Have you ever tried to remove the battery cover with a coin slot for turning it open?  Those devilishly difficult  covers are on cameras, fit bits, and in my case, the remote for a window shade.  I persevered in this exercise in frustration – because what else do I have to do these days.  I seriously considered keeping the shades where they had landed.  It wasn’t so bad; I could move to another chair when the sun beat in, or just avoid the room altogether.

I tried every coin I could find – a penny, a dime, a quarter.  I dug through my sewing supplies and found a quilting pin.  I pressed a toothbrush and a pen into service to no avail.

I asked google. Surely someone else had had this problem.  Turns out many had posted complaints but no solutions.  But I persevered.  Finally, in an obscure corner of the internet I found a note to use a Euro coin.  I still had one from my travels, and – it worked!

This morning I could finally raise and lower the shades, but the clouds are covering the sun, so the shades remain dormant.

Between my furious attempts to solve my shade problem, I read the ebook the library threatened to take back.  Libby, the online master of library books, had offered me a “skip the line” to a book with a six month waiting list.  The caveat was to finish the book in seven days, not an insurmountable problem, except I forget about it until it was due in two days – thanks to Libby’s threatening reminder.

The Archive of the Forgotten is A. J. Hackwith’s sequel to The Library of the Unwritten, a fantasy story with books in hell, a dead librarian/author with unachieved ambition, and a cast of other worldly characters with issues, mostly concerning stories in books.

If you are a fan of the irreverent “Good Place” series, you will relish Hackwith’s Library of the Unwritten.  A librarian who was human but didn’t make it past the pearly gates, Claire oversees books not yet written; the library is in hell.  When one character escapes from his book to meet with his author on Earth, and another soul offers stolen pages from the devil’s Coda in exchange for living among the angels, the action starts, and never falters.  An exciting ride through different worlds where the devils are more fun and the angels tend to be judgmental and arrogant, the book swerves through lives and characters.  Noting the cautionary note to all procrastinating authors (me included) – “there’s nothing an unwritten book wants more than to be written” – I listened to the book on Audible and found myself speeding up the narrative to get to the next chapter.

The Archive of the Forgotten has the same characters with Claire, Hero, Rami, and Brevity continuing the battle to protect the library, while facing a new threat. More of Hell’s Library is revealed – the Dust Wing, where the books that humanity has forgotten end up, and the Unsaid Wing, full of letters and confessions that were never sent. Although the storyline gets more or less resolved, it also leaves points to be addressed in the next book.

I can’t wait for the next fun adventure with books in Hell, and my next challenge with assorted mechanical malfunctions.