Panicking Over Nothing Which Is Really Something

This Triple Dog Dare has twenty days left. Three weeks before I can start browsing library books. I'm really hoping this year that I can hold myself back and give myself a chance to read some of the books I buy as well as the books from the library. I mean, I must want to read them if I buy them, right?

Tragically, the month of March has arranged itself so that the last day is Thursday, which is also library day. So I won't get new books until April 6th! This is awful!

On the other hand, for someone not getting any new books, I seem to bring home a heavy library bag. Um. Oops. From the hold shelf:


The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo
Clean Sweep, Ilona Andrews
Soldier's Secret, Sheila Klass.

These three are for book clubs. The tidying book is for next June or so; I was a few hundred down on the waiting list when I checked last week so I thought I was on track for then. My library is rather frighteningly awesome. Clean Sweep is our actual next book for April. I also messed up with the third -- it's for my elementary book club, and I meant to get a book called Secret Soldier. Oops. It's about the same person, so maybe I can read it and claim I'm providing an interesting alternate view? Ignoring the fact that the kids really want to hear each other and don't really care about my thoughts, which is how I like it except when I want to tell them my thoughts...

And I need to restock my Reading My Library Quest shelves, so I got books from the next column, which had five rows and finished up Large Print. Notice that the last 3 are nonfiction:



Sisterland, Curtis Sittenfeld. This is set in St. Louis, although I'm not sure which one, so I'm hoping it also works for my 50 state challenge. I think I've heard of it before.

A Spool of Blue Thread, Anne Tyler. I've enjoyed everything I've read by Tyler.

Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, Sarah Vowell. Another author I've had good experience with.

Living With a Wild God, Barbara Ehrenreich. Yet again I went with a known author but an unknown book.

Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, Jon Meacham. OK, again I picked this for the author, but not because I've read him before; his name matches mind except for one vowel sound. So I feel like I should support him, as he's almost in my family. Probably an outlying, bad-spelling branch of the family :-)

I've currently got 30 things out from the library, including ebooks, books for me, and books for the kids (at least four). That's not too bad, right? This feels very responsible.  Especially because five of them are meant to last me for 3 months or so of reading.

I'll go look at the Library Loot which is at The Captive Reader this week to see what everyone else is getting.  Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Linda from Silly Little Mischief that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. 

Library Questing

I finished The Secret of Sir Richard Kenworthy by Julia Quinn. I've read at least one other romance from her; I think she likes to invent enormous families and then marry them all off. This is the fourth in a series about a zillion sisters. I was getting a bit bored by the central conflict -- we know his secret from early on, but he doesn't tell her so there's lots of handwringing from both of them. But the final chapters were great -- the heroine finally shakes the secrets out of her feeble-minded in-laws, solves the problem in the obvious way after raging about how foolish they've been, and fixes the world. I hope the rest of the family learned a valuable lesson about just telling Iris the truth and doing what she tells them. I think I was won over when she threatened to hit her her young sister-in-law with a cricket bat.

I'm still listening to Hild by Nicola Griffith, and it's still lovely and I hope an accurate depiction of Britain way back then. It's nineteen disks long and I'm on #11, so I'll be here for a while,