Books
Festive Tasks: Door 1, Task 4 – Walled in by Books
Master Update Post HERE Task 4: Australia has the world’s longest fence, the dingo fence, which at 3,436 miles (5529.7 kilometres) beats the Great Wall of China. Using an average of 12 books / meter, or 4 books / foot as a guide, if you had to build a fence of your own to […]
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June 2021 and Mid-Year Reading Recap
Sigh. Well, I think posting a monthly (and even half-year) reading recap a full three weeks into the next month has to be some sort of record, even for me, but here we are. And I admit that at this point I’d even been contemplating holding off another week so as to combine this with […]
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An Alphabet of My Likes and Dislikes: “Y”
This is a post belonging to a new blogging project — the title is pretty much self-explanatory, I think; the project’s introductory post can be found HERE. Credit for the idea: BeetleyPete. As always, the only thing linking the two items mentioned in this post in my mind is that they both start with the […]
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May 2021 Reading Recap
Still a lot of work on the back end of the blog, including on my “featured authors” pages (see the right column on the main Literature page and the introduction of my April 2021 recap post). So, contrary to plans, still no new posts in my alphabet blogging series in May. However, the time-consuming back end […]
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April 2021 Reading Recap
First things first: The persistent bug preventing followers / readers to comment on my posts straight off the post (i.e., other than by using the WP Reader) has finally been weeded out, thanks to my hosting service’s IT team … so you can, at last, comment even if you’re not using the WP Reader. (I […]
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February and March 2021: Reading Recap
Well, go figure. The first quarter of 2021 is already behind us, never mind that I’m still having to remind myself on occasion to write “2021” instead of “2020” … (and we’re even a week into April already, but let that go). Anyway, since I never got around to doing a “February in review” post, […]
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Festivus Scale of Strength: Weighty Books
24 Festive Tasks: Door 20 – Festivus, Task 2: The Scale of Strength: Pick 3 of your weightiest tomes and place them on a scale. Tell us the total weight. I used Shakespeare’s Complete Works, my copy of the illustrated guide to Houses of the National Trust, and Eye to Eye, a collection of […]
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Christmas Tea, a Book, and a Candle
24 Festive Tasks: Door 2 – Guy Fawkes Night, Bonus Task #2: Host a traditional English tea party, or make yourself a nice cup of tea and settle down with a good book to read. A mug of Christmas Tea with a Yuletide candle and this year’s final (recently republished) Golden Age mystery, Brian Flynn’s […]
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My Reviewing and Rating Philosophy / Use of (Half-)Star Ratings
24 Festive Tasks: Door 12 – World Philosophy Day, Task 1 & Bonus Task: Task 1: What is your reviewing / rating policy? Do you accept book review requests? Bonus Task: Half star ratings or not? Tell us what you think and whether you use them. My rating philosophy is set out HERE — tl;dr […]
Read More$3.2 million worth of rare stolen books have been found under a house in rural Romania.
When a group of thieves stole $3.2 million worth of rare books from a London warehouse in 2017, including seminal scientific texts by Isaac Newton … $3.2 million worth of rare stolen books have been found under a house in rural Romania.
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The Millions: 28 Books You Should Read If You Want To
Source: 28 Books You Should Read If You Want To – The Millions Image via Abee5/Flickr By Janet Potter Earlier this month Amazon released a list of 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime. It joins Esquire’s 80 Books Every Man Should Read, The Telegraph’s 100 Novels Everyone Should Read, Huffington Post’s more manageable […]
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Books and the Bottom Line
24 Festive Tasks: Door 4 – Guy Fawkes Night, Task 2: Start a revolution: What one thing would you change about the book reading world? (Be it publishing, distribution, editing, cover art, bookstores – anything having to do with books. The one “revolution” I would like to see happening in the book world is that […]
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Books Shipped Long Distance
24 Festive Tasks: Door 16 – St. Lucia’s Day, Task 4: The historic (3d century AD) St. Lucia was Italian; yet, like those of many other saints (including, e.g., St. Andrew and St. Nicholas), the most important celebrations of her holiday don’t occur in her place of origin but somewhere else in the world. List […]
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An “Out of My Reach” Book Wishlist to St. Nick
24 Festive Tasks: Door 14 – St. Nicholas’ Day / Sinterklaas, Task 1: Write a book wish list to St. Nick / Santa Claus for books that you’ve been eyeing but can’t justify the expense of purchasing. (E.g., art books? Collector’s editions? Boxed sets?) Dear Saint Nick, it would be really nice if one […]
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My Reading, Rating, and Reviewing Philosophy
24 Festive Tasks: Door 9 – World Philosphy Day, Tasks 1 and 2: Share your reading philosophy with us – do you DNF? If so, do you have a page minimum to read before you declare it a DNF? And: Share your reviewing philosophy with us – how do you rate a book? Do you […]
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Oh Horrors! Fictfact closed. Please do reblog so everyone using knows to download their data.
Reblogged from: Debbie’s Spurts Ugh! Ugh! Ugh! Just went to update my series read to see this from fictfact: “FictFact is closed. We recently lost our primary source of income, Amazon Associate sales. Due to a minor error on our part, we unknowingly had in infraction of their terms. We tried to appeal after we […]
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24 Festive Task Players: Meet Charlie – our adopted Book Bus
Reblogged from: Murder by Death And “Charlie” wrote a letter too: Marian, the woman I’ve been speaking to, also passed along this message: Of course our reading volunteer scheme is open this year in Livingstone, Zambia from 1st July to 6th September. We are always looking for people who are passionate about books and […]
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24 Festive Tasks: It’s Giving Time (Part 2)
… or rather, giving back time — giving back to all of you for the enthusiasm and creativity you brought to the 2018 version of 24 Festive Tasks! As MbD said, there are many deserving charities with many deserving individual projects out there, and a heartening number of them are book-related. My choice this year, […]
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24 Festive Tasks Players: We adopted a book bus!
Reblogged from: Murder by Death As Themis-Athena said earlier, the 24 Festive Tasks of 2018 was a runaway success! We amassed 1105 points between us, and from all reports so far, everybody enjoyed doing it. I can’t thank Themis-Athena enough for partnering with me and co-hosting the game; I think we have two very different skill sets that complement each […]
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Birthday Gifts
BD gifts: My mom gave me a ticket for Bonn Opera’s production of Händel’s Xerxes — a simply riveting, tongue in cheek production setting the story in a dictatorial fairy tale puppet theatre (yes, there is such a thing) — and my BFF raided my Ammy wishlist … as well as adding a few things […]
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