I didn’t get much reading done this week, which is too bad because I got two books from inter-library loan (The Magicians by Lev Grossman and Making Toast by Roger Rosenblatt) that I only have 14 days to read! Gah!
Communities
I’m combining three of blog-business posts into one with this, because I don’t like it when my blog gets overrun with posts not actually about books. This week, Weekly Geeks wanted to look at commenting, a topic I think is really important to think about as a blogger. The task for the Blog Improvement Project is to look into categories and tags — two administrative tools that help keep blogs organized and can help search engines find you blog. And finally, a few bloggers (My Friend Amy, Beth Fish Reads, others?) posted social media policies yesterday, which inspired me to do the same
I was reading one of my new library books recently, Hunger: An Unnatural History, and came across a checkout receipt from another patron. That person checkout the book on September 17, 2007 from the Sequoya Branch Library at 3:44 p.m. They also checked out The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science. I wonder what kind of person would check out both of those books at the same time?
After a bit of a morbid week on the blog (I reviewed The Great Starvation Experiment and The Poisoner’s Handbook), I wanted to post something a little more cheerful today.
If you haven’t read it yet, Esquire’s recent feature of film critic Roger Ebert written by journalist Chris Johnson is just beautiful. I guess it’s a little sad, but it’s also well written, funny, and shows just how powerful a well-done journalistic profile can be. I can only wish to write something this lovely someday.
This has to be a pretty quick TSS post because I have people coming over to watch the Superbowl in a couple hours and I have cookies to bake and soup to make.
One of the best things about only taking two classes this semester is the extra time I’ve found to read. Yesterday I was able to finish “Socialism is Great!” A Worker’s Memoir of New China by Lijia Zhang. This was the first book I decided to read off my Women Unbound reading list, and it was a good one.
Anyone who is a regular reader of my blog knows that I love nonfiction, especially narrative nonfiction and memoirs. I think it takes a tremendous amount of skill to write compelling, interesting, and powerful stories about things that are real, without changing the ending or characters of ideas to reflect what we wish the story could be rather than what it is.
I’ve been on my Christmas Break for 14 days now, which means I should have read 1400 pages to be on track to meet my goal of reading 3000 pages in 30 days. As of Saturday night I was at 1327 pages. Just a little short, but nothing that can’t be made up.
About a month ago I proposed a personal reading project for myself: read 3,000 pages in the 30 days of my Christmas break. Technically, I still have one magazine story to revise and turn in, but it’s so close to being done with the semester that I’m going to start today, yay!
I’ve been on the waiting list for Catching Fire, the second book in Suzanne Collins Hunger Games series, for like six months now. I went to the library yesterday to pick up another book and discovered the book finally came for me! Yay! So instead of working on a paper while I babysat last night, [...]
I’m generally behind the curve when it comes to recently published works because I don’t seek them out very often. The one major exception to that has always been the Harry Potter series, which I would get the day they were released and read nonstop until I finished. I miss that! But anyway, this Top [...]
