I appreciate that I can place books on hold at our library, knowing that they will be set aside for me as soon as they become available. But I do wonder about the timing sometimes. A while back, I had placed holds on Gretchen Rubin's Better than Before, and on Pioneer Girl, the annotated autobiography of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Several people were ahead of me on the waiting list for each of them, so I was not expecting to read them anytime soon, though with one I was much closer to the top than the other. Wouldn't you know, both books suddenly became available at the same time—right before we left for several days out of town. I had to check them out, or lose my place in line, even though neither was suitable for taking with me on the trip.
We returned a week before the books were due. The normal lending period is three weeks, but for popular books it is reduced to two—with no possibility of renewal. Thanks to some other tasks taking top priority after our return, it wasn't until the weekend that I got very far into Better than Before. And Pioneer Girl? It has 400 pages. Wilder's actual text is in larger print, but the bulk of the book is Pamela Smith Hill's copious, detailed—yea, exhaustive—small-print footnotes. I read it in under 24 hours.
That's not how to read a book. It's like trying to quench your thirst while standing under a waterfall: you get exhausted trying to keep your balance, and end up more drowned than hydrated.
Nonetheless, I did get quite a bit from both books, enough for each to merit its own, upcoming, review. At first I was just going to include very brief comments on them in this post, but "very brief" and I don't keep company much. There's a reason my Tweets are mostly hyperlinks back here.
