You know what’s a good test of a book? Leave the book you are reading behind while you go on vacation for three weeks, come back to it and find yourself feeling as if you’d never stopped reading it.

That’s exactly what I felt with A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel. I forgot it when I went on vacation but I had no trouble diving back into it. This isn’t always the case. I usually have several books going on at once and if I start to focus more on one book, sometimes by the time I finally get to the others I’ve lost interest or I’ve completely forgotten important details and I pretty much have to start all over.

Anyway, I found Zippy immensely enjoyable. I was especially surprised as memoirs aren’t really my thing.

I’m also nearing the end of Lucky Girls by Nell Freudenberger. It really hasn’t grabbed me as much as I hoped but it’s not over yet so who knows.

I planned to go through my vacation pictures this weekend so I could post them but being that I’m still trying to unpack that didn’t quite happen. Besides, I had quite a busy weekend.

I went to a Chicks-Only Open Mic night on Friday. I even read some of my poems. Hee. Saturday I went to a Rubber Stamp convention. I know, call me crazy. I wanted to find some unusual stamps for bookbinding projects but found mostly crowds. Anyway, I did walk away with an amazing zine about journals. Play is the brainchild of Teesha Moore, and if you are interested in visual journals I highly recommend it.

Today was great as I got to see Christine for a nice, long chat. Now I’m off to finish reading A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel.

We also encountered big books on our daytrip to Berlin. At Bebelplatz, where once 20,000 books were burned, this new sculpture stands as a proof that books are big in Germany.

Did you know that about 700 million copies of books are printed in Germany every year? That’s about 80,000 titles, nearly 60,000 of them new publications. Germany is in third place on international statistics after the English-speaking book market and the People’s Republic of China.

And, yes, that’s me next to the big stack of books. My stack of unread books somehow doesn’t seem as daunting any more.