I am pretty much of a stay-at-home person when I am not at school, so socializing for me consists mostly of receiving email and Facebook messages as well as chatting via IM. Last month I received 41 emails/messages and chatted 20 times, which is a fairly active social life for me. This does not include people who read either one of my blogs or my online zine, but since I do not have counters on any of them I have no idea how many people that includes. However, I do get comments from readers occasionally, some of them total strangers! I wonder how those people find my blogs anyway.

I solved the problem of the Dover Publications discount by buying $30 worth of books for two people whose names I drew in grab-bags and only spending the last $10 on myself! I selected Ivanhoe and Last and First Men. That is in addition to two sf books I ordered a few weeks ago from the History Book Club’s Buy One Get One Free deal along with a $10 coupon they sent me, Jack McDevitt’s new Alex Benedict novel Devil’s Eye and Alastair Reynolds’ latest novel The Prefect. Sneha is going to scold me for buying 4 more books when I already have several hundred to read! ☺

So far this year I seem to be slightly ahead of the reading curve as I have bought 26 books total and read 29 books. However, a closer inspection reveals some flaws in that statistic. Two of the books I read were books already in my collection that I actually reread (Simak’s A Choice of Gods and Farmer’s To Your Scattered Bodies Go), while one of the books I bought was a four-in-one collection of Heinlein novels. So actually I bought 29 new novels this year while reading 27 new novels so far. Thus, if I read two more books this month I’ll actually only break even in my attempt to catch up on all the unread books in my collection. *sigh*