Princess Sparklefists

This was working really well last year, and then I just... stopped. Once I stopped, it was hard to get going again. Inertia, I guess.

After some slumpy months, I really got going again in June and July. This was in part due to replacing my normal diet of hockey podcasts with audiobooks. I tend to have "oops I stopped paying attention for a minute there" problems with audio, which is why hockey yelling is usually better than complex narratives, but I've had some successes. Yay!

Because I'm posting this on August 6, I've technically already finished a book this month, one of the aforementioned audiobooks, Sorcery of Thorns by Margeret Rogerson.

The rest of the August TBR:

Girlfriend on Mars by Deborah Willis - already started this one

White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link - ditto

Something Close to Magic by Emma Mills

Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros - specifically for while I visit Heather

I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki by Baek Sehee

I can probably squeeze in at least one more since I've got a week of vacation, and read books is half of what I do at Heather's, but I'll leave my options open for now.

July was another success! I read all the books I listed on my TBR, and since I had extra time, I used the opportunity to read a couple popular authors outside my normal wheelhouse.

Those were:

• The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell - Psychological thrillers are consistently popular at the library, and I'd heard good things about Lisa Jewell's work. Not my normal thing, but it was an engaging, quick read. I'd pick up another from her.
• It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover - The TikTok darling author that we literally can't buy another of (because paper shortage in publishing). Lots of trigger warnings on this one. Although I respect what the author was doing, it just wasn't my thing.

I also started Shorefall by Robert Jackson Bennett, the middle book of the Founders Trilogy. The final book is coming out really soon, so I'm trying to catch up.

Also on my August TBR:

• Dial A for Aunties by Jesse Q. Sutanto - because Heather told me to
• Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell - adding some fun looking nonfiction
• Husband Material by Alexis Hall - if my hold arrives on time
• Oaths of Legacy by Emily Skrutskie - becuase it's the summer of continuing series

And finally, already finished in August, the first volume of the manga series I Want to Be a Wall, which I read yesterday evening after work because the book was already overdue. Oops!

There has been a whole-ass (ongoing) pandemic since I posted here. Tumblr banned porn and everyone was supposedly going to come back here, and then Elon Musk said he's buying Twitter and everyone was hie thee to Tumblr, and all the cool kids (literally) are on TikTok so here I am on the non-T site.

Hello!

A lot of stuff has happened in the three years since I last posted, in my life and in the world, and I am here to talk about NONE OF THAT. Instead I am here to TRY A THING. That thing is making a TBR list for the month, in the perhaps vain hope that instead of checking out 50 different books and carrying them back and forth to my house and never reading them, I instead pick a few things that I'm most interested in right now and actually READ them.

Revolutionary idea, I know.

For Book Club™

• Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson - Part 2

Everything Else: 

• Jade War by Fonda Lee - I read Jade City in April and I have a chance to finish the series before I forget everything that happened
• Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that Made China Modern by Jing Tsu
• Himawari House by Harmony Becker
• The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes by Cat Sebastian - assuming my hold comes in!

And that is more than enough for me to struggle to finish.

At the beginning of 2015, I set some reading goals. So how did I do?

• First, I wanted to read at least 75 books. Go figure, by setting that goal lower, I actually ended up reading more. According to Goodreads, my total was 106, including rereads of the first six Toby Daye books. (There were some picture books, too, and plenty of single issue comic books, but I generally don't count those.)


• I did a much better job determining what books I was or was not interested in. There were plenty that I read 20-50 pages and abandoned. There were a few exceptions where I soldiered on, mostly for a reading challenge at work.


• I read Do Muslim Women Need Saving by anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod and The Butterfly Mosque by journalist and comic writer G. Willow Wilson. The former is more academic and provides many examples of how the lives of Muslim women are more complex than they are portrayed in Western Media. The latter is a memoir of Wilson's years living in Egypt, where she met and married her husband, after she graduated from college and converted to Islam. (I also have continued reading Wilson's Ms. Marvel comics.)


• Heather and I read lots of the same stuff. Is anyone surprised?

At work, our manager also designed a reading challenge for the staff with a different genre or category for each month of the year, e.g. a romance novel, a young adult book, a non-fiction book, a Newbery winner. There were a few duds in that bunch, but also some great books I probably would not have otherwise read.

Overall, it was a good year for books. I stayed on top of the YA releases I wanted to read, and I also read significantly more non-fiction than previous years, with excellent results.

I've seen several posts floating around Tumblr in the last week lamenting the demise of old-school LJ fandom, which prompted me log on and check my old f-list, which came with the pleasant surprise that some old friends have been posting recently! (I mirror all my posts at LJ, but because my f-list seldom shows much besides posts from communities I've honestly lost interest in, I'm guilty of abandoning it for long stretches of time.)

The combination of these events has me thinking about what I personally miss about LJ-style fandom. 

I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that LJ fandom was a lot more personal. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy Tumblr a lot, but mostly I know the people I follow there by what they are interested in, not who they are. Part of that is definitely down to a lack of critical conversation. I found friends on LJ (and before that, in forums) not just based on shared interest, but from the ability to have interesting conversations about those shared interests.

One of the phrases that baffled me when I was just starting out on Tumblr was "don't tag your hate." My primary fandom, to my ongoing shame, for the past few years, is Teen Wolf. The source material is, putting it kindly, not very good. But on Tumblr, if I want to be critical of the show at all, fandom tells me that I shouldn't dare tag my post #teen wolf. I have to react positively to everything in fandom, or be banished to some weird, untagged corner where no one else can accidentally hear my opinion? It's weird.

(And don't even let the librarian side of me get started on how, from a metadata standpoint, "don't tag your hate" is a terrible, nonsensical idea.)

Lately I've mostly used my journal as a dumping ground for all the personal stuff that doesn't fit on Tumblr--and that I'm honestly not comfortable sharing that openly anyway--but I think it's time to open it back up and start writing about the fannish side of things here too. We'll see how long that lasts ;)

 Out of the blue I just remembered the time at last year's Dragon Con where we found an free almost full 12 pack of Diet Coke in our hotel hallway. Did I gleefully stash it in our room while Patty and Karen summoned the elevator? Yes, I did.

Last year I divided the list into Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Graphic Novels thinking that would make me actually read more non-fiction. That... failed spectacularly. In general, I just didn't finish as many books as I would've liked last year, but it's not fair comparing to 2012, since that was when I got into Marvel and read a ton of trades. Still unaccounted for were (and are) single issue comics and the massive amount of fic I've been reading.

I did do a pretty good job writing reviews for everything, so I'm going to at least try to keep that going.

( CLICK FOR THE LIST. OR ELSE? )

Once again at the request of ceitfianna: Teen Wolf-how did you get into it? When did you first fall for Stiles? Sterek, what fanfic should I read? Anything you can think of.

I'm not 100% sure Fi realizes how potentially dangerous it is asking me to write about "anything I can think about" about Teen Wolf, because it's a bit of an obsession these days, but I'll try not to go too crazy.

( The Show )
( The Fic )

Got another topic suggestion? Go here to suggest something! (In the absence of which I will continue rambling about looking for jobs.)

At the request of ceitfianna: "Talk to me about what being a librarian means for you and your journey to become one."

(If you'd like to suggest a topic to make me write about, comment on this post. Right now it's all Fi.)


I got my first job at my local public library when I turned 16. (I actually asked the circulation manager about jobs about half a year before that, but 16 is their minimum age.) I worked there as a shelver for the rest of high school and came back for most of my summer breaks during college, but for most of that time I didn't actually know what kind of career I wanted after graduation. At the time, what I really knew was that I didn't want to teach high school, which is what many of my fellow English majors were preparing to do. I think I only took one creative writing class, not because it didn't interest me, but because by college I was pretty convinced I had no realistic chance of success there. At some point it finally occurred to me that I could just keep working at the library, and if I got a Masters, I could do that professionally. I really don't know why it took so long to put that together.

It wasn't all smooth sailing from there, though. I applied to, I think, five different graduate programs. I ended up picking McGill because the university is well-respected, I liked the idea of living in Montreal, and the tuition was super cheap compared to American universities. (I'm a Canadian citizen, so I didn't have to pay international fees.) After a few months, I was feeling pretty disenchanted with the whole thing, so I withdrew, spent a month in Columbus, then moved to Kansas City where a worked in, you guessed it, a library, this time at a community college. I went back to grad school at Maryland in the fall, where I discovered that LIS programs just suck universally, but you have to jump through the hoops in order to get the professional qualification.

Between bogus LIS programs and the terrible job market, I've developed quite a bit of library related cynicism, but that's mostly concerning structural problems, not library-work itself. Because that? I still really enjoy. Almost all my jobs in the past decade plus have been in libraries, almost exclusively in public institutions, and at this point I really balk at the idea of working in the corporate world, presuming they'd even have me. I like providing a service that enriches people's lives, whether that translates as suggesting good books to read or teaching technology
skills.

Obviously right now, I'm open to a lot of things, but I would love to get back into a public library position. My ideal would be either working with teens or working with local history materials. (I took a lot of archives classes and worked in archives digitization for three years before I took the high school job.) Columbus is a smaller city, so there aren't as many openings, but there also aren't two competing grad programs in the city, so hopefully the market won't be as oversaturated as it was in D.C. Fingers crossed, you know.

Now that I've been posting again and feel like I have a chance of actually doing this, I'm stealing the topic posting meme from bcgphoenix

Pick a date below and give me a topic — it can be anything, from fandom-related to life-related to history-related to whatever you want.

They will probably be brief, or not, depending on the subject.

Also, I reserve the right to decline prompts that I don’t feel equipped to meet.

Topics: you can get an idea from my tags/from the stuff I usually ramble about/from things you maybe wish I talked about more but don’t.

You can request multiple topics (as long as they’re on different days — one topic per day!).

( Dates below... )