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Jesse Galef, one half of "the world's #1 brother-sister blog about rationality, science, and philosophy" has compiled a list of what each Hogwarts house might read, here.

Includes booklists, with nice pictures of each House's bookshelf.

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This article (Beyond Bodice Rippers: How Romance Novels Came to Embrace Feminism) led me to this very interesting blog: Romance Novels for Feminists

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HOW IS IT that I did not know that this beloved book had been made into a Broadway musical? I ran across the link to this song, and I really really like it. What a great song about a young girl brimming with life and hope, on the cusp of adulthood. Mothers, take note. Will probably investigate and buy the soundtrack tonight.

Fiona and Delia? This one's for you.

Love,

Your mother




("I just want to... cure disease and write a symphony and win the Nobel Prize like other girls.")

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jimhines (Livejournal link here) Jim Hines mimicks the poses of the women on his fantasy book covers and discovers that striking a pose is not all it's cracked up to be. (Specifically, that the poses made his body, er, crack.)

I deeply, deeply adore him for doing this.

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How is it that I have never thought of doing this before???

THIS SHOULD BE MY CHRISTMAS TREE!!!





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I get the Writer's Almanac email from Minnesota Public Radio every day. Yesterday's included these two paragraphs about Louise Erdrich, and my immediate reaction was yes oh yes indeed yes:

She said, "We have a lot of books in our house. They are our primary decorative motif—books in piles on the coffee table, framed book covers, books sorted into stacks on every available surface, and of course books on shelves along most walls. Besides the visible books, there are the boxes waiting in the wings, the basement books, the garage books, the storage locker books. They are a sort of insulation, soundproofing some walls. They function as furniture, they prop up sagging fixtures and disguised by quilts function as tables. The quantities and types of books are fluid, arriving like hysterical cousins in overnight shipping envelopes only to languish near the overflowing mail bench. Advance Reading Copies collect at beside, to be dutifully examined—to ignore them and read Henry James or Barbara Pym instead becomes a guilty pleasure. I can't imagine home without an overflow of books. The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough, or the right one at the right moment, but then sometimes to find you'd longed to fall asleep reading The Aspern Papers, and there it is."

She said, "By having children, I've both sabotaged and saved myself as a writer. [...] With a child you certainly can't be a Bruce Chatwin or a Hemingway, living the adventurer-writer life. No running with the bulls at Pamplona. If you value your relationships with your children, you can't write about them. You have to make up other, less convincing children. There is also one's inclination to be charming instead of presenting a grittier truth about the world. But then, having children has also made me this particular writer. Without my children, I'd have written with less fervor; I wouldn't understand life in the same way. I'd write fewer comic scenes, which are the most challenging. I'd probably have become obsessively self-absorbed, or slacked off. Maybe I'd have become an alcoholic. Many of the writers I love most were alcoholics. I've made my choice, I sometimes think: Wonderful children instead of hard liquor."

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I discovered manybooks.net yesterday and have loaded onto my Nook free books by Jane Austen, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Louisa May Alcott, Rafael Sabatini, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, the Brontë sisters, Fanny Burney, George Eliot, Alexandre Duma, père, and, ahem, Baroness Emmuska Orczy (talk about guilty pleasures). W00t!

I'm just loving my Nook. I was worried about cost when I got it for Christmas, but it's been a lot more economical than I was afraid it would be. I've bought less than half a dozen books to load on it, but I've read probably close to seventy books on it. I've downloaded dozens from the library. That's a great perk: you download a book and then you have the right to read it for three weeks, and you don't ever get any overdue fines. And wow, I didn't find out until this week that Barnes & Noble offers a free book for download every Friday. Yes! And I love the free web browsing I can do with it when I'm out at a coffeeshop, since I don't have a laptop (although keyboard input is slow and not ideal).

I wish it could download and use applications, since I don't have a smart phone. Maybe that will come someday with a software upgrade? I can hope.

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starting Game of Thrones. I am a total neophyte to the series.

Good idea/bad idea? (Alas, I do not get HBO and so cannot feast my eyes on Sean Bean.) But I saw some initial promotional material which certainly intrigues me. Especially given a cursory check with Googlefu, which notes the influence of the history of the War of the Roses on the series.

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From a book review on Amazon:

"I got this book based on a recommendation from a friend. I am now reconsidering that friendship, the book was that bad."

(No, I'm not going to tell you which book.)

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