Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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Google searches. They seem straightforward. You put keywords in the search bar. The algorithm spits back results. You usually find what you want.

OR SO YOU THINK.

This article from Scientific American about all the tricks you can do with searches just blew my mind. (At least, the “What Good Searchers Do” section.) I do almost none of them. Will I remember to do these tricks when I’m searching two weeks from now? Probably not. But will I remember this article and use it for — at least — the next ten minutes. Absolutely.

What are you searching for right now?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

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 read that month. Book reviews are important for authors, and I want to get better about 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 January.

I read a lot of Parnell Hall’s Puzzle Lady books last month, but I’m not going to do a separate review for each one because I wrote about them in December. I still like the series. It’s mind candy.

Six of Crows (Leigh Bardugo): I spent years taking this book on and off my TBR list. I don’t know why I was so reluctant to commit to reading it because it’s FANTASTIC. It’s a book about a magical heist in a vaguely Scandinavian-like universe. I had to read the first chapter twice to figure out what was happening, but I quickly found my footing in the world. My cousin and I read it for our book-club-for-two, and we’re following it up soon with the sequel, Crooked Kingdom.

A Study in Scarlet (Arthur Conan Doyle) and Sign of the Four (Arthur Conan Doyle): I’m re-reading the Doyle canon. While I’m currently deep in the short stories, I wanted to go in chronological order, so I started with the two novella. I’ve always liked Doyle, but I’m getting so much more out of these stories since going on a Sherlock Holmes tour of Edinburgh. That tour was one of the best things we’ve done on a vacation. It has made me think about how much our tangential experiences affect the way we read a book.

What did you read last month?

The most exciting thing happened to me this week (I guess I lead a pretty unexciting life)–I won a Goodreads giveaway. I enter them regularly because Goodreads will send you a heads up if a book on your to-read list holds a giveaway. It’s two clicks to throw your name in the hat.

Despite entering regularly, I’d never won a giveaway. I didn’t know anyone who won a giveaway, which made me wonder if they actually chose winners and sent books.

But then magic happened. One morning this week, I woke up to an email telling me that I was a winner in the giveaway for Rhys Bowen’s Above the Bay of Angels, and my prize was waiting for me in my Kindle account. If I lived inside a movie, it would have been that part of the film where we all break into the same dance, tossing our devices in the air while we do back flips. And then catching them while sinking gracefully into the splits while consuming chapter three.

Or something like that.

Anyway, in case you were wondering (as I was), people do win the Goodreads giveaways. Which is 1000 kinds of awesome.

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Happy Valentine’s Day. Or, if you don’t celebrate Valentine’s Day (we are not Valentine’s Day people), happy Friday. Or happy February 14th. Or happy weekend. You choose.

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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 in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

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

• “Childless woman announces her life not filled with freedom, money, travel, never-ending ease” (Infertilityhonesty)

Okay, now my choices this week.

I usually don’t feature pieces from mainstream media here, but I liked that New York Times did a piece on the financial cost of treatments. Of course, there are so many hidden costs in there, such as therapy, lost wages from time taken off from work, gasoline to and from the clinic, but this is a great starting point for the general public to understand the astronomical costs (sometimes) associated with family building.

A Separate Life has a beautiful anniversary piece. This line is bittersweet: “When the babies didn’t come, amid some scary diagnoses and losses and difficult years, his hair went grey.” And this one made me smile: “They are old only in the length of time they’ve loved each other.”

Infertilityhonesty has a post fit for the Onion depicting the press conference she wishes she could hold. Laughed at this line: “Studies show awkward pauses are the number one occurrence resulting from childless not by choice people talking honestly about their lives.” This parody is brilliant–go read it.

Lastly, Inconceivable! has a moving post about the grief that comes after a decision and how so many other feelings about other things can get tied up with processing the end of family building.

The roundup to the Roundup: I’m a winner! Happy Valentine’s Day. 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 February 7 – 14) 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.

Another spoiler-free thought from Megan Angelo’s Followers. It’s once again from a 2051 section of the book, when people are televising their lives in an endless livestream a la The Truman Show.

On page 205, Marlow talks about the benefits of being watched, of living out her life online. She knows that if she ever got into trouble, millions of people would know instantly. And they would rush to help her, even if it was just to alert the authorities.

She knew there was a third thing keeping her safe: the network. Her followers … Her whole life, Marlow had been sure that if she got into trouble, the network would protect her.

I always think about this tale from the early days of the Internet. Ayelet Waldman wrote a blog post while in a depressive episode, and someone read it and reached out, staying on the phone until she called her psychiatrist. Waldman’s network may have saved her life.

And that type of story repeated over and over again in those early days of the Internet when we used it to connect rather than scream at one another. Okay, so maybe we screamed at each other back then, too–it’s not as if trolls were formed out of thin air in 2016. But it did feel like a different time online, even though stories like Waldman’s continue to happen today.

There is this weird sense of safety that comes from being online. I’m assuming (and maybe I’m wrong) that if I didn’t post for a week or two, someone would send me an email and inquire whether I was okay. It’s out of character; I post here at least five times per week. You tether me. And, hopefully, I tether you. We tether each other. That’s a network.

And networks, sometimes, save us.

Maybe that is why it is so disconcerting when someone stops blogging and never returns. You were tethered to this person by their story–and they were tethered to you. A closing post allows you to tie a loop. But slipping away with the story open feels like a snapped cord dangling in the air.

This isn’t a guilt trip. It’s just something I was thinking about as I read those lines. How much you all mean to me.

Another more thought-provoking, spoiler-free moment from Followers by Megan Angelo.

On page 288, a character receives a letter where the sender tries to explain why she did what she did. In other words, she did something horrible.

Think Jean Valjean in Les Misérables: Stealing is wrong. But the character adds context. In Les Misérables, we empathize with Jean Valjean. Sure, he did something wrong, but he only did it because he was starving. If we don’t feel anything, we’re as bad as Javert, who is held up as the antagonist. The “because” becomes just as important as the action, softening the edges.

Back to Followers, the writer of the letter has done something awful, but she’s trying to give context. (Telling you what she did would be a major spoiler. I want to talk about it, but I’ll wait a little while before I write it and mark that post as clearly containing a spoiler.)

The letter states:

There’s one thing I get that you never have. There aren’t actually heroes or victims or villains. Not in our story, and probably not in anyone else’s. I know you know this deep down: it’s all in the edit.

I am clearly the protagonist in my story. I may do terrible things, but that’s because I’m loveably flawed. Other people do terrible things, and my brain paints them as fully evil. I do something wrong, and there’s a “because.” Someone else does something wrong, and the only explanation is that they’re malicious. We are quick to forgive our friends. We are quick to find fault with our enemies… even if our enemies are politicians on Twitter or that annoying person who sends 14 insipid posts per day on the neighbour listserv, clogging your inbox.

It comes down to how we edit the situation; the story we tell ourselves.