A New Genre and Library Reservations

I realised today that I haven’t got any reservations at the library(!), so I’ve placed three:

• Hooking Up by Tom Wolfe
• Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky by Patrick Hamilton
• Criminal Records by Andrew Holmes

I’ve also just finished re-reading Hex by Rhiannon Lassiter. I’m a massive fan of the Hex series and I’ve read them all more times than I could count (plus almost all of Rhiannon Lassiter’s other books), but I’ve never really given much thought to trying other sci-fi, so I’ve decided to give that a go. I have read The Technicolor Time Machine by Harry Harrison and Waiting for the Galactic Bus by Parke Godwin, and I enjoyed both of them immensely, so maybe there’s something in the genre for me?

My plan of attack was to post a thread on LT asking for recommendations and also look at the books recommended for readers of Hex. I’ve had a lot of people respond with some ideas, so I’m now going to look all those books up on bookmooch and see what I can get. Any suggestions, anyone?

Dewey’s Readathon October 2009

The next Readathon is on October 24, starting at 1pm GMT.

I’m a little bit daunted by the whole idea, so I’m not going to go in as a reader, but I’ve signed myself up as a cheerleader so hopefully I can still have my share of the fun!

You can visit the Readathon website and sign up yourself here.

The Sunday Salon: BBAW ends

So BBAW ended on Friday *sniffle*. This is the first year that I participated and it’s been an absolutely amazing experience. I can’t wait to do it all again next year! I’ve had a brilliant time discovering a lot of new blogs (we’ll come to them in a moment) and participating in the memes. I’ve got a lengthy list of new ideas for posts, but for tonight, I’m just going to share with you the list of blogs I’ve added to my feedreader this week:

• Bookmagic
• Book Chick City
• The 3 Rs Blog
• Wordsmithonia
• Sophisticated Dorkiness
• Devourer of Books
• At Home with Books
• Linus Blanket

I’ll be updating my blogroll here soon.

What blogs have you discovered this week?

BBAW interview

As part of BBAW, Deb from Book Magic and I exchanged interviews (you can read my answers to her questions here). Don’t forget you can read more interviews at the BBAW site!

On blogging…

You’ve participated in several memes: most recently, What are you reading Monday?, but also Booking Through Thursday, Library Loot, Teaser Tuesdays and others. Which memes are your favourites? Where do you think the balance between original content and memes should lie?

I like the memes, especially What are you reading Monday because that one helps me keep track of my weekly reading goals. But I think memes should only be used to enhance, or supplement and not make up the majority of one’s blog.

We’re both newbies to BBAW – what are you expecting, and what are you most looking forward to?

I don’t know what to expect! But I’m sure it will be fun. I like the sense of community it brings and I really like discovering new blogs. It will be interesting to learn new things about bloggers I already follow.

Compared to many, you’re quite a new blogger, having founded your blog in May this year. Having almost reached the half-year mark, what do you think of the experience? What are the highs and lows – and has it been as you expected?

When I first started blogging, I had no idea what to expect. I didn’t even have a clear idea of what I would be doing, beside writing about books. I’m still tweaking so much, from the format and look of my blog, to the content and even my rating system. I started out giving ratings then stopped because I didn’t have a concrete system.

I had no idea how supportive and helpful other bloggers would be and I am so grateful!

Aside from book blogs, what other sorts of blogs do you read (if any)? Do you have any favourites you’d like to share? Are you ever tempted to blog about other things?

I pretty much just read book blogs. I have a lot of favorites, Wordsmithonia, J.Kaye’s Book Blog, Wrighty’s Reads, and many others. Right now I just blog about books, once I’m more comfortable, I may blog about other things. Probably still books, but more than just reviews and memes.

How do you read blogs? Do you use an RSS reader, or visit the sites themselves? Are you a prolific commenter or do you prefer to stay in the background?

Right now I use my blogroll and visit the sites. Then if I have time, I scroll through Google Reader to check blogs I subscribe to. I try to comment as often as possible but not nearly as much as I would like.

How important is the design of your blog to you? Have you ever considered changing to another blogging platform? Why do you choose to present your blog the way you do?

Blogger is pretty easy to use and serves my purpose for now. I like having gadgets and all the different backgrounds available. I like it to reflect my personality. I’m still working on it, but it is pretty close to how I want it to be.

On books…

Reading some of your archives, I noticed you mention that you have a Kindle. How has owning an ebook reader changed the way you read? Do you prefer ebooks or paper copies? What’s your prediction for the future?

I love my Kindle but that has not changed my love of paperbooks. This just gives me more options. I always carry a book with me, wherever I go, and having the Kindle means I can bring lots of books with me. But I love coming home to a package of books, with their new book smell! Having a Kindle also helps with storage as my bookshelves are overflowing! I don’t think ebooks will replace paperbooks, ever.

You’ve participated in a few reading challenges. Which has been your favourite? How do you choose books for your challenges? Have any challenges made you think again about a type of book, or helped you discover a real gem?

I had never been into Vampire books until I started The Sookie Stackhouse Challenge and now I’m hooked! I’m also enjoying The Every Thing Austen Challenge because I love Jane Austen and even enjoy the Austen knock-offs.

How do you arrange your books? How many do you have? Which books have been on your shelves the longest?

I don’t have my books well organized by I try to keep authors together and separate fiction from non-fiction. I also try to keep by tbrs separate from those I have read, other wise I lose them for awhile. I hold on to all books that I like, so I have several hundred, at least. I do a lot of rereading. I only get rid of a book if I know I will never read it again because I didn’t like it that much. Then it gets donated.

You have several librarything widgets on your blog. I’ve played around with LT and liked it, but I’m a little daunted by the prospect of cataloguing all my books and keeping track of my reading properly. Did you feel the same? How do you use LT now?

I love LT but I have so many books yet to enter. I add every new book but I need to spend some time getting a large chunk of still unlogged books into LT. It will be good once I have them all in, because I have been known to buy a book that I already own!

I’m running out of room!

I’ve reached that point (again) where I simply don’t have enough shelf space. My bookshelf is full. My two shelves allocated for TBRs are also full, despite my having started choosing my next book to read based on how thick it is (!) and therefore how much shelf space it will fill up.

There are 3 more shelves on the bookcase with the TBRs, but they’re all full already – I have a feeling that some creative reshuffling is in order so that I can increase my collection!

A Serious Dislike

This is a topic I’ve spoken about with a few people, but I don’t think I’ve ever posted about it on here before.

When I was young, I used to read a lot of series books. Nancy Drew, The Babysitters’ Club, Sweet Valley…I think I had over 150 Sweet Valley books at one point, and I read every single one of them. I also used to read shorter series. I watched a lot more TV back then too.

Over time, my opinions have changed a lot. For me, the problem with series is that you have to compromise. You can have a series that’s essentially one really, really long book broken into different volumes, which does give you the advantage of being able to have a complex story but also brings the disadvantage that you have to have the commitment at the beginning of the series that it’s going to be worth reading all the way through (or at least I do – I hate to start and not finish) and with stories that are that complex, things can often get confusing. You can have a series that works more like a brand, with each book in the series being a variation on a theme, which brings the advantage that there’s less importance placed on the order but also the disadvantage that things tend to get repetitive. And finally, you can try to have a plot that moves forward but also try to have each book have a plot of its own, which makes for a more interesting story as there’s no feeling left dangling but can sometimes feel forced.

The same problems apply to television series, which is why I’ve almost entirely stopped watching them -  I watch films and the news and that’s about it.

The specific example I was talking to my family about earlier is Harry Potter. I really enjoyed the first four books, ploughed through the next two without really taking anything in and never bothered to read the final one. The first four books are pretty self-contained and deal a lot with J.K. Rowling’s imaginary world. After that, though, the series seemed to move away from that and started getting into The Big Serious Plot. A lot of people kept reading, but I felt totally alienated at that point – I liked the books because I often have trouble suspending my disbelief (which makes reading fantasy very difficult) and they were realistic enough for me to be able to enjoy something different to what I normally read. After the fourth book, though, the series made the awkward shift from mostly self-contained books to being very plot-driven. I understand that the first four books were setting up for what happened later, but personally I think it would have been a better series if the major plot (which doesn’t really come about until the latter half of the series) had been introduced earlier. As it is, it felt like it was tacked on at the end for a grand finale.

Another series that let me down was the Lemony Snicket books, A Series of Unfortunate Events. It’s also another series where it changed midway through: the first few books were mostly just repetition, up to The Awful Academy (at least I think that was the title), when the real plot kicked in. I carried on reading, confident that the ends would be tied up and I’d get a return in my twelve-book investment, only for the thirteenth book to be a total pile of rubbish that answered none of my questions. That’s what finally put me off series: I’d been looking forward to the answers, I’d put in a lot of time (and money, unusually for me) to getting them and I was gutted not to get the resolution I felt I deserved. At least if you read a bad novel, you’ve only put in the investment of one book (though you can run into similar problems when you read an author’s best book first and find all their others a disappointment).

Pretty much the sole exception to my dislike of series is detective books, which I like because I’m picky about the way I like my detectives, my murderers and my writing. Having discovered a good series of detective books, I know that each book will be almost entirely self-contained (at least you always get to find out whodunnit at the end, even if there’s some personal history you don’t quite get) and I’ve then got a source of some more to read. That’s going back to what I said about series sometimes being like brands – I’m not looking at the story, I’m looking at what I know I’m going to get by reading a book that’s part of that series.

I have a feeling that I could’ve structured this a bit better, but hopefully it still makes some kind of sense. What about you? Are you prepared to make the investment in reading series or do you too tend to avoid them?

TSS on Monday

Okay, so I really should’ve got myself organised and done this yesterday when I meant to, but I didn’t. I’ve been away (a week on a narrowboat on the Leeds-Liverpool canal) so it’s time for a holiday reading wrap-up.

I read 7 books while we were away, which sounds like a lot, but you get a lot of time to read when you’re not doing locks! Here they are:

• Morvern Callar by Alan Warner
• Memoirs of an Invisible Man by H.F. Saint
• The Rotters’ Club by Jonathan Coe
• Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café by Fannie Flagg
• Marabou Stork Nightmares by Irvine Welsh
• Kissing in Manhattan by David Schickler
• Anonymous Lawyer by Jeremy Blanchman

I also read about half of The Chelsea Girl Murders by Sparkle Hayter but gave up on it.

In Skipton, we visited a bargain bookshop (much recommended – take a look if you’re ever there, it’s right on the high street) and I picked up a couple:

• Anonymous Lawyer, as I said – a book made up of the blog and emails of a fictitious hiring partner at a major law firm
• American Gangster by Mark Jacobson
• The Girl Who Stopped Swimming by Joshilyn Jackson
• Nice Girls Finish Last by Sparkle Hayter – another Robin Hudson mystery. I bought this before I started The Chelsea Girl Murders, and I’m getting rid of it unread, but it was only 99p so I can’t feel too bad about it.
• The Next Accident by Lisa Gardner – I enjoyed The Survivors’ Club, so hopefully this should be another good mystery/thriller.
• True Crime by Jake Annott

For once, I remembered to write down some notes about the books after I read them, so I’ll be posting some reviews soon.

Review: Predictably Irrational

Genre: Popular science

Synopsis: Why do we do the things we do? This book gives examples of times when we behave in a way that seems rational but upon closer inspection is influenced by all sorts of factors you never would have even considered.

Thoughts: I don’t read a huge number of popular science books, but from what I have read, this one was fairly typical. I enjoyed the conversational tone and personal feel (there’s quite a few personal anecdotes and stories). The examples of predictably irrational behaviour were interesting, but I disagree with the introduction: I don’t think being aware of these things will actually make any difference in how I do things. My only complaint is that things were spelled out a bit too much and too many examples of the same thing were given.

If you enjoy popular science books or you’d like to try one, then I would recommend this. It’s a quick read, so it’s not going to take up much of your time or require a good amount of effort. It’s fine to read out of idle curiosity as I did, but I wouldn’t overwhelmingly recommend it as it didn’t really stand out from the crowd for me.

Dan Ariely has a website which is probably worth checking out if you’re thinking of reading the book.

Clocking on

I’ve returned from the abyss and currently working through the huge pile of RSS updates and such that have accumulated. You can expect some sporadic posting here for a while so’s I can get everything – online and off – sorted out.

In the meantime, I’m going to leave you with book art by Brian Dettmer – some of this is truly, truly stunning.

Book blog guild

The Book Blog Guild

Many of you will already have seen this. It’s a new ’society’ for book bloggers, set up by Rebecca of The Bluestocking Society (you can read her post introducing it here).

This looks to be a good way of connecting with other book bloggers and such, so I urge you to take a look and maybe sign up if you haven’t already