look for her) and Dashiell Hammett’s The Continental Op (slightly interconnected short stories about an otherwise-unnamed detective with the Continental Detective Agency – and if you don’t know Hammett or only know him from his movie-adaptations like Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man movies, well, he’s another one I have to tell you to run, don’t walk, out to find). I’m also in the midst of The Plot to Save Socrates by Paul Levinson (time-travel fun about, literally, a plan to keep Socrates from dying after drinking the hemlock). So far it’s not moving quite as quickly as I’d like, but it’s still very big fun and has tremendous potential for this philosophy major who also happens to be addicted to time travel books.

Moving past the library, I’m also in the midst of a few others (teehee). On Kindle (bed-time reading), we have Dreaming Anastasia by Joy Preble (YA immortality/supernatural tale about a modern teenager who has the ability to save the last of the Romanovs) and I’m just getting ready to pull Fragments by Monique Martin (third in a series about a time traveling teaching assistant/professor team) and last, but certainly not least, in “real” books: Fifty Shades Darker (I’m new to the 50-Shades series; it’s intense, but very easy reading – in style if not always in substance!) and perfect chaos by Linea Johnson and Cinda Johnson (my next LuxuryReading review, a mother/daughter memoir about life with bipolar). Quite a random mix, but so far all very good stuff. Hooray!