Dec 28 2008
My Bookish friends this week - reviews, post-Christmas contemplation, and many, many reading challenges
Happy post-Christmas! I hope everyone is recovering from being all stuffed and hopefully merry. It’s interesting to see that so many people in the Book-o-sphere are still busy with books, looking back and the previous year and planning for 2009.
Nicola at Alpha Heroes is nearing the end of her month-long excursion into the world of anthologies. I’m very entertained by her current review of the anthology, Hot Blooded. The review talks not just about the novellas in the book, but about Nicola’s own change of heart with respect to vampire stories. It’s an interesting commentary on how our tastes change, though as always, it also depends on whether there are good stories out there.
Which might bring up an interesting question: which comes first, our change of taste or the proliferation of good stories in a particular genre?
Which causes which, or precedes which? (Could Nicola have had a change of heart about vampire stories if all the current vampire stories were awful?)
Sheri S. at Bookopolis has recently reviewed a book that really intrigues me: Time of My Life, by Allison Winn Scotch. The book takes the main character back to a point seven years earlier in her life, and she gets a “do-over.” It sounds like the book brings up all sorts of “what if” questions about second chances. Would we really do any better with a “do-over”? Is that what we really want? I may hunt down this book and have a read.
Breeni Books has had some guest bloggers the last few days, and this review by author Cheryl Anne Gardner is quite interesting. I agree with Ms. Gardner’s assessment of what has now become the “troubled marriage formula,” and might not have been tempted to read the book because of that. But from the moment Gardner interjects her “word of caution,” the review itself becomes deeply insightful. Maybe I feel this way just because I agree with her; I’ve always thought that there’s no way a marriage partner can become “everything the other partner needs” as a human being. It is — nay, it must be — possible for a married person to have deep friendships outside the marriage, and even to be aware of an “outsider’s” sexual attractiveness. People in a marriage remain (or ought to remain) a part of wider society, and no married state can possibly (nor ever should) shut off all other interactions or responses to every other human being on the planet. So I really enjoyed Ms. Gardner’s comments as she reviewed this book.
For those looking for reading challenges for 2009, Sandra at Fresh Ink Books has listed several of them: Support Your Local Library, Africa, What’s in a Name?, Costa Prize Winners, Art History, Orange Prize. If any of these are your cup of tea, check out Fresh Ink to find details. And look down the right margin for links to more.
One thing is certain at this time of year. If you look widely enough through the Book-o-Sphere, you can find a reading challenge to suit your tastes.
However, if you’re uneasy about reading challenges, you can find a balancing view at Worthwhile Books, where hopeinbrazil explains why there may be drawbacks to engaging in these challenges. Instead, she looks back over the books she’s read in 2008, and lists the ones that have been the “best” in several categories.
Meanwhile, Melanie at The Indextrious Reader, has another entertaining way of looking back at 2008, the First Lines meme. This is where she takes the first sentence of the first post in each month of the year, and reflects on how this might indicate her blogging trends for the year.
I’ve only been doing the Bookishgal blog since October, so I don’t have much. But let’s see how things have gone for at least the first three months of this blog:
October - If you’re really into goofing off — I mean idling — as a vocation, almost a profession, you’re going to love a book launched on October 8.
November - We’re all stark raving bonkers, of course.
December - Just kinda’ riffing on the name of my book today: The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood of Great Renown in Nottinghamshire.
The first was a book review, the second referred to my starting NaNoWriMo, and the third was one of my Books Without ISBN. So even just three posts cover rather a lot of my interests and emphases in this blog. Fun meme.
And last, but absolutely not least, a couple of posts by Lisa at Minds Alive on the Shelves. Her December 27 entry on Santa’s lash-back against the greedy, whiny kids who write him letters makes me want to rush out and immediately find the book! As she says, it sounds like a nice antidote when Christmas commercialism and “forced family time” gets to be just too much. But do check out her post just before that, from December 24th. I for one am in love with her lovely little tree, and am absolutely madfor her collection of Old World Santas. If I’m ever in her area around Christmas time some year - she’d better have good locks on her doors, is all I can say!
So that’s what is going on just within the confines of my own Blogroll this week. Imagine what you can find if you go to their blogs, and click on their own Blogroll links, and click on theirs, and theirs, and theirs…
It’s fun to look back over the year of books, isn’t it? I’m amazed at how many wonderful book blogs there are out there - my blogroll has grown and grown during 2008.
I have joined a bunch of challenges for 2009, but most of them are the kind that don’t require a ton of pre-planning - like reading more than 100 books, doesn’t matter which ones. Part of the attraction to reading challenges is the community-building involved - meeting all the other challenge participants and discovering their blogs.
Happy New Year!
Hi Carrie! Thanks for stopping in. I’m going to do a challenge or two for 2009, but they’ll probably involve small ones, like that challenge I wrote about, two or three Sundays ago, involving reading three science books in the year.
Nicola, I’ve gotten interested in a few such novels lately myself. Well, not purely vampire novels (it sounds like you’ve read or know about Kim Harrison’s “Hollows” series?). In fact, I bought a book by a Toronto writer over the summer, from a library sale, that is a vampire novel. (I haven’t read it yet; I discovered it’s the second book about the same characters.)
And of course there were the Blood Ties books, by Tanya Huff, that I quite loved.