Half-Year: Check-in, Review

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Well, howdy. Happy Sunday. Joyous Canada Day Eve. How's every little thing with you?

Here it is June 30, the year half over and summer just beginning. It seems to me like an apt time to take stock of 2013.

So far, not such a great year, really. There have been a few milestones, though:

• power boating course: certification in competent crew, day skipper, coastal navigation

• radio operator's certification

• assistant professor title

For the last seven or eight weeks, my every spare moment has involved editing. I've edited, copy edited, and/or proofread a ridiculous number of pages in the last two months, including an online exhibit on western Canadian culinary history, a book on special-service canine training, two novels, an exhibition catalogue on Chinese maps and other cultural documents, and a book on the creative arts as complementary training in health and medical studies. I am a text-processing machine!

At the same time, I foolishly agreed to do some volunteer work for the editors' association, both locally and nationally. What was I thinking?!? Was I thinking?

And I continue to review books, including four new titles for fall. I have nearly thirty published reviews to date.

And I am still in pursuit of my two-hundred-book goal for 2013, although right now I'm far shy of the hundred-book mark, with only seventy-one books read as of today.

(There is, I admit, some tangle in the logic of this process. When I receive the published copies of the books I've edited, I enter them in LibraryThing as read books, but I don't record them in my daybook as read books. A distinct discrepancy! But I haven't found a comfortable solution yet.)

My recent books read — excluding manuscripts — include two urban-fantary novels about a Hell-fighting Keeper, a New Adult novel about the children of fallen angels, Lois McMaster Bujold's astonishing novel Paladin of Souls (which has given me a strong new protagonist to identify with), and a brilliant scholarly book on readers and the construction of regional identities. It fits beautifully with my own academic work and I have a research project turning somersaults in my brain. But stilll! That's August's work.

In the meantime, I'm looking forward to some vacation days and the restorative power of the West Coast.

With hope that I'll check in more often in the next half, I remain,

Your correspondent,

L