Tuesday Thingers July 8, 2008 (hosted by Marie at The Boston Bibliophile)

Since we’re past the Fourth of July and the summer season has officially started, what are your plans for the summer? Vacations, trips? Trips that involve reading? Reading plans? If you’re going somewhere, do you do any reading to prepare? Do you read local literature as part of your trip? Have you thought about using the LT Local feature to help plan your book-buying?

As you probably already know if you’re a regular reader here, my family’s summer vacation has already come and gone – we left the day after school got out, and have been back for a couple of weeks now. We don’t really have any major plans for the rest of the season, and any travel we do will probably be local. Aside from the July Book Blowout, which I haven’t started off terribly well (only two books finished so far, and one was a leftover from June), I have no special summer reading plans. I’d really like to do more reading, but that would probably mean less time for writing and blogging, and I haven’t hit a good balance on those activities yet.

As far as travel is concerned, I usually do some research and reading before I visit somewhere new, but these days I get most of my advance information online rather than from books. However, I still won’t hit the road without my AAA TourBooks!

I’ve really never thought much about reading local literature as part of a trip. However, if I have a book that I know takes place in a particular locale, and that’s where I’m going to be, I’m likely to pack it to bring along to read – because when I plan my packing for a trip, it includes books. There are usually some books in my TBR collection that I have mentally set aside as “good vacation reading” for time or thematic reasons (if not both), and I’ll take a few of them with me. I’ll usually take more books than I think I can possibly get through, just in case I have more reading time than expected – I would not want to run out of reading material! However, if that should happen, it would just be a good excuse – as if I need one – to check out a local bookstore, which is something I’ll rarely pass up an opportunity to do.

On a tangentially-related note, I do enjoy reading travel memoirs, whether or not I’ve ever visited the place the writer is discussing. What sort of travel-related reading do you do, and do you have any particular travel and/or reading plans for summer vacation?

Booking Through Thursday: Doomsday (hosted by Deb) July 10, 2008

If my favorite source of books became unavailable, I’d just have to hope it wasn’t my only source of books. Fortunately, in these days of Internet commerce, that probably wouldn’t be very likely. Conversely, even if Amazon.com disappeared overnight, I think there would still be other online booksellers to step in, and despite rumors of poor health, there still seem to be plenty of bricks-and-mortar (or stucco, or wood…you get the idea, some building material) bookstores around. Granted, many of them are chains like Borders or Barnes & Noble (and I have to agree with Trish at Hey Lady! about a preference for Borders, to be honest), but chain bookstores these days offer much more than the ones I remember from shopping malls when I was younger.

As it is, I live in a one-bookstore town – granted, it is a Borders, but that’s one of my biggest complaints about where I live – but if something happened to that bookstore, there are others within reasonable driving distance. While I do shop for books online when I know exactly what I want, it’s not the same experience as the physical wandering, discovery, and leafing through pages that happens in a bookstore itself, when I go in not looking for anything in particular and leave with four or five new additions to TBR purgatory.

Because I prefer to have books available at my whim, I’m much more likely to find a new bookstore than turn to the library. Overall, though, I might mourn the loss of my favorite bookstore for a short time, but it would probably be a “blip” in my reading habits and I’d move on.

Do you have a favorite book source, and what would you do if it disappeared? If you answered this question for BTT, please leave a link to your post in the comments!

Friday Fill-Ins #80 July 11, 2008 (hosted by Janet)

All questions this week are courtesy of the original founder of the Friday Fill-Ins, Megan.

1. Oh, I can’t wait until I have a long weekend again.

2. A very crowded top shelf is the first thing I see when I open my refrigerator.

3. I never leave home without my keys, my cellphone, my ID, some “just-in-case” cash, and a book.

4. If I were a condiment, I would be pico de gallo because it’s one of the few condiments I actually use.

5. People who enforce the rules for others, but ignore them for themselves is are really high up on my list of pet peeves.

6. The last thing I thought of before I went to bed was “I can’t keep my eyes open any longer.”

7. And as for the weekend, tonight I’m looking forward to a trip to Target (a.k.a. “a typically exciting Friday night at my house”), tomorrow my plans include grocery shopping in the morning, and a baseball game at night (Go Dodgers!) and Sunday, I want to get some writing done before my nephew’s birthday party in the afternoon!

1. Pick up the nearest book, and open it to page 123.
2. Find the fifth sentence, and post the next three sentences.

I’m just about to start Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon–And the Journey of a Generation, a joint biography of these three iconic singer/songwriters. I’ve flipped through it, and I’ve already learned about one thing all of these women had in common – James Taylor (although only Carly married him).

Page 123 is the end of the section covering Carole King from 1961-1964. There are only seven sentences on the page, so here are the last two:

Freed from her obsession with her husband, “[M]aybe now Janet can go to med school,” the friend hopefully muses. Eventually, there would be a similar liberation for the real-life young woman whom Alice Adams’ character coincidentally resembled: Carole.

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