Sophisticated Dorkiness — A bookworm journalist blogs on literature and life

The Sunday Salon: Sunday at Home!

January 15, 2012 Sunday Salon

It is amazing what a full weekend at home can do for making life seem more manageable. Earlier this week I felt totally overwhelmed by… everything. After more than three weeks of not having an entire day at home to myself, I was just feeling worn down. I wasn’t reading, I wasn’t writing, I just [...]

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My Life in the Swamp of the Non-Reader

January 13, 2012 Book Riot

You may have noticed that things have been quiet around the blog this week. I’ve been in a wicked reading and writing slump, and instead of trying to force the posts I was planning for this week I decided to just let things slide for a bit.

I blame at least part of the slumpiness to the fact that between the holidays, work, and volunteering, I haven’t spent a full day at my house in 25 days. Twenty-five days! How does that even happen? It’s insane. Let’s just say I am sooo looking forward to spending tomorrow in my pajamas.

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Indie Lit Awards: Nonfiction Short List

January 10, 2012 News and Notes

Now that 2011 is gone and we’re trucking along into 2012, I can finally share with you the nonfiction short list for the Indie Lit Awards. This year, Biography/Memoir got split off from the Nonfiction category, which means our nonfiction list is chock full of intensely long and serious nonfiction reads. Seriously. Every book on this list is more than 400 pages long. So much reading!

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Review at Book Riot: “Priceless” by Nicole Richie

January 5, 2012 Book Review

When I was doing some blog maintenance last week, I came across an un-posted “review” that I wrote soon after finishing Priceless (Yes, I did actually read the book!). Rather than let more than 1,100 words of bitter sarcasm go to waste, I turned the review into a post over at Book Riot that went up yesterday where I talked about the Not So Great Expectations Book Club and my thoughts on reading Richie.

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Goals: Looking Back at 2011 and Forward to 2012

January 4, 2012 Metadiscourse

Despite the fact that I’m not especially great at keeping track of my goals each year, I always go through the exercise of reflecting on my goals from last year and setting some new reading and blogging goals for the next year.

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Review: ‘The Western Lit Survival Kit’ by Sandra Newman

January 2, 2012 Book Review

Just about every English major has to take some version of a survey class as a freshman or a sophomore — a look at the major authors and works in the Western (British and American) canon. Although there are many critiques of the canon (it’s not inclusive, the author aren’t relevant, the books are boring…), the point of studying the classics as an English major is to get a good basis for where our major literary traditions came from and how they make an impact today. At least, that’s what I took from my English major.

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Don’t Become a Reading Robot

December 31, 2011 Musings

If you haven’t read Gabe Habash’s piece about the ups and downs of setting reading goals — “Reading 55 Books in 2011: What I Learned” from Publisher’s Weekly — then you absolutely should. It’s not very long, but offers quite a bit of food for thought.

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Favorite Nonfiction Reads of 2011

December 30, 2011 Book Review

Yesterday I posted my short list of favorite fiction reads of 2011 — The Magicians, Domestic Violets, When She Woke, The Art of Fielding, and The Imperfectionists. Today I’ve got five of my favorite nonfiction reads to share. They’re in no particular order — trying to rank them would have just been too difficult! Thoughts?

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Favorite Fiction Reads of 2011

December 29, 2011 Book Review

My first short list of favorite reads in 2011 — which covers everything I read this year, regardless of when it was published — was more than 25 books long. I managed to cut down my list to five fiction and five nonfiction favorites. Since I don’t think I’ll be finishing any more books this year, I’m posting my fiction picks today and nonfiction picks tomorrow. Let me know what you think!

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Mini-Reviews for the End of 2011

December 27, 2011 Book Review

Lu (Regular Rumination) had this great idea to do a “Great Review Catch Up” post to quickly sum up the books she read this year but never wrote reviews for. I liked the idea so much that I decided to “borrow” the idea myself and do a quick post about the books I read this year but never reviewed on the blog.

It’s a rather mixed bag of books, but there were definitely some good ones that I passed over because I just didn’t have anything (or, in one case, too many things) to say about them.

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