Grrrr....

[nwhiker]

I hate it when this happens.

I had one -one!- measly chapter (ok, fine it was long and dense, but it was ONE. FREAKING. CHAPTER!) left in a book I've been reading -one!- and fine, ok, yes, the epilogue, but truly only a few hours of (dense) reading left when it, poof!, disappeared because I'd run out my library loan.

Had it been a real book, I'd have kept it an extra day and paid the fine (well, we don't have fines at this point, but I've have been a bad citizen and kept it for an extra day). As it is, I'll have to wait over a month to finish it.

Leaving aside what this does to my finishing my goodreads books for the year, this just freaking annoys me. And what's worse, with covid, I can't even go to Barnes and Noble and finish it there! ;> Actually, tbh, I wouldn't do that, I did have a few hours of reading, which is too much to steal from a bookseller. The B&N trip to finish a book was used once or twice and when it was truly a matter of a few pages of a book or when someone ripped out the last chapter of a book.

Ugh on not finishing this one.

FTW, the book is American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People by Jared Yates Sexton and I'm of a mixed mind on it. I get that the American Myth is a freaking lie and propaganda, and that this country has been, on balance, more bad than good, but internally (treatment of enslaved people, etc) and externally (Hawaii, the Philippines, banana republics, why the fuck did we install the Shah etc), but I think the dark mirror where the US is just bad and don't even think there is one thing this country has done that was good method of writing history is a good one. I know he trying to contrast the truth of what we are, unvarnished, to the myth we've created but part of that truth is that we did help in Normandy, and (yes, white) people have come here and many have made better lives for themselves, even if it's not the perfection we like to pretend it is. Anyhow. It's well worth a read and I will finish the last chapter when I finally get hold of it again.

About goodreads. I'd initially set my goal of books to read at seventy-something and blew past that goal a few months ago. So I set a new one, because things like 120% above goal don't inspire me. Anyhow, that's all well and good, but I have 101 books to read this year, I've read 98, and now this one, which was supposed to be 99 will go in 2021's tally and I'm gonna have to find some short easy books to read to make my goal by the end of the year.

Comments

[camelsamba]

So annoying! Matthew often turns off wifi on his Kindle so a book won't disappear, but that won't work if you're reading on an always connected device. There was one time when i was listening to an audiobook that had a noticeable gap (i think it had been digitized off cassettes or a scratched CD or something), and I managed to track down that bit either from Amazon's "see inside" or maybe it was online at my local library? But it was a short snippet, and an older book.

[camelsamba]

and i'm way off my goodreads goal; not sure how that happened! actually, one guess is that in recent years many of my books were BBC adaptations of Agatha Christie novels, so they were fairly short, and that increased my total; since I don't have any more of those to listen to my throughput has declined.