Back up to 6 books in August, and now I only have 3 tasks left on my reading challenge! Unfortunately, I keep getting stuck on one of them: a book published before 1850. I have now started and abandoned two in that category (The Last of the Mohicans and Belinda). I’m on the hunt for a SHORT book that fits the bill so I can just cross it off. I have confirmed that I don’t enjoy books from that era, and I’m okay with that.

I’m also well into the audiobook version of Yes Please! and I’m finding that I’m enjoying the format okay. It’s been a very disjointed way for me to consume a book, because the times that I want to have words-audio rather than music-audio are few and far between, but that works okay with non-fiction. I’m not sure how it would work if I were trying to keep up with characters and plot. Definitely not an audibook convert, but I’m glad to have tried it.

As usual, I can’t remember how this one made its way onto my to-read list, but I snagged it when it went on sale for Kindle recently. I liked it, but I already can’t really remember why. It did make me feel bad about my diamonds for awhile. The fictionalized history around the DeBeers avertising was really fun to read. I felt like the ending was abrupt, but I enjoyed the multi-threaded plot lines that all ended up coming together.

This was an engrossing chick-lit type of book, but as with other Emily Giffin books I’ve read I took some issue with the basic tenets of it. (Like, in Something Borrowed I sort of hated that I was cheering for the infidelity.) Not sure if I would recommend it or not. It was sort of like a bastardized Friday Night Lights, which, how could you DO that to that show?!

I finally felt emotionally stable enough to read the conclusion of this series after Jakes ripped my heart out in the second installment. It was good and sweeping as were the others. If you’re looking for a Big Book to sink your teeth into, I’d recommend starting with North and South so you can end up here.

Y’all, this book. THIS BOOK. I checked it out from the library on my Kindle, but now I want to buy a copy, because it feels important to be able to share it with other people. What beautiful, amazing characters, that you hope are like real people in the world. What beautiful use of quotations. What a beautiful message. This deserves every bit of hype it’s ever gotten. I read it in a day because I couldn’t put it down! I was turned off at first by some of the quotations chosen as chapter intros, but I got over it. There were also some cultural references (e.g. to Diary of a Wimpy Kid) that I worry won’t stand the test of time. But those were my only complaints. Who cares that it’s meant for 8-12 year olds? You should read it. My book club had one of our best discussions in awhile about this one.

Two of my favorite passages:
The only reason I’m not ordinary is that no one else sees me that way.

I wish every day could be Halloween. We could all wear masks all the time. Then we could walk around and get to know each other before we got to see what we looked like under the masks.
(Because, DON’T WE wear masks?! Just not the literal kind that Auggie means.)

At first I had a hard time getting into the poetry-novel style of this book, but it grew on me. The writing was absolutely beautiful in places, and you definitely get the sense of a plot. I feel like it was probably a really cool experience writing it. I wonder, though, how kids would respond to it. Would they get it? Maybe I underestimate them.

I somewhat impulse bought this one at City Lights Books in San Francisco because I just really wanted to buy something there, and this one was on my “maybe” list and it happened to jump out at me. It was a really nice feeling book, and the cover was sparkly, so, there’s that. Moreover, I think I’ve been unfair to short stories, namely, that I never thought I liked them, but I liked this book and I also liked Dear Life by Alice Munro. So maybe I can like short stories after all. I definitely liked some stories better than others. They are quirky, and some of them made me feel a little uncomfortable. But in others the characters really stayed with me. I had to stop reading one in the middle because my train arrived at my stop, and I found myself thinking about it all day until I could get back to the book. Novels usually conclude, while short stories sometimes leave you wanting more. That’s what I always thought I didn’t like about them, but now I’m seeing that maybe that’s their beauty.

Do you like reading short stories? Any recommendations for a potential convert?

July’s reading was all about the Book Riot challenge. I knocked out 5 books, and 3 of them counted toward my challenge.

This book was recommended to me by the ever-lovely Meredith Wiggins, and I heartily enjoyed it! I worried that I would wish I had read the original fairytale, but it stood well enough on its own. (Though, if anyone has read both and thinks it would have enhanced my reading, feel free to let me know.)

I expected to love this book, as I’m a sucker for a YA romance and boarding school books are my jam, but it fell a bit flat for me. It was a strange sort of book that didn’t fit neatly into any of the expectations I had for it.

I may be the only female on the planet who didn’t love this book, but sorry not sorry. It was disjointed and not very profound. Maybe if I had already loved Mindy Kaling from The Office it would have resonated more with me, but, as I didn’t, I was just annoyed by it. Also, the pictures came through terribly on the Kindle, for what that’s worth. I did enjoy talking about it with my book club, though.

A rather quiet book. This satisfied the Book Riot challenge task of “a book written by an author of the opposite sex from you.” It had been on my to-read list for awhile and fit the bill.

Another one I expected to love and didn’t. A bummer, as I absolutely devoured the other Rainbow Rowell books I’d read! I’m glad I waited to get this from the library rather than paying full price for it as I was oft-tempted to do. It was a fun book, but I wasn’t as sucked into the love story as I was in her other books.

In Rainbow Rowell news, though, I’m excited to hear that she is writing the Simon Snow story that we all fell for in Fangirl!

Happy Sunday, folks! My birthday is coming up in a few weeks, and I want to try something new this year. Many charities, most notably charity:water, offer supporters the opportunity to “donate” their birthdays. When I worked at BCM, we would occasionally get large drop-offs of food that came from someone soliciting canned goods instead of gifts.

I’m not going to lie, I really like getting gifts. I still make a birthday wish list every year even though I am an adult. But I also like supporting causes I care about.

For much of my life, books were the big hit on my birthday. I mostly read on my Kindle these days, and I don’t need any new physical books. But there are a lot of kids who don’t get to know the pleasure of being immersed in an alternate universe.

This year for my birthday, I want to send books to them. I’ve set up a virtual book drive through FirstBook, a Charity Navigator four-star charity, that sends books to kids in need. 97% of all donations to them go directly toward the cause, and just $2.50 sends a book to one of the recipient organizations who will make sure it gets into excited little hands.

I’ve set an audacious goal of raising $1,000 for my birthday–that’s a whopping 400 books!! Will you join me? Click the image below to head to my fundraising page and chip in.

I started back to full-time work this past Monday (I may have a post in me about that soon), so Andy has been keeping me up-to-date on the goings-on at home, a.k.a. sending me adorable pictures of our cat. This week, this one took the cake.

In links news, some of these are a bit old, because I’ve been stashing them for quite some time and haven’t actually written a post! But I promise none of them are stale.

• Interesting in light of my recent switch: Why the 9-to-5 job may be dying

• I’ve become somewhat obsessed with typography. Typekit’s lists help me look like I know what I’m doing.

• Apropos for this holiday weekend (don’t worry, it’s from The Onion)

• Ever wondered why your zippers all say YKK?

• This is the truth: Words I use to refer to a pet over the years that I live with it

• We can only dream: How to take your cat camping

• The useful adult things we didn’t learn in school

• How can camping be rejuvenating when you’re missing so many creature comforts?

• I never had the California redwoods on my to-visit list, but now I totally do.

• I may just have to get some of these wedding registry essentials for myself!

What’s the best thing you’ve read on the Internet this week? Did your cat visit an alien spaceship via a ray of sunshine like mine did?

Last weekend my best friend from college got married and I had the honor of being part of her wedding party as a bridesmaid. We lived together for 2 years (and the year before that had doors that opened right across the hall from each other, not to mention shared a hall communal bathroom, so it might as well count as living together) and know all of each other’s quirks. We literally re-arranged our schedules at least one semester so that we took every single class together, even winding up in one that neither of us particularly wanted to take but that kept us together. So yeah, you could say I got a little emotional at her wedding. (Uh, and by emotional I mean that after we recessed out of the sanctuary I ugly cried for a few minutes while Susanna patted my shoulder and the groomsmen looked on with baffled faces. I was a goner as soon as the pastor closed his prayer by calling the new bride and groom a family.)

ANYWAY, all the feelings aside, a couple of weeks before the wedding I shared a quiet bachelorette celebration with the bride-to-be in Birmingham. I had mentally come up with a lovely plan for a weekend getaway at a cabin in Mentone (the one I chose was on Airbnb, if you’re in the market), but given the somewhat short timeline we had and the small number of people who would be able to come, it wasn’t economically feasible. I re-grouped and planned for a spa morning, lunch at one of the bride’s favorite spots, and a bookish scavenger hunt at 2nd and Charles, an amazing used book store.

Of course every good bachelorette party needs some girlie supplies, even if you’re not going out drinking.

(The plates and such were for a nice picnic we enjoyed at an outdoor symphony concert!)

We completed all the tasks, though we had to fudge a bit on a few of them. (Please note that it’s very important for your bachelorette weekend chaufferess to have a tiara of her own.) It was such a blast!

If you have a friend who’s not a big partier, doing a bookish bachelorette scavenger hunt may be just the way to celebrate her impending nuptials. Click the image below to download the list of tasks for yourself! It’s laid out so that you can print 4 on a standard 8.5 x 11 piece of paper and cut it so everyone can have their own. The only supplies you’ll need are a pen to check them off, a printed picture of the bride’s dad, and a bookstore that also sells movies and CDs.

Have fun!! I know we did.