Personal blog: All opinions are only my own, unless you want to borrow them. (he/him)
April is National Poetry Writing Month and I’ll be participating. I won’t promise a poem a day, and I won’t always be following the daily prompts on the official NaPoWriMo site, but I do plan to write at least two or three new poems a week for the rest of this month.
Here’s my first NaPoWriMo poem:
This post is part of my effort to tell the story of my recent health journey.
In the interest of full disclosure, getting myself back to health wasn’t as straightforward or as easy as my last posts make it sound. I faced crises on the path—several, actually, at several points in the process. Maybe it would help to share one of those crises here.
The following is something I wrote two-and-half years ago, about a month after I’d started going to the gym on a regular basis. I’d spent the previous few years slowly reversing my inertia of inactivity and had finally reached a point that going to the gym for more serious exercise was something I genuinely wanted to do.
Even then, even with all my new motivation to get healthy, I still found myself close to giving up…
This post is part of my effort to tell the story of my recent health journey.
But what if nothing much changes in your life to make you care about improving your health?
You could just keep on as you are—which means that, eventually, you could end up with some kind of health scare. Better if it never gets that far.
I think there’s a way to build up to caring about your health without a scare and without major life changes—much like how I took many small steps to slowly change my inertia of inactivity, you can generate a momentum of caring. It starts with a necessary first step:
Stop making weight the goal.
This post is part of my effort to tell the story of my recent health journey.
Getting rid of some of the obstacles that built up and stopped me from committing to exercise was an essential part of my path to better health, but it wasn’t the only factor. I need to talk about the elephant in the room:
Back in my late 20s and early 30s, when I was overweight and sedentary, my health simply didn’t matter all that much to me. I didn’t care about it.
It wasn’t just the cascade of obstacles that stopped me, it was the fact that getting healthier wasn’t important enough to me to bother overcoming them.
This post is part of my effort to tell the story of my recent health journey.
I was heading up the stairs of the parking garage as I left work the other day. I prefer to take the stairs rather than ride the elevator, and I usually take the stairs two-at-a-time, not running up them but pretty fast. A coworker saw me and asked why I take the stairs that way. I responded that it’s an easy way for me to get a little bit of extra exercise into my day. They looked somewhat skeptical of this justification.
They’re right to be skeptical of that reasoning. In the grand scheme of things, assessed in terms of exercise, a couple flights of stairs taken two-at-a-time at a good clip doesn’t really accomplish much of anything. It doesn’t elevate my heart rate for more than a minute or so, it doesn’t burn that many extra calories, etc.
And yet, I’m convinced that taking stairs this way—and eschewing elevators and escalators when possible—makes all the difference in the world when it comes to my health and well-being.
Continue reading “It Really Is the Little Things that Matter”
This is the first post in my effort to tell the story of my recent health journey.
April Roy is the branch manager at the Lucile H. Bluford Branch of the Kansas City Public Library. April is a 2015 winner of the “I Love My Librarian Award” from the American Library Association in recognition for her work at Bluford.
You can read an article about her work here:
KC librarian honored for transforming branch, community
by Donna Pitman (KMBC, January 20, 2016)
April and her staff are amazing librarians and they’ve done incredible things for their neighborhood. I’m exceedingly proud to be a part of the same library system.
Continue reading “How Libraries & Librarians Can Promote Community Health”
I’ve been rather silent on this blog lately. That happens sometimes. In this case, I’ve been worn out from working on projects around my house. Totally worth it, though, because I now have (among other things) a whole floor-to-ceiling wall of built-in bookshelves!
I’m also excited to announce that I’m now reviewing for Booklist Online. My primary focus for them will be adult SF with an occasional nonfiction title thrown in. So… not all that different from the kind of books I review here.
A friend of mine posted this article on Twitter a couple days ago (via the New York Public Library):
What Makes Great Detective Fiction, According to T. S. Eliot
by Paul Grimstad (posted by The New Yorker, February 2, 2016)
I love knowing that no less a luminary than T. S. Eliot was a passionate advocate of early detective fiction. But more illuminating is this glimpse into historic perceptions of genre fiction:
Namely, critics have always dismissed genre fiction as low-brow and formulaic, as intrinsically non-literary, and therefore less worthy.
In my continuing quest to find my way into and through the world of Readers’ Advisory…
Sometimes people will ask me how to get started on a particular author. They haven’t read anything by this author, but they know I have and they want to give ’em a try. They ask me which of the author’s books is my favorite, or which they should read first.
My initial impulse is to tell them which book is my personal favorite by the author. But I also know that what appeals to me might not be what appeals to them, and so my favorite might not be theirs. Learning which is my personal favorite might tell them something about me, but it might not be their best entrée into the author’s body of work.
Continue reading “When People Ask Me about My Favorite Authors”
All of the data that follows was collected by me using a combination of Google Sheets and Google Calendar. Once again, I elected not to track pages read—too much discrepancy between formats to generate meaningful comparisons.
A complete list of all the books I read in 2015 is at the bottom of this post.
I read 66 books in 2015. Fiction titles outnumbered nonfiction by 2-to-1:
John the Librarian 