Well friends, how’s it going these days? Here we are barrelling into the middle of December and headlong toward the end of 2016. The book lists are popping up everywhere and I have so far managed to avoid looking at a single one of them. I am afraid if I do I won’t be able to resist adding more to the pile of books that is already growing “for my vacation” the last two weeks of the month.

That’s what I keep using to comfort myself at any rate. The pile is mostly books about neoliberalism and it is not quite done growing yet. Once it is I will give you a full list of what I borrowed from the library. I don’t plan on reading all of them, I am not certain I have that kind of fortitude. When they are all piled up where I can look at them, I plan on sorting through and making a decision about what I will actually read.

Onto this pile has also somehow slipped a gardening book, a science book, and a training book for cyclists. I could play coy and say I have no idea where these came from, but I know I wouldn’t be fooling anyone.

I am still hurriedly reading my way through all the library books I was deluged with over Thanksgiving. I started reading The Lesser Bohemians a couple days ago. I loved McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing and very much like the way the new one starts off. Unfortunately it is in a style like Girl which means it cannot be read fast or rushed through even if I tried. Having only a couple days left with the book before it was due, I decided to stop around page 48 so I am not too far in. I will get back on the holds queue for it and when next my turn comes round, I will know I have to pick it up right away. The queue is not huge and my guess is I will have it again sometime in January.

In the meantime, I am rushing to finish The Secret Loves of Geek Girls and when that is done, I am ready to dive in and speed through Lab Girl. Is your head spinning yet because mine sure is!

I have a new book to read and reivew for Library Journal too and it is one I actually would pick up on my own for a change, Siri Hustvedt’s A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women. It is a huge fat book of essays. Yay! For those of your who were interested in The Nemirovsky Question (a play on The Jewish Question), a book I read about Irene Nemirovsky, it is excellent. It is one of those combo kinds of books —biography, literary criticism, social and cultural and political history. Well written and intriguing as it sets out to examine Nemirovsky’s Jewishness (she was accused of being a self-hating Jew and anti-Semitic).

Well and so. I could babble on about the book piles and you would likely be marvelously kind and tolerant about it, but I will not burden you with that — for now anyway! I make no promises about what might happen next week.

I do have a bit of housekeeping I have to let you know about. At the end of December any email address you might have of mine that is from earthlink is going to disappear, zap! So if you need to email me, please use the email I have linked over in my sidebar for the blog. If you have my personal earthlink email address, that will disappear too, so email me before then and I can give you a new one.