Rachel Coleman

I'm playing an ice hockey game tonight in Cambridge, a charity fundraiser between Warbirds and Tri-Base Lightning. But until then I have a strangely unscheduled day. I might sleep or read or something.

I could post about what I've been up to lately!

Work:

• spoke on a panel about effective 1:1s, it seemed to go well
• played my usual Senior Tech Woman role for a colleague's recruitment panel, and am happy that our preferred candidate has apparently just accepted. (a frustrating number of timewasting applicants more or less obviously using LLMs to write their applications and generate their free-text statements on suitability for the role; I really resent having to wade through paragraphs of verbose buzzword bilge to ... fail to find any evidence they actually know how to do the job)

Hockey:

• KODIAKS WON PLAYOFFS on the bank holiday weekend oh yes they did. So proud of the players, and definitely earned my share of reflected glory managing the team this season and running around half the weekend. League winners, Cup winners, Playoff winners, promotion to Division 1 next season, utter delight.
• Very much an Insufficient Sleep weekend, we topped off the playoff win with a night out in Sheffield, I got back to my hotel as the sky was getting light, good times.
• Kodiaks awards evening last night: lots of celebration of the hard work and lovely camaraderie of this group of players, A and B teams both. I got to announce and hand out the B team awards, and I received a really nice pair of gifts for me as manager: a canvas print of a post-final winners photo, and a personalised insulated travel mug (club logo and MANAGER on it). I love this team.
• I'm still enjoying also playing with Warbirds, and have now been to a few summer Friday scrimmages run by Tri-Base. I went to a couple of Friday scrims at the end of last summer and felt everyone was very kind but I was pretty outclassed. I'm pleased to feel like I'm keeping up a bit better now after training a lot harder this last season.
• I trained three days in a row this week (Warbirds Monday, Haringey Greyhounds tryouts in Alexandra Palace on Tuesday, Kodiaks Wednesday) and that was Too Much and I was pretty sore Wednesday evening and Thursday. Rest days are important even if I am much improved in fitness compared to this time last year.

Other:

• I did a formal hall at my old College! Using my alumna rights and having a nice evening hanging out with old friends (who were the ones to suggest the plan). Good times, will do again but probably not this term.
• I had an excessive number of books out from Suffolk libraries that needed returning, so I did a flying visit to Newmarket by bus last Saturday, this turned out to be the cheapest/quickest way across the county border. I managed to stick to my resolution not to borrow any more physical books but slipped and fell on the "withdrawn books for sale" stand. Managed to only come home with four.
• I did a little indoor cricket the Friday before playoffs (it's now finished due to exam period), and some nets practice last Sunday, but I keep being too busy to actually play any of my team's games. I'd like to do more nets practice though, that was intense but also felt like I was beginning to improve.
• I did a little table tennis with Active Staff but that's also now suspended for exams. I'm considering getting a cheap set of bats and balls for me and the family to go use at the local rec ground, or in the free indoor tables at the Grafton Centre.

Coming up: my summer is full of ice hockey camps and tournaments (Prague, Hull, Sheffield, Biarritz) and my old club Streatham have just announced all their summer training sessions will be "Summer Skills Camps" open to all interested WNIHL players, so I'm looking at going to London regularly again in July and August.

My ankle remains stiff and sore but was a lot less sore this morning than last night. I did the 111 online symptom assessment which concluded that I should care for it at home and didn't need an xray, which suited me fine. I really didn't want to go have another day in Clinic 9 at Addenbrookes. I did book an appointment with the physio practice based in the university sports centre, and I'll see them Monday morning. (Private, expensive, but I judge worth it for promoting a faster and better recovery.) Most of the day I have spent in bed, keeping my ankle elevated, wearing an old compression tube I found, and icing it at intervals.

I have spent a lot of this enforced downtime watching Arsenal Women videos behind the fan account sign-in: a five-part documentary called Togetherness about the 2022-23 season, and a whole bunch of match highlights for this season's games I didn't watch live. I also found the FA Player has today's game against Tottenham Hotspur, which was broadcast live on Sky Sports, but I might just watch the highlights of that too because it's getting late.

(I spent way too long looking up assorted books from the Economist's "best books of 2023" on Amazon/my libraries, and then did the same for the "best books of 2022" on the grounds they might be more available in the libraries. Then I went down a couple of rabbitholes of other authors I'm interested in, and now my library bookmarks list is kind of ridiculous. Plus I am now up to nine holds in Libby across both Cambridgeshire and Suffolk libraries, plus there are some books that Suffolk has in Libby that aren't in the main catalogue (sigh) so I've got them tagged and am not borrowing them until I've at least caught up on what I've currently borrowed. I did slip and buy a "best book of 2022" that was 99p, and it's huge, so er, lots of reading for me I think. I could probably have read a short book in the time I spent adding a zillion books to wishlist / library bookmarks / Libby tags.)

I also did extra Duolingo, where I am doggedly attempting to complete the Irish course yet again, after recent updates and extensions to the course. I have let myself be gamified into doing two sessions a day to make use of the double-points bonuses, so I usually do "new course bits" in the morning and "levelling up to Legendary" in the evening. In January I plan to restart Greek ahead of our planned visit to Mick and Joye in Stoupa in the Easter hols, so I'll put Greek into the morning Duo slot, and keep going with Irish in the evening.

I borrowed seven of the books selected for the August Cambridgeshire Listens and Reads collections, with the goal of at least trying all of them in the initial 3 week loan (they are all available for 60 days).

Didn't like in the first chapters:

• One August Night by Victoria Hislop: everyone in the first chapter was deeply dislikeable and I was done
• A Taste of Greek Summer by Mandy Baggot: meant to be a romcom I think, but I was not finding it as funny as I think it was meant to be, so I stopped
• Date with Mystery by Julia Chapman: cosy detective mystery in Yorkshire, was kind of meh about the main protagonist and got fed up of the copaganda in chapter two

Okay but got bored:

Ellie Pillai is Brown by Chistine Pillainayagam: children's book about a misfit child and her popular best friend, but after several chapters she'd made it from her bedroom to the school gates and I still wasn't that interested.

Good:

MumLife by Louise Pentland: a memoir about motherhood in many aspects, by a British vlogger and author I had not previously heard of. Definitely not something I'd have gone out of my way to find, but it was an engaging listen on my way from Yorkshire to Biarritz and home again. I may even go seek out her fiction books now.

To Kill a Kingdom by Alexandra Christo: a gory YA retelling of the Little Mermaid, with a murderous prince-killing siren, and a siren-killing prince. I admit that at the time of writing I haven't finished this - I read enough of it before the due date to renew it - but on the 40%-ish that I've read so far, I'm loving it.

The Martian by Andy Weir: brilliant, as discussed previously. I have renewed the audiobook just so I can take my time listening to it again for bedtime reading.

Overall, this was a good experiment: I tried some things, let myself give up on books I wasn't enjoying (this is something I sometimes need a reminder I can do, and it's much easier when it's "just" a library book), stepped outside my comfort zone a bit, and found three books I really enjoyed. I have to admit I've looked at the remaining books for August and am feeling distinctly meh about all of them, so as August is nearly over and I have other library books, I'll just wait to see what turns up in September's picks this weekend.

Because I was isolating in my room from Sunday, I decided to continue with the decluttering I started in January - for a room that I didn't think was that messy, I sure have pulled out a lot of Stuff, both then and this weekend. I chronicled some of the adventures at unclutter.

(obligatory shout out to Dana K. White, whose decluttering approach is working really well for me)

I finished working through the bookcases in movement breaks today. So obviously this evening I decided to start getting complicated and moving books around in the room for better long-term organisation, and identifying a largeish number for Tony to triage. I have vacuumed enormous amounts of dust, and I have committed the epic fail of having Piles Of Things everywhere, but my fitbit thinks I've done 39 minutes of cardio and it's getting late, so despite part of me wanting to MOVE ALL THE THINGS NOW, I'm going to leave it and carry on when I need movement breaks tomorrow.

(Also the new Martha Wells book came out today and I desperately want to read more of it than I've managed so far.)

I also need to decide what to do about covid testing tomorrow morning, before I take the test. ( Read more... )

Yesterday I had C's annual EHCP review meeting, from which I have a big pile of homework to do asap and by end of next week at the latest. But generally a positive and productive meeting.

I also did a tiny bit of bereavement admin, calling my mother's GP surgery to explain that no, she will not be attending her Stroke Clinic review. I am sure that I already notified the surgery of her death - and their number was in my call history with an entry last summer - but this time round I was asked to send them a copy of the death certificate. So I've done that.

This morning I had a necessary and routine medical appointment which was entirely straightforward and successful, and also very unpleasant even with prescription painkillers. (Coil change and smear test.) In the early afternoon I reluctantly decided to drop out of this evening's ice hockey scrimmage in London. That was definitely the right decision, and I'm pretty sure I'll be fine tomorrow, and definitely fine for the game I'm playing Sunday afternoon in Milton Keynes.

Otherwise I have spent most of the two strike days continuing my reread of the Clorinda Cathcart's Circle series. I am tired and they are very comforting.

Last summer Marieke Nijkamp made a list of 30 books for children/teens with "fantastic disability rep", which I am copying out here in a form I find easier to reference than a twitter thread. Comments in quotes are from Marieke's tweets, unquoted comments are me.

(Also a note here that I am always interested in recommendations for children's books with autistic main characters. There are some in this list that I will be getting on and investigating, but please feel free to suggest more in comments.)

1. Cursed by Karol Ruth Silverstein. "A spectacularly angry book about Ricky, whose life in changing in many ways, and who has to come to terms with living with juvenile arthritis."
2. Anger Is a Gift by Mark Oshiro. "a stunning, heartwrenching book and a fantastic exploration of PTSD and trauma. Also, the whole cast is spectacular."
3. Show Me a Sign by Ann Clare LeZotte. "A gorgeous middle grade novel about a Deaf girl who lives in the thriving Deaf community on Martha's Vineyard in the early 19th century."
4. One for All by Lillie Lainhoff. "a genderbent retelling of Three Musketeers with a POTSie main character"
5. A Kind of Spark by Elle McNicoll. "one of my favorite autistic middle grade books ever. It’s a stunning exploration of finding your voice and standing up to injustice"
6. Sam's Super Seats by Keah Brown, picture book, not yet actually published, in the meantime Keah Brown's book of essays is The Pretty One
7. You Should See Me In A Crown by Leah Johnson. "This is a book full of heart and promposals, and it handles anxiety beautifully". I have read this one! I even wrote a short review of it!
8. Sick Kids In Love by Hannah Moskowitz. "Exactly what it says on the cover. And that’s why you should read it."
9. The Weight of Our Sky by Hanna Alkaf. "A raw, gripping book about a teen girl with OCD who is trying to find her way back to her mother during the historic race riots in 1969 Kuala Lumpur."
10. The Art of Saving the World by Corinne Duyvis. "A story about identity and finding yourself (…or parallel universe versions of yourself). Oh, and saving the world."
11. Get a Grip, Vivy Cohen! by Sarah Kapit. "a wonderful middle grade novel in letters, about an autistic girl and her major league pen pal"
12. Run by Kody Keplinger. "features complex characters (including a legally blind girl) and complex-er friendships. Fierce and sometimes uncomfortably honest."
13. Full Disclosure by Camryn Garrett. "about Simone who is HIV-positive--is everything you could want from a book. It’s funny, it’s heartbreaking, it’s unapologetic, it’s hopeful."
14. The Bone Houses by Emily Lloyd-Jones. "A young gravedigger. Risen corpses known as bone houses. An apprentice mapmaker with chronic pain. Doesn’t that sound amazing?"
15. When the Stars Lead to You by Ronni Davis. "about a girl with a love for the stars and about putting yourself back together when everything falls apart"
16. Finding Balance by Kati Gardner "about two cancer survivors whose summers at Camp Chemo start to spill over into their daily lives"
17. For a Muse of Fire by Heidi Heilig. "All of Heidi’s stories are magical in one way or another, and this one is no different. Complex, creative, rebellious"
18. Vampires Never Get Old edited by Zoraida Córdova & Natalie C. Parker, collection of short stories by YA authors on a vampire theme, out next month. "Because vampires. Including disabled ones."
19. Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo."Two words: Kaz. Brekker. <3 (I really want a cane with a crow’s head too???)"
20. Braced by Alyson Gerber. "follows Rachel, a young girl with scoliosis, who has to figure out life, friends, and school soccer with a brace."
21. History Is All You Left Me by Adam Silvera. "a harrowing story about grief, love, and friendship, featuring a MC with OCD."
22. The Moth Girl by Heather Kamins. "a magical story about coming of age with a chronic illness"
23. Little & Lion by Brandy Colbert. "A beautiful story about family, love, and loyalty."
24. When Reason Breaks by Cindy Rodriguez. "Anger. Depression. And Emily Dickinson’s poetry as a guide for two girls facing their personal demons."
25. Darius the Great Is Not Okay by Adib Khorram. "Give me more Trekkie main characters!"
26. Eliza and Her Monsters by Francesca Zappia. "a must-read for every geek, every fanfic writer or fanart creator, and everyone who’s ever lived with anxiety or depression"
27. El Deafo by Cece Bell. "a graphic novel memoir, about a young girl and her experiences with her Phonic Ear"
28. Mooncakes by Suzanne Walker and Wendy Xu. "is magical. Quite literally so. With a HoH main character. Without a magical cure."
29. Black Girl Unlimited: The Remarkable Story of a Teenage Wizard by Echo Brown. "Like Kirkus said: Just brilliant."
30. Disability Visibility edited by Alice Wong. "a collection of first-person stories"

Plus her own anthology: Unbroken: 13 Stories Starring Disabled Teens edited by Marieke Nijkamp

I'm looking for non-fiction books about autism

• aimed at under-tens
• with the assumption the reader is autistic
• bonus if #ownvoices

We have Can I tell you about Autism? by Jude Welton, which is good for clear and understandable language but is trying to "explain" an autistic child to the neurotypical people around them, which isn't quite what we need.

Sir Julius Vogel Awards, which "recognise excellence in science fiction, fantasy, or horror works created by New Zealanders and New Zealand residents" and specifically the finalists for 2020

(How cross am I that CoNZealand did not publicise that I, as a member of the national convention of New Zealand this year, could have read and voted in these awards? Pretty cross. Not that I had much time, but I would have tried!)

However! Octavia Cade produced a Twitter thread of living NZ SFF authors which I have transcribed below because that's easier for me than finding the thread again.

• Steph Matuku
• Whiti Hereaka: WHereaka
• J.C. Hart / Nova Blake
• Sascha Stronach
• Andi C. Buchanan
• A.J. Fitzwater
• Tina Makereti
• Elizabeth Knox
• H.G. Parry
• Lee Murray
• Dan Rabarts
• Summer Wigmore
• Casey Lucas
• Melanie Harding Shaw
• Toni Wi
• Tabatha Wood
• Graci Kim
• AJ Lancaster
• Tamsyn Muir
• Gina Cole
• Maurice Gee
• Patricia Grace
• Nalini Singh
• M. Darusha Wehm
• Eileen Mueller
• Karen Healey
• Pamela Morrow
• Rachael Craw
• Sean Monaghan
• Sally McLennan
• Tim Jones
• Lawrence Patchett
• AJ Ponder
• Kerry Donovan Brown
• Bren MacDibble
• D.V. Bishop
• Maru Nihoniho
• Kirsten McKenzie
• Adam Christopher
• Russell Kirkpatrick
• Helen Lowe
• Juliet Marillier
• Mary Victoria
• Philippa Ballantine
• Ken Catran
• Philip Temple
• Witi Ihimaera
• Saf / wanderlustin
• Grant Stone
• Isa Pearl Ritchie
• Phillip Mann
• Lani Wendt Young
• Jack Remiel Cottrell

Drakkinabrarian wrote a thing about To-Read Piles and while quite a lot of is not relevant to me, or at least is no longer so, this bit hit me with that sense of "ohhhh, that's why I do it" (it, in this case, being buy more books every month than I can ever hope to read).

You know how people who deal with food insecurity can end up food-hoarding in non-useful ways because it’s hard for them to believe that they will, next week, have the same access to food as they have right now? Book-hoarding can actually work the same way – and be just as useless

( bit of navel-gazing about books and scarcity )

I'm tentatively trying out a new reminder-phrase: "you don't have to buy all the book bargains", and I've turned off some of the bargain-book alerts I was signed up for.

Via oursin and assorted others on my reading list, based on James Nicoll's list of “100 SF/F books You Should Consider Reading In the New Year.”

Italic = read it. Underlined = not this, but something by the same author. Strikethrough = did not finish.
* already on my to-read pile somewhere

 

( the full 100 )

14 read, 17 authors I've read something else by, 7 on my to-read pile already. Lots of interesting suggestions in the remainder for future reading.

A few weeks ago I got new bookshelves up in the children's room.   Before today I had achieved moving about 2/3 of the books across from Charles's old room (now the spare room).

Today, helped (or hindered) by Nico I have:

• moved the remaining children's books over
• added more shelves to the spare room, making 16m of shelving space
• filled those 16m with books-read from the shelves in my room that have been double-stacked for years
• vacuumed up a disturbing amount of dust from books and shelves

Still to do (not today!):

• clear assorted clutter off that bookcase in my room
• move and add shelves, creating another 12-16m of shelving space in my room
• move my to-read pile and Tony's to this space (and stop my to-read pile in particular encroaching all over the house)
• move my library books and OU textbooks there too
• move books-in-living-room to space freed up in study by previous steps
• move children's books in living room to their bedroom
• move remaining books-read to living room

The end goal is to have books-read in shared space, and books-to-read in private space, and children's books in children's space.  And as much as possible single-stacked for ease of viewing and access.

Also each move of books and things is an opportunity to declutter.  So far in this project I've taken 3 bags to the charity shop and I've another one ready to go.  Plus an awful lot of general rubbish uncovered and (mostly) recycled.

(Worst thing about getting back to single-spaced books: I uncovered my MZB books and had to make a decision about what to do with them; for now I've stacked them in a Really Useful Box and stuck that in a corner behind other things.  I'm not quite ready to throw them away but for sure I don't want to see them now.)

ceb pointed me at a kickstarter for Queers Destroy Science Fiction, by Lightspeed Magazine who did the Women Destroy Science Fiction! collection that I'm currently reading and Women Destroy Fantasy! that I read recently.  I've been pretty impressed with both of those.

With 5 days to go, it's already well past funded and most of the way through the stretch goals.  Additional collections about Horror and Filk have already been unlocked, and Queers Destroy Fantasy! is about $1.5k away.  Also they are offering extra flexibility about exact combinations of rewards with "addons" that will be manually processed (this was a good move on their part, I more than doubled my pledge as a result).

I am selfishly hoping for the Fantasy stretch goal to get unlocked, thus the signal-boost :-)

Today's Kindle Daily Deals includes Glamour in Glass by Mary Robinette Kowal for 99p, which is the second in the Glamourist Histories series, and I think readable without having read the first.  hilarita's reviews (one, two, three) convinced me to try the series, which are sort-of "Jane Austen with magic", and I enjoyed all three very much when I bought and read them a couple of weeks ago (not, sadly, at 99p each).

Also I was looking for the Kushiel novels by Jacqueline Carey to stick on my to-buy list, and noticed that the first three (Kushiel's Dart, Kushiel's Chosen, Kushiel's Avatar) are on Kindle at 59p, £1.19 & £1.79 respectively.   I like them a lot, a quick rustle through my friends list turned up this brief review of the third one by nwhyte 

From Ian Sales, via nwhyte

Book meme! Here are the 25 titles chosen for 2012's World Book Night. Do the usual: bold for read, italics for owned but unread.

( Read more... )
[I thought this was a very British-centric "World" book list; it turns out that the event covers the UK and the USA ... and that's it. I want a real World Books list, with authors from every continent.]

So basically I've read - and liked - three and got one on the to-read pile. I've read a sequel to Harlequin by Bernard Cornwell, and enjoyed it; and the film of Touching the Void was amazing in a climbers-are-mad way. Is there anything else on the list people would recommend?

As created by james_davis_nicoll here, women authors of SF&F who were first published in the 1980s.

Italicize the authors you've heard of before reading this list of authors, bold the ones you've read at least one work by, underline the ones of whose work you own at least one example of. Come up with improvements to flavour your versions.

I like rachelmanija's version, as signalboosted by coffeeandink:
Drop the authors you’ve never read to the bottom. For the remainder, discuss or rec at least one of their books with at least one sentence of explanation about why you do or don’t like it. Ask your readers to tell you about the authors you’ve never read.

I've only time for the sorting and markup tonight (i.e. the easy-memey part) but I'll come back with the recs soon.

Lois McMaster Bujold
Barbara Hambly
Janet Kagan
Katharine Kerr
Mercedes Lackey
Elizabeth Moon
Eluki Bes Shahar (AKA Rosemary Edghill)
Sheri S. Tepper
Deborah Wheeler (Deborah J. Ross)

( the rest I've never read, oh tell me more of them )

As created by james_davis_nicoll, women authors of SF&F who were first published in the 1970s.

Italicize the authors you've heard of before reading this list of authors, bold the ones you've read at least one work by, underline the ones of whose work you own at least one example of.

( Read more... )

Gosh there are lots there I didn't recognise.

I wrote I think trying to enforce 22 books out before I get any more is seriously setting myself up to fail

Yeah, unless I read a seriously challenging book, look at the quality of my two latest supernatural fantasy fluff reservations from the library, look at the two teenage werewolf fantasies by the bed, and decide that actually all the Mills & Boon in the to-read pile can go to the charity shop. There's more in the library if I really want an easy romance fix, or I could just reread Cotillion or Bet Me.

So that was 21 out, and 1 in because I found a book my mother-in-law left when I was tidying up. So 3 more books off the to-read pile and I'm all caught up without any complicated schemes. Yay.

I feel mild guilt and a bit of worry about being snobbish; but maybe throwing out masses of unread magazines earlier in the week has hardened my heart to guilt.

From Time To Time is an adaptation of The Chimneys of Green Knowe, with Maggie Smith playing Mrs Oldknow. It's a sort of ghost/time travel story with children from different generations of the family that have lived in the same house over the centuries. I loved the Green Knowe stories as a child and earlier this year I visited the house which inspired them, which is about 20 minutes drive from Cambridge. Diana Boston, the daughter-in-law of the author and current resident of the house, mentioned the film on our visit, but I haven't been able to get to any of the showings until now.

The film is on at the Arts Picturehouse, Tuesday 7th December at 16:30, which is a little early but I should just be able to make it if I leave work promptly (I'm in early that day anyway). It doesn't look like assigned seating & tickets are a slightly eye-watering £7.50 unless you have membership discount. I've got to be in the city centre tomorrow evening anyway, so will save myself the £1.50 booking fee on top by getting my ticket in person. I will get tickets for others at the same time if you email me before 5pm tomorrow (Friday).

I think I've found and catalogued all the to-read books now. So the total stands at 347, of which 9 are library books. This is not meant as a contest; I'm fed up with myself for continually acquiring rather than actually getting on and reading the acquisitions. I think when I buy books I'm also buying the happy fantasy that I have time to read them.

Anyway, from now on I want to do at least 2-out, 1-in on the to-read pile (not counting the library books). Trying to stop obtaining new books outright has failed lots of times in the past, but this seems a more achievable target. Also having a computer do the counting should help me stick to it.

I have a supporting membership of Aussiecon 4 and a list of Hugo nominees. So I have set myself a reading project to:

1. Read the nominees for Novel, Novella, Novelette and Short Story (and Related Work & Graphic Novel if I have time/inclination).
2. Write and post "something coherent" about each of them.
3. Vote by the deadline of 31st July.

The project has 3 purposes:

1. Read more SF!  I have read exactly 3 of the nominated authors, and only one of the nominated works.
2. Practice writing something other than "what I did on my holidays" and the occasional rant.
3. Be part of the conversation: other people do this (notably Nicholas Whyte, whose Hugo reviews last year and this I have really enjoyed reading), and maybe some of my other friends would like to join in.

Aussiecon promise an online "packet" of the nominees to members, but as I prefer to read in paperback format where I can, I've been spending some quality time with Cambridgeshire Libraries online catalogue: looking up what they have, and slightly cheekily making new stock suggestions where they don't.  (Though I'm not sure it is really cheeky to expect a good library to have the Hugo nominees in the SF section - I think they get in mainstream fiction award winners, and the Richard & Judy book club etc.)  Notes under the cut mainly for my own benefit, though other Cambridgeshire-based people might be interested.

( Read more... )

About a month ago I stepped into Oxfam to check if they sold donated VHS tapes, and came out with:

* a box set of 9 Laura Ingalls Wilder "Little House" books
* the latest Marian Keyes paperback
* the latest Sue Grafton paperback (T)
* a book by a Fellow of my old College set in a fictional but similar women-only College

A month later I have read one, count it, one of these (the Sue Grafton). My to-read pile is measured in triple-stacked shelves, and yet I still struggle to not buy books I like the look of if they are in front of me. My buying habits were formed in the teenage years where my local bookshops were WHSmith and the charity shops. Then my disposable income roughly matched the incidence of finding books I wanted to buy and the rate at which I read them. My disposable income has grown and my spare time to read has shrunk but I don't seem to have adjusted.

I am hoping the reopened central library will help here. It is 5 minutes at my pace and 10 at Charles's from where I pick him up each evening, so we should be able to pop in once a week or so to change books. I can take out my quota of New Shiny Books (and at the moment it looks like every book is new and shiny in there) without costing myself money and more space than 10 books at a time. I am hoping this will displace at least a little the urge to buy up "everything good" in the Oxfam bookshop every few weeks.

nwhyte recently mentioned BookMooch, and I had some fun listing books and making my first symbolic mooch on Saturday. At first it was just the slightly-too-tatty-for-Oxfam books that I still think someone will love. And then I found myself looking at my books and wondering which ones I'm never going to read again.

I also reminded myself again of BookCrossing which is rather more altruistic, informal and social than BookMooch. I think on the whole I prefer BookMooch - it's quicker, it's simpler, and the points system formalises the benefit-to-individuals that happens informally with BookCrossing. I find it interesting that the very simple reward scheme of BookMooch has prompted me to seriously look at my permanent book collection in the way that my use of charity shops and BookCrossing has not.

The funding model for BookMooch appears to be partly Amazon sales referrals, and partly a tipbox. I do wonder how sustainable this is.

[Note on Amazon: while the gay books teacup-storm has died down now, and apologies have been made, various people pointed out other reasons to avoid Amazon which matter to me, and of which I had not previously been aware. So I am hesitant to leap back into giving them money, even though they make it so very easy to do so. I also feel I have to check on any alternative that they aren't doing the same kind of things of which I disapprove, before I definitely spend money elsewhere. The whole thing just makes me freeze up on buying new books, which may be no bad thing! But then where does that leave using BookMooch, which appears to be financially dependent on at least some people spending money at Amazon?]


But back to the weekend of books: for some time now we have been meaning to make a slight adjustment to the bookcases in our bedroom. The bookshelves are deep enough to double-stack but to discourage this we had placed the books at the front of the shelves. The inevitable hideous build up of dust behind the books took place. In the meantime we had accumulated a great many books to insert into the alphabetically-sorted shelves. The trouble with a large book collection and alphabetic sorting is that insertion takes a lot of effort, so I like to save it up for months at a time.

I therefore spent a lot of Sunday afternoon and evening moving books around, vacuuming books and shelves, filtering in newly-read books, and putting aside books to give away. With the exception of the top shelf (because otherwise I can neither see nor reach the books there), all the books are now at the back of the shelves, which will make it easier to dust regularly. It also makes it easier to stack books ready to filter in.

My cull resulted in a small pile of books to give away immediately, and another pile approximately 3 times bigger to read one more time to decide whether to keep or give away. I had to find somewhere to put these two new piles, so I implemented a plan I've had for a while to swap my to-read pile in the living room with the anthologies in the study. This means when people look at those shelves in the living room, they see nice interesting books grouped sensibly together, rather than my haphazard never-shrinking to-read pile.

This involved more vacuuming, and the drafting of the dining table as swap space. I took the opportunity to roughly sort the to-read pile into:

* non-fiction
* Mills & Boon
* "last chance saloon" fiction culled from my permanent collection
* all other fiction

I'm hoping this will make it easier for me to find the kind of book I'm after when I want something new to read, which in turn might make the to-read pile seem more like a source of entertainment and pleasure than a burden of guilt.

The immediate giveaway pile is slowly going onto BookMooch as I have time, and I'm already receiving and responding to requests. The main problem I foresee is resisting the urge to acquire even more books with the points I'm earning. Apart from that first mooch, I'm going to try to only mooch books when I'm ahead of my 1-item-per-day decluttering target. Let's see how long that lasts.

An advert in the back of the most recently-read ancient M&B romance (formatting theirs):

"Each Romance features British heroines and their encounters with dark and desirable Mediterranean men. Plus, a free Elmlea recipe booklet inside every pack."

Yeah, that's the way to attract those dark and desirable Mediterranean men: fake cream.

Annoyed by two books in a row featuring wimpy women and sexual assault justified by "she wanted it really".

A while ago Ingi recommended Raising Boys to me, and while I was browsing Amazon for that I also looked at Raising Babies by the same author. I requested both of them through the local library system along with What Mothers Do (about which I have enthused before). I read Raising Babies very quickly and it has completely changed my mind about what I want to do for Charles's childcare.

Until now I have been working on the assumption we would place him in the university nursery at 18 months so I could return to full-time work, as the cheapest and most convenient option. I started to feel warning signs recently when the nursery wouldn't confirm whether I had a place "as we are only processing applications for this year at this time" and I found myself pointing out to a friend that it appeared that the administration was run for the convenience of the nursery rather than the parents or the children.

The book is unapologetically campaigning, with the central thesis that children under three should not go to nursery, but should instead be cared for by parents, or if that is not possible, by a single dedicated carer. The points made are:

* Nursery is a qualitatively different environment from the parental home or a nanny or childminder arrangement, with children being grouped and looked after by multiple staff, often with a high turnover. The very frequent interaction that characterises most parent-child relationships (and certainly does ours with Charles) does not occur in a nursery setting, and has been shown not to by filmed observation, even when the workers knew they were being observed and presumably trying to look as good as possible.
* 0-3 is exactly the age where children are learning to socialise and need to have strong bonds with a very few loving carers who will give them the frequent intense interaction described above.
* There is evidence from several large UK-based studies that children placed in nursery before three are at much higher risk of developing anti-social behaviour in later life.
* Cortisol tests show that apparently calm babies/children are in fact very stressed when isolated from their primary carers.

The author has clear strong views on the "right" way to parent, but these happen to be the way Tony and I parent: with strong attachment and attention to the child, letting the child set the pace of development, and so on (all the stuff that tends to get wrapped up in the label "attachment parenting"). In particular the point about young babies wanting/needing to have a strong bond with a very few people really resonated with my observations of Charles: he wants me most of all, then Tony as a second-best and there are a very small number of other adults with whom he seems to relax, and then not always. He will be friendly to almost everyone, but he needs that reassurance of someone he knows really well being around. I am sure there are thousands of people who went to nursery under 3 who are just fine, but I am now convinced it is not the right thing for Charles or us.

In essence, this book was not so much telling me things I didn't know (with the exception of some of the studies) as exposing opinions/beliefs I already had and showing me how they were incompatible with sending Charles to nursery at 18 months old. In addition, I'd always thought I should go back to full-time work sooner, as the higher earner, but in fact I am happy with my current workload, while Tony is beginning to chafe. So it may be him going back first, as that is (probably) still a financial win as well as a happiness win. I am beginning to think about childminders and budgets.