Back in the day, I had a massive Candy Crush addiction, which was my gateway into other match-3 games. I got up to a disturbingly high level in Farm Heroes. It’s a little embarrassing. And then, like a fever, the hold that match-3 games had on me broke, and I was left shivering and wondering where all of my time went.

For whatever reason, many many many years later, I decided to Candy Crush Soda and start at the beginning. After downloading, I tore through the first 31 levels and finally made myself stop and read a book. It’s terrible. I’m glad they limit me to five lives.

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Stop procrastinating. Go make your backups. Don’t have regrets.

Seriously. Stop what you’re doing for a moment. It will take you fifteen minutes, tops. But you will have peace of mind for days and days. It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

And now the blogs…

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But first, second, helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week. To read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “The Priceless Gift of Being Part of Someone’s World” (The Next 15000 Days)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Apron Strings for Emily is back with a story about a new dog (and a seal) after losing her sweet Kirby. She explains about that earlier loss: “Kirby found us at the time when Hubby & I were finally able to fully accept that human children were not in our future. I’ve said it before, but Kirby was the son I never had.” It is a very sweet post. Welcome, Kona.

Lastly, Infertile Phoenix points out that how you present information plays a big role in how people receive it. She tells a great story of a time when someone acknowledged her as the listener before sending a photo.

The roundup to the Roundup: Why did I restart Candy Crush? Your weekly backup nudge. And lots of great posts to read. So what did you find this week? Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between May 29 – June 26) and not the blog’s main URL. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week. Read the original open thread post here.

Every time I finish a book, I log it on Goodreads, give it a star count, and write a brief review. I do it (like I said yesterday) because those reviews make a difference to the author. I have a personal policy of not rating something if it will be below three stars. In those cases, I would just log the book and move on.

I read something that made me think about this whole system of rating and reviewing art. It’s so subjective. There are plenty of books that I can admire, quality-wise, that I didn’t enjoy, and other books that will never win major awards that I thought were brilliant.

She asks why our impulse is to immediately decide how much we like it vs. let it sit, unrated. She writes: “I’ve been trying to stop doing this—giving a work of art an immediate thumbs up or thumbs down, like I’m rating a mop on Amazon. But the habit seems to spring from my subconscious: watch movie, submit verdict. This is how I’ve been trained to respond.”

And because my four-star read is different from your four-star read, and how I would rate something ties into how I was feeling at the moment while I read the book, so many of those stars are completely useless in using to decide how you may feel about a piece. She writes: “The aggregate star ratings on Letterboxd presume to communicate something standardized, but in fact they give cover to chaos … Book ratings on Goodreads raise the same questions.”

These are all great questions. I don’t have answers, and I am going to keep writing those tiny reviews because I know (as an author) that they matter to authors. They help with book sales or making the decision to check out a book from the library. I could write the little review without the stars, but would that review hold as much weight without the star anchor to immediately give context to the words below it? Unsure. But this made me think. A lot.

As I say every month, I’m shamelessly stealing this idea from Jessica Lahey. She has a recurring monthly date where she reviews all the books she reads that month. Book reviews are important for authors, and I want to get better at doing this.

So. I’m going to review them here and also online, but I’m going to do it a little differently. I’m only going to review the stuff I really liked. I don’t see a reason to spend my time writing about something I didn’t love; it’s just using up more of my energy. So only positive reviews.

These are the books I liked (or mostly liked) from May.

Mad Mabel (Sally Hepworth): 5 stars for characters. 3 stars for plot. She played up the big twist so much that I figured it out 24% of the way through the book. But even as a twistless mystery, the story moves at a good clip, and I think this would make a great beach read.

Look What You Made Me Do (John Lanchester): This was bonkers in the best possible way. The twists were amazing – I only saw one coming – and there was so much to mentally chew over in this story. It would make the perfect book club book because you immediately want to talk about it afterwards. I am still thinking about this book weeks later.

Dissection of a Murder (Jo Murray): I liked the first 3/4ths very much. The last 1/4th less so. It got a little far-fetched, and it didn’t feel like a twist but more like a random change. With mysteries, you should be able to look back and see everything you missed. The book will be on AppleTV soon (the second season of Presumed Innocent), and I could see it being a better show than book.

London Falling (Patrick Radden Keefe): Keefe is an incredible storyteller, and this is a very sad and very intriguing story. It felt like jigsaw pieces snapping together, which was both upsetting because you know the picture the puzzle will reveal (the death happens in the first page or two), but also provided structure for understanding how a lie can grow larger than you can imagine when you utter the first words.

What did you read last month?

When I started this blog, I assumed I could keep it going for a few months. I would consider it a major win if I got to two years of semi-regular posting.

By the time I got to the fifth year, I started to wonder if I could keep this thing going all the way to ten years. Ten years! A decade! How many projects reach a decade?

But now it is 20 years. 20 years, five times per week, I write something. It isn’t usually profound. Sometimes the posts are super brief. I don’t always remember a story when I look back on past posts. And many other times, we’ve used my blog to remember when something occurred. It is like a time capsule that I keep adding to over the years; a nest where I can figuratively curl up in a cozy space created out of words.

I have thought about stopping. A lot. I don’t have a date anymore in my brain where I’ll stop writing in this space; I’ve stopped thinking about the end. I may reach 25 years or 30 years. Who really knows?

Because isn’t that the point? That we can never know what the future will be? All I know is that when I started this blog, I was writing a book about infertility, and my twins were giving up their bottles. And now that book is massively out of date, and the twins are in college. I’ve changed. You’ve changed. Blogging has changed. And yet, if you’re reading this, you’re still here. And I’m still here. Thank you.

I am enormously proud of what I’ve created. And at the same time, all I have done is convince myself that it would be a good idea to sit down and get into the spirit to write by writing a blog post. I don’t always post what I write. It doesn’t always come easily. My only advice is not to think too deeply about it. If you sit down and do it, you too will one day have 20 years of blog posts.

I am grateful to everyone who has read any part of this journey. Thank you for being here. For letting me know you’ve seen my words. For letting me know that I’m not alone out here.

I am not writing my blog right now because I want to spend time with the twins before they leave for their summer plans. I scheduled these posts so the blog wouldn’t be empty, using a random date generator (from random.org) to choose the posts. Having the kids go is still really, really hard. I’ll be back soon.

After the bags had been taken to the dump and the boxes were lined up for Goodwill; after the bins were labeled so I’d never have to open them again if I didn’t want and the things we are passing along to others were neatly packaged up in the laundry room, waiting delivery; after the play room had been tidied and combed over for items worth discarding, Josh and I sat down on the sofa and surveyed the room while the twins played upstairs. Despite containing four walls covered in books — thousands upon thousands of books — as well as sporting equipment and a few random toys, the basement looked empty. Part of my brain looked at it as pristine, a space waiting for something to happen. The other part of my brain looked at it as deflated, void of all those early years — the climby toys and the bouncey ball pit, the ride-on toys and rockers. It looked like a place where something once happened instead of a place that was waiting to become something new.

Read the whole post here.