bookblog.meanlouise.com
-"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read." Groucho Marx
These days, I read email. Lots and lots of email. It’s a rather unfortunate situation. So, I thought I’d send you over to Patti Abbott’s site, where she’s asking bloggers to contribute mini-reviews of books they love that don’t get the attention they deserve. Here’s a linky to a Fridays Forgotten Books post with lots of links to keep you busy surfing around and learning about all kinds of books you may have missed.
Amusing little piece in today’s Washington Post: “Check it Out: Finding Romance and Adventure at the Library.”
I realize the teetering pile of New Yorkers on the coffee table is de rigueur for the so-called Washington Intellectual. The Stack demonstrates that one is witty and clever enough to subscribe, but much to busy and important to actually read.
Nevertheless, my constant low-level skirmishes with the encroaching clutter in my house have led to an unofficial household New Yorker policy. If an issue sits around for more than two months, I skim it and pull out any articles that fall into these categories:
1) Keep for my own research
2) To be read
a) by both Husband and myself
b) by me
c) by Husband
Then, they get filed.
Category 1 is simple. I place the article into my files wherever appropriate (story idea, background for work in progress, subject area, etc)
2a. Any that are being saved to be read by both of us go into a set of clipfiles arranged by broad category (food, culture, tech, politics, book reviews, general).
2b. These go into a folder. After being read, they are either tossed or filed in the research files.
2c. Husband throws these in a pile and may or may not get to them eventually. Husband is a nest-builder. See also: the constant war on clutter.
Laugh if you wish, but it’s very handy to have a file of articles one can pilfer for portable travel reading, particularly since most get tossed after we read them so there’s no need to cart around heavy books or a big stack of magazines. That’s what I tell myself, anyway. Please respect my delusions, I respect yours.
I’ve had to set aside Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Amusing piece in Paper Cuts (the NYTimes bookblog) about which books belong on your bookshelves, which was touched off by an even more amusing piece by Simpson’s writer Matt Selman, titled “The Unabridged Rules of Library Management.”
I’d never heard of novelist Scott Smith until I saw the movie A Simple Plan. The film adaptation of Smith’s debut novel was directed by Sam Raimi, but the screenplay was also written by Smith. I enjoyed his second novel, The Ruins, but somehow was oblivious of the movie, which opens in just a few weeks. The book was really quite yucky, though. I’ll probably pass on the movie. Maybe I’m being too quick to judge, but it it’s being directed by an unknown fashion photographer, which isn’t really a big attraction for me.
I just finished another of Jo Dereske’s incredibly amusing murder mysteries from the Miss Zukas series. (aka the Library Murder Series).
I picked up a few of these once as a present for a friend of mine who’d just become a library director and somehow never managed to read these. The woman behind me in line tapped me on the shoulder and told me I’d be disappointed. She was in Library School and assured me that real librarians and real patrons in public libraries were neither as weird nor as psychotic as some of the ones in the books. I guessed, correctly, that she’d never actually worked in a library, public or otherwise. I thanked her for her opinion, bought the books, and wondered what kind of nasty surprise that woman was going to get when she got out of Grad School with her $60,000 degree and absolutely no clue about what she was getting into. I also wondered if maybe she’d read one of the books, seen herself in one of the more prickly characters, and was in denial.
But I digress.
I just finished Bookmarked to Die
I listened to the first hour of an audiobook of Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass yesterday on my flight to Florida. I have nothing erudite to say about it, it was just a harmless way to fill the time. And to distract me from the fact that I was on a Southwest 737 that had, just that morning, had it’s windshield replaced.
Here’s the website of the Lewis Carroll Society (not to be confused with the Lewis Carroll Society of North America or the Lewis Carroll Society of New Zealand).
There’s a rather interesting website, Looking for Lewis Carroll, which has the goal of carefully dissecting the many myths and legends that have grown about Carroll (whose real name was Charles Dodgson).
As I mentioned ages ago, I picked up the first three volumes in Cleo Coyle’s Coffeehouse Mystery series. The first one was amusing, although a bit romance-y. The second one, also amusing, but even more romance-y. I liked the first 2 well enough to give the third one a go, but if the downward spiral of over-caffeinated and slightly awkward Harlequin homage continues, that may be it for this series.
We’ll see.
(Who am I kidding? I’m obsessive, you know I’ll read them all).
Another post about Whitney Matheson’s Pop Candy blog (which you should read every day):
Since I’m very excited to be going to the comic book store with a friend tomorrow, I thought I’d highlight Whitney’s four part-feature that she called her “One month comics crash course.” It’s really great so I’m posting the links here for your edification:
part one: 25 essential graphic novels
part two: 25 family friendly titles
part three: 25 must-see series
I’m still working my way through all four posts – so far it’s loads of fun.