Posts made in March, 2010

I took this during my travels last week. Actually, it was on St. Patrick’s Day appropriately enough. I would like to point out a few things in case they are not obvious from my somewhat grainy photo. This is a dump truck. It is not royal in any way that I can discern. It is also not green. I’m not even sure what royal green is. I mean, I’ve heard of royal blue, but royal green? I guess, though as names go, it beats Dumpy Brown, which would certainly be more appropriate. Well, if it’s true that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet I guess a dump truck by any other name would still stink. Have you stumbled across any inappropriate...

Like Dirk Gently I love the interconnectedness of all things, and especially love when the different things I am reading seem to connect with one another. Over the past week or so the audio version of Zeitoun by Dave Eggers kept me company on my travels. This non-fiction book tells the story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a resident of New Orleans who chose to stay in the city during Hurricane Katrina to look after his home and business. Six days after the storm hits he suddenly disappears and his wife, who has evacuated the city desperately works to piece together what happened. It’s a gripping and disturbing story, which I highly recommend. At the same time that I was listening to Zeitoun I was reading a short story anthology. At first glance a non-fiction book...

Thursday night I took a trip into the city for a party kicking off the official launch of the Sourcebooks Fire YA line at Books of Wonder.  Entertainment for the evening was provided by Tiger Beat: You might recognize the band’s lead singer as the multi-talented Libba Bray. The best part of the evening for me, though, was getting to meet some fellow Elvensies as well as some other up and coming YA authors. It’s always nice to get to meet online friends in the flesh. I had the opportunity to meet Kiera Stewart whose debut novel Fetching is due out in December 2011 from Hyperion. I also got to meet Lisa and Laura Roecker, the sister writing duo, whose debut novel The Haunting of Pemberly Brown is due out from Sourcebooks next spring. The other nice...

For awhile now,  I’ve been trying to keep up with participating in a weekly group blog in which we all share what we’ve read over the past week. Well, being busy I missed last week’s blog, and then today turned out to be pretty busy as well. So, I am just now getting around to getting something posted. In light of this, I think instead of trying to post a weekly summary, going forward I’ll just try to highlight what I’ve been reading one book at a time. In the past two weeks I’ve read . . . two very different graphic novels: French Milk by Lucy Kinsley which is a sort of travelogue done as a graphic novel and (Tammy Pierce is) Unlovable by Esther Pearl Watson which was based on a teenager’s diary from the 1980s that was...

Douglas Adams would be 58 today, but sadly he left us too soon. I can remember as a teenager discovering Douglas Adams thanks to an omnibus collection of the Hitchiker’s Guide novels that I received as a birthday gift. It was love at first page. I can distinctly recall sitting on our kitchen floor (I honestly have no idea why I was sitting on the floor.) forcing my mother (here, Mom, I’m writing something about you, and there’s no picture, but you won’t read this anyway since you are in Hawaii) who was busy cooking dinner to listen to me read passages aloud while tears of laughter streamed down my face. It was a few years later when I accidentally discovered the Dirk Gently books in a bookstore. I hadn’t even known of their existence...