With the fall leaves almost gone and daylight saving time behind us in the US, I thought it’d be a good time to look at some of my favorite fall reads. The nights are getting longer and the weather cooler, so what better thing is there to do than to curl up with a good book and read for those few extra hours of darkness? I missed the boat on Halloween reads, but I’ve included a bonus list at the end of some great Halloween reads!
Category: Random
Dear Authors and Book Bloggers
I had no plans to blog today, but after an email I received sometime in the last 48 hours I wanted to get on my soapbox and write a little PSA. I’ll get back to semi-regular blogging with Stephen King’s The Gunslinger (The Dark Tower #1) on Monday.
I am not going to name and shame (Vlogger hotel scandal article Daily Mail link), but if you received the email you’ll know what I’m talking about. Please do not name and shame as that’s just more promotion for them. That is not the goal, this is just free advice for authors and bloggers so take it or leave it. I apologize for the length, click here for the TL;DR.
Dear Authors and Fellow Book Bloggers,
Authors, you want your books read, right? Bloggers we want our sites read, right? It’s natural—it’s why we do what we do.
Authors, you desperately want to write the next best-selling sensation and bloggers we all want to be the one to say: “I discovered that before it was big.” And we all want our names to be recognized, I get it. We’re all content creators, we’re all content consumers, we’re marketers through our books or our blogs, we’re all hustling to make an impact in the larger world. Why else would we be doing this so publicly?
你好蘇州和上海 | Nǐ hǎo sūzhōu hé shànghǎi | Hello Suzhou and Shanghai!
When this goes live, we will be in the Chinese city of Suzhou, but we’ll be leaving for Shanghai, by way of Wuzhen, a historical scenic town on the Yangtze River tomorrow!
I’m really looking forward to the Shanghai Museum tour and the free time we’ll have to shop on Nanjing Road! You know I already have bookstores in mind to visit! There’s at least one foreign language bookstore I’m aware of, but I’m also looking for copies of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (哈利·波特与魔法石) and Wuthering Heights (呼啸山庄) in Mandarin/Cantonese (I’ll take either). Either way, I can’t wait to get back and share the amazing photos I’m sure I’ve already taken!
北京歡迎你 | Běijīng huānyíng nǐ | Welcome to Beijing
I have no idea if the characters in the title will post or not, but I wanted to do a similar post to last year, Bienvenidos a Madrid! I failed miserably at learning any Mandarin, but what I did find out is that even if people speak different dialects they can still read the formal written characters. How interesting? I guess it shouldn’t be that weird, but that’s about as far as I got in the book.
By the time this posts, we will have been in Beijing for a few days after flying from Boston! I hope the 15 hour total flying time (with a short layover in Chicago) wasn’t as long as I thought! And I also hope we’ve adjusted to the 12 hour time difference by now!
I think I’m most looking forward to the three-day river cruise down the Yangtze later this week where we’ll get to relax a bit on the boat. There are some excursions planned where we’ll go ashore to see a few villages and get an up-close view of the Three Gorges (Wikipedia link). After that we’re off on the high-speed train (SAY WHAT!?) to Suzhou where we’ll spend a few days. I’ll have another post next week that tells you about Week two!
The Book Blog Clean Up :-(
Don’t worry, I’m not leaving book blogging, it’s the one thing I’ve kept constant over the past however many years, this is more an observation of something I randomly stumbled upon earlier this week.
I originally wanted to call this post “RIP Fellow Book Bloggers,” because what I’m writing about is sad and it’s also October, so makes sense right? Well earlier this week, I’m still not sure why or how I did it, I found myself cleaning up my RSS feed. I had about 120 blogs under my “Books” label (individuals, libraries, bookstores, etc.). Well I started clicking on them individually and seeing when the last post was made and I was saddened by what I found. By time I finished I found out 57 of the book specific blogs I followed at one point no longer existed. Let me say that again, In the past 3-4 years ALMOST half of the book blogs that I discovered have ceased to exist. It was a bit surreal as I kept clicking and kept finding blogs that no longer existed, blogs that felt like they ended mid sentence and blogs that had turned private.