Real life bits and pieces (not book-free)
Oct. 6th, 2006 09:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
First the yay - OD got another story accepted for Strange Horizons. Yay! Story's coming out in the spring, so the link's only to that wonderful magazine.
I was avoiding my usual run of children's/YA book blogs for a while there, to keep me (mostly) out of bookly temptation's path. Yeah, right. But it did cut down, a bit at least, on my running across, and having to order, US-only-published books. So, no sooner did I start reading them all again than I found Mother Reader had just done a Top Picks for 2006 (So Far) list - collated here. Well, I saw it too late to contribute (if I'd been able to play) but just in time to add a few more books to the Must Acquire Somehow list: Shug, Jenny Han (AFAIK, published here, so didn't order from Amazon.de), An Abundance of Katherines (on which more later), and Nailed, by Patrick Jones, about which I hadn't heard before, and am now about to start.
Another yay is Charlie's Death of a Ghost appearing on the list - though not sure about middle school? It's the YAiest of the YA, I'd have thought. But good it's there!
I'll probably do my own list - maybe - indecisiveness looms again - but it occurred to me just this morning that of my most recent reads, in children's and YA, nothing I've loved has been fantasy. (Inda wasn't published YA - just pointing this out in case the not loving + fantasy were to be misconstrued.) Doubtless different if I looked back over the whole year. I hope.
Really enjoying the MA course work now - first wodge is reader response theory, and I especially like the narrative stuff: thinking about real and implied authors/readers and narrator/narratee is just fun, especially wrt Winnie-the-Pooh. And amazingly, I even convinced my mother it could be fun, which is no small thing! She's reading Richard Ford's new book, The Lay of the Land, which has a first-person narrator, and I'm getting reports/questions/comments most days on her previous day's reading. Also trying to figure out whether to do my first assignment on Charlie's The Lurkers (tempting, as it has - unusually - an obvious narratee as well as an implied reader) or The Thief (plus the two others - equally tempting in a different way, as I think you could argue for a developed implied reader, who's come from The Thief expecting tricks, which the narrator has to develop different ways to provide.) I haven't usually enjoyed thinking about assignments this much!
I was avoiding my usual run of children's/YA book blogs for a while there, to keep me (mostly) out of bookly temptation's path. Yeah, right. But it did cut down, a bit at least, on my running across, and having to order, US-only-published books. So, no sooner did I start reading them all again than I found Mother Reader had just done a Top Picks for 2006 (So Far) list - collated here. Well, I saw it too late to contribute (if I'd been able to play) but just in time to add a few more books to the Must Acquire Somehow list: Shug, Jenny Han (AFAIK, published here, so didn't order from Amazon.de), An Abundance of Katherines (on which more later), and Nailed, by Patrick Jones, about which I hadn't heard before, and am now about to start.
Another yay is Charlie's Death of a Ghost appearing on the list - though not sure about middle school? It's the YAiest of the YA, I'd have thought. But good it's there!
I'll probably do my own list - maybe - indecisiveness looms again - but it occurred to me just this morning that of my most recent reads, in children's and YA, nothing I've loved has been fantasy. (Inda wasn't published YA - just pointing this out in case the not loving + fantasy were to be misconstrued.) Doubtless different if I looked back over the whole year. I hope.
Really enjoying the MA course work now - first wodge is reader response theory, and I especially like the narrative stuff: thinking about real and implied authors/readers and narrator/narratee is just fun, especially wrt Winnie-the-Pooh. And amazingly, I even convinced my mother it could be fun, which is no small thing! She's reading Richard Ford's new book, The Lay of the Land, which has a first-person narrator, and I'm getting reports/questions/comments most days on her previous day's reading. Also trying to figure out whether to do my first assignment on Charlie's The Lurkers (tempting, as it has - unusually - an obvious narratee as well as an implied reader) or The Thief (plus the two others - equally tempting in a different way, as I think you could argue for a developed implied reader, who's come from The Thief expecting tricks, which the narrator has to develop different ways to provide.) I haven't usually enjoyed thinking about assignments this much!
Top Picks of 2006 (So Far)
Date: 2006-10-07 03:53 pm (UTC)I put the books where people suggested they fit, though sometimes I made adjustments if I knew about the book myself and thought it be be a better fit elsewhere. Since I haven't read Death of a Ghost, I must have relied on the suggester. Or on Amazon.
Overall, the list is a great starting place with suggestions from all over the blog world.
MotherReader
Re: Top Picks of 2006 (So Far)
Date: 2006-10-07 04:01 pm (UTC)The list is a great source of tempta... er, recommendations! So another belated thanks for compiling it.
Re: Top Picks of 2006 (So Far)
Date: 2006-10-20 05:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-08 01:58 pm (UTC)That list is fascinating, full of so many names to check, thanks!