Does anyone still read the Sunday papers? (We just cancelled ours.) I have news to share about some things they wouldn’t tell you there. After a successful inaugural year, the Independent Literary Awards are poised for growth in their 2011 edition with the addition of three new categories. The genres and panels for this year’s awards were announced a few days ago. Many of the 2010 panel members are returning to serve again, and the […]
Hey, did you know that Read an E-Book Week starts today? Just when I was planning to take a break from e-books, which I have found much more comfortable to read while having only one usable arm; for those monitoring the situation and who missed Friday’s post, my right arm is OUT of the sling as of this weekend, and I start physical therapy for my shoulder tomorrow! Well, maybe just one more e-book after I […]
We’re entering the ninth week of 2011, and I’ve read and reviewed nine books this year…a perfect book-a-week pace! I’m not projecting that it’ll continue that way, but by my standards, it’s not a bad start. However, I knew going into it that my reading for the first couple of months of the year would be somewhat regulated by commitments; I had books to read for the category I was evaluating in the Indie […]
Some time in the mid-1990s, the way I shopped for books changed. Borders Books and Music opened their first store in the Memphis area. Just inside the Germantown city limits, it was located at Carrefour along Kirby Parkway, between the Poplars (Poplar Avenue and Poplar Pike), I’d never seen a bookstore that offered its variety of titles and genres – and it was a five-minute walk from the apartment I lived in at the […]
Hey! Who are you calling “unprofessional?” That was the Question of the Week, directed at a romance novelist who responded to a couple of reviews that didn’t please her with a post on her blog, Authors Helping Authors, advising her fellow writers to steer clear of “unprofessionals” who “set themselves up as reviewers” and probably “never wrote anything themselves other than a grocery list.” I’m not linking to it myself, because plenty of others […]
Between starting this blog in 2007 and last year, I didn’t re-read anything – the old “not enough time, and too many new books to explore” argument. But the “someday” I’ve had in mind for those books I’ve kept to re-read “someday” grows time-limited too, and I’m starting to think that three to five re-reads over the course of a year may actually be a very good use of time. Five of my 55 […]
As you may recall, I’ve been home for the last week recuperating from shoulder surgery. It’s been a decent week for reading, once the pain subsided and the stronger drugs wore off. Friday 1/21: Surgery Day: not much reading, which should surprise no one at all. I was in surgery itself for four hours, and given the pain meds and anesthesia still in my system, I wasn’t awake for all that much of the […]
Regular readers already know about this, but just in case you hadn’t heard, I had shoulder surgery on Friday. It was an outpatient procedure and I’m at home, but my right arm will be in a sling for the next four to six weeks. While I am capable of typing left-handed if I have to, it’s slow and uncomfortable going, so posting frequency around here will most likely drop off during the next […]
Last week, participants in The Broke and the Bookish’s “Top Ten Tuesday” posted reading and blogging resolutions for the New Year. I wasn’t one of them. For one thing, I don’t really do New Year’s resolutions; and secondly, because I try to write and schedule my posts ahead of time, I don’t do many daily/weekly memes any more unless the prompts are posted in advance. However, I did read quite a few lists of […]
You may have heard that the Sunday Salon closed to new members a while ago for technical reasons; the feed aggregator it uses for participants’ posts had reached capacity. Well, have you heard that it’s re-opened – as a Facebook group – and both old and new members are invited to join up there? Group members can link up their Sunday posts on the FB page and easily comment and have bookish discussions with […]
I posted a revision to my Book Review Policy a couple of weeks ago, stating that I would not accept most review offers for the first six months of 2011 due to various other commitments, including recovery from shoulder surgery scheduled later this month. (That may be a good time for reading, but probably less than ideal for writing reviews!) I’ve been trying to dial back my review commitments for over a year, yet over […]
Current and upcoming reading: The Lotus Eaters: A Novel by Tatjana Soli (TLC Book Tour, January 2011) Indie Lit Awards Long List, Non-Fiction: At Home by Bill Bryson Let’s Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson I’m planning to post my year-end reading roundup for next week’s Salon, but I’ve started […]
