Ah, gentle reader. No book or garage sales to report, no stack, so no photo. But for your information (and by your, I mean the me looking to write a book report for that one book sometime in the future my), I have gotten several books in the last week or so, mostly with an eye to the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge.
Because I needed a heating element in a hurry, as I mentioned, I broke my Amazon tweehad and ordered one–and I ordered a CD (Battle Beast’s Steelbound) to take myself over the $35 free shipping. That one arrived intact, fortunately, but then I thought to order one to have in reserve in case the latest installed one goes out. So I did, ordering two books to fit reading challenge categories to get to $35:
- An Amish Marriage Agreement by Patrice Lewis for the “Genre New To You” category.
- Native American Songs and Poems, a Dover thrift edition (they still make them? Mercy!) for the “Native American Author” category (although authors on this book would be plural, but that’s splitting hairs.
But! Although Amazon shipped the first heating element I ordered in a sturdy box, the second one was shipped only in its plastic sleeve. So, as you might expect, it arrived bent, and it is going back. I will ship it back in the sturdy box the first one arrived in so they can see the damage wrought by the “efficiency” of quicker picking and shipping. To recap: That’s a full fifty percent of these heating elements ordered from Amazon which have arrived damaged. Tweehad: REACTIVATED.
On Saturday, ABC Books had a book signing, so I went. I was a little rushed, so I only got two books:
- Where the Wind Never Sleeps by Ruth M. Sherwood, a memoir of her parents life as homesteaders in northeastern Montana through her early life in the area in the 1940s when German POWs helped with their sugar beet crops. It sounds fascinating to me, who likes these personal narratives of life in the 19th and early 20th centuries in rural areas, and I overheard her telling Mrs. E. that she raised her family in Alaska–so maybe she has more books or more books forthcoming. But she’s 86. And when I came into the shop, she was browsing for more books. Which is an inspiration to me who sometimes thinks “I’m getting up there, and I won’t read all these books before I die.”
- Priceless by Dave Ramsey. As I put these books on my credit card, I can only expect Dave Ramsey would respond thusly:
So that’s three shorter books for the Winter Reading Challenge and one longer book I’m looking forward to reading. Which will be helpful after I finish the “500+ Pages” category that I’ve gone for early.
