A life of books . . .
And with the humidity and mugginess June is here. May went by so fast that we were sitting on the porch last night and I turned to Tim and asked if he ever felt time was moving too fast. He just sort of looked at me like, well duh.
The good part of May was that I think the rainy days and flooding of April were mostly gone and we had beautiful days like the one in the photo to the right! I’ve been able to walk in the mornings (5:30am-ish) because the sun is rising so early and it’s warm.
It has been one of those months where I didn’t read a lot but I did SO much from visiting Rockport, MA (photo to the right), releasing my fifth episode of Come Read With Me and staying super busy at work.
I could talk about all the amazing art and the numerous galleries we visited in Rockport, but what was the most exciting thing for me was we went into two little bookstores (Toad Hall and Bullseye Book, I only found a blog talking about a move three years ago here.). At Bullseye, I finally asked someone where they got the bags they use to store paperback books (bagsunlimited.com) and I ordered some for my Wuthering Heights collection and autographed books! (Pictures to follow in another post I’m sure.) What’s also cool about Bags Unlimited, is they have a lot of preservation items so I’m excited about that for my postcard and posters too!
Hey Everyone,
Are you a book blogger? Do you blog about other things but still read books?
I know a lot of you use different blogging platforms, but if you use WordPress I would appreciate your help.  Please add your voice to my “idea” in the WordPress Ideas forum: “Customizable Goodreads Widget.”
If you’ve ever tried to add a Goodreads widget to your wordpress.com site you know you can’t do it. They (rightfully so) don’t allow iframe or javascript, and they did finally build a widget, however it’s slap-dash and has no customization. I mean look to the right – I can’t be the only one who thinks it looks odd. The coding is similar to that provided by Goodreads so it wouldn’t take much editing for WordPress to make this possible.
I’m not sure if anything will come of it, but it’s worth a shot. So click here and add your thoughts, please!!!!
Thanks!
Geoff
Just a warning, this is more of a rant about other readers than a review of the story. It is hard to review a continuous series with very little break in action between books especially if you’ve read them as many times as I have. Let’s just say I’ve loved these novels since I first read them and I’m excited (and sad) for the final novel’s release, but it will be a fitting 50th book this year!
When I went to Goodreads to mark I was re-reading this book, some of the vitriolic responses to the book and the author truly surprised me. It quite upset me how rude and caustic people were being with their claims of copying other stories.
Has Paolini borrowed from other fantasy authors? Yes, but haven’t they all? Is his writing perfect or on par with the HG Wells and JRR Tolkien? No, but what were they doing when they were 19-years old? Does Paolini stretch to far and occasionally end up with awkward dialogue and too much description, yes of course he does – but did you read The Two Towers? I’m fairly certain Tolkien tells you how many leaves are on every bush in the swampland. Is The Inheritance Cycle story worth reading and does he bring something new to the fiction/fantasy genre? Yes.
July was a crazy busy month, but I was somehow able to read/post EIGHT books.  I actually read Tropic of Cancer and Slammerkin in July, but didn’t have computer access this past weekend so those posts were the first two of August. I’m reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and it’s interesting to say the least.
On Goodreads yesterday I found this AWESOME stat (above) where it tells you the number of pages (or books, or the year of the books in a graph format) of the books you’ve read that year. My current tally sits at 10, 775 pages. Given books vary in the editions you read it could easily be off, but it’s still pretty neat.If you’re not on Goodreads, Join! And FRIEND ME!
I’m also very excited as over the weekend the Boston Book Festival announced the author lineup for the 2011 festival. I’m probably most excited for Alison Bechdel (Heck yeah Fun Home), Michael Ondaatje, Booker Prize winning novelist of The English Patient, and Carlos Eire author of Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy. October 15, 2011 can’t get here soon enough!
On a personal note, I work for on one of the Harbor Islands, and this month is a busy month, as are the next few! We’ve had graduations off and on over the past few weeks, a family event this coming weekend, a 4k trail run next month, a reception in October and a lot of correspondence going out by the end of the calendar year. But one of the perks of the job, is the fact that I work for an island and occasionally have the opportunity to get out of the office and work from/on the island.
Today I was out on the island for a graduation ceremony and ended up waiting for a later ferry, and got to sit on the dock in the sun and read for a half hour (left, you can almost see the city in the upper left hand corner) in the lovely Adirondack chairs (right). 
So even though sometimes I feel like I’ll never catch up on work, or that I can’t quite complete a project to the perfection I want, the opportunity to visit the island and to interact with the countless students we serve and the donors who visit the island, and something as simple as getting to read for 30 minutes on the dock truly makes it all worth while.