Category: Memes

Booking Through Thursday

 Booking Through Thursday:

This week’s question is suggested by Puss Reboots:

How much do reviews (good and bad) affect your choice of reading? If you see a bad review of a book you wanted to read, do you still read it? If you see a good review of a book you’re sure you won’t like, do you change your mind and give the book a try?

The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. ~ Virginia Woolf

I do read reviews, book blogs (like Book-a-Rama), and librarian blogs all in search of new books to read. I don’t put a lot of store in Amazon reviews, although I might look cross-eyed at a book that doesn’t have a lower star rating. A book with a really strong voice is bound to piss someone off–and sure, that someone could be me. More often than not, the review reveals more about the reviewer than the book.

And I admit that sometimes reviews might keep me away from reading the third/fourth in a series I was feeling meh about anyway (*cough*Stephenie Meyer*cough*).

But with so many books and not enough time (even if all I did was read, there still wouldn’t be enough time), I need some way to sort through all the possibilities out there. Reviews are a starting point, but certainly not the end point.

Booking it a bit late: Highlights, 2007

Booking Through Thursday a bit late this week:

It’s an old question, but a good one . . . What were your favorite books this year?

List as many as you like … fiction, non-fiction, mystery, romance, science-fiction, business, travel, cookbooks … whatever the category. But, really, we’re all dying to know. What books were the highlight of your reading year in 2007?

My goal this year was to read 52 books. And I read … 52 books.

I read a lot of good books this year. Just about every book on my list below had something to offer. A few I was “meh” about. (If you’re thinking about reading one, email me, and I’ll let you know if it was a “meh” book–although, one person’s “meh” is another’s “wowza.”)

My wowza this year includes:

The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak

I Am the Messenger, also by Markus Zusak

Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl, which actually, I read twice. If you look on Amazon, you can see it’s truly one of those love/hate books. Did it have flaws? Yeah, it did. But I felt the good outweighed those. Plus, some of the “flaws” vanished on the second read. Or at least, they did for me.

All in all, it was a good reading year for me.

Books read in 2007 (in sort of alpha order):

A Certain Slant of Light (Whitcomb, Laura)
A Northern Light (Donnelly, Jennifer)
Amazing Grace (Shull, Megan)
Devilish (Johnson, Maureen)
Elsewhere (Zevin, Gabrielle)
Evolution, Me & Other Freaks of Nature (Brande, Robin)
Fever 1793 (Anderson, Laurie Halse)
Girl at Sea (Johnson, Maureen)
Hacking Harvard (Wasserman, Robin)
How I Live Now (Rosoff, Meg)
How to Be Popular (Cabot, Meg)
I Am the Messenger (Zusak, Markus)
Just Listen (Dessen, Sarah)
Keturah And Lord Death (Leavitt, Martine)
King Dork (Portman, Frank)
Last Siege, The (Stroud, Jonathan)
Life As We Knew It (Pfeffer, Susan Beth)
London Calling (Bloor, Edward)
Lottery (Wood, Patricia)
Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac (Zevin, Gabrielle)
Prom (Anderson, Laurie Halse)
Pygmalion (Shaw, George Bernard)
Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party (Compestine, Ying Chang)
Skylight Confessions: A Novel (Hoffman, Alice)
Speak (Anderson, Laurie Halse)
Special Topics in Calamity Physics (Pessl, Marisha)
Stargirl (Spinelli, Jerry)
The Alibi Club (Mathews, Francine)
The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl (Lyga, Barry)
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1: The Pox Party (Anderson, M.T.)
The Book of Lost Things: A Novel (Connolly, John)
The Book Thief (Zusak, Markus)
The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear (Keyes, Ralph)
The Gospel According to Larry (Tashjian, Janet)
The Long Road Home: A Story of War and Family (Raddatz, Martha)
The Luxe (Godbersen, Anna)
The Nature of Jade (Caletti, Deb)
The Off Season (Murdock, Catherine)
The Probable Future (Hoffman, Alice)
The Queen of Everything (Caletti, Deb)
The Rest Falls Away: The Gardella Vampire Chronicles (Gleason, Colleen)
The Road (McCarthy, Cormac)
The Stolen Child (Donohue, Keith)
The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel (Setterfield, Diane)
The Virginia Woolf Writers’ Workshop: Seven Lessons to Inspire Great Writing (Jones, Danell)
Thirteen Reasons Why (Asher, Jay)
Tomorrow #1: When The War Began (Marsden, John)
Tomorrow #2: The Dead Of Night (Marsden, John)
Uninvited (Marrone, Amanda)
Valiant: A Modern Tale of Faerie (Black, Holly)
Vote For Larry (Tashjian, Janet)
Wild Roses (Caletti, Deb)

Booking it orderly

 Okay, I haven’t booked through Thursday for a while, so I thought I would.

Do you use any of the online book-cataloguing sites, like Library Thing or Shelfari? Why or why not? (Or . . . do you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking to?? (grin))

If not an online catalog, do you use any other method to catalog your book collection? Excel spreadsheets, index cards, a notebook, anything?

I use Library Thing, but it’s more of a reading log than a place where I catalog books. So there’s a mix of what I own and what I’ve read and I haven’t tagged which is which yet. I guess I should do that someday.

In other news, what my kids want for Christmas that they’re probably not going to get:

  • Andrew: a lizard
  • Kyra: a real magic wand

All I Want Is You

I found this one over at Book-a-Rama.

Here’s what you do:

Set your Mp3 player on shuffle and write the title of the first song that comes up as an answer to each question no matter how stupid it sounds…(savvy? Here we go.)

IF SOMEONE SAYS “IS THIS OKAY?” YOU SAY?
Angel of Harlem, by U2 (that’s a weird answer)

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOURSELF?
Temptation, by Tom Waits (honestly, I wouldn’t)

WHAT DO YOU LIKE IN A GUY/GIRL?
Extreme Ways, by Moby (ha, ha, this one actually makes sense)

HOW DO YOU FEEL NOW?
She’s So High, by Tal Bachman (no, I am not)

WHAT IS YOUR LIFE’S PURPOSE?
 I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For, by U2 (but apparently I’ve found every U2 song)

WHAT DO YOUR FRIENDS THINK OF YOU?
Take Me Out, by Franz Ferdinand (I have some demanding friends, no?)

WHAT DO YOUR PARENTS THINK OF YOU?
True, by Spandau Ballet (I think this is a good answer, it could be worse, no?)

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT OFTEN?
Walking on the Moon, by The Police (I’m not sure I’ve ever thought of that)

WHAT IS 1+1?
Don’t Leave Home, by Dido (It must be that new math)

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR BEST FRIEND?
Rock ‘n’ Roll Lifestyle, by Cake (too funny)

WHAT IS YOUR LIFE STORY?
Original of the Species, by U2 (When Charity isn’t being original, she’s clearly listening to U2)

WHAT DO YOU THINK WHEN YOU SEE THE PERSON YOU LOVE?
Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money), by the Pet Shop Boys (Snort)

WHAT WILL THEY PLAY AT YOUR FUNERAL?
Longview, by Green Day (Whatever)

WHAT IS YOUR HOBBY/INTEREST?
Black Coffee in Bed, by Squeeze (Caffeine is my life)

WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST FEAR?
The Other Side, by David Gray (Strangely appropriate, freakishly so, even)

WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST SECRET?
Every Little Thing She Does is Magic, by The Police (Bet you didn’t know I was magic)

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR FRIENDS?
Tangled Up in Blue, by Bob Dylan (you guys are all tangled up)

WHAT IS THE THEME SONG TO YOUR LIFE?
Leaving New York, by R.E.M (I’ve only been there once)

WHAT DESCRIBES YOU?
Rio, by Duran Duran (I’ve got nothing for this)

WHAT WILL YOU NAME THIS POST?
All I Want is You, by U2 (I know. Again with the U2)

Booking Through Thursday: Wild Abandon

Booking Through Thursday:

Today’s suggestion is from Cereal Box Reader

I would enjoy reading a meme about people’s abandoned books. The books that you start but don’t finish say as much about you as the ones you actually read, sometimes because of the books themselves or because of the circumstances that prevent you from finishing. So . . . what books have you abandoned and why?

I am one of the few people who never made it through The Da Vinci Code. I put it down at page 79 and never picked it back up again. This has less to do with the writing than the subject matter. I’m also one of the few people in the western world who is “meh” on the subject matter. Yawn. Whatever.

If I were into the story, the prose wouldn’t have bothered me as much. Sure, the gold standard is excellent story/characterization + prose that matches. But I’ll hang in there with a book if there’s a two out of three combination. Characters I love, even if the story moves a little slowly, a pot boiler, even if the characters are a little flat. And so on.

I tend to be a mood reader. I also try to respect a book for what it is. If something’s a lighthearted romp full of camp, I’m not going to get upset when the characters don’t bleed their emotions on the page. Ditto something that’s angst-ridden and angry. It is what it is.  

I’m also an “aspiration” reader. I will read something because it was a NYT notable book, or won a Pulitzer, a National Book Award, A Newbery, and so on. I like to understand why something received that honor, even if I end up not really liking the book.

My (highly personal) bias is a writer should read outside her comfort zone once in a while.

Who knew there was so much to say about not reading.

Booking through Thursday: Gotta catch ’em all

Booking through Thursday this week:

You may or may not have seen my post at Punctuality Rules Tuesday, about a book I recently bought that had the actual TITLE misspelled on the spine of the book. A glaring typographical error that really (really!) should have been caught. So, using that as a springboard, today’s question: What’s the worst typographical error you’ve ever found in (or on) a book?

As a writer, I really, really sympathize. Since I have this (freakish) thing for pronouns, I generally catch those errors. The ‘h’ left off the she and dialogue being attributed to the wrong character. That happens once in a while.

But the worst (or funniest, depending on how you look at it) was one of my own. It was for installation guide. The phrase I meant to write was something along the lines of: It does not …

What did I type instead?

It’s doe snot …

Not one of the features in our software offerings, I’m afraid. So here I sit, not throwing any stones today.

What, you haven’t read that?

All the cool kids (Jen, Marianne) are doing this book meme.

106 Books You’ve Never Read and Probably Should:

The basic premise is that it takes the top 106 unread books from Library Thing, and you mark whether you’ve read them or not (and various other offshoots on that… see below).

The instructions are:

Bold what you have read
Italicize those you didn’t finish
Strikethrough the ones you hated
*asterisks next to those you’ve read more than once
+ cross in front of the books that are on your bookshelf
Underline books that are on your “to read” list.

*+Anna Karenina

+Crime and Punishment (I’m a very bad Russian major; I couldn’t make it to the end.)

+Catch-22

+One Hundred Years of Solitude

+Wuthering Heights

+The Silmarillion (Honestly, did anyone read this all the way through?)

Life of Pi: a novel

The Name of the Rose

Don Quixote

Moby Dick

Ulysses

Madame Bovary

The Odyssey

*+Pride and Prejudice

*+Jane Eyre

A Tale of Two Cities

+The Brothers Karamazov

Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies

+War and Peace

Vanity Fair

+The Time Traveler’s Wife

The Iliad

+Emma

+The Blind Assassin

The Kite Runner

Mrs. Dalloway

Great Expectations

American Gods

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Atlas Shrugged

Reading Lolita in Tehran

Memoirs of a Geisha

Middlesex

Quicksilver

Wicked: The Life and Times of The Wicked Witch of the West

The Canterbury Tales

The Historian

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Love in the Time of Cholera

Brave New World

The Fountainhead

Foucault’s Pendulum

Middlemarch

+Frankenstein

The Count of Monte Cristo

Dracula

A Clockwork Orange

Anansi Boys

The Once and Future King

The Grapes of Wrath

The Poisonwood Bible

+1984

Angels & Demons

The Inferno

The Satanic Verses

Sense and Sensibility

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Mansfield Park

One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest

To the Lighthouse

Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Oliver Twist

Gulliver’s Travels

Les Misérables

The Corrections

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

The Curious Incident of The Dog In The Night-Time

Dune

The Prince

The Sound and the Fury

Angela’s Ashes

The God of Small Things

A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present

Cryptonomicon

Neverwhere

+A Confederacy of Dunces

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Dubliners

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Beloved

Slaughterhouse-five

The Scarlet Letter

Eats, Shoots & Leaves (Ha, I’m the only writer who hasn’t read this.)

The Mists of Avalon

Oryx and Crake: a novel (I gotta be in the right kind of mood for Margaret Atwood)

Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed

Cloud Atlas

The Confusion

Lolita

Persuasion

Northanger Abbey

The Catcher in the Rye

+On the Road

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Freakonomics

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

The Aeneid

Watership Down

Gravity’s Rainbow

*+The Hobbit

*In Cold Blood

White Teeth

Treasure Island

David Copperfield

The Three Musketeers

So, I guess we can all feel bad about this together. I mean, these are the books most tagged as unread on LibraryThing. No one else has read them either.

The 12 question writing meme

Found this one over at Marianne’s.

What’s Your Writing Style?

  1. Are you a “pantser” or a “plotter?”

    I don’t like this question because it sounds like if you even do a hint of pre-work, you’re all about plot and not characterization. Most of my pre-work is characterization. I know most people would call me a plotter. For me, it’s more like thinking on paper.
  2. Detailed character sketches or “their character will be revealed to me as a I write”?

    Not sketches, but memoirs. First person in the character’s voice. I have a series of questions, but if the topic is “cars” and the character starts babbling about politics in Sweden, I go with it. I figure that means something.
    The more I write, I find this is the one single exercise that really matters.
  3. Do you know your characters’ goals, motivations, and conflicts before you start writing or is that something else you discover only after you start writing?
    I do look at all of this (see above), but nothing’s set at this point. Sometimes, I’ve only scratched the surface of what the character and story are really about and it takes a few more drafts to get it where it should be.
  4. Books on plotting – useful or harmful?
    Like anything else, in the wrong hands, they can be dangerous. Seriously, I’ve found that craft books are a lot like any other kind of book. Some people will relate to a certain writer and some will not.
  5. Are you a procrastinator or does the itch to write keep at you until you sit down and work?
    I can circle work for days (just ask Darcy). I look at it, it looks at me, and we both go, “Meh.” I used to freak when I hit a slump (okay, still do). Like somehow if I don’t write for a week, I’ll forget everything I’ve ever learned about writing up to this point and will have to start all over again.
    Neurotic, who me? Not at all. I’m getting better at seeing that I simply need time to think.
  6. Do you write in short bursts of creative energy, or can you sit down and write for hours at a time?

    Yes.
  7. Are you a morning or afternoon writer?

    I’m a morning person, but I probably write more in the afternoon. Go figure.

  8. Do you write with music/the noise of children/in a cafe or other public setting, or do you need complete silence to concentrate?

    Yes.

    See my previous post on Chuck E. Cheese. I don’t like writing with music coming from my computer speakers, but if there’s background music (say, at Miss B’s ballet class), I can deal.

    Sometimes I think we writers baby ourselves too much. When you look at what some writers did/do under repressive regimes to write and compare it to the “omigod, I can’t write unless I have my three aromatic candles lit and Yanni on the stereo.” it can look a little indulgent.

  9. Computer or longhand? (or typewriter?)

    I’ll do both. I like doing both. It’s a mood thing.
  10. Do you know the ending before you type Chapter One?

    I generally have a sense for how I want the story to end. There’s a writing saying about “the end is in the beginning.” I once figured out the end to a story by chanting that to myself.
  11. Does what’s selling in the market influence how and what you write?

    Thing is, what’s new on the shelves right now is what was selling 12 – 18 months ago. I subscribe to Publisher’s Marketplace, which sends out a list of deals every week (actually, if you’re a site member, you can log on and see/search deals).This isn’t every deal, just those agents/publishers feel like reporting.I find it more inspirational, especially when someone says, “You can’t sell that as a new author.”

    Well, yes, you can sell that as a new author. You just have to do it right. That’s the tricky part.

  12. Editing – love it or hate it?

    Love it, love it. Writing is rewriting and thank goodness for that. The one thing I’m not wild about (probably because I’m doing it this week) is keying in changes. I always edit on paper, which means I have to 1) decipher my own handwriting and 2) make changes without typos procreating around those changes.

Booking Through Thursday: Decorum

This week’s Booking Through Thursday:

Do you have “issues” with too much profanity or overly explicit (ahem) “romantic” scenes in books? Or do you take them in stride? Have issues like these ever caused you to close a book? Or do you go looking for more exactly like them? (grin) 

Well, I think we all know how I feel about swearing (scroll down for that answer). For me, it all has to do with the “higher good” of the story. Does it fit? Does it contribute? Is it crucial to the story?

What I don’t like is sex scenes added simply because the everything must be hot, Hot, HOT these days. But I’d feel the same way if these were car chase scenes, scenes taking place in a church, scenes where the heroine is communing with her bunny friends*. Whatever. Anything can be gratuitous.

*This isn’t a euphemism for anything (that I know of), but I’m thinking it should be.

Today’s Banned Author

Banned in Oklahoma: Maureen Johnson

Since it’s still Banned Books Week, I’m highlighting another author, another one not on the top 100 list, but a case that is both current and very interesting.

I’m not going to say a lot about it here because you can read Maureen’s entire series about her book being challenged in the tagged posts here on her web site/blog. If you want to start from the top, so to speak, you have to scroll to the bottom. However, her last post gives a good overview of what happened and the current situation. It’s a blow by blow book challenge/banning in real time.

From Maureen’s blog:

One of the more bizarre aspects of all of this is the secrecy in which this action was conducted. Without the actions of the librarian, no one would have known this happened. Book banning often happens in small meetings, out of sight. If you’re going to do something like this, I think you have the responsibly of making it public. It’s amazing what happens when you just add public knowledge to the equation.  

Booking through Thursday: Friendship and Banning

Booking through Thursday this week:

Suggested by Marsha:

Buy a Friend a Book Week is October 1-7 (as well as the first weeks of January, April, and July). During this week, you’re encouraged to buy a friend a book for no good reason. Not for their birthday, not because it’s a holiday, not to cheer them up–just because it’s a book.

What book would you choose to give to a friend and why?

And, if you’re feeling generous enough–head on over to Amazon and actually send one on its way! 

Actually, Buy a Friend a Book week coincides nicely with Banned Books Week. If you like, head on over to the American Library Association web site (link above and in the sidebar) and pick a book from one of their lists of most challenged books: from last year or the most challenged books from 1990 – 2000, or the most challenged books from the 21st century.

I’m feeling the sudden urge to corrupt minds with Harry Potter, Captain Underpants, and Judy Blume.

How about you?