Off The Shelf

A Punnett(ish) Square

This came out of a brief conversation with my niece and nephew the other day and I had to give it a try. TBD on where The Wild Things ends up

A Line

Ah, the Bechdel test. Revealing both everything and nothing about the stories we tell each other. Here’s my take on how these books would fall if the test were a spectrum:

A Venn Diagram

Here’s a fun little side project I’ve been working on — mostly while procrastinating writing my next post. It started when I kept noticing characters visiting Spokane, WA. A perfectly nice town, but really? Four books almost in a row? Then the father–son thing jumped out at me — less amused, more annoyed about that discovery — and two thirds of a Venn diagram was born. I tried and rejected a few other categories: Baseball (too much overlap with Spokane), Retrospective (kind of dull), Shame (too dark for my current vibe). Obviously this will evolve, so check back…

*indicates books not read for the blog

A Table

Here’s a silly little made-up metric. It’s the number of pages I read in order to experience one star’s worth of joy or appreciation or awe, or something like that. It fundamentally makes no sense, but I have stuck with it anyhow. I’ll keep collecting the data and see if anything useful or interesting ever comes out of it. So far it mostly breaks down by star alone, but also I clearly am liking shorter books more. Is that saying more about me or about people who write 500+ page books? (Looking at The Corrections coming up soon…)

*For reference only

**DNF

***Doesn’t feel fair to rate here but I did anyhow