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

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 Soul and The Spine

Sharing with The Sunday Muse #195 . Come and share! When it blew out the candle, It began to speak, voice low, eyes dimmer than flame. Jenn believed, once upon a childhood (she's still there... but it's waning), it inhaled fire. Spines, tonight. Gears ladder bones and metal and plastic, all that lived, rungs to heaven. Heaven is a level of space where you can't breathe so they used to send the dead. When the flame goes, it takes our memories with it. But not bot files. Maybe it believes she'll sleep easier if bots go breathless, too. It continues murmuring and she pretends she's hearing a confession in a box Like the song her mother plays when the dark stretches between signals We can handle shocks. She can handle the dark, the small not-flame of its eyes. It's finally winter!! Which means bitmapped frost on the roofs, cold mornings, and a table full of succulents that are pretty much glaring at me because the kitchen window isn't the same as full su...

A Single (Terrible) Poem

I did not buy the poetry book whose sample Was page after page of essay and praise. I'm not following the trumpets. Today I follow the ringers-- Huzzah and call out the streets! Lift your arm, swing the bell; Call out the quiet, call out the neat Call out the loud, call out the bold Call out the wrong, call out the wise We remember the bells We shiver the skies. This isn't about...anything. It's not about nothing. It should go without saying that a poem shouldn't need an essay or a textbook to be what it is. And I'm not sure why, with a stack of poetry at hand to be read, one silly Kindle sample (and writer's block and anxiety and...) would push my buttons so badly. But seriously. Where is my parody book full of fake blurbs that runs for 50 pages and ends with a single (terrible) poem? -- Chrissa

A Weed on The Curb

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