The Bookening: New Reads in the Palace of Pandemics
More books have arrived in my pandemic apartment of doom! Honestly, this is going to be endless because I buy books faster than I can organize them. After all, I am a book dork. Today’s lot features a few new novels and two academic works that might be of interest to some of you. Not that we’ll get to read everything given how utterly wonky the world is right now. But I’m certainly going to try! Here’s what I got:
The Bookening: New Reads in the Chamber of Serpents
Shortly before the world went into full lockdown, I did what any book dork would do: ordered a bunch of books. Today’s book haul mostly contains books in the “things I want to read” category with a smidge of “books I bought to support authors.” On the list:
One More Week!
In a lot of ways, I’ve been pretty fortunate to work for Bemidji State University. While losing two weeks of class sucks, BSU didn’t choose to rush into the university-wide shift to remote learning. The result? A lot more breathing room (for me). So in addition to all of the things I’ve been doing to keep my mind off the nightmare sweeping across the United States (today: taking a walk, playing some video games, and petting my cat), I’ve also been working hard on adjusting syllabi…and tempering my expectations. Even two weeks doesn’t feel like it’s enough…
Academia During a Pandemic: Hunker Down Philosophy 2A
I made it through a week of isolation. Mostly. I still went “out,” but in my car to play Pokemon or to occasionally go to the store to get things I wasn’t able to get earlier. At odd hours. In that time, I’ve apparently decided to blog on a regular basis, catalogue my books (finally), watch an absurd amount of TV, schedule an impromptu podcast recording, and prep my classes for remote learning. It’s been a weird week, y’all. A scary week. The one upside to all of this is that I’m pretty sure most of my classes are going to be OK once we switch over to remote learning. While it won’t be ideal, most of my classes are already fairly embedded in digital tools anyway. For those classes, simply upping the stakes on managing the course wiki and wiki-based assignments is a no-brainer. For the other classes, the big question will be whether we can keep certain things “as is” or whether I need to adjust certain assignments and structures for a different mode.
Life Log #03: Strange Spines, Mites, and BEER!
The past five days have been…interesting. Yes. Interesting. Let’s go with that. So, what happened?
The Downsides to Owning Way Too Many Books
Yeah, I know. There’s no such thing as “too many books,” except when there is. As I mentioned recently, I’ve been slogging through Stephen King’s IT on a mission to get a fuller picture of the story we’ve been told 1.5 times in film. When I say “slogging,” I mean it. For all that I enjoy about the book, there are so many things that I don’t, most notably its massive page count and glacial pace. It comes back to that “big books” problem, which I’ve talked about before (probably on Twitter somewhere) — albeit in a somewhat different context. In brief, I’ve avoided books over 300-350 pages for years simply because I work so much and read too slow. With all that swirling around in my head, I decided to put IT down for a bit to put my brain into something else. All of this leads me to my topic for today: