Filling in the Gaps

I think I picked the wrong candle for the computer room because right now I'd really like to sneeze but I can't really take a deep breath. So--tomorrow this candle moves to the den and I stop Vick's flashbacks while typing.

What's up this afternoon? I recently watched a CriminOlly video asking whether he'd read a book published in every year he'd been alive (per his Goodreads' list). Immediately, I had to discover whether or not I had a book from every year I'd been alive on my Goodreads list. I did not (which doesn't mean I haven't read books published in those years, just that I haven't bothered to fully populate my Goodreads from childhood forward. This meant I now needed to read at least five books to populate those years.

Which meant that I needed to raid our bookshelves to find books from 1973, 1980, 1984, 1989, and 2023. Interlude for lots of sneezing, being asked what I'm doing, knocking a stack of books on one dog, and realizing I'm really bad at guessing publication years based on cover art.

Here are the books I found for each year:

1973: The Mystery of Monster Mountain (Alfred Hitchcock/Scholastic)

1980: The Cape Cod Caper (Margot Arnold)

1984: The Third Book of Swords (Fred Saberhagen)

1989: The Shining Falcon (Josepha Sherman)

2023: Stargun Messenger (Darby Harn)

1973 turned out to be a very difficult publication year for our particular bookshelves and it eventually drove me to a stack of books inherited from a great aunt who had several old classroom shelves of paperback books from the late '60s through the '70s. These books, after providing a hit of nostalgia, had been slotted in the very back of a bookcase, behind a stack of more recent reads. These are the kinds of books that you may remember from book fairs, the ones that start out with soft, maybe slightly grey, pages and age into stiff, yellow pages with crackling glue at the spine. There is very little overlap between my own book fair shelf, although they share The Witch of Blackbird Pond, which I may reread this fall around the time I reread Practical Magic. I did pull two additional books from this stack (Stowaway to the Mushroom Planet and The Ghost That Came Alive) that I plan to read this afternoon.

I don't know that there's a time goal for reading these books/adding them to my Goodreads (there is a stack of books in the chair next to me of books I haven't added from the beginning of the year) but I'd like to have these read before my next TBR stack, which begins in August.

Hope you're reading/writing is just as delicious as a book fair!

-- chrissa

Comments

Treacle Season

Sharing with The Sunday Muse #190 , hosted this week by Carrie. Keaton was great in that show—the one with wings— Where he was constantly a [man]child on a ledge dreaming an angel who became a superhero. She was a sarcastic (fake?) angel—it was the 80s— But always good, on time, her lessons easy, Easy as it would have been for him to fall. The metaphor so obvious...but I didn't get it. Nor the easy and obvious good. (/s) I watch the TV movie every other December Remembering believing in easy And crushing on this character, that city... Angels should be sweet, sarcastic figures, knowing (like nurses and social workers) we prefer Sleeping on the ledge, reckless to call for "heroes." To clear up any confusion: there is no Michael Keaton movie we watch every holiday season. Although, if there were...I'd probably watch it. -- Chrissa

Seeds for the Fire Bushes

Sharing with The Sunday Muse #261 , for our final week. Thank you for reading & interacting with these poems over the past several years. Cold blood works the fire bushes: marble, serpent, maybe. Snakehearted limestone gathers a full bouquet. Line the tables, cook the feast over the flowers, Hang the bottles from the marble bodies. Gods are sporting tonight; Dancing under the empty jars Eyes clear as the darkness, Deep as the heavens. Hang bottles to catch the sparks, Bottles to cast from the shore Already burning from their nearness. Bottles to kindle a thousand Epics, hearts, madnesses, parties... Bottles to seed the fire bushes On some colder, newer shore. I'm not sure whether I'll be returning to weekly poetry for the time being. I might turn this blog to reading to inspires me to get through a grim and treacherous TBR that seems to swell with books that aren't quite read, even if bookmarks appear in their shallows. From June through September I'm going to

Turn Away

Sharing with The Sunday Muse , for #193. Turn away, like the moon, listening... Listening to the planet that rumbles with a hundred million slaps. All the feet, all the rockets, all the pistons in the cars on the asphalt over the chasm where the veins run deep, blue in sunlight, black at night. Running over the chasm. Once or twice they ran to you. Once or twice they ran by. Greetings and salutations. The sky is an entertaining shade of concrete yellow as the rain promised earlier in the week makes good on its arrival. It's a disturbing bright sallow sky, the kind of sky that puts you in mind of old movies and degraded film stock and the pops and crackles incidental to the main story. Several years ago I made a resolution to journal more and last year I came across a video that suggested I actually re-read those journals, at least those of the previous year, at the beginning of each new year. Technically, I have kept the journal resolution, making daily notes in the margins of

A Weed on The Curb

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