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I've got ninety-nine problems, but a book ain't one.

2009 at 12pm     Posted by Rebecca Schinsky

Yeah, yeah. I’m bastardizing lyrics from a Jay-Z song. And no, I don’t condone referring to women as bitches, especially in the context of possession.

But what’s this all about?  Well, let’s just say this post was almost titled “I’ve got ninety-nine books read, but a hundred ain’t done,” as in, it’s time for me to make peace with the fact that I’m going to miss my goal of reading 100 books this year by one book.

ONE MEASLY BOOK! DO YOU KNOW HOW MADDENING THAT IS?

And I blame it all on my mother-in-law. You see, I had it all figured out. I needed to read two books (Homer & Langley and In a Sunburned Country) on my Christmas vacation, listen to on audiobook on the drive from St. Louis to Aurora and back, then complete The Little Stranger just in time for New Year’s (and so I could potentially include it in my “best of 2009″ post, for which I’m already sure it’s a contender).

The plan was solid, and I was making good progress. But then I discovered, when it was already far too late (and far too early–we departed for the road trip at 6:30 in the a.m.) that my mother-in-law’s car DOESN’T HAVE A CD PLAYER!  And this is a relatively new car, people!  How was I supposed to know? I could have uploaded the audiobook on to my iPod if I’d known.

BUT NO!

It was like there some some book nazi in the sky shaking his fist at me and cackling, “NO AUDIOBOOK FOR YOU!”

So then I had a choice to make. I could put off The Little Stranger in favor of two quicker, shorter reads, or I could fall on my sword, stick with the book I really wanted to read, and figure that ninety-nine wasn’t such a bad number after all. As much as it makes me feel like I’m dying a little bit on the inside (and as much as I’ve had to endure my husband telling me it’s ridiculous to settle at ninety-nine when I had options that would have allowed me to read one hundred), that’s what I’ve decided to do.  Why?

Because it provides the perfect transition to my reading philosophy for 2010!

By now, you’ve probably heard about this idea to make 2010 the year of “reading deliberately.” Several weeks ago, Vasilly and I were tweeting about how I wanted to re-focus my reading for 2010. Reading time is precious and limited, and I want to maximize its impact in my life. I set the goal to read 100 books this year because I just wanted to see if I could do it, but I feel like I’ve sacrificed quality a few times along the way, and when it comes down to it, I’d rather read fewer books and have them all be really fantastic than the other way around.

At some point in the conversation, Jennifer from The Literate Housewife jumped in and suggested “reading deliberately” as the way to sum up what I was trying to do, and now she and Vasilly (and some other bloggers whose posts I’ve read but have failed to keep track of) have beaten me to the punch with great posts about their 2010 reading goals.

So, what does “the year of reading deliberately” mean for The Book Lady?

  • Classics: Because I like them, because they’re important, and because a familiarity with them makes one a better reader of contemporary novels, which often refer or allude to them.
  • Chunksters: In my quest to read 100 books, I put a handful of big, meaty books on the back burner because I knew they’d slow me down. They’re time-consuming, and they need to be read carefully, and I knew I’d end up rushing through them and not doing myself any favors in the process. So it’s time to rescue them and get down to business!
  • Tackling the TBR pile: I bought the books on the pile because I wanted to read them, but I allowed them to be preempted by ARCs, new releases, and books for which I imposed some arbitrary deadline far too often. I still want to read these books, so damnit, I’m going to read them!
  • Getting picky about ARCs, review books, blog tours, etc. I love free books as much as anybody, and I’m always flattered when an author or publicist reaches out to me and thinks The Book Lady’s Blog is a good fit for their book, but I need to become even more selective about what I accept for review. I cracked down during the second part of this year, and it’s been rather nice to have more flexibility and freedom in my reading. Who wouldn’t want more of that?
  • Balancing new releases with backlist titles: As a blogger, it’s fun to read new releases and be in on the conversations on blogs and Twitter, and when I was working as a bookseller, it was vitally important to be familiar with the hot new titles (because they’re hot and new and also because hardcovers have the highest profit margin), but I don’t want to read new releases to the exclusion of everything else, and I feel like I swung further in that direction than I intended to this year. After all, there are books on my TBR pile that have been there since they were new releases, and that’s just ridiculous.

These are the basic principles that will guide my reading in 2010, but the bottom line is that I want to be more mindful of how I select reading material. I read because I want to be a well-rounded, informed, intelligent citizen of the world. I read to have my boundaries stretched and to explore new ways of thinking and being and to see the world through someone else’s eyes. I read to learn and be challenged. And I want to keep these purposes in mind each and every time I walk to my shelves or into my favorite indie bookstore or click through an online retailer in 2010.

What will you be reading in the new year?

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Book Review: In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson

2009 at 5pm     Posted by Rebecca Schinsky

When you’re packing for a trip halfway across the country, and you know you’ll be sitting in airports and on planes, you need good reading material. When your trip halfway across the country will deposit you into cold weather and a household full of family members and children filled with the holiday spirit, you need something more. You need the literary equivalent of “Calgon, take me away.”

And that’s where Bill Bryson comes in.

For the uninitiated (poor you!), Bryson is the author of a myriad of humorous travelogues, memoirs, and works of narrative nonfiction. His A Short History of Nearly Everything makes science and history exciting, and A Walk in the Woods actually had me thinking that I, too, wanted to hike the Appalachian Trail. When I need an escape that is both informative and entertaining, Bryson is my first choice, and In a Sunburned Country—his account of adventures in Australia—has everything I’ve come to know and love.

Bryson jumps right in with a brief introduction to the history of Australia, beginning with the history of colonization and the fact that Britain orginally used Australia as a prison camp. Interesting, right? As he explores Australia from the big cities to the desolate outback (it gets really hot there, by the way) and discusses the social and cultural history of Australians and its scientific significance (Australia has more species of plants and animals found only in one place in the world than any other location), Bryson works in anecdotes from his personal experiences and misadventures down under, and that’s why I love him so much. His narrative agility and his ability to weave research into story so deftly is unparalleled, at least in travel writing, where so many books feel like “Day One: Went to X, Did Y, Saw Z; lather, rinse, repeat.”

In a Sunburned Country taught me about people, places, and things I’d never heard of before, including a number of snakes, spiders, and insects who could kill me with a single bite, and it provided a beautiful, dangerous, occasionally frightening escape from the “real world.” I didn’t even mind that Bryson took a turn for the serious to explore Australia’s treatment of its indigenous people, the Aborigines, because he did it with great intelligence, insight, and depth of feeling.

And that just goes to show you that travel writing doesn’t have to be vapid, reliant on jokes about poop, or filled with convenient and stereotypical epiphanies. It can be substantial and educational, and it can assume a certain level of intelligence and worldliness from its readers, and still be wonderful and successful and widely read.

Oh, dear God, how I hope Bill Bryson will continue to be widely read.

Whether you’re looking for a virtual warm-weather getaway, an adventure in a faraway land, a few good laughs, proof that NONFICTION CAN BE FUN, REALLY! or a new favorite author, Bill Bryson and In a Sunburned Country will deliver….even though this isn’t my favorite of Bryson’s books (the aforementioned A Walk in the Woods holds a special place in my heart for most chuckle-inducing read ever), it is most excellent, and I highly recommend it. 4.25 out of 5.

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I'm back from vacation, and I don't know what day it is, and here's what I did on my Christmas vacation!

2009 at 11am     Posted by Rebecca Schinsky

Since I spent most of the day Sunday journeying from Aurora, IL, where hubby and I paid a quick visit to one of his brothers, back to St. Louis, where we spent the rest of the holiday, and because I was unplugged for the holiday weekend, and because pretty much no one was reading blogs, I didn’t have a Sunday Salon this week. And hey, that’s all right. I’m not married to a routine here, and if I’m being really honest, I do this blogging thing in the fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants method about 90% of the time anyway.

So.

Despite my extensive complaining, the vast majority of my good old-fashioned family Christmas was delightful. Our first evening in St. Louis brought the much-anticipated tradition of Family Movie Night. Hubby’s parents go out to the movies exactly once a year, and it’s always right around the holidays. They take all four of the boys (or however many are in town) and their wives, and the grandkids stay at home with a babysitter (usually Aunt Dorothy, who is the coolest nun I know). This is a tradition that is not to be messed around with, so it always, always means a late-afternoon movie followed by dinner at Outback Steakhouse (which is conveniently located across the parking lot from the theater….because of course, for it to be Family Movie Night, you have to go to the SAME THEATER EVERY YEAR).

Family Movie Night can be a bit of a debacle for the following reasons. 1) Hubby and I are the only ones in his family who are inclined to plan anything ahead of time. 2) Trying to get the rest of them to agree to a day, time, and movie can take days on end and is about as uncomplicated as herding cats. 3) Hubby’s parents don’t want to see anything with sex, drugs, offensive language, or violence; anything that requires too much thought; anything with a less-than-happy ending; anything that might make you cry. There are no downers on Family Movie Night.

(I feel like this would be the time for a joke about how the first rule of Family Movie Night is you don’t talk about Family Movie Night, but that would be too dark, right?)

As you can imagine, fulfilling these criteria is rarely easy, so we usually end up seeing something that is either far too juvenile for a group of adults ranging in age from 26 to 67—I can usually be heard ranting about how WE’RE ALL ADULTS AND WE SHOULD BE ABLE TO SEE MOVIES WITH ADULT CONTENT—or that is just sappy sweet or slapstick funny (re: not funny to anyone but my father-in-law) or overly moralistic or just downright bad. But we have scored a couple times with Dreamgirls (though they didn’t like it when Eddie Murphy dropped his pants or when Beyonce’s character fought with her husband) and Charlie Wilson’s War (which the in-laws didn’t mind even though the opening scene includes nudity, hookers, and cocaine), and this year I had a big win with suggesting Up in the Air.

You wanna know why? Because even though it has prolific and creative use of the F-bomb, sex, infidelity, a main character whose job it is to fly around the country firing people from their jobs, and a less-than-happy ending, much of it was filmed in—you guessed it—St. Louis!  I didn’t know this ahead of time, but it seems that this movie was in the news in St. Louis A LOT during filming, and my in-laws had a great time spotting local landmarks while I drooled over George Clooney for two hours and enjoyed this genuinely funny, smart, well-written, grown-up movie.

Holla!

Dinner at Outback was predictably satisfying (who doesn’t love a Bloomin’ Onion every now and then?), then we returned home in our food coma, and I snuggled up on the couch to finish Homer & Langley. Yes! There’s that mention of reading material you’ve been waiting for!  I’ll be writing my review soon, but suffice it to say Homer & Langley is most excellent and one of my favorites for the year.

Christmas Eve was spent lazing around the house—it was Thursday, but we treated it like a Sunday—with Bill Bryson and In a Sunburned Country (also most excellent), then hubby and I went to ten o’clock mass (even though I’m a heathen Methodist and neither of us can be considered to be a “practicing” anything) because Christmas Eve church is one of my holiday rituals and then headed home to await Santa’s arrival.

Christmas morning brought excessive consumption of coffee, very excited children, and some wonderful gifts. Most notably, hubby gave me a sherpa fleece-lined hoodie I’ve been ogling for months, the in-laws gave me a beautiful set of chef’s knives, and the sister-in-law who had me in the family gift exchange stocked me up with great music, including both volumes of the GLEE soundtrack, and a shiny new copy of The Pioneer Woman Cooks.  If you don’t follow The Pioneer Woman, you’re missing out on a fantastic, funny blog that covers cooking, photography, stories from family life, and the occasional feature about her basset hound Charlie (those are the best).

The rest of Christmas Day was spent visiting extended family, listening to my niece and nephew chatter about and fight over their new iPod Touch, and eating way too much stuffing. Is it just me, or are the side dishes the best part of holiday meals?

I would normally spend the day after Christmas sleeping in and then hitting the mall to look for good deals, but this time around, the hubs and I loaded up our four-wheel drive sleigh and hit the road bright and early to make a quick trip up to Aurora, IL to visit another of his brothers and meet our newest niece. We arrived at the beginning of a little snowstorm and were thrilled to have four inches of the fluffy stuff to play in by the end of the day. I rode a sled for the first time in at least ten years, we kissed in the snow (pictures to come!), and we actually got to sleep in a bed that wasn’t inflatable. All in all, it was a good visit.

The drive back to St. Louis on Sunday brought a much anticipated stop at Steak ‘n Shake, which is a highlight of any trip to the midwest, a few more hours with Bill Bryson, and the realization that if I’m going to meet my goal of reading 100 books this year, I have some work to do this week.

We got settled in back at home yesterday, with hubby catching up on email and me rocking out to the GLEE soundtracks while testing out the meatloaf recipe from my new cookbook. I’m happy to report that the meatloaf was a smashing success, and I can’t wait to try out more of the recipes. Did I mention there are step-by-step photos to show you exactly what to do as you assemble the meals? I LOVE that. Also, the GLEE soundtracks are delightful, but the song about “You’re Having My Baby” makes me extremely uncomfortable. I mean, really, is that necessary?

In other exciting news: you can now subscribe to The Book Lady’s Blog by email! Just click the little button in the right-hand sidebar, and you’re golden.

In this, the last week of 2009, I’m hoping to review Homer & Langley and In a Sunburned Country, read The Little Stranger and Half-Broke Horses (both of which I ambitiously packed for my Christmas travel but didn’t get to move from the bottom of the suitcase), somehow write a Best of 2009 post, and gear up for a good friend’s wedding this weekend.  I’m also hoping to catch up on blog reading and pull together my resolutions for 2010 and my thoughts on a new reading philosophy.

How was your holiday? What did you get? What have you been reading?  Did I miss any good gossip? Did your family make you crazy too? Tell me all about it!

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Pssst!

2009 at 11pm     Posted by Rebecca Schinsky

Hey! I have less than 12 hours to go with this good old-fashioned family Christmas, so I’m popping in for an on-the-fly posting session.  And guess what?

  • I haven’t dropped the F-bomb in front of my mother-in-law yet! (scroll down to the previous post if you’re not sure why this is a big deal)

 

  • My 3-year-old nephew, however, is not observing this rule and marched through the room a couple days ago chanting “Fucking shit, fucking shit” like it was nobody’s business.

 

  • I told my brother-in-law that my husband can be “a pain in the ass sometimes” in front of my mother-in-law, who promptly told me I shouldn’t speak that way of my loving husband (right, because her son is perfect?). And then I almost dropped the F-bomb. Because anyone who’s ever been married (or in any long-term relationship that made it out of the ooey gooey honeymoon phase) will tell you that a good third of your time is spent either annoying the piss out of your partner or having it annoyed out of you. And my father-in-law is no exception.

 

  • The Goods starring Jeremy Piven is not, in fact, good. But Mr. Piven is hot, and I want to do dirty bad things to him, so I forgive my brother-in-law for choosing it for family movie night, even though there was a joke in the movie about a man getting a rash between his balls and his thigh, which prompted my sister-in-law to engage in some extreme oversharing.

 

  • When your tech savvy 11-year-old nephew and his 8-year-old sister run in the door Christmas morning telling you they got an iPod Touch to share, RUN THE OTHER WAY. It’s about to get ugly. And it will stay ugly. And then the only thing you’ll hear is “hey, we could do that on the iPod Touch.”

 

  • It’s no longer cool to say “cool.” Everything is either “sick” or “beast” (at least if you are the aforementioned 11-year-old nephew). Beast. As in “I just went down this sick hill on the sled and it was so beast.”  Whodathunk?

 

  • Do not, under any circumstances, comment on how well the children are behaving. Nothing good can come from it.

 

  • A few minutes alone with a Bill Bryson book can make just about anything better.

 

  • No matter how much I love my husband or enjoy family visits, there’s nothing like the glow of knowing I’m just hours away from running toward my plane and suppressing the urge to let out my very best William Wallace-esque “FREEEEEEEDOOOOOOM!”

Do it with me. It feels good to let it out, right?

Now I’m off to endure enjoy a few more hours of overstimulating togetherness and one last night in an inflatable bed (I tell you, hubby and I always get the shaft on the sleeping arrangements) before flying back to Richmond to pick up the hound and return to the quiet, snuggly, peaceful goodness of home.  I can’t wait.

It’s going to be totally beast.

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Proud to be one of "the jolliest bunch of assholes this side of the nuthouse"

2009 at 11pm     Posted by Rebecca Schinsky

Before you go getting your knickers in a twist over that post title, let me tell you it’s a reference to my all-time favorite watch-it-every-year holiday movie National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. And it could have been worse. I almost went with “The Shitter Was Full,” (that’s just for you Chris).

Why the sudden potty mouth? Well, I’ll be spending the next week with hubby’s family, and they’re not exactly the type to condone my affection for a well-placed curse word. And by “not exactly the type,” I mean that I live in fear of someday stubbing my toe or slicing my finger in the kitchen and accidentally dropping the F bomb in front of my mother-in-law.  Seriously.

So I figured it was better to get it out of my system ahead of time, right?

Anyway, in the spirit of celebrating a good old-fashioned family Christmas, I’m unplugging for the next week or so in order to tune into some quality time with my hubby, in-laws, two brothers-in-law, two sisters-in-law, three nieces, two nephews, a couple random aunts and uncles, and my mother-in-law’s amazing cherry pie.

I’ve stocked my suitcase with Homer & Langley, The Little Stranger, In a Sunburned Country, and Half-Broke Horses. I’ve loaded my iPod with holiday favorites, extra Miles Davis (for when the wine just isn’t enough to keep me mellow with all those people around), and my favorite Counting Crows mix. I have snacks for the plane and comfy PJs for the downtime (God, I hope there’s downtime), and I’m ready to leave the computer behind for a couple days.

This has the makings of a perfect holiday…..but it could always go south a la the Griswolds. And if it does? Well, my rather proper in-laws have this reaction to look forward to:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk74WprmZxY&feature=related]

Here’s hoping that you and yours have a delightful and decidedly crazy-free holiday. I’ll see you sometime before the new year.  Maybe.

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