BTT: A Numbers Game

A Numbers Game (from Booking Through Thursday)

1. Are you currently reading more than one book?

2. If so, how many books are you currently reading?

3. Is this normal for you?

4. Where do you keep your current reads?

I always have one or more books on the go at one time, depending on what has caught my interest.  Sometimes I have one simply because I'm in a book lull.  Other times I have so many on the go.  You could say that I am book-bipolar.  Although I know this method is not effective (since I end up taking books back to the library unread because I had too many books out), I have not yet found a way of balancing it out.  Today, I have three books that I am actively reading, two that I occasionally pick up, and three which are always on the go because they are daily writing exercise books.  I have three books on my nightstand (one active title and the two passive ones), one is at work for reading during breaks, and one is at home that I will carry back and forth between work and home.  Sometimes, depending on the content (aka NSFW), I will leave the home read at home either on my couch or my footstool (because I don't have a coffee table) and only read it at home.  I am able to have so many books on the go at once because I pick titles that are different from each other.  I don't read two titles about the same topic at the same time...that would be too confusing.

Read on,

Paula

Booking Through Thursday; An introduction to genres

I work in two libraries and I am book-obsessed.  I think about books practically all day every day.  And I love it.  But for some reason, I don't always know what to talk about here on my book blog.  I recently discovered the Booking Through Thursday blog which offers up weekly book-related questions.  Actually, I discovered it on the blog of Simon Savidge (of The Readers).  I love to journal so book-related journalling is twice as nice!  Unlike the rest of the world, I am relatively new to blogging and definitely newer than Booking Through Thursday.  I've decided to start at the beginning, which was May 2005.  That's right...seven years' worth of questions!  So without further ado...

An Introduction To Genres
1. What kind of books do you like?
2.Why?  Provide specific examples.

Despite it being a basic question, I don't think I've answered it with specifics before.  Although I read widely, I generally read whatever sounds interesting to me plot-wise.  I would say that I read general fiction the most or literary fiction as opposed to any specific genre.  I read a lot of non-fiction and have my favourite subjects like neuroscience, music, fat studies, and my main love is books about books and reading.  I read a lot of the "popular science" genre.  I have all of Mary Roach and Malcolm Gladwell's books on my TBR because I have very much enjoyed the ones I've read ("Packing For Mars" by Mary Roach; "Blink" and "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell) .  I love learning new things without becoming an expert.  I love the "popular science" genre mostly because they usually teach you something without using boring language.  Thus the popularity of Mary Roach...she adds humour to topics that are not generally thought of as funny (human cadavers in "Stiff", the afterlife in "Spook", and sex in "Bonk").  I find the entertaining non-fiction books to be the best because they make learning fun.

What about you?  What do you like and why?

Read on,
Paula

"Some Kind of Fairy Tale" by Graham Joyce

Synopsis (from dust jacket): It is Christmas afternoon and Peter Martin gets an unexpected phone call from his parents.  It pulls him into a bewildering mystery.

His sister, Tara, had come back home.  Not so unusual you might think, this is a time when families get together.  But twenty years ago Tara took a walk into the woods and never came back, and as the years have gone by with no word from her the family has, unspoken, feared that she was dead.  But now she's back, tired, disheveled, but happy and full of stories about twenty years spent traveling the world, an epic odyssey taken on a whim.

But her stories don't quite hang together and the intervening years have been very kind to Tara . . . She really does look no different from the young women who walked out the door twenty years ago.  Peter's parents are just delighted to have their little girl back, but Peter is not so sure.  There is something about her.  A haunted, otherworldly quality.  Some would say it's as if she's off with the fairies.

And as the months go by Peter begins to suspect that the woods around their homes are not finished with Tara and his family...

My review:  I enjoyed this book.  It wasn't quite what I was expecting but that's because the synopsis doesn't give much of the story away and there's not a lot you can say about it without using spoilers.  The story opens with Tara returning home after being gone for twenty years.  Twenty years ago, Tara disappeared without a trace and the story deals in part with what happened in the aftermath.  How people did or didn't deal with it.  How people's lives were affected.  Upon her return, the story deals with where she was during those twenty years.  The book is supposedly narrated by one character but tells the stories of different characters' points of view.  I found it difficult to decide whom to believe, and that may have been the point of using more than one POV.  After a while, I became attached to certain characters, wanting to know what would happen to them.  In particular, I wanted to know more about Richie, the boyfriend.  To me, he seemed the most affected by Tara's disappearance.  I was disappointed with the ending but it's open-ended enough that you are left with questions but also the ability to decide for yourself where the rest of the story would go.  I'm disappointed that there wasn't more about the relationship between Tara and Hiero.

My only negative comment about the book is that even in the synopsis there is a spelling/grammatical error.  It should read 'look no different from the young wom[a]n who walked out the door'.  There were missing punctuation marks and spelling errors ('a way' instead of 'away') in the book.  And one section had both sides of a conversation in one run-sentence with no punctuation or breaks to differentiate between the characters that were speaking...and yet I could still figure out what character was saying what.

I first heard about this book on The Readers Podcast.  I waited until after I read the book to listen to the podcast episode and enjoyed hearing from the author.

Read on,

Paula

"Up and Down" by Terry Fallis

Synopsis: On his first day at Turner King, David Stewart quickly realizes that the world of international PR (affectionately, perhaps ironically, known as "the dark side") is a far cry from his previous job on Parliament Hill. For one, he missed the office memo on the all-black dress code; for another, there are enough acronyms and jargon to make his head spin. Before he even has time to find the washroom, David is assigned a major project: devise a campaign to revitalize North America's interest in the space program - maybe even show NASA's pollsters that watching a shuttle launch is more appealing than going out for lunch with friends. The pressure is on, and before long, David finds himself suggesting the most out-of-this-world idea imaginable: a Citizen Astronaut lottery that would send one Canadian and one American to the International Space Station. Suddenly, David's vaulted into an odyssey of his own, navigating the corporate politics of a big PR agency; wading through the murky but always hilarious waters of Canada-U.S. relations; and trying to hold on to his new job while still doing the right thing. 

My review: I reeeaaalllly enjoyed this book.  Being an amateur space geek and a Canadian, of course I would want to read this book.  David Stewart, a former Parliament Hill employee, takes a job at a Toronto PR agency that is tasked with devising a campaign to revitalize North America's interest in the space program.

If you've read it, you'll understand what I mean when I say she tried to take the book with her.  That made me cry.

The main character, David, is a Sherlock Holmes fan.  After reading "Dust and Shadow" by Lynsay Faye, I bought the Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes two weeks ago.  Reading "Up and Down" and in particular about David reading Sherlock Holmes to his dying mother, I am even more eager to read the Sherlock Holmes stories.

I loved the interactions/relationships between the characters and how some of them evolve over the course of the book.  I loved the unexpectedness of the character of Landon Percival.  This book was amusing and witty and fun.

There were only two titles on the 2013 Evergreen Award nominees list that I wanted to read.  This book, along with "Triggers" by Robert Sawyer, is nominated.  I am a big fan of Robert Sawyer but I will be voting for "Up and Down" when the voting takes place in October.

I loved this book so much that I bought my own copy.  And I'm super-excited because one of my libraries has arranged for Terry Fallis to come for an author talk.  I'll be attending, of course, and hopefully getting him to sign my book.  That talk is in June...you'll hear more about it later.

Read on,
Paula

Speed of reading

Yesterday my brother asked me how I can read so many books.  He asked if I read every word, heard every word in my head, or did I speed read.  The answer to the first two questions is yes, no to the third.

The only appeal of speed reading is that I would be able to read more books.  But speed reading involves skipping words, getting a general gist of what's being said and that does not appeal to me at all.  When I read, I read every word so that I become even more enveloped in the world within the book.  Particularly when reading fiction, reading every word allows me to visualize the scenes depicted in the book.  Skipping words would be too distracting to me; instead of getting lost inside the book, I would feel more like an outsider, an observer.  I know this because I have done some speed reading: when I am no longer interested in the book and just want to know how it ends.  Thankfully, this doesn't happen often.

Another reason I can read so many books is because I read so often.  I have been reading as much as I can for as long as I can remember.  I make reading a priority in my day.  While others have television, Facebook, online games, gardening, sports, and other hobbies, my hobby is reading.  This gives me a minimum of five hours a day (depending on my schedule) for reading.  Just like other things, the more you do it, the better and faster you get.

And I've just started reading "Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read" by Stanislas Dehaene.  So I told my brother I'd let him know what I learned from it, since the index has quite a few references to the speed of reading.

On a side note, at Easter my mother gave me an envelope with all of my report cards in it (Junior Kindergarten to my last year of high school).  Yesterday, I read them.  One of the most interesting things I saw was on my Junior Kindergarten report card.  My family was posted to CFB Lahr in Germany, which is where I attended JK.  On the report card under "Reading and Writing Skills" are two criteria I have never seen on a report card before or since: (1) Shows a respect for books and (2) Explores books with interest.  Oh, how I wish those two criteria were on every report card forever!  I think those two things should be mightily encouraged in today's society.  Just because people spend more time online now than they ever have doesn't mean that books have lost their usefulness or power.  I think a respect for books is highly critical in humanity in general.  And I will do my best to promote that in others.

Read on,
Paula

Organizing my personal library

Because I have spent so much time in libraries, I have never given any conscious thought to how I organize my home library.  I just automatically organize it the way we do at work: fiction is sorted by author's name (last name then first name), except I then alphabetize by title for each author; non-fiction is sorted by the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system.  I know a lot of people don't understand how the DDC works but, in the simplest of terms, each subject has its own number.  Therefore, in even simpler terms, non-fiction is sorted by subject.  I then alphabetize by author within the subject.  To me, this seems the easiest way to organize any library.  Reading "Phantoms on the Bookshelves" by Jacques Bonnet (translated from the French by Sian Reynolds), he talks about how difficult it is to organize large personal libraries (his definition of 'large' being a collection of more than 1000 books), his own included.  Although my library is not large (almost 300), I can still imagine how easily I would be able to navigate my collection if I did have thousands of books.  This is because I easily navigate two such large collections every day at work.  Even if I don't know the exact DDC number for a specific title, I do know the general area it should be found and then I browse that area until I find what I'm looking for.

This is so much easier than Bonnet's arrangement by genre and sub-genre, with books being placed alphabetically within sections.  He has three main categories: literature; non-fiction; and the arts.  Literature is subdivided into languages.  Non-fiction has two main divisions: abstract (philosophy, theology, history of religions, science, psychology, literary criticism, linguistics, and literary history) and concrete (history, politics, anthropology, and biography).  The arts are subdivided by music, cinema, photography, painting and drawing, architecture, exhibition catalogues and art history that are then subdivided again.  His arrangement doesn't even work for him all the time:

"Sometimes I spend time looking for a book for which the logical place has been overtaken by events.  Or failing to find a book that I know I have somewhere.  Have I mis-shelved it or is it lost?  I cannot always answer that question, or else it is answered too late, when I have already bought another copy."

I know that I take my knowledge of DDC for granted.  I also know that I don't know it as well as I could; I still have to look things up.  Being responsible for cataloguing the collections of two different public libraries means that I've gotten a stronger sense of where specific topics are shelved.  And then I have my own collection which reflects my personal interests and subjects.  I know that my knowledge of DDC has been gained over almost ten years of working in public libraries.  I also know that library patrons generally have a vague idea of how DDC works.  I truly wish that all students were taught how to use DDC in elementary school and made to use it in all levels of education (elementary, secondary, and college/university) so that everyone in every generation could take DDC classification for granted like I do.

Read on,
Paula

Judging a book by its cover

Lately I'm finding that the titles that I am the most eager to read are the ones I think have the most appealing cover art.

(In the photo)
*The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson
*The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
*The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry
*The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas
*The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe
*Grayson by Lynne Cox

In general, we are taught not to judge a book by its cover.  And I fully believe that to be true, particularly when the cover includes people.  I try to ignore any cover art that attempts to represent the main character(s) because, almost always, the publisher fails to accurately capture my mental image of him/her/them based on the actual book content.  To me, the book content-to-cover art dilemma is a static version of the book-to-movie dilemma.  I think it is quite nearly impossible to visually adapt book content simply because the brain interprets book content far more dimensionally (aka through all of the senses) than is possible through one medium (vision).  Having watched the Harry Potter, Twilight, and Time Traveler's Wife movies and being disappointed with their adaptations, I have no interest in ever seeing the movie versions of my favourite books.  Even if they ever made the Corinna Chapman series into movies, I wouldn't watch them because I much prefer my mental images.

But I still love cover art in general.  I have seen cover art that I think is truly beautiful on a book that I have no interest in reading.  Cover art truly is an art...and, just like general art, some of it is better than the rest.

Read on,
Paula

Discovering publishers catalogues...dangerous!

Our library receives piles of publishers catalogues that the CEO goes through to choose titles for me to order.  Until recently, I thought nothing of it.  And then I wondered if the public can have access to these catalogues.  So I went online and realized how few publishers/imprints I know.  I went to Penguin's Canadian website and found access to their catalogues.  This was a bad idea...I now have 115 catalogues downloaded to my computer to peruse at my leisure.  And that's after not downloading the ones for children's books and audiobooks.  There are some imprints I'd never heard of.  Like Dutton/Gotham.  I thought it sounded like they would sell mysteries, thrillers, etc.  Yeah, so I opened one of their catalogues and have now downloaded them all because of "Every Day is an Atheist Holiday" by Penn Jilette and "The World's Strongest Librarian" by Josh Hanagarne.  And there are still a few other imprints I wasn't sure if I would like and will check out their catalogues later.  But here's the problem: this is one "publisher" and I've got 128 catalogues to browse through (2002-2013).  As I find more publishers, I will probably be downloading/viewing their catalogues.  I do believe that my love of books has officially become an obsession.  I think my TBR is about to become burdensome.  Up until now, my TBR has been achievable because, if I read nothing but what is on my list, I could feasibly read them all in less than 10 years.  Now that I've discovered publishers catalogues, I'm finally in danger of never getting them all read.  It doesn't help that I heard that 50,000+ titles are published every year.  And I never hear about most of them.  Even with my picky tastes, that's a lot of books.

But then, the hunt for books to add to my TBR has been one of my favourite things about reading.

This just happens to come at a time when I am actually craving buying books.  This is the first time that it's been an actual craving rather than a desire.  What makes this particularly painful right now is my need to save money.  So perhaps if I gave myself permission to buy one book a month, I wouldn't end up overspending when I finally do go book buying.

Read on,

Paula

"Introducing the Honourable Phryne Fisher" by Kerry Greenwood

Synopsis: Meet Phryne Fisher, the 1920s’ most elegant and irrepressible sleuth, in her first three adventures bound together in one great value volume. This is the perfect way to introduce your friends to your favourite and most stylish sleuth—or to catch up on some of Miss Fisher’s earlier career. Our unflappable, unconventional and uninhibited heroine, The Honourable Phryne Fisher, leaves the tedium of English high society for Melbourne, Australia, and never looks back. In her first three adventures, she encounters communism, cocaine, kidnappers, and murderers. Phryne handles everything—danger, excitement and love—with her inimitable panache and flair, and still finds a little time for discreet dalliances and delicious diversions. This brilliant omnibus volume presents Cocaine Blues, Flying Too High and Murder on the Ballarat Train.

My review: I absolutely adore Kerry Greenwood's Corinna Chapman series.  But her Phryne Fisher series is more prolific (6 in the Corinna Chapman; 19 in the Phryne Fisher).  "Introducing the Honourable Phryne Fisher" is an omnibus of the first three titles in the series (Cocaine Blues, Flying Too High, and Murder on the Ballarat Train).

I wasn't sure if I was going to like this series or not.  I'm not into murder mystery novels and police procedurals.  I don't like blood and gore.  Thankfully, reading these, I was able to let my mind gloss over the details and not work too hard at imagining it too closely.  But I loved these books because, like the Corinna Chapman series, I really enjoyed the characters themselves.  I enjoyed their depths and the environment created in each novel.  In reading all three, my personal enjoyment of tea has been refreshed.  In the second book, Dot (a grown woman) gets her own room for the first time in her life and it made me appreciate that I have my own apartment and can keep it just as I like.

To the best of my knowledge, this is the first book I've read set in the 1920s.  Phryne Fisher is a woman born of poverty, granted wealth later in life (I believe she's in her 30s).  She is fashionable, strongly independent, has no interest in having children, and has casual sexual relations with good-looking men.  She's free-spirited, smart, widely skilled, and is able to solve mysteries.  In short, I like her a lot.  She makes me want to be a bit more glamorous than I am.

In fact, Phryne Fisher is so fashionable that the first novel went into a lot of detail of her clothing choices.  Not being a fashion maven, I didn't understand a lot of it and didn't care to find out.  That doesn't happen so much in the other two novels.  But there was enough for you to understand that her clothes were stylish, expensive, and beautiful.

I read somewhere that someone complained about the abrupt change to another character's point-of-view without indication (like, in the same paragraph as another character's POV).  Yes, it caught me off-guard the first time it happened but you get used to it as you continue reading her books.  If you want to talk about writing style and form, fine, go ahead and complain.  But for me, it blends well with the story.  Instead of waiting until later in the story, Greenwood cuts to what the other character in the scene is thinking (usually about Phryne) or gives some background to the character that explains something about them in reference to the scene or what is happening to them within the plot.  I didn't mind it and usually it was only a few sentences. A brief aside, as it were.  Not so horribly distracting from the story.

Yes, so I did indeed enjoy this book (and therefore the first three novels in the series) and so now I will have to hunt down copies of the other 16 novels.  I have five non-consecutive titles from later in the series on ebook; I'll just have to find the earlier ones.

On another note, I recently bought a copy of Kerry Greenwood's "Salmancis/Jetsam" from Amazon; it was published in March 2013 and is only available for Kindle.  And we got a copy of her "Out of the Black Land" (published in February 2013) at one of my libraries but I haven't completely decided whether or not I will read it, simply because it is set in ancient Egypt.  And in case I haven't already said it anywhere else, Kerry Greenwood is my all-time favourite author.  If we count "Introducing the Honourable Phryne Fisher" as the three separate titles, I have read nine of her books and loved all of them.  I happily look forward to reading more.  And I sincerely hope she writes more in the Corinna Chapman series.

Read on,
Paula

Date a girl who reads

If you haven't heard the horrible news, Google is discontinuing their Reader.  I am heartbroken.  I love Google Reader and may have difficulty finding anything good enough for me to replace it.  In preparation for its demise in July, I've been going through old starred blog posts and printing the ones I want to keep.  And that's where I found an entry with the quote "Date A Girl Who Reads" by Rosemarie Urquico.  Here's the link to the full quote on Goodreads and here's the first paragraph:

Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

I absolutely adore this whole essay.  My dream is to fall in love with a guy who totally gets my book addiction.  Since I have no intention of having children, I am already planning which books to give my nieces/nephews as they get older.  I want to be the book aunt.  Although I don't sniff the pages (damned allergies!) and my reading tastes are different from those prescribed in the quote, I would dearly love for my would-be-partner to hold me while I cry over a book simply because he understands how a book can affect you.

Frankly, everyone should read Urquico's quote, but most especially all of us girls who read.

Read on,
Paula