What I’m reading
- in print / on screen
I’ve moved on to April reviewing for Shelf Awareness, starting off with New Life, No Instructions: A Memoir by Gail Caldwell. I really liked Caldwell’s 2010 memoir of friendship–human and canine–Let’s Take the Long Way Home, but this one may be even more affecting–it’s feeling like a perfectly-timed choice for my milestone-birthday month.
Have you heard that this is Read an E-Book Week? I’ll be continuing with Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World from last week in iBooks.
- on audio
I finished Fangirl, the audio that spurred me to read Fic, early last week, and have very much changed direction. My current listen is Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything–and it’s shorter than I realized. This was one of my very first Audible downloads–it’s been in TBLT (To Be Listened To) Purgatory sine the summer of 2011–and I made a rookie mistake with it: I bought the abridged version. However, the full version isn’t read by the author, and I wasn’t that much of a rookie–I knew that if at all possible, I wanted to hear Bryson read Bryson. Maybe it wasn’t that big a mistake, come to think of it…
What I’m watching
The new series–a remake of the show that made Carl Sagan a household name–Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey kicks off tonight. We have it set up on the DVR. It dovetails nicely with my audio read, although the timing is coincidental, honestly.
What I’m writing
Next Sunday will be this blog’s seventh birthday. I’m planning to write something to commemorate that, but the week ahead is probably not going to be the best for productive blogging, so I may be sending myself a belated blogiversary card.
What caught my eye this week
I shared this on social media a few days ago, but it’s worth mentioning again. Blog posts with pictures tend to get more noticed, but sometimes you just don’t have one of your own that’s a good fit. Getty Images has made 35 million images from its archives available, free of charge, for embedding online. The photos and illustrations can’t be modified or edited, but even so, this is a fantastic resource for images to enliven your blog posts–like this one, which is now officially non-gratuitous (but is also officially gratis): (EDITED TO ADD: I’ve discovered that this photo may not show up properly in your feed, so you may have to click through if you want to see it. I’m guessing that’s something about the nature of the embed code.)
“I think along the way somewhere book blogger became synonymous with book reviewer and I definitely found myself willingly put on that hat. Certainly a good majority of book bloggers identify as book reviewers. But I don’t necessarily think book blog has to mean you need to be a book reviewer. A book blog can be SO many things and honestly they could be completely devoid of book reviews.”
—“In Which I Hang Up My Hat as a Book Reviewer” (The Perpetual Page-Turner)
What Else is New?
Some of you know that I’m not a practicing Catholic now, but I do still make some effort to observe Lent. On Ash Wednesday, I recorded my intentions for Lent in my Day One journal, including this one:
- wish-listing ebooks, audiobooks, music, and app downloads–my current self-indulgent impulse buys–until after Easter
The last one is a variation on my annual resolution to “give up book-buying for Lent” Between the steady stream of review copies and the lack of a good local bookstore–Barnes and Noble just hasn’t been doing it for me recently–I haven’t bought a print book for myself in months, so committing to not doing it for another six weeks isn’t as painful as it once was. Resisting the instant gratification of an ebook or audiobook download will be a sacrifice, however.
Please visit Friday’s post for the Summer-Cation Blog Hop for this week’s “Gratuitous Photo”…and comment to enter the giveaway while you’re there, why don’t you?
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