Updates

November 2012 Recap

I hope all you American’s had a Happy Thanksgiving and everyone else had a warm(ish) November. It’s starting to get really cold here and although I’m loving it, I was not ready for this weather. I can’t believe December 1st is tomorrow and December brings my birthday, Christmas and New Years are all flying up fast. Here’s my last monthly update of the year!

Once again this month I have another awesome Tweet to share. Katherine Winter, author of Annabel responded to my response to her novel on Twitter. Awesome, right? Once again just to reiterate, sometimes you just have to love social media.

Recent Acquisitions (Yes, still a library :-D)
I didn’t go on a book buying ban like I should have, but I of course have brilliant reasons/excuses. However, I am rapidly running out of excuses/reasons – my to-be-read bookshelf is officially overflowing, I only have one Groupon left and only a bit left on my gift card!

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Updates

September 2012 Recap

Where to begin?!? Let’s start with the big news! If all of a sudden I go missing in October, don’t worry – I will be starting a NEW JOB on the 15th! I’m sad about leaving my current workplace, but excited and ready for my next adventure. I will be joining an amazing fundraising team at an amazing school and am really looking forward to it! (A lot of my posts throughout October will be scheduled at least a week, if not more, in advance so I can focus on work.)

The same week I found out for certain I got my new job, I also won a book from Robert over at 101books.net and it arrived this past week. Check it out to the right. I got to select it and I’m REALLY excited about reading it and hopefully it won’t be on my TBR shelf for too long. In addition you should check out Robert’s hilarious post on How to carry an embarrassing book in public. It was one of the first posts I read over on his site and I truly enjoyed it!

In addition to the above book, I picked up a copy of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger from the remainders tables at Harvard Book Store. It was only $3.99 (or so) and it’s on my list as it won the Man Booker Prize in 2008. But more interesting the printing at the bottom of my Harvard Book Store receipt. Now, I fully understand and support why it is there, but it made me feel guilty and I don’t like that.

It says “How much money stays in your community when you spend $100?” It then breaks it down based on a locally owned store, a chain store and Amazon. I get why they do this, drawing an emphasis to the fact that they are a locally owned independent store, but it still got to me. I think they forgot that they just happen to have one of the most successful brands of all time behind their store name (Harvard University) even though they’re not affiliated with the University, and I think they also forgot about the overwhelming number of young people and students in the Boston/Cambridge/Somerville area. I know I can rarely afford to buy a newly released book at cost from a local bookstore or even a chain bookstore. But I DO, however, go out of my way to make sure I get all of my used books from smaller independent stores and when I order from Amazon (again, used more often than not), I try to order from sellers within Massachusetts and New England to support the local economy. It’s not a lot, but it’s the bit I can do until I CAN afford to only shop at little local stores.

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Updates

Lunch Break Interlude IV

Lucky you, fellow bloggers, two Lunch Break Interlude posts within a two-week span!  The writing bug has clearly infested my brain, as by the time this posts I will have pre-scheduled three weeks of consecutive posts, dating all the way back to my first piece about Anne Brontë!

Mother’s Day weekend I went over to Harvard to get my haircut and once again couldn’t escape the lure of Harvard Bookstore. I stopped in afterward and got these two lovely books! Annabel by Kathleen Winter is on my long to-be-read list from when I saw it in Harvard Book Store over a year ago and The Ghost Road by Pat Barker is a Man-Booker Prize winning novel and I’m slowly working my way through all those winners as well. The only downside was that The Ghost Road is the third book in a trilogy and the other two books in the trilogy, even though they were used, were more expensive so I didn’t grab them, but that means I’ll be supporting my local library!

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Culture Corner

Oh Hey, Big City…

This is why I love living in Boston, a ‘big city.’

Yesterday I was desperately searching for five copies of Christopher Klein’s Discovering the Boston Harbor Islands for an event we’re having next month when I found out Emma Donoghue, author of Room, was in town doing a reading last night and question and answer session at Harvard Bookstore.

Title page of "Room" signed by Emma Donoghue Needless to say I was very excited. I have been patiently waiting for Room to come out in paperback for over a year and while my step-mom was visiting this past week she bought me a copy of it. If you haven’t heard of Room, it’s told from the perspective of five-year-old Jack, who is the son of a kidnap victim whose entire universe is one room. The book has gained increasing attention over the past year and won the Irish Book Award and appeared on the shortlist for the Man-Booker prize. Ms. Donoghue was brilliant, she was hilarious and serious and well spoken and had researched all aspects of the book and it made me very excited to actually get the chance to sit down and read the book.

But the icing on the cake of living in a big city, is that I found out Marge Piercy will be in town tomorrow night reading from a new book of poetry (The Hunger Moon: New and Selected Poems) at the Brookline Booksmith and needless to say I am very excited and will be going to get my copy of Woman on the Edge of Time autographed as well as a copy for a good friend in the UK. I wrote a paper on Woman on the Edge of Time that caused a bit of hoopla in my department and needless to say it will be interesting to see what she has to say.

In case you were wondering, I did find five copies of Klein’s book at the AWESOME Brookline Booksmith.