Warning: strpos(): Empty needle in /homepages/5/d845057890/htdocs/clickandbuilds/LionessatLarge/wp-content/plugins/regenerate-thumbnails-advanced/classes/Environment.php on line 47
The Mystery Blogger Award – Lioness at Large

The Mystery Blogger Award

 

I was nominated by arielaonthego for the Mystery Blogger Award — which came as a complete surprise; thank you so much, Ariela!

Rules
  • Display the award logo on your blog.
  • Thank the blogger who nominated you and provide a link to their blog.
  • Mention Okoto Enigma, the creator of the award .
  • Tell your readers 3 things about yourself.
  • Answer 5 questions.
  • Nominate 10 – 20 bloggers.
  • Notify your nominees by leaving a comment on their blog.
  • Ask your nominees 5 questions of your choice, including 1 weird or funny question.
  • Share the link to your best post.

 

Three Things About Me

… that you can’t already tell from the rest of this blog, I take it (such as the fact that I own am owned by two adorable 3 year old tomcats and that I love books, music, movies, tea, photography and traveling).

1. Strictly speaking part of this, too, is something you can tell from the rest of this blog, as many of my posts are imported and have an “original post: …” link at the bottom, but since it’s fairly key to where I am (literally) coming from and I’ve collected a number of new followers in the past couple of months (welcome, everybody!):

From 2013 until the summer of 2020, I used to belong to a book blogging community called BookLikes. What made the BL website (itself) unique was its format of combining a blogging community with a central “dahsboard” feed and an integrated book database, but the BL community was actually about a lot more — we played book-related games together and shared photos and posts on everything from cooking / baking / dining to gardening and other “off topic” (non-book) interests and views, etc.; all of which, over time, created a truly tight-knit community that was unlike anything I’ve ever seen anywhere else on the web. — I activated my WordPress blog (which in the past had chiefly been my backup for my BookLikes posts) when BL, through the site owners’ neglect, took a nosedive in July … since which time the BookLikes community has been a bit of a traveling circus on the lookout for a new permanent home. (We’ve found a venue for our signature fall book game, Halloween Bingo, and a venue where most of us have agreed to dip at least a toe in the water in order to keep the community together, but the BookLikes site with its unique format is still very much missed.)

That being said, the de-facto BL demise has inspired me to spruce up my WP blog and strike out in the blogging community, which I definitely consider a good thing. The one bit I didn’t realize when I made that decision was that WP has, in the interim, started to push their block editor, which I hate with a vengeance. So, I’ve decided to go “self-hosted” in order to be able to continue using the classic editor (without having to remember to select it every time I’m creating or accessing a post, that is — and even that is clearly a disfavored option on WP.com these days, so it’s bound to disappear entirely at some point). There’s nothing much on the new version of my blog, yet, but I wanted to have a chance to set it up in time before WP.com goes “block editor without the option” once and for all. I’ll officially share the link to my new blog as soon as I consider the transition (essentially) far enough along the way for it to make sense. For the time being, I’ll be double-posting in both places, so as not to have to rely on WP’s (less-than-perfect) import system — so if you’re using the WP Reader and are seeing two versions of my posts, you’re not seeing double … this one is down to me.

2. I’m a massive hoarder — Marie Kondo and I would never be friends. (In fact, I abhor her attitude to book ownership in particular.) Other than my books, music and DVD collections, I’m channeling my hoarding proclivities into a collection of mugs (not all of them with book-related themes) and a collection of refrigerator magnets (chiefly Shakespeare, travel, and cat-related), but if I had unlimited space, I’d doubtlessly fill it with other things as well.

3. My favorite color is red — which you don’t necessarily see in the clothes I wear (outside the odd red sweater or other, that is), but it’s impossible to miss the moment you enter my apartment: there are plenty of red “touches” to what passes for my version of interior decoration, my “daily use” china, cooking pots etc. are (mainly) red, etc.. Red also features somewhat more prominently in the new, self-hosted version of my blog; as it has done, in fact, in most of the websites that I’ve owned ever since I started dabbling with that sort of thing back in the early 2000s.

 

My Answers to Ariela’s Five Questions:

1. What is your favorite dessert?

Anything involving either fresh citrus fruit, fresh pineapples, or fresh strawberries.

Anything involving cherry or plum sauce (or compote, or stewed / baked / flambé cherries or plums — I like both cherries and plums better after they’ve been processed in some fashion than when they come straight off the tree, but once they’ve been processed, I like them a lot.)

And anything involving a combination of crème fraîche (or some similar base; e.g. double cream) and wine, port, or sherry.

 

2. What is your favorite book?

Oh help, I can’t even pin down my favorite dessert to a single option and you’re asking me that? Lol.

Favorite play: Shakespeare, Hamlet. Favorite 19th century classics: novels by Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë. Favorite Golden Age mysteries: Sherlock Holmes, as well as virtually anything by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. Favorite Silver Age and contemporary mysteries: P.D. James, Ian Rankin, Michael Connelly. Favorite fantasy: Tolkien, Lord of the Rings and J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter. Other recent favorites include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Half of a Yellow Sun; Aminatta Forna: The Memory of Love; and Bernardine Evaristo: Girl, Woman, Other.

 

3. If you could have one super power, what would it be?

The ability to fly — even if that is a superpower only in humans.

 

4. Do you like to dance?

Yes, but you don’t want to watch me while I’m doing it!

 

5. Would you rather have a pet porcupine or a pet mushroom?

Hah. 😀 Assuming that “neither” is not an option, I guess I’d go for the porcupine — I’d probably eat the mushroom at some point anyway (if I wasn’t too scared it was poisonous), and you can’t communicate with a plant (at least not in the sense of getting an immediate response) … whereas you can with an animal. Besides, I once had a cat with a very decided noli me tangere (don’t touch me) attitude, so I could probably get used to a pet with that kind of attitude once again. And generally speaking … more power to any creature (other than humans) coming armed against predators. There’s a reason why I like wild cats (and hate trophy hunters) — and, for that matter, why roses are my favorite flowers.

 

My Best Post:

Hmmm, that’s a difficult one given that my blog is currently in double transition (from BookLikes to WordPress and within WP from .com to self-hosted). So I think I’m just going to share the links for a few very, very old “battle of the books” posts that have already made their way to the new version of my blog (even if the formatting is still slightly off — and incidentally, it’s pure coincidence that two of them involve works by Tolstoy):

Astrid Lindgren: Pippi Longstocking vs. Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina
Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn vs. Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird
Isabella Beeton: Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management vs. Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace

 

My Nominees Are:

Anyone who sees this and feels they want to do it! (If you do, please drop a link in the comments section of this post.)

 

My Questions:
  1. What is your favorite season?
  2. Who is your hero / heroine in fiction (and why)?
  3. Would you rather be able to produce literature or music? (Assume that “both” is not an option.)
  4. If you had a time machine allowing you to travel to up to 3 different eras (past and future), what era(s) would you like to travel to?
  5. From a burning building, you have the option to rescue either a [cat / dog / supply your own favorite animal] or a priceless work of art, but not both. Which of the two do you rescue (and why)?

29 thoughts on “The Mystery Blogger Award

  1. I really do miss BL too . Its sad the way it went , I can’t even log in anymore . I’m glad I found some BL people here on WP reader, as I’m not a fan of GR and its group “system” , but I do miss the people.

    1. I miss BL, too, but even if I can still log in, I just cannot bring myself to support the current platform by creating content and add to their usage stats.
      It has clearly been abandoned by its owners.

      1. Sad, sad thing — yes, it has.

        @SnoopyDoo, I think you are also on Librarything — did you see that Tim Spalding (the LT founder) recently posted in the “BookLikers on Librarything” group, saying he’s going to try and rescue BL? I doubt it’s going to work, but I’m completely bowled over that he’s even trying.

      1. Oh thanks for alerting me to the comment thing. I thought I’d set it up so anybody with (inter alia) a WP address could comment, but apparently not … I’ve changed a few settings; does it work for you now?

  2. I noticed your WP presence increased this summer. You may have mentioned it before, but I had a suspicion something bad happened at BookLikes. Well, that’s too bad the developers let that site go down. But it’s great to see your posts more frequently again on WordPress. I love popping in on Halloween Bingo, especially🙂

    1. That’s why I decided to go self-hosted when I still had the ability to bring my posts over while the classic editor was still available, even if only as a disfavored option. I discovered that the company that hosts my office website has a very reasonable program for WordPress blogs … after I discovered that, the decision was practically a no-brainer. I’m still p*d at WP for making me do it in the first place, though.

  3. The new editor is a menace. Loved your answers, though. I too like red, it’s such an energetic color! And I could eat any amount of fresh sour cherries – though I prefer plums baked 🙂

    1. Re: the new editor, preach it. And yes, that‘s exactly what I like about red — and the fact that it‘s in the “warm“ part of the color scale. (Though I do also like turquoise, blue and green … but I could never live in a place featuring only “cold“ colors.)

      1. Yeah, I’m partial to the warm colors, from yellow to dark red, though I like blues and greens too – especially in plants 😊

        I used to have a nice workaround to get to the old editor functionality but now even this doesn’t work… Seems WP fervently believes in a type of social darwinism and its tenet, adapt or die…

        1. … or move to a different planet, if you can find one that‘s habitable. Yes. I took a look at other platforms when they silently dumped the “oh, by the way, your life has changed and you won‘t get it back“ thing on the .com community earlier this month, but ultimately decided those weren‘t really for me, either. So I was stuck between either remembering to expressly select “classic editor“ every time I‘m accessing or creating a post (once I‘d found that option to begin with, as it‘s not exactly like they‘re advertising it) — and knowing that once something is made a disfavored option, its days are numbered anyway — or taking control of my contents and move it to a place from where I can control how I create and edit posts. I decided to move while the going was still halfway good.

          1. As we all, as we all 😉 we’re not ready to go self-hosted yet, but before now we’ve never even considered it an option – and now it keeps looking more and more promising…

          2. It was less of a hassle to set up than I expected (and than it used to be in the early days of the internet). The thing that p*sses me off the most is that WP‘s export function only grabbed a fraction of my blog‘s content, so I‘m still going to have to bring over a substantial amount manually (or rerun the export / import thing again in the vague hope that‘s going to help). Which isn‘t a total catastrophe as far as the contents originating from BookLikes is concerned, as I had started to consolidate and (in part) discard that anyway, but l‘m less than pleased about having to redo some of that, too. Oh well … the things we do in pursuit of perfection! Or our understanding of it, anyway …

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Literature Reviews

Adventures in Arda

Note: This was my summer 2022 project — but while I posted the associated project pages here at the time (Middle-earth and its sub-project pages concerning the people and peoples, timeline, geography, etc. of Arda and Middle-earth, see enumeration under the Boromir meme, below), I never got around to also copying this introductory post from […]

Read More
Literature Reviews

Michael J. Sullivan: Riyria

The Riyria Revelations are the fantasy series that brought Michael J. Sullivan instant recognition back in the late 2000s.  Originally published as a series of six installments, they are now available as a set of three books, with each of the three books comprising two volumes of the original format.  As he did with almost […]

Read More
Literature Reviews

Michael J. Sullivan: Legends of the First Empire

Michael J. Sullivan’s Riyria books have been on my TBR for a while, but until I’d read two short stories from the cycle — The Jester and Professional Integrity — I hadn’t been sure whether his writing would be for me.  Then I found out that (much like Tolkien’s Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and The History […]

Read More