Mid-year updates

I feel like a broken record since I keep saying "wow, I can't believe it's been x months since I last updated..."

Or "I'm still reading... but nothing really jumped out, so dodn't feel like blogging."

Except both are still true.

So far I'd read 12 fiction and 12 non-fiction plus a bunch of books in Chinese. So not to bad for effort now that I have an almost 3 years-old (about half of what I used to read prior to kid). If you want to see what I'd read so far, see here, and if you are interested in any of those books, I'd write about them more.

All the fiction were just okay. Three memoirs I read were more interesting as I learned something new (The Sky is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist by Neil deGrasse Tyson, My Brief History by Stephen Hawking, and The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism by Naoki Higashida).

  

The most thought provoking is The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo, Cathy Hirano. If you haven't heard about this, just goggle this book or Konmari. It's not your typical decluttering book. After I read it, it just makes so much more sense. My friends thought she sounds hokey after I told them about it, but completely changed their mind once they read it. It explains why other traditional decluttering doesn't work for me (may stay clean for a week, then back to its original mess... sigh.) I'm almost done with my closet (and have donated 8 full bags of clothes and I wasn't even that ruthless about it!!) I really can't wait till I'm done with the whole house (she said it may take 6 months... I can see why.)



I think I'll also use her approach when it comes to this blog:

Blog when it sparks joy.*

I'm also on a book tour on August 24th about Hurricane Katrina - can you believe it was 10 YEARS AGO??? It's called Aftermath Lounge: A Novel in Stories by Margaret McMullan. Haven't started reading it yet, but will do so closer to the date so it's fresh in my mind. I've become quite picky about tours nowadays because I want to give it my 100%. Given my schedule and sporadic blogging, I just don't think it's fair to accept the books and not deliver.

Oh and for fun, I'd bought these 3 writing books. Sometimes it may be more fun to write on paper than type on a keyboard...

1. 712 More Things to Write About
2. My Future Listography: All I Hope to Do in Lists
3. The Line-A-Day 10 Year Journal: Blue Jacket

  

I am going to start the 10 Year Journal on my son's 3rd birthday. I'll jot down something I want to remember about him or say to him that day, and give it to him on his 13th birthday. I have started a couple of entries in 712. Sometimes it's hard to write it in a fictitious way rather than a memoir sort of way... or I suppose it doesn't really matter one way or another as long as I write. I already have lists of things I want to do or read or experience in my head, so it'd be nice to finally write it down, and then look back later on to see how many I'd done.


* There is more to her methodology that that, but this is the essence of it.




All reviews and posts are copyrighted by Christa @ Mental Foodie. Please do not use or reprint them without written permission.

Updates

Wow I haven't updated in forever.

I have been reading (you can see my 2014 list here). I'd been busy with work and family still, and this year my guilty pleasure had been novels written in Chinese (as opposed to YA in the past), mostly by the same author who wrote about relationships. I don't know if there is any point in doing reviews of them since her books aren't translated.

Most of the English books were just average. There were some fun reads, but none of them made me felt like shouting "GO READ THIS NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" so I didn't feel motivated to blog.

So I am wondering what I should do with my blog... only blog when I found something that falls into the "recommend to everyone" category? Just blog random thoughts? Is there anyone who is even interested in reading my boring random thoughts - I don't even have a twitter account because well, my life isn't that interest to update every 2 minutes.

Any "GO READ THIS NOW" books you've come across lately?! I'm so out of the whole new books world...



All reviews and posts are copyrighted by Christa @ Mental Foodie. Please do not use or reprint them without written permission.

2 months?!

Wow has it really been 2 months since I last posted?!

Work has been crazy busy... hence my silence.

I am now also behind on reviews - by 4 fiction and 3 graphic novels (a series).

Hopefully I will have the energy to post soon. Was going to do one or two today, but got a cold so I'm taking it easy instead...

Hope everyone is doing well! The long winter is killing me here... I really can't wait till spring!



All reviews and posts are copyrighted by Christa @ Mental Foodie. Please do not use or reprint them without written permission.

Question?

Every so often, I will see reviews like this on Goodreads - now I don't mean the actual content of the review, but the use of the animated phrase like so in this review:

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/614944022

Where do you get those animated clips (e.g. the omg ones in the above review)?!







All reviews and posts are copyrighted by Christa @ Mental Foodie. Please do not use or reprint them without written permission.

Bye Bye Google Reader

As most of you probably know, Google Reader is going bye-bye.

Panic... was my first thought... "I am going to loose all my feeds!! There are so many I subscribe to, how can I find them all?!"

Of course, a simple Google search shows that you can easily export/import it to another reader. Phew.

So I gave http://www.netvibes.com/ a try. It even imported all the folders I had. Yay. Decided to clean up a bit... wow, I didn't know soooo many book blogs hadn't been updated for a long, long time. Sadly still, I didn't even notice they hadn't been updated...

So let's hope I'd connect with all of you more, now that I hope my life is 0.01% more predictable with an infant, rather than a newborn.

Can you believe it? He's over 7 months already... Normally that'd have meant I'd read about 70 books in that time frame. But, try changing 1000 diapers instead.

And that's a conservative estimate.

PS - now that I have used netvibes for a couple of days, customizing it, I actually like it quite a lot... esp in widget form. More so than Google Reader... dare I say. Ummm.


All reviews and posts are copyrighted by Christa @ Mental Foodie. Please do not use or reprint them without written permission.

Just how behind am I?

Not reading much nowadays make it much easier for me to blog reviews... since I actually don't read everyday... that means there is no fallen behind since I am not under the pressure/thrill to start a new book right after I finish one! So that makes blogging a bit more enjoyable but it also means blogging less since I am reading way less...

Thought I'd take a lot to see how many books I am still behind though, since this year is almost done you know?

8 Fiction and 2 Non-Fiction from 2011 (yep you read that right!!)

11 Fiction and 8 Non-Fiction and 2 DNF in 2012.

Total = 31.

Sigh.


I'd list them all here, maybe it'd motivate me to catch up. Or do mini-reviews...

Fiction

1. The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt: A Novel in Pictures by Caroline Preston (3 Stars)
2. I Heart You, You Haunt Me by Lisa Schroeder (3 Stars)
3. Pope Joan by Donna Woolfolk Cross (3.5 Stars)
4. Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach  (2 Stars)
5. Q: A Novel by Evan Mandery  (3.5 Stars)
6. Paper Angels by Jimmy Wayne and Travis Thrasher (3.5 Stars) 
7. The World We Found by Thrity Umrigar  (3.25 Stars)
8. Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys  (4.75 Stars)
9. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs (2 Stars)
10. Dirty Little Secrets by C.J. Omololu (4 Stars) 
11. The Restorer (Graveyard Queen #1) by Amanda Stevens  (3.5 Stars)
12. 1222 (Hanne Wilhelmsen #8) by Anne Holt (3.5 Stars) 
13. Half-Past Dawn by Richard Doetsch (3 Stars) 
14. The Devotion of Suspect X 容疑者Xの献身 by Keigo Higashino 東野圭吾(4.5 Stars) 
15. The Three Coffins (Dr. Gideon Fell, #6) / The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr (3.5 Stars)
16. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green (4 Stars)
17. Cinder (Lunar Chronicles, #1) by Marissa Meyer (4 Stars) 
18. Legend by Marie Lu (4 Stars) 
19. Delaney's Shadow by Ingrid Weaver (3.5 Stars)

Non-Fiction

1. Missed Connections: Love, Lost & Found by Sophie Blackhall (3.5 Stars) 
2. The Wisdom of Big Bird (and the Dark Genius of Oscar the Grouch): Lessons from a Life in Feathers by Caroll Spinney and J. Milligan  (3.5 Stars)
3. A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan (3.5 Stars)
4. How to Avoid Making Art (or Anything Else You Enjoy) by Julia Cameron (2 Stars)
5. Helicopters, Drill Sergent and Consultants: Parenting Styles and the Messages They Send (Love and Logic series) by Jim Fay (4 Stars)
6. What I Thought I Knew: A Memoir by Alice Eve Cohen (3.5 Stars)
7. French Kids Eat Everything: How Our Family Moved to France, Cured Picky Eating, Banned Snacking, and Discovered 10 Simple Rules for Raising Happy, Healthy Eaters by Karen Le Billon  (4 Stars)
8. Bringing the Baby Home: An Owner's Manual for First Time Parents by Laura Zahn (4 Stars) 
9. HypnoBirthing: The Mongan Method by Marie F. Mongan  
10. The First Eight Days of Being a Mom by Gea Meijering

DNF

1. The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson
2. The Lover's Dictionary by David Levithan

And of course there are still a bunch of ARC I was supposed to review... well I'd need to read them first wouldn't I. I have stopped taking in ARC since I don't think it'd be fair... will I ever read up to 100 books a year again? Not including children's books of course :) So far I'd read 28 this year (19 Fiction and 9 NF, and 4 DNF).



All reviews and posts are copyrighted by Christa @ Mental Foodie. Please do not use or reprint them without written permission.

Question Time - Do People Ask You Why You Blog?

As I was busy typing up my last review, my husband asked, why do you do reviews? I guess to him, it's like homework.

Why would I want to assign myself homework huh :p

I guess since he doesn't read books (he prefers short articles, with his ADD and all), he doesn't quite get the excitement of discovering books (especially novels) and talking with others about books.

He likes movies, so to me books are no different to movies, except I play the movies in my head when I read. I am the director, the casting director, the photographer, the...  it always amazes me that people get weird when they hear you love to read, but they don't give a second thought if people say they love movies.

I also told him I don't want to forget what I read (and of course he asked, why? So what if you forget?)

Well I just want to damnit :) I love to read, but I don't like reading textbooks at school. I like to blog but I don't like writing reports for school/work.

I blog because I can. Because I want to :) It's not like I am asking him to blog :)

Yes I am still Alive

Yes I am still alive... quietly reading.

And slowly. (The last book, Domestic Violets, took me 7 days to read?! Usually it takes me half the time when it's an average size book... )

I am reading your blogs too, but may not have commented much.

I am hoping I'll start reviewing again soon.

The last review was posted August 6, and the two before that were on July 4?!?!

Where did the time go...

Latest reads:

1. Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down: A Novel by Irene Schram
2. Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen
3. The Blade Itself by Marcus Sakey 
4. Letters for Emily by Camron Wright  
5. Hot Lights, Cold Steel by D. P. Lyle 
6. Domestic Violets by Matthew Norman
7. Stolen Life: A Memoir by Jaycee Lee Dugard
8. On the Mend: Revolutionizing Healthcare to Save Lives and Transform the Industry by John Toussaint and Roger Gerard

My Blog's Personality Type (MBTI - Myers-Briggs Type Indicator)

Being a psychology student, I loved doing all sort of personality tests :)

Came across this website from Hello, My Name Is Alice:

Just put in your blog name here and find out what your blog's personality is!

http://www.typealyzer.com/

Here is my blog result :)

The analysis indicates that the author of http://mentalfoodie.blogspot.com is of the type:

ISFP - The Artists

The gentle and compassionate type. They are especially attuned their inner values and what other people need. They are not friends of many words and tend to take the worries of the world on their shoulders. They tend to follow the path of least resistance and have to look out not to be taken advantage of.

They often prefer working quietly, behind the scene as a part of a team. They tend to value their friends and family above what they do for a living.

I have done the MBTI in real life, and I usually score a INTJ or INFJ As you can also see in the graph below, I am about an equal split on the F and T axis (top left to bottom right). Ha, maybe I am more of a N than an S in real life (imagination and symbol), but my blog is very orderly and detailed :p I wonder how it knows my blog is an "I"

So what is YOUR type? 

Is your real life type and your blog type the same?

Analysis

This graph displays dominant parts during the writing:

Note:

If you have never heard of MBTI, here's a little explanation (copy and paste from here):

Excerpted with permission from the MBTI^® Manual: A Guide to the Development and Use of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator^®
 
Favorite world: Do you prefer to focus on the outer world or on your own inner world? This is called Extraversion (E) or Introversion (I).

Information: Do you prefer to focus on the basic information you take in or do you prefer to interpret and add meaning? This is called Sensing (S) or Intuition (N).

Decisions: When making decisions, do you prefer to first look at logic and consistency or first look at the people and special circumstances? This is called Thinking (T) or Feeling (F).

Structure: In dealing with the outside world, do you prefer to get things decided or do you prefer to stay open to new information and options? This is called Judging (J) or Perceiving (P).

Your Personality Type: When you decide on your preference in each category, you have your own personality type, which can be expressed as a code with four letters.

The 16 personality types of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator^® instrument are listed here as they are often shown in what is called a “type table.”

ISTJ	ISFJ	INFJ	INTJ
ISTP	ISFP	INFP	INTP
ESTP	ESFP	ENFP	ENTP
ESTJ	ESFJ	ENFJ	ENTJ