From the ML Stacks Vol. 13
July 8, 2023
This edition of the stacks brings you a few links of interest, some summer travels, my June reading stats / reflections and my July random galley pick. Let’s dig in!
In the last two months I wrote here, here and here about the middle grade category, so I was excited to see this article about middle grade in the June 19 edition of Publisher’s Weekly. I then of course immediately texted it to all of my librarian friends and we spent our morning discussing it ~ as librarians do.
Another new podcast I have been loving! The Retrievals from the NYT is a riveting look at the very real case of a nurse at a Yale fertility clinic stealing fentanyl for her own addiction and replacing it with saline ~ leaving the women undergoing egg retrieval procedures with no pain medication and no way to explain their excruciating pain. I just finished the second episode and love the show’s nuanced look at addiction and how women are treated in the medical system.
Travel Talk
Let’s be real ~ I ONLY travel in the summer due to my school schedule, three different kids’ school schedules, and a lot of anxiety that requires me to have adequate time to prepare and recover from any overnight trip. That means I have to make the most of these summer months!
Earlier this week, the kids and I made a quick drive up to my sister’s in northern WI (my sort-of hometown) to meet up with my brother and his family and our dad for a quick 24 hour visit. I wish we could get everyone together more often, but my brother’s family lives near Seattle and all the kids (some are actual adults now!) are getting old enough that scheduling is brutal. All but one of the cousins were able to be there ~ we take what we can get! It was a wonderful visit and we squeezed every second of fun we could get out of the trip.
AND ~ my girls and I are headed on yet another trip next week! This time we’re driving from Wisconsin to Denver for a concert (!!!!!), then making the shortish drive from there to my mom and stepdad’s house in Buena Vista, CO and staying most of the next week. Their house is yet another of my happiest places and I can’t WAIT to wake up with the view of mountains again! I go every summer and I eagerly await the visit every year. My husband works all year, so he very rarely travels with us, and the middle kid is opting to stay home for work and baseball ~ just me and the girls again!
June Reading Stats
My June book cards are here! I started this practice up again in May and I’m still enjoying the ability to see what I’m reading and where I’m getting my books from throughout the month. A few thoughts:
This definitely helped push me to grab books from those three genres / formats I tend to overlook, and it made me read a Kindle Unlimited book I had been wanting to read for ages but kept overlooking in favor of new releases.
I added the / Hoopla this month because I JUST realized that my home county library system has Hoopla (previously only the city library system did and I wasn’t eligible) and it’s been fun seeing what they have on audio that I can’t access elsewhere.
My Summer Reading Guide tracking has been fun too - it’s helping me remember to look at all of them often to remind myself of what they have to offer.
My June reading was surprising to me! I went with a lot longer and heftier reads than I usually start summer off with, and I read a LOT of backlist rather than digging into many of my digital advance copies. And EIGHT of my own books ~ yay for circulating the unread shelf!
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