Karen Sandler

Tag: reading

  • Taxes, Books Read, & Diversity

    3 CoversI’m having a grand old time getting my taxes organized…perhaps not. But in the course of said organization, I made a tally of books read in 2014. The bulk of what I’ve read were ebooks purchased from our Beloved Overlord, er, Amazon, and since they send an email for each book purchased, it’s easy to count them up.

    Print books I purchased at either my local Barnes & Noble (the only big-box bookstore still in my area), my local IBS* (we have a few very nice ones) and my local UBS* (again, a couple great ones) are harder to track. I’d have to (a) remember that I read it or (b) stumble across it on one of my myriad bookcases. Much trickier. Also, there are a not insignificant number of picture books I bought for my granddaughter. I include a couple below, but can’t recall all of them.

    So I won’t claim this is a complete list of the books I read. I have eliminated those I bought and started, but did not like well enough to finish. First the Amazon list:

    12 Years a Slave
    Sand Omnibus
    The Rosie Project
    Odyssey
    Hercule Poirot & the Greenshore Folly
    Pines
    Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
    Geeks, Girls, and Secret Identities
    Typhoid Mary
    The First Phone Call from Heaven
    A Monster Calls
    Prophecy
    Fake ID
    Blue Boy
    The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf
    Openly Straight
    The Living
    Boy Meets Boy
    The School for Good & Evil
    The Great Greene Heist
    The Summer Prince
    Magic Under Glass
    The Miseducation of Cameron Post
    The Chaos
    The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Things
    The Only Thing to Fear
    Charm & Strange
    Underneath
    Hollow City
    Ship of Souls
    Cryoburn

    And the print books purchased from brick and mortar stores or other venues:

    Fat Angie
    Ball Don’t Lie
    Yacqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass
    The Beast
    Brown Girl Dreaming
    Each Kindness
    The Other Side
    Dragonwings
    The Star Fisher
    Prodigy
    Shadow Hero (addition)
    El Deafo (addition)

    I’m pleased to note that of the 41 43 I could account for, 31 33 were books either by diverse authors and/or featured diverse main characters. Apologies for not including author names–I have a new resolution to make my blog posts quicker and simpler. If you can’t figure out the author, ask me in the comments.

    So for those who might be thinking diverse books are hard to find, do the math here. A full 75% of my reading material this year (possibly more since there might be a few I haven’t accounted for) is diverse. And there are many more I’m eagerly looking forward to reading, both new, and classics.

    Happy reading to all in 2015.

    *IBS – Independent Book Store, such as my local fave, Face in a Book.

    *USB – Used Book Store, such as my local faves, The Almost Perfect Bookstore and The Bookery.

  • Best Book in November – RTW

    It’s the last Wednesday in November and YA Highway’s Road Trip Wednesday asks, What’s the best book you read in November?

    I have been reading Old School for all of November, and part of October as well, reading paper books rather than using my Kindle. In October, I bought a whole pile of books by one of my fave science fiction/fantasy authors, Lois McMaster Bujold, from one of our local UBSs (Used Book Store). I’ve been making my way through those books ever since.

    A side note: I do love finding books I want to read in USBs. I like the idea of supporting a local business. But I feel a little guilty when I do that because I know the author doesn’t get her share when I buy her book used. Not to say you should never buy books used. Just be aware of that fact when you do.

    So, among my LMB purchases was a three-fer titled Miles, Mutants & Microbes. LMB has published so many books in the Miles Vorkosigan universe that her publisher has gone back and repackaged a number of them together in various volumes. Miles, Mutants & Microbes includes the novels Falling Free and Diplomatic Immunity sandwiching the novella Labyrinth.

    Of the three, Falling Free was definitely my November best book. Falling Free takes place a couple hundred years before the birth of Miles Vorkosigan, the featured player in most of the Vorkosigan Saga books. In Falling Free, we’re introduced to the quaddies, genetically engineered humans designed to live in freefall. Their bodies thrive without gravity (where normal humans would lose muscle mass and therefore bone density). And they’re able to navigate a living environment in freefall because in place of legs, they have an extra pair of arms. Hence the quaddie designation.

    It’s a very cool story with a triumphant ending. Reading LMB’s later books that feature quaddie characters is all the more fun because we know their origin story.

    If you haven’t checked out any of Lois McMaster Bujold’s books, I highly recommend her. She writes both excellent science fiction and fantasy. And I’m quite thrilled that she will be the Guest of Honor at BayCon in San Francisco, which I will be attending in May.

    So how about you? What have you been reading this month?

  • RTW – Favorite Book in May

    Today, YA Highway wants to know What was the best book you read in May? I checked my Kindle list and found I downloaded four ebooks in May (I’m not as prodigious a reader as some). Of the four, I read and very much enjoyed two, had to struggle through one and never finished it and barely peeked into the fourth (it was a freebie that turned out to just not be my cup of tea).

    But of the two I read and enjoyed, the Latte Rebellion especially turned out to be my cup of, uh, coffee. It was such a fun book with a great multi-cultural cast. What starts as a money-making lark for the main character, Asha, turns into a full-fledged cause for mixed race kids. Her relationship with her best friend, Carey, gets dented along the way, but Asha’s character arc is believable and powerful.

    Although the tone of this book is light and the opposite of angst-ridden, it covers some pretty significant topics. One of the other characters, Roger, keeps asking Asha, Why don’t you just join the Asian club? In other words, although Asha is a mix of ethnicities, Roger wants to pigeon-hole her into just one so she can be categorized. But that’s the whole point the Latte Rebellion (the movement within the book) is trying to get across. That people can’t always be easily pigeon-holed.

    It occurs to me that there is another book I might just have finished at the start of May and it really deserves mention. Vodnik from my fellow Lee and Low/Tu Books author, Bryce Moore, is a YA boycentric adventure so unique I doubt you’ve read anything quite like it. Unless, of course, you’re steeped in Slovak and Roma fairy tales. It’s an exciting, page-turning read, full of the unexpected.

    So there you are, my reads for May. What have you been enjoying?

  • Do You Know the Title of This Book?

    Last night, my husband was doing a little electrical work. We’re getting a new vanity installed in our master bathroom with some fancy granite as a countertop. The new vanity is taller than the old one. The old outlet on one side is so low it would be in the way of the backsplash. Yes, we could have the installer cut the granite to fit the outlet, but we preferred the option of moving the outlet up on the wall.

    I bring this up because at one point, my husband was trying to fish wire between those two small holes you see in the photo. There’s insulation inside the wall and sundry other things to block the cable from sliding easily from point A to point B. As he was struggling a bit to get the wire through, a memory popped up in my mind of a book I’d read (and re-read, and re-read) as a child.

    I was maybe 8 or 9 when I first read it. Sadly, I can’t remember the title. It was probably published by Scholastic since I bought plenty of books from their school catalog. I hung onto the book for years, loving the story each time I re-read it.

    In any case, the story went like this. A boy goes to the local pet shop to buy a pet mouse. But the mice cost more than he has saved up. He spots a mouse in the cage that’s missing its tail. The pet store owner agrees to sell the mouse at a discounted price (which the boy can afford) because of the missing tail. The deal was something like, Well, it’s 3/4 of a mouse, so you can pay me 3/4 of the price.

    Thrilled, the boy takes his pet home. This is a particularly clever mouse and the boy manages to teach it to come when he rings a bell. One day he takes the mouse to where his dad, an electrician, is working on wiring a house. The dad is trying to push electrical tape through a conduit. Once the dad has that tape through, he’ll attach the wiring cable to it, then fish the wiring back through the conduit.

    But just as the dad has almost got the tricky tape through, the pet mouse gets loose. When the boy reaches out to catch it, he bumps his dad’s arm. Now the tape is hopelessly stuck and Dad has to start over. He’s angry and tells his son he shouldn’t have the mouse at his job site.

    The boy gets an idea–attach the tape to the mouse (I think it had a little collar or harness) and let the mouse pull it through the conduit. The boy will ring the bell at the other end to summon the mouse. Of course, the boy’s works, and the boy and the mouse save the day.

    Why has that story stuck with me for so many years? I’m not sure, but I suspect it’s because the boy was the one who was the hero. It was his patience and cleverness in teaching the mouse that solved the problem. I remember also thinking how cool it was to have trained the mouse to come when the bell rang. I liked the dad too, who despite the frustration of having his son jostle his arm, gives his son a chance to try his plan.

    As a side note, I identified with that little boy and wanted to be him. Even though I was a girl. The fact that all the heroes in books were boys back then didn’t faze me. It never crossed my mind that as a girl I couldn’t be as heroic.

    So what childhood books have stuck with you? The ones that your mind returns to at odd times, the ones that still make you smile? Extra special credit if anyone can come up with the title and author of the book I described.

  • RTW — My YA Buddy IRL

    This week’s YA Highway prompt is What IRL people can you talk to about YA? I confess it took some head-scratching to figure out what IRL meant. Yes, I’m an old fogey (hah! how many of you even know the word fogey?) and sometimes I have to look up those Internet acrynyms. For those as fogeyish as me, it means In Real Life.

    After figuring that out, it took a little more cogitation to come up with an answer. My hubby might read YA if I told him it was a fab book. He read my book TANKBORN (and even got annoyed with me when I interrupted him while he was reading it), so why not other recommended YA books? Well, you should see this guy’s TBR pile (hah again! see, I do know some Internet acronyms). He’s got books piled everywhere and he often only has time to read late evenings (when he promptly falls asleep) and weekends (when he sometimes falls asleep). Plus most of my YA books are on my Kindle and he likes reading paper.

    My younger son reads some YA (Neil Gaiman for example), but he’s often the one giving  me recs for books. Also, he’s got his own eclectic tastes and I’m pretty sure the YA books I’ve been swooning over wouldn’t be to his liking.

    Then there’s older son. Since he lives in Osaka, Japan, we bought him a Kindle so he could buy and read new books without having to have them shipped at great expense. I have lent him nearly every lending enabled YA Kindle book I own and have strongly recommended he buy others if I’m not able to lend. I lent him The Hunger Games after I read it, and when I didn’t get around to buying the other two books, he told me he would if I didn’t. So I got him somewhat hooked on YA.

    So I guess he’s my YA buddy IRL. I look forward to sharing many more books with him in the future.