It’s the last Monday of the year. The last Monday of 2021. This year has been full of lots of reading, inconsistent blogging, and the hardest learning I’ve done since trying to figure out how to write up original research.
It’s been a year of big moves: buying a house, moving my mother-in-law from Ohio to New Mexico; and it’s been a year of big losses: the home goings of my aunt and paternal grandmother. My aunt, the only other Dr. Oldham I knew, made completing a terminal degree something I never thought as unattainable (imposter syndrome aside). She also gave me a healthy love for mathematics and math games that I still play today. I remember that my grandmother gave me a VHS of The Client, as a kid, which propelled me into all the John Grisham I could get my hands on in the late 90s.
Pour a little out for them.
Last Week in Reading
I’ve been pretty terrible at recording my reading the last few months. Especially with the year winding down.
I did decide that I want to try this book journaling thing again, keeping it in Procreate, maybe making my own graphs at the end of the month.
If you haven’t heard of Procreate, it’s an iOS raster drawing app. I started my hand lettering and calligraphy journeys with Procreate and swear by it.
Two major bonuses I see for keeping my journal in Procreate: if I want to make changes, it’s going to be really easy to do so, and I don’t have to recreate my spread every month. I can just duplicate the layer groups.
This is the template I’ve come up with so far. I may tweak it again before the new year.
This Week
This week I’m finishing up Traci Chee’s, We Are Not Free. While the time in our (read: United States) history sucks, I’m glad to see more historical fiction novels taking on the involuntary internment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II. We vilify Nazi Germany while simultaneously sweeping this aspect of our own sordid history under the rug.
This one isn’t young adult, but I thought I’d through it in here anyway since sharing shared reading is still as important to me now as it was when I was in the classroom.
Sometimes finding something adult that will engage our similar-but-differing interests is challenging. There’s something intriguing about this one – about the annoying but still interestingly endearing protagonist.
And so that’s what my week looks like. Just a few more days until I’m back in the work fold again.
I wish you all a good week. As always: happy reading, and don’t forget to be awesome.
the (book) supplier 