Book Feast or Famine

I hate it when I am trying one book after another and I'm not liking those books.  That is a Book Famine.  On the other hand, I love it when I am on a roll, finding and reading one good book after another.  That is a Book Feast and I'm in the middle of a Book Feast!

  Some of the good series I've read lately are:

I'm in the middle of the "44 Scotland" series and I'm really enjoying these books.  The chapters were originally published as a serial story in an Edinburgh, Scotland, newspaper in daily installments, and the author admits to having been never more than two or three installments ahead.  I just finished book #3 and will pick up book #4 and #5 if they're in the library today.  

 As you may recall, I really enjoyed "The #1 Ladies' Detective Agency" series by the same author, Alexander McCall-Smith.  I must note here that I liked the first book in that "#1 Ladies' Detective" series, but not enough to read any other books in the series.  Then, because I was in one of those Book Famines, I picked up book #2 in that series and I was hooked.

I have really enjoyed reading the young adult "Samurai Mystery" series by the Hooblers.  It is set in ancient Japan and the story is told through the eyes of a young man who is about fourteen.  He wants to be a Samurai but because he was born into a merchant family, he has to become a merchant.  Thought a series of circumstances, he is taken under the wing of a judge who is also a samurai and he helps the judge solve mysteries.  I've read four of the six books and the local library doesn't have book #5, so I'm waiting for a used book to come from Amazon.  I think all three of my teenagers would enjoy this book.

Other than the scriptures, I almost never re-read any books.  In fact, I can probably count on one hand the number of books I've re-read in my whole life.  I read a book, enjoy it, and move on.  However, sometimes I read books that I would almost want to read again and this "Stuff" book is one of them.  It is non-fiction, written by Dr. Randy Frost, a professor of psychology and an expert on OCD and compulsive hoarding as well as the "pathology of perfectionism" and by  Dr. Gail Stekette, a professor of social work.

My sister and I have been sorting through my parents' "stuff," and therefore seeing our own "stuff" in a new light, so this Stuff book has been timely.

Well, I'm off to run errands and, of course, to stop by the library!

Selecting books!

My favorite way to choose a book to read is to go along the library book shelves (or bookstore book shelves), looking at the rows of books until something catches my eye. I have used this method of book selection since I was a kid and it still works for me.  I look for things like a great font, aesthetically pleasing cover art, a clever title, interesting subtitle, or anything else that somehow catches my interest.  I also have an aversion to really, really thick books for some reason!  :o)  Once something catches my eye, I read the summary that is inside the front cover or on the back of the book to see if the books sounds interesting.  As an adult, I do employ other methods for finding books to read and I do love the search options offered by the Internet (long live the Internet!). I'm just saying this method of physically scanning the shelves is my time-honored favorite.

I love to go to other libraries in the county and just look and look.  I've looked through the local library's rows, particularly in Young Adult Fiction and Juvenile Fiction, so often that it looks somewhat familiar.

Somehow I must have perfected my talents for book selection because besides selecting books for myself, my children like me to select books for them, too.  I willingly find books for them . . . all the time.  For example, today I have more than twenty books checked out on my library card--books for the four of us.  I enjoy looking for books they might want to read.  I have tried to understand their tastes in books and then I try to find books to suit their individual tastes. I don't mean to sound like I always find perfect books for them, because I do find a certain percentage of duds.  But that is OK.  It is all part of the process.  I find duds for myself every so often, too.

I will often read the same books I select for the kids, either before or after the kids read them, because the books sound interesting to me, too, but I do not read every single book I select for them.

I take the task seriously to search for good books for them to read because I want my children to be readers.  I think I've helped my two oldest children to be avid readers.  I'm still working on my youngest--still a work in progress--but we have hit on some great finds this past year. He's my most difficult to please.

I find this odd that they would defer to me.  I would never have wanted anyone else to make my recreational reading choices for me and I would have hated to miss out on looking through all those rows and rows of books.  I've sometimes wondered if my children can even select their own books to read (they actually can . . . ;o).  Through the years they have all thought, and a couple of the kids think even still, that their school libraries "don't really have books" or "don't really let people check them out" or "just have school stuff" or "have nothing to read."  Bizarre but understandable because I have so completely handled that whole book selection process.  I've decided that even though they wouldn't confess to my having "MAD book selection SKILLZ," I must do or they would have stuck out on their own long ago. :o) Ha!

So here's to books and to looking through rows and rows of books! I love it! I'll see ya in the stacks!

My blog books

Someone had asked that I post pictures of my blog books, so here are my two blog books.  The blue one covers from September 2008 to the end of that year and the orange one is for all of 2009.  These are soft-bound books and are printed on very nice paper.  

In the first book, the pictures are not consolidated and the book "reads" more like my blog with pictures, then text, and then pictures again and all in chronological order.

In the second book, in an effort at economy, I had the pictures consolidated.  It did save money but I prefer the other layout.  On some of the pages in this second book, you have only pictures and so whatever I wrote about those pictures is on some other page.  But money talks.  And I listened.