I finished one book this week, I’m halfway through a January release I’m reviewing for Shelf Awareness, and I’ve got just over two hours left of my current audiobook. And here are links to some other things I’ve read recently.

On Blogging and The Online Life

Brainstorming ideas, organizing them, optimizing them, writing about them, picturing them, and distributing and promoting them–Buffer‘s Big List of Blogging Tools has 39 suggestions to help with all of these

Mediabistro analyzes the time we spend on social networks, and I have to ask: are the people in my age group spending so much time on Ello because it’s that good, or because we can’t figure it out?

“(A)ny activity can become restrictive if we do it all the time, not just being online. It’s good to take breaks from all kinds of things — but there is nothing magical about doing so that suddenly makes us better people. And when I tell my children to play with their “real friends,” they are right to get irritated with me: the friends that my teenaged daughters have made on Tumblr and Twitter and Instagram are real friends — just because they have never been in a room together doesn’t change that.”

— “Being connected is more of a good thing than it is a bad thing” by Matthew Ingram at GigaOm

“I don’t want the people I know, people who share their lives with me, to ever recognize themselves in my corner of the Internet and not like what I have to say about them. 

“There are parenting and life issues that present themselves to me on a daily basis that I know would resonate with many if I wrote about them. I see those issues being written about by others all over the place…(a)nd sometimes they are written about in such detail that I can’t help but wonder how the people on the other side of those blog posts feel. Because you know if they saw it, they would know it was them being written about.”

— “I Promise I Won’t Write About You On My Blog” by Kelly Suellentrop at BlogHer 

On Books & Bookish Things

“Waldman’s tantrum is so compelling because it reveals one of the most tenacious roots of author angst over these lists: the feeling that it’s all just so unfair. The bestseller list is based on cold hard cash. Either you out-sell your peers or you don’t. The bestseller list isn’t necessarily an indicator of literary quality, though. For that, you need the approval of the critics, who release no rubric and relinquish none of their ballots to the popular vote.”

Erin Keane reports on “Why the year-end Notable Books race causes so much angst.”  Meanwhile, Laura Miller looks at literary trends over time and reflects on “What I learned from reading two decades’ worth of NYT Notable Books lists” (the lists themselves, not the books on them):

“The kinds of books we’ve decided to ‘note’ have changed over time, and so have the books that loom largest in our imaginations or that we urge on our friends, even if similar books have been around all along. In other words, it may be the readers who have changed as much as (if not more than) the titles made available to us.”

It’s also the time of year for announcing and joining challenges and other reading events. Here are a couple I spptted this week:

• Revisit the Roaring ’20s with Leah at Books Speak Volumes during Jazz Age January
• Meet Sheila of Book Journey at the public library for the 2015 Library Challenge

The Weekly Winchester

Chillin’ on the couch, Thanksgiving 2014

I think we may be going to the movies to see Interstellar today. I don’t think we’re doing any holiday decorating this weekend–we’ll wait till next week when my stepkids are here–but we may do some shopping. I’m pretty sure I’ll be doing some reading. What are you up to this Sunday?

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