TSS: What Impact Does Your Blog Have?

It's hard to go through book blogosphere without bumping into a blog in which the author wants to "read deliberately" for the year- focusing on different types of deliberateness, such as reading slower, reading different genres, reading more classics, or reading books by authors of different ethnicities.  It's really interesting to me because, while I set goals I'd like to accomplish, I really just like to read for me and see where my whimsy takes me.  Then Amy wrote a post about Being a Public Reader, and how our reading choices impact the world around us that really got me thinking that maybe I am supposed to put more thought in my reading choices.

But... how much do my reading choices impact anything?  I think it's wonderful to consider your reading choices and reflect on how you do your choosing, but I don't think that I greatly impact anyone else's reading decisions through this blog.

Review: Blankets

Blankets, by Craig Thompson, is a graphic memoir about growing up in rural Wisconsin.  Craig grows up with a very religious mother, a large and gruff father, and a younger brother with whom he shares a bed.  He feels very awkward at school his whole life, never quite fitting in, keeping to himself and preferring drawing to sports.  Every winter break, he attends Church Camp; there he is told that Heaven is nothing like the way he imagines it to be, and that to reach God he must sing.  Craig, though, would rather reach God through drawings.  One day at Church Camp, he meets Raina, a beautiful girl from Michigan who fascinates him and invites him to visit her after camp for a few weeks.  He does so, and much of the rest of the book explores their tentative young love and the aftereffects it has on Craig.  This moving graphic memoir shows the difficulties of growing up and questioning your faith, making full use of words and pictures to relate a beautiful and touching story.

I read this book with Ana.  We both thoroughly enjoyed it!  Check out her blog for the first half of our review.  And then come back here for the second half below!

Rosie's Riveters: Paula & Penelope

Rosie's Riveters is a weekly posting written by Booklust readers about riveting females in literature. Many readers have strong reactions to the women in the books they read- either very positive or very negative. These are the characters we find riveting, for good reasons or bad ones, and they form the population of Rosie's Riveters. Through this weekly post, we can discuss females we love to hate, or love to love. And maybe, just maybe- we can determine why we react so strongly to them.

I am no longer accepting people to participate in the Rosie's Riveters series.  The participants I currently have on the list will all have their chance to share their favorite or most hated woman, and then we shall start the new With Reverent Hands series on this blog.  More details on With Reverent Hands can be found in my Sunday Salon post here.


This week's post (the last one!) is by Paula Butturini, the author of Keeping the Feast, a book I reviewed yesterday.  I thoroughly enjoyed Butturini's memoir about living with a loved one who suffers from depression, and the struggles that go along with it.  She went up even higher in my estimation when she submitted the following Riveter, based on a book I really enjoyed reading!

The publishers are being so kind as to offer a FREE copy of Keeping the Feast to a lucky BookLust reader located in the US or Canada.  To enter, leave a comment WITH YOUR E-MAIL ADDRESS and say what your ideal Italian destination would be.  I'll draw a name on Sunday.

Who is your Riveter?

 Penelope, wife of Odysseus, and the not-quite-beautiful cousin of Helen of Troy.

What book does she feature in?

 The Penelopiad, by Margaret Atwood, in which Homer's The Odyssey is finally told -- just a few thousand years late -- from the female side, by Penelope, the faithful wife, instead of from the testosterone side (in which Odysseus managed to spend ten years away fighting the Trojan War and another ten wandering the Aegean Sea, supposedly trying his best to get home).  

Review: Keeping the Feast

Title:  Keeping the Feast

Author:  Paula Butturini

To be published by Riverhead Books in February 2010.

This review is based on an advanced reader's copy.  I received this book for free to review.

Summary:

Paula Butturini grew up in a very Italian family, where everyone came together at the end of the day to share a good meal and stories.  She held tight to this tradition through moves across the US and Europe, through a marriage and early divorce, through the shattering knowledge that her mother suffered from severe depression.

When Butturini met John Tagliabue- a reporter for the New York Times- in Rome, she was grateful to have finally found someone who seemed to truly understand her, someone with whom she could start her life.  They lived together reporting the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, and going through a great many troubles because of it.

Butturini was beaten and bruised by riot police only a few weeks before her wedding.  And only a short time after they were married, Tagliabue was shot and nearly killed by a bullet through his body.  While he recovered, slowly, from the bodily injuries, he was much slower to recover from the emotional toll.  Butturini soon realized that, just as her mother had, her husband too was suffering from severe and acute depression.  After yet another blow hits their family, Paula and John returned to Italy in an attempt to heal their scars, depending on their happy memories of meals and walks and blossoming love in Rome to get them through their trauma.

Order of Odd-Fish Party

Some months ago, I read and reviewed the book The Order of Odd-Fish by James Kennedy, a young adult fantasy novel about a girl who finds out she has to save her new home town from the wrath of the All-Devouring Mother goddess.  It's a fun book and has quite the cult following online!

This cult following is, I daresay, mostly due to the personality of James Kennedy himself.  Once you watch him act out a scene from his book, it is very hard not to want to read the book yourself.  And when he also has impressive fights with Neil Gaiman, it's no wonder that people are picking up this book and taking notice.

They are also showing their support and true fangirl/boy status.  How?  By brewing Belgian style beer.

By baking disturbing-looking cakes:

By immortalizing cockroaches in stained glass:

But mostly by sharing their creative powers with Kennedy in their Odd-Fish art.  It's the coolest of the cool when a story can inspire people to create art themselves.  And Kennedy has done a brilliant job of giving credit to people who love his book and support his work by creating fan art.  He's going further than most authors do, too, to promote his book and thank his fans.  He's having a whole party to celebrate!  As Kennedy says,

It'll be not only an art show, but also a costumed dance party and theatrical extravaganza. I'm working with a Chicago theater group called Collaboraction to do this. They're going to decorate their cavernous space to portray scenes from the book (the fantastical tropical metropolis of Eldritch City, the digestive system of the All-Devouring Mother goddess, the Dome of Doom, etc.).

Opening night will be a dance party where people dress up as gods and do battle-dancing in the Dome of Doom. In the weeks afterward, we'll bring in field trips from schools. They'll browse the fan art galleries, be wowed by the elaborately decorated environment we've created, take in some performances from the book, and participate in an energetic writing workshop.

A costumed dance party and theatrical extravaganza?!  Gosh, I love Chicago's literary community.  So creative and willing to break down the barriers between the arts.

If you're in Chicago and you want to attend, here's the information.

And if you're not in Chicago, but have read and enjoyed The Order of Odd-Fish and have artistic impulses, feel free to send your art to James Kennedy and rest happy knowing that in April, Chicagoans will dance a merry jig in bizarre costumes around it and pay homage to the book and your art in a theatrical extravaganza.  Pretty sweet deal, isn't it?  Just be sure to submit by March 15th to ensure you get your place of honor in the show!

Review: The Help

The Help by Kathryn Stockett is a novel set in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s as the Civil Rights movement in America was picking up steam.  It revolves around the narrative of three women:  Skeeter, a recent Ole Miss grad who is too tall, awkward and different to fit into her social circle; Minny, a tell-it-like-it-is black maid with an abusive husband; and Aibileen, another black maid who has raised seventeen white children, while her own son was killed in a work-related accident.

After her best friend Hilly tells Skeeter to put an announcement in their Junior League newsletter about why white families should install separate, outdoor toilets for their hired black help, Skeeter realizes her place in the world is not where she wants it to be.  She approaches Aibileen about putting together a book of interviews, in which the black maids tell everything- the good, the bad, and the ugly- about what it's like working for white women in Jackson, Mississippi.  Aibileen hesitates, but then comes to the realization that this is her chance to make an impact, to change the way her former charges think of her.  "...my jaw so tight I could break my teeth off.  I feel that bitter seed growing inside a me, the one planted after Treelore died.  I want to yell so loud that Baby Girl can hear me that dirty ain't a color, disease ain't the Negro side of town.  I want to stop that moment from coming- and it come in ever white child's life- when they start to think that colored folks ain't as good as whites."

Aibileen recruits Minny, and the three are off, taking great risks to bring change to their world.  The novel explores all these relationships- between blacks and whites, employer and hired help, friends growing apart, men and women, parent and child and so many more in a respectful and beautiful way that left me spellbound.

Review: Before They Are Hanged

Title:  Before They Are Hanged

Author:  Joe Abercrombie

Published by Pyr Books

This is book two in The First Law Trilogy.  See my review of book one, The Blade Itself, and book two, The Last Argument of Kings.

Plot Summary:

Bethod's armies are advancing on the Union from the north, aided by a massive giant and thousands of Shanka.  From the south, the Prophet Khalul's forces creep upwards to retake Dagoska, expand their empire, and cleanse the world.  Glokta, the cripped torturer for the Union's Inquisition, is sent to weed out traitors in Dagoska and save the city from attack.  Meanwhile, Colonel West is baby-sitting the utterly useless Crown Prince in his first, brutal battle.  And another motley crew of Bayaz the Mage, Logen the Northman, Jezal the pretty boy and Ferro the intriguing southerner travel on a quest none truly understands to find the one weapon that can end the war.

This book sparked my post on racism in epic fantasy, but I hope that does not detract from my review of the book itself.  This book is great, and I think I pointed out my reservations on it enough in my other post that I can just talk about the book (without "racial baggage") in this one.  Before They Are Hanged is the second book in a trilogy, and so nothing is really "resolved" in a conclusive way.  Didn't matter to me because I was completely engaged through the whole story.  Even more than I was during The Blade Itself.  There is a lot of traveling in this book, and a lot of waiting for enemy forces to attack.  This gives the characters (and there are many of them) time and room to develop, and I was very pleased with the results.

In my review of The Blade Itself, I mentioned how fascinated I was by the character of Glokta.  In this book, I am still more fascinated.  He is such a complex and deeply flawed man, but with so many redeeming characteristics that come out in this book.  I think that, if things had gone differently in his past, he would have been a hero to everyone.  As things stand now, he is only a hero (sometimes) to me and other readers of this book.

He is only one of the characters who grew into his skin in this outing, though.  We learn so much more about Ferro, the terrifying southern woman with a chip on her shoulder, and about Jezal, who reminds me of the very intriguing Jamie Lannister in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series.  And I fell a little bit in love with the Dogman from the north, too.  Not to mention Colonel West.  So many crushes, so little time!

But these character references mean nothing to you, of course, if you have not read the book and so I will just say that if you enjoy epic fantasy, I think you'll enjoy this series.  It's detailed, it's well-written, it's populated by varied and flawed characters who all speak with their own distinct voices.  I really like how Abercrombie gives us detail on the world, but makes it clear that the main focus is on the characters.  It's not about the magic and power and politics; it's about the effect of the magic and power and politics on the people.

My only wish is for a map to peruse, but apparently Abercrombie is very anti-map.  Sigh.

Guest Posting

I am guest posting on Cara's blog today about the fabulous fantasy genre.  If you have time, peek over and take a look.  And don't forget that Louise is guest posting HERE today for Rosie's Riveters!

Rosie's Riveters: Louise & Bone

Rosie's Riveters is a weekly posting written by Booklust readers about riveting females in literature. Many readers have strong reactions to the women in the books they read- either very positive or very negative. These are the characters we find riveting, for good reasons or bad ones, and they form the population of Rosie's Riveters. Through this weekly post, we can discuss females we love to hate, or love to love. And maybe, just maybe- we can determine why we react so strongly to them.

I am no longer accepting people to participate in the Rosie's Riveters series.  The participants I currently have on the list will all have their chance to share their favorite or most hated woman, and then we shall start the new With Reverent Hands series on this blog.  More details on With Reverent Hands can be found in my Sunday Salon post here. 

This week's post is by Louise, who blogs at Lou's Pages.  She is a great book blogger, reviewing mysteries, horror, chick lit and everything in between.  I have only been following her blog for a few months now, but it's lovely and I'm so glad I found it.  I hope you all enjoy discovering her, too!  And if her chosen quote doesn't make you want to go out and grab this book, then you are very different than me :-)


Note:  Next week is the last Rosie's Riveters post.  I'll do a wrap-up on it during Sunday Salon on the 31st, and then start With Reverent Hands sign-ups.

Who is your Riveter? 
(Ruth Anne) Bone Boatwright

For Discussion: Racism in Fantasy & Its Effects on People of Color

Note:  I apologize for the length of this post.  I know there are a lot of posts on the topic, but I just wanted to show my support for the cause.  This is a complex topic.  You do not have to read the post, obviously, but I hope you will.  If you don't, I hope that you at least click on the links I post within it.  They are excellent, particularly the link to the post I Didn't Dream of Dragons and to the video about being black in America.

There has been a great deal of talk recently on blogosphere about the book Magic Under Glass which features a dark-skinned protagonist in the story but a white-skinned model on the cover.  This has led to a lot of very interesting and useful discussion, in my opinion, but also to a lot of defensiveness and anger.

I have also just finished reading the book Before They Are Hanged by Joe Abercrombie, the second book in his First Law trilogy of epic fantasy.  And while I love this series, I think it's prejudiced.  Actually, I think all epic fantasy is deeply prejudiced, but I am using Abercrombie's work as an example.  So, just to make clear- as a fantasy fan, I love The First Law trilogy (or the two books of it I have read thus far).  As a person of color, I am disappointed and somewhat offended by it.

Abercrombie's story revolves around a Union that is under attack from the north and from the south.  The northerners have names like "Logen Ninefingers," "the Dogman," and "Threetrees."  They have a tribal culture with a strict hierarchy of Named Men, down to Carls and then to the Thralls.  They are hardened warriors who are used to a cold and bitter climate and used to traveling under austere conditions.

In fact, they sound exactly like the Saxons, particularly those that took over Britain (from the north) after the fall of Rome.  Eventually, some of the Northmen come down to the Union to help their forces defeat the person who is true evil, a northman named Bethod who wants to expand his empire.  The Unionists eventually let these men help them, and they all (to paraphrase) become fast friends and work together to a greater cause.

Review: Dear Enemy

Title:  Dear Enemy

Author:  Jean Webster

I read this book via free emails from DailyLit.

See my review of the book's prequel, Daddy-Long-Legs.

Plot Summary:

Sallie McBride leads a happy, carefree existence as a socialite before her good friend from college, Judy, gives her the opportunity to serve as the interim superintendent of an orphan asylum.  Sallie takes on the position and is at first overwhelmed by the amount of work to be done.  The children are ill-fed, ill-clothed and ill-behaved.  The trustees think she is shallow and flippant.  Her gentleman friend disapproves of her desire to live with dirty children.  But Sallie is not one to give up on a cause she believes in and she sets into her task with courage and cheer and makes big plans to change the orphanage for the better.  Her letters to Judy, the orphanage's doctor and her gentleman friend all recount her trials and triumphs in her year at the school, and introduce readers to an illuminating (if sometimes truly horrifying) account of early 20th century beliefs and methods in the proper rearing of children.

I can't actually say if I liked this book or not.  Parts of it were wonderful.  Sallie's voice rings so true in her letters- you can tell she is a fun, teasing girl who has a fine sense of the ridiculous in most of the situations that confront her.  She also is full of vim and vigor for her cause; she truly believes her efforts on behalf of the orphans in her home will make them into good people and help improve the world.  She exerts so much energy, so much creativity, into helping the lives of the people around her.  I could see her being a fabulous fighter for women's rights and suffrage, being successful through her charisma and charm and go-getter attitude.  Sallie fights societal norms to be a single woman earning her keep when everyone would prefer her to settle into marriage and child-rearing.  She hires other women to work for her who are much the same.  She refuses to settle for something dull when she could be doing something useful.  She is very much a Rosie's Riveter.

Flashback Challenge Link-Ups!

2010 is well underway and many of us have started to re-read books for the Flashback Challenge!  Link them up below and make sure you check out other reviews to see the stories that took other bloggers down Memory Lane.  Please include the book title in your link name/description!

Thank you and happy (re-)reading!

Review: Graceling

Title:  Graceling

Author:  Kristin Cashore

Plot Summary:

At a young age, Katsa's eyes changed colors- one to blue, one to green- and marked her out as Graced.  The Graced are people with special, enhanced abilities to do certain things.  Katsa's was to kill people; her Grace first showed itself when she slammed the nose of a man into his face and killed him.  Since then, she's been the royal thug to her uncle the king, traipsing around his kingdom threatening people and breaking bones or doling punishment until they comply.  She also runs a secret underground resistance network, The Council, through which she helps people fight the corrupt governments of her world.

On one mission, she meets Prince Po, a foreigner who is Graced with fighting skills and who has an uncanny knack of knowing her thoughts.  They become friends, and then set off together on a quest, ostensibly to save his grandfather, but really to fight a corrupt king and save a young, innocent girl who will be queen.

I know I'm one of the last to this party, so I wasn't even sure I should review this book.  But I review every book I read, so here we go!

I think for me, this book was probably a victim of its own success and my expectations.  I really liked it.  It held my attention throughout, its characters were engaging, and I enjoyed the fantasy world it presented to me.  But it just wasn't as good as I expected it to be.  People rave about this book!  It is on countless "Best of 2009" lists and I have seen so many reviews praising it to the skies.  And it's unfair of me to expect more from a book just because I've heard it's good.  But, I must admit, I expected this to blow me completely out of the water.  And it didn't.

It's a fairly typical epic fantasy novel, with a hero (or in this case, a heroine) setting off on a quest, through dangerous terrain and surrounded by people she can't trust.  It's also a very believable and quiet romance.  I have a niggling feeling that if I had read the book without any expectations, I'd like it a lot more.  But I went in with a vague idea of Graceling having a huge, shattering impact on me and it did not deliver that.

What it did deliver was a very solid female lead.  I could see Katsa becoming a Mary Sue if this series were to continue (but thankfully, the other book in this series is a prequel revolving around a different character entirely), but in this story I found her easy to empathize with.  She is a woman who knows herself, who is confident in her abilities and who doesn't suffer fools.  She is more afraid of losing her self-reliance than she is of anything else.  And when people treat her like a dainty little thing, she gets angry, but often her thought process behind the anger is lucid and makes sense.  I appreciate that.  And even though she wasn't a lead character, the Princess Bitterblue was also a very convincingly real and respectable female.  I am thrilled that there were no women in this book, actually, that annoyed me.  All of them had common sense and good heads on strong shoulders, and I loved it.

I also liked the male characters.  Prince Po was three-dimensional and had a wonderfully vulnerable side.

I guess in that way, I'm not sure why this one just didn't grab me the way I expected.  It was an excellent story with great characters, but I didn't think the world was as fully developed and fleshed out as it could have been.  I am a sucker for hearing about history and religion and the like in fantasy novels (especially in epic fantasy) and this book didn't have any of that.  It was set firmly in the present and we aren't given much in the way of filling in the blanks.  I would have enjoyed a deeper understanding of the world in which the story was set.

That said, though, I think this is a great book!  It is a quick and engaging read with strong, likable characters, and I'm glad I finally read it!  I hope that Fire is even better!

Sunday Salon: How Many Memes?

How many weekly memes exist in book blogdom?  How many do you participate in?  Do you participate in more than one each day?  More than one each week?  How many is too many?

I don't participate in any weekly memes besides The Sunday Salon.  This is mainly due to laziness but also to my being completely overwhelmed by the memes everyone else participates in.  There is In My Mailbox Mondays, What Are You Reading Mondays, Monday Musings, Tuesday Teasers, Library Loot, Waiting on Wednesdays, Wordless Wednesdays, Booking Through Thursday... and I'm sure there are many more that I can't think of at the moment.  I don't mind memes in moderation.  I think they can be fun to read and a really good way of getting a pulse on what other people are up to.  But when so many blogs are updating on, for example, Tuesday, and everyone is listing their Tuesday Teasers, then I get so completely overwhelmed by the number of posts to get through in my Google Reader that I just scroll through, don't read them, and don't bother replying.

Do people who do not participate in these memes comment on them?  I don't really comment on any of them with any sort of regularity unless one stands out to me, but I am perfectly aware that I could be a freak.

And how many do you participate in?  Personally, I feel that one a week is sufficient.  This is of course because I only participate in one a week, The Sunday Salon, and I am the idea.  No, seriously, I don't really know how many memes people individually participate in because I only see them all in a bunch on my Google Reader.  But, quite frankly, it seems like some people participate in a lot.  To the extent that there are so many posts to get through for one person's blog just because of these memes.  And that frustrates me because I try very hard to comment on people's blogs and I go through Google Reader almost daily, and still there are just so many memes!  I sometimes I feel like the reviews or thinking posts are lost in the deluge because I am so busy sifting through things that maybe my eyes don't catch them.

But I realize this could very much just be me.  Obviously, a lot of people like the memes because they're so wildly popular and have so many participants.  Which is great!  But my question is, what's the ideal?  How many weekly memes do you participate in?  And do you make a point of commenting on other bloggers' meme posts?

Review: Daddy-Long-Legs

Title:  Daddy-Long-Legs

Author:  Jean Webster

I read this in e-book format via DailyLit.

Plot Summary:

Jerusha Abbott is a brilliant young lady stuck doing menial tasks in the orphanage where she grew up.  One day, she is called into the administrator's office, where she catches the long shadow of a gentleman leaving.  The administrator tells her that, due to her excellent writing skills (mocking the orphanage and its staff), she has been awarded a full scholarship to attend college by one of the orphanage's trustees.  She is to write the generous gentleman a letter every month thanking him for his support and informing him of her progres in college.  She is to address each letter to a Mr. John Smith- that is not her benefactor's name, but that is what she is to call him.  Jerusha complies, but says very frankly, early in her correspondence, that she thinks Mr. John Smith a very dull name and will call her secret hero Daddy-Long-Legs, based on her glimpse of his long shadow.  What follows is a delightful epistolary novel in which Jerusha (who changes her name promptly to Judy) shares all her college doings and exploits to Daddy-Long-Legs, from her time on the basketball team to her summers at a farm to her never-quite-gone feelings of isolation from the other girls to a budding romance.

Nymeth reviewed this book (and its sequel) on her blog early this week and, based on the quotes she shared in her review, I promptly looked for the novella online and found that I could read it through the DailyLit site.  I was enchanted by the story very early, continually requested DailyLit to send me the next installment immediately, and finished the story in a day.  It is lovely.  It's such a light, warm-hearted story of a girl's first entrance into the world, full of vim and fire on how she can find her place in it and make it better.  Jerusha writes as an American woman before women had the right to vote (how's that for a stumbling sentence?) and her letters are full of witty repartee about women citizens and her dreams of becoming a writer and her absolute popularity at school.  It's easy to see why she's so popular when she has such a sparkling sense of humor:

Review: The Phantom Tollbooth

Title:  The Phantom Tollbooth

Author:  Norton Juster

Illustrator:  Jules Feiffer

First published in 1961 by Random House.

Favorite Line:  So many things are possible just as long as you don't know they're impossible.

Plot Summary:
Milo is a very bored young boy who goes home from school one day to find a box in his bedroom.  He follows the instructions and finds that he has created a tollbooth.  Using his electric car, he pays the toll, goes through the tollbooth and emerges in a different land.  There he meets Tock, a watchdog (literally, a dog with a watch) and they travel together to the kingdom of Dictionopolis.  There, they are sent on a mission to save the princesses Rhyme & Reason who are locked up in the Castle in the Air.  Accompanying them is the Humbug.

Milo, Tock and the Humbug set off on the adventure, jumping to Conclusions, doing Unimportant Tasks, visiting Digitopolis, seeing Illusions and  Reality, traveling through the Valley of Sound and confronting Ignorance in their quest to save the princesses.

This is the first book I remember reading on my own.  I remember picking it out at the bookstore and then being captivated by the story.  I must have been in second or third grade, and this book, maybe along with The Enchanted Forest Chronicles, really cemented in me a love of reading.  So when I was picking out books for the Flashback Challenge, this was the first one on my list.

I read it in one afternoon, and I am still in love with it.  In fact, I am possibly even more in love with it than I was in third grade as much more makes sense to me now than it probably did then.  Now I really understand the danger of Jumping to Conclusions.  I know how frightening the demon of the Overbearing Know-it-All is, or Threadbare Excuses and, of course, the Triple Demons of Compromise.  I probably didn't understand all those allegorical things then, but I did understand the wordplay.  The difference between witch and which.  The word play of eating your words, and the math involved in subtraction soup.  I ate that up, and I still do.  For example, here's an excerpt that really just shows how witty this book is:

Review: The Bone People

Title:  The Bone People

Author:  Keri Hulme


First published by Spiral Publishing in 1984.

Plot Summary:

Kerewin lives alone in a large Medieval tower she constructed on the coast of New Zealand's south island.  One day, she finds an intruder in her library, a young mute boy named Simon Gillayley.  He spends the night at her tower, steals from her, and then comes back to give her a valuable gift.  This starts off a deep and meaningful friendship between Kerewin, Simon and Simon's adoptive father, Joe.  The three become fast friends, spending a great deal of time together and understanding each other in ways no one else can.  Then Kerewin finds out that Joe beats Simon- almost without mercy.  This involves her in the lives of the Gillayleys more than she'd like and soon she finds herself as almost a third member of their strange family.  And then something happens that affects them all and drives them apart, each to confront their own personal demons.  They can only be together again when they come to terms with their actions and the impact the triple relationship has on each of them.

My summary above does absolutely no justice to this complex and deeply moving story.  It is difficult and painful and emotional and amazing.  I highly recommend reading it but I also highly recommend reading it with someone else.  It is much easier to deal with the horrors of the story when you can discuss them with another person.  I was lucky enough to discuss them with one of my closest book blogging friends, Zibilee from Raging Bibliomania.  I'm so glad I did because discussing the book in so much detail with her added a lot to my enjoyment and understanding.  In fact, even now we're still discussing it over email.  Reading is such a solitary activity, so it's nice to once in a while get that discussion and reflection aspect back.  Especially with someone so great!

Below is half of our joint review.  I asked the below three questions, and the two of us gave our answers.  Check out Zibilee's blog for her three questions and the remainder of our joint review.

Bloggiesta Wrap-Up [TSS]

Gosh, the weekend is already almost over!  I know that Bloggiesta doesn't end for some hours yet, but my Sunday will be focused on looking at other participants' blogs and commenting on them, rather than working on my own.  So, what did I accomplish during my first ever Bloggiesta Fiesta?

A lot, as it turns out!  It's funny, I signed up for Bloggiesta just on a whim and didn't even think I'd really do much to participate.  But then I saw everyone else's ideas and then got my own ideas and just wanted to make sure I wasn't slacking on my poor blog, so I got to doing one thing and then that thing led to another, and another and now... well, BookLust is quite different!

I now have tabs at the top of my blog.  This is probably the improvement I'm most thrilled about as it gives me so much more room and maneuverability with my sidebars.  Because of it, I was able to return to a two-column format, which is much appreciated.  I also think the blog looks a lot cleaner and sleeker now than it did before but I may be biased.  I also like that now I can keep track of all the books I read going forward in my "2010 Books" tab.

I cleaned up my labels.  There are many fewer labels now, and I don't think anyone notices that but me, but I feel blog clean-up is more for the blog administrator than for anyone else, anyway.

I graded my blog and it went up from an 85% in mid-December to a 93% earlier today.  That is exciting!  It seems to have gone up in rating solely because I added meta tags and alt descriptions to the most recent entries.  I am not sure how I feel about the website grader.  I don't know if what it grades on is actually important, or is more archaic or maybe is just an opinion.  It didn't really hurt to put meta tags on the blog, and I admit that I'm glad that now Google search results show a blog description instead of the first sentence of the most recent post.  Other than that... I don't know if anything really makes that much of a difference.  I don't think that is going to change my Google page rank that much, or bring so much more traffic to my blog.  But it didn't take too much effort to do, so I'm happy with it.

I also participated in some challenges.  I did the Farm Lane Books back-up challenge and the Bookalicous copyright challenge (thanks to a tip from Marg for help on how to do this).  I also accidentally participated in some challenges from the last Bloggiesta, but they helped improve my blog, too, right?!

I did a pretty minimal Google Reader update by removing all the blogs I subscribe to that haven't updated in several months.  That's about all I did on that goal!  I didn't make a Favicon, either.  I am not sure how to deal with that mostly because I got specific permission from an artist (the fabulous Canadian artist Oliver Ray) to use his painting "Girl Reading" in my header.  I love the painting and hope to buy a copy for myself as a present for getting into graduate school but I feel bad using it too much for my own "branding."  This led to my goal of wanting to rebrand my blog by using a different image set, but that is a bit out of my price range right now and I don't know what I want to do, exactly.

Overall, I'm really happy with my Bloggiesta accomplishments.  I did a lot of things I didn't even consider doing before I started (like re-formatting the entire blog).  I thought I'd just focus all my time on labels, but I didn't.  I hope I can keep up my organization with the image tagging and including all books read in my 2010 Reads tab!

Thank you so much to Natasha at Maw Books for hosting Bloggiesta!  And thanks to everyone who was so nice and supportive about my blog changes.  It's great to start 2010 off on such a hopeful note, full of resolutions on reading, and a new look for the blog.

Now I'm off to read my first book for the Flashback Challenge, The Phantom Tollbooth, my favorite book from childhood.  I'm so excited!!

Review: Still Life - Adventures in Taxidermy

Title:  Still Life - Adventures in Taxidermy

Author:  Melissa Milgrom

To be published by Houghton Miller Harcourt in March 2010.

This review is based on an advanced reader's copy.

Summary:

Still Life is Milgrom's journey through the history and world of taxidermy, starting at a taxidermist shop in the US, continuing through museum displays, attending world taxidermy conferences, bidding at an auction of fabulous works by Mr. Walter Potter (of Mr. Potter's Museum of Curiosities), meandering through modern art, and finally culminating in her stuffing and mounting a squirrel herself.  Throughout the book, Milgrom comes back to how taxidermy has evolved, how museums present information and how people react to things of wonder.  As the book is really a series of essays in which Milgrom accounts her experiences and the people she meet, I'll just spend time highlighting things that stuck out for me.

A taxidermist's job (and a dying breed of a job it is, too) is to show animals exactly as they would be in life.  Their whole work revolves around an animal dying and then working with the animal to recreate it in detail so that it looks just as it would while it was alive.  In an era where countless species go extinct before we even discover them, this profession is alternately beloved and reviled- beloved for preserving for posterity things we might never see again, and reviled for the death of those animals.  This is further complicated by the fact that most taxidermists in the past could only make a living by stuffing hunting trophies for big game hunters.  Now, though, the serious ones work for the museums, attempting to catalog lives of animals that may or may not last much longer in the wild.  It was fascinating to meet the taxidermists referenced in this book.  I didn't think they would be so conservative and religious and pro-guns and hunting, but I suppose it makes sense.  I always thought a taxidermist would love all Earth's creatures, but I never considered that they all have been somehow linked with big game and hunting at some point in their lives.

Bloggiesta: Goals

I don't really like posting more than once in on day, but it's Bloggiesta and I forgot that I should list my goals for what I'm doing this weekend!

Bloggiesta is kind of a blog spring cleaning, if you will.  It's a weekend over which you try to accomplish all those niggling blog maintenance things you always want to do, but never get around to.  Here's my list of hoped-for accomplishments.  I will cross them out as I achieve them:

• Write a review policy
• Write an About Me post
• Make tabs under my header so that I can clean up my sidebars.  Tabs for:  About Me, Review Policy, Rosie's Riveters, With Reverent Hands, Reviews by Year (Only starting in 2010)
• Update Blogroll
• Update & Organize Google Reader
• Make a Favicon?
• Research consulting costs for "branding" blog with a very clean new look, gravatar, favicon, columns, etc.
• Figure out how to make my sidebar background images slimmer to jive with the actual width being used (N/A as I unexpectedly and completely changed my blog layout)
  
• Figure out how to properly use the break-up post thing on Blogger so that I can do the "Read More" thing on posts and de-clutter the site.  This didn't work last time I tried it due to sidebar issues.
• Prepare meme questions for With Reverent Hands series
• Can I import really old posts from LiveJournal into Blogger?
• Backup Blogger and LiveJournal posts to both computer and new backup blog on Wordpress
• Add Meta tags
• Clean up and possibly decrease number of labels
• DECLUTTER
• Figure out what "Alt" images are and improve mine. It is far too onerous for me to go back through all my posts and add ALT tags, so I did it through mid-November and will try to make sure I keep it in mind going forward, too.
  
• Should I add "Digg" and "Delicious" links to each post?

Update:
As of Saturday, just before noon, I have spent about seven hours on the blog.  The last hour has been spent doing the ALT tags, which seem to make a big difference on the "Website Grader" since my score went up 3% to a 93 after I went through my most recent posts and added image tags.  However, I don't know how objective/subjective website graders are, so who really knows?  Anyway, "alt" tags are ways for you to define and describe any images you have on your blog.  Here's a site with information on adding alt tags.

I backed up my blog to Wordpress and to my computer, which meets the Farm Lane Books mini-challenge.

Review: The Yellow Wallpaper (Short Story)

Title:  The Yellow Wallpaper

Author:  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

First Published in 1899

Plot Summary:
A young family goes to a country home in a small American town for the summer.  The husband is a physician who hopes that being in the country will help his wife over her currently unhappy state.  The wife has just recently given birth to a son and is probably suffering from what we would today call postpartum depression.  She feels sad and tired often, and her physician husband's cure for this is to isolate her in the attic of their rented home.  The attic has barred windows, a bed nailed to the floor, and hideously yellow wallpaper.  As time moves on, we see the woman, who narrates the story, become more and more enthralled with the wallpaper- first she sees it as ugly, then she sees patterns and shapes in it and finally she sees that there is a woman trapped behind it, trying desperately to get out.  And she decides to help this poor woman.

After reading Wish Her Safe at Home late last year and loving it, I heard a lot about this short story, The Yellow Wallpaper.  It is very short- I read it in two "longest" DailyLit installments.  This is also the first e-story I've ever read.  I highly recommend clicking the link on the title above and reading the story!

In Wish Her Safe at Home, we also had a woman narrator who is slowly going insane, but in a completely different situation.  The narrator in that story chose to go insane, and live out the life she always wanted for herself.  In The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator asks her husband multiple times to let her out and to allow her to socialize and write and enjoy her life, but he refuses, citing her health as his reason.  As the narrator says, her husband "is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction."  Thus, isolated as she is and suffering from what starts as a seemingly mild form of mental illness, the woman in The Yellow Wallpaper descends into insanity and no one even notices until it is too late.

Rosie's Riveters: Simone & Zhuang Xiao Qiao

 Rosie's Riveters is a weekly posting written by Booklust readers about riveting females in literature. Many readers have strong reactions to the women in the books they read- either very positive or very negative. These are the characters we find riveting, for good reasons or bad ones, and they form the population of Rosie's Riveters. Through this weekly post, we can discuss females we love to hate, or love to love. And maybe, just maybe- we can determine why we react so strongly to them.

I am no longer accepting people to participate in the Rosie's Riveters series.  The participants I currently have on the list will all have their chance to share their favorite or most hated woman, and then we shall start the new With Reverent Hands series on this blog.  More details on With Reverent Hands can be found in my Sunday Salon post here.

This week's post is by Simone who blogs at The Romantic Query Letter.   Simone is like me in her love of the Georgian and Regency eras- not only does she read books set in late 18th century and early 19th century England, but she likes to delve into the personalities and politics and details of the period.  Her blog always features gorgeous paintings and a lot of great information about the people who made the Regency what it was.  She is very knowledgeable and very nice.  Here she is with her Riveter!

A Rant Against the Perception of Victorian Women

I read a really great review on Book Snob of the book The Journal of Dora Damage that got me thinking (and commenting on my thoughts).  As I'm not really sure when my next book review will be, and as Rosie's Riveters is on hold for this week, I figured this was an excellent time for one of my Rants.

I have often gone off against women in literature in the past, and how I don't think females are portrayed in a realistic or likable way.  After reading Rachel's review, I realized that more than anyone else, I hate the way Victorian women are portrayed in contemporary writing.  I don't really have a problem with how they are portrayed by contemporary writers.  Dickens, Collins, Hardy and the Brontes all have very believable Victorian women populating their novels, and I salute them for it.  I don't always love those women (Lydia Gwilt and Helen Graham get no love from me), but I respect them as being real.

I do not, however, like most modern versions of Victorian society.  I don't understand why authors today seem to feel that all their female Victorian characters must be the "rebels."  I understand I'm making a blanket statement, and I know there are some contemporary authors that portray Victorian women in a fabulously realistic manner (Sarah Waters, I'm looking at you).

But most don't.

Sunday Salon: How many books do you read at a time?

Note:  Apologies!  This wasn't supposed to post until tomorrow, but I scheduled it for 1/3/09 instead of 1/3/10.  Oops!  Sorry :-)

I have always been one of those people who only reads one book at a time.  I am always amazed by people who can read more than one and keep things straight in their heads.  That has never been me.

However, I ended 2009 and started off the new year biting off more than I could chew, and am currently in the midst of reading three books.  This is not going well.  I started reading Team of Rivals during Christmas, thinking it would be a great book to end the year with, nice and chunky.  However, I have only gotten about half-way through the book.  I also signed up to read Dead Souls with my friend in Minneapolis over the course of five weeks.  So I'm reading that one now as well.  And Zibilee and I agreed months ago to read The Bone People by Keri Hulme together because it is a very intimidating book.  So, er, today I delve into that one as well.

Seriously, how do you multi-tasking readers do it?!  I am feeling completely overwhelmed and have no idea what book I should be reading when.  I wanted to finish Team of Rivals first, but the more I read it, the more I know that to really enjoy it (which is one of my goals for 2010!) is that I must read it slowly.  Which means I probably won't finish it for quite some time.  I really enjoy the book and I'm loving learning more about my beloved Abraham Lincoln.  (I'm from Illinois.  We're very proud of him here.)  But the book is pretty dense, full of a lot of names that I would never have recognized 300 pages ago, and it's just not something I can read quickly.  So, I've resigned myself to the fact that I'll probably finish it in March some time...