The Sunday Post #94

The Sunday Post is hosted by The Caffeinated Book Reviewer. It’s a chance to recap the past week, talk about next week, and share news. It’s Monday, What Are You Reading? is hosted by Book Date. I get to tell you what I’ve read recently.

Blogging From A To Z

Things around here are a little different this month. I’m participating in the Blogging from A to Z challenge. Every day in April (except Sundays), I’m going to write a short post about how books and book blogging have impacted my life. Brace yourself. Posts are coming.

Dewey’s 24 Hour Read-a-thon

Dewey’s 24 Hour Read-a-Thon starts on April 29! This is my first time participating. I’m going to be posting my updates on Twitter, so follow me there if you want to see them.

On The Blog Last Week

• N is for “Number Generator”
• O is for“ Ones I Read Over And Over”
• P is for “Plague”
• Q is for “Quitting”
• R is for “Read All The Things!”
• S is for “Special Ed.”

Coming Up On The Blog

I won’t be posting a Sunday Post next Sunday. Here’s what’s coming up in the next two weeks:

• T is for “Tommyknockers & Terabithia”
• U is for “Uncertainty”
• V is for “Vacation”
• W is for “What Happened to Lani Garver”
• X is for “Xenophobia (and Books to Combat It)”
• Y is for “You’ll Rot Your Brain”
• Z is for “Zzzzz (Books That Kept Me Up Past Bedtime)”
• Review of American Housewife: Stories by Helen Ellis
• Covers I Love
• Review of The Sound of Gravel: A Memoir by Ruth Wariner
• April Wrap-Up
• Massive Spring Book Haul (Part 1)

In My Reading Life

Last week, I finished Smoke by Dan Vyleta and Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Then I read Most Dangerous: Daniel Ellsberg and the Secret History of the Vietnam War by Steve Sheinkin. Right now, I’m reading A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories by Lucia Berlin and Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters.

In The Rest Of My Life

Five things that made me happy last week:

1. Easter with my family.
2. So much chocolate.
3. My cousin discovered that we’re distantly related to the actress Courteney Cox. I wish I’d inherited her acting talent. Or her looks. Or her ability to make money.
4. The sunflowers I’m growing in the basement are getting big. I had to put them in new pots.
5. Stanley Cup playoffs. I was a rabid hockey fan as a child/teen, but I gave it up several years ago to make more time for reading. Lately, I’ve been blogging like a machine, so I’ve been listening to games while I type.

Take care of yourselves and be kind to each other! See you around the blogosphere!

S is for “Special Ed.”

Welcome to the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. Every day in April (except Sundays), I’ll be sharing a short bookish memory with you.

I was definitely not born a bookworm. When I was a kid, I did everything in my power not to read.

As a child, I was . . . um . . . special. School was not my thing. In school, I was so anxious that I twitched uncontrollably or so depressed that my teachers would have had better luck teaching a bowl of lime Jell-O how to read. I was a profoundly slow learner who couldn’t handle unpredictability or changes to my routine. I hated crowds and couldn’t focus in the classroom. I was also a control freak with zero social skills. Basically, little-me was a hot mess in a fancy dress.

From first to sixth grade, I took classes for “Special” kids. For most of the day, I was in class with the “regular” kids, but before school and during lunch and recess, I had extra lessons. I was in “special” math, reading, and writing classes. I spent hours sitting in hallways, working one-on-one with a teacher’s aide. I’m surprised that I don’t have permanent nerve damage in my ass from doing so much of my schoolwork on hard floors. (I don’t know the current status of the aide’s ass. Maybe she got nerve damage from sitting with me? Would the school have to pay her medical bills? I need to Google these things.)

Anyway, being “special” isn’t great for a twitchy kid’s self-esteem. Adults were always trying to figure out what was wrong with me. Nobody knew why I was such a failure at life. I felt like there was enormous pressure on me to catch up to the other kids and stop being special. But, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t catch up. The self-loathing was intense. I was terrified of making mistakes because mistakes just reconfirmed my “special” status.

Then, there were the bullies. Kids look cute on the outside, but they can be vicious little demons. They called me “Special Ed,” “Ed,” “Retard,” and “Fucktard.” For anyone who hasn’t been initiated into an elementary school clique, Fucktard is a clever amalgamation of the words “Fucking retard.” The bullying got so bad that I started getting physically sick whenever the teacher’s aide walked into the classroom. I knew she was there for me, and I knew the other kids would give me crap for needing her help.

Since I didn’t get along with other kids, I was sent to special friendship classes. For Friendship Class, the school counselors rounded up all the “Eds” in school and put us in a windowless room roughly the size of a walk-in closet. Then, they had us make art. This often ended in disaster.

(Oh, I just reminded myself of a random tangent. Funny story about Friendship Class: Once upon a time in Friendship Class, one of my fellow Eds had a meltdown. He started flinging buckets of crayons around our classroom. Since I was an anxious Ed, I immediately lost interest in coloring my Friendship Turtle and panicked. One of the counselors said, “Don’t worry, that boy has ADHD.” I have no idea if she was talking to the other counselor or to me, but nobody bothered to explain what “ADHD” meant. For all I knew, it was a secret code word for We’re about to get stabbed to death with the sharp end of a broken crayon, but don’t panic, the school district will give our corpses proper Christian burials. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Friendship Class.)

Okay, back to books. How did I transform from an Ed who couldn’t read to a bookworm? Honestly, I’m not entirely sure. There was no magic Helen-Keller-type moment where someone shoved my hand under a water pump and everything suddenly made sense. Becoming a bookworm happened slowly. My parents and teachers were very persistent. They made me read Every. Single. Day. When I complained, fought, and feigned deadly illnesses, they still made me read.

During forced reading time in fifth grade, I accidentally stumbled across a few books that I didn’t hate. These books showed me that not all books suck. Once I knew my own reading tastes, I was able to hunt down more books that didn’t suck. I eventually discovered that I (gasp!) enjoyed reading. By the time I got to seventh grade, I was reading for fun every night. I was also put in normal classes in seventh grade. I was still weird, but I was no longer “special.”

So, if you have “Eds” in your life, don’t give up on them. I can’t tell you how my fellow Eds turned out, but this Ed read 108 books last year.

Are you a bookworm? Were you born that way, or did you develop your book love later in life?

  

R is for “Read All The Things!”

Welcome to the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. Every day in April (except Sundays), I’ll be sharing a short bookish memory with you.

I’ve been single handedly running this book blog since 2013. All 664 posts currently on the blog were written by me. The graphics and layout were painstakingly cobbled together by me. Every typo, broken link, ugly mess, and minor disaster is completely my fault. Trust me when I say that blogging is hard. It’s much harder than most people realize. You have to know a lot about the subject you’re blogging about, and you also have to know a lot about blogging itself. Today, I thought we’d take a look at some of the non-bookish things blogging has taught me.

What I've learned from blogging

1. Website design. I don’t know much about the workings of the Internet, and it’s not a subject that interests me, but when you run a blog, you have no choice. You have to learn something about designing a website. I didn’t like any of Blogger’s premade templates and wanted to design my own, but I had no idea how to do that. How do I get the buttons in my sidebar to work? How do I get my header in the right place? These were all problems that I needed to solve.

2. Making graphics. This is one of the things I hate most about blogging. I’m not good at making graphics and never will be. (Check the graphic at the top of this post for evidence of my ineptitude.) But, blog posts that include graphics get more traffic. If I wanted more people to see my posts, I needed to teach myself how to make graphics.

3. Social media. Are you on Twitter? Facebook? Instagram? Pinterest? Bloglovin’? Goodreads? When I first started blogging, I wasn’t on any of them. I still use far fewer social media sites than most bloggers, but I taught myself Twitter so I could connect with the book blogging community.

4. Making friends. Using social media and commenting on other people’s blogs was terrifying at first. What if I said the wrong thing? What if people hated me? What if nobody understood my weird sense of humor? Talking to strangers on the Internet is scary at first, but eventually those strangers become friends.

5. Persistence. Most blogs don’t get 10000 followers overnight. When you first start out, you’re going to spend a lot of time shouting into the void. I did. I sometimes still feel like I’m shouting into the void. If you want people to notice, you’ll just have to keep shouting until they do.

6. Good things happen slowly. Bad things happen all at once. It takes years to make friends and build an audience for your blog. Bloggers aren’t born knowing how to write great posts. In contrast, bad things can happen quickly. Websites crash. A comment you made is taken out of context and blows up on Twitter. When you’re a blogger, you just have to be patient and do the best you can.

7. The value of shutting up. I have a lot of opinions. I like to pretend that I’m the smartest person on Earth, but I’m definitely not. There are always people who know more than I do. Sometimes, I should shut up and listen to them instead of shouting my opinion across the Internet.

If you’re a blogger, what has blogging taught you? 

Q is for “Quitting”

Welcome to the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. Every day in April (except Sundays), I’ll be sharing a short bookish memory with you.

“Almost everyone can remember losing his or her virginity, and most writers can remember the first book he/she put down thinking: I can do better than this. Hell, I am doing better than this! What could be more encouraging to the struggling writer than to realize his/her work is unquestionably better than that of someone who actually got paid for his/her stuff?” – Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

On Writing by Stephen King is my favorite writing craft book ever. That’s a huge compliment because I’ve read a lot of craft books, and I think they’re naturally boring. Stephen King proves that he has writing talent in On Writing because he manages to take a tedious subject and turn it into something you actually want to read about.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft - Stephen King

Part memoir, part master class by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writer's craft, comprising the basic tools of the trade every writer must have. King's advice is grounded in his vivid memories from childhood through his emergence as a writer, from his struggling early career to his widely reported near-fatal accident in 1999—and how the inextricable link between writing and living spurred his recovery. Brilliantly structured, friendly and inspiring, On Writing will empower and entertain everyone who reads it—fans, writers, and anyone who loves a great story well told.

The quote at the start of this post refers to writers, but when I read it, I also thought about readers. Do you remember the first book you DNFed (did not finish)? I hated reading when I was a kid and probably DNFed 99% of the books that were forced upon me, but by the time I was a teenager, I was a rabid reader. I read every book I could get my hands on.

I rarely DNFed books as a teenager, but there is one DNF that stands out in my mind. When I was fifteen, English class forced me to read Black Boy by Richard Wright. Fifteen-year-old me could not make herself care about Wright's rambling infatuation with communism. I know Black Boy is an important American classic and blah, blah, blah, but I was bored. Truly, mind-numbingly, bored.

Black Boy - Richard Wright

Black Boy is a classic of American autobiography, a subtly crafted narrative of Richard Wright's journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. An enduring story of one young man's coming of age during a particular time and place, Black Boy remains a seminal text in our history about what it means to be a man, black, and Southern in America.

I have a memory of shoving Black Boy off the edge of my bed and having this conversation with myself:

There are millions of books in the world.

I won’t live long enough to read all of them.

I tried really hard to read this book, and I hate it.

If there are millions of books in the world, why am I wasting time reading one I hate?

To be a happy bookworm, sometimes I have to DNF. Forcing myself to read something I don’t like makes reading feel like a chore instead of a hobby. I need my hobbies to be fun, not stressful. Making the decision to DNF can be hard sometimes, but life’s too short to read boring books.

Do you remember the first book you DNFed?