August Month in Rewind

August is over! Goodbye, heat wave (hopefully). Goodbye, weird summer. Hello fall, pumpkin spice lattes, and being a basic Betty who lives in sweaters, leggings, and boots. Exclusively.

Highlights from August:

Babes. ✌️✌️✌️

A photo posted by @tiffyofthemonts on Aug 25, 2016 at 5:59pm PDT

Got to hang out with people from the Internet! Melissa from Live Love Read was in town last weekend, so I got to meet her in person (finally), along with lovely Dana and Brittany. Social media is so amazing – I have no idea how I'd ever make friends with YA lovers otherwise, and it's incredible that we now live in an age where it's normal to meet online friends in person. As Drake says, what a time to be alive!

I finished my Level 1 American Sign Language class! Not exaggerating, I have been trying to learn ASL for years. One of my work friends referred me to this great school earlier this summer and I finally registered for the class. It's been such an incredible education. I'm excited to start Level 2 in a few weeks.

December travel plans! I booked my plane ticket for Paris. I'll be traveling solo (I think) for 2 weeks and hopefully meeting up with my friend Carmay at some point. I plan to drink a decent amount of chocolat chaud (and pretend I'm Anna in Anna and the French Kiss) and speak to people in abysmal broken French. Allons-y!

Books I finished this month:

Cloudwish by Fiona Wood (4.5/5)

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo (3.5/5)

The Clasp by Sloane Crosley (3.5/5)

Trade Me by Courtney Milan (4.5/5)

Things I bookmarked:

The Best Player in the NFL Is Also the Weirdest. A story on Von Miller who is a football player. I can't remember what team he plays for, but that's not important. What's important is that he's working on a Plan B (in case the football thing doesn't work out), and Plan B involves him being a chicken farmer. A chicken farmer! Von Miller is officially my favorite non-fictional football player and also the only non-fictional football player I know.

Chasing Banana: One Girl's Quest to Find Britney Spears' 2001 VMA Snake. This diligence. This perseverance. I applaud the journalist who wrote this article, which is not only enlightening and interesting but also hope-restoring.

This Twitter thread of diverse book recommendations and aesthetics. Everything about this is flawless. And while we're at it, have a look at Maf's new adult book recs too.

Why Do So Many Women Who Study Engineering Leave the Field? Harvard Business Review reiterates everything we know about women in STEM fields with a mic drop-worthy conclusion (emphasis mine):

Women’s experience of their education differed along two critical dimensions – they encountered a culture where sexism and stereotypes were left unaddressed, and they saw only lip service offered toward improving society – and both of these disproportionately alienated them.

The number of women and men are nearly equal in law and medicine, and the number of women in basic sciences is growing annually. With such a low proportion of female engineers nationally, educators and businesses need to pay more attention to how an occupation founded on a commitment to complex problem-solving so consistently fails to repair its well-documented gender problem.

Efforts focused only on changing the curriculum are insufficient because they simply reproduce the norms and practices of the profession. In order to curb the high rates of women leaving the field, engineering programs need to address gendered tasking and expectations among teams, in class and at internship work sites. The culture has to learn to take women seriously.

Recent obsessions:

I've been putting together my own syllabus/curriculum to educate myself on the art of storytelling, and the Enchanted Realm of René Magritte, an immersive play from Exquisite Corpse Company, was something I happened upon a few weeks back.

The play is set in a house on Governor's Island – the premise is that René Magritte is selling his childhood home, and we the audience are potential buyers. Through the play, we get to explore the life and inspirations of Magritte through interactive storytelling.

The Enchanted Realm of René Magritte was mesmerizing and such a wonderful experience. To this day, I am still thinking about it and the marvelous cast, set design, choreography, lighting, script... I want to find more stuff like this.

What I'm looking forward to in September:

Crooked Kingdom launch party at the Strand later this month! I am most certain it will be a total shitshow but as we all know, I love(!!) Leigh Bardugo so I'll deal.

How was the month of August for you? What good things are happening in September? I feel like it was a rough month for a lot of people – really, I feel like 2016 has been a rough year in general. Here's to a new season of learning, growing, and being brave enough to put ourselves out there again and again and again.

Tiffany, READ THESE BOOKS.

I feel like I've been caught off guard with all the book releases that are just around the corner. It's making me realize just how far behind I am in my reading list. I've prioritized my TBR on Goodreads (from highest to lowest priority: "read like you're running out of time", "follow through goddamnit," "show me how to say no to this," and "nope not gonna happen"). However... my shelves are starting to merge because I keep accidentally buying books from my "follow through goddamnit" shelf, which makes me feel like I need to prioritize those higher since I'm actually spending money on those books. Bookworm problems. Welcome to my brain.

So, ANYWAY... I'm using this post as a note to myself of what needs to happen and by when(ish) so that I can have some semblance of control as far as books are concerned.

Tiffany's Official List of Books to Read:

1. ✔ Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo **MUST READ THIS PRIOR TO 9/26 BECAUSE YOU WILL UNDOUBTEDLY BE SPOILED AT THE CROOKED KINGDOM LAUNCH EVENT
2. Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil by Melina Marchetta, goddess of everything **okay so this isn't actually out until October but Melina Marchetta lives high on my priority list in general so she can just stay here and hang out
3. ✔ The Clasp by Sloane Crosley **I don't particularly want to read this book but it's for my book club and in the name of expanding my reading horizons, I will do my best to follow through... READ IN SEPTEMBER – if you can manage after Six of Crows, that is
4. ✔ The Wrath and the Dawn (re-read so you can remember what happens before you read...)
5. The Rose and the Dagger (but maybe you should first read...)
6. The Moth & the Flame / ✔ The Crown & the Arrow / ✔ The Mirror & the Maze (?)
7. Summer Skin by Kirsty Eagar **ask Aunt Christine to buy in Australia... or maybe purchase in December when you're tentatively in Australia it's getting released in the United States! (in 2018!)
8. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi **OCTOBER BOOK CLUB
9. Every Word by Ellie Marney **technically I should read this asap but Book 3 doesn't currently have a US release date lol lol lol </3 BUT maybe I can buy this in Australia even though my covers won't match
10. Iron to Iron by Ryan Graudin (I was so excited for this e-novella so WHY HAVEN'T I READ IT YET)
11. Words in Deep Blue by Cath Crowley **out in October although it might not actually be released in the US until later but we'll just keep this as a placeholder for now
12. Blood for Blood by Ryan Graudin **out in November 2016
13. Strange the Dreamer **really shouldn't even be on this list since it's not out until 2017 but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ NEW LAINI TAYLOR BOOK WOO!
14. Between the World & Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates **DECEMBER BOOK CLUB HIGH PRIORITY ALERT ALERT READ THIS although you probably won't be able to attend this book club meeting... maybe it'll be rescheduled for January? – discuss with Louise
15. The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen **for book club, Pulitzer Prize winner

Listing all of those out definitely did not make me feel any better. But I will definitely put Six of Crows on my list for late August/early September reading, which will probably give me just enough time to experience a quarter-life crisis and obsess over the book for a couple of weeks before I am able to pick up where I left off and read Crooked Kingdom. I'm really dedicated to that instant gratification.

Wish me luck!

Quick Update.

When it comes to side projects, I have a notoriously short attention span. I love starting things, but my eyes are typically bigger than my stomach and I want to start more than I can actually handle. All this to say that I've started blogging about things that are not solely book-related at a new blog:

Little Plainsong

I'm doing this for a couple reasons, really. Won't bore you – or pique your interest... – with too many specifics but (1) I'm starting to get tired of straightforward book blogging, and (2) I want to write about more than just book-related things, and I don't have the attention span to manage multiple blogs at once! I don't know yet which one I'm going to stick with, but if Bookplates for Brunch goes silent for a while, you'll know why and you'll know where I'm at.

(And if the new blog suddenly disappears from the Internet, you'll know it's because I decided I didn't feel like blogging there anymore and probably deleted it.) (Short attention span, remember?)

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas! Have a wonderful holiday if you celebrate (and even if you don't)! Hope you get to spend it with a great book, a dog, cookies, cake, hot chocolate, warm sweaters, clean underwear, socks with no holes, socially aware relatives, and all the people you love. XOXO

Back from Seattle.

This past weekend I flew to Seattle to visit my best friend and finally see the city. I had such a good time exploring the different neighborhoods and eating ice cream and chocolate and seafood and wandering bookstores and walking/driving/bussing around with Lily. It felt like I was gone for ages but it was really only a couple of days.

It was amazing to get away from New York, though. It's just a different quality of living there. The air is cleaner, the people are friendlier (at least compared to what I'm used to), the culture is decidedly less neurotic. It's making me rethink life on the East Coast.

I'll be getting back to a more regular posting schedule in the next week or two, but in the meantime I wanted to share a few book snaps that I took while there. (I started a bookstagram, by the way! Feel free to follow along! My username is bookplatesforbrunch. And if you have a bookstagram, definitely let me know what it is.)

And now I'm off to get some much-needed rest (red-eye flights are a terrible idea) and catch up on errands and all that fun stuff.