And we're back!

After my vacation in June, I sat down and wrote a great post for this blog. It was about what I read on vacation, what I took but didn’t read, some books that I read before I left, and the nature of vacations. It was brilliant. It had links. I spent quite a bit of time on it.

Just as I was nearing the end of this masterpiece, the power went out for about 30 seconds. It wasn’t storming, but it was windy, so I guess some wires were temporarily blown out of full connection or something. We barely had enough time to register what was happening before the power came back on. The dvd that the kids were watching resumed right where it had left off. My virtuoso piece of writing, however, was gone. This discouraged me so much that I haven’t been back since, except for the brief post of pictures.

I have kept up my reading and my list, though, so I decided today that it was time to stop being silly and start again. Of course, I am composing this in Word and saving often, but at least I am writing it. It seems appropriate anyway--getting back to work after a summer vacation. My daughter went back to school last week, and now I am getting back into the routine, too.

So, I am sure anyone who has read this blog before (all, what? 5 or 6 of you?) is dying to know where my count for the year stands. I am at 61 books for the year. Not bad for the first 8 months of the year, but my pace has definitely fallen off what it was at the beginning of the year, when I was averaging two per week. I knew I would not maintain that for the whole year, though, and I am not even sure that I would want to, at least from the standpoint of having a life in the real world. On the other hand, there are so many books out there to read that it seems like I should hurry up and get to them all.

A quick look at some of the statistics of my reading:

• Science Fiction is my top genre now, with 20 books, or just under 33%.
• General Fiction, a bit of a catch-all category, is in close second, with 19 books, or just over 31%.
• Non-Fiction as a whole sits at 14 books, or nearly 23%.

Overall, my list is fairly diverse, which is good. I have not updated the Books-To-Be-Read list lately, so the 47 books on there do not reflect all the books I have waiting. I joined the Science Fiction Book Club, so I got a bunch of books in the mail from them, and the only ones that made it on the list were the ones I have finished, and those aren’t the only books I have bought and not documented. My list of Books-To-Buy sits at 39, but I am sure that could use some updating, too.

I am thinking of trying to put my spreadsheet out on the new Google spreadsheet. I have a problem with wanting to update my list both at home and at work, and keeping those in synch is tough. If I had it out on the web, that would help a lot. Plus, I could put a link here, because I am sure this would be just as fascinating to everyone else as it is to me. Kind of like a train wreck.

Anyway, that is where I stand, reading-wise. I have also recently joined the community center so that I can work out more, signed up to volunteer more at my daughter’s school, and gotten tremendously busy at work. More on all that later, though.