In anticipation of my reading this year, I want to articulate one main goal and a few stretch goals.

My main reading goal is to read one more book than I already have. This means the total for the year is a moving target

Here are some stretch goals, meaning I want to remember to do them but I want them to be low pressure:

• Read one nonfiction book a month.
• Stop requesting books from NetGalley that I don’t know anything about except what is on NetGalley.
• Stop requesting books from NetGalley based on marketing emails they send me.
• Keep up with new releases from authors I love.
• Any time I’m in a city with a romance-only bookstore, visit it.

I didn’t want to write this blog post in 2024. For reasons I cannot remotely explain, my gut/intuition/heart wanted to write this in the new year.

So here we are. I’m very sleepy.

I don’t make resolutions. Instead, I choose a word of the year (MORE) and I make a list of things I want to try. Here’s this year’s list:

1. To make something daily.
2. To write something daily.
3. To cook more.
4. To dig deep into my personal spiritual practices.

Those are the main ones. I’m sure others will pop up. I’ll document them when they do.

Like last year, I’m going to share some notes on my reading before popping the full list of all the books I read this year in here.

I read 106 books this year, including 4 picture books/easy readers. As with last year, I overwhelmingly read romance. This is about twice as much as I normally read, which can be attributed to two things: how propulsive so many romance books are, and the fact that I was freelancing and only doing that minimally from January through July. This left a LOT of time for reading. I read two or three books a week in that period. I’ve slowed down to my usual one a week since beginning my part-time school librarian job in August.

I did deep dives into the backlist of Kresley Cole and Sarah MacLean, thanks to the podcast Fated Mates. This podcast has been the greatest influence on my choice of what to read this year. I read a lot of old X-Men comics reading along with the book The Best There Is at What He Does: Examining Chris Claremont’s X-Men. I’m still in the middle of that project, which I started after watching X-Men ‘97. I think I’m going to pick it back up soon.

In just the past couple of months, I have really found my way into fantasy romance. My favorite and the series that really got me here is Milla Vane’s barbarian fantasy romance series, A Gathering of Dragons. It answers the question, “What if grimdark, but romance?” which is not something I thought I would want when I first started this tear of romance reading but actually is exactly the thing I want right now.

Here are all the books I read this year:

🍿 Watched Autumn at Apple Hill.

I wanted made-for-TV Christmas movie vibes without succumbing to the early Christmas fervor, because I adore autumn and Halloween. So I hunted around and found Autumn at Apple Hill, which checks so many boxes for this kind of movie:

✅ adorable small family business
✅ event planning
✅ charming small hometown
✅ workaholic Suit Man
✅ save the place!
✅ neighborhood holiday Halloween party
✅ developers hotel chain
✅ charming hotel
✅ guy she went to high school with

via GIPHY

Is it fine art? Nope. Does it get the job done? It sure does.

Trying fortnight notes today.

I finally got W’s fancy watch back to him, with a nice new battery and glass that isn’t cracked. A belated anniversary present but handled all the same.

I had grand dreams of embracing my Jew-ishness (the hyphen is there because while I’m ethnically ⅜ Jewish, my family assimilated so thoroughly that I am completely disconnected from the plurality of my heritage) by making a Cheerwine brisket for Rosh Hashanah but was thwarted by migraines.

On October 5, W and I built our 12 foot skeleton with the help of our neighbor and in the evening, I went to see & Juliet with our friend who has gotten tickets from some friends of hers who couldn’t use them. I wasn’t sure I would like it because jukebox musicals rarely work for me, but it was a lot of fun. The second act has more ballads in a row than I would have liked but overall it was a great time.

One of M’s friends was born the exact same day as him. We went to her birthday party which was Taylor Swift-themed with karaoke. Many of the other guests were students I work with and their families. I was the first grown up to actually do karaoke. I sang “I Can Do It with a Broken Heart” and while I didn’t do as well as I wanted to, people said nice things. Kid reactions ranged from saying to a parent with pride, “I KNOW HER!” to a confused, “Why is the school librarian singing?” A couple parents said I was so brave to get up there and I told them that I’m a karaoke hustler (not actually, I’m a ringer if a DJ knows me and needs somebody to jump in with an upbeat song but I’ve never participated in a contest) who’s spent lots of money on voice lessons, so that made it easier.

On the way home from the party, I took M to Fresh Market and he picked out a delicious vanilla cake from their bakery to have as we celebrated with W’s mom. When we got home, we finished building a big trampoline which was M’s main birthday present.

The next day was M’s actual birthday and we gave him quite a few books, a LEGO Friends cat playground set, and the Pokemon Battle Academy box that teaches you how to play the trading card game.

It was a mostly normal work week. Friday was a staff development day so M got to stay home with W while I went in and caught up on some work and learned about the development of our campus safety plan.

Then I ran errands! I picked up library holds and a new belt and returned a nightgown I didn’t love. This was big as I’d been sitting on these errands a little while.

Saturday we went as a family to a local farm that does a corn maze and hayrides, has a spooky nature trail, and lets you pick your own pumpkins. It was a gorgeous day and we were outside for about 4 hours.

Today, W and I went to the local theater’s horror series and saw The Thing and They Live. I ate way too much popcorn and have felt pretty gross tonight. Next time, no popcorn or a smaller order of popcorn.

How have the past couple of weeks been for you?

I mentioned in my month notes for September that I’ve been playing epistolary RPGs with my friend K.

K lives three states away from me and is a trailing spouse; his husband got a tenure-track professor job and as one does, K moved with him to the area where the university is. Unfortunately, the gaming scene there was… not what K was looking for. So in the hopes of combatting some of K’s trailing spouse isolation, we started a D&D game that we play over Zoom with a couple of our other friends who are local to me and thus also far from K.

But getting 4 busy people together at the same time is hard and that group will often go 9 months or more without playing.

I buy charity bundles on itch.io sometimes and I noticed that some of the games there are for only two people and are easy to play asynchronously, so I asked K if he wanted to try some of those and he did, so here we are.

The obvious benefits of this kind of game are that you can play it whenever one of you has time and the other can then catch up at their convenience. There are a lot of different ways of doing it, but we play in a shared Google Doc we create for each game.

So far the games we’ve played have used a deck of cards, either standard playing cards or Tarot, to randomly select prompts for you to address in writing as you play.

I anticipated the gaming benefits of this style of play, but what’s been a delightful surprise is the effect it’s had on my writing and my writerly identity.

I thrive as a writer of fiction when I know there is an audience of at least one. In fifth grade, we had to write stories using vocabulary words and I wrote a series featuring characters based on my classmates. They eagerly awaited each new installment. In ninth grade, I wrote a story called The Hog Prince and shared it with friends.

I prefer writing fanfiction to writing original fiction partly because I know where to publish it and know that someone will read it.

An epistolary RPG means that the other player(s) are going to read what you wrote, so that audience I crave is built in, with no delays for publication.

Like fanfiction, when you’re writing in these games you kind of get to play with someone else’s toys. And when the players know each other well, you can give each other gifts in the text. You can make something appear that you don’t have a plan for but that you know another player will do something great with. Which is even nicer, I think, than just picking up and playing with toys that weren’t built for you.

A third piece of these games that makes them really work well for me is that they inherently require you to be creative within constraints. Kate Bingaman Burt gave a great TEDx talk about the value of these kind of constraints. I’m the kind of person who gets paralyzed by the number of choices available when doing something creative. I could write anything, so I don’t know how to begin, so I write nothing. The prompts in these games and the contributions of other players mean that I don’t have to choose a starting point, and that’s huge. And if I get stuck, well, soon I’ll have a new prompt to work with.

If you’ve been struggling to do creative writing, maybe find a way to make it a game. There are solo RPGs you can play this way, too, and maybe I’ll try one of those soon.

If you asked me what happened in September 2024 and I answered without looking at my calendar, I’d say nothing much. My mom was hospitalized for pretty much the whole month (with any luck she’ll go home tomorrow) with idiopathic colitis that seems to have gotten better but was never explained.

But if I look at my calendar, I see that it was actually a full month with a lot of fun stuff going on. So here we go!

Fun

Our local Bricks & Minifigs had their grand opening. W. and I took M. and his best friend. My brother joined us, too. The line was long and it was sunny, but eventually we got in and I got what I had come for: Kermit and Miss Piggy minifigures. W. won the raffle grand prize, which is a Back to the Future Time Machine set signed by the Broadway cast of Back to the Future. I’m torn because this is a set I really want to build but I know building it will ruin any collector value it has, so. I don’t know. I guess maybe I’ll buy the set separately sometime? I also got a couple of the D&D Minifig surprise bags.

W. and I went to see [Clue Live On Stage](https://clueliveonstage.com/, which was incredibly fun. It’s got all your favorite stuff from the movie, and lots of other jokes that you can only do in live theater.

A family we’ve known for a while since their kid and M. have been in school together hosted a Chilean Independence Day party, which was very fun to go to. And I remembered that I don’t need to try Pisco Sour again because it is way too strong for me.

W.’s mom wanted to take M. to Paperhand Puppet’s annual show, so we all went along with M.’s best friend and his dad. The artistry of these giant puppets is incredible and I loved seeing how clever they were doing things like having bubbles come out of fishes’ mouths. The scale of those puppets is not to M.’s liking so I don’t think we’ll go next year, but I do hope to see them at a fairy festival or something sometime because they’re very cool to look at.

My friend K. and I have been playing epistolary RPGs, which are great because he lives in another state. We just have a shared Google Doc to play in. First we played The Only Amenity in This Endless Dungeon is a Daemonic Postal Service and then we started Tether.

Work

We had Back to School Night, where caregivers come and learn a bit about how their kids’ days go and what to expect over the course of the school year. My role was to hang out in the library and chat with the grown-ups who wanted to learn more about the library. It was really great to meet everyone and talk with them about their kids’ use of the library. One parent expressed interest in volunteering in the library, so I’m in the process of getting that set up.

Another parent who has been volunteering in the library for years really started working in earnest once I finally figured out what would be most helpful for her to do, and that has melted away tons of stress I had about not being able to get everything done in 20 hours a week. Is it still enough work for a full-time position? Of course it is, but at least now I can focus my attention on the things only I can do, like instructional support, collaboration, and collection development.

Speaking of instructional support, I put together both print and digital resources for the 1st & 2nd year (equivalent of 1st & 2nd grade) classes about North American animals. This is a fun way for me to learn about what’s already in our collection. I also pulled together statistics about things kids were interested in for a 4th year rounding lesson, which it sounds like the kids really enjoyed.

Stress

There’s been one big source of stress, which is that in August I took my and W.’s watches to get their batteries replaced, as a little anniversary gift left over from our anniversary in July (15 years modern gift is watches but we both already had great watches, hence watch batteries) and the glass on W.’s limited edition Mr. Jones Sun and Moon Miyamoto watch got broken. The store employee told me they’d send it to a jeweler and have it ready in a few days. I didn’t hear from them and after a month, I finally went back and asked about it. The store employee took my name down and said he’d look into it and call me. Two more weeks went by and I had no word, so Monday I went down there and was ready to just ask them to give me the watch and I’d take it to a jeweler. But they tracked it down, I laid eyes on it, they corrected my phone number because the original person had written it down wrong, and then they called me later to confirm it was at the jeweler. So here’s hoping that gets resolved soon.

Media

I read 6 books, a bit of a slow down from earlier in the year but what can you do? When you go from unemployed to employed, your reading is going to slow down a bit.

W. and I have been watching the new season of Only Murders in the Building. We watched the latest season of Hilda as a family and finished up a Gravity Falls family watch, too.

My brother and I saw Beetlejuice Beetlejuice in the theater. Beetlejuice is such a critically formative piece of media for me. There was no way its sequel could hold a candle to it in terms of having a place in my heart. But I think they did a great job. It’s super fun and I think has exactly the vibes that a 35-years-later sequel to Beetlejuice should. Also I love our Baby Goth Queen Jenna Ortega.

I played a little bit of Dragon Age: Origins but once my mom was super extra sick, I didn’t want something that intense, so I’ve been playing Disney Dreamlight Valley, which pleases me greatly.
Whew. That’s enough that I think maybe it’s time for me to start doing weeknotes instead of monthnotes.

How was your September?

When We Flew Away by Alice Hoffman is a middle grade novel that imagines what Anne Frank’s life might have been like before she had to move to the attic of her father’s office building. Here’s the publisher’s description:

Bestselling author Alice Hoffman delivers a stunning novel about one of contemporary history’s most acclaimed figures, exploring the little-known details of Anne Frank’s life before she went into hiding.

Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl has captivated and inspired readers for decades. Published posthumously by her bereaved father, Anne’s journal, written while she and her family were in hiding during World War II, has become one of the central texts of the Jewish experience during the Holocaust, as well as a work of literary genius.

With the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, the Frank family’s life is turned inside out, blow by blow, restriction by restriction. Prejudice, loss, and terror run rampant, and Anne is forced to bear witness as ordinary people become monsters, and children and families are caught up in the inescapable tide of violence.

In the midst of impossible danger, Anne, audacious and creative and fearless, discovers who she truly is. With a wisdom far beyond her years, she will become a writer who will go on to change the world as we know it.

Critically acclaimed author Alice Hoffman weaves a lyrical and heart-wrenching story of the way the world closes in on the Frank family from the moment the Nazis invade the Netherlands until they are forced into hiding, bringing Anne to bold, vivid life.

Based on extensive research and published in cooperation with the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, When We Flew Away is an extraordinary and moving tour de force

.I’m going to diverge from my usual review format for this book and be a bit more stream of consciousness. But I hope you’ll still get a sense of the book and whether it might be for you, someone you love, or someone you work with.

I’ve never read anything by Alice Hoffmann before, and many other reviews talk about her using lyrical language and that being a struggle for them. For me, the early chapters of the book read like a middle grade nonfiction book, describing Anne’s experiences, with little dialogue or direct action portrayed. I think that’s a bit tricky, especially for a book like this that isn’t nonfiction but draws heavily on research and might be hard to distinguish from nonfiction.

The lack of action and dialogue made it hard for me to read this at first, but eventually I really got into imagining Anne’s life in the city of Amsterdam, and that’s what really brought the book to life for me. I think many of us only imagine Anne in hiding during the Holocaust, rarely thinking about the many years of her life before this event that both defined her literary voice and led to her death.

That’s the great joy in When We Flew Away for me: thinking about her daily life before going into hiding. Anne went to bookstores. She ate ice cream. She flirted with boys. She ice skated. And all of these activities and more are things she does in this book.

Like many women, I imagine, Anne Frank’s diary was very important to me as a young person. I first read it in sixth or seventh grade. I read it again before auditioning for the play adaption of it when I was in ninth grade, and I think I’ve probably read it again as an adult. One of the things that’s so remarkable about Anne Frank’s diary is how true to the developmental experiences of a wide variety of Western teenagers across time and place it is. I think many young people reading it can see their own dreams and anxieties, family relationships and hopes for romance, in Anne’s writing.

Because Anne’s writing has been so important to me, I made it a priority to visit the Anne Frank House while I was in Amsterdam. Before you go into the attic, you walk through rooms with video and audio about the time Anne was living in and the expansion of Nazi occupation into the Netherlands. Then you walk through the bookcase hiding a secret door and up a very narrow staircase (typical of staircases in Amsterdam) and find yourself in the attic.

Wandering through the rooms, I was disheartened by how hard it was to feel connected to that time long ago and the people who lived there, even though I was in their space. I was surprised by the things that really made me feel closer to their experience: the pencil lines on the wall tracking Anne and Margot’s heights. The view of a tree through the one place Anne could see the sky.

And of course, seeing the diary itself. That was the most powerful thing of all.

In the same way that seeing these things helped me understand Anne’s experiences, reading this book and thinking about the things I experienced in Amsterdam beyond the Anne Frank House added a whole new dimension to my understanding of her life. Anne walked the same streets I did. She looked at the same houses I did. She went to the same parks.

Readers who need action and dialogue to stay engaged with a book will struggle with this book, but readers who want details that help them imagine other people’s lives more fully will find so much here.

Book: When We Flew Away
Author: Alice Hoffman
Publisher: Scholastic
Publication Date: September 17, 2024
Pages: 304
Age Range: Middle Grade
Source of Book: ARC via NetGalley

It’s been a full month since the official first day at my new job, and we’ve had the kids at school for three weeks. And, as you might expect, in that time I’ve learned some things.

There’s a 40-minute recess period before lunch and I have the library open during that time. Kids are welcome to come in, check out books, sit and read, or draw. In the first two weeks, I felt slammed during that time. There will often be a LOT of kids in the library. Maybe eventually I’ll actually count but all I know is it feels like maybe as many as 30 at a time. And inevitably 8 - 10 of these kids will require my help at once: to find a book, to check out a book, to suggest a book that we purchase. I am so glad they’re there, so happy that so many kids (there are about 130 at the school and I would guess at least a third of them come through at some point in lunch recess) are excited about reading. Of course I want to help them all! But it was overwhelming and exhausting.

So I started thinking about how we can make it so that the help I’m giving has the most impact.

The most obvious place to start was to teach even the youngest kids (1st graders) how to check out books themselves. Many of them have learned, and there are usually at least a few other kids who already know how that are happy to help. This frees me up a lot more to help with finding and choosing books.

We were having super long lines at checkout, and kids were getting back to lunch late, so I ended up dedicating two computers to checkout. In the early days, hardly anyone was using the catalog. Now we’re getting long lines at the catalog computer, so I may need to reconsider this set up. It is possible for me to have them set up for kids to do both, but that will require slightly more training.

Next, I realized that kids didn’t know how to use the catalog to find the physical location of the library, because the initial screen that pops up gives a call number but because our library is genrefied, the kids need to know both the call number and the location. So once I learned how to find that information in the catalog, I developed a brief lesson to share what I learned. That seems to be working well; kids are now able to find locate most things in the catalog on their own.

My goal is to make these sort of administrative tasks as independent of me as possible. Because the real joy in my job happens when a kid says, as one did this week, “I really like books like Guts, Drama, Ghosts, and El Deafo. Do you know any others like that?” Things are so busy at lunch recess I had to say, “Give me a day to work on it.” But the next day I had a big stack of other books for her to try. This is called readers’ advisory, and it’s one of my favorite parts of library work.

Another of my favorite parts is supporting instruction, which I did for the first time this week. Our younger students will be learning about North America this week including animals, people, and maps/land features. The teachers working on the animals lessons asked me to pull some resources together for them. So I spent a couple hours on that, getting a big stack of books together and building them a collection of ebooks on the ebook service we use, as well as recommending iNaturalist for photos of the animals out in the world.

I could only do that, though, because the teachers happened to catch me on a day when I didn’t have any students in for circulation.

The key thing to note is that I work 50% time. And the way that 50% is scheduled, about 2 of the 5 hours I work on a given day are dedicated to front-facing, direct student support. Another hour or two are dedicated to administrative tasks like getting books checked back in.

This only leaves an hour or two a day for the deep work of readers’ advisory, instructional support and collaboration, and collection management. (I haven’t even really gotten started with collection management yet; I’ve been thinking about it, but not doing it.)

I do have high school TAs who can help with shelving and checking in, but when they’re available and when I need to have books ready to go back out to kids or free up space (they’re allowed a maximum of 10 books checked out at a time) aren’t always the same.

So. I’m trying to create systems to help me make more time for the deep work.

I think I had a different high school experience than a lot of my peers. When the reunion committee asks, “What was your favorite after school hangout?” mostly people mention fast food restaurants or the mall. I’m all, “My house? No, wait, play rehearsal.”

First, I didn’t have a car.

Second, I genuinely can’t imagine being able to just go and hang out somewhere after school. As I remember it, I would (in 9th & 10th grade) ride the bus or (in 11th & 12th grade) be dropped off by a friend, always at home. I might watch Animaniacs and Batman: the Animated Series, but then I’d get right to homework. And then I’d have dinner and head to rehearsal.

I have no regrets about living in theaters in high school.

The other thing though as I think about it is that if I wasn’t home, who was going to hang out with my siblings? My mom was so sick with pernicious anemia and hypothyroidism, she barely had the energy to get out of bed. (I have worked very hard to make sure this isn’t my adult life. She didn’t have the access to information that I do.)

My brother was ages 1 - 4 when I was in high school and childcare was prohibitively expensive. Was I going to make my 9 - 13-year-old sister care for him? No. Was I going to consign her to a fate of waiting in after school care until my dad could pick her up? Definitely not; we’d lived that life when I was in elementary school and our school’s after care felt very sad.

So I didn’t go hang out anywhere until my dad got home from work, and then I went to rehearsal. Usually he drove me, but sometimes a friend did.

I had such a bad experience in driver’s ed and driving with my permit that I didn’t get my license until I was 20. So there’s a real sense of freedom that my peers had at 16 that I just didn’t.

But even if I’d had my license: we had one car. If I’d gotten a job to buy a car, the childcare question would come up again. (I just realized that of course my mom had to care for my baby brother during the day, so now I’m thinking that’s where all her spoons went. She had to save her energy for that.)

Anyway, yeah. My favorite after school hangout was our futon I guess until my dad got home and could take me to the theater, my actual favorite after school hangout.

But my favorite weekend hangout?

That was the library.