This Sunday has been pretty slow, but in a good way. I spent the morning finishing up my eighth book of the month, The Postmistress by Sarah Blake, which capped off a great month of reading. I spent the early part finishing up the nonfiction reads for the Indie Lit Awards, plus some other nonfiction I’ve been excited about for awhile.
Search: TBR Dare
I think when I read too many review copies of books in a row, I start to get a little stir crazy. February was the month I planned to focus on review books, and I read five of them, with a couple library books in the middle for good mix. I read review copies with a little more focus than books I’m just reading because I want to, which I think gets tiring.
This week I decided to take a little break — TBR Dare, be damned! Forget you, overflowing bookshelf! Get away, review copies! I want to read freely and at random.
This morning I made a quiche, and it was excellent. You can read a little bit about it and see a fuzzy picture at my Day Zero project blog.
Now, for reading: At the beginning of March I proposed a “perfect” reading month — the books I would read that would make me feel satisfied with how I spent my time with books. So how did I do in fulfilling that goal? Pretty good! Here’s my reading list for March, with books from my original “perfect month” list in bold (links go to my reviews).
Thinking About Reading
Jackie (Farm Lane Books) made a bold statement last week: “If I had to choose between only reading debut novels for the rest of my life, or eliminating them completely, I would choose the former.” Hop on over to her post about loving debut authors and join the discussion — it’s a good one.
Ok, this is the final meta-book and blogging post for the foreseeable future. Next week I’ll be back to reviews and other bookish stuff, promise. But my first post for 2010 was a review of my 2009 goals and setting my goals for 2010, and it seems like a good way to start 2011.
Looking back, I like the way that post was formatted, so I’m going to mimic it for this year.
Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns did an interview with Nieman Storyboard, one of my favorite blogs about journalism and narrative nonfiction, about some of the process of writing her book.
Natalie (Book, Line, and Sinker) wrote a great post – Book Reviews or Book Reports: Which are you writing? – about how she taught her students about reports and reviews. What I liked most about it was how well her advice can be applied to reviewers of all ages!
This is a story about how a dare, an open-minded friend, and a bunch of unwanted books came together to create a new book club, tentatively called “Not So Great Expectations.”
The players in this story are me and my friends Kristin and Katjusa. Kristin works at an office that has a bookshelf of free books people regularly borrow from. The excerpts below are edited Gchat conversations from earlier this week.
If you could have a perfect reading month, what would it look like?
I felt awesome when I got done with my reading in January, but looking back at my reading in February, I’m not sure I’d call the month perfect. It was good — I read some books I liked a lot — but I didn’t get through as many as I’d like (only 7), and I don’t think the balance between personal/library/review books was what I’d want to have moving forward. Granted, I did decide to spend the month focusing on review copies, but I think in the long run that’s a bad plan.
So if February wasn’t awesome, what exactly would make a “perfect” reading month for me/
It’s a bit of a short tally this week — I didn’t find as many great links because I was so distracted by a mid-week snow day and reading as much Super Bowl analysis as I could find. #Imissfootballseasonalready
Geoff Nicholson wrote about the perils of profiling people based on the books they read in the New York Times, which makes sense but also makes it less fun to poke around the bookshelves of people when you go to their house for the first time.
Writers in the Real World
A friend from college, Ben, has been blogging about his experiences in an MFA writing program. He’s had a couple really thoughtful posts recently about the idea of casting nets widely, or read broadly to experience different types of books. His second post is a little more formal look at the idea and some of the short stories that helped him read widely this semester.
Anthony Bourdain came to Madison a few weeks ago, and my friend Lindsay wrote up her impressions of his speech. I got to go too, and will have some thoughts about it soonish… I hope!
