Sunday Post – July 31, 2022

July 31, 2022 Sunday Post 8

The Sunday Post is hosted by the wonderful Kimberly, the Caffeinated Book Reviewer. It’s a chance to share news, recap the past week, take a look ahead, and showcase our new treasures—I mean books!

This Week

My play-reading group met on Wednesday (via Zoom) to read through Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. I had neither seen nor read the play before, and I am really enjoying it. I’m reading Lady Thomasina Coverly, a brilliant teenage mathematician modeled after Ada Lovelace. We got through Act 1, but realized that finishing the play would take us until 10:00 (EDT), which was a bit late for some of the group, so we will continue with Act 2 in two weeks.

I’ve joined the two-monitor club. Most of the books I index are smaller than an 8.5×11 page, so I can crop and enlarge the PDF to get the font to a comfortable size whether I’m working on paper or onscreen. But my current project is a larger format, with small margins, double-column formatting, and a small font. Working on standard letter-size paper is out of the question; my eyes can’t focus on print that small for very long. So I have borrowed one of the monitors from my husband’s home office for a month or so. We’ve set the second monitor up to the left of my main screen, in portrait rather than landscape mode to give it the height as well as the width to enlarge the PDF to a readable size. But it sure takes up a lot of room on my desk! Luckily, I have a full-size office desk. I don’t know if this two-monitor setup will be permanent; I’ll have to see how it goes.

Recent Posts

Looking Ahead

  • Monthly Wrap-Up: July 2022
  • In the Dragon’s Eye: August 2022 New Releases
  • Books Set In Places I’d Love To Visit – Top Ten Tuesday; tentative
  • WIP Wednesday – spinning and knitting; tentative
  • reviews TBD
  • Sunday Post – 8/7/2022

What I’ve Been Reading/Watching

Reading: I finished buddy-reading The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna (ARC), with Lenore of Celebrity Readers. I read Mooncakes, a graphic novel by Suzanne Walker with art by Wendy Xu, which has been on my TBR list for a couple of years. Both books were wonderful! I also finished rereading Once Upon a Dreadful Time by Dennis McKiernan, and I reread A Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie for the #ReadChristie2022 challenge. (July’s theme was “a story which takes place on holiday.” The official book was At Bertram’s Hotel, but I reread that one back in early 2020, so I chose to revisit A Caribbean Mystery instead.) And I reread Guild Boss by Jayne Ann Krentz, just because I wanted to.

Listening to: I listened to  A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers and 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff.

Watching: Not much, but I did watch two episodes of All Creatures Great and Small Season 1.

Added to the Hoard this week

For Review or Consideration

Many thanks to Avon for sending me a finished copy of The Littlest Library, and to Berkley for an e-ARC of Because I Could Not Stop For Death!

Purchased (Kindle and audio)

Kindle: The Duke Undone; Well Matched; The Body in the Garden; Silence in the Library; A Death Long Overdue; Deadly Ever After; Magic Lost, Trouble Found; The Knowledgeable Knitter (Click title for Goodreads page or my review.)

Audiobooks: I grabbed these during Audible’s “Shorts” sale: Masked Ball at Broxley Manor; 84, Charing Cross Road; The Black God’s Drums; (Click title for Goodreads page.)

Stay safe, stay healthy, stay kind… and may you find books a haven in the coming weeks.

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8 Responses to “Sunday Post – July 31, 2022”

  1. Berls

    The play sounds fun – do y’all plan to make it a production at some point? Or is it just for personal enjoyment? Either way is fun!

    I have to have 2 monitors for my work – sometimes I wish I had a third honestly! Technically I have 1 monitor plus my laptop but it’s a BIG laptop so it works. And I use them side by side with an external mouse and keyboard. I think once you get used to it, you won’t want to go back. I’m curious to see though 🙂

    Have a great week!
    Berls recently posted…Sunday Post with Berls | Week of July 24thMy Profile

    • Lark_Bookwyrm

      The play-reading group was put together by a college friend, and consists of theater people she knows from college, grad school, and her community theater. We’re scattered — I was going to say, all over the country, but on Wednesday we were joined by a new gentleman currently living in Japan (I think), so now it’s all over the world. So we won’t be putting on any productions IRL! But it’s fun to read plays together, and it’s certainly all the theater I’m going to get for the time being. We started with Shakespeare but we have branched out; the main requirement is that the scripts are available online, and the plays aren’t depressing.

  4. Nicole @ BookWyrm Knits

    I am a happy member of the two monitor club. There’s so many things about my work that are easier with two monitors. Though technically, one of my monitors is my laptop screen. 😉

    I’m not familiar with Arcadia either, though I’m pretty sure I’ve heard it referenced in other works so I probably should read it. You know… when I have a break in my towering TBR pile… 😉
    Nicole @ BookWyrm Knits recently posted…Top Ten Tuesday ~ Books Set In a Place I’d Love to VisitMy Profile

    • Lark_Bookwyrm

      My monitor screen is a bit small for working comfortably all day, though I manage when I’m traveling. (Not that there has been much of that in the past few years, other than our trip in December to stay with Robin.) But at home, I love my 24″ monitor, and the new vertical 24″ has its benefits. I still don’t use it for non-work stuff, though – just the 24″. My laptop is off to one side; it serves as the computer but I don’t use the screen when I’m hooked up to the bigger monitor(s.)

      The towering TBR pile! 😀 I have one, too. But Arcadia is definitely worth reading, though I suggest a quick look at Wikipedia or some other site for background, first. It’s a witty play, as you would expect from Stoppard, but it helps to have some background knowledge of Byron, chaos theory, and the mathematical concepts of iteration, fractals, and algorithms, as well as some sense of the dualities Stoppard was exploring within the play.