TBR Survey because I can't help myself

I said to myself "I'm not going to do any more of those surveys for awhile. I think I'm getting to the point where I'm relying on these too much and I should back off." And then this weekend was busy and I'm trying to get posts done for the week and OH HEY, Sarah (naturally) has another survey and this one is more bookish than most. I am weak, what can I say.

1. How do you keep track of your TBR pile?
Goodreads. Totally on Goodreads. Otherwise it would just be a random list, maybe some titles on scrap paper, others in Excel, mostly in my head (meaning instantly forgotten). However, my Goodreads list is made up of both books I already own and need to read and just ones I want to read. I really should organize those better.

2. Is your TBR mostly print or ebooks?
OK, so my TBR is usually a wish list. However, there are random times throughout the year where my TBR list becomes more than theoretical and I suddenly find myself with a pile of books to get through. Right now is that time, and it's because I found a bunch of ebooks on sale that I wanted, so most of them are there. That said, I did just buy a physical book today, so yeah. Whoops.

3. How do you determine which book to read next?
Just like Sarah, I usually go for whatever I'm in the mood for, but I'm also trying for diversity. The book I bought today fits the diversity category (which NONE of my other books fit, which is sad) so I'm going for that as well. My goal is at least 1 book each month that meets at least one of the three criterion: the author isn't white, the author isn't from the US, the book was published before 2000. It really shouldn't be that difficult to hit, and yet.

4. A book that's been on your TBR list the longest: 
I just realized this today, and I'm sort of embarrassed by this, but a million years ago Emily sent me a copy of Any Given Day by Dennis Lehane which I haven't read yet, and only because the book is a physically large book and my shoulders groan at the thought. But I really WANT to read it and it's ridiculous I haven't yet.

5. A book you recently added to your TBR
I just bought Blindness by Jose Saramago. So that.

6. A book on your TBR strictly because of its beautiful cover
None I can think of, on either my "I want to read these but don't own it yet" list or my "I have actually bought you already" pile.

7. A book on your TBR that you never plan on reading

Wait...what? Then it wouldn't be on my TBR list. It would not be on any list because why would I keep a list of books I never plan on reading? I think you have misunderstood the purpose of a TBR list.

8. An unpublished book on your TBR that you're excited for
I don't know enough about the bookworld to get excited about specific books that aren't out yet. I guess I can go with more general ones, like whatever Game of Thrones book George RR is taking his time on (the next one is 2016 now? maybe?) and then in general I'm excited for whatever Bill Bryson, Christopher Moore, and Jasper Fforde have up their sleeves.

9. A book on your TBR that basically everyone has read but you
There are a lot. Americanah comes to mind first. I really will read that. Soon. Probably this year cos of that whole diversity goal.

10. A book on your TBR that everyone recommends to you
Well, Americanah. You know, cos basically everyone has read it and thus can recommend it. I mean I guess if everyone had read it they could NOT be recommending it. But if basically everyone has read it and they were all recommending AGAINST reading it, I'd probably take it off my TBR. So, yeah.

11. A book on your TBR that you're dying to read
If there was anything I was super dying to read, I would just read it next. Because I mostly pick my books based on mood.

12. How many books are on your Goodreads TBR shelf?
This is making some presumptions that I have said shelf. I mean, I DO cos I mentioned it in question 1, but still. Alright, I'm done being argumentative and will look it up. 226.

Damn. That's higher than I thought. And yet, I keep buying books not on said list. (Like Blindness...)

Bookmarks!

The other day I went on a mini-rant about bookmarks. Specifically bookmarks given out by bookstores. I like bookmarks but they don't need to be fancy. They really just need to be "piece of paper to keep my place". So I am more than happy to use bookmarks that stores give out. I'm happy to give indie bookstores some free advertising. And obviously I don't know the actual costs to hand out bookmarks with all purchases, but it seems like a relatively low-cost option.

I thought hey, why not pull that out and make it a whole post, and thus push off writing a real post (you know, review) for another week. Huzzah!

I mentioned Porter Square Books gives out bookmarks. As does Strand. I think the Booksmith started handing them out, after I left, which is lame. The bookstore near me, BookRevue, does NOT hand them out despite me thinking REALLY HARD that they should. (What's that? Actually suggest it to someone who works there? Haha, yeaaah that won't happen.)

Why don't we take a look at the 2 I do have?

Look how handy these things are!
Logo at the top, so it's poking out of my book and HEY FREE ADVERTISING FOR YOU. Granted, the Porter Square logo mostly focuses on books, which is great for a plan (books should be the focus!) but not great for branding (cos it looks like "yay books" instead of "yay books from this specific place, hey buy your books here!")
Info on the back: Address(es), hours, website, phone number, social channels. Now I have this information right in front of me and don't need to go through any extra work to look it up. And the less work I have to do THE BETTER.

Strand's bookmark is slightly fancier. The bookmark is a little bit thicker and shiny, with that picture of their storefront. But that's not to knock Porter Squares. It's a thicker card stock with a little texture but that's about it. But it does it's job.

So there you go. This is a thing I think all bookstores should do and now I want to start a collection of indie bookmarks.

January Reading Wrap-up

I don't know about you, but my January was nuts. I'm pretty sure I'm going to be saying that about every month. Work was crazy busy and I'm hoping things will start slowing down maybe around...May. Yeah, probably. But good news is I got a promotion, so the work is paying off!

We're also still house selling/house buying. No movement on part one, which means no movement on part two. Someone just brave the snow and buy my house, dammit.

Oh also, in case anyone was wondering how I fared in Blizzard Juno, I'm fine. It was (not all that surprisingly) way less of an issue than anticipated. Maybe we got like a foot of snow. It's hard to say since it was so windy. There were about 3 foot drifts in some places, and of course the plows made some giant piles, so it looks more impressive than it is.

Look at this! I actually finished some books this month! Not like December (damn you, George R. R.) I'm also working towards my reading resolution, reading at least 1 of the following each month: something written by a non-white person, something written by a non-US person, something written before the 2000s

Now, TO THE STATS

Number of books read
3
A Storm of Swords by George R. R. Martin
Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
Beirut Blues by Hanan al-Shaykh

Number of pages read
1,887

Percentage of fiction read
67%

Percentage of female authors
67%

Percentage of white authors
100%

Percentage of US authors
67%

Book formats (new category, to account for audiobooks)
ebooks - 33%
paperback books - 67%

Percentage of rereads
0%

Percentage of review books
0%

Books written by decade
1990s - 33%
2000s - 67%

Books by genre
Fantasy - 33%
Science/health - 33%
Literary Fiction - 33%

Resolution books
33%
Beirut Blues was originally written in Arabic, by a Lebanese author, and published in 1992. To figure out author race, I went with the US census definition, which counts Lebanese as white. But otherwise this book fulfills 2 out of the 3 criteria I'm looking for in my resolution books so WIN.

Souls are like ideas...Everybody has one that they think is worth something

Back in November Tom and I took a trip up to Boston to visit some friends and one day after brunch at this Chinese restaurant we went to Porter Square Books which, I am embarrassed to say, I never visited when I actually lived up in Boston. I'll give you excuses about how it's actually out in Porter Square (you know, hence the name) which is out past Harvard and I had the Booksmith* right there. Excuses, excuses. But the problem has now been remedied.

We were going through the store, suggesting books for each other, when one of my friends recommended the book The Weirdness by Jeremy P. Bushnell. He'd actually mentioned it the day before as I book I should check out, and now that we're at a bookstore OH HEY, perfect chance to pick up a copy. Not just any copy, but a signed copy!

One other "fun fact" and then I'll get into actually telling you about the book, Bushnell is a writing teacher at Northeastern (my alma mater) and also teaches a class apparently going over Ready Player One. This was not an option when I was there, which is very not fair. Sure RPO wasn't published until a few years after I graduated BUT STILL. Not cool, NU.

Right, so, the book! Billy Ridgeway is sort of a loser. He wants to be a writer but he doesn't actually do that much writing. Instead he works at a sandwich shop and spends time hanging out at his crappy apartment or pissing off his girlfriend. One day he wakes up in his apartment hungover and rolls out of bed to find a stranger sitting on his couch. It's not his roommate (who's been missing for awhile now...), and he's far too nicely dressed to be a vagrant who just wandered in. He claims to be the devil and he has a proposal for Billy. If Billy will go and retrieve his missing Lucky Cat statue, he'll make sure Billy's book is a bestseller. And deals with the devil always go SUPER WELL.

There are devils and powerpoint presentations and warlocks and opposing factions that use a Doctor Who knock-off to communicate its members and other supernatural goings-on as people either try to destroy or save the world (teams seem to change a lot, so who knows WHO you should trust) and some choices vs. freewill and do we really know who we are. There's far more than just will Billy help the devil to become a bestselling author. Which good because that story doesn't sound so interesting. Though there is a LOT shoved into this story, and by the end I was wondering if there was a bit too much going on. Never to the point that I didn't enjoy the story, but something that struck me a few times as perhaps the story could have been tightened up a bit.

That said, the story was a lot of fun. It was funny and had twists I did not anticipate and overall good time. Maybe not a story to inspire deep thoughts and Billy is a protagonist I've seen before but neither of these are bad things.

*One thing I want to say, unrelated to the book but related to local bookstores. PSB includes a bookmark with your purchase. Up at the top it has the name of the bookstore and the back has the stores address, hours, website, etc. WHY DOESN'T EVERY BOOKSTORE DO THIS? One, I'm always looking for bookmarks (despite having 8000 leftover from the wedding, they're currently packed away...somewhere). But more importantly, what great, fairly inexpensive advertising. When I'm reading a book in public places, you know, like the subway, I stick the bookmark somewhere in the back of the book, with the top of it poking out. So the bookstore name is out there. And I will happily use a local bookstores bookmarks and indirectly be like "Hey everyone, why don't you shop here?" The Strand does it too (I have a bunch of their bookmarks) and yeah. I love it. Sorry this post has had so many non-book related bits to it, but this was obviously important.

GIF rating:

Title quote from page 27

Bushnell, Jeremy P. The Weirdness. Melville House, 2014.

Giveaways & Booktours - What do you think?

Question for you book bloggers out there: do you do giveaways and booktours. Why or why not? Please show your work.

I'm thinking this has something to do with the new year, but I've been getting more-than-usual book review requests, though nothing that has really struck my fancy. A couple of them have been requests for a giveaway as well. Which on the surface makes sense and seems like a good thing. I get to offer my readers something free! They get their book out there. Win-win. But you know, what if I don't like your book?

If I didn't like the book, I don't want to give it away on my blog. And really, how successful of a giveaway would it be if I wrote a very lackluster review and then was like "YEAH so if you want a copy of this, jump through whatever hoops are required and a free copy of this book I couldn't stand COULD BE YOURS!" That'd be awkward.

Same deal with a booktour. I guess there are probably (though I haven't done one so could be totally wrong the details) a set list of questions the author answers, so maybe not as awkward. I mean, for the author that is. But again, wouldn't that suck if I ended up not liking their book and now they gotta answer questions and pretend I said nice things about their book.

I'm not saying I would definitely hate the book. I go into books assuming I am going to like them. Because really, why would waste my time on a book I assumed I was going to hate? But I won't know until I've read the book.

Now that said, if an author I already like reached out about a booktour or giveaway, I'll go with it. It's already been shown I'll probably like them so the opportunity for awkwardness is less. Or at least the awkwardness will show up in new ways I haven't figured out yet.

Have any of your dealt with this? What'd you do if you didn't like the book but now were committed to a giveaway or booktour?

Nothing was a tragedy, and everything was a joke

Lena Dunham's Not That Kind of Girl was getting a lot of talk back in October when the book went on sale and I snagged a copy because peer pressure (even from the media) and sales are a pretty good way to get me to impulse buy things. I've never watched GIRLS (though I have seen several SNL sketches about it, so yeah, that's pretty much the same thing, right?) so this is the first thing of Dunham's I've actually experienced. Not sure if this is going to make me watch GIRLS anytime soon.

The book is a memoir, going over Dunham's awkward childhood through her awkward twenties and since that's how old Dunham is that's where things end. Which is fine. I don't mind her being young and writing a memoir now. There's something to be said for writing experiences while they're still fresh versus writing about situations decades later. Of course, I would assume this would means the self-deprecation would have to wait until you can further from the event and then you can laugh at how ridiculous things were. Dunham still has that self-deprecation you see in, say Bossypants, though she seems to go into the situation with the self-deprecation already in mind. I don't know that this means what she's written is inauthentic to her. She sort of comes off as the type of person that enters into every situation this way.

There were things that I liked

As hard as we have worked and as far as we have come, there are still so many forces conspiring to tell women that our concerns are petty, our opinions aren't needed, that we lack the gravitas necessary for our stories to matter. That personal writing by women is no more than an exercise in vanity and that we should appreciate this new world for women, sit down, and shut up.

There were things that made me roll by eyes

When I was seventeen years old I even had a vegan dinner party that was chronicled in the style section of The New York Times - headline: A Crunchy Menu of a Youthful Crowd!" - and catered by a now-defunct establishment called the Veg-City Diner. I wore my grandmother's Dior, insisted on shoelessness (leather was a no-no), and explained to the reporter that, while I didn't care much about the Iraq War, I was very concerned by our nation's casual attitude toward bovine murder.

I enjoyed Lena Dunham's Not That Kind of Girl, but the whole time I was reading I just thought "Man, knowing you in real life sounds...just exhausting." Sometimes I really want to be BFFs with the writers (Mindy Kaling haaaaaay) but Dunham, no thank you. I enjoyed reading your book. You are entertaining and your show even seems like something I would probably enjoy but you can stay way over there, thankyouverymuch.

I like that Dunham is a young woman who has seen the amount of success that she's earned. While her book wasn't my favorite thing, it's impressive that she managed to get such a high advance for the book and that ultimately the book was/is a success, so take that naysayers. I think the controversy around the book, specifically the scenes with her sister when they were both young children, are blown out of proportion. Of course, I read about most of the controversy on Tumblr, where "blown out of proportion" is the norm. I like that she's out there doing what she's doing, even if what she's doing isn't necessarily my thing.

Certainly not one of my favorite memoirs. Or books. It was entertaining enough, annoying at times, self-involved much of the time. Essentially everything I expected going into this.

GIF Rating:

Title quote from page 185, location 2654

Dunham, Lena. Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She "Learned". Random House, 2014. Kindle.