Christine Seifert's Blog: Lady Professor Reads, page 9

Birthday Haul

The best part of being a book lover is having book-loving friends. It was my birthday last week, and I got exactly what I wanted: Books (and a nap).

Here’s what I’ll be reading next:

 

Unraveling Oliver by Liz Nugent (present to myself from myself)

 

Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde

 

Penance by Kanae Manato

 

Choose Your Own Adventure by Dana Schwartz

We Aren’t Too Busy to Read (If We Really Want to Read)

I’m a Reader, a capital-R reader. For me it’s an art, a sport, a hobby, a calling—it’s a way of life. So nothing irks me more than people who say, upon learning I am a Reader, that they would love to read, but they simply don’t have time. If they didn’t have a kid/a poodle/a spouse/a lawn/a job, why, they’d be reading up a storm, too. This is the same type of person who will raise an eyebrow skeptically and wonder aloud what it must be like to have all that free time to engage in something s...

The Tyranny of Meetings

My reading schedule has suffered this week (already) because it’s the first week of school. If you are a professor–or a human being with a job–you probably get invited to a lot of meetings. A lot of soul-sucking meetings.

For that reason, I decided to return to my regular and impassioned rant against meetings. A well-run meeting with a clear agenda and defined outcomes can be useful. But many (most?) meetings are not just a waste of time, they are a waste of money and energy.  Let’s look at...

Old Favorites: Georgia Nicolson

  

Whenever I can’t decide what to read next, or whenever I just need a break from reading new things, I always go back to one of my favorite series: the Georgia Nicolson books by Louise Rennison.

Georgia is a British teen who hates her wide nose, her pimples (lurking lurkers), her embarrassing father (an utter madman), Stalag 14 (her school), and Slim (the Oberfuhrer who runs the school).

But Georgia loves her cat Angus (part mad housecat, part Scottish wildcat who spends his time mocking th...

Library Holds

I have two arrivals from the library, just in time for my last week of freedom.

    

Some Thoughts: Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits–to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life by Gretchen Rubin

I’ll read any book about habits. It’s my weird addictive genre-crack. So I finally picked up Gretchen Rubin’s book on habits from the library, and have some thoughts.

Let’s just start by saying that even a book about habits that I didn’t love is still worth it to me. As far as I’m concerned, any book about habits is a treasure.

As you can probably guess by that lead-in, I didn’t love this book. I did, however, learn some useful things from it. I’ll start there, and then I’ll tell you what tu...

Book of the Month: August 2018

I can’t wait to start this one, primarily because it’s described as “wildly entertaining.”

Who doesn’t need to be wildly entertained at the point when only one week stands between us and the beginning of Fall 2018 classes?

What I Read: July 2018

July was a good month for reading, in part because my hiking vacation was canceled (due to extreme heat, flooding, rock falls, and locusts).

(Just kidding, there were no locusts.)

(But the other stuff was real).

We did a home staycation instead, which turned out to be marvelous. There was much reading, napping, walking, and eating–all of my favorite things. And because I was on brain rest, I had the mental capacity to read some longer and more complicated books that I never seem to get to dur...

Books About Weddings

I’ve attended a lot of weddings. My favorite was one wedding in which I was the maid of honor. I absolutely loved my dress. It was a bright, shiny forest green with huge poofy short sleeves. It had a fitted bodice and a full skirt. I wore velvet black pumps with it.

The whole outfit was the very pinnacle of 80s fashion (though keep in mind that I wore it in 1995–I was seriously behind the times). I loved that dress so much, I’d probably wear it now if I had it. And if I could fit more than my...

Review: If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio

Elevator Pitch: Oliver Marks has served ten years in prison for a crime he confessed to committing. On his first day out, the only thing the lead detective on the case wants to know is the truth. To get there, Oliver has to take him back to Dellecher Classical Conservatory, the liberal arts college where ten years ago he and six theater classmates lived and breathe Shakespeare–onstage and off.

My Tagline: Hamlet meets The Secret History by Donna Tartt meets a troupe of teen stage actors fr...