Hello and welcome back!
After seeing snow last week, I think I can finally be hopeful spring is here. It’s been in the 60s and 70s lately. My brother and his wife are visiting next month and he does not do well in anything 65 or below. However, spring in New England can be so hard to predict. I’ve had rainy, frigid Memorial Day weekends plenty of times. I told him to start making sacrifices to the ghost of Sam Adams or something to curry favor.
Other than that, is you’re typical not enough hours in the day for all my hobbies. At least my spouse is making me some birthday mac & cheese this weekend. The only time I get it is for Thanksgiving and leftovers last all of two seconds.
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If you’re in Texas and want to get involved in your local school board elections, or at least be a bit more informed, Frank Strong on Bluesky has a Google Doc and Substack with tons of info and resources.
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EC Spurlock sent in this link about the habits of super readers! What’s the most you’ve read in a year? For me, it was 212 titles and I was at the height of my depression.
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A fantasy and dark lit bookstore is set to open up in Salem. There’s currently a Kickstarter running. I’m pretty excited for it!
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There’s a book coming out about gamers in love (Levels of Love by Anabelle Stehl) and the game in the book Novel Haven was actually made and it’s on Steam! It’s free and I think it’s a neat tie-in extra.
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Want a deep dive on the “We Buy Ugly Houses” people? I know I do.
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Don’t forget to share what cool or interesting things you’ve seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we’d like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way!
I haven’t had a chance to read the HomeVestors article yet but have always been super curious about how those companies work.
r/BestofRedditorUpdates had a post last week titled “My husband is spoiling the spicy scenes in my romance books by acting them out before I get to them” which amused me.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/1sgf24c/my_husband_is_spoiling_the_spicy_scenes_in_my/
According to that interesting article I am a super reader (it’s been a little less than but approximately 365 books a year for all my life) (the ratio of new to reread books changes based on depression far more than the quantity of books I can read). But apparently I am an outlier in most of the habits the article mentions. Which I suspect is just because the sample process was clearly selected by a journalistic rather than scientific curiosity, but who knows.
It was particularly interesting to me in light of the books as luxury discussion, because I wonder if the access/acquisition divide would have even come up previously, although I suppose there’s always been collectors vs readers. Still, making a point of it not being an aesthetic thing seems very current. It also highlighted one of the ways that reading has traditionally been regarded as higher status than other forms of entertainment, that whole Horatio Alger self-made myth, wherein reading is a form of improvement. Most of my reading time (although I do also always read interstitially) simply comes at the expense of watching tv. No one seems to question the information retention of tv viewership, but perhaps as videos become increasingly part of educational formats, watching things will come to be considered as onerous and admirable as reading them.
Perhaps others will find this early 2025 Washington Post “Department of Data” article about super readers as interesting as I did.
https://wapo.st/3QaYZbe (This link might work w/o pay wall.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/01/17/who-are-top-readers-2024-where-did-they-get-their-books/
Happy birthday, Amanda! I hope that the coming year is filled with wonderful new experiences.
Homevestors and the like are complete scams, usually targeting older folks. Same with reverse mortgages. The family always gets screwed.
Another “super-reader” who reads instead of watching TV, and has for many decades (for a while in the 1970s I didn’t even own a TV–on purpose). I took a quick look through my library history for 2025 and checked out over 200 books, plus I have thousands of books in my Kindle library that I read when I don’t have a library book available. So I’d say I probably read about 300 books a year. It is more now that I’m retired but I read in every spare moment and I read fast so I probably qualified as a super-reader even then. I couldn’t read in the car when I was younger but it stopped bothering me in my 40s so my previous 30-40 minutes commute plus 60 minute lunch also gave me time to read. These days, fiction is my choice, romance and mysteries especially, but I sneak in non-fiction and “literary” fiction, especially classics, as well. Oh, and this wonderful blog is about as close as I get to social media so that gives me more reading time, too. As far as retention, I have enough of a memory that if I mistakenly pick up a book I have read, I usually recognize something within a few pages (actually happened just yesterday with a library book) and put the book down to read something else (no, I don’t intentionally re-read). Seeing how much I just typed, I’m just thinking how much I could have read instead!
Apparently 426 books is my top amount , but between 200 and 400 a year. I have the read while waiting Habit, which may account for the large number.
I’m usually between 400-500 books per year, but 2025 was so stressful that I read 526
It looks like I average around 350 a year. I think some years it’s a bit more and some a bit fewer. Like Maeve, I think I often read even more when life is stressful…
Are we gonna get that mac and cheese recipe??? (HBD!)
@Lucy: It’s Nagi’s recipe! https://www.recipetineats.com/baked-mac-and-cheese/
It’s a good base if you want to tweak and include some veggies or experiment with spices (love adding a little bit of heat). It’s also easy to make gluten-free, which we do.