Kicked off the end of August and beginning of September with a long weekend up in Acadia National Park, Maine so thought I’d include a beautiful sunrise photo to wrap up the month.
Work has moved into full speed for the season, so I’m surprised I read as much as I did. I’ve also spent time reading longer articles on my to be read list (aka my Instapaper app), some of which have been there since January! I’m reading plenty of longer pieces (45-90 minutes reading time) and the good part about it is that I’ve read a wide range of articles from (closeted) gay neo-Nazis to millennials as the burn out generation, and weirdly this puts less stress on my goal of reading a nonfiction book every month.
We also FINALLY have a completed roof deck – just in time for fall, oh joy (sarcasm much?). The good part is that there have still been a few nice days that we’ve been able to sit outside for a bit, but we’ve also sat outside with blankets because damnit we’re going to use it. I even spent a lovely morning out there reading and drinking my coffee—I’m SO fancy!
Books and Bookish Things
This month was a split between young adult (surprise, surprise: Honestly Ben and We are Lost and Found) and galleys (A Hero Born and Sorted). I’m finally making headway on my galley backlog, only three left to go once I finish reading Off the Grid by Robert McCaw (meh).
- Honestly Ben – Bill Konigsberg
- A Hero Born (Legends of the Condor Heroes #1) – Jin Yong
- We are Lost and Found – Helene Dunbar
- Sorted – Jackson Bird
- Bob’s Burgers: Char-Broiled (#5) – Jeff Drake, Brian Hall, Rachel Hastings, Mike Olsen, Mark Von Der Heide, and Anneliese Waddington
I do want to share a pet-peeve about galleys though. It’s been the case for a while, but I’ve noticed more and more recently that publishers are not providing device-ready-copies of books (.mobi/.epub/etc.). This is problematic for multiple reasons, the sizes are odd and make the text hard to read, the photos/graphics are massive and cause loading issues, and frankly it’s just unprofessional. It’s reaffirming why for the longest time I refused all digital copies of books. I felt bad, mostly for smaller independent publishers, so started accepting digital copies again, but I’m leaning back to only physical if they can’t provide better versions.
On the left you can see that the book was clearly exported from InDesign and they didn’t even crop it to the final size and on the right you can see a formatting error where one sentence completely runs together. The latter might’ve been caught before publication, but it was still very hard to read. There were some other weird formatting issues with that book.
I checked and I don’t think I picked up any books this month. I’m still sitting on a copy of Bookburners by Max Gladstone I picked up last month from the library and have been once again notified that my hold request for Stephen King’s Song of Susannah (The Dark Tower #6) is available. I’ll get to it, eventually.
The three social media posts that caught my attention were one of my favorite podcasts talking with a chef who cooks foods from novels, genius; a gay Pride & Prejudice remake set on NY’s Fire Island; and yet another art post from Colossal with superimposed images on childhood books.
For the last couple of years I’ve been threatening to pitch a gay Pride and Prejudice adaptation that takes place entirely on Fire Island and I finally found a platform foolish enough to do it!! https://t.co/ta6bkQxu4L
— Joel Kim Booster (@ihatejoelkim) September 25, 2019
Culture Corner
It’s not super cultural, but it kind of is. We voted in our preliminary elections earlier in the month and it was hilarious. I was the first person there for all the districts to vote. I showed up right after 7:00 am and they didn’t even know they were open and thought I was there to volunteer. I was like, nope, need to vote before work.
On the arts front we saw Kacey Musgraves at one of the outdoor venues in Boston and she was fantastic (as expected). I’m so glad she came back to Boston this time around, we had tickets to her show in January, but I accidentally double booked us in NYC for a long weekend and couldn’t get out of it.
We also saw SIX: The Musical that is a re-imagining of Henry VIII’s wives at the American Repertory Theater here in Cambridge. It was wonderful—I can’t stop listening to the soundtrack. It’s another one that we’ve seen right before it heads to Broadway 😀
What’s Next?
We have another weekend in Maine scheduled to relax mid-October before the holiday travel, family and friend visits, and the winter weather really kicks off and settles in. I’m going to continue working through my galleys and hopefully start up again reading books from my bookshelf and give the library a break! I’ve slowly been pulling books from my general shelf and putting them in an order I’d like to read them, but who knows if that’s how it’ll actually work out.