Tuesday Thingers (hosted by The Boston Bibliophile)

In most categories, I don’t have just one or two items that I like above all others, and it’s no different with authors. I have 14 authors “favorited” (is that really a word?) on LibraryThing: Michael Chabon, Jasper Fforde, Alice Hoffman, Nick Hornby, Barbara Kingsolver, Anne Lamott, Madeleine L’Engle, Sue Miller, Christopher Moore, Carolyn Parkhurst, Ann Patchett, Jodi Picoult, Michelle Richmond, J. K. Rowling, and Anne Tyler.

It’s probably no surprise that my most-shared favorite is J.K. Rowling, who has 1,083 LT fans, but I was pleased to discover that my second-most-popular favorite is Jasper Fforde (337). The least-common favorite author on my list is Carolyn Parkhurst, who is a favorite of only 6 LT members, counting me, but she’s only published two novels so far, so I’m hopeful her audience will grow. Six of my favorites, including Rowling, are shared with one other LT member, and between one and five favorites are shared with other members in various combinations.

I listed an author as a favorite if I’ve read and enjoyed most of his or her books in the past, and/or I plan to continue seeking them out in the future. The list will probably grow over time – Michelle Richmond is the most recent addition – and some authors won’t have new books to add to their catalogs eventually. On that note, I’m sharing a picture of someone who has been on my “favorite authors” list since I was in my early teens, the late Madeleine L’Engle.

credit  Kenneth S. Lewis; copyright (1) Random House publicity photos (2) http://smartpublic.randomhouse.com/teams/

Care to share the names of a couple of favorite authors, whether or not they’re identified as such on LibraryThing? Do you share any of my favorites?

Teaser Tuesday (hosted at Should Be Reading)

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!
• Please avoid spoilers!

I picked this up at an interesting shop in Laguna Beach called Art For the Soul, where it was one of the few things I could afford. It’s an collection of mini-biographies of women writers called Wild Women And Books: Bibliophiles, Bluestockings, & Prolific Pens from Aphra Ben to Zora Neale Hurston and From Anne Rice To the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, by Brenda Knight. It sounds fascinating, and I expect it will provide some good blog fodder once I finally get around to reading it :-).

“A bout of ghost stories told around the fire as a distraction from an unusually cold summer inspired nineteen-year-old Mary to pick up a pen.Written in one year, Frankenstein is now hailed as the first Gothic novel and a seminal work of science fiction.” (page 58, “Mary Shelley”)

Your turn…

…challenges
…organizing your sidebar
…updating lists of some sort (I need to deal with my giveaways list!)
…making links wherever (challenge lists, monthly reading summaries, etc.)
…bloghopping
…your TBR pile
…your library books
…updating your blogroll
…updating your reader
…???

I’m sure there are several book-blog-related things I need to catch up on, but I knew that if I picked more than one for this task, they probably wouldn’t get finished, and one of my quirks is that I’d rather have things undone than half-done. (I guess in some ways I’m an “all-or-nothing” kind of person. Maybe that’s why it bugs me when the “unread feeds” count in Google Reader piles up too much.)

This assignment gave me the nudge to get all of my 2008 book-review posts, and most of my 2007 stand-alone reviews (many of my earlier review posts here included multiple books in order to catch those up), linked to my book catalog on LibraryThing, which I’ve been meaning to do for awhile. (Sadly, I’m not sure my GoodReads listings are going to get the same update; I just get more regular use out of LT.) I’m going to do my best to keep that current, and to remember to update my Book Talk Master List, whenever I post a new review. Since I usually do those on Thursdays, you’d think it wouldn’t be that hard to keep up with, but apparently it is.

Well, THAT was different! – Booking Through Thursday 

Good question! I’m not sure I have a good answer, unfortunately, especially if you’re asking about THE most unusual book.

One of the things I think makes a book “unusual” – not just for me, but objectively – is a creative format; an unusual layout, unconventional use of fonts, that kind of thing. Even though her books are very much within my “usual” realm, Jodi Picoult has made use of things like that; her stories are often told from multiple viewpoints, and each narrator’s chapters may be printed with a different font. She also included a short graphic novel within The Tenth Circle, although it really didn’t do much for me. Variations in typography and layout can be interesting, until they reach the point where they overwhelm the content, and it becomes more about “look at this page!” than what that page says – that’s a bit too much style over substance, and too “postmodern,” for my taste.

Since I’m not a big genre reader, “unusual” for me would actually take me into a genre – a mystery or detective series, romance, science fiction or fantasy. I actually used to read more SF and fantasy, but they lost appeal for me as I got older because trying to keep track of all the details and rules of their imagined worlds just required too much effort. A few years ago I did undertake reading The Lord of the Rings trilogy, but it was mostly because when I’d first attempted it (about twenty years earlier), I’d stalled out one-third of the way through The Return of the King, and I thought I should read it before I saw the movie (the other two books were re-reads). To be honest, I’d rather have these stories onscreen than on the page – I found the books a bit ponderous.

Recently, I think the most unusual-for-me book I’ve read is probably The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, and I’ve never finished it; it’s still sitting on a table with a bookmark in it about two-thirds of the way in. I know a lot of people who have raved over it, and I want to like it, but it just kept losing me. I keep the bookmark there, though, just in case I ever decide to take the rest of it on.

On the other end of the “unusual-for-me” spectrum would be the Anita Shreve novels I’ve read for my book club. They’ve all annoyed me in one way or another, and I’ll do my best to avoid any more.

I have an unusual-for-me book on my nightstand right now. I bought my husband a copy of Stephen Colbert’s I Am America, and So Can You! for his last birthday; he’s already read it twice and is urging me to read it too, but I’m procrastinating.

I really don’t think of myself as an “unadventurous” reader, but answering this question is making me wonder. Maybe I just know what I like, and that happens to be broad enough for me that I prefer to stay with it rather than venture too far afield. Besides, sometimes I’ve found that when I do branch out, I find that it reinforces what I like and why I like it.

Have you read anything unusual lately?

Friday Fill-Ins #91

1. My wedding anniversary, my husband’s and sister’s birthdays, and one other thing I’m afraid to mention yet are some of the things I’m most looking forward to in October (but Halloween is NOT one of them).

2. Sometimes I am very good at getting in my own way.

3. Things change every day, whether you like it or not, and that’s why there is a saying, “never say never”! (And I think it’s good to be careful about “always,” too.)

4. When I’m down, I’m there for a little while, and then I get back up.

5. In front of a computer is where you’ll find me most often.

6. A rainy day is good for staying at home, curled up on the couch with a book!

7. And as for the weekend, tonight I’m looking forward to my Book Club’s final meeting befor it morphs into a “Book and Movie Club,” tomorrow my plans include my stepdaughter’s party for her 14th birthday, and Sunday, I want to catch up on whatever didn’t get done on Saturday!

So, what are you looking forward to this weekend?

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