STACKED

books

What I’m Reading Now

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Finishing a book lately has been rough for me. I keep on picking up a title, getting about 50 pages in, setting it down, and not feeling compelled to pick it up again. It’s not that there’s anything really wrong with the book in question. I’m just in a bit of a reading funk, and from what I’ve read from others right now, I’m not the only one.
A few reasons for my lack of desire to read much: it’s blistering hot outside, where I tend to do most of my relaxing reading; I’ve been working until 7pm most nights, which means my evenings are dinner and bed, usually; and I’ve been more interested in working on my puzzle, which is difficult to do while reading. It’s difficult for me to read while tired, too – I always fall asleep, no matter how compelling the book. It makes those 7pm nights particularly bad for reading.
What this means is that I’m currently reading quite a lot of books, although I’m not finishing them (yet). These are books that would normally appeal to me, and I expect to finish most of them at some point – maybe some of you have read them and can speak for how wonderful they are, thereby convincing me to keep at them until the end.
Long Lankin by Lindsey Barraclough
Kelly loved this one, and it appealed to me before she loved it, so I’m going to keep at it. So far, I’m having a hard time adjusting to some of the dialect used (British slang). Still, I’ve read and enjoyed stories with much tougher dialect than that included here (Knife of Never Letting Go, for example), so I know it will just take time.
Diverse Energies edited by Tobias S. Buckell and Joe Monti
This is a collection of SF short stories featuring teen protagonists of color. Most of the stories are dystopian in some way, although at least one of them is just straight science fiction. I decided to pick this one up especially hoping it would break me out of
my funk – in 20 pages or so, I can get a beginning, middle, and end,
and I haven’t invested huge gobs of time. The stories have been hit or miss, as expected. My favorite so far is Malinda Lo’s story about a girl hunting for her missing brother in the tunnels below a city where racial purity is mandated by law. It’s one of the better-written stories and also makes sense narratively. A couple of the stories have been more disappointing than usual – I feel like they were too disjointed and hard to follow, not just “eh, not my thing.”
Seraphina by Rachel Hartman
This book, which features dragons that can assume human shape, royal intrigue, and lots of delicious secrets, has been highly acclaimed by readers I trust, and it’s just the type of book I usually love. It’s been praised for its originality and its writing, but I haven’t been able to make myself move past a few pages.
Erasing Time by CJ Hill
As a teen, I thought it would be the coolest thing ever to be taken out of my own time period and brought to the distant future. To this day, it’s still a great tragedy in my mind that I won’t be able to see the amazing things the far future will bring. (I love dystopias, but my heart always convinces me to picture a more utopian future.) CJ Hill’s Erasing Time does just what I dreamed about as a teen – it brings two girls from our present day into the distant future for a specific purpose. I’m excited about this book’s premise, but it hasn’t been able to pull me in yet.
Are you in a reading funk? Is there anything in particular you’ve done to get out of prior funks?

What I’m Reading Now

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Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas
I’m one of those people who reads a lot of reviews before I read a book. The reviews of this one have been very, very mixed. I think the author’s story to publication is fascinating – she originally wrote the story online at fictionpress.com before being picked up by Bloomsbury. The story is about a teenage assassin, punished as a slave in the mines but freed in order to compete to be the king’s personal assassin. I am a sucker for a good old-fashioned fantasy epic, and I hope this will fit the bill. After reading the first few chapters, I can tell that my teenage self would have thought this was the perfect book; I’m not so sure about my adult self.
Starry River of the Sky by Grace Lin
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon is one of my favorite middle grade reads and one of the most beautiful books I’ve held. This story is set in the same world, but it focuses on a boy called Rendi, who has run away from home and gets taken in by an innkeeper as a chore boy. Unlike Mountain, this story has almost zero adventure: it all takes place in the same town, most of it in the same building. Like Mountain, though, it incorporates smaller stories told by the characters within, and these stories go on to have greater meaning near the end. I read the review copy, but I plan to get my hands on a finished copy so I can see the artwork, which blew me away in Mountain.
Scarlet by Marissa Meyer
This book is proof that Kelly is the best co-blogger a person could ask for, since she’s the reason I’m able to read it. I like the direction Meyer has gone with this sequel: it focuses on Scarlet, but it also follows Cinder’s story. Scarlet is a French girl who must rescue her grandmother, kidnapped by a gang of humans with wolf-like qualities. One of the wolves, a deserter of the gang, decides to help. Cinder and Scarlet haven’t met up yet, but I’ve a feeling it will happen soon. I’m curious to see how Meyer (presumably) plans to juggle four girls’ stories in the last installment. The pace of Scarlet is slower than Cinder, but so far it’s just as enjoyable.
Under the Never Sky by Veronica Rossi
You know how sometimes the jacket copy of a book appears to only reveal the very first, small section of the story – just enough to get you interested – but in fact that section takes up the first 70 pages of the book? That happened here. I read those first 70 pages knowing Aria would be exiled, and it was painful to read about her optimism: “Oh, they’re going to take me to see my mother!” No, no they are not. That little annoyance aside, I am really digging this dystopian tale about a society that lives in environmentally-sealed pods and the girl who gets into trouble with the wrong people and finds herself exiled into the wilderness, full of savages and aether storms. (Sorry I just ruined the first 70 pages for you.)
Review copies received from the publisher (and Kelly!). Under the Never Sky borrowed from the library.

Shelf Life: A Book Case Tour

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I let my bookshelves get out of hand. To the point where I have no room, have things in piles on top of piles on the shelves, and then eventually, I give up all together and have piles all over the floor. But after spending approximately all day yesterday (and a good chunk of the day before…and the day before…and the day before) perusing Unf*ck Your Habitat, I finally got the motivation to just tackle the shelves full force. It’s about this time of year every year I go through my I don’t want to become a hoarder stage and end up pitching half my house. I think this was a big first step.

Because I know I dig looking at other people’s shelves, I thought I’d give the grand tour, before and after style.

So these are the bulk of my office shelves, and they were arranged by color. The three wooden shelves were pretty good in terms of not being too messy. But then if you look to the wire shelves on the left, things weren’t quite as nice:

This is what happened after the Cybils, and I never bothered doing anything about it. I just kept shoving books in there. Then as I started finishing more recent books, I went ahead and made some nice piles on top of the shelves. Now, seeing this set of rickety shelves is beside the treadmill desk, it was only going to be a matter of time before I had a real disaster on my hands.

On the other side of my office (and mind you, my office is tiny – it’s probably 10 feet by 10 feet) is another book case. This one wasn’t so bad because it’s a lot smaller.

There was actually room on this set of shelves. Kinda.

The room next to my office is my bedroom and there is another small book case beside the bed. Also semi-empty, also not too bad.

I’m starting to kind of get embarrassed by how disorganized all of this was. Except that it only gets kind of worse from here on out. Before getting to my shame piles, let me take you to my living room book case, which is where I keep the more recent titles I’ve gotten and the things that are unread (the stuff in my office and bedroom is either stuff that I’ve read or stuff that’s not a review title and therefore less of a priority or it’s stuff that belongs to my husband because yeah, I let him put his books on my shelves).

Apparently, I’m showing off my incredible clutter habits in addition to my shelving habits. But anyway. This set of shelves isn’t too terrible. The top shelf, up on the left, houses books that either I need to review or are books that I’ve meant to review or do some further action on and the ones on the right are books on writing craft. I’ve also got my paper book lists (because yes, I hand write every single book I read down in those little notebooks on the middle shelf), my Cubby (if you’ve read Frost that will be a fun reference), and my husband’s junk box on the second-from-the-top shelf.

Okay. Now I give you two photos of shame. First, this is underneath the front window in my living room:

These are the most recent books I’ve received or at least that’s what I continued to claim they were. The truth is, most of them were ALA books I never bothered to put away (or didn’t have room for, as evidenced by the shelves). In addition to these shame piles, I have my committee book pile in the guest bedroom.

These are the Alex books coming in and causing me even more stress because I have no idea where to put them.

But alas, I learned today that not all is lost, and that I can take care of my own book shame. First, it took an incredible amount of purging. Between books I plan on giving away and books that were in crummy enough shape that recycling them made the most sense, I got rid of about six garbage bags and cleared a ton of room. It left me so much space I tinkered around a bit with my shelf organization, though by no means is there a true method here.

Starting back in the office:

This is my now usable set of wire shelves. It’s become where all my reference-type books have gone, along with the Norton Anthologies I cannot bring myself to throw away. As much as I hate them and as little as I use them (read: never), I can’t bring myself to get rid of them. I think it’s because I know I have some great stuff written in the margins and maybe someday I’ll want to remember what I was thinking about some piece of post-modern fiction (…I can dream). Also, as you’ll see, I’ve got my husband’s immense collection of Uncle John’s titles, coding books, style guides (because who doesn’t have an APA and an MLA guide sitting around), and my copy of ED Hirsch’s masterpiece on Cultural Literacy. Read that last part with a tinge of sarcasm and knowledge my copy is stuffed with glitter.

So the shelves to the right of the wire set have been completely reorganized, too.

Look at how straight the books are! And how much room there is! On the left set is adult books and poetry, the middle set of shelves is a mix of a few different things, and the right set are my ya books. Let’s look closer (because I know you’re interested in WHAT is residing on those shelves as much as the fact they’re now pretty to look at).

Grouped together on the top few shelves are my different-books-by-the-same-author, including Bill Bryson, Douglas Coupland, Don DeLillo, Franz Kafka, Haruki Murakami, Ryu Murakami, Kurt Vonnegut, etc. After that, it’s just by size from left to right on the shelves until the very bottom shelf — that’s where I’ve stacked all my poetry books. This is a mix of fiction and non-fiction.

 
My middle and shorter shelf is a mix of a few things. The very top of the shelf has some of my magazines, my college’s literary magazines, and all my graphic novels. On the top shelf, I’ve got my smaller paperbacks (all adult). The middle shelf is one of my favorites — it’s all my signed books. Yes, I’ve met Bill Clinton, yes he’s signed my book, and yes, I’ve read it. The bottom shelf is the start of my ya fiction and it’s all my series books. As you can tell, there’s room for some titles to be added (and some of them are currently loaned out to other folks).

And here’s my ya fiction book case. There is no organizational scheme at all, except by size across the shelves. The bulk of these are ones I’ve read but there are a few that are still in the “I’ll read it some day” category. Honestly, the majority of my purging today was of old galleys that I knew I would never get to. The things that, if I really had the whim to read, I’d go pick it up at the library. I hate things taking up space in my house, and those were doing just that.

The shelf across from these became an overflow for all the adult books, both fiction and non-fiction. Most of these belong to my husband.

I want you to know we call the little monkey bank “Sunshine.”

So now that the office was tackled, I had the entire book case in my bedroom to use. I’d emptied it completely, adjusting everything to fit in the office. But before I went to fill the bedroom case, I weeded the book case in the living room, moving all the older galleys into the bedroom. And then I decided I should just rid myself of the Alex shame pile in the guest bedroom at the same time. So my bedroom shelves now look like this:

There is even room for more books as they come in. I’ve been warned this will certainly not be enough room, but as you can see, there is a small floor space to the left of the shelf, and that’s where I’ll be piling them up. At least that shame pile will be in my bedroom beside the book case, next to the rest of the same type of book.

And finally, I moved the books residing on the floor in my living room to my living room shelf. It is now a thing of true beauty and simplicity.

My top shelf, where I held all those “to complete action on” books is now down to two books I have to write reviews for, and the pile of books between those and my writing books are books that belong to my friend Andrea. I made so much room, in fact, the entire bottom shelf is empty.

There you have it — a tour of my book shelves and the entire process behind purging and shifting. Let me tell you how nice it feels to have gotten rid of so much stuff. I love books as much as any other reader, but I’m not really attached to the product when I finish reading. I don’t have a huge problem letting go of the physical copies, especially with the ease of being able to access them via my ereader if I want to (but I think I’ve mentioned before I kind of hate ereading…but the point is I CAN access books if I need/want to). More importantly, I no longer have shame piles in my house, and I foresee this being the case for quite a while.

I see weeding as a huge part of having a big reading life, and I think it’s important, too, as part of the process of reassessing one’s growth and development as a reader. Keeping old things around weigh us down and hold us back. At my first library job, my coworkers used to comment on my weeding because I was pretty ruthless about it, but my philosophy is that the more you weed and the more you get rid of the things that you don’t have some sort of attachment to, the more you find the things you’ve maybe missed out on and the more you can better define what it is you do love. Hokey but true. It also helps you from becoming a hoarder.

What I’m Reading Now, Twitter-Style

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A few of my recent reads in 140 characters or less.

 
Cinder by Marissa Meyer

Smoothly-written sci fi that uses the titular fairy tale as a springboard for something more unique. I especially love the world-building.

When the Sea is Rising Red by Cat Hellisen

I’m interested to see if the story – a fantasy about wild magic a girl’s death calls up from the sea – can save the book from its cover.   

The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer by Michelle Hodkin

Interesting premise (girl wakes up after accident unscathed, but two friends are dead), messy execution. Also: wtf prologue, icky boyfriend.

The Near Witch by Victoria Schwab

This book had the opposite problem – beautiful writing, boring story (the title is basically the whole plot). I’m in the minority opinion.
The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
My second listen. Everything about this Full Cast production is perfect, and the story remains as incredible as it was when I first read it.

What I’m Reading Now, Twitter-Style

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Most of these won’t be released until later in the year, but I like to give our readers a taste of what I’ve been reading lately. Look for longer reviews of some of these closer to publication date.

Silent in the Sanctuary by Deanna Raybourn

Lady Julia & Brisbane investigate a murder within the March home. Second book in series takes 200 pages to get going, but when it does, it’s just as good as the first.


Silent on the Moor by Deanna Raybourn

Third book in series finds Lady Julia dropping in on Brisbane for a surprise visit at his new home and stumbling upon a murder on the moor. Lots more romance in this one!

Tankborn by Karen Sandler

YA SF about humans grown in “tanks” and used as slaves by natural borns. From the first crop in Lee and Low’s new YA imprint – the story is good and the cover is a standout.

 
Blood Red Road by Moira Young

Saba is on a quest to find her kidnapped brother in a future wasteland. I’m struggling with the dialect & lack of punctuation, but I’m told it’s excellent so I persevere.

A Long, Long Sleep by Anna Sheehan

Five-star SF about a girl left in stasis & awakened 60 years later. So many delicious secrets & Rose is a great protag. This is the book Across the Universe wanted to be.

The Shattering by Karen Healey

Keri, Janna & Sione’s siblings all committed suicide, but they’re convinced it was murder. Slow-burning book that builds into something moving & utterly fantastic.

Wisdom’s Kiss by Catherine Gilbert Murdock

This MG has EIGHT POVs, all told in different ways (letters, diary entries, traditional narration, etc.). Result: no character development. Sadly disappointing.