Saturday
was my birthday. I wish I had been in a better place emotionally for it, but
there were still three things that were good about it.
There were
a lot of Facebook greetings. Facebook will tell you who is having a birthday
that day, and there is a pop up box where you can type your greeting in, making
it really easy. Even knowing how easy it is, it still means something that
someone does it, and when your timeline is full of people wishing you a happy
day, it feels good, which I needed.
There were
even some Twitter greetings. The Twitter greetings were mainly from people whom
I am connected to on Facebook as well, which allowed them to know. Some people
re-tweet their birthday wishes. If you do that more people will see it is your
birthday, so you can get even more well wishes, but I did not feel comfortable
doing that. I only clicked "Favorite" and replied "Thank
you!", as well as liking all the Facebook posts, because they did make me
happy. I just felt like re-tweeting would be too self-promotional.
Another
thing that was good was dinner with friends, which I think I will post about
separately, but it is related to the other good thing, which was books.
I am not
finished with my Christmas books yet, but now I have more, and even more on the
way. Karen gave me an Amazon gift card and Sonya gave me a Powells gift card. There
is also the stack of library books that I have, so it all feels like progress.
I have
written about my various reading lists at different times, and this relates to
that, but let me also talk about Goodreads for a moment. Goodreads is how I
know I read 100 books last year (and why being so close to 100 led to me
reading two children's books on December 31st.)
As the new
year started, Goodreads prompted me to set a new reading goal for 2015. Well,
my first thought was 144, which is ridiculous, but reflects how many things I
want to read and learn. The average was 64 though, so I set that. Perhaps it
seems low for someone who read 100 the previous year, but a lot of that is because
of comics - though I really do want to read a lot of comics. Still, if I read
64 regular books, plus 2 Caldecott winners and at least one graphic novel per
month, then that is 100 again, and would probably be about right. It's still
ambitious, but not impossible. I think.
Looking at
the breakdown of the smaller reading lists, it gets much better. I had down
four gardening books, and I got two of them for my birthday. They were books
that the library had, but I think they will be handy as reference, so owning
them seemed desirable, and I needed to add things to my wish list.
There were
three books that I wanted to finish before starting my 2014 Native American
Heritage reading. I just finished one, have one here, and I think I know when I
can read the third. There had been three books that were part of pre-Halloween
reading that the library didn't have and that were kind of expensive, the gift
cards and new used copies showing up in stock means they are all on the way, as
well as two really hard to find academic books that are starting to feel
necessary to read sooner rather than later.
So, here's
how I see things going down. Right now I am reading The Secret History of
Dreaming and it will be followed by Sometimes a Great Notion. Then I
am going to read the heck out of those Pre-Halloween books. I should then be
ready for 1493. When that is done I will start alternating gardening and
Native American Heritage books, then the pre-Italy and Black History books.
That is
putting the drawing books on hold, but I feel like I need to do that until I
have more time to draw, or the lessons get lost. I will probably get them back
into the rotation in May, along with the books that are feeling necessary
sooner than later. (I assume they will be pertinent to things that are coming
up, but they are not directly related to each other in any obvious way.) I
think I am going to order used copies of the other two dream books now, too,
because the library doesn't have them, and this should be a good paycheck.
At that point
I will be able to start working on fleshing out my education, so that's pretty
exciting. All of the smaller lists combined equal 58 books, so if I read 64
this year, that means I can be caught up on those and into the School list of
98.
For the
Caldecott Medal winners I am working from both ends. I just finished the 1938
inaugural winner, and I have the 2014 winner ready to read tonight.
For graphic
novels - and I am saying that instead of comic books in this case simply
because they are so far all more novel-like, this month is NonNonBa,
which is on my shelf as I write, and next month I want to do Anya's Ghost.
If there is another MOOC that could change the order around, and that would be
fine with me. I find things through the MOOCs that I wouldn't find otherwise.
I admit my
excitement level about this might be ridiculous, but it's there. Books! Come to
me my pretties!
Also, for a
long time, no matter how many books I read my to-read list was always three
times as large as my read list. Well, a lot of it is just remembering books
that I had read but never added, but I am getting close to having the
"read" list equal half the "to-read" list, and I feel good
about that.
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