Book notes

Category: General/meta

  • Library Books/What Next?

    I went to the library the other night intending just to return The Quickening Maze and to pick up just one book I had on hold, but you know how that goes, right? I left with not one but five books, and now I get to pick which to read next. From top to bottom,…

  • What I Read in 2010/Plans for 2011

    Happy almost 2011! I’m pleased to be back from my annual Christmas trip to Georgia (Atlanta-ish), and glad to have been re-united with my suitcase, which made it back to NYC two days earlier than I did. I’m planning a very low-key night here in slushy Brooklyn: I’d hoped to go see the steam whistles…

  • The rest of English Hours, plus a vacation and a great sidewalk find

    I read the rest of English Hours very slowly, interspersed with a few issues of the New Yorker, and am not sure I have much intelligent to say about it, especially since I seem to have lost a piece of paper on which I’d written some notes while reading. But I know I wanted to…

  • San Francisco Bookstores and Other Highlights: Part Two

    In my last post, I talked about Book Bay Fort Mason and what I bought there. Here are the rest of the bookstores I found noteworthy on my San Francisco trip. But first, a photo. I didn’t take any bookish pictures, but here’s one from my favorite long walk (Day 2, see the end of…

  • San Francisco Bookstores and Other Highlights: Part One

    As previously mentioned, I took a one-week vacation in San Francisco in late August. It was great. It’s been a while since I traveled solo for fun rather than for work, and it was a delight to have my days entirely free to do whatever I felt like, never to have any particular place I…

  • Cooking, plus thoughts about choosing books

    It is summer, which means mountains of vegetables from my CSA farm share are filling my fridge every week. I was behind on cooking and eating all these veggies for a few week, but the other day I decided to have a great big fridge clean-out, in which I threw out everything that was past…

  • Library Book Interlude

    For a while I feel like had been so good about reading books I own instead of library books… or maybe it’s just that I was really slowly making my way through The Captive & The Fugitive, so it felt like I was reading books I owned instead of library books, but really it was…

  • Library Books, and the TBR Pile

    So far I’ve only read two books from my TBR Challenge list, though one of those (The Captive & The Fugitive) was a long one. I started a third yesterday (Nigel Slater’s Eating for England), but I think it may get put aside for a little bit. I went to the library this morning to…

  • Book-shopping in London

    In January I went to Cambridge (UK) for a few days for work: I arrived on a Wednesday, went in to the office for workshops with colleagues on Thursday and Friday, had pleasing dinners (including one at Alimentum), and did a little evening walking around town. Because transatlantic airfare is so much cheaper if there’s…

  • What I Read in 2009, Numerically Speaking

    Reading everyone else’s end-of-year posts, plus reading Jenna Freedman’s Lower East Side Librarian Reading Log 2009, made me want to make a wrap-up post of my own. In 2009 I did not read as many books that I own as I wanted to—though I hope that will change in 2010 with the help of the…