Bloglebrity Status and Borrowing Stacks

I stumbled across this on Chris’s blog the other night and couldn’t resist checking out my standing in the bloglebrity ranks. The result was a very respectable C, not bad for a few months’ work. I wonder if I can work my way up to a B? Something to contemplate....

In other news, I had a good day at the library. Make that a very good day. A double-digits day. Yes, despite my best intentions I borrowed 10 books, taking my total checkouts to 13. In my defence, I will say that it was a very stressful morning. Yes, it was university careers fair day. So first there was the nervous anticipation (I’m pathologically shy and they expect me to network?), followed by the discovery that this is not the year for biochem or biotech. In fact, excluding the defence force, there were only two employers looking for either: Queensland Health (“check our website in June”) and the Department of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries (in Canberra; lovely place, but currently overpopulated with people I have no desire to see again). What’s a girl to do to cheer herself up?

If she’s me, she goes to the library, of course.

I only planned to get a couple of books to help get caught up on my New Year’s Resolution of one never-thought-I’d-read-that book a week. (Famous last words.) I got the two: H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine and Roddy Doyle’s The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. But then there was the Tracey Chevalier historical. And the Connie Brockway contemporary. And the first of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet (I’ve been wanting to read his books ever since My Family and Other Animals).

There was the David Baldacci I’d heard was brilliant and knew Mum would love. And North and South, the longed-for subject of my Bookfest hunting, which I’ve wanted to read since watching the BBC adaptation (and, admittedly, since watching Richard Armitage in the BBC adaptation). And that other doorstopper, The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. And the guide to character traits which’ll be handy should I find the time to start writing again (fat chance with that many books to read). And to round out the ten, a book from the history section speculating that Alexander the Great was murdered.

I barely managed to stuff them all in my backpack, and it was a miracle I could stand upright afterwards. Anyone remember in Runaway Bride when Julia Roberts’s mountaineering fiancé helped her into the overloaded pack and she promptly toppled over backwards? A few hundred pages more, that would have been me. I was already carrying around the 600+ pages of The Decameron for the Banned Books Challenge, adding to both the weight and the reading pile; and I’m yet to begin this month’s read for the TBR Challenge.

Which explains why I am not planning to enlist in any more challenges.

Not yet, anyway.