Weekly Geeks 2009-12 Link Luv

I just discovered this past weekend that Weekley Geeks, the meme begun by Dewey (of 24 Hour Read-a-thon fame) had been carried in Dewey's honor after her passing last November.

WG now has its own blog hub.

This week's assignment was a revival of one of Dewey's early WG assignments: to announce on your blog your willingness to link to another reviewers review of a review you have posted and if possible make it easy for visitors to find your archived reviews so they can peruse them for reviews you may have in common with them.

I so paraphrased that. Go here for the assignment verbatim.

Last August I created a post I called a Book Review Portal in which I began to collect the links to my book reviews on Joystory. I only included a few of the most recent reviews at that time. I kept meaning to return and update with newer reviews as they were posted...as promised. And kept meaning to finish wading through my archives to ferret out all reviews from the past four years...as promised. But, well, life butted in.

Well, this assignment gave me the push to get that pesky task done. I've spent hours this week going through my archives and adding the book review links to the book review portal. I hope to get a button or link to the Book Review Portal in my sidebar eventually along with the portals to my poetry and fiction which both need updating as well. As does my sidebar though I have finally started dabbling at getting it groomed and gussied up. After three years of neglect it had as many broken links as an abandoned tennement has broken windows.

Anyway visit Book Review Portal see if I've reviewed anything you have reviewed. If so visit my review and leave the link to your review in comments and I'll update my review with your link and visit your review if I can. (Though as long as I'm still helping out here at my Mom's, time for blog visiting is limited.)

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Weekly Geeks #15: Book Cover Close Up

The assignment: To take close-up photos of book covers and see if our readers can guess which books they are.

Hint: the pic at top is from the cover of the book I've announced here previously that I'm hosting a giveaway for the week of September 22. For a single copy inscribed personally by the author to the winner. Be sure to check back.

Update: There have been two correct guesses already. blueviolet and ylin. Just to be sure there is no confusion this post is not the giveaway post for Matrimony by Joshua Henken. This was just my sneaky way to put an advance plug for the giveaway coming up in about two weeks. The author assigned the week for the giveaway.

Visit other Weekly Geeks:

1. Alessandra (Out of the Blue) 2. Maree (just add books) 3. marineko (dreaming out loud) 4. Terri - teelgee 5. MizB (Should Be Reading) 6. Becky's Book Reviews 7. Sarah (Pussreboots) 8. Sherrie 9. Ali (Worducopia)

10. Kim (page after page) 11. Jackie (Literary Escapism) 12. Joanne (Book Zombie) 13. Rebecca (Jus One More Page) 14. Molly (Restless Reader) 15. happyichigo 16. Icedream (Reading In Appalachia) 17. Bart's Bookshelf 18. bookworm (prize giveaway)

19. Melody 20. Melissa (Book Nut) 21. Suey 22. Lightheaded (Everyday Reads) 23. iliana 24. Chris@book-a-rama 25. J.C. Montgomery 26. Betsy

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Weekly Geeks #14: Picturing Books

Weekly Geeks is back after a two week hiatus. This week's assignment is to post pictures of books.

See the bottom of this post for an important announcement.

These are the pics I took immediately after the January room makeover. I posted them in my TT the last week of January.


This is the view I have from my 'office' at the head of the bed. That's the top of the TV on the bottom edge of the picture. The shelves are deep enough to contain two rows of books. The front row on the bottom shelf are all library books. That row is empty this week as I've not been able to make the walk to the library for nearly two months because of the heat waves and the smoke from the California fires.

There is a row of Ed's programming books on the top shelf not shown above.
The blue books are the set of World Book Encyclopedias that I bought for $1 apiece at the library in early 2005. I blogged about it here. Below them is half of the Great Book set acquired the same way just two weeks later as described here.

More library books on that bottom shelf. Above them is half of the Great Books set. Above them is a shelf with nf trade and paperbacks. That stack in front of them then was my stack of to-be-reviewed at the time. That space in front of the nf is now completely full as two-thirds of its space is taken up by the review books I received from Hachette Book Groups.

This is my office. There are more books on the shelves by the window and more on the shelves under the computer.

I'm ashamed to say, I've not kept it nearly as tidy as these pics show it. Yet pleased to report that it has been six months and it has never been at risk of degenerating into anything resembling the before pics. The quilt has not been spread since March and is serving as part of my backrest as I type with my laptop on a board over a box between my legs.

Some of this week's WG participants:

1. MizB (bookshelves) 2. Alessandra 3. Icedream 4. Kerry (Saving my Sanity) 5. Joanne (Book Zombie) 6. Jackie (Literary Escapism) 7. Kim (page after page)

8. Molly (Restless Reader) 9. Rebecca (Just One More Page) 10. bookworm 11. Marisa 12. Mysteries in Paradise 13. Nari 14. Melanie

15. Serena (Savvy Verse & Wit) 16. Suey 17. Renay 18. Stephanie's Written Word 19. Kim (Sophisticated Dorkiness) 20. SmallWorld Reads

I will be hosting another Hachette Groups giveaway some time in the next week.

And the week of September 22 I will be hosting a giveaway of Joshua Henkin's Matrimony. A single copy inscribed personally to the winner by the author!

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Weekly Geeks #13 Author Photos

From Dewey:

Your basic challenge is to post author photos.

Using the meme-like list below, post photos of authors in response. Please feel free to skip any you don’t like. You’re also free (encouraged!) to add your own, but if you do that, please be sure to indicate which are yours, so that people can credit you if they use yours.

But don’t put words/names with your photos. Ask your readers to guess your answers! If you have a book to give away, you may want to offer a prize, maybe draw a name from those readers who guess correctly.

1. Photos of your favorite author(s).
2. Photo(s) of the author(s) of the book(s) you’re currently reading.
3. Photo(s) of any author(s) you’ve met in person (even very briefly).
4. A youtube of (an) author(s) you’ve heard speak.
5. Any photo(s) you may have of yourself with an author.
6. A photo of the author of the book you’ve most recently finished.
7. Photos of the hottest author(s)!

Below I show the authors of:

2 that I am currently reading
5 that I recently read
? that are the major influences on my own writing (umm, I lost count and I'm not going to try to count them now. Psst...I added this category)

Currently Reading:

Recently Read:

Authors who have most influenced my own writing:
















WG Participants:

1. Annie 2. MizB (Should Be Reading) 3. Kim (page after page) 4. Kerry (Saving My Sanity...) 5. Marg (Reading Adventures)

6. Mysteries in Paradise 7. SmallWorld Reads 8. Alessandra (Out of the Blue) 9. Mary (This Book Is For You) 10. Confuzzled Books

11. Tasses (Holding My First Contest Ever) 12. Maree 13. jessi 14. Bybee

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Weekly Geeks #12 Pt 2 The Answers

Here are my answers to some of the questions I received from other WG participants in WG 12. I am holding back on all of the questions pertaining to The Historian and A New Earth as I think they both need full posts of their own and I am already working on reviews for them. I intend to incorporate my answers into those reviews and will let the questioners know when I post them.

Thanks to all who left questions and all who answered mine, some of whom I still need to visit or return to leave a comment where I stopped by to read the answers on the fly. The book giveaway ate up a lot of my time and attention this past week.

Care of Care's Online Bookclub asks:

re: The People of the Book. After reading on amazon what this is about - I wondered HOW LONG but under 400 pages is good for me. Do you feel the length was appropriate? not too long, got everything in that was needed? etc. Thx, Care

The length worked for me. I was able to read it in about five or six moderate to long sittings. But the structure of the book would allow for taking more time and taking more breaks. The protagonist of the framing story is a book conservator expert in repairing ancient books and manuscripts and preserving them from destructive elements. She can also acquire many hints about the book's history from her knowledge of the materials used in its making and the history of book making. Certain things she discovers in the ancient hagadah give clues as to where it has been in its 400 odd years. Those clues are extrapolated upon in separate stories inserted between scenes of the protagonist's 21st century story. Each of these stories read like stand alone short stories which can all be read in a single sitting. Whenever I stopped it was usually at the end of one of them. When I could resist moving ahead to the next present day scene. The framing story was a bit of a suspense story along with a tense mother/daughter relationship story and it was sometimes hard moving from a kind of cliffhanger into a brand new story in a brand new setting.

Bybee of Naked Without Books asks:

Is this the first play you've read by August Wilson? Is this part of a series? Is it a period peace? How do you feel about reading plays as opposed to reading novels?

The Piano Lesson is the first play by August Wilson I have read. As far as I know it is not part of a series. It is a period piece if you consider settings in the American depression era of the 1930's period pieces and I suppose they ought to be thought so. It is a quite different place in time with a distinct ambiance.

I am fairly new at reading plays. Other than Shakespeare that is. I have set upon the task as an exercise in learning how to write better dialog that carries its own weight in the story and how to give individual characters their individual voices.

I find all the elements of storytelling distilled to an essence just short of poetry in a play. I do think something is probably lost in not having the stage settings and the actor's voices adding pacing and nuance.

I like the quick pace of reading a play. It is a bit like watching a tennis match. I liked being able to read a complete story in a sitting too. I want to add more plays to my TBR. But I won't be giving up novels!

Alessandra from Out of the Blue asks:

I'm curious about The Foretelling by Alice Hoffman. Which was your favorite character, and why? How does the portrayal of the Amazons in this book compare to their mythological image?

My favorite character was the narrator and protagonist, Rain. But I was extremely fond of both Io her adopted sister and Deborah the priestess. As supporting cast they were well drawn and compelling.

I thought the portrayal of the Amazon culture fit well with what I remember of my encounters of them in myths but it has been awhile so I wouldn't be able to identify discrepancies or imaginary extrapolations from the 'facts' known from mythology and legend.

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Weekly Geeks #12

I'm going to combine WG this week with the giveaway that I've been talking about here all weekend. Or, I should say, the beginning of the giveaway since I've been allowed 5 copies to giveaway and have decided to make it an all week event. I'm going to feature the book in some manner each day Monday through Friday and there will be a winner chosen from among the commenters to each post.. Which means essentially Tuesday through Saturday since, like today, I often begin working on a post so late in the evening that I frequently don't click publish until the wee hours of the next morning.

Anyway. After this post each day's winner will be chosen in some random manner from the pool of commenters expressing interest. But the first winner will be chosen differently. Read on. The explanation will follow the presentation of this week's WG assignment.

From Dewey:

1. In your blog, list any books you’ve read but haven’t reviewed yet. If you’re all caught up on reviews, maybe you could try this with whatever book(s) you finish this week.

2. Ask your readers to ask you questions about any of the books they want. In your comments, not in their blogs. Most likely, people who will ask you questions will be people who have read one of the books or know something about it because they want to read it.

3. Later, take whichever questions you like from your comments and use them in a post about each book. I’ll probably turn mine into a sort of interview-review. Link to each blogger next to that blogger’s question(s).

4. Visit other Weekly Geeks and ask them some questions!

****ETA: I don’t want to tell people what to ask, but I’m seeing a lot of “What did you think of ______?” and “What is ______ about?” questions. And I just want to suggest that bloggers might appreciate something more specific to answer.

Oh boy. This is something I so need to kick start my butt. I have a TBR pile rivaled in size only by my TBR pile. That is my To Be Reviewed pile is at least a young adult version of my To Be Read pile. For example I've got a folder on my computer with 120 Book Reviews in various stages of completion. A dozen or so were complete and posted either here or at Joyread. Another dozen were complete and waiting for HTML pages. Several dozen contain little more than the author, title, publisher info.

But I'm not going to draw from that list for this assignment. I stopped working with those book reviews and stopped beginning new ones in the word processor over two years ago. I stopped studying HTML and thus stopped making pages for Joyread and Joywrite in 2005 the year my Dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I stopped working on formal book reviews in late 2006 after the announcement our libraries were slated to close their doors in April for lack of funding. I must have checked out over 300 books between December and April, but other than a handful of novels I wasn't reading to finish books. I was reading to cram my head with as many facts and as much ambiance related to my various writing projects--the professions, diseases and stomping grounds of the dozens of characters in my stories in progress; the supporting facts for the thesis of the many essays in progress; how to for fiction and poetry writing; anything Shakespeare and DVDs by the dozen. But I stopped taking notes.

By the time the libraries opened back up in October 2007 I was so focused on writing my own fiction again, I'd practically stopped reading entirely.

I've recently been trying to shift the balance back to reading, especially fiction. And to taking notes and reviewing books. A writer needs to read. A fiction writer needs to read fiction. A poet needs to read poetry. I recently tried to create a post to collect the links to book reviews I've posted here but I could find only a handful of the ones I had firm memories of reviewing on Joystory. Then one day last week, while musing about a book I was still reading and another I had just finished in the last paragraphs of a post, I realized that must have been what happened to the 'book reviews' I remembered posting. They weren't formal enough to merit their own post so I didn't title the post with the title of the book and most of them were posted long before Blogger provided labels.

So. I'm sure that was way too much information.

The books I'm going to list here I finished in the last several weeks. Or am about to finish. Most are novels. All but a couple are library books and most of those I will have to send for again before I can do a proper review. The giveaway book is among them. :)

1. A New Earth by Ekhart Tolle
   
2. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
3. Swordbird by Nancy Yi Fan
4. Swordquest by Nancy Yi Fan
5. The Piano Lesson: A Play by August Wilson
6. Messi@h by Andrei Codrescu
7. The Secret Supper by Javier Sierra
8. The Morning After by Lisa Jackson
9. People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
10. Green Angel by Alice Hoffman
11. Foretelling by Alice Hoffman
12. ? (the giveaway) Still Summer by Jacquelyn Mitchard
    Joanne of Book Zombie gave the correct answer so the first copy of the book is hers.
    
13. The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers by Christopher Vogler (which I need to finish this week as another patron is waiting their turn so it may be weeks or months before I get another turn)
14. The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kid (which I'm about to finish)
15. Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (which I'm about to start)
    

That's right I'm still not naming it because the winner for today will be the first one to leave a comment with the correct title and author. The clues are contained in three of my previous posts:

Heads Up
Monday Poetry Train #55
Thursday Thirteen #92 you can ignore the windy intro. The book is in the list of 13.

If no one guesses correctly by the time I'm ready to click publish on tomorrow night's post (sometime between 9PM and the wee hours) I will select a winner by some random method from the pool of commenters expressing an interest. Then I will be requesting the winner to provide a mailing address via: joystory AT gmail DOT com.

That mailing address must be either United States or Canada and cannot be a PO Box. I know of several this is likely to affect but there could be a fudge. If you have any family or friends with a qualifying address you could provide that. Either to gift them with the book or to ask them to ship it to you if you are willing to pay those costs.

Don't forget to indicate in your comment if you are interested in winning the book as there will be a drawing instead if no one guesses correctly in time and only those expressing an interest will be included.

Don't forget to also leave me some questions about one or more of the books in the above list. Including the mystery book if you figure it out or arrive here after I've updated this post with the answer and the announcement of the winner soon after I post tomorrow night. Which I imagine will be one or two hours either side of midnight. If there has not been a winner before I begin working on the post, I will check comments one last time before clicking publish and thus closing the contest so as long as this post is riding the top of the page you still have time.

Some of this weeks WG participants:

gautami tripathy
Bybee
Joanne of Book Zombie the winner of the book.
Alessandra from Out of the Blue
Care of Care's Online Bookclub
Kim of Page After Page

I will try to remember to return and add more after I start visiting more WG.

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Weekly Geek #10 Magazines

I remember getting Highlights magazine as a kid. That was over forty years ago. My favorite feature of each issue was the full page drawing in which a number of small images were hidden within the lines that made up the bigger picture and you were challenged to find them all. I wonder if they still do that? Are they even still publishing? It's been over ten years since I was babysitting regularly and looked for Highlights magazines in the library to check out for them. By then they had changed their look so much that wouldn't have recognized them but for the name. They had gone full color and slick and shrunk several inches in height and width. Highlights magazine also nurtured the seeds of wonder for language and story. I was especially captivated by the riddles, puns, word games and jokes scattered throughout the pages of each issue.

By the time I was eight or nine I began picking up the Reader's Digest which was the only periodical my parent's subscribed to. At first I mostly read just the jokes and the vocabulary building page but would occasionally dip into the articles. By the time I was twelve I was reading it cover to cover and did so pretty much every month until I left home at 21.

We've seldom been in a position to afford magazine subscriptions since then. But I have a faint memory of subscribing to Writer's Digest for at least one year at some point. I very, very occasionally bought single issues of a magazine when it featured something important to me--something about writing or writers or publishing or books; some kind of investigavite journalism; short stories and/or poetry; articles about cutting edge science or technology; articles with photography of exotic (all most anything not 1960s suburban America was exotic to me) places or cultures.

But for most of my adult life I satiated thos magazine hungers the same way I satiated most of my book hunger--via the local library.

There were two ways to do that. The first and most obvious was to check them out. The second was to take from the rack by the entrance where people could 'recycle' the magazines they were done with. Only my hometown Longview library and the old Phoenix branch building had those racks though. We didn't have room in the temp building we moved into in the summer of 2005 and so far I haven't seen them reinstate them at the new building. It is probably just as well. Magazines are one of the things I have hoarding issues with.

Following is a list of some of the magazines that often attracted me:
Mother Jones*
Utne
Writer's Digest
The Writer
The New Yorker*
The Atlantic Monthly*
Harpers*
Redbook (years ago and it was mostly for the fiction which I heard they stopped publishing but I can't confirm that rumor as I haven't looked; in fact I can't even confirm they are still publishing at all. I'm too lazy to Google it.)
O Magazine
Omni
Science
Scientific American
National Geographic*
The Nation
The New York Times Book Review*
and several of the pulp science fiction and fantasy magazines whose exact titles are blending into each other in my very tired mind.

*These are magazines I've occasionally visited online in the last couple years. Which has been the extent of my magazine reading since I lost access to that giveaway rack at the old library building. Except I do still have about a foot-high stack of magazines 3-5 years old that came from that rack and used to read them while sitting with my husband's grandmother in the last two years of her life but I don't think I've picked one up since she passed a year ago last month.

More Weekly Geeks:
Puss Reboots
Literary Feline

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Weekly Geek #9: Challenges

This week's WG assignment was to organize your challenges OR if you aren't already participating in any to join one. This came with perfect timing for me as one of the things that caught my attention as I browsed the WG blogs for the scavenger hunt was all the challenges and I started collecting links to challenge info pages.

There are several I am very interested in joining in time. But I settled on Herding Cats for my first. It caught my attention first by its name. I love that saying. I used it a number of times in the first couple years here on Joystory while talking about my two cats Merlin and Gremlyn. Before I lost Gremlyn a year ago, getting the two of them on their leashes from the room to the backyard was an exercise in herding cats. They seldom wanted to go in the same direction at the same time. Our antics were often comical to view I'm sure. I related in last night's post about what can happen when you are trying to get just one cat to go up the porch steps and into the house. Imagine that scenario with two cats playing cat's cradle with their leashes around your ankles.

So the name caught my attention right off. Then I found out how the challenge actually works and I was hooked as thoroughly as I am by Merlin's claws when he's demanding attention.

Participants contribute a list of ten of their best loved books. They can include both fiction and non-fiction. Post the list and then submit the link of that post to bottle of shine the creator and host of the challenge. That list will be folded into the master list. Then between May 1st and Nov 30th this year read a minimum of three books off that list (or off the posted lists found at participants blogs) and post reviews for them and submit the links to those posts to bottle of shine.

So then. Here is my list:

1. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
2. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
3. Tidewater Tales by John Barth
4. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
5. The River Why by David James Duncan
6. Three Junes by Julia Glass
7. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
8. The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav
9. The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
10. Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen R. Donaldson v.1 of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever (There are two trilogies and a third in the works set in this epic fantasy story world. I haven't started the third trilogy yet. I might wait for the third book to come out. But I think of the first two as nearly a single entity. I listed this one not because it is the best of the six but because it is the door into this magical world. I've been contemplating re-reading all six for some time now.)

All 10 of these books were more than just good stories for me. Every one of them had a huge impact on my concept of life, story and/or writing. Every one of them caused a huge shift in consciousness for me. They all would bear re-reading.

I just finished #2 last week and am still working on the review. I've linked #7 to my review of it. I have a review for #6 posted at Joyread I'll hunt the link down later or better yet re-post it here and then link it.

I've done nothing with Joyread or Joywrite since the summer of 2005 when news of my Dad's impending death turned my world topsy-turvy. Then that fall Ed's Grandmother's health went down fast and I was pleased to find myself able to help the family cope with it and keep her in her own home until the end. But meanwhile I'd lost my tentative grip on working with HTML. It was so much easier to just post to Joystory.

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Weekly Geek #8: Scavenger Hunt

This week it is a scavenger hunt. This is WG #8. Although it is only my second time participating, I used the edition number in my title and will in future as I think that will be less confusing over time.

For details see Dewey's post. The short explanation is that we are to hunt 50 keywords in the blogs of WG participants. Two ways to find participants are suggested in Dewey's post.

There is a prize for whoever finds the most keywords in the most blogs.

We are to list the keywords we find along with the link to the post we found it in. Being the eternal optimist, I'm going to paste the entire keyword list in this post and add the links as I find them throughout the week.


The Keyword list:

1. THE PRIZE is a subscription to Bookmarks magazines. Also the winner will be featured in Weekly Geeks #10--Dewey's Hidden Side of a Leaf

2. youtube--Cara's Online Book Club
3. war--Katrina's Reads
4. Sunday Salon--Blue Archipelago
5. Buy a Friend a Book--
6. BTT (or Booking Through Thursday)--Mog's Book Blog ~ Maree's just add books
7. omnibus--
8. Speculative fiction--Stuff As Dreams Are Made On
9. Short stories--Katrina's Reads
10. Ani Difranco (or just Ani)--
11. Printz--
12. Man Booker Prize (or just Booker)--
13. Newbery--
14. Mother Talk--
15. interview--Literary Escapism
16. history--A Girl Walks Into a Bookstore
17. glbt (or any other arrangement of those letters, or with a q in there)--
18. fantasy--
19. film--Biblio Brat
20. giraffe--
21. biography--Melody's Readig Corner
22. Geraldine Brooks--Chain-Reading
23. graphic novels--Out of the Blue ~ nothing of importance ~ Age 30 - A Year of Books
24. classics--nothing of importance
25. faerie--Melissa's Book Nut
26. Amelie--Out of the Blue
27. doo doo doo--
28. 24 Hour Read-a-thon--Confuzzled Books ~ Nymeth's things mean a lot
29. etsy--Chris' book-a-rama
30. poetry--Katrina Read's
31. Bookmooch--MYSTERIES in PARADISE
32. del.icio.us--
33. R.E.M.--
34. Bookworms Carnival--Maree's just add books ~ Adventures in Reading
35. library--Bybee's Naked Without Books! ~ Melissa's Book Nut
36. Lost (must refer to the TV series)--
37. Six Feet Under--
38. ReadingAnimals--readinganimals.com/about/
39. hedgehog--
40. pregnant--Melody announce she is expecting a baby girl tho she doesn't use the word pregnant.
41. nosebleed (or nose bleed)--
42. 42 (No, that’s not a mistake; number 42 is to find the digit 42.)--nothing of importance
43. herding cats--
44. Django Reinhardt--
45. A.S. Byatt--Stuff As Dreams Are Made On
46. Homer--
(The next three are suggestions from my son.)
47. ROFL--
48. cheezburger (must be spelled with Z!)--Chris' book-a-rama
49. d20--

50.-?: Each participant gets to put one keyword in the comments, so keep coming back to check on them if you’re trying for the prize!

<<<<<>>>>>>>

Well I don't feel so off the wall now, Tiny Librarian had the same idea to post the whole list and add the links as she finds them.

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Weekly Geek

I learned about this new meme while preparing the post about the Read-a-thon on Tuesday. It is also hosted by Dewey. I was drawn to it because I thought it might help me apply boot to butt on a number of projects I've been procrastinating on re blogging. And it could help me tip the balance back toward books and reading here at Joystory where the emphasis on writing since last summer has about taken over. Not that I want to lessen that emphasis but writers MUST read too. It is of equal importance to writing as a regular practice and discipline.

I was also wary of taking on a fifth meme. On the other hand this one is a free floater; not attached to any particular day of the week. The assignment is given on Saturday and you have through Friday to post and leave your link with Dewey. That is a plus because I am often scrambling for ideas for posts on the non-meme days. Yet another plus is that you can still participate even if you don't get around to the assignment. You can just make your post about that.

One of the attractions this week was that the assignment was fairly easy. Or at least could be as easy or as complex as you wanted to make it. Now last week was a different story. If I had stumbled on this in the middle of last week and found the assignment to 'catch up on reviews' late Tuesday with TT looming on the horizon and no snippet ready, I wouldn't have given two minutes consideration to getting involved then though I would have made a note to check back on Saturday. A note that would have to take its chances with the bazillion other 'notes to self' floating around my head and hard-drive and workstation.

This week's assignment was to post photos. There was a number of suggestions to elaborate on that theme but the basic premise was to illustrate your post with photos. It seemed to be implied that you were to take the photos yourself but surely Dewey didn't mean to bar participation to those without digital cameras! I am confident of this based on the experience of last October's Read-a-thon--the rules are relaxed and inclusive to make increased participation the overriding rule. It's too late to check with Dewey to confirm my assumption.

Oh well, if nothing else this is at least a post about why I didn't do the exact assignment and might still appeal to the typical participants: mostly book bloggers tho blogs with other themes are not discouraged from joining in. (see? inclusive!)

It is not that I don't have a digital camera. It is just that I didn't get around to taking new pictures and now it is too late as the household is sleeping. Ed is just inches from my elbow as I type this. I thought about 'borrowing' pictures of our library from the two TT posts devoted to the before and the after moving from the temp building to the new building last winter. But that didn't appeal. It's old news.

I have to get back to work on my snippet for tomorrow's Friday Snippet post as soon as I get tonight's post finished so I was about to give up on participating in Weekly Geek this week. I set about to put up a quick humor post with LOL cats because I'd seen one on Ann's TT from last week that cracked me up. I went to Ann's to find it and trace it back to its homepage to get its embed code. While there of course it was impossible to resist clicking 'next' a few times to see more. And then I found one on a book theme and at the same moment realized that the one I came hunting for was on a geek theme and thought: why not? But I didn't like the caption on the book one so much. So I re-captioned it.




more cat pictures



moar funny pictures

Hope you got a chuckle or two.

Check out Dewey's WG post for this week. She took pictures of and described several of the Bookmooch Journals she has created. I'd never even heard of the concept before. It is fascinating. Do take a look. Dewey is one creative lady.

Kathrine at A Girl Walks Into a Bookstore posted pictures of her own bookshelves. I can never see too many pictures of books and bookshelves full of books.

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