Tuesday Twaddle - A Visual Guide

Today's Twaddle (in lieu of malarkey, which was not possible yesterday, due to a Blogger snafu) will be mostly visual because there's so little to talk about. Actually, there's not all that much to photograph, either, but we won't go there.

Above is the photo I repeatedly attempted to load, yesterday, while I was reading it: Feather Brained by Bob Tarte. If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you've already seen it. I suppose that means I should take a different photo for the review, right? We'll see if I can be bothered. I did finish the book, last night, and I loved the ending.

I only got one book in the mail, last week, and it's one I purchased on a whim. I need to work on that whim business. I keep having attacks of whimsical purchasing.

In this case, The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek popped up when I was looking for something entirely unrelated, book-wise, at Amazon. It absolutely does not look like a book that would appeal to me, a WWI satire over 700 pages long, but for some reason I clicked on the image and read about it. And, within 2 days it was on my doorstep. I've flipped through it and I do like the light-hearted writing style. The real question is, "Will Bookfool be able to stick out a 700+ page book?" The usual answer is "no" but there have been exceptions.

I only finished one other book (besides Feather Brained), last week:

I loved A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki in an, "I want to hug this book" way. The picture makes me snicker. I don't know what possessed me to pose it with Japanese items but after I did, I thought, "That looks stupid; I should make an origami crane or something" (which is probably equally ridiculous), looked up paper cranes in two old origami books I own, failed to find any instructions, and gave up. So, that's the photo I'm currently stuck with. At any rate, the book is terrific and I particularly loved it for the reminder of our visit to Japan in 2011. But, I also adored Ruth Ozeki's writing and will be seeking out her first book.

I stopped everything to focus on A Tale for the Time Being (although that's a little misleading -- you'll see when I tell you why I read so little) read one story from Simon Van Booy's Tales of Accidental Genius, and then dived into Feather Brained, this week. I also settled on my classic of the month, Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson.  Unfortunately, I didn't realize Winesburg, Ohio is a set of interconnected short stories until I got to the second story, so I've temporarily set that aside and I'm considering either shifting to another book or just waiting to read it till after I finish Accidental Genius because I don't really want to read two books of short stories at the same time. We'll see what happens. In the meantime, I picked up an entirely different book, this morning, for the change of pace:

Raising Ryland by Hillary Whittington is nonfiction, the story of a very young girl who declared that she was a boy and has transitioned to boy (without, as far as I know, surgical intervention -- I'm not far enough to know that, yet). I know next to nothing about transgender people -- the psychology, the science, the way trans people feel. What little I've read has been frankly confusing. So, I figure one way to understand where the trans community is coming from is to read their stories. Call them sinners or mental cases or chemically whacked, if that's how you feel, but that's not my bag. What matters to me is understanding and respecting my fellow humans. Raising Ryland just happened to be offered to me by HarperCollins (before the so-called "bathroom bill" in North Carolina), so it's a start.

A brief diversion for links to last week's posts:

• One Step Too Far by Tina Seskis (book review)
• Fiona Friday: Pretty in Red (cat photo)

Just two posts, thanks to a raging migraine that lasted most of the week.

I also checked out a book from the library. There were two very cool things about that experience. One, there were many, many gorgeous black-eyed susans in bloom in the library gardens:

And, the librarian's fingernail polish accurately matched the book cover of my hold, The Nest:

I wish it had occurred to me to snap a picture of her hand on the book. It was cool, though, trust me. We both got a good laugh.

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