2018

Reading in 2018

2018, Books in Bed, Reading /

I knew it was bad but I didn’t know it was THIS bad, hahahahahaha. Ugh.

90

I read 90 books in 2018?

90

WHO AM I????

10 audiobooks (not bad, really.)
10 non-fiction (umm, how can that be??????)
2 were graphic novels or manga
18 were Cybils (and some of those were from LAST year’s Cybils list. Blah)
45 were children/middle grade/YA (No surprise)

17 were written by men or women of color. I’m not displeased by this. Almost 20%. I can do better but considering so many of my books this year were sequels, I’m definitely not complaining.

The biggest disappointment of the year, besides the general lack of reading, was how few Cybils I read. Only 11 from this list. 11. How is that even possible?

At this point, I don’t even know what to shoot for in 2019. 100 for the year? More of EVERYTHING?

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Three Children’s Books

2 Comments / 2018, Audiobooks, Books in Bed, Children's Literature, Fiction /

JMP is trying to figure out this whole reading thing. It doesn’t come naturally to him and he is easily frustrated so… The Grandmas are on a mission to make reading fun and that led to me reading three children’s books last weekend.

Hi! Fly Guy, we listened to on audio as we drove from Kingsland, GA to pick up Momal at the JAX airport. It was quick and fun. I think I’ll grab a couple of these in print – they seem to be pretty easy to read and if we can get hooked on a series, that’s half the battle.

If You Take a Mouse to the Movies – we have a free version that came from a kids meal many years ago and I thought it would be fun to read and then do some activities based on the book or that were natural extensions from the book. Natural extensions are what “if this then that” is all about right? It was fun and I spent the weekend asking Pippin what happens if you do X.

Because it’s Christmas season and we’d been involved in Christmas ornament making and Christmas decorating because that’s what happens if you take a mouse to the movies… we listened to an audio version of The Gingerbread Man, which Pippin had already listened to in school, while making some Christmas ornaments so that we could think about baking cookies. (Turns out Pippin had never had gingerbread so we changed our cookie plans to gingerbread cookie plans.) It was a fine version but I found myself wishing I’d chosen differently and read one of our many print versions to him. No big deal, maybe I’ll pull out a bunch of versions and we’ll have a Gingerbread Man/Boy/Baby marathon and compare the differences and similarities another time (maybe when we read a House is a House for Me and build gingerbread houses.)

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Lumberjanes: Unicorn Power!

2018, Books in Bed, Feminism, Fiction, Queer, Young Adult /

Shortly after we moved to Chicagoland, we discovered a small independent bookstore in the next town over and found ourselves visiting it every year, on Christmas Eve, to purchase books for all of the kids. Yay, Book Bin! When we moved back to Florida, we inadvertently stumbled upon an bookstore in Fleming Island and that’s become our yearly shopping spot – but we don’t necessarily shop on Christmas Eve. This year we went on Black Friday.

While we were browsing, TW stumbled over a couple of baskets of ARCs of books and found a couple that she was interested in. I was skeptical because you’re really not supposed to sell those AND there were no price tags on the books… turns out, you get to choose one free for every $50 you purchase. I won’t tell you how many we got free (4) but an ARC of Lumberjanes Unicorn Power was one of them.

Friendship to the max! Lots of fun music references (Blondie’s Bring On Me on accordion? Sleater Kinney? Yes, please.) Unicorns that are pretty but smell really yuk. There’s also a non-binary or trans person with they/them pronouns. Totally fun!

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The House of Unexpected Sisters

2018, Audiobooks, Books in Bed, Favorites, Fiction, Women /

It’s been a long time since we listened to a #1 Ladies Detective Agency book. Our darn library has significantly reduced the number of audiobooks available (even on digital versions) so I was pretty pleased to see that one of their new e-Book services had The House of Unexpected Sisters. It was fun to listen to, mostly on our drive to WDW, and I enjoyed it a lot more than I have some of the other books recently published in the series.

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Reading in November

2018, Books in Bed, Reading /

Sucked. It did and there’s not a good reason for it. Besides work and stress and fun stuff like that. Reading two pages a day is just not going to get the books read, is it? And, I keep quitting books 50 pages in because I am not loving them and that is really annoying. What a waste of reading time when you’re an hour or so in and decide you’re not going further. Whatever. Onward to… January? I’m going to need a #fakereadathon in January, I think.

8 total

2 audiobooks (one was a YA Cybil! First Cybil I’ve finished in ages!)
5 children’s/middle grade fiction. (One was LGBTQ themed.)

1 was written by a MOC

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Scythe (Arc of a Scythe)

2018, Books in Bed, Cybil Challenge, Fiction /

We listened to the first Scythe book on audio last month. It’s an actual real live Cybil, woohoo. It’s also pretty grim and gruesome but also very interesting.

Let’s suppose The Cloud takes over the world because human beings suck at taking care of the world (or themselves) and in doing so resolves all the world’s problems, including mortality. People keep being born but nobody is dying… that’s where the Scythes come in.

Makes sense… except that Scythes are humans and The Cloud hasn’t actually solved the fact that human beings are horrible… very interesting, really.

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Down Among the Sticks and Bones

2018, Books in Bed, Favorites, Queer, Sci Fi and Fantasy /

The sequel to Every Heart a Doorway, Down Among the Sticks and Bones was about Jack and Jill and their doorway “adventure.” Good story, even if it was bloody and sad. I’m not sure I’d have saved my sister if she’d done what Jill did. Jack’s a better woman than I am.

The next book will bring us back to Eleanor West’s boarding school. I’m looking forward to it.

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Five Children’s Books

2018, Books in Bed, Children's Literature, Comics & Graphic Novels, Fiction, Queer /

I ordered some Halloween books for the little boys and forgot to blog about them. So here they are:

Bonaparte Falls Apart was a big hit with Pippin.

ET: The Classic Illustrated Storybook – It’s the story of ET with great illustrations. I didn’t have time to read it to Pippin when I was babysitting.

Spooky Pookie – this one was cute. Squishy liked it but mostly just wanted to carry it around and look at it by himself rather than have me read it to him.

You’re My Little Pumpkin Pie – I didn’t like this one quite as well, (I wouldn’t), but Squishy seemed to enjoy me reading it to him. He sat all the way through and didn’t try to take the book away from me, lol.

Princess Princess Ever After is a book I saw on some list of LGBTQ books in June or maybe October? I don’t know but it was in my Evernote mixed up with other LGBTQ titles. It’s a graphic novel for young middle grade kids. It’s cute – princess rescues princess and rescues a prince and then the other princess kind of rescues everyone and becomes queen. Then some amount of time passes (a lot, I’d guess) and the princess comes back to the castle to marry the queen. I could have done without that marrying the queen bit (patriarchy, etc. etc.) and time passed without us seeing the princess or the queen at work. That kind of stinks. If you were going to do that, it should be a series where we watch the kids grow up, do their own things, and then come back together again. (I clearly have strong thoughts about this book, lol.)

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