Sunday Post, Super Bowl Edition

In the blog previous to this blog, the late, lamented 52.blog, I used to participate weekly in a meme called “The Sunday Post” which was a chance to share news, and anything book-related from the week that didn’t warrant its own post. Because this is a more general blog, if there’s news, I have probably already shared it, but I am not making time for everything bookish that happened this week, so I’m thinking that I may rejoin the ranks of the Sunday Post-ers.

First, I am failing MISERABLY at dropping mini-reviews in here when I finish a book. In my defense, it’s usually very late at night when I finish, and the next day there are more books just waiting to be read.

But a promise is a promise.

I am four books into the month. I am still reading a balanced selection of genres, having read two M/M romances, one general fiction and one mystery so far. There really are no rules to this balance that I am going for beyond a vague goal of romance books not ending up at more than 50% of my reading for the year. It’s tricky, because I hate the idea of anyone restricting what they read for any arbitrary reason, but ADHD means that—just like I can eat the same thing for breakfast for two years without getting sick of it, I can read the same sort of book over and over and over and over and over…without getting particularly bored of it. The problem with that is that there are other books that I really love and I don’t remember that as I shuffle from Cat Sebastian to Emily Henry to Lucy Score to Tal Bauer to S.E. Harmon to AM Johnson.

It’s a wonderful vicious cycle and it’s next to impossible to break out of.

But then I remember that I love mysteries and I love Urban Fantasy and I love thrillers and I love…good stories. So.

I’m trying to see this less as restricting something that I am not going to let myself read and more that I am deliberately adding things that I forget that I love.

I’m trying to be more intentional.

Having said that, I…ok, I am not leaving Goodreads. But I am also not USING Goodreads any longer. I have exported all my data—all twenty years worth—and imported it into The Storygraph and that is where I will be tracking books going forward.

Why am I not leaving Goodreads? Cause it’s connected to my kindle, and it automagically tracks my reading without me doing a gosh-darned thing, so it’s a pretty reliable backup. So, my books will go there, but I will not, if that makes sense. Unless there’s some sort of book tracking emergency.

The Storygraph has much to recommend it. The interface is clean and not cluttered the way GR is. There are tons of end of month and end of year reports—pies and lines and collages and calendars, oh my!—and if you pay for the plus version, the ability to do historical comparisons against prior years.

There are two features that I love most, though. One, they have quarter-star reviews (remember that GR is a no-star situation), which allows for a lot more granularity in top-level reviews.

And my favorite feature is that when you log in, it presents you with a RANDOM five books from your TBR. I look forward to that every time I log in. To be reminded of a book that I hadn’t thought about in, maybe, years, possibly since I put in ON the list is…*chef’s kiss*.

So. That’s what’s going on in the bookish world here at Bowie House of Games and Pinball. There is some Football today, and we here at the BH are rooting for the Three-Peat. None of us are primarily Kansas City fans (We have as Ravens, Lions and Steeler fans on the couch today) but we all hate Philly and triggering New England fans is a pleasant side-effect of the three-peat.

And, yes, we love when Taylor is happy. Shoot us.

When I need to rate a book, I do not rate it in comparison to other books, and especially not to other books of other genres. I rate books relative to my expectations for the sort of book that it is.

So, yes. I could very well rate a Pulitzer Prize-winner and a gritty detective novel and a cozy romance all three stars. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the cozy mystery is just as good as the Pulitzer Prize-winner. What it means is that all three books exactly met my expectations going in as to the quality of the experience.

A 3-star read is simply a book that is a fine example of the sort of book that it is.

4-stars are better than I expected. 5-stars blew me away. 2-stars were disappointing. 1-stars were…*shudder*.

Complicating this further is that I paid a lovely man on fiverr to make me letter-grade rating graphics to use on the blog, because I think those are more intuitive than stars, and now I use both. They work like this::

And now that I have written all that, l should probably pull it out and pin it somewhere. Ah, that sounds like a project for later me. Today me has SuperBowlSnax to make.

So many mini-reviews! But I’m caught back up now.

Happy Sunday, everyone! Go forth and snack!

Love y’all.