Stating the Obvious

It's been 2 weeks since I wrote anything here. Not that long, I suppose, but a lifetime for someone like me who is used to writing every day.

It's been a nice break. It will continue... and it won't...

I won't post here for the foreseeable future.

But if you want to talk baseball, come read what I'm writing at Pinstripe Alley.

And if you want to talk books, let's connect at Goodreads or LibraryThing, where I'll continue to post book reviews.

Things That Might Slow Down a Blogging Schedule

1. Buying a house might do it.
2. Being behind on your reading might do it.
3. Responding to comments on an Open Mic might do it.

These are reasons, not excuses, and I promise there's several book reviews just around the corner. Just as soon as life gets out of my way.

Going Back to Goodreads

One of my 30 Before 30 goals is to improve the blog layout. While it isn't exactly an adjustment to my site, last night I finished importing all my reviews on this blog and LibraryThing to Goodreads.

I got onto Goodreads years ago (seriously, the first book I added was East of Eden on July 11, 2007). Back then, I didn't like it. It was clunky and slow, and it didn't do a good job of sorting through multiple editions. Just because I read one version of Pride and Prejudice doesn't mean I need 1000 versions in my library.

When I started blogging about books, I discovered LibraryThing. It had a much smoother interface than I remember from Goodreads, and the site is small enough that I've actually won a few books from their give-away program. But smallness is a disadvantage, too. I'm not leaving LibraryThing, but with 21 million members, Goodreads is where the people are.

If I'm going to properly serve myself in promoting my reviews, and serve the publishers and authors who have sent me books, I've got to reach the biggest audience possible.

So, whichever site you prefer, let's connect.
Goodreads
LibraryThing

Lamb Ragu

Best Buddy Adam

For February, I've been working on a blog challenge to improve the site.

Most of this has been behind the scenes, but one of the out front things I've worked on is emptying out my queue of post ideas that I'm really going to get to soon if I just have the time.

And so, I'll conclude the month with the post I've been holding onto the longest.

Best Buddy Adam is a fantastic cook. No, really, check him out.

When he came to visit a few months ago, he cooked a lamb ragu made almost entirely with ingredients from our local Farmer's Market. Adam loves his vegetables, and with several local farms around, he was (understandably) excited.

30 Before 30: #27 Improve the Blog Layout

I'm not quite 100% with #27, but we've taken some big steps forward.

I put up the new banner and moved into the two column layout a few days ago. This morning I finished the top nav, including a little re-write of the base code so that Blogger's silly "You're only view posts tagged x" message won't pop up anymore on the Books & Reviews or 30 Before 30.

I love the widget in the sidebar that pulls the book covers straight from my LibraryThing account, though I kind of wish I could make it focus on books I've tagged, rather than any book I've reviewed. But that's work that can be done later.

Next up: culling the labels!

30 Before 30 Update

The full list
2. 70 pages into The Sound and the Fury
16. Went to the gym today with my new workout buddy! Seriously, of all the things I learned in the Boy Scouts, the buddy system seems to be the most important.
17. Board game drafted and board started! I need to buy some beads (to use as tokens) to keep score with.
18. Contacted my local Habitat for Humanity, but haven't heard back yet. It's probably too cold to have a project going.
24. So far, I have listened to 1 hour (and only 1 hour) of commercial radio. In that hour I heard only 9 songs, and this song twice.
27. Notice the widget via LibraryThing.com for books I've reviewed in the right hand column? Why didn't anyone tell me they made a widget sooner?
30. We've got 2 things left to do on our to-do list for January: get a pair of pants hemmed, and sort out our wedding photos.

30 Before 30 Bucket List

1. Read In Search of Lost Time (A Remembrance of Things Past)

In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel writes "It's said, after all, that people reach middle age the day they realize they're never going to read Remembrance of Things Past." That quote struck a nerve with me, and once I decided that 2013 would be my year for Remembrance... the rest of this list started to take shape.

My 30 Before 30 Bucket List

This is a blog about books, and about life. I think the two things are indistinguishable. How you handle one impacts how you approach the other. What was speaks to what it and what will be.

Last year, I made a resolution to read a book a week. I did it. I could do it again, but where's the fun in doing something you know you can do? While reading a book per week is exhilarating in its own way, I think I shied away from some of the monsters of by bookcase- I'm looking at you Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow.

This year's resolution started with books (to read In Search of Lost Time as well as the books I haven't finished from the Modern Library's top ten). Then my resolution started to wander to non-book places, and I decided that was fine, too.

So tomorrow, on my 29th birthday, I'm going to post the 30 things I intend to do in the next year. And then I'm going to do them.

This is still a blog about books, but it'll be about life too. Because, it's the same thing.

Book Review: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

from here

It's been a year of dystopia for me- from the five star (a couple books of Vonnegut, Habibi, and BFG) to the mediocre (World Made by Hand,  Hunger Games).

So, on a recent road trip, I brought along the audio-book of Brave New World.

End of the Blogathon

Today marks the end of the 2012 Blogathon, and it's been a lot of fun.

Some highlights for me:

A batch of book reviews-

The Art of Fielding
Bone
Goodbye, Columbus
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal
The Monsters of Templeton
Wild Fermentation (guest post by Aundra of Fit for Life)

Thoughts about writing, the internet and books-
Charles Dickens Hates a Good Ending

Dealing with Paper.li Spam

Learning How to Write from Shakespeare
Mothers in Literature with An Addendum
The Reading List
Thinking About All Books as Comedy, Tragedy or History
The Value of Workshopping a Poem and an Open Mic

Baseball-
Injuries and the Yankees
Facing Life After the Great Rivera

And the well-lived life-
Creating a Board Game: Chuck Fluxx
Congratulating Myself on a Job Well Done
Haikus on My Day Off
Loving Board Games Like Settlers of Catan
Recipe for the Perfect Mojito

Hope you've enjoyed reading.

But! The new post every day will continue for at least 3 more days. Tomorrow is my review of Cutting for Stone, Friday is Happy Friday, and Saturday has some thoughts about character death in novels.

Hope you'll be back.

and a little wine Wordle

For the blogathon, Wordle day was actually supposed to be yesterday. But since I already had a post idea for yesterday, I decided to save my Wordle for today.

The first one I made, I tried to just use words from recent posts, but it picked up on parts of a lot of titles of books I've read recently. Since Wordle doesn't offer a way to exclude words, I decided instead to make a Wordle out of my post tags.

The Calm Before the Book Review Storm

It's been a little quiet around here for the last week. I've fulfilled my Blogathon 2012 commitment to post something each day, but it's hardly been of the depth I expect of myself. If not for the Blogathon, I might have only posted once or twice in the last week.

That is, of course, both good and bad. More is alright, but better is my real aim.

Which brings us to this post, designed entirely to whet your appetite (interesting that the phrase revolves around whet meaning "to hone" rather than it's equally logical homonym meaning "to moisten" when the phrase "mouth watering" is also so common).

In the next four days, three book reviews. The Monsters of Templeton, Bone, and Lamb will bring me 21 books on the year, slightly ahead of schedule. By the time those all post, I hope to be working on my 22nd review, Cutting for Stone (spoilers, excited to write that one).

For now, enjoy the music and a quiet night.

The To-Do List

I'm not promising a post on each of these topics, because I'm not promising to get them all done. But these are all things that are weighing on my mind as the weekend rushes at me:

1) Book Reviews: In the last week, I've finished reading The Monsters of Templeton, Bone, and Lamb.
2) Yard work: the grass needs to be mowed (again/ still), and I need to finish building Carol's garden boxes.
3) Survive Reunion: I work for a college; this is the week.
4) Finish all the work that will allow me to survive Reunion: see above.
5) Finish Book Club books: I have two book club books coming up on Monday and Tuesday (1861 and Cutting for Stone, respectively). I don't know that I'll be able to attend either book club because of rehearsals for The Sound of Music, but I want to finish the books.

Are Paper.li Tweets Spam?

from here

As I get the hang of Twitter, social media and all of this, I'm still learning my way around the netiquette of (frankly) everything.

This is the thing that has always scared me off of Facebook and Twitter to date, that even as a member of "the Facebook Generation," none of this is intuitive to me. I dislike frictionless sharing, I don't care what you ate for breakfast, or that you miss your babies (by which, you mean your dogs). I hate abbreviations and text speak (FTW!), and don't want to see a picture of how you look to yourself in the bathroom mirror.

So as I've begun to use Twitter to connect with other people interested in the things I'm interested (I have separate feeds in Hootsuite for baseball, books, friends, and the NYTimes free that gives me my news fix), I'm increasingly interested in what is and isn't acceptable in these forums.

In that vein, I don't know what to make of the paper.li tweets that periodically show up with my name attached. If there was a person deciding that my writing is one of their "top stories," I'd be flattered. Knowing that there is not, that this is a machine collecting anything published under hash-tag "whatever," I find I'm annoyed by it.

How annoyed should I be? I don't really know.

I know there are ways to opt out. Is it worth the effort? Are these mentions trolling for traffic from me showing up in my follower's feeds? Or is it just reaching me?

I know from visiting a couple of these sites that have tweeted about my work that my article is not particularly easy to find, even when I am a "top story." On the other hand, all publicity is good publicity, right? And links from outside sites impact where your blog ends up in Google searches, so is this auto-tweet spam just a side effect I should tolerate?

Tweaking the Layout

You'll see some changes happening to ...and a little wine... in the next few days. See the links floating up there in the header? I've been reading other blogs with a more critical eye on layout in the last few weeks, and I'm adjusting my own approach accordingly.

I've moved and revised some of the "about" me information, as well as added some info about my willingness to review books for publishers and authors (that layout was largely stolen from other book bloggers I admire, like Rebecca Joines Schinsky and Word Lily, so I hope I haven't violated any best practice-esque netiquette).

I'm still in search of a good "Related Posts" widget. I've got a text-based one that would work fine, but I'd really like to find one that functions with thumbnails. I have faith that Google will provide. I'm also in the market for a Blogger compatible email submission form, and a Ways to Follow widget. I think I've got the chops to code my own Ways to Follow- I may work on that this afternoon.

Thanks for reading, and for hanging with me through the renovation.