I‘m slowly making my way through my Christmas present stack, and this one was timely: we just took my oldest back to school (two states away) last weekend.

Because @Tattooedteacher tagged me… :)
1. Hot tea, plain, minty, or fruity
2. Hershey‘s miniatures
3. No, the cobwebs are all natural and show up year-round.
4. Don‘t have one
5. Soft blankets
6. Bookshelves

I‘m fostering this book for my husband‘s coworker. They‘re high school art teachers sharing a classroom, & space was tight *before* they had to rearrange the room to allow for social distancing... I spent a lot of the book wondering if my great grandparents or their parents saw any of these ads (they might not have—small town life) & what they would have thought of them. It was an interesting read, but many of the ads had tiny, unreadable fonts.

Somehow, I missed reading this one as a kid... I was probably busy reading fussier, more “proper” books, lol. Reading it now, as a teenager with 30+ additional years of experience, it didn‘t seem to carry the same punch that it could have for a younger version of me.

I didn‘t grow up here, but I‘ve been here long enough to have heard about some of these places. It‘s kind of fun and sometimes a little sad to visualize areas I know with a very different landscape. The author included a small section of recipes, including one for a breaded pork tenderloin (yum). I‘m sure that many recipes from these places are long lost, but the book would have been even more interesting if one had been included with each story.

1. I‘m working from home for at least two weeks. My kids‘ schools are closed & will be switching to e-learning as soon as they can. My husband will still be teaching, but his students will attend via video.
2) For now.
3) I‘ll wear my green socks if I can find them.
4) I just finished a book for work, and I‘m ready for a palette cleanser. I have a stack from Christmas, so I‘m good.
5) I have no idea. I don‘t really like many movies. #randosurvey

I wandered into the office a few weeks ago, was told my boss‘ boss was looking for me, and learned that I was to be part of a “book club” at work. I tried (and am trying) to be excited, but I doubt we will ever be reading the kinds of books I enjoy... The book itself contains useful information for leaders and aspiring leaders, but I really didn‘t enjoy having to sift through the rest of its macho content to find it.

(My cat, for attention purposes)

What are some of your favorite short works written in the past 50 or so years?

My daughter is making a list of short stories, short novels, and maybe poetry and plays suitable for & interesting to a high school English class.

A lot of my books are old fashioned/too long/not a good fit. I don‘t have many short story collections, and the stuff I read in high school & college was pretty dull.

I‘m pretty sure that the Pigeon is my spirit animal.

Thanks to reading the acknowledgments, I finally have a name for this genre: catoir (cat + memoir). I‘m a couple books behind still, but I‘m hoping that they appear under the Christmas tree in a few days, that is, if I can get one put up without the three of my own furred kind tearing it down. We‘ve not put one up for a couple years because they have kitten ambition in full-grown cat bodies.

This was a pretty picture book. If I had all of the time in the world to pursue my hobbies, I would learn to make clothes with such perfect details.

I think I would have enjoyed this one more read aloud. The story is cute, the characters are just slightly less than flat (but likable for what they are anyway), and it‘s just long enough to be engaging.

It‘s not leisure reading (at least not for me), but it is full of good information if you‘re into this sort of thing. Bonus: It wasn‘t as difficult of a read as I thought it would be.

I can‘t decide which amused me most, the cats, the odd, real-life characters, or the author trying to make sense of it all, in his own way.

It‘s been a long past few months of having just enough time to function, and not enough time to focus, but I can finally say that I finished another book. There isn‘t a plot to this one—it‘s a collection of personal stories? essays? Something like that. It felt like a written version of the long walks the author takes. He‘s often funny without being over the top about it, but I did giggle to myself more than once because I could totally relate.

This is a companion to The Friendly Persuasion. As much as I enjoyed the first book, I liked this one better, and wish the two had been published as one work.

This book was mentioned in a different book I read a few months ago. It would be much too long, but I think a more accurate title would be “Things your great grandmother probably knew, your grandma might have known, your mom might have heard in a story one time, and you probably wouldn‘t have ever considered” (with proper title capitalization). It‘s an interesting read, and it makes me sad that so many clothes today aren‘t worth the effort.

My husband and son are hardcore baseball guys. Me? Well, I love them, but I don‘t speak the language, so my husband got me this for my birthday. It‘s not a long read at all, so I finished it in just about one sitting on this not quite snowed in kind of day. I don‘t feel any more versed in weird baseball terms than I did before I read it, but now I have a reference book.

You know how, when you have a fresh from the oven pan of brownies (or whatever your temptation of choice may be) and you know you should only have one, but you finish the whole batch in one sitting? That was this book for me. I might end up taking this one to the office and keeping it at my desk for the stressful days/weeks/months that we have been promised for the first half of the year.

Book #2 in the series... I think I have book #3 waiting on my shelf, but I‘ll have to put the others on my Christmas list, I guess. This one seemed to align itself pretty well with the first book, only Mary Poppins seems even sassier. ♥️

I finally finished this one! It‘s been my read-while-waiting book forever, so I started and stopped many times. I wanted to like it. I didn‘t hate it. I just never felt that I was getting close enough to the characters to stay engaged.

It‘s not very often that I get excited about movies, but Mary Poppins Returns is coming out in December, so I‘m getting ready!

I was sitting at Sky Zone w/ a miserable migraine, waiting for my daughter, who was there with a friend. I forgot my book (because migraine), so I looked to see what was available through Libby. Outlander? My bookish girlfriends gushed over it & I‘d never given it much thought, so why not? I enjoyed it up until the journey after the wedding. After that? Meh. I was getting annoyed by Claire and lost my will to continue. Don‘t revoke my reader card.

I was starting to think that all I would accomplish today for #bookloversday would be work and yard cleanup, but I managed to squeeze in enough me-time to finish this one. Now, after I get the rest of the yard back to presentable and the house picked up, I will be ready to work through my repair stack and my to-upcycle heap. This book was like Pinterest without being a rabbit hole—I want to remake all the things!

The weather is lousy, I feel as if I‘ve been hit by a truck, so it‘s a day of sleeping on the couch and catching up on my TBR for me. I didn‘t realize this was a lyrical prose book when I picked it up. It adds to the story in many places and limits it in a couple. It‘s a good, quick read, though, and it makes me wonder how many children found themselves in similar situations in those days, as well as how many survived them.

My high school-aged daughter has taken an interest in costuming, so I‘ve been picking up books, patterns, and other odds & ends to help her along. This one was interesting. I‘m sure it‘s not comprehensive, but it was fun to look through. The upper class must have spent hours getting dressed and undressed every day... so many layers!

I picked these up for the dance studio where my daughter and I take classes. They‘re cute. They‘re not quite Elephant and Piggie cute, but they‘re fun all the same.

(What I actually read was the 1962 Betty Crocker‘s New Good and Easy Cook Book, but that wasn‘t in the list.) If you like recipes made from Bisquick, gelatin, pickles, and monosodium glutamate, this is the cookbook for you. Some of the recipes might be worth a try, but a few of them left me a little bit dumbfounded.

I‘ve seen so many posts from different sources about this book that I finally had to read it myself. It‘s interesting, after a childhood when Little House on the Prairie was all the rage on TV, to see a children‘s book that treats Native Americans as (gasp!) real people and not as some sort of exotic enemy or primitive former occupant of the land where our great-great-great grandparents settled.

A friend asked to borrow A Wrinkle in Time so that she could read it before she sees the movie. Of course, I loaned her the quintet and the other books that go along with it, except this one, which I‘ve had in my TBR for some time. It started a little slower than I‘d hoped, but the last third or so was satisfying.

I‘ve been carrying this book in my busy bag for a few months, reading it here and there when I was able to find a quiet place. I finally finished it—distraction-free zones are hard to find lately.

This was a very quick read from my Christmas present stack. I chuckled most of the way through it & wondered why I didn‘t come up with this idea myself—we used to spend hours at the fabric store when I was little. I guess I was more focused on fancy, impractical dresses instead of the drawings. (Pardon the weird shadows and bright blue chair. It‘s swim practice time for my older kid, and it‘s too cold & snowy to sit in the car while I wait.)

I️ bought a bunch of childhood classics at thrift shops when my kids were younger. As fate would have it, they don‘t care much for my taste in books (they must be their dad‘s kids). Too bad, they‘re for me now. At any rate, I‘d forgotten how fabulously wicked Roald Dahl‘s stories could be.

I need a level between Pick and So-So for this one. I was caught up in the story and sympathizing with the heroine for about the first 2/3 or 3/4 of it. Then the end... I don‘t know. I didn‘t want to not finish it, but it felt forced to go in a certain direction, which, thinking about the characters‘ lives, seems kind of fitting, but it‘s frustrating at the same time.

It's a collection of short stories, compiled from short stories first published in magazines, that covers forty or so years of a Hoosier Quaker family in the late 1800s. The vignette format made it an easy read, but I found myself constantly trying to fill gaps in the storyline as I moved from one chapter to the next. That doesn't mean I enjoyed it any less--I just wish there had been a few more chapters to pull it all together.

This book was really well-written and easy to pick up and put down because each chapter is a different tale, but it was kind of dark and a little uncomfortable at times.

It's been a busy spring. I'm trying to squeeze in some reading time in a relatively quiet space that doesn't include foul balls. I started back with this one because it's one of my favorites, and it's short enough to read in one sitting, even if I get distracted a half dozen times.

I would rate this between "Pick" and "So-So" if I could. It's a good choice for an experienced Vonnegut reader, but I wouldn't suggest it to someone who hasn't read any of his other works. The last work of his I read, prior to this, was Slaughterhouse-Five. It got under my skin in a painful way. This was a good reset button. Though I struggled with some of the humor (is it dated? just unfunny?), I did enjoy the chaos and weirdness of the story.

I picked this up on a whim at a library sale, and I'm glad I did. West did a good job presenting the issue of the massacre from the different viewpoints of the characters, and that keeps the story interesting. The sites of the actual events that inspired this story are within a reasonable drive, so the local history aspect captivated me, too.

I don't remember if I read this as a kid or maybe just a selection from it, but it's funny how my reading on a whim lined up with my very crazy week.