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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

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