Bibliomama

Every once in a while there's a glitch in the Ottawa Public Library's ebook system, and a book that should be expired and inaccessible on my ipad just... isn't. It just sticks around until I tap on it to delete and return. It's a happy little gift from the literary gods for which I am always grateful. This time it is a massive tome called New Cthulhu: the Recent Weird , and if it hadn't gone all Overdrive Slipstream I never would have gotten through it on time since it weighs in at around 1100 digital pages. As a fairly devoted horror fan, I'm not great at appreciating actual Lovecraft. Look, I relish tentacle porn and the unjudicious use of the word 'eldritch' as much as the next girl, but it's a little too on-the-nose for me - I just like my horror a tad more subtle. So it's probably not even technically allowed that I love Lovecraft-inspired horror fiction as much as I do. But I do, and most of the stories in this sprawling, wide-ranging

So Sunday was Blogging Out Loud Ottawa  at the Writers Festival , probably the last one ever. I'm kind of sad that there's no chance Lynn will be emailing me to say "I'm so sorry, but you have to read at BOLO again" next year. I wore my new Docs because I wore my old Docs the very first time I read, and it seemed like a full-circle kind of thing. I had brunch with a group of people so fabulous that I kept pinching myself and everybody else just to confirm that I wasn't dreaming, until everyone said stop pinching me or I will pelt you with Tater Tots. Photo credit Jennifer Bennett And here's a really bad photo of my cute dress.  I got to the venue and saw even more fabulous people and I thought I might actually be in heaven, except a few key people were missing. Also, in the one picture of me reading I look as big as a house (not inaccurate, but sobering). But I kind of like this picture of me laughing at Joe Boughner 's hilariousness.

So I saw my (rather dreamy) eye doctor and he thinks my contacts are giving me pink eye because of microscopic areas of inflammation in my eyes, possibly left over from when I was really sick over Christmas. So, eye drops. Then my ears got sore and I couldn't hear very well, so I went to the doctor, and she said I have an ear infection because of poor fluid drainage, possible due to who the fuck knows. So, ear drops. And (TMI alert), the nasal prongs from my CPAP have given me a blister inside my left nostril. So, laying off the CPAP for a few nights (who needs to sleep and breathe at the same time, let's not get greedy). And yes, first world problems and yay Canadian health care and all that crap, but perhaps you'll forgive me if I feel a bit like the seven plagues of Egypt have descended into my head. I'll keep you posted on whether locusts start flying out of my throat. So my reading focus has been less than stellar. I keep starting new books and not finishing them

A few weeks ago, I came across a  Buzzfeed Quiz  about Newbery Medal books with a tagline: Were you a well-read child ? Naturally, this pissed me off a little (I just typed "got my knickers in a bit of a twist" and then erased it, for some reason. I wonder why that is. It's a perfectly serviceable expression, and yet I felt disinclined to use it. Curious) since there seems to be a bit of a fallacious assumption going on there: one could surely have been a well-read child (I was) without having necessarily read a great number of Newbery Medal-winning books (I hadn't, as it turns out). But doing the quiz (I can't resist quizzes where I get to check off books, even ones that irritate me - the quizzes, I mean, not the books) reminded me of a few books that I had always meant to read and had somehow never gotten around to, and introduced me to a few others that looked interesting and worth a look. So I decided then and there that I would read and blog about all the New

So last week was tough. I was recovering from my second mysterious barfing plague in two weeks, my husband was in France, and Tuesday evening it started raining and didn't stop until Friday afternoon. It wasn't that there was so much to do - there were two baseball games and a school barbecue to deal with, but none of them actually ended up happening, because of illness (Angus's) or weather. It wasn't that I fed the kids leftover macaroni and bacon on Monday and ordered pizza on Tuesday and then made chicken souvlaki on Wednesday and made them eat it for the rest of the week. Photo credit John Beales It was that I was doing everything while dragging these shackles around. You know, the depression shackles, the ones that clank around behind you and make every step a huge effort, while hollering lie after lie. You're ugly . You're useless . Nobody loves you . Your kids wish they had a better mother . They also whisper a few things that are probably true. You

I've never claimed to only read "worthwhile" literature. I hold hard to my trashy mysteries - okay, I hold hard to my love of mysteries, and when I was younger I read trashy ones, but at this point I try to only read well-written ones. I love science fiction and fantasy and I will go toe-to-toe with anyone who says genre fiction isn't valuable or worthy of respect. But I'm not really an indiscriminate reader, either, although I use it as a label. I don't read much historical fiction or war novels. I don't like hard science fiction. And I don't read "women's fiction", where the main thrust of the plot is women's relationships with other women, or work-life balance, or romance. I always say that it's not that I think less of it, I just have a limited number of books I can read and they're all filled with other types of fiction. The same way I don't shun reality television because I'm above it, I just prefer my ridiculo

co·in·ci·dence kōˈinsədəns,-ˌdens/ noun 1 . a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection. "it's no coincidence that this new burst of innovation has occurred in the free nations" synonyms: accident ,  chance ,  serendipity ,  fortuity ,  providence ,  happenstance , fate ;  More Best not to bother reading this if you're one of those people that are like "enh, whatever, coincidences aren't statistically relevant, don't bother me with your quasi-superstitious silliness". Also, lighten up man. I love coincidences. I think incidents of coincidence evince extreme coolness. It's like the general perversity of things has decided to bump your hip playfully with a shaggy, golden-retriever-like head instead of working you over with overgrown spiky fingernails. That said, a couple of my weird book things aren't coincidences at all. One was just an embarrassing lapse: I was al

I'm not remotely surly today, but I also can't think of a post title (I suck so badly at SEO optimization, I might as well title every post DO NOT READ: DEVOID OF ANYTHING INSPIRING, ENTERTAINING OR REMOTELY TIME-WORTHY and have done with it). I've had the loveliest week, which is weird since it's January and typically I'd be eyes-deep in the Slough of Despond. It's been cold and the roads have been not great, so aside from grocery shopping and ferrying Eve to acting class and piano I've been mostly hermitting, while baking, cooking, hanging on Twitter with fabulous people, reading and making another embarrassing blunder in one of my courses but who cares? I blamed the children for my witlessness, and the instructor has kids too so she was on board with it. I read a couple of articles on Book Riot recently that referred to my issue   about Orson Scott Card and whether I should see Ender's Game: No, I Won't Read Your Book if I Think You're a Mon

Books 2013 - Final Total and Two-Star Books Here we go! Books I read in 2013 (that I remembered to record on Goodreads - otherwise they're quite possibly lost to the ether forever). 111 seems to be the grand total, compared with -- *clicks around madly looking for last year's post* -- geez,  144 last year . I've been positively slacking. I blame  baseball . I always pause and reflect on whether it's worth posting about the one-and-two-star books - if people are reading these posts for recommendations, it seems kind of silly. But then I looked at the Goodreads reviews for a book I downloaded to my ipad on a whim on New Year's Eve Eve and then stayed up way too late reading, and it really illustrated how different people can have completely different reactions to the same book, and it doesn't denote a lack of intelligence or one person being more right than another (unless we're talking about, say,  this , or maybe  this  - so many people, so, so wro