February is a Fickle Month

Happy Sunday All,

February, month two of 2017, 28 days of wintery bliss that somehow always goes by far to fast. February, the month where I don't feel like I accomplished as much as I wanted to regarding my reading goals. February, the month that distracted me like no other this year! Oh February, by Tuesday you will end, March will begin, and I have a plan; yes I have a plan to March straight into these reading challenges with vigor and coffee. So much coffee.

To date I've completed the following challenges:

BOOK RIOT READ HARDER
Read a book about books	The Book Jumper	Mechthild Glaser	384
Read a book published between 1900 and 1950	The Great Gatsby	F. Scott Fitzgerald	156
Read a book that is set more than 5000 miles from your location	Tulip Fever (Amsterdam)	Deborah Moggach	288
Read a book in which a character of color goes on a spiritual journey	Norwegian Wood	Haruki Murakami	296
Read a book published by a micro-press	Margaret The First	Danielle Dutton	176
POP SUGAR
A book of letters	The Private Letters of Countess Erzesbet Bathory	Kimberly Craft	142
An audio book	Caraval	Stephanie Garber	416
A book that's a story within a story	The Miniaturist	Jessie Burton	416
An espionage thriller	Bad Monkey	Matt Ruff	241
A book by an author who uses a pseudonym	The Silent Wife	A.S.A Harrison	326
A bestseller from a genre you don't normally read	How to fight presidents	Daniel O'Brien	272
A book involving travel	Passenger/Wayfarer (Time travel)	Alexandra Bracken	1018
A book that's published in 2017	The Possessions	Sarah Flannery Murphy	368
A book involving a mythical creature	The Bear and the Nightengale	Katherine Arden	336
A book you've read before that never fails to make you smile
A book with career advice	Getting an Academic Job in History	Dana Polanichka	112
A book with pictures	Vlad the Impaler: The Real Count Dracula	Enid A. Goldber & Norman Itzkowitz	128
The first in a series you haven't read before	Under Different Stars	Amy A Bartol	297
A book with an eccentric character	The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared	Jonas Jonasson & Rod Bradbury	396
A book you got from a used book sale	The Last Lecture	Randy Pausch & Jeffrey Zaslow	206
#LitsyAtoZ
Book A	All The Ugly and Wonderful Things	Bryn Greenwood	352
Book Z	Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald	Therese Ann Fowler	375

Moving on into March I'm realizing that I need to get focused again; books can be distracting, who would have known?

Since it seems that the area I'm lacking in the most at present is my #LitsyAtoZ books they're going to be my March focus. My plan is to read at least five books slated out for that challenge and one for each of the others. Seven challenge slated books, and then whatever else I want to read. Gotta love having that goal right? 

Until next time, 

XoXo 

BrainyHeroine

Failures, Feats, and February Goals

Afternoon All,

Sorry to have kept you waiting, but the last few weeks have been a bit challenging. For example, the weekend of the 24in48 Read-a-Thon I'd been so excited for? Yeah, my horrible brother in law came into town and it turned out to be grasping at the straws of time to get 24 hours of reading in. I was able to finish Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitsgerald by Therese Anne Fowler, which was wonderful as I've been watching Amazon's "Z:The Beginning of Everything", a truly magical show.

I'm not proud of how January ended, though my stats are pretty okay. 27 books consumed. 8 Audio books, 3 E-Books and 16 printed books. Of these books 2 were book club books, 2 were for LitsyAtoZ, with the rest filling the Book Riot and Pop Sugar reading challenges in various slots.

February will be a better month! On Litsy and Instagram I'm doing FeistyFeb and RiotGram pics, following the prompts and sharing them around! I'm also doubling down on my reading efforts. I need to do more of my LitsyAtoZ books, and zero in on the remaining challenge categories. Oh, and I still want to read some things for fun, and I kind of get side tracked when I just read for fun.

With February having just started my current listen is Caraval by Stephanie Garber, My current read is Vassa in the Night by Sarah Porter, Soonly I'll be starting Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly and The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. My current book club read is Tulip Fever by Deborah Moggach .

Until next time,

XOXO
-BrainyHeroine

The Joy and Luck of a Book Club

Morning All,

Can we talk book clubs for a moment? I personally belong to two, one that I run and one that I participate in, and then I have a Book of the Month subscription which sort of counts. The club I run is a Historical Fiction book club that was born many years ago thanks to a course on the MOOC site Coursera. Our January book is America's First Daughter by Laura Kamoie and Stephanie Dray. The one that I just participate in is new and one of the Litsy Goes Postal groups (#CoverToCover). #CoverToCover is a little more mysterious, I get to read books selected by 12 other amazing women, write my thoughts in a notebook, send it off to the next person, and get the book and notebook I send out back sometime next year before the cycle starts again.

Now I know the BOTM subscription isn't actually a book club, but A LOT of the books I'm using for the #LitsyAtoZ challenge came from BOTM. Knowing that I have 12 mystery books coming to me means that someone may send me something to fill in a gap on any of these challenges is fascinating to me, and running a club means I get to steer the selection towards something I need if needed. Granted for the HF book club we vote on books, but I'm the one that puts up the selection. February's book is The Other Einstein by Marie Benedict, which I'm using as my "A book I was excited to buy but haven't read yet" book.

There's also just a magic about having a collection of people who are all reading and discussing the same books, especially when one of them is your absolute favorite. I like the conversations that I've had thanks to book clubs, and I love it when people say they hated the book. It is perfectly okay to not like the book! What book club decided that it wasn't?

When you've found your passion about something, regardless of what it is, you want to share it. Books take my breath away, give me far to many emotions, consume me, and sometimes annoy me; and yes I've read books I haven't liked or just couldn't get into, it happens to the best of us.

So find someone to talk to about the books you're reading. I'm sure you'll find it exhilarating and exciting when you see someone else light up the way you did, or when you get into a passionate or loud discussion about why the book was bad in your opinion. Find or create a book club, in person, online, through the mail even! You won't regret it.

TTFN
-BrainyHeroine

The Crisis of X and the Curse of Netflix

Hello Internet,

As you may know I am participating in the #LitsyAtoZ book challenge in 2017, (to learn more about it check out some other posts like this one or this one.) The gist is 26 books, with the titles corresponding with a letter of the alphabet, and our English alphabet has some pretty weird letters; namely the letter X. X is weird and random and sounds like an E or a Z depending on how you say it or how something is spelled. However! I proved successful in my endeavor to find a book beginning with X, the lucky winner was/is Xanadu by John Mann. I was able to find a high quality copy for only a few bucks off of Thrift Books (which is amazeballs) and waited to receive my holy grail. First I got a Spanish edition of "Prisoner of Heaven" by Carlos Zafron, a truly fantastic novel I already own in English. After they corrected their error I did in fact get the book I'd ordered. With one very small exception, the title had changed. When ordered it was a lovely gold cover that bore the name XANADU by John Mann, and this is not what I got.

Turns out that Xanadu became the source material for the show on Netflix about Marco Polo and his adventures. Yay for the author, but it has left me in a pickle. Can I continue using this book because it can be found under the right letter? Do I find a new X book because the new title doesn't match? Silly as it seems I'm quite flustered by this. I feel like I could get away with it, in the manner that Starbucks gets away with having you pay for $5 worth of coffee, but giving you a cup that wasn't quite full because of "foam" or "whipped cream". Technically it was what you asked for and wanted, but you somehow still wound up gypped.

Thankfully I have time before I'll read my Marco Polo book, and maybe I'll replace it with a different X book, maybe this one will fit in somewhere else in the midst of all these challenges. Maybe I'll let it stay where X marked its spot in the first place.

Who really knows? The Shadow?

-BrainyHeroine

The Insta List

Morning All,

Today is the last Wednesday of the ridiculous year of 2016; and last night I found a book challenge list on Instagram that blends in beautifully with all the other #LitGoals for 2017 and will be simple enough to incorporate. This is listed as the 2017 Reading Challenge: Reading for Fun: Put the oomph back in your reading life! (Do people lose the oomph? Is that a thing? Should I worry about that?) 

The challenges are as follows: 

• A book you chose for the cover
• A book with a reputation for being un-put-down-able
• A book set somewhere you've never been but would like to visit
• A book you've already read
• A juicy memoir
• A book about books or reading
• A book in a genre you usually avoid
• A book you don't want to admit you're dying to read
• A book in the backlist of a new favorite author 
• A book recommended by someone with great taste
• A book you were excited to buy or borrow but haven't read yet
• A book about a topic or subject you already love

Hmm... On second thought this may be tougher than I imagined, how do I pick ONE book I'm excited to read or borrow and haven't read? 

Can't wait to see how this one turns out! 

#TTYL

-BrainyHeroine

Going Postal for the New Year!

Good Morning All,

I am ridiculously excited to be a part of a Litsy Goes Postal group. 13 books, 13 months, 13 people. I can't wait to get each book, see if I have similar tastes to anyone, see if my mind is opened to something new. Perhaps one or two of these books will even fall into a challenge category! How serendipitous would that be? I'm sending out one of my very favorite classics, one that I've been obsessed with since I first read it as a kid. There is something to be said for sending a classic, and I do hope that this group of readers gets my love of the book. I so easily fall for literary monsters, I see love stories where most see horror, and the monster in the book is never the monster the author meant it to be. I'll chronicle my postal readings here, but keep them vague, or send a link to their GoodReads page. I'm so excited to start the new year!

XoXo
BrainyHeroine

Books and Math

Good Afternoon All,

One thing that I have always loved about books is that they are decidedly un-mathy, unless you're reading a book about math. Since I was never very good at math, numbers and I just don't get along. However it occurred to me that these reading challenges are going to be a numbers game. By the end of next year I will have (hopefully) read between 84 and 108 books; 26 from the #LitsyAtoZ challenge + 40 from PopSugar's 2017 Challenge + 12 additional PS challenge books + 12 books for my Historical Fiction book club + 12 Book of the Month Club books + 6 to make the total nicely divisible by 12. All said and done it is 108 books, the minimum to meet the challenges will be 84. I'm still presuming that there will be some cross over as 9 books in a month is quite a bit. Though, when you factor that some of these books will be in audiobook format it seems more plausible somehow. I'm excited for this undertaking. I've bought a second book log to keep track of EVERYTHING I read and listen too next year, whilst keeping my TARDIS log for the challenges.

The more thought and preparation I'm putting into my Lit Goals for 2017 the more excited and nervous I'm getting. Help me along, won't you? Tell me what your favorite book is, or one you think would fit any of these challenges, or one that makes you happy, one that you think the world should read; I'd really love to know.

All the best,
Brainy Heroine

The Hunt Begins and Ends in Geekdom

Evening All,

Today was a day spent trying to find the one, singular, most perfect item to aid me in the coming year of literary challenges. Today I made it my mission to find a book journal. Now there are several available for purchase online, Amazon has a great selection, Moleskine has a seemingly good one at a great price too boot. However I find these sort of things to be challenging to purchase online. When it comes to journals in general I prefer to feel them, smell them, see if the thickness of the pages will hold or smear the ink of my favorite pens. I love looking for journals that are purse sized, ones that I will carry with me every where, or find ones that are large, perfect for desks or nightstand writings. My husband found me a truly beautiful one the other day, an 8x10 Blue Sky marble looking hard back thing of art. Honestly though? I just need something that feels right, is cute, and will keep me committed to it, and an excuse to spend hours in Barnes and Noble to find something that meets ALL the above criteria and then some (and just time spent in B&N) doesn't hurt anything either.

With a solid goal and budget in mind I set about to find my magical item. The first trip through B&N didn't yield a winner, then again I wasn't giving anything a fair enough chance. B&N is my go to place to physically buy Moleskine notebooks, I was looking for the book journal, didn't find it, and found 5 discount books to soothe my soul. At Ross I was able to find a perfect 2017 planner, and thought I found a great notebook to match, but flaws were found. The realization of the coupon magic that was had at B&N meant a trip back to purchase a Christmas gift, and to give the other journals a second chance.

As I'm looking at them, seeing their Dapper Fox, sloth, and motivational journals I grabbed some contenders and sat down to really pour through them. As I began putting them back I found the one. The only one like it. The Doctor Who TARDIS 6"x8" Journal.  "You want weapons? We're in a library! Books! Best weapons in the world! This room's the greatest arsenal we could have. Arm yourself!" - The Doctor, played by David Tennant While I'll have to implement my own organizational structure, dealing with some trial and error on that end, it felt right.


A reading challenge, or a series of them is something at its very core is meant for the Nerd/Geek/Dorkdom's of the world. And books are like the TARDIS, they are bigger on the inside and can transport you
  anywhere you could ever want to go.


So this is what I wound up with, and I'm excited to see where it leads me next year.

Thanks for reading,
Brainy Heroine