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Top Ten Tuesday: Shortest Books I’ve Read

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week’s subject is technically books we’ve read in one sitting, but I don’t tend to read that way…I pick up books and put them down pretty frequently throughout the day. So I’m focusing instead on short books that really grabbed my attention, even if they took me more than one sitting to finish.

Civilization and Its Discontents: Breaking the rules here almost immediately, as this isn’t really a “one-sitting” kind of book despite being very short. If you’ve heard of Freud and have an opinion on his theories but have never actually read his work, this is a totally fascinating exploration of the tension between society and the individual.

Men Explain Things to Me: The concept behind the title essay in this collection has become widely recognizable as “mansplaining”, but that doesn’t mean the essay itself isn’t worth reading, along with the others that touch on various aspects of the experience of being a woman in the world.

Number the Stars: A childhood favorite, I recently revisited this story about a Danish girl and the Jewish friend whose family her family helps to escape on audio and honestly I think it holds up.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: The “life-changing teacher” is a stock character in media, but this book explores a much darker side of a charismatic educator influencing young minds.

Lord of the Flies: A lot of people have hated this since they read it in school and had to analyze the obvious symbolism, and while there is certainly room to disagree with its premise, I found it a really interesting examination of the evolution of power dynamics.

The Sense of an Ending: The story in this novel is the kind that some authors would have indulged themselves padding out to 350 pages, but the sparseness really makes it work.

A Clockwork Orange: Deliberately meant to be hard to get into because of the use of words from its own invented language but once you do get into it, it’s great!

Exit West: This one I did come very close to reading in one sitting. The story of immigrants Nadia and Saeed just flew by.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s: I love the movie, it’s wonderful. The original novella is different…darker, and sadder, and just an incredible piece of writing.

The Awakening: This is one that has hung with me since high school…short, but elegant and powerful.

A Month In The Life: October 2020

October is my favorite month…it is my birthday month, after all! After a summer that felt like it lasted foreverrrrrrr, we’re finally having some fall, so I’m enjoying the touch of crisp in the air (not too crispy for the most part, though, it’s about 70 today). Otherwise, we are looking forward to getting through the next two months and shutting the door on 2020.

In Books…

  • Adaptation: This YA sci-fi/fantasy is honestly pretty unremarkable but for its central love triangle. Teenage Reese and her debate partner/crush David are driving back from Arizona to San Francisco after a sudden crisis grounds air traffic, when they suddenly crash in the Nevada desert. They get treatment at a mysterious hospital, and find that they’ve developed strange new abilities. While Reese tries to figure out what happened, she meets pretty Amber on the street, and realizes she might not be entirely straight after all. Character development is weak and so are the story elements, but a sensitively handled bisexual first love(s) story is something pleasantly different.
  • Michael Jackson: The Magic, The Madness, The Whole Story: This is a very comprehensive look at its subject, clocking in at about 750 pages. It’s not a particularly good biography, leaning heavily towards a recitation of facts without much in the way of analysis. It did at least help give me some more context about the life of a figure who remains controversial even over a decade after his death.
  • Exhalation: If it’s short stories, it’s because it’s a book club pick. I usually don’t especially care for short story collections, as I find they have as much chaff as wheat. This one, though, was special. It’s eight science fiction stories, one long enough to practically be a novella, and while not all were brilliant, they were thought-provoking and compelling. I really liked it!
  • A Bollywood Affair: My brain and my heart didn’t feel quite the same about this one. I had some real issues with characterization, particularly of central character Mili, who is almost always either crying, blushing, tripping, or eating in an apparently especially sensual way. And I didn’t love Samir either, finding his “bad boy cured by the love of a good woman” arc trite. But I did get swept up in it in the middle, before the ending lost me again.
  • His Only Wife: I wanted to like this debut novel from Ghanian author Peace Adzo Medie more than I actually did. There are solid bones here…the story of a poor but pretty young woman, Afi, who is married to Elikem, the handsome son of a wealthy local family, in his family’s attempt to break up his longstanding relationship with a woman they don’t like. Complications ensue, of course, but Afi is often irritatingly naive and some of the side characters are honestly more interesting than the main ones.
  • The White Princess: The Wars of the Roses in England were finally ended when the two skirmishing families were joined as King Henry VII wed Elizabeth of York. This book follows the story of the latter after the downfall of her uncle, Richard III and through much of the rest of her life, including her marriage to Henry and the birth of all but their last child. It’s one of the weaker installments of this series, less because of Gregory’s choices (though I definitely side-eye some of those) but because Elizabeth is a fundamentally reactive, passive character, which makes it difficult to get invested in her.
  • Looking for Alaska: This book is hard for me to evaluate as a 35 year-old. On the one hand, it felt like it would be an excellent book to read as a teenager, full of making new friends and self-discovery and crushes on unattainable people and thinking about life and the world. On the other, I am a boring settled-down adult lady now and have a hard time connecting with that kind of intensity of feeling, and the characters felt more like collections of quirks than actual people.

In Life…

  • I turned 35!: And so did my husband (our birthdays are two weeks apart). Like pretty much everyone else this year, I had a very subdued celebration…we ordered in from one of our favorite local restaurants and watched a movie, which was nice. And of course, I gave away a copy of Exit West to celebrate my fifth year of blogging, so congrats again to Savannah for winning it!

One Thing:

One of the categories I include for my lists and awards is the best-seller list from The New York Times. I actually don’t use it at all to drive my book decisions (awards are much more enticing to me), but I always find it interesting to note which books I’ve read have been very popular. Well there was a study that cross-referenced those lists with the way readers actually reviewed the books, based on Goodreads ratings, and I found it very interesting! Maybe you will too, so I’ve linked to it here.

Gratuitous Pug Picture:

Year 5: An Update (And Giveaway!)

I am 35 years old today, marking my halfway point through this decade of my life. Starting tomorrow, I’ll be closer to 40 than 30. It’s also the halfway point of my challenge to myself to read 500 books, the genesis of this blog. When I turned 30, I set some goals for myself for the next decade. One of those goals was to read at least 50 books per year, or 500 total, so I started the blog a couple months later to hold myself accountable and have a place to talk about all those books! Since my reading years begin and end on my birthday, I like to do a check-in post every year to look back on the year that was, both in books and life. Without further ado:

In Reading

  • Books read (this year): 76. While very comfortably north of my 50 book goal, this is actually my lowest yearly book total since I started the blog. I’ve generally trended downward every year, with a very small bump up between years two and three. I think this is mostly a function, this year, of the struggle I had to read during the first few months of a pandemic.
  • Books read (total): 421. I am now far, far beyond my goal number for this point, which would have been 250, and I could realistically finish out the 500 within the next year (though I suspect I won’t).
  • Male/Female Authors: This year I read 41 books by male authors and 35 books by female authors. This is fairly close to an even split, and a recent stretch of mostly-male authors knocked it a little off-kilter.
  • Most Read Genres: This year’s split between fiction and nonfiction is almost identical to last year’s: I read 53 fiction books and 23 nonfiction books, which puts my ratio below 3:1, where I aim for it to be, but above 4:1 at least. My most-read subgenres for fiction were contemporary and historical (which is normal for me) and for nonfiction were history and memoir. I’m a bit surprised at the latter, as I wouldn’t describe memoir as an especially favorite genre of mine.
  • Kindle/Hard Copy: This year I read 54 books in hard copy (either paperback or hardcover), and 22 books on my Kindle. I aim to be fairly even, but I really do just prefer hard copy books. I shop overwhelmingly secondhand, and the ones that I finish that I don’t love end up in Little Free Libraries, so it doesn’t feel wasteful or anything. I would probably read even more hard copies if I had the space to store them!

In Life

  • I went to Skate America: I LOVE figure skating, but had never seen a live competition before. Well, they had the 2019 edition of this first event on the Grand Prix calendar in Las Vegas, so my best friend Crystal joined me! I was reading: Revolutionary Road (review to come)
  • I went to New York City with my mom: My mom has always liked to take a special trip during the holidays, and this year she asked me to join her in New York City for a long weekend! I hadn’t been for a few years, so I made the cross-country journey and we had a lovely time exploring the city and seeing Moulin Rouge on Broadway! I was reading: Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling (review to come)
  • I went to Newport Beach, California: My work retreat was to Orange County, California, and it was lovely to have a weekend away where I got to put my feet into the ocean. I had one more plane trip to come, at the very of January for meetings in Las Vegas, but this was my last normal trip. I was reading: Perfume (review to come)
  • My mom came to Reno to visit: My mom’s birthday is at the end of February, and her present to herself was a trip out West to visit people she loves. Obviously that includes me so she stayed in Reno for a few days, and I’m glad she did because otherwise it would have been even longer since I’d gotten to see my mom after things shut down. I was reading: A Visit From the Goon Squad (review to come)
  • The country shut down: I’m dating this from the day after the NBA postponed the Utah-Oklahoma City game because of COVID-19. Obviously the Seattle and San Francisco outbreaks had started before this, and I think the news that Tom Hanks had contracted the virus came shortly before, but when it stopped sports it felt REAL. I was reading: Lost Children Archive (review to come)
  • My sister’s baby shower: The first time I stepped foot on a plane since January was in late September, which was a bizarre experience, because I usually travel every few months and usually go to Michigan at least once per year. This marked 14 months between trips, but I definitely had to make this one happen, as my little sister is pregnant and I wouldn’t have missed her baby shower for the world. I was reading: Naked (review to come)

The Giveaway

Every year, I give away a copy of the book I loved the most out of the ones I’ve reviewed on the blog over the past 12 months. I reviewed some wonderful books this year, but the one that captured my heart most of all was the lyrical, lovely Exit West. If you haven’t read it, and would like to, here’s your chance! Just enter via the Rafflecopter below during the next week and this book could be yours! Apologies to my international friends, but this giveaway is US-only.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

 

Book 214: Exit West

“His eyes rolled terribly. Yes: terribly. Or perhaps not so terribly. Perhaps they merely glanced about him, at the woman, at the bed, at the room. Growing up in the not infrequently perilous circumstances in which he had grown up, he was aware of the fragility of his body. He knew how little it took to make a man into meat: the wrong blow, the wrong gunshot, the wrong flick of a blade, turn of a car, presence of a microorganism in a handshake, a cough. He was aware that alone a person is almost nothing.”

Dates read: March 9-11, 2018

Rating: 10/10

I don’t have to go too far back on either side of my family to find immigrants. On my mom’s side, my grandmother left her native Austria as a young woman, and on my dad’s side, my great-grandfather came over from Poland as a teenager. Neither were what would be considered particularly desirable immigrants: great-grandpa was illiterate in his native Polish and spoke no English at the time of arrival, and grandma was a Jewish woman without higher education at a time when America was not especially welcoming of Jewish immigrants. But arrive here they both did, and carved out lives for themselves, and started families, and here I am a couple generations later, an American writing this blog.

As long as there are parts of the world that experience war, famine, and oppression, there will be immigrants and refugees. Mohsin Hamid’s short, delicate Exit West tells a story about two of them, Saeed and Nadia, with a small magical realism twist: people move between countries through doors that appear, seemingly at random. People go through them, but they don’t come back, so you don’t know exactly where you’re going until you get there. You just know that it’s not where you are, and for many people, that’s enough. Including our central couple, young people in a never-named, seemingly majority-Muslim city. Nadia covers herself from collarbone to toe in a long robe although such attire is not mandatory…but she’s an atheist who smokes pot and is sexually active. Saeed is more traditional, but still far from devout. They meet in a class and sparks start to fly…but then so do bullets as insurgents begin to battle the government in their city, too.

Soon, they’re left with little choice but to flee if they want any hope for the future. As they enter first Mykonos, and then London, thousands of others are doing the same. Hamid tosses little side vignettes of other refugees into his story, showing how people react to the new reality: some respond with fear and violence, but others build unexpected connections. As more and more people come streaming across borders, tension between the native populations of the countries experiencing an inflow and the desperate masses who’ve arrived begin to build. But cracks begin to form between Saeed and Nadia, as they find themselves taking different approaches to life in their new reality.

There’s something fairy-tale-esque about this story, and it’s not just because of Hamid’s absolutely jaw-droppingly gorgeous writing. Maybe it’s in how Saeed and Nadia are given personalities, but still feel symbolic. Maybe it’s the way Hamid “zooms out”, as it were, every so often to give us a fuller view outside of their story. Maybe it’s the familiar beats of love, and loss, and a journey. Maybe it’s the undeniable sense of optimism. Maybe it’s the elegance of the narrative. It’s probably a little bit of all of the above.

I’ll admit that I was wary when I heard that this book has a magical realism element, as that doesn’t usually appeal to me. But I found myself grabbed by Saeed and Nadia, and their growing bond, and their reluctant flight from home, and their struggles to make new lives for themselves. And the device of the doors makes for a certain efficiency that works with the overall flow of the novel…like I said above, there’s a real elegance to it, every word and plot detail seems like the product of a deliberate choice to include it. So using doors allows us to skip all the tedium of the mechanical aspects of getting from point A to point B. I was both charmed and deeply moved by this book and now I need to read everything else Hamid’s ever written because this was amazing. I’d recommend this book to everyone.

One year ago, I was reading: The Cuckoo’s Calling (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: Fourth of July Creek

Three years ago, I was reading: The King Must Die

Four years ago, I was reading: Thirst

Top Ten Tuesday: Books With Great Titles

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about book titles. Specifically, good ones! I’m only human, and as susceptible to the pull of a great title as anyone. So here are ten that got my attention!

A Clockwork Orange: I remember reading one that Burgess wanted to contrast the idea of mechanics/clockwork with the most alive thing he could think of, and came up with the juicy burst of an orange. I loved the book, and the title is captivating in its own right.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: I understand why this wouldn’t have worked as the title of a movie, but it’s so much better than Blade Runner.

The Color Purple: Every time I think about the title, I remember the central tenet of the book…which is effective for a title to do!

Exit West: This one just immediately suggests questions you have to read the book to find the answers to, like who’s doing the exiting, and west of where?

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: This title is a spoiler for its own book! But it promises an interesting story, and it delivers.

Skinny Legs and All: Tom Robbins has a way with eye-catching titles.

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: I read this book because a college roommate liked it, but I would have 100% picked it up based on the title alone anyways.

Thank You For Smoking: There words in this order is so unexpected to see that it immediately grabs your attention.

Pride and Prejudice: The alliteration on this one just gets it stuck in your head. And it has a nice rhythm to it when you say it out loud!

Gone Girl: More alliterative goodness. The single syllables here give it a distinctive ring as well.

Top Ten Tuesday: British Covers I Like Better

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week’s subject is cover redesigns that we love or hate, but the only cover redesigns I can think of besides the classics are movie covers, which I pretty much always hate. So I’m going to turn my eyes across the pond to show you ten lovely covers (for books I love!) that I like much better than the American versions!

 The Bear and the Nightingale
 

Memoirs of a Geisha

 

An American Marriage

A Brave New World
The Kite Runner
 
High Fidelity

Exit West

 

Daisy Jones And The Six

 
White Oleander

 
The Virgin Suicides


Top Ten Tuesday: Recent Favorite Couples In Books

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! With Valentine’s Day coming up around the corner, this week we’re looking at favorite couples! I feel like I did something similar-ish not tooooo long ago, so I’m highlighting my favorites from books I’ve read fairly recently.

Arthur and Freddy (Less): Arthur Less feels silly for being so sad when he finds out his ex Freddy is marrying someone else…after all, they weren’t even ever really “official”. But as he remembers their time together, it’s more and more obvious how much he did actually love his lost flame.

Jessica and Marcus (Sloppy Firsts): We all have that one crush on the “bad” guy that we shouldn’t have feelings for at some point, don’t we? It’s satisfying watching that relationship actually come together and kind of work!

Bathsheba and Gabriel (Far from the Madding Crowd): Watching Bathsheba make bad decisions about dudes is so rough because the right one is right there and you’re just waaaaaiting for them to finally get together.

Maud and Roland (Possession): Like most nerds, the idea of falling in love while engaged in an intellectual pursuit is just impossibly romantic to me.

Nadia and Saeed (Exit West): These two young lovers and the journey they take is so deeply moving, even as their experiences change them in ways that put their future in jeopardy.

William and Katherine (Stoner): William’s life is so sad that even knowing his affair with his beautiful, smart colleague can’t last, I still found myself caring so much and wanting it to go on as long as possible so he has the chance for more happiness.

Lux and Joseph (Valley of the Moon): I liked the way Gideon built up the relationship between these two slowly and organically so that by the time they actually got together it felt so right!

Joe and Rosa (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay): I don’t entirely love how Chabon wrote Rosa overall, but I really did care about the relationship between her and Joe and wanted things to work out somehow.

Vasya and Morozko (The Girl in the Tower): One of the things I love about how Arden writes these books is that Vasya is deeply aware of how ridiculous the idea of an actual relationship between a teenage girl and an ancient death god is…but they’re so easy to get invested in!

Ifemelu and Obinze (Americanah): Rooting for these two to make it means rooting for someone who cheats on their spouse to end up with the person they’re cheating with…but I found their love story so compelling I couldn’t help it!

Top Ten Tuesday: Best Books I’ve Read In 2018 (So Far)

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re looking at our top ten reads of the year so far now that the year is a little over halfway over. I usually try to restrict my year-end list to year-of releases, but for this one (since I haven’t even read ten 2018 releases yet), I’m just going to talk about the best things I’ve read this year without including the 2018 releases, only a couple of which would have made my list anyways.

Exit West: I chose this as a Book of the Month selection last year, but hadn’t gotten around to reading it by the time my book club moderator chose it for us a couple months ago and holy smokes did I love it. Spare, lyrical, and powerful (and I didn’t even hate the magical realism).

Good Omens: If you enjoy British humor, this tale of two angels (one fallen, one not) trying to deal with the pending rise of the Antichrist and associated end of the world will delight you. Both funny and clever.

Stiff: Mary Roach examines some of less conventional ways to deal with dead bodies with her trademark warm curiosity and it’s fascinating.

The Girl With All The Gifts: I don’t usually read heavily in the horror genre, so I was pleasantly surprised by how much I really did enjoy this twist on a zombie story.

Possession: I can already tell that I’m going to want to read this deeply-layered, parallel-storylined book again to appreciate more of its subtleties and richness.

An Untamed State: I’d never actually read one of Roxane Gay’s books before this year, despite knowing I liked her Twitter presence and editorial pieces and the raw power of her talent and skill, despite an extremely difficult subject matter, blew me away.

Thank You For Smoking: I watched the (excellent) movie version of this in college, but now that I myself work in the general public affairs arena, the sharpness of the satire was something I appreciated even more.

Far From The Madding Crowd: I’ll be honest, I thought Tess of the d’Urbervilles was a stronger work from Hardy. But this beautifully told tale of romantic misadventure in the countryside is still a very good book with an indelible heroine.

The Color of Water: I’m not always big into memoirs, but when they’re done right they can be profoundly moving and this one about a mother told by her son is definitely done right.

Mansfield Park: Fanny Price isn’t the lively, spunky heroine many of us expect from Jane Austen, but that doesn’t mean Austen’s sharp wit and keen observations are any less enjoyable.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books With My Favorite Color On the Cover

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re looking at books with our favorite color on the cover. My favorite color is blue, but since we’ve got a topic coming up in a couple months that’ll include books with blue covers, I’ll move to my second favorite: purple!

The Color Purple: This one is obvious, no?

To Kill A Mockingbird: My own hardcover copy is prettier than this, but I think we all read the one with this lavender cover in school.

Pride and Prejudice: This is a blue-r purple but still a lovely cover for a delightful book.

The Stranger Beside Me: The mass market paperback of this true crime classic (which is the edition I own) features Bundy’s stare from a purple background.

The Other Boleyn Girl: I feel like I’m talking about this book a lot lately, which I’m not necessarily trying to do, it just keeps coming up.

Dead Until Dark: The first in Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire Mysteries features Sookie Stackhouse and her vampire lover Bill floating against a dark purple sky.

Stay With Me: This debut novel has, well, stayed with me in the months since I read it…and its orange and purple cover is striking.

A Brave New World: This classic of dystopian fiction has an unusual tone of grayish purple in the cover.

Exit West: Beautiful book, gorgeous cover.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: These books get redesigned covers pretty frequently (the originals that I grew up with are my favorites), and honestly I find most of the ones in this series uninspiring, but I love this moody purple-soaked one.

A Month In The Life: March 2018

And the year is officially one quarter over! Compared to the first couple months of the year, March was pretty calm. My mom’s visit wrapped up early in the month, and my husband was out of town a little, but otherwise not much besides celebrating my in-laws’ birthdays (like my husband and I, they share a birthday month). A laid-back schedule meant a banner month for me on the reading front, which felt great! I keep acquiring new books to read, so I need to get through the ones I already have.  
In Books…
  • Henry and Cato: Ever since I saw the movie Iris, I wanted to read one of Iris Murdoch’s books. This one went on sale for the Kindle, so that’s what I went for. It was good, with interesting parallels and themes and well-crafted prose, but it didn’t blow my mind. It was good enough to make me want to pick up other things she’s written, but it isn’t something I’ll need a copy of for my own shelf. 
  • Good Omens: I’ve come to be a big Neil Gaiman fan and this was actually somehow my first encounter with Terry Pratchett, and this has gotten a lot of raves so I went in with high expectations. Which were mostly met! This book is delightfully witty and fun to read. It’s not perfect, but it’s damn good. 
  • The Martian: I actually think this worked better as a movie? It’s solid, don’t get me wrong, but on the page the formulaic-ness of the plot (a problem arises, is solved, and then another problem arises, is solved, etc combined with a rescue mission) becomes very obvious. It doesn’t mean I didn’t like it, but it wasn’t outstanding either.
  • Exit West: This was the book club pick for this month, which worked out perfectly because I’d gotten it as my Book of the Month a year ago but hadn’t had a chance to read it yet. I was a little wary because magical realism is not something I particularly enjoy, but this was just gorgeously written and strongly rooted in a beautifully portrayed relationship between two young people in a city that’s descending into violence. It’s a stunning book.
  • Court Justice: As a college football fan (and someone whose husband loved the NCAA football video games), I’ve been interested in the O’Bannon lawsuit and the ongoing debate about the idea of paying college players, so this book seemed right up my alley. It didn’t work, though, for me. The writing was clunky, and it felt like there was more information about O’Bannon’s life and career than there was about the lawsuit. I’m sure there’s a good book to be written about it all, but this isn’t it. 
  • Stiff: I read Roach’s Spook last year and enjoyed it, so I went back to read her first book! I learned a lot of really fascinating things about dead people and what happens to them, and my inclination towards organ donation was re-affirmed. 
  • The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: I’ve been hearing good things about this book for years now, and happily, my recommenders were right! This is a fascinating book, exploring the life of the titular lady (whose cancer cells were the beginning of one of the most widely-used cell lines in the world), medical ethics, and what’s become of the children Henrietta left behind when she died at only 31. It’s a little uneven in the pacing, but definitely worth reading. 
  • Possession: This book is so dense and rich I’m sure it takes a second or even third reading to really fully appreciate it, but I enjoyed it enough that I’ll be happy to return to it someday. Compelling characters and an interesting, nerdy mystery that requires them to find and follow literary clues to solve it? Sold. 
  • Of Human Bondage: Books like this are why I continue to refuse to DNF. About halfway through, I was not really enjoying this character study of a shy, sensitive young man who can’t figure out what he wants to do with himself. But by the end, I was glad I stuck by to watch him struggle and grow and change and finally find a kind of happiness. 
In Life…
  • I bought a car: It’s actually less exciting than it sounds…my lease was ending, so I decided to keep the car I’ve been driving for three years already. But this is the first car I’ve actually bought and I’m excited that it’s mine (well, it’s my credit union’s, but it’s basically mine). 
  • Campaign season begins: Our filing period for candidates for political office opened on March 5 and closed March 16, which meant a lot of time for me with elections offices websites and spreadsheets. Now that who’s running for what is all set, primary campaigns begin (including one that my colleagues and I are working on)!
One Thing:
As a lifelong devotee of University of Michigan sports, there is no better place on the internet to read about football, hockey, and this time of year, basketball than MGoBlog! It’s been a long time since I was an active commenter, but Brian Cook and his team are the first ones I turn to for analysis and commentary about the Maize and Blue! 
Gratuitous Pug Picture: 

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