Kobo Plus vs. Scribd vs. Kindle Unlimited

Photo by Henry Be on Unsplash

Resurrecting this moldy old carcass of a blog just in case this information is helpful to any other readers out there. I recently tried 30-day trials of Kobo Plus, Scribd, and Kindle Unlimited and had Opinions about the experiences that require airing. All of these platforms rely on a subscription fee to give you access to read the books, but they do not give you ownership of the books, and you lose access to all the material as soon as your subscription ends.

Kobo Plus:
I’ve used Kobo in the past for purchasing a few ebooks but hadn’t tried their monthly subscription. I tried the Kobo Plus Read & Listen plan, which is normally $9.99/month as of now. During the 30 days, I read:

Ebooks:

• Paladin’s Grace by T. Kingfisher
• A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher
• Seven for a Secret by Mary Webb
• These Old Shades by Georgette Heyer

Audiobooks:

• The Bird and the Sword by Amy Harmon
• The Queen and the Cure by Amy Harmon
• She by H. Rider Haggard
• The PG Wodehouse Collection (the parts of the collection I hadn’t already read)
• “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” by F. Scott Fitzgerald (short story)
• “The Cats of Ulthar” by H. P. Lovecraft (short story)
• “Lot No. 249” by Arthur Conan Doyle (short story)
• “The Dunwich Horror” by H. P. Lovecraft (short story)
• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (didn’t finish)

I enjoyed what I read, but by the end of 30 days, I was also coming up pretty empty on things I really wanted to read. Kobo has a lot of classics you could easily read on Librivox for free, and a lot of self-published stuff that varies wildly in quality. I disliked the mobile app intensely, especially for audiobooks; it would randomly skip ahead several chapters and absolutely would not allow me to go back. The only way to fix it was to delete the audiobook and re-download it. Ultimately, I thought the trial was well worth it, but continuing the subscription definitely wasn’t.

Scribd:
I had high hopes for Scribd because their selection looked so impressive. I added 250+ books to my to-read list and excitedly planned to binge as much as I could in 30 days, and maybe even extend the subscription, which costs $11.99/month. During the 30 days, I read:

Ebooks:

• A Walk in Wolf Wood by Mary Stewart
• The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells
• Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente
• Gone to Earth by Mary Webb
• My Cousin Rachel by Daphne Du Maurier (in Documents)

Audiobooks:

• Paladin’s Strength by T. Kingfisher
• The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher
• The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher
• Being Seen by Elsa Sjunneson
• “The Design” by China Mieville (short story)
• Paladin’s Hope by T. Kingfisher (didn’t finish)

Scribd’s selection does indeed look great on paper…until I realized that the more I read throughout the month, the fewer books were available to me. Scribd throttles access to the full selection as you consume content, so after I’d read two ebooks and two audiobooks in a month, I only had access to about half of the titles on my to-read list. By the time I’d read four ebooks and four audiobooks, I only had access to Scribd originals (Scribd-only content that looked extremely unappealing) and Documents. (Documents are a bit of a grey area on Scribd; people clearly upload full novels to them, and you can read them even when all other content is throttled, but I can’t imagine that it’s legal to do so.) The more recent, popular books you read, the faster you’re throttled, so you might be able to read a bunch of classics without much impact (although you could also get those for free on Librivox), but if you read a couple bestsellers, that’s pretty much it for the month. I was also incensed to discover that the throttling can happen mid-book, as happened with Paladin’s Hope—I was literally in the middle of listening to it when I lost access. Scribd cheerfully announces that these titles will become available to you again at the start of your next billing cycle.

I was very frustrated by this, obviously, but I was also halfway through a book and had some other titles I really wanted to check out (had to feed that T. Kingfisher obsession), so I grudgingly decided to pay for one month of Scribd. I was also wondering if the throttling might not be so bad once I got on the paid plan, as opposed to the free trial. During my second 30 days on Scribd, I read:

Ebooks:

• Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier
• Bryony and Roses by T. Kingfisher
• The Raven and the Reindeer by T. Kingfisher
• The Seventh Bride by T. Kingfisher
• Plot Gardening by Chris Fox (in Documents)

Audiobook:

• Paladin’s Hope (finally finished!)
• River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey
• “The Birds” and “Don’t Look Now” by Daphne Du Maurier (short stories)
• “Origin Story” by T. Kingfisher (short story)
• Sorcery of Thorns by Margaret Rogerson (didn’t finish)

The throttling was just as bad, sadly, and once again I was cut off halfway through the last audiobook. By then I was fed up with Scribd. It might be okay for light readers (although one wonders if $11.99/month is worth it, in that case), but in my opinion, not for high-volume readers. The mobile app was better than Kobo’s, I’ll give them that. It’s worth doing the trial to get a few titles in, if you’re prepared to lose access partway through.

Kindle Unlimited:
I had done a trial of Kindle Unlimited a long time ago, and I don’t read a whole lot of indie authors so I didn’t find it to be worth it for me. But it had been long enough that I’d accumulated a list of KU titles by a friend to check out again, so I signed up for a 30-day trial of the plan that usually costs $11.99/month. (There’s currently a special where it’s $0.99/month for three months, but that wasn’t available to me at the time.) During the 30 days, I read:

Ebooks:

• Vow of the Shadow King by Sylvia Mercedes
• Heart of the Shadow King by Sylvia Mercedes
• A Girl Called Samson by Amy Harmon
• The Moonfire Bride by Sylvia Mercedes
• The Sunfire King by Sylvia Mercedes
• Of Wolves and Wardens by Sylvia Mercedes
• The Beggar Prince by Kate Stradling
• Of Silver and Secrets by Sylvia Mercedes
• Carabosse and the Spindle Spell by Sylvia Mercedes
• Overpowered by Kathryn McConaughy

Audiobooks:

None. I know there are a few audiobook titles available in KU, but they’re few and far between, and none of them really caught my eye.

I made good use of the time, but I felt pretty satisfied at the end of the trial that I’d read everything I wanted to for now. I just don’t read enough of the titles on KU for it to be worth paying a monthly fee; I’m far more likely to keep a list of indie books I want to read on KU and then sign up for a month every year or two to work my way through that list. Also, while I adore audiobooks, the selection on KU just doesn’t tickly my fancy.

My alternatives:

Ultimately I decided not to keep any of the three subscriptions, so what do I do instead? These are my favorite alternatives:

• I devour books on Libby, the free library app, like they’re going out of style. This is the first place I look for books, and I consume tons of audiobooks and a few ebooks this way. The selection (at least for our county library) is amazing, and if you have cards in different libraries, you can add more than one card to the app and expand your selection.
• My second stop is usually Hoopla, which also provides content through the library. Selection is limited and very random, but I do find some good stuff sometimes. Not bad for free.
• For books in the public domain that aren’t on Libby or Hoopla, the Librivox app is a great way to go. The audiobooks are read by volunteers, so the quality is quite hit-or-miss, but it’s free.
• Physical library books either from the county or from interlibrary loan are old-school but also often the best way to get hold of tough-to-find titles. I’m lazy and put holds on books that I want to all be delivered to the same branch in my county so I can go in and pick everything up at once.
• I don’t often buy audiobooks, but when I do, I like Chirp. They run good deals sometimes, and I feel better about supporting them than Amazon-owned Audible.

I hope this will be helpful for other folks in their hunt for books. Happy reading!

Unpredentedly uncertain

Words and phrases I would like to ban until further notice:

• Unprecedented
• These uncertain times
• An (over)abundance of caution (not seeing this one as much lately since things that initially were cancelled out of “an abundance of caution” are now cancelled as part of “the bare minimum of things we should be doing these days.”
• When this is all over (caught myself saying this way too much).

Okay, now that I have that off my chest, how are you? Life is weird for pretty much everyone now, but I know it’s been a heck of a lot harder for some folks. We’ve been very blessed in that our income hasn’t changed, unlike so many people we know who have been laid off work. Ross is teaching from home, which is fascinating to me. All over the country, spouses are realizing, “Wait, THAT’S how you sound when you’re at work?” Since I worked from home anyway for my day job as an executive assistant, not much has changed for me, other than being busier. I work for a nonprofit that provides healthcare in West Africa, so it feels like we’ve been sprinting since late February.

Life during the pandemic has been a strange ping-pong of anxiety over current conditions and enjoyment of the slower pace of life overall (work busyness notwithstanding). I have friends and coworkers seriously affected by the virus and it’s impossible to read the news and not be (rightly) concerned; the world is mourning and will be for some time. But I do think finding the bright side to all this is healthy on a personal level.

Here are my favorite things to do during these unprecedented, uncertain times until this is all over and we can go back to an underabundance of caution:

• Get outside. I know not everyone can do this right now so I don’t take it for granted, but it’s the number one thing improving my mood these days. We go on long walks and runs with Calvin all the time, and he loves it but is baffled by current circumstances, not to mention exhausted by them. He’s currently slumped at my feet after an hour+ run during which he finally just planted his feet and refused to go farther.

• Looseleaf tea. One of my coronavirus splurges has been ordering tea online from Chad’s Chai and Tin Roof Teas, and it’s my best pandemic decision to date. Both shops are running coronavirus sales. Bonus: you get to support local business.

• Get takeout. Speaking of supporting local business, we’ve been trying to keep some of our favorite restaurants afloat by ordering curbside pickup. Neomonde, Sitti, Tangerine Cafe, El Rodeo are some we’ve tried. We even dressed up for date night at home one night.

• Read. My concentration is shot these days, and I’ll bet a lot of you are in the same boat. Light and funny books are the name of the game for me. I recommend Terry Pratchett and James Herriott, for starters. I listened to It Can’t Happen Here on audiobook, and that was a terrible mistake. I’ll save the fascist dystopias for happier times, thank you. Another coronavirus splurge of mine was buying a few new books. Do I have a zillion books to read already? Oh yes. Was I thrilled to get new books anyway? Oh yes.
• Immerse myself in Icelandic culture. Since our trip to Iceland has been postponed indefinitely (I’m still hoping we can make it in late June, but I’ve reluctantly come to the realization that we may not be able to go until summer of 2021), I’m taking this opportunity to improve my Icelandic, take an online course on Medieval Icelandic Sagas, and read more Icelandic books (see above note about new books I didn’t need).

• Video chat with friends and family. This is becoming a double-edged sword because now we chat with folks every night, and it almost feels like we’re too busy again, but it’s still so lovely to see friends’ faces. We’ve caught up with folks we haven’t talked to in years, and I hope this tradition continues long after the pandemic is a thing of the past. We’ve even been playing board games like Settlers of Catan over Skype.

• Watch TV. Pre-pandemic, I was so busy that I was hard-pressed to squeeze in one hour of TV per week, which made keeping up with shows almost impossible. Now, especially with so many sites offering free month-long trials, I’ve been able to see most of Picard and a few other Trek episodes on CBS All Access, finally finished Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries on Acorn TV, and have watched the occasional movie. Shocking!

What are some of your favorite coping mechanisms during all this insanity? Are you doing okay? Let me know!

Creating your own online library catalog

I love lists. I love lists of lists. I would probably love lists of lists of lists, but I cut myself off there because it seems like straying into the territory of dangerous obsession. Since books are one of the few things I love more than lists, I of course have endless lists of books. To read, have read, loaned out, borrowed, you name it.

So obviously creating an online catalog of all of the books I own is something I did a loooong time ago, with great delight. To some, this in itself probably already seems obsessive, but there are some practical reasons for cataloging your personal library:

1. Makes book shopping easier. Was it book 3 or book 4 I was missing from that series? Do I already own this particular Agatha Christie novel? Is this author I ran across at the shop the same one who wrote that one book I liked so much? Do I already own too many Louis L’Amour novels? (Of course not.) Bring up my library on my phone, and I have my answers.
2. Makes it easier for family to buy books for each other. My husband has access to and updates our online library as well, which makes buying books for each other MUCH simpler.
3. Helps rein in your book-buying. We can comfortable fit around 1500 books in our house, and having an online library keeps us accountable, both financially and in terms of space. We have a rule (at least for now) that for every book we buy, we have to give away or sell one, and we can track how often we buy books, and how many.
4. Keeps your books organized. On the shelves, our books are organized by genre, then alphabetically by author’s surname (with the exception of history books, which are organized chronologically by time period that they cover). Because my online catalog has columns for these genres and is sortable by author surname, I can look on the catalog and instantly know where any book is in the house.
5. Helps to rebuild your collection. Heaven forbid, if I lost books due to fire or flood or some other disaster, I’d know which books to replace.

So how do you set up an online library catalog? There are a slew of options:

• Goodreads. Goodreads already has an option to check the “owned” box for books, and I tried using this for a bit. I love using Goodreads for managing my read and to-read lists, but for me, it turned out to be impractical for a catalog. Searching for the particular edition I owned on Goodreads took too much time, and a lot of my very old books weren’t on Goodreads anyway.

Yeah, pretty much none of these bad boys showed up.

• LibraryThing. This one was super tempting, and I almost went with it. At the time, though, my phone was sketchy and wasn’t reliably scanning barcodes on books. Entering them manually had the same issue as Goodreads; finding my specific edition could be tricky, and really old books weren’t always on the site.
• Libib. Very similar to LibraryThing, but wasn’t around when I was building my library.
• Shelves, Home Library, Delicious Library, and BookBuddy are similar apps, so if you don’t mind scanning books, one of these may be your ticket.

Ultimately, I went a pretty clunky and labor-intensive route, but I have to admit, it works flawlessly for me because it’s so customizable. My books were already organized on their shelves, which made things pretty easy. I created a Google Spreadsheet and manually typed in every single book I owned. Ha. Yes. That did take awhile, though not as long as you’d think. Here are the column headings I use most often (click here to see larger image):

This works best for me since I can sort by author, title, category, whether I’ve read it or not, etc., and if I want to add additional columns (whether I’ve loaned a book out, for example, or to track book-buying), it’s easy to do so and to remove them when I’m done. I can search for particular words, and I can make specific notes on editions when I care to do so. For example, I have two copies of Wind, Sand, and Stars by Antoine de Saint Exupery, and I have a note in the library that one specific copy includes hand-written notes in the margins from a particular philosophy discussion group. But if the particular edition doesn’t matter to me, I can just leave it blank instead of having to select an edition in an app. Also, when I’m out and about, I can browse this quickly on my phone without using a lot of data, and since this is a Google Sheet, I can share it with whomever I wish.

Before I got married, I had read all but 20 or so of the books I owned. Then Ross’s massive book collection got added to the mix, so there are a lot that we own now that I haven’t read (and to be honest, probably won’t read since he and I don’t have all interests in common). I did convert him to my library idea, though; he ended up cataloging all of his comic books in a similar way, and we created a tab for our movies as well.

Warms my organized little heart. 😉

Review: How to Publish Your Book (from The Great Courses)

I just finished How to Publish Your Book by Jane Friedman, part of The Great Courses, and I felt it deserved its own blog post.

It also deserves a spot on the must-read list for anyone who would like to get their writing published, even (perhaps especially) if they intend to self-publish. The course is written by Jane Friedman, possibly one of the most qualified people in the country to do such a thing, and it outlines in great detail how to find a literary agent, how to write a great query letter, and a lengthy list of what NOT to do at each step of the way towards, during, and beyond publication. Friedman is kind but doesn’t sugar-coat, and she doesn’t waste the reader’s time. Her realistic, professional approach to the market was refreshing, and I will be recommending this book to many of my editing clients.

While the book mainly focuses on the traditional publishing market, this is invaluable information for someone self-publishing too. To compete effectively, or at all, with traditional publishing, self-publishers need to understand the market–and it is a complex, rapidly changing one. The publishing landscape has changed so radically in the last twenty or even ten years that many of the strategies that worked before simply aren’t viable. Don’t expect to make it big doing what someone else did to make it big in 2009; times have changed, and writers have to change along with them.

You can get the book on The Great Courses website, naturally, but I was able to listen to the audiobook for free using the Overdrive library app, which I highly recommend. Don’t miss out on these insights!

 

The best shipping notification I’ve ever received

I ordered the eighth House of Niccolo book, Gemini, by Dorothy Dunnett from BetterWorldBooks because I’m working on the seventh book currently, and I’m no idiot: one does not finish a Dunnett without having the next book in the series on hand. Those cliffhangers are murder.

This was the shipping notification I received:

Hello Stephanie,

(Your book(s) asked to write you a personal note – it seemed unusual, but who are we to say no?)

Holy canasta! It’s me… it’s me! I can’t believe it is actually me! You could have picked any of over 2 million books but you picked me! I’ve got to get packed! How is the weather where you live? Will I need a dust jacket? I can’t believe I’m leaving Mishawaka, Indiana already – the friendly people, the Hummer plant, the Linebacker Lounge – so many memories. I don’t have much time to say goodbye to everyone, but it’s time to see the world!

I can’t wait to meet you! You sound like such a well read person. Although, I have to say, it sure has taken you a while! I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but how would you like to spend five months sandwiched between Jane Eyre (drama queen) and Fundamentals of Thermodynamics (pyromaniac)? At least Jane was an upgrade from that stupid book on brewing beer. How many times did the ol’ brewmaster have one too many and topple off our shelf at 2am?

I know the trip to meet you will be long and fraught with peril, but after the close calls I’ve had, I’m ready for anything (besides, some of my best friends are suspense novels). Just five months ago, I thought I was a goner. My owner was moving and couldn’t take me with her. I was sure I was landfill bait until I ended up in a Better World Books book drive bin. Thanks to your socially conscious book shopping, I’ve found a new home. Even better, your book buying dollars are helping kids read from Brazil to Botswana.

But hey, enough about me, I’ve been asked to brief you on a few things:

We sent your order to the following address:

From there it gave the usual shipping notification info and signed off, “Eagerly awaiting our meeting!”

I already liked the impact BetterWorldBooks is making in the world (seriously, check out how much they do), but this just cemented my love. I have to wonder, though, what kind of book filing system puts Dunnett in between Jane Eyre and the Fundamentals of Thermodynamics? 😉

Shop talk + 20% off literary gifts

Getting gifts for book lovers should be easy, right? Just buy them books! This has backfired for me mightily before, though. Someone may be a great friend but have very different reading tastes, and just because *I* love Steinbeck doesn’t mean that everybody else wants every book he ever wrote on his or her shelves. Apparently. I’ve also had the opposite problem, where I excitedly purchased a favorite book of mine to give to a friend, only to see that said friend already has a copy on their bookshelves. Maybe even two copies. And yeah, you can always get gift cards to bookstores, but sometimes that just feels too impersonal.

Bookish gifts are a great compromise. I recently was approached by Melissa at Literary Book Gifts to see if I’d be willing to feature her shop here on the blog. I admit, I was fairly skeptical since I’ve never done anything even remotely approaching sponsorship before and was leery of the idea. After checking out her shop, though, I was extremely intrigued. She features t-shirts and tote bags with old book cover designs that are just lovely. Here are some of my favorites:

War of the Worlds t-shirt

Velveteen Rabbit t-shirt

Wizard of Oz tote bag

The Hound of the Baskervilles tote bag

Now, the really cool bit is that Melissa offered a 20% off discount code for readers of this blog! Just use the code QUOTHTHEGIRL20 at checkout to get 20% off anything in the store. No minimum order, and the code doesn’t expire.

I didn’t receive any compensation or products in return for this feature–just the code, which all of us can use. If you order anything, let me know in the comments what you think!

“You can borrow a book, but you get to keep the ideas.”

I love sharing bookish articles, discoveries, or musings that I’ve run across in hopes that other folks will enjoy them too. Here are a boatload!

• One of the best bookstore customer stories I’ve ever read.
• Who doesn’t read books in America? Try not to cry.
• Susan Cooper’s Wales: a literary pilgrimage. A fan of Cooper went to as many of the sites described in her books as possible, and it’s fantastic.
• The rare-book thief who looted college libraries in the ’80s.
• Historical perspective or racism in Little House on the Prairie? My husband and I just finished reading all of the Little House books out loud to each other, and we did cringe a bit at some of the period racism (which totally went over my head when I read the books as a kid). I certainly agree that explaining to young readers is essential, although I have mixed feelings about Wilder’s name being removed from a children’s literature award.
• Great article by Guy Gavriel Kay (one of my all-time favorite authors) on editing. “Somewhere along the line, I grew up a bit. I realized that even if I only accepted a quarter or a third of what a copy editor suggested as changes, that quarter or third I bought made my book better.”
• Why you should surround yourself with more books than you’ll ever have time to read. I mostly agree with and love this. My perspective has changed a bit in recent years after meeting people who actually struggle with actual book hoarding and how utterly crippling that can be, so I think there is a line to be drawn somewhere–but I do find the fact that there are more great books out there than I can read in my lifetime to be an inspirational, cheerful thought. Imagine how sad the alternative would be! “Oops, I’m 98, and I ran out of books to read.”
• Subreddit for bad scifi book covers. I’m a cover snob to begin with, and these are so bad that I really can’t look at more than a page or two without getting mad, but some are just hilarious. Heads up, though, some of the covers are somewhat NSFW.
• Authors: Warning Signs That You’re Being Scammed. Required reading for any aspiring author.
• Did this book buy its way onto the New York Times Bestseller List? I’m ambivalent about the New York Times Bestseller List anyway (so often it seems like a list of exactly the type of books I do *not* want to read, and it certainly isn’t a litmus test for quality), but at the very least, you shouldn’t be able to buy your way onto it.
• The amazing story of Kentucky’s horseback librarians. Good gracious, if 10-year-old me knew this was a career option, I’d have been over the moon.
• Okay, so this may be cool only to me, but it was such a surreal moment that I had to share. I had the honor of being the cover model for “Fallen Star,” a short story by Anne Elisabeth Stengl set in her Tales of Goldstone Wood universe. There’s a Tales of Goldstone Wood fan art contest every year, and the second place entry was a scene from “Fallen Star.” It was just so cool to see how the artist used outtakes of the cover photo (which Stengl had shared on her blog) and recreated the costume, down to my boots and leather pouch and braids.
• Speaking of Tales of Goldstone Wood, there’s a coloring book out now, for those who love such things!

If you want to know what I’m reading these days (and my usually very strong opinions thereon), check out my Goodreads!

“Take some more tea,” the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.

I failed to tell you about our adventures at the tea room! *wavery back-in-time music*

The Olde English Tea Room, alas, closed its doors for good on December 23, 2016. My friends and I had the intense pleasure of being able to visit (for the first time, for most of us) on its final day of business. I was both elated that we managed to check it out before it closed and devastated that we could never go back again.

Isn’t it adorable?? And the tea was exceptional.

We all dressed up because that’s what you do at an old English tea room. Each afternoon tea came with its own tiny tea pot, which you could get refilled with hot water as much as you wanted. We basically sloshed our way out of the place.

They even had sugar cubes!! I had never actually seen sugar cubes before. And, as you can see, there were tea sandwiches, scones, and petite desserts. The food was incredible.

And such good tea. Not pictured in the group picture: my amazing sister-in-law, who took the photo for us. We all had a glorious day, topped off by a visit to some antique shops and a book shop.

I recently discovered the Oak Park Tea Room, so a reunion may be required to explore that new location and see how it measures up.

Here are some bookish internet discoveries for you:

• The Hemingway App. If it works, this could be incredibly useful.
• The ugly truth in children’s books.
• A bookstore does an interesting exercise for Women’s History Month in March.
• The earliest surviving Wizard of Oz movie, from 1910.
• Ask not for whom the dog barks.
• Nobokov’s favorite word is “mauve.”
• Oxford comma wins a lawsuit.
• Audiobooks and the obsession with multitasking.

Next up, all the other adventures I didn’t have time to write about when they were happening!

“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”

The conference in VA Beach went smoothly, and may well be the last conference I have to run onsite! I’m super excited about that. Due to long hours at the registration desk, I spent all of 20 minutes on the beach, but I did get to see some glorious sunrises:

The Hubs was able to come with me for the first time ever, so I enjoyed spending my evenings with him in our swanky hotel room. We also found Yukai Japanese and Sushi Buffet on our last day and desperately wished we had discovered it sooner. REALLY good food!

Book Reviews:

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. Whew. I had read The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett and disliked it, but I thought I’d give the author another go (probably due more to my affection for the movie adaptation of The Thin Man than for any charitability towards Hammett). I do believe I loathed The Maltese Falcon even more. How this book became a classic is beyond me. Clumsy, endlessly repetitive description! Uninteresting, trudging plot! Thoroughly irritating characters! I wouldn’t have minded a bit if everyone were killed off in the end, but sadly most of them survived to be amoral, sleazy manipulators into the future.

Ransomed from a one-star review on Goodreads (just barely) by the fact that Sam Spade epitomizes a genre, but heck if I know why, and for the audiobook narrator, who did a grand job with Gutman’s and Spade’s voices.

The Prophet by Kahlil Gabran. Three and a half stars on Goodreads for this book is probably more accurate, but the language was beautiful enough to elevate the score (subject of this post is stolen from this little book). We received the book as a wedding present, and I savored the wisdom in it–while recognizing that much of the beautiful language was lacking in substance. I can see why the book was so popular during the hippie movement; there is a strong undercurrent of “do what feels good” running throughout, and God loves everyone and we’re all God and bro, have another smoke, etc. And yet I feel badly for mocking it because there WAS wisdom in it too. Perhaps younger Stephanie would have been more deeply affected.

In spite of my four stars, I would say that this lovely book had very little impact on me.

Tik-Tok of Oz by L. Frank Baum. Continuing the tradition of reading Oz books aloud with my husband whenever we’re traveling (whoever isn’t driving gets to read). Gotta say, not too impressed with this one. Baum completely disregards continuity, and the title is fairly nonsensical given that Tik-Tok features so little in the book. Still enjoyable because I have such affection for the Oz books, and the scene discussing why Toto doesn’t talk makes the whole book worth reading.

“Good and evil mingled in her, but always in heroic dimensions.”

I really like lists. They’re just so SATISFYING. I had a little time on my hands each evening for the past few weeks, so I’ve been gradually going through our books and cataloging them in a Google Sheet. (Yes, I know there are apps for that, but for reasons of my own, this worked better.) It’s incredibly therapeutic. We have over 1300 books, not counting comic books (which I’ve been afraid to touch–that shelf is…daunting). Listing them has been really useful for discovering books we have waaay too many duplicates of (*cough* The Wizard of Oz *cough*) or books we really should get rid of. A pilgrimage to Ed McKay’s will shortly be in order, methinks.

I leave Tuesday for Virginia Beach to run another conference, which should be far more fun than usual since the Hubs is on fall break from teaching and gets to come with me! While I’m gone, check out these cool links:

• Amazing a capella cover of “Jolene” by Dolly Parton and Pentatonix. Holy smokes, Dolly. I hope I’m going that strong at 70 years old.
• “Come On and Take Your Sweetie to the Stars” by Marian Call.
• Stop taking pride in not knowing how to do basic stuff. Language warning, but this article is spot-on and well worth the read.
• Class, the YA Doctor Who spinoff series, premieres on October 22nd.

I stayed up till the wee hours last night (this morning), finishing Imperial Woman by Pearl S. Buck. I expected to love it because Buck’s skill is matchless, and this book was no exception. The book is a fictionalized account of the life of Tzu Hsi, the last empress of China, a formidably intelligent and manipulative woman. She ruled for 47 years until 1908. Having just read Under Heaven, which takes place in the 8th century, I was struck by how similar Imperial life was in the 1800s. And that was Tzu Hsi’s main struggle: change was coming to a country that had seen little change in over a thousand years. Buck does an excellent job of humanizing a figure who could otherwise be seen as a power-mongering villain; the reader ends up rooting for Tzu Hsi throughout her lengthy and impressive life. This portion of Buck’s introduction sets an apt tone for the book:

Her people loved her–not all her people, for the revolutionary, the impatient, hated her heartily and she hated them. But the peasants and small-town people revered her. Decades after she was dead I came upon villages in the inlands of China where the people thought she still lived and were frightened when they heard she was dead. “Who will care for us now?” they cried?

This, perhaps, is the final judgment of a ruler.