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Tiny Town of Hobart, New York and it’s 5 Indie Bookstores

Wm. H. Adams Antiquarian Books by Flickr User: Watershed Post

Above is one of five bookstores in the very tiny town of Hobart, New York. This town of only 400 people has five independent bookstores. The one pictured above, Wm. H. Adams Antiquarian Books actually has a website! The little town of Hobart with all of its .5 square miles is about an hour west of Albany, NY.

I first discovered about this little town from a post on from Atlas Obscura a great website with lots of really cool lesser known stuff. The exact kind of thing I loved covering when I was producing History Podcast. Atlas Obscura also has a book for you to read, how convenient. I actually discovered the website only after I heard about the book. It’s one of those big tomes that you read slowly and savor. I’m reading it slowly, an article here and there and I also signed up for Altas Obscura’s daily emails with lots of cool stories like this one.

Man, these folks that started the bookstores in Hobart are smart:

help himself unwind, he taught himself classical Greek.

To help himself unwind. Who does that now? I sit down and think, man I need to relax, I’m going to binge on Stranger Things. But those in Hobart relax by teaching themselves to read the Illiad in classical Greek! Geez! I wonder how different the story comes across. Nevermind, it will never happen at least not for me. My Gosh!

This is Diana and Bill the founders of the store above. It gets better though:

translated Hippocrates in his spare time

Yep, in his spare time! Wow! The Atlas Obscura article is a well-written piece on how the town came to have all these bookstores. I recommend it to my readers as I myself enjoyed it very much!

Displaying Books Backwards

My four-year-old daughter often repeats this mantra at the table during dinner,

“I don’t like that.”

She exactly captures my feelings about this newish trend to display books backward. Two things about the image above (you can click on it to see an article from Apartment Therapy on this new trend), first how can you tell which books are in there? Second, these are in a fireplace, my goodness, have some respect people!

I mean there is one level of disrespecting books, e.g. dogearing, and then there is this next level hatred of books we see here. It’s a big deal too this has been going on for at least a year and its a trend. What has happened to my book lovers, you can’t think this is okay?!

Books Backward Bookshelf — The Kissing Booth Blog

I will admit, it looks nice, okay it does, but it still doesn’t make sense. Why hide the books like this. How can you admire the book spine art? How can you find the next book you want to read or re-read? On Neatorama, they did an article and a poll:

And yes my vote was with the 643 votes saying it is an abomination. What are your thoughts? Am I off my rocker? Or are you with me? Brothers and sisters, stand strong, we can fight this awful trend!

Book Review | Breakfast at Tiffany’s

I’m glad to have read Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s because I must admit after watching the movie a few times I was still lost as to who Holly was and what was her deal anyway.

The book is narrated by a man named Fred, who later becomes a friend of Holly’s. Holly is an 18 or 19-year-old young lady who came from a farm simple life. She put herself in New York City and established her self as a high society girl. She “spends time with” wealthy men and gets everything she wants from them because they all find her so desirable.

It’s all pretty grey on if she is a prostitute or as Capote puts it an “American Geisha”. The reader will have to decide for them first. This is another book that I picked up as a quick win in the summer reading contest, as it weighs in at only 140ish pages. Again, though I’m glad I read it as it added a lot of detail as to who Holly was. The movie felt like it was moving along really fast grazing over things that I wish there was more content too. But that is how the medium works always grazing along the top of things that a book can cover so much better.

I enjoyed reading this and gave it 4/5 stars. It is one of those few books I think I can go back and re-read at another time. Maybe things will become even clearer to me a second time around.

2017 in Review

My daily profession is as an analyst, so I’m really into numbers. This is going to be a very number-heavy post. First, I should mention that without my reading log it would take me forever to put this post together. The reading log helps in a lot of ways. It helps me understand what kind of books I’m reading and why. If I am diverse in my reading or not. Links to my reading list are on the left side of the site. I’ve had a reading log since 2015. Let’s dig in.

Something that may not be that important to everyone, but is important to me is how much I spent on the books that I read this year. This isn’t how much I spent on books this year, but how much I spent on the books read this year, an important distinction. The total costs of the books I read in 2017 are $486.36. This is how much it would cost (MSRP) to grab the same book in the same format from Amazon. However, I spent $0 on my 2017 books read. I get a lot of my books from the library, which is a big way that I keep the costs of books down. 43% of the books I read in 2017 came from the library, the single largest source of the books I read. Library savings alone was $295.50.

Another very important but small number is the total number of books that I read this year. That number is much smaller than I wanted it to be this year, only 37. Other numbers that I would consider a miss was on the diversity side of things. Only 24% of the books I read were written by female authors.

I most frequently read on my kindle. This is how many of my friends gift me books. 46% of my reading was done on a kindle.

Audiobooks were close behind. I listened to 5,313 minutes of audiobooks or 89 hours, or 3.7 days. I count pages on kindle as actual pages to make these next numbers easier. I read 7,018 pages in 2017. The average book length was 242 pages. The shortest book I read was 36 pages, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. The longest was When Paris Went Dark at 480 pages.

And now the part you have all been waiting for. Here is the full list of all the books I thought worthy of a 5-star rating. Out of 37 books only 11, 30% reached this coveted placement. I’m linking to the review for each of the books below so you can learn all about them before diving in.

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin [Buy]
Super You by Andy Walker [Buy]
Wine Folly by Madeline Puckette [Buy]
The Grownup by Gillian Flynn [Buy]
Alight by Scott Sigler [Buy]
Supergirl by Michael Green [Buy]
The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel [Buy]
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde [Buy]
Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck [Buy]
Library of Souls by Ransom Riggs [Buy]
Eating Animals by Jonathan Sarfran Foer [Buy]

Book Review | Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

Joe Russo of We’re The Russo’s recommended Walden on Wheels as a good place to start when researching van life. If you are not watching their youtube videos you should start. Kait and Joe are very entertaining and full of useful information for anyone interested in van life.

In Walden on Wheels, the author Ken Ilgunas takes us along on his adventure to reduce is college debt. Like many of us, myself included, Ken, followed the societal norms of going to college after high school, simply because that is what was expected of him and what he was taught he should do.

After college, he has a large amount of debt he needs to pay off and fast. But with a degree in literature, he has trouble finding good paying jobs. The readers will follow him on various adventures to Alaska among others in order to find work where there is also free room and board offered. This is great because all of the money he is making goes straight to paying off his debt.

Once the debt is paid off, when you think the book is about to end, Ken actually continues his adventure by going back to school. What?! What about the debt he will incur, wasn’t that the whole thing about the book?

Ken has a plan. He is going to live in a van while going to school and eat hardly anything while working in all of his spare time. For me, this is where the real adventure started. This book is a really fun ride and helps you appreciate just how much that we have that we don’t really need. What is life about, possessions or experiences?

This is the first book I have read in 2018. Well, finished in 2018, I started it on December 29th. The best part of this book, besides the content, of course, is that the book is free for Amazon Prime users and is also part of Kindle Unlimited if you have that.

Book Review | Being There

Another goofy novel similar to The Importance of Being Earnest. Short and funny. I think in the 160 pages that Jerzy Koskinski has he does a better job telling the story of Being There than was done in The Importance of Earnest. Things are clearer but still funny.

I would think may have seen the movie but might not realize that there was a book first as that happens so often now. The book was first published in 1970 and the bubbling but lovable Peter Sellers does a great job 9 years later portraying Chauncey Gardiner. Sellers is depicted on most of the covers of the book that you can find now.

Chance or Chauncey as he is later known in the book is a gullible simple-minded man. The is the gardener of a fancy home near Wall Street. When his wealthy benefactor dies, Chance has to leave the house. He runs into a nice young lady that is completely convinced he is a rich businessman of amazing intelligence.

What follows is a comical series of events where Chance is basically set for life, even though he is still the simple-minded fool we meet at the beginning of the book.

I found the story entertaining and very telling of society and the way we only see each other, but don’t really know each other. The book also made me reminisce of when I had seen the movie many years ago as if pulling the memory from the deepest part of my mind so that I could just bearly remember seeing the movie a very long time ago. The book heaved those memories to the forefront and I was pleasantly surprised that I knew the story, but still needed to be reminded of how everything turned out for Chance.

I happily bestowed 4/5 stars for Being There.

Book Review | Rape: A Love Story

This book was very difficult to read. The title is not misleading. You are getting exactly what you think with this book. With that said if you can stomach the awfulness of this Oates writing is very good and this is an important book. These stories need to be out there. This specific book Rape: A Love Story is fiction, but so often it is not for many, many others.

Again this is very tough material. You will cringe you will want to put it down and not pick it back up. But again, this is worth repeating. This is some people’s life. We must learn about this. Not that we will understand their pain, but so we can at least begin to understand the horridness.

A local woman known to all in the small town takes a shortcut. She is accosted by some local men and you know what happens. The story is told in parts with the timeline all mixed up. You don’t get the whole story until the end. You will live through the pain with Teena as she fights to maintain her sanity. And there is one more thing and it’s even worse, her daughter is with her when it happens.

I gave this book four stars, it may have earned more if not for the topic. It was just so damn hard to get through. If you want to challenge yourself with a tough read like I did, then you can try this book, but you have been warned, it is not a pleasant read.

Book Review | Library of Souls

Library of Souls is the third and final book in the series, Miss Peregrin’s Peculiar Children. I loved the first two novels very much. Not sure why it took me so long to get around to reading this final installment. It is a young adults novel as is the entire series is. The main character Jacob continues his journey and it is an adventurous one. While I thought the outcome of everything was pretty clear before this last book began, I did really enjoy the journey. And most of the good reads community agrees with me.

77% gave it 4 or 5 stars! That is really good! I’m one of those 5-star reviews. This one was as good or better than the first two books. I don’t see anyone picking this up who hasn’t read the first two books so I’m not going to go into the story, but if you liked the first two you will like this one.

If you enjoyed the movie, then you will love the books. As I’m sure you know the book is almost always better than the movie. Ransom Riggs is a great writer and I want to explore more of his writing. It doesn’t look like he has too much else out there at this point, but I can wait and see what he comes up with next.

Book Review | Travels with Charley: In Search of America

I may have said this before, and if so, it is still true as before. You can’t go wrong with Steinbeck. Maybe it is because I’m a California boy myself, but for practical damn good books, Steinbeck is the man!

I read Travels with Charley the best possible way. While I was unable to recreate the journey that Steinbeck takes in the book, I was able to listen to the audiobook while traveling up the California coast. The best part of my trip, aside from listening to some great writing was that I got to stop at the Steinbeck museum. That’s right, he has his own museum. He is the only American writer to have his own museum in America.

Rocinante is what Steinbeck named his truck that he traveled in. It is also the name on Don Quixote’s horse. The museum in Salinas has his truck on display even including a replica of his dog Charley in the front passenger seat. You can also see the inside of the camper (shown below):

The book was marvelous. I heartily give it a 5/5. Again, it follows Steinbeck on a trip across America. A trip he felt he needed to take to reacquaint himself with the American people. He felt he had lost his relationship with the common man and the trip was a way to rekindle that relationship.

About Video Creation

I did it! I finally did it. Last night I watched a video from Peter Likes Books. In the video, Peter convinced me to just jump in. The video is shaky and you can see me glancing at my notes. It is also heavily edited which I know will come across as you watch it. I have a tripod and a good DLSR that does video, but I didn’t use it. On the next video, I will try to use that setup, especially if I will just be standing there talking to the camera.

For this video, I used an iPhone 7 Plus. It’s shaky because I’m holding it myself the whole time. While I do have a Kindle Oasis unboxing out there on youtube, it is not on my Jason Reads channel, which I did research to figure out how to start today. Recording the video only took about 5 minutes. I did write up some notes before I started. This may have backfired as I kept looking down at them. It probably took me about 30 minutes to edit the video.

If you have tips for me to implement for my next video please leave them in the comments below. I will for sure be using a tripod if the next video permits. That should help a lot. If you liked the video please subscribe and give it a thumbs up!

Here is Peter’s video which convinced me to just do it! Thanks, Peter! You’ve got a new subscriber!