Saturday Review 12-6-08

Bulletin Board

**** Have you entered any of my FOUR giveaways yet? Find out more here! They’re open until next Friday (December 12), and you may enter any or all.

**** Give the gift of comments during Delurking December! (Thanks to Kylee for the heads-up!)

**** Speaking of December, I’m sad that apparently there won’t be a Cavalcade of Bad Nativities this year, but if you missed out on last year’s, you really need to check it out.

**** “Scobberlotcher” for hire! Karen Harrington, author of the novel Janeology and the often insightful and frequently amusing blog Scobberlotch, is available for guest-blogging gigs (she’ll be here on Thursday, December 11). Leave a comment on her blog and take her up on the offer!

**** For those who are interested and may not have heard the latest regarding continuation of Dewey‘s various book-blog-community events, here’s an update:

Read-a-Thon: The next 24-Hour Read-a-Thon will take place in April 2009 and will be organized by Trish, Nymeth, and Hannah (Wordlily), who all helped Dewey with the Read-a-Thon this past October. Updates will come from them.

Bookworms Carnival: Jessica, Jackie, and Renay have all expressed interest in taking the lead on this. They probably will need to coordinate with each other before we know more. A Yahoo group has been set up so that those interested in behind-the-scenes work on the Carnivals can communicate more easily. You can join the group by sending a blank e-mail to bookwormscarnival-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

Weekly Geeks: Becky has proposed a Weekly Geeks topic for this week – sharing our thoughts and remembrances of Dewey – details are here. There will be a short break in WG after that, until early 2009.

A lot of people are interested in being part of Weekly Geeks’ continuation planning, and a Yahoo group has been set up to work out details and future topics. You can join the group by sending a blank e-mail to Weeklygeeks-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. WG will most likely become a stand-alone, multi-author blog, and it’s possible that the Read-a-Thon and Bookworms Carnival will get their own blogs as well.

A lot of these plans have been hashed out in the Book Blogs discussion group on Ning, so please feel free to check that out as well if you haven’t already been there.


These efforts have been sanctioned by Dewey’s husband (quoting an e-mail posted to the discussion group:

“I believe that having the 24 hour read-a-thon become decentralized and led by several people was actually the next step in any case; I talked to her after the last one, and her health just wasn’t up to it. Weekly Geeks, challenges, all that stuff, there’s no copyright there, and she game it to the wider community.

I remember when she started her blog and we were talking about it. I said to her that the best way to increase audience size was to remember that building a community is the way to go. She was in total agreement; she loved building community. Take the community projects and run with ’em, with my and her blessings.

Good luck!”

And speaking of Weekly Geeks: Voting is open for the Book Bloggers’ Best Books of 2008 at Literary Escapism. The poll opens today and is open until December 20.

New in Google Reader

The Effing Librarian, via Literarily
Sophisticated Dorkiness
book:thirty
Margaret and Helen, via PunditMom (I want to be these women when I’m 80)

As seen in the blogiverse

My son was with us for Thanksgiving weekend – he flew from DC to LA on Thanksgiving Day itself, and it all went pretty smoothly. That wasn’t so true for this traveler.

Thankful to have arrived safely, even if their stuff didn’t…

Thoughts from another mom who spent the holiday with her visiting, grown-up children  – which reminds me, who says your life is over after you have kids?

The only girl in the local boys’ club

The curse of WALL-E?

A reflection on the “Black Friday”/Wal-Mart tragedy notes just how far from its roots its business practices have strayed

Drawing the line between online and offline lifeyou might want to do that before you end up like this Twitter addict

A dissection of the historical (in)accuracy of Gladiator

Have a great weekend, y’all!

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9 comments

  1. It’s wonderful that so many people are coming together to take charge of Dewey’s community events–and so quickly! I may not participate in most of them, but I am glad to see they will continue.

    Margaret and Helen’s blog is going straight to my Google Reader. What a great blog. My husband kept asking me what why I was laughing so much as I read it.

  2. I’m far from it, but my wife might think I’m addicted to Twitter. I only follow about 32 right now; I don’t know if I could handle many more.

    I like the road trip story. It could very well have happened in Vacation. 🙂

  3. Yay! You are relatively new in my Google Reader as well 🙂 Thanks for posting the e-mail from Dewey’s husband, I hadn’t seen that yet.

    Kim (Sophisticated Dorkiness)

  4. Wendy (Literary Feline) – Don’t you want to be Margaret and Helen when you’re their age? I cannot believe I hadn’t found that blog before – so glad you like it too!

    I think it’s a testament to the book-blogging community – and to Dewey’s place in it – that people are coming together and working so quickly to keep her projects alive.

    Mike – Both the posts you mentioned were written by friends of mine who also contribute to the LA Moms Blog.

    Trust me, you are FAR from being a Twitter addict :-).

    Jessi – I try to do this every week, so come back next Saturday for more!

    Kim – I hadn’t seen the e-mail till this morning (I edited this post to include it), but it’s good to know he’s backing us up. And thanks for adding me to your Google Reader too :-)!

  5. wonderful catch-up post on everything. Thanks for posting the info about weekly geeks, etc. I will continue participating in weekly geeks when I can.

  6. Serena – Glad to do it, although I think there may be a few other book-bloggers rounding up that info too. It’s all about community :-).