Reading something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue
I am so sorry I haven’t updated in a week. I’ve been terribly busy and I was running ragged for the past few days, but this morning is something I really want to share with everyone.
I just got back from the airport with something I’ve had my heart set on for ages…
I run through trivia books like other girls run through, say, a tube of lipstick.
At any given time, in between the novels I read, I thumb through five to eight trivia books simultaneously and all over the house — in bed, in the bathroom, in the den, in the kitchen. As I’ve said before, they make great palate cleansers, especially when I’ve been reading text-heavy narratives, plus they contain snippets that can be read and digested easily, not to mention the convenience of being able to stop at any point of the book and pick it up days or weeks later and just keep on reading. The trivia junkie that I am, these useless bits of information do come in handy from time to time during the weekly quiz nights and the monthly geek fights that I attend.
I finish a batch of trivia books several times in a year, hence the trivia book roundups. Here’s the last bunch from last year, which includes Say Chic; The Bathroom Trivia Book; Be Safe!; Cocktail Party Cheat Sheets; Kiss and Tell; A Year in High Heels; From Altoids to Zima; The TV Guide Book of Lists; The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Fun FAQs. These are books 189-198 for 2010, which means I only owe you 6 more book reviews in my 2010 backlog. Hopefully I have the remaining six up by next week so I can move on to my January reads (12 and counting) as well as a surprise in the works for this month (patience!).
I don’t normally read business books, but I needed a U for last year’s A-Z Challenge and I couldn’t find any fiction book by a U author that interested me, so I raided my sister’s book stash. My sister, marketing manager of the supermarkets of a major retail chain, was about 21 pages into the book Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping by Paco Underhill when I encroached upon her reading! :D
I’m no fashion savant, but I do like reading pretty fashion books, just to keep myself updated.
Last Christmas, I got two personal style books to give as gifts: Style A to Zoe: The Art of Fashion, Beauty, and Everything Glamour by Rachel Zoe with Rose Apodaca, and Off the Cuff: The Guy’s Guide to Looking Good by Carson Kressley. The Rachel Zoe book went to my sister, and the Carson Kressley book to a friend, but of course, before they got wrapped, I could not resist poring into them!
People on my Facebook may have seen this on my status last night — I learned a new word, librocubicularist, which means “someone who reads in bed.”
Because I am an unabashed librocubicularist, I often read in the dark, because I like drifting off to sleep in the middle of a book. In the latter half of 2010, though, my nocturnal reading was severely curtailed (maybe this explains the drop in last year’s reading figures) because I was without a book light for some period of time: my Lumos lightwedge went out of commission (batteries leaked and stuck in the narrow terminals, and their customer service could not give me any advice on how to get them out!); the Really Tiny Book Light turned out to be the Ridiculously (Expensive but) Flimsy Book Light that conked out after a less than a dozen uses; and the lightwedge clone turned out to be, well, a dud.
My book club friends and I were making our rounds of the bargain bookstores one day when I spotted a row of little rectangular boxes on a shelf full of toys and school supplies. It was labeled: Mighty Bright Flex II and when I saw it was a book light at an amazingly low price, I quickly called everyone over and we happily trooped to the counter with at least one box each.
