Links I love

Here we go: our first games for fall sports season start this weekend. You can bet I’ll be reading a ton on the sidelines. I should have plenty of good material to choose from because I’m also visiting the great used book sale at Locust Grove and using these tips I shared yesterday.

We’re wrapping up our annual MMD survey. Thanks so much for your input so far! If you haven’t yet chimed in, please do so now. (Today’s the last day.)

My favorite finds from around the web:

• “It doesn’t have to be Tolstoy or Joyce.” “Finishing is about starting, and then plugging along, day after day. This has pretty much been my realization about big books.”

• How your personality affects your paycheck. “Measuring as extroverted, again by one standard deviation higher than average, is worth almost as much, $490,100.”

• On the slyly subversive writing of E.M. Forster. “Like Austen, Forster was at once firmly situated inside bourgeois culture and detached enough to satirize it. So as both critic and empath he adopted Austen’s free indirect discourse—the third-person narrator who slips in and out of the consciousness of characters, especially the imperfect lens of the mind of his heroine.”

• For many library visitors I’m the only person they’ve talked to all day. “I never meant to be a librarian, but even in difficult times, when I don’t know if I’ll have a job from one round of cuts to the next, I love it.”

News

We just added five stops to the I’d Rather Be Reading fall tour; the current list is pictured above. Please visit the events page for specific dates, additional information, and subsequent additions.

I hope I’m coming to a city near you so we can hang out and talk all things books and reading in person.

Favorite Instagram:

I have a thing for happy flowers, and feel the need to tell my kids this frequently, and they mock me for it. I don’t care. (Especially because they left little vases of zinnias all over the house.) Follow me on instagram @annebogel.

On the blog:

One year ago: Does your reading list embarrass you sometimes? (This category is for you.) “Sometimes we judge ourselves, like maybe we wish we weren’t the kind of person who wanted to read memoirs by former contestants on The Bachelor, but we totally do.”

Two years ago: Love is a skill, not just an enthusiasm. “But if you find yourself living a rather ordinary life, it’s terribly difficult to find fictional characters whose lives mirror yours in any meaningful way. This feels like a missed opportunity. And that’s why I loved this book, explicitly about an ordinary marriage.”

Three years ago: What’s your unfair advantage? (and how I read so much). “If you’re like most people, you don’t have one unfair advantage—you have many. To put it to work for you, the first step is to spot it.”

Four years ago: Vacation, bonus time, and the advantages of being out-of-sync. “All week, I’ve been thinking of more commonplace, less extravagant ways to build similar slices of bonus time into my regular Louisville life.”

Five years ago: Fall fashion preview. (It’s not what you think.)  “My one fashion rule for fall: Wear what you love. Sure, there will be fall trends. But these trends speak more to what’s available for sale in the stores than what you ‘should’ be wearing.”

Six years ago: Online book club on steroids. “There are a whole lot of book lovers out there. You can find somebody, or a group of somebodies–I’m sure of it!”

Seven years ago: The definitive guide to Pride and Prejudice on film: 1995 BBC edition. “Jane Austen’s novel is a book about Elizabeth, but P&P 1995 is very much about Elizabeth and Darcy.”

Have a great weekend!