Sad State of Affairs

Don't you think I'd have more free time, to read and to blog? Not so much. Unemployment is eerily time-consuming.

Anyway, July was the Month of the Young Adult Book. I read about 5 regular books and at least 7 YA novels. They varied a lot. The Babysitter's Club is consistent, the same way those little cheese-and-crackers packets, the ones that come with a little red paddle for applying your cheese whiz to your butter cracker, are consistent. Yum. Julie of the Wolves was not bad, but seemed kind of obscure and distant. The sequel, the crappily-titled Julie, was much better, I thought, and much more full of character development. The end was weird and I didn't get it, but other than that, it was great. Fever, 1793 was pretty good, in a solid, historical fiction, YA way. Nothing to write home about.

Knowledge of Angels, by the way, which I was raving about before? Just lovely. Kick in the gut there at the end, but just a gorgeous book.

Now I've hit one of those lulls where I started a bunch of books at the same time, so I haven't finished one in ages. I'm reading The Spiral Staircase, by Karen Armstrong. It's a sequel to her memoir about her seven years as a nun, about trying to make her way in the world (as the nuns call everything outside the cloister). I'm also reading My Latest Grievance, by Eleanor Lipman, which, while still dealing with her theme of how annoying people sometimes improve our lives, is kind of more fun than a lot of them, mostly because, so far, the main character is keeping one step ahead of the annoying person. And I couldn't help it--in spite of the 5 books I borrowed (it's getting on toward stole) from Brenda and the 5 other library books I have out (including The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco, which is a tome), I've started re-reading (RE! As though I didn't own a dozen books of my own that I haven't read yet) The Seige by Clara Claiborne Park. This is a fabulous book about raising an autistic daughter who was born about three years before the word "autism" existed, and back when it was commonly called "refrigerator mother syndrome." It's not a miserable book; it's a beautiful, hopeful, honest book.

I'm thinking of quitting the whole unemployment thing to read full time.