Lit: Uniquely Portable Magic

Well, here's some bad news, for me anyway. Thanks to Google, some of the functionality of Blogger has been deleted. This makes editing things in my sidebar all but impossible. For the time being, I'm looking to see if there's a work around that doesn't require me to spend money on a platform that continues to become more and more archaic. I may have to delete and re-add some of the buttons every time something changes in them which will be a massive pain and not likely to be something I'll do for long. More than likely, I'll need to change the sidebar. And then, after 12 years of blogging on Blogger, it may be time to decide if it's worth my time to move this baby to Wordpress. Can I just say that I wish I'd done that nine or so years ago when I spent a lot more time working on the blog and had a lot less information to transfer?!

Enough about me. Here's the good news:

• We still have six weeks to finish reading all of the books on the Booker Prize long list before the short list is announced on September 14th. If you're like me, that means you have 13 books to read between now and then. Yeah, that's not going to happen. Maybe one? 
• On the other hand, I have read two of five of the finalists for the Women's Prize for Fiction. But there's only three days to read the rest before the prize is announced on September 8th. Oh, well.
• Now here is something I am succeeding at: tsundoku - the practice of buying more books than you can read (Treehugger). 

"Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity." – A. Edward Newton, author, publisher, and collector of 10,000 books.

• If any of you needed an excuse to stop cleaning and pick up a book, Inc. wants you to know Why Reading Is the Most Intelligent Thing You Can Do.  
• And if that weren't enough, Inc. also wants you to know Why Reading Books Should Be Your Priority. 

There now - I've given you some things to think about, calmed down some about my blog, and successfully put off writing a review that I don't really want to write off for another day.