Sunday Salon: Reading Notes and Bookkeeping

I haven’t done a Bookkeeping report for a few weeks because there hasn’t been a lot to report. I haven’t added many books to TBR Purgatory for the last couple of months. I’m scaling back review books, and have been trying to confine my book-buying to titles already on my wishlist - and at least until Christmas, my book-buying will be limited to books for other people.

However, it certainly looks like I’ve been busy reading some of the books already in my possession: 


Reviews since my last report
When You Reach Me (Rebecca Stead)
Notes from the Underwire (Quinn Cummings)
An Election for the Ages (Trova Heffernan) - Green Books Campaign)
Outside the Ordinary World (Dori Ostermiller) (TLC Book Tour)
Looking for Alaska (John Green)
Unstoppable in Stilettos: A Girl's Guide to Living Tall in a Small World (Lauren Ruotolo) (TLC Book Tour)
Emily of Deep Valley (Maud Hart Lovelace)
Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music (Marisa Meltzer) *nf

Upcoming reviews
Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild (Deborah Siegel)
Stiltsville (Susanna Daniel)
Beautiful Maria of My Soul (Oscar Hijuelos)


I discussed my reading plans for 2011, including participation in reading challenges, in a combined Weekly Geeks/belated Sunday Salon post last Monday.


I’m introducing a new occasional feature this week, Thoughts From My Reading. I’ve done similar posts in the past, usually after reading a couple of books with a common theme consecutively, but this will be the first one that officially gets that label - it will be up on Tuesday. Thoughts posts will consider my reactions to books beyond the scope of my typical review, and will focus more on my connections with the book’s subject matter than its literary attributes.

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I’ve started a Tumblr blog where, among other things, I’m collecting bookish links and quotes throughout the week - a few of the items in this Salon were posted there first. If you’d like more of that sort of thing, I invite you to follow the 3 r’s, lowercase.

I realize that most readers here don’t need convincing, but I thought I’d share this anyway:

10 REASONS WHY YOU (and Everyone You Know) SHOULD GIVE BOOKS THIS HOLIDAY SEASON, as presented by Kamy Wicoff and circulated in the She Writes Daily Newsletter:

ONE:When you give someone a book, you create a way to share an experience that will continue long after the holidays. Months later, you can ask: “What did you think of the part where he left her?”, and the book might mean the world to both of you.  Unlikely when the altnerative question is: “What did you think of the linen spritzer?”

TWO: Have YOU ever tried to wrap a Round Cocotte? Well, forget about it!

THREE: JK Rowling needs the money. No, wait: Nora Roberts needs the money. No, wait: Any writer not famous enough to be mentioned in this list needs the money! (And more than the money, they need a little bit of love for all those years of labor.)  

(FYI: Jeff Bezos does not need the money. He is building a personal space-port in West Texas. Please consider an independent bookstore. )

FOUR: Books are the best deal there is. The National Book Award-winning author Marilynne Robinson, for example, spends years on her novels, sometimes decades. And she writes sentences like this:

“Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water—peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires.”

You can get “Housekeeping” in paperback for $11.20. That is $1.21 more than a Mr. Bill Plush Pet Toy.

FIVE: Most people who aren’t nine would rather fall asleep with a book by their pillow than with this year’s number one bestselling toy (so far): the Pillow Pet.

SIX: Books don’t break until you love them so much their spines collapse.  And even after that happens they don’t get shorter.

SEVEN: Books don’t get lost. If you read a book it’s yours forever, no matter what happens to the pages its written on.

EIGHT: Books don’t come in the wrong size, or in the wrong color, or with batteries not included. (That’s your eReader — not the book!)

NINE: Books don’t judge their readers. But books invite the kind of judgment that elevates the discourse, and that sometimes changes the course of things altogether.

TEN: A lot of presents say more about you than they do about the person you give them to.  But a book speaks for itself.

And if you’re convinced to give books but looking for specific suggestions, try the She Writes Recomm-Engine - drop in a little info about your book giftee, and get recommendations from the She Writes community.

Indie Lit Awards nomination deadline looms!

The Independent Literary Awards are book awards given by literary bloggers. Lit bloggers write about books and literary related items. They are the fastest growing form of publicity in the literary world, though most are still independently run and do not receive compensation for their reviews or recommendations. All judges and panelists for theses awards are completely independent and do not receive compensation for reviews nor their work on the award board.

Nominations for the 2010 inaugural Indie Lit Awards are being accepted until December 15th in the following categories:

• Literary Fiction
• Speculative Fiction
• Mystery
• GLBTQ
• Nonfiction

(Disclosure: I am a member of the judging panel for the Nonfiction awards.)

Nominators must comply with these guidelines:

• You must be a literary blogger; and a link to your blog must be provided so we can verify this. (You may not be the author, publisher, or publicist of the book you are nominating).
• Books nominated must have a 2010 release date.
• You may nominate a book that has already been listed (the books with the most nominations will be what we add to the Long List).
• You may nominate books in more than one genre/category, but only one per genre.

There a just a few days left to make your nominations, so please do so if you haven’t already!

Ponderable: Is Oprah's Book Club a boys' club?

In a post on Beatrice.com, Ron Hogan says:

By juxtaposing contemporary novelists like Cormac McCarthy, David Wroblewski, and Jonathan Franzen with canonical authors like Faulkner, Tolstoy, and Dickens, I would suggest the Oprah Book Club is putting forth an argument about a literary continuum—saying, in essence, these people writing today are as vital to the tradition of the novel as those acknowledged masters. And, for the last six years, not one woman writer has been deemed worthy of placement within that continuum.

The original (1990s) version of Oprah’s Book Club was pretty heavy on books by women writers, but things changed when it relaunched after a hiatus following her first Franzen selection (and the subsequent controversy), The Corrections, in 2002. Still, most of Oprah’s audience (and, presumably, readers of the books she selects) are women...so why aren’t more of her authors?

Have a great reading week!