On Books & Reading: My TBR List for February 2022

Hi there, Dear Reader. It’s mid-afternoon in Lithia, Florida on Thursday, February 3, 2022. Not surprisingly, it is a warm Florida winter’s day. Currently, the temperature is 83˚F (28˚C) under sunny skies. With humidity at 49% and the wind blowing from the south-southeast at 12 MPH (19 KM/H), the feels-like temperature is 83˚F (28˚C). Today’s forecast calls for partly sunny skies and a high of 85˚F (30˚C). Some breezy conditions are also expected. Tonight, skies will be partly cloudy. The low will be 64˚F (18˚C).

If you know me – either from my scribblings on this blog or in person – you know that I am a life-long reader. On my mom’s side of the family, many of my relatives, including my grandparents and – of course – my mother loved to read. My cousin Francisco Aurelio Cajiao is a well-known educator and author in Colombia. And if my mom’s version of our family history is correct, it was my maternal grandmother who taught me my ABC’s (with, appropriately enough, ABC blocks) and, as a consequence, how to read.

I read every day. Not the way I used to at my former home in Miami, where the environment was more suited for curling up on the living room couch with a book and reading for hours. This was a habit that I had even when I lived in Bogota, Colombia and didn’t break until I moved – partly by choice, but mostly by necessity – from Miami to the Tampa Bay area in the spring of 2016.

I thought I could keep doing that here, but since the lady of the house is not at heart a “true reader,” the lighting in most of the rooms is not conducive to reading. Even my room – which is the smallest of the five bedrooms here – only has reader-friendly lighting in the late morning and throughout the afternoon. I write during the day, and I can’t just turn my schedule topsy-turvy by changing my writing schedule, so instead of reading a book in only a few days, now it takes me several weeks to enjoy a book and read it from cover to cover.

With that in mind, this is my To Be Read (TBR) list for February 2022:

• The Steal: The Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election and the People Who Stopped It, Mark Bowden & Matthew Teague
• In Harm’s Way: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors, Doug Stanton
• The Battle of Leyte Gulf, Thomas J. Cutler
• Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges, 1944, Antony Beevor

And since I have a screenplay to work on, I am also reading David Trotter’s The Screenwriter’s Bible.

I don’t have any updates on when I can pre-order West Side Story (2021) on 4K UHD either at Amazon or ShopDisney.com. I know that Disney-owned 20^th Century Studios and Buena Vista Home Entertainment announced a release – or “drop” – date of March 15, and I remember reading on Blu-ray.com that it could go into pre-order mode this week. Amazon does not have it listed as such, and neither does ShopDisney.com. Maybe I misread the post on Blu-ray.com, or maybe it is in pre-order status in Canada but not the U.S.  Who knows?

And on this note, I will wrap this post and bid you a fond “see you later.” Until next time, Dear Reader, stay safe, stay healthy, and I’ll catch you on the sunny side of things.