August 2017 Reading Summary: 09/01/17

Mid July we moved out of our home of thirteen years and into a tiny (and hopefully) temporary apartment. Ninety-seven percent of our home library is in storage, leaving our reading choices to those carefully selected books we brought with us, ebooks, digital audiobooks, and the library.

Mid August we finally got our house fixed up enough to put on the market. It was stressful — but anyone who has put a house on the market knows that. Like July, I spent most of the month devoted to the house — getting it fixed up, getting it staged, meeting with contractors, signing endless amounts of paperwork, and so forth.

Selling the house ate up most of my summer. The kids and I didn't go once to Don Castro to swim — though we did swim in the apartment pool. We didn't go bowling. We didn't go hiking. They did homework and I worked on the house or on setting up the apartment.

Then near the end of the month we jumped into my car and drove cross country to Wyoming to see the eclipse. Our trip out took about twenty hours — divided across two days: Reno the first day and Rock Springs the second day — meaning we drove through the entirety of Nevada and Utah in a single day. For the actual eclipse we got up early and drove into Casper which had the longest totality of anywhere in the eclipse's path. It was so worth getting up at 2 AM to see!

But between the house and road trip, I didn't get much reading done. Last year, I read thirty-four books in August. This August, I read 28 and most of those were either audiobooks or comic books. Over the summer, I realized I could buy comic books on my phone which saves me from either schlepping to the one comic book store in the area or waiting until the albums come out. I'm still planning on buying the albums but it's fun to stay current.

Back in 2009 when I first started tracking my reading and reviewing, I had a backlog of over four hundred titles I had read and wanted to review. Eight years later, I'm down to a backlog of only a couple months. As I'm basically current now in what I read and what I review, I've changed up how I schedule my reviews. I used to do it by topic. Now I am devoting a day each week to a particular type of review:

Despite the lower number of books read, the reading was more focused, meaning I was able to mostly read diverse books. Roughly two thirds of the books I read were inclusive.

Review-wise, though, most of the books weren't diverse. August was my second big push to get through older reviews. I'm excited and nervous at the prospect of not having a backlog of reviews to rely on for times when I'm not reading as fast as I usually do. When that time comes, I'll have to re-think my "a book review a day" tag line.

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