Review: I’m at a loss for writing a summary for The Girl Who Was on Fire, so the description from the back of the book will just have to suffice for now:
Katniss Everdeen’s adventures may have come to an end, but her story continues to blaze in the hearts of millions worldwide.
In The Girl Who Was on Fire, thirteen YA authors take you back to Panem with moving, dark, and funny pieces on Katniss, the Games, Gale and Peeta, reality TV, survival, and more.
How does the way the Games affect the brain explain Haymitch’s drinking, Annie’s distraction, and Wiress’ speech problems?
What does the rebellion have in common with the War on Terror?
Why isn’t the answer to “Peeta or Gale?” as interesting as the question itself?
What should Panem have learned from the fates of other hedonistic societies throught history — and what can we?
If anything in that description sounds at all interesting to you, go and get yourself a copy of this book because it easily delivers on the premise.
The Girl Who Was on Fire is what I’d consider “literary criticism light” — it’s not so theoretical that it’s dense or hard to read, but it’s not simple enough that I’d already considered all of the arguments in the essays. I really enjoyed exploring the series again through a more critical lens, a lens that I couldn’t find myself when I read and reread the books. They’re so gripping, it’s easy to lose yourself in the stories.
Today is my third blogiversary, which means my blog has officially moved out of the Terrible Two’s and is fast growing into a toddler!
I did a sort of “state of the blog and my life” post at the beginning of the year, and not a whole lot has changed since then. After how crazy 2010 was with all the life-changing events, I’m glad to have had a relatively quiet start to this year. However, I do have some fun “blog by the numbers” stats to report:
204 = Books read
670 = Posts published
10,938 = Comments written and received
87,222 = Visits since I started tracking with Google Analytics in 2009
393 = Most visitors in a single day (April 12, 2011)
I’m not a big fan of doing giveaways or contest as seems to be traditional-ish with birthdays and blogiversaries, so I’m not going to do one today. But I do want to say thanks. Without your reading and commenting and generally being awesome, I’m not sure I would have stuck with blogging this long. On days when it seems like too much work, being on Twitter or getting a comment that says, “Wow, I want to read this book!” keeps me motivated and excited.
The thing that would make my day is for each and everyone of you to stop by and let me know you’re here. I do a lot of my blog reading and commenting based on when people leave comments here, so if you’ve never commented I may not know you’re around. The book blogging community is a huge one and it’s hard to know who is who or which ways a single blog connects to others. The best way for me to find you is to just say “Hello!”
Monday Tally is a weekly link round-up of some of my favorite posts discovered over the week. If you have suggestions for Monday Tally, please e-mail sophisticated [dot] dorkiness [at] gmail [dot] com. Enjoy!
I’m going to be experimenting with some changes to Monday Tally over the next couple months to see if I can find a way to make the post easier to put together and less time-consuming for everyone to read.
Last week I started playing around with Tumblr, which is a short-form blogging platform — somewhere between Twitter and a full-length blog. Tumblr has different post formats that make it easy to just throw up a picture, video, link, or text into a short post. So far, I really like it as a way to collect links and comment on them as I find them. You can find my Tumblr, A Little Bit of Dorkiness, at http://kimthedork.tumblr.com/.
I want to keep doing Monday Tally, so my plan is to use this Monday post to highlight three or four of my favorite links from Tumblr over the last week, with a little bit more commentary than I used to include. If you want more of the goofy links I tend to find, they’ll be over on Tumblr to check out. Please let me know what you think of the change, and I’ll tweaking with everything.
Mike Matas, co-founder of Push Pop Press, offers a demo of a full-length interactive book.
It looks very cool, but I wonder if settling in to read something that busy would actually be relaxing? One of the things I love about a physical book is that there’s nothing linked from the page to pull out and distract me. However, one person pointed out that this type of book might be great for nonfiction (which is what the example book is), where you could pull out extra content that rounds out a topic. Thoughts?
Do you ever have weeks where it feels like everything that could possibly happen all happens at the same time and it seems like you can’t even find time to think? That was the last couple of weeks for me.
This general sense of life busyness started 11 days ago. In that time I’ve worked full time, plus… played two soccer games, gone to one birthday party, driven to and from Minnesota twice (for a total of about 18 hours in the car), gone to dinner, took a sick day, volunteered, went to an author event, went to my book club, visited all of my grandparents, visited a friend’s family in the hospital, and attended a funeral. I also wrote two freelance stories and a guest post and read two books.
I also got it in my head that I could accomplish more if I just slept less, which worked exactly as well as you might expect it would. I need my sleep.
So… it’s been a long 11 days.
I got back from my second trip to Minnesota last night around midnight, then got up early this morning to finish a second freelance story. Now that the piece is finally mailed, I can take a little breath. And blog. And read, I hope!
Two Sentence Summary: At the age of 72, Mary Delany invented the art of collage after seeing a geranium petal fall to the table. This is the story of how she got there.
One Sentence Review: The images of flowers and beautifully descriptive writing make this book an enjoyable read, even when some parts of the story feel extraneous.
Why I Read It: I think the cover really grabbed me when I first saw it, and I loved the idea of reading a book about a person who found her calling late in life.
Some of the links used at Sophisticated Dorkiness are affiliate links through Amazon. If you make a purchase through any of those links, I will receive a small commission.
Monday Tally is a weekly link round-up of some of my favorite posts discovered over the week. If you have suggestions for Monday Tally, please e-mail sophisticated [dot] dorkiness [at] gmail [dot] com. Enjoy!
