Susan Orleans' story about the LAPL fire in the 1980s is really an amazing piece of writing. It not only is a great book advocating and promoting public libraries and their mission, but also is a harrowing telling of the fire that destroyed a huge amount of the library's collection and almost the library itself.

The way she weaves the library, it's history, it's mission, and the fire and its subsequent investigation is, honestly, one of the best pieces of writing I have read about libraries.  Her interviews with the librarians, the library staff, the patrons, and those who helped save LAPL is really wonderful and heart-felt and reinforced why I love libraries and wanted to be a librarian in the first place.

Well. Not only has the Halloween Bingo been fun, it has really advanced this year's reading goals! For the game, I at least started and "finished" (with reviews) 32 books: 20 audios, 3 ebooks, and 9 bound books. Of those, I DNF'd 5 (one with the intention of going back to try again later), but completely read 27 (25 squares +2 wild cards).

Goals:

• 13 books knocked off my 2018 TBR mountain
• 10 previously unread books from my physical bookshelves*
• 1 book from my "remembering dad" project
• 2 Book Riot's "We Need Diverse Books"
• 2 Banned books
• 0 Nancy Drew
• 0 Public Library physical books

Not bad for 7 weeks of reading! I do need to step up my borrowing of physical books from my public library - I borrow plenty of digital media, but I know the library depends on borrowing stats to maintain its funding. 

*One book from my physical bookshelf doesn't count as read/completed, because I pulled it down, looked at it closely, and decided to just put it in my donation box unread because I didn't really want to read it. It was a freebie that I picked up somewhere, years ago, and had been cluttering up my bookshelves since. It counts to my bookshelf TBR project because it's an unread book removed from my shelf. I'm only letting myself buy 1 new book for every 2 I take off my bookshelf in an effort to keep myself from being buried in books. 

I was following up on this post from Reading Is My Escape From Reality, which was reblogged from Leah's Bookish Obsession, and discovered that the Houston Public Library's e-card is free to all Texas residents, sponsored by the local grocery store chain HEB. Took me 5 minutes to sign up with my drivers license number, and now I have access to all their audiobooks on Overdrive!  Wooooohoooooo!

Seriously, HEB, when are you coming to North Texas so I can show you some love? 

Thanks to Lillelara, I've found the new library app (Libby) that seems to be a vast improvement over the Overdrive app. I spent last night playing with it, as a distraction from watching the Rangers lose yet again. 

Pros:

It works like Overdrive, in that it syncs with your library Overdrive account and allows you to download the books you've checked out. There are some enhancements on the audiobook functions, and a vast improvement on the ebook functions.

I've never been successful with the ebooks on Overdrive, as they seem to get lost when I try to download them, so I can neither read them nor return them until my checkout expires. I've only been able to do ebooks from Overdrive by sending them to my Kindle app. But I tried checking out, downloading, reading, and returning several ebooks on Libby last night, and they all worked just fine. 

It's also more seamlessly integrated with the Overdrive library, which makes browsing for books much, much easier. It automatically syncs your checkouts and holds  with the Overdrive library website, too. 

Cons: 

My "wishlist" of almost 200 ebooks and audiobooks that I've carefully compiled and synced with my larger TBR list, using the Overdrive website, does not sync with Libby. It instead uses a "tag" system, which is completely separate, and is less than useful as you cannot see the book's availability when browsing your tags list. So, for example, if I want to check something out right now and start reading it right away, I can go to my wishlist on the OD website, and filter by "available", and browse through books that are already on my TBR list and are immediately available for checkout. This isn't possible on the Libby app. But, I can still do it from the OD website, check it out there, then open the Libby app to immediately download and listen/read. 

It's still not perfect, but it's a huge improvement over the current Overdrive app. I might even start reading some ebooks, which is a good thing since so many of the books on my TBR are only available from my library in that format.