I haven’t done a Bookkeeping report for a few weeks because there hasn’t been a lot to report. I haven’t added many books to TBR Purgatory for the last couple of months. I’m scaling back review books, and have been trying to confine my book-buying to titles already on my wishlist – and at least until Christmas, my book-buying will be limited to books for other people. However, it certainly looks like I’ve been busy […]
It’s that time of year…and I had planned to talk about it in this week’s Sunday Salon, but I didn’t get a chance to write one. However, when Weekly Geeks posted it as this week’s topic, I decided I’d make my response a special belated Salon post as well. Becky asked: Do you plan on participating in any reading challenges in 2011? Are you planning on hosting any reading challenges? Are there any challenges you […]
I finished and reviewed my 50th and 51st books of 2010 last week, although the reviews have yet to post here (LibraryThing is all caught up, though). I’m excited to have crossed that threshold this year – and with time to spare! – since I’ve fallen short of it for the last two years; I didn’t even crack 40 books read in 2008, which was dismal. Dismal by book-blogger standards, at any rate; I blogged […]
Year-end is fast approaching, like it or not, and one sign of that is the arrival of the Lists. Because I’m once again nursing a dislocated shoulder and not up to a lot of (one-handed) writing, I thought they’d make a good cut-and-paste post topic for this week’s Sunday Salon. Amazon.com got a head start on the 2010 best-book recaps, announcing its Editors’ Top 10 in October. The editors’ choices mixed fiction and nonfiction, and […]
Karen’s comment on my entry for last week’s Weekend Assignment made me stop and think for a minute: “It’s interesting that your habits have changed on (re-reading). Is it that your reading horizons expanded with adulthood so you had access to more books TBR, or was it more a question of awareness of a wider range of books in which to be interested? It sounds as though your recent rereading is pretty much all […]
For the second year in a row, I’m publicly saying NO to National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I love to read, and I love to write. Also, I love to write about what I read, otherwise my blog would never have been born. I think there are some truths about life and humanity and why we are the way we are that are best explored through fiction. I think that fiction can help us […]
Here’s an idea: Via Shelf Awareness, I read about an online book club that would charge members $15-$30 for such privileges as being supplied with ARCs four to six months in advance of publication and participating in author chats – and supposedly, publishers are receptive to it. This endeavor is being launched on a pilot basis by the women’s website wowOwow.com and was the subject of a Forbes.com story last week. I couldn’t really find […]
I often come across book reviews that include statements like “I didn’t know anything about this book before I read it” or “I avoided reading the jacket copy” – something along the lines of wanting to go into the reading experience without much advance knowledge of what was coming. The blurb for Chris Cleave’s novel Little Bee totally plays off this: “We don’t want to tell you what happens in this book. It is a […]
I don’t have a theme for this Sunday’s Salon – I’m a bit random this week. HELD OVER – Banned Books Week: After reading Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, I’ve decided to stretch out Banned Books Week a little longer and pull out two books I’d set aside for my failed Shelf Discovery Challenge. Forever… by Judy Blume and A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle are very different from each other, but they’ve both been […]
I’m very much in favor of the freedom to read what one chooses to read – and in order to make those choices well, one needs access to the full range of choices. I also believe in the freedom to choose not to read something. But I believe those rights belong to the individual and not to any institution (with an exception, perhaps, for parents of young children regarding what those children read in their […]
Congrats to The Sunday Salon for winning “Best Meme” in the BBAW Awards this past week – that makes all of us Saloners winners too! Another Book Blogger Appreciation Week has come to an end, and while it was indeed “a treasure chest of infinite books and infinite blogs,” it unfortunately lacked infinite time to experience them all! I hope to catch up on the posts I missed by the end of this weekend, and […]
Tomorrow is the first day of Book Blogger Appreciation Week! But you know, without writers, there would be no reason for book bloggers to exist. Therefore, I’m excited to tell you that Book Blogger Appreciation Week has joined up with She Writes! Are you familiar with She Writes? In its own words, here’s what this online community is all about: “She Writes is a community and a workplace for women who write, with over 11,000 […]
