This morning I took Em (niece, age 7) to the craft store for hot glue sticks and air-dry clay. She’s modding a knock-off My Little Pony, clever girl.

Did I mention that we went to the library last week? I got five books, of which three were great and one was readable. Only threw one down in a huff. Lol. Pretty good ratio! The good ones were _The Downstairs Neighbor_ by Helen Cooper, _The Children’s Blizzard_ by Melanie Benjamin, and _A World Beneath the Sands: The Golden Age of Egyptology_ by Toby Wilkinson (not finished with that one yet. It’s dense). I recommend all three!

Beverly Cleary died a few days ago. She was 104! One of those cases of “wow, she was still alive??” I wish I had written her a thank-you note 40 years ago. I never cared much for Ramona, though I know she is loved by nearly everyone. The Ramona books stressed me out. I was happier reading about Beezus and Henry. And I LOVED the teenage books. I must have read “Sister of the Bride” and “The Luckiest Girl” a hundred times. Our library didn’t have “Jean and Johnny” or “Fifteen” when I was a kid, but I read them in my twenties and loved them too. When I head about Beverly’s death I downloaded allll the Henry Huggins books and all four teenage books so I can do a big re-read. I started with The Luckiest Girl, which is just as great as I remembered, and then Fifteen which is also very enjoyable. I love how the heroine’s thoughts spin out of control with every turn of events. So real, so relatable.

My reading-tracker app (iReadItNowHD) broke in iOS 13 and I’m tired of waiting for the guy to fix it, so over the last few days, when not napping or coughing, I’ve been manually entering alllllllll my reading data into goodreads.com. I do not like goodreads — I’ve been avoiding it for years. So many ads; ugly, cluttered, clunky interface. ALL I WANT in a reading tracker is to be able to keep track of what I read and when I read it, a wishlist, and the ability to bookmark my current book in either page numbers or a percentage. But one small independent iPhone app after another keeps going belly-up (first Readmore, then iReadItNowHD) so I guess I’ll just switch over to goodreads and be done with it.

If you want to find me there and be all social that’s cool. I’m Kara Shallenberg:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/2783354.Kara_Shallenberg

Not sure why goodreads has decided that I’m an author. Someone must have put me in as a librivox narrator and it got confused? Anyway if you scroll down past the books I didn’t write (dracula, etc.) you’ll get to my actual data, like what I’m currently reading. Two of them (Standard Deviation and Because Internet) are instant re-reads because I loved them so much the first time!

There’s an app called Libby. https://meet.libbyapp.com

Install, help it find your library, and enter your library card info.

And then BOOM you can check out ebooks and audiobooks right there, instantly. You can listen to the audiobooks right in the app, with a well-designed little player whose features include offline play, bookmarks, easy scrubbing forward and back through the book, and a sleep timer.

If you want to read with your eyeballs, you can read in the app or — get this — you can have your book DELIVERED TO YOUR KINDLE INSTANTLY. I don’t like reading on my phone, which is what has stopped me from checking out library ebooks in the past, so this is thrilling to me!

The Libby app lets you filter your search in sensible ways. You can search by genre. You can search for audiobooks, ebooks, or both. You can search for titles that are available to check out instantly, or ones which are already checked out to someone else, in which case you can put a hold on the item and it will be checked out for you automatically (with an email notification) when the item becomes available.

I tell you, it is such luxury to think, hmm, I’d like to listen to a new crime thriller, let’s see what there is… and then 3 minutes later I’m listening while I sew. Or thinking, hmm, I’ve never read “The Devil Wears Prada”, I wonder if it’s on Libby? And then three minutes later I’m reading it on my kindle.

I installed the app on 6yo Em’s iPad and helped her to find picture books to read and kids’ audiobooks to listen to.

Of course, the selection is limited. It’s not EVERYTHING you can get physically at your library. But I don’t check out physical audiobooks at all, because I don’t own any kind of cd player, so this is the only way I’ve found to get free modern audiobooks. Librivox is awesome but sometimes you want to hear something that was published later than 1923 :)

Through Libby I discovered a fantastic police procedural series by Elizabeth George, starring Inspector Lynley and his pals. I’ve been listening to them non-stop for weeks :) They’re well-written, and very long (like, around 25 hours of audio each). They are perfect for bedtime listening too — not gory or scary, interesting without being too exciting. Just right to help my tired brain fall asleep, and of course I drop a bookmark when I go to bed, so in the morning I can back up to that point and not miss anything. There are 20 novels in the series so far, so if you like ’em as much as I do you’re set for a long time. I prefer the ones narrated by Donada Peters, which is most of them.

Oh! Also I recently listened to “Heartburn” by Nora Ephron. I think I found it on the “humor” shelf. It was read by Meryl Streep!!! She is an absolutely amazing narrator, and the book was great too. While I was listening, I thought, huh, this dialogue really reminds me of When Harry Met Sally. And then I found out that Nora Ephron wrote When Harry Met Sally :)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/23/anne-mccaffrey-pern-dies-85

Dragonsong and Dragonsinger were my favorites. They made a huge impression on me when I first read them as a 10-year-old (I still re-read them every few years). Menolly was a wonderfully real girl — brave enough to run away and live Holdless for the sake of her music, but as shy and insecure as I was.

Thanks, Anne.

Yes, it’s “just” a kids’ book… but still it was quite an accomplishment for me! And very fun, as well. I’ve always loved boarding-school stories. And I was just delighted when Dolly gave horrible Irmgard a good shaking!

Now I’m in the middle of “Balletschuhe” by Noel Streatfeild, which I’ve read before in English, of course, so that helps quite a lot. But I think Streatfeild’s writing style is a bit more complex than Blyton’s.

It was just the sort of book I love: a big complicated family, lots of aunts and uncles and cousins, their servants, all the little details of relationships and family life, etc., set against a historical background (pre-WWII England, in this case). Every character seemed real to me, but I thought the author was particularly good at writing the children and teenagers. I can’t wait to find out what happens next. I don’t know which will get here first — the next book or the next disk of the miniseries, but either one will make me drop everything else.

Vielen Dank!

To prevent random strangers from bumping into the project and editing rather than translating it, I’ve made it visible only to my contacts. So if you’d like to help, please make an account at Bite-Size Edits and then ask it to make me (username: kayray) your contact, and I’ll OK you right away.

Vielen Dank!