Finding Books

I had someone ask me recently how I found time to read as many books as I do. I didn't really have an answer, I just find the time. Ten minutes in the car rider line waiting to pick up the kids from school. Thirty minutes in the kitchen while cooking dinner (get up, stir, sit down, read, get up, chop, sit down, read). Forty five minutes after the kids go to bed instead of TV. The time is there as long as you don't mind reading whole chapters one paragraph at a time. Back in the day I was even very good at reading one armed while holding a sleeping baby in the other. No big deal you say, everyone can do that, but I did it holding them walking around at night. In the dark. I'd read just a bit every time I'd walk past the windows where enough light came in go get in a sentence.

Finding time to read is easy, finding books is hard. You can always find time to read, but focusing on stacks of books while keeping your kids from going crazy is impossible. Neither the book store or the library is a place where you can just browse for reading material when you have little kids. The easiest solution for this is to just buy books online and have them shipped to you. You can do this, and I always did some, but it's expensive. The library is much more cost effective, but I could never figure out a way to make it work until the last few years, so I thought I'd pass my system on to you. Many, if not most, libraries have a presence online now. You can look at what books the library has, whether they are checked in or not, and renew your books. If you live near an area with any sort of college, your library is also probably part of a system of libraries which greatly expands the books available to you. You can request a book from any library in the system and they'll arrange for the book to be shipped to your library so you can read it. If you're really pressed for time, you can even have them grab a book off of their own shelves and reserve it for you. Now you don't even have to go look for it!
Great, so now you know you have access to a LOT of books but you still don't have time to go search the stacks. If your library is like most of them, their website is functional, but not useful for finding books unless you know the exact book you want. What to do if you need to find something new? There are plenty of sites on the internet that you could use for book suggestions, but when you do that, you're always going off someone else's opinion. What I prefer is to use Amazon.com. They have to be the best book searching resource on the planet. Whether you buy books from them or not, they can help you find them. The easiest thing to do is start with a book you like. Find it on amazon and then scroll down to the part where it says 'customers who bought this also bought' and see what's there. Amazon has some fantastic programing that does a pretty good job figuring out things that are related to what you're looking at. Sometimes there's something weird thrown in there, but it's a great start. Click on another book down there that looks good and see if you think you might like it. Now scroll down again and repeat the process. Doing this you can get get a list of titles that sound interesting. You don't even have to start with a book title if you don't want, just start with something like 'history of cows' and see what comes up in books. That's how I found the Angus book I read this week.
Now you take that list of titles and go back to your library web page and see what you can get. Since you have the exact title and author it's easy to find them. There are always books that you can get on amazon that you can't get through your library no matter how good it is, but many of them you can. Now you can check if the book is in, write down it's call number and just go to the shelf and pick it up. If it needs to be ordered then you can do that and be notified when it gets there to be picked up.
This might all sound complicated but it becomes very very quick. You hear about a book, you search amazon for it or books like it, you check for those books at the library. In about 10 minutes you have a list of books that you can pick up at the library that will last you for a month.

Books I finished this week:
A Cow's Life, The Surprising History of Cattle and How the Black Angus came to Be Home on the Range - M. R. Montgomery
100 Great Poems for Boys - Edited by Leslie Pockell
A Cow's Life is a better book than you might think. To give it full credit you really need to skip the middle 1/3 of the book that goes specifically over the Angus and it's breeders in Scotland in the 1800's. If that's your thing and you're really interested in specific blood lines, then read on, otherwise the meat of the book for the general reader is much like a cow, on both ends. The beginning that covers the history of domestication and the end that covers modern ranching are both very interesting and well written for the general reader. It was worth picking up and I'm unaware of any other book that covers ranching in a way that is informative rather than political.
100 Great Poems is more of a book to sit down and skim over. I'm not much of a poetry reader but it was fun to just flip through and sample some great poems. My favorite was the first two verses of Block City by Robert Louis Stevenson

What are you able to build with your blocks?
Castles and palaces, temples and docks,
Rain may keep raining, and others go roam,
But I can be happy and building at home.

Let the sofa be mountains, the carpet be sea,
There I'll establish a city for me:
A kirk and a mill and a palace beside,
And a harbor as well where my vessels may ride.

The poem was written in 1883.
Sometimes the world changes a lot, sometimes it stays the same.