I was between books and TW said Citizens Creek is really good so I gave it a try. It was really good.
The story of Cow Tom, born into slavery and sold to a Creek Indian chief. How he bought his freedom and the freedom of his family, became Chief Cow Tom and then the story shifts to those of his children/grandchildren after his death.
Chief Cow Tom was a real person and novels around real people can be problematic. Luckily, in this case it worked well. I’m really glad I read it.
If you are friends with me on Facebook then you know my new obsession is with Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. The thing is, this book came along at exactly the right time in my life.
Last year at about this time I created a timeline of things to do to prepare for our move in June of 2016. I had planned for us to begin clearing out rooms and stuff, starting in May of 2015. We have so much and we’re busy, not young, and also kind of lazy so there’s no way we could wait til next spring and get rid of things + pack + move. It just would not have worked. We need the full year to prepare.
One reason the KonMari Method is really speaking to me is that I remember what it was like to get rid of a ton of stuff in order to move here. It wasn’t fun. In fact, it was the exact opposite of fun. It was painful. It’s still kind of painful now, seven years later. We left behind things we should not have. We left behind things that brought us joy. We did that and moved to a place that we absolutely did not want to move to. We were leaving behind the big kids who weren’t moving with us. We should have brought as much joy with us as possible, and we did not. It was a hard move.
This time around, we’re moving to a place we DO want to move to but once again, we’ll be leaving kids behind. The little kids won’t be going with us. At all. They’ll be at college, or off living their lives, or doing whatever it is that grown-up kids do when they don’t live with their mommies. And, this is the last batch of kids. The last time we’ll do this. This time — that’s it. HUGE life change.
We are not going to make this move any harder than it’s already going to be. We’re going to bring as much joy into the process of moving as we can. We’re going to bring as much joy with us as possible. We can’t bring along the kids who bring us joy, but we’re sure as hell NOT bringing any “stuff” that doesn’t bring us joy. Nope. Not happening this time.
We’re moving with joy.
The KonMari Method and Why We’re Doing It Read More »
I have no idea how Serendipity Market landed on our library cart. It was YA so I assumed it was a Cybil. Nope, it wasn’t a Cybil. No idea.
Anyway, it was super short and very quick to read, which was good since I started it late in the evening and was able to finish it before I went to bed.
I really liked the retelling of the fairy tales but the way they were connected to the Serendipity Market and bringing the earth back into balance was never really clear. You just had to go with it and accept it as the way of things. Another 50 pages to really connect the dots would have been awesome.
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Way back in April, I picked up some books from the library that I thought Elly and her boyfriend might like since they were going to join us for #readathon (turns out they joined us for #readathon practice, but it was still awesome.) 99 Poems For the 99 Percent was one of the books I picked up.
I’ve been reading a couple of poems every day or two, usually when I sit down to have lunch or something. They’re not bad. Some of them are really very good. I’d have never picked this up if it hadn’t been for “N” joining us so yay for that!
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If you are friends with me on Facebook, you’ve no doubt seen me talking about The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up aka the Konmari method.
Much of what I typed was just me being silly. It’s a little overwhelming but very interesting and much of it makes sense. My real problem though is her method of managing books. I don’t think she understands my relationship with books.
From the beginning of her section on books…
We have to take all of the books off of the shelf and put them on the floor. I understand her suggestion to do this, in general. It makes a lot of sense to see your collections of items as one big THING. It also makes sense to touch each item to determine which bring you joy.
Since I already know I have an ass ton of books, shouldn’t I be able to just pick up each book from the shelf, hold it and then either return it or discard it? Do I really have to move thousands of books into one room in order to determine joy? I think not.
Also, since TW and I co-own these books, how do we decide together which books bring joy. If one brings me joy, but doesn’t bring TW joy, does my joy outweigh hers?
She also talks a lot about imagining A bookshelf filled with books you love.
I, however, picture a good half dozen bookshelves filled with books I love.
Also, she does not understand that my books are arranged by color. Therefore dozens of bookshelves of books sorted by color DO make me happy. Those books DO have value just by being on the shelf. They are beautiful. They do serve a purpose by just being there. Books are not only valuable for the information they provide to you when you read them. Or even by the pleasure you get from reading them. They bring me pleasure simply by BEING there.
I suspect she doesn’t understand this. Or, I wonder if she’d tell me that my books are not in fact books, they are komono or sentimental items so they should be managed differently. Maybe?
One last problem is that I’m not sure I buy into the idea that “sometime means never” as in “I might read that sometime.” I do sometimes read the books from my stacks, though she is right — I rarely re-read books.
I also don’t think I buy into the idea that the perfect time to read a book is when it first comes to you and if you don’t read it at that moment, then you’ve missed your opportunity and you should simply let that book go. I’ve read books from my stacks years after I first acquired them and I’ve fully enjoyed reading them.
I’m not giving up, I’m definitely going to give this a try — even if I have to do some sort of modified version of Konmari. Totally fascinating.
Konmari Problems: Books Read More »
TW has started making fun of me for checking out so many gardening books. lol. It is a little odd, but I LIKE THEM, darn it. I really liked Foodscaping though I sure would like to know how to keep wildlife from eating all of your foodscaped gardens. This book was a little short on advice for that. Plant sweet peas in multiple patches and hope the bunnies only notice one patch isn’t real solid advice, ya know? lol. Anyway, I’ve read 3 or 4 books about foodscaping and this was probably my favorite of the bunch. I think we’re going to have to plant kiwi…
Last week (or was it the week before?) when my back hurt like crazy and nothing on the bookshelves looked good to me, I picked Decorating for Real Life from the new arrivals shelf. I wasn’t expecting much but turns out I really liked it. I liked the different houses and rooms and it was exactly the right book to read when I was tired and tired of having a back ache.
It’s books like The Living that cause me to say NO cruises. NO living on the west coast. And, thank goodness JMP no longer lives in Hawaii. Quick read. I wasn’t thrilled with the characters at the beginning of the book but they grew on me.
I’m not sure I’m going to read the next book, though it does stink to not know what happens next. After all of that horrible stuff and I don’t know how it ends? Ugh. Totally annoying.
There are too many darn sequels in the world now. Have you noticed this? I’m really getting tired of sequels when we don’t need sequels. We need authors to write books and give them a real live ENDING every now and then. Sheesh.
Salvage started slowly. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to stick with it. It’s a super-long book, (528 pages), with unusual sentence structure and language. The first 100 pages, I just wasn’t sure. And then, I pretty much couldn’t put it down.
YA feminist scifi. I liked it. I’m looking forward to the next book.
I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel about TheCrossover — we listened to it on audio and it’s about basketball. Not generally our sort of thing. Turns out… amazing book. Amazing. I loved everything about it. The poetry. The characters. The plot. *sniff* I’m not going to say best book ever but damn it was a good book.
Read it. Listen to it on audio. Give it to your kids.
One of the Jupiter Pirates books is on the Cybils shortlist and since there are only two published (so far) and they’re middle grade scifi, I figured I’d just reserve them both. I’m glad I did. They were both a lot of fun and super quick to read.
The captain of the ship is a woman (a mom) and her husband is the first mate. There are three kids competing against each other to be the captain when their mom retires but they also have to work together because they’re crew. The female child is the one who’s most into “firepower” — that’s a nice change from the girl being the smart, bossy one.
I can see the first book (or the second) being a great action movie for kids. Great characters, interesting plot, lots of special effects. Someone should option these now.
The Jupiter Pirates (2 Of Them) Read More »