The Other Sandy

Pattern by The World in Stitches.

This was a retirement gift for a friend I've been coworkers with for 22 years. She's a huge Harry Potter fan. It was really fun to stitch, too. I loved the colors.

Total: 10,523 pages

My goal for the year was to read one paper book per month. I didn't quite make it--I only read 10 out of 12. Still, that's 10 more paper books than I read last year, so I'm going to call it a qualified success.

I also started reading more comics than I have in a long time since I tried e-comics. Turns out that what was keeping me away from comics for so long was trying to figure out what to do with them after I read them. Now they just sit quietly on my hard drive.

Meanwhile, participating in the Goodreads Summer Reading Challenge was so much fun that I went and joined a reading challenge group, then committed myself to a ridiculous number of reading challenges. Stay tuned for the round-up post.

Stuff I read in 2018:

( Books/E-Books )

( Graphic Novels/Manga/Manhwa )

( Zines/Fic )

Squeaking in just under the wire, I finished my Goodreads Summer Reading Challenge! This was way more fun than just listing what I've read and tallying up the pages like I've been doing. It got me to dig up some things from the depths of my giant piles of unread books, exercise some creativity in picking out what to read to fulfill the requirements, and read some things I wouldn't otherwise have when I didn't own a book that fulfilled a requirement.

All this is by way of saying that I really enjoyed it, and I'm going to do another one.

Total: 9,805 pages

After getting behind on my series books in 2016, my resolution for this year was to focus on catching up on the various series I read. I succeeded in getting caught up on 11 different series, which is fewer than I was hoping for but better than previous years.

However, I've ended up doing most of my reading on my tablet for the last couple of years, because I'm essentially very lazy and it's super easy to close a book on my tablet and immediately open a new one without ever even having to get up off the couch. This is not helping to reduce my towering pile of unread physical books, which I would like to stop tripping over in my bedroom. Therefore, my resolution for 2018 is to read at least one physical book per month. We'll see how that goes. I really, really like e-books.


Stuff I read in 2017:

( Books/E-Books )

( Graphic Novels/Manga/Manhwa )

( Zines/Fic )

( Series Completed/Current )

My New Year's resolution this year was to not buy a new book until after I've read one of the many, many books I already own. Now that we're just past the halfway point, how am I doing? Abysmally. It sounded like such a good idea on paper, but I clearly didn't think it through.

Problem #1: Series books. I read a lot of series books. In fact, I read mostly series books. Since I don't already own every book in every series I read, having this rule was creating huge wait times between reading books in the series I'm following.

Problem #2: BookBub. If you're not familiar with BookBub, it's a free online deal alert service for ebooks. You can opt to receive a daily (or weekly) newsletter with ebook deals for $2.99 or less in the subjects or genres of your choosing (including M/M romance), or you can add books to your account and BookBub will email you if there's a deal on them. This has been both great and terrible for me because this is where I end up buying a lot of my ebooks. Because I am cheap cheap cheap.

Problem #3: Samhain Publishing announced they were going out of business. Samhain is my favorite publisher for M/M romance and I had a lot of things on my To Read list on their slate. Since they didn't announce a conclusive date when they would close up shop (they're "winding down operations"), I went over to their site to grab what I could before things started going out of print, coincidentally on a day when they were having a massive site-wide sale where everything I wanted was under $3.00. (See above re: cheap.) (And argh, I just popped over to their site for two seconds to copy/paste their URL and what was on the front page? A new book in a series I read. I just bought another book. Somebody please stop me.) [ETA: Samhain's URL removed because the site is now closed.]

On the plus side, I've mostly given up TV and fic in favor of reading my books, which was my original goal when I started giving myself annual reading challenges back in 2010. So maybe it'll only take six more years before I manage to start reading my own books instead of buying new ones all the time.

"It was a terrible day even before Crispin blew up the study."

--Rag and Bone by K.J. Charles

Total: 10,062 pages

Last year I struggled to hit 6,700 pages due to the unusually large number of books I read that I didn't like very much. This year I discovered Listopia, and in particular the list for Gay Romance Featuring Psychics/Mediums/Shamans/Spiritualists, and read an absolutely record number of things for me without even trying. Unfortunately out of the staggering number of things I read in 2015, only about five of them were things I owned when the year started, so the giant pile of unread things has not been reduced at all.

Towards that end, my resolution for 2016 is to not buy a new book until I've read one I already own. Since there are at least seven books I know of coming out in the next year by authors I like, I have little hope that the giant pile of unread things will be hugely reduced, but at the very least it won't get any larger.

Stuff I read in 2015:

( Books/E-Books )

( Graphic Novels/Manga/Manhwa )

( Zines/Fic )

So, it looks like I've stopped writing episode reaction posts. This was not a conscious decision on my part, more like a confluence of circumstances. Most of my shows are currently engaged in long-term story or character arcs that I actively dislike, while at the same time I've hit an amazing run of really good books in a row. I keep looking at the TV and thinking I should watch my shows, then reading instead. As a result, I'm way behind on many of my shows and uninspired to write about them, but I've completed 80% of my reading goal for the year on Goodreads.

I have no plans to leave LJ; I'll just have to find something else to post about. I also can't swear I'll never do episode posts again, but I just can't dredge up the squee to do them right now.

P.S. -- Where has Listopia been all my life? Gay Romance Featuring Psychics/Mediums/Shamans/Spiritualists was not a thing I knew I needed in my life, but guys, I am reading all the things.

This book contains no primary sources. The author has done no original interviews, gathered no unique photos, nor included an original thought of his own. He appears to have plugged Martin Freeman's name into Google and regurgitated what he found there. The author doesn't even seem to have watched anything Freeman has ever appeared in, because each mention of one of Freeman's works is followed by a quote about his performance from an entertainment magazine, rather than the author's own analysis.

Also, if you're interested in this book because you loved Martin Freeman in Sherlock or The Hobbit, you'll be very disappointed. They receive approximately 5-6 pages of coverage combined and barely do more than mention he appeared in them.

If you have access to a computer and can type Martin Freeman's name into Google, you will find more (and more in-depth) information than is presented in this book.

Today I got to catalog a children's nonfiction picture book called Bee Detectives. The majority of the book was about how bees are being trained to detect land mines because they're small enough and light enough not to trigger the mines. That was actually kind of cool.

However, the book ended by talking about how bees are also being trained to detect bedbugs. Umm, what? Because a bedbug infestation isn't bad enough? You need a houseful of bedbugs and bees? Why not throw in a couple handfuls of ants and spiders too, just to complete the horror?