Good Reads

I just got an email from Good Reads, so I decided to update my status a little bit . . . since the last time I had been on there was September of last year. And before that, I'm pretty sure my status showed that I was "currently reading" a book about parenting a toddler since 2009. And how many books do I have on my e-shelves? A piddly 14. So yeah. I'm not so good at keeping it current. I like the idea behind Good Reads (as far as I understand it), I just don't keep it updated all the time. Do you do Good Reads? Do you like it? What do you like about it? Let's discuss.

Also, as a tangential p.s., check out 32 photos that will make your stomach drop. I don't LOVE heights or doing anything hugely risky, but I can appreciate a picture of someone else's crazy feats—right here from the comfort of my chair that is sitting on even ground. These pictures are pretty cool and pretty crazy. But the cliff camping ones? Really? Is that the best idea or even necessary? I'm pretty sure you could just climb 20 more feet to get to the top of the ledge and to a flat area and put your tent there for the night.

Word Geekery and Other Randomness

A few interesting bits in the world of words, lately:

• This post from Jim Romenesko about a memo from the editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, telling reporters to stop using the word "iconic" because it has become cliché.
    
• And how the memo spurred this post, which details a list of overused words and phrases that the Washington Post's Outlook section is supposed to avoid. Fascinating and funny and reminds me of the time I worked at a newspaper (probably because I regularly used a handful of those words).
    
• This list of contronymns was also going around: 14 Words That Are Their Own Opposites. Also fascinating. (Should "fascinating" go on my overused list? Perhaps.)
    
• And for a little bit of fun (on the off chance anyone didn't think the previous items were riveting), I also came across this list of 50 Great Rory-Lorelai Exchanges. I posted a bit about Gilmore Girls on the other blog recently, so this came at a good time. I also enjoyed 25 Little-Known Facts About 'Gilmore Girls' I found on the same site. You might be wondering what this has to do with words, but Gilmore Girls was great writing. And it was funny. So there.

88 Books That Shaped America

Last fall, I saw an article in the newspaper about an exhibition from the Library of Congress at the National Book Festival featuring 88 books that shaped our country. It was a fascinating list, such a potpourri of topics and a refreshing change from the top 100 literary classics or top 50 YA fantasies or whatever booklist has been making the rounds lately. Nothing against those lists (as I love all books—almost), but it was nice to see a mix and to consider how each might have influenced our culture.

Also, I loved seeing books like Ezra Jack Keats' The Snowy Day, The Cat in the Hat, and Idaho: A Guide in Word and Pictures right there alongside Moby Dick and Leaves of Grass. Awesomeness.

I also love to read book lists and scour them for books I have read, which makes me feel all smart and stuff. (Yes, I cut this list out of the newspaper and highlighted the books I had read. I'm that big of a geek.) This also gives me ideas for books to add to my To Read list. So for your reading pleasure, I posted the list below; peruse it and see what you think. Just for kicks, I bolded the books I have read and put a star next to titles I had read parts of. Because that totally counts for something. 

88 'Books That Shaped America'

"Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain (1884)

"Alcoholics Anonymous" by anonymous (1939)

"American Cookery" by Amelia Simmons (1796)

"The American Woman's Home" by Catharine E. Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1869)

"And the Band Played On" by Randy Shilts (1987)

"Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand (1957)

"The Autobiography of Malcolm X" by Malcolm X and Alex Haley (1965)

"Beloved" by Toni Morrison (1987)

"Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" by Dee Brown (1970)

"The Call of the Wild" by Jack London (1903)

"The Cat in the Hat" by Dr. Seuss (1957)

"Catch-22" by Joseph Heller (1961)

"The Catcher in the Rye" by J.D. Salinger (1951)

"Charlotte's Web" by E.B. White (1952)

"Common Sense" by Thomas Paine (1776) *

"The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care" by Benjamin Spock (1946)

"Cosmos" by Carl Sagan (1980)

"A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible" by anonymous (1788)

"The Double Helix" by James D. Watson (1968)

"The Education of Henry Adams" by Henry Adams (1907)

"Experiments and Observations on Electricity" by Benjamin Franklin (1751)

"Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury (1953)

"Family Limitation" by Margaret Sanger (1914)

"The Federalist" by anonymous (1787) * maybe?

"The Feminine Mystique" by Betty Friedan (1963)

"The Fire Next Time" by James Baldwin (1963)

"For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway (1940) *

"Gone With the Wind" by Margaret Mitchell (1936)

"Goodnight Moon" by Margaret Wise Brown (1947)

"A Grammatical Institute of the English Language" by Noah Webster (1783)

"The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck (1939)

"The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

"Harriet, the Moses of Her People" by Sarah H. Bradford (1901)

"The History of Standard Oil" by Ida Tarbell (1904)

"History of the Expedition Under the Command of the Captains Lewis and Clark" by Meriwether Lewis (1814)

"How the Other Half Lives" by Jacob Riis (1890)

"How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie (1936)

"Howl" by Allen Ginsberg (1956)

"The Iceman Cometh" by Eugene O'Neill (1946)

"Idaho: A Guide in Word and Pictures" by Federal Writers' Project (1937)

"In Cold Blood" by Truman Capote (1966) (Does watching the movie Capote count?)

"Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison (1952) *

"Joy of Cooking" by Irma Rombauer (1931)

"The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair (1906)

"Leaves of Grass" by Walt Whitman (1855) *

"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving (1820) *

"Little Women, or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy" by Louisa May Alcott (1868)

"Mark, the Match Boy" by Horatio Alger Jr. (1869)

"McGuffey's Newly Revised Eclectic Primer" by William Holmes McGuffey (1836)

"Moby-Dick; or The Whale" by Herman Melville (1851) *

"The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass" by Frederick Douglass (1845)

"Native Son" by Richard Wright (1940) *

"New England Primer" by anonymous (1803)

"New Hampshire" by Robert Frost (1923)

"On the Road" by Jack Kerouac (1957) *

"Our Bodies, Ourselves" by Boston Women's Health Book Collective (1971)

"Our Town: A Play" by Thornton Wilder (1938) (I've at least seen it performed. Does that count for something?)

"Peter Parley's Universal History" by Samuel Goodrich (1837)

"Poems" by Emily Dickinson (1890) *

"Poor Richard Improved and The Way to Wealth" by Benjamin Franklin (1758)

"Pragmatism" by William James (1907)

"The Private Life of the Late Benjamin Franklin, LL.D." by Benjamin Franklin (1793)

"The Red Badge of Courage" by Stephen Crane (1895)

"Red Harvest" by Dashiell Hammett (1929)

"Riders of the Purple Sage" by Zane Grey (1912)

"The Scarlet Letter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)

"Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" by Alfred C. Kinsey (1948)

"Silent Spring" by Rachel Carson (1962)

"The Snowy Day" by Ezra Jack Keats (1962) *

"The Souls of Black Folk" by W.E.B. Du Bois (1903)

"The Sound and the Fury" by William Faulkner (1929) *

"Spring and All" by William Carlos Williams (1923) *

"Stranger in a Strange Land" by Robert E. Heinlein (1961)

"A Street in Bronzeville" by Gwendolyn Brooks (1945)

"A Streetcar Named Desire" by Tennessee Williams (1947) *

"A Survey of the Roads of the United States of America" by Christopher Colles (1789)

"Tarzan of the Apes" by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1914)

"Their Eyes Were Watching God" by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)

"To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee (1960)

"A Treasury of American Folklore" by Benjamin A. Botkin (1944)

"A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" by Betty Smith (1943)

"Uncle Tom's Cabin" by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852) *

"Unsafe at Any Speed" by Ralph Nader (1965)

"Walden; or Life in the Woods" by Henry David Thoreau (1854)

"The Weary Blues" by Langston Hughes (1925)

"Where the Wild Things Are" by Maurice Sendak (1963)

"The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" by L. Frank Baum (1900)

"The Words of Cesar Chavez" by Cesar Chavez (2002)

Book Club Party Time

So tonight was my friend's book club discussion about LITTLE SUN. Remember how absolutely excited I was? That's why this post gets four excitement stars. (Plus, they're just fun.) Anyway, tonight was so amazingly fun. And probably, in part, for very dorky and possibly egocentric reasons, but I don't really care. I'm still riding the high.

Tonight was the first time this book club had an author attend their discussion, and they were very interested in the writing process. And, frankly, it was fun to talk about. How often are people super interested in something you've done and ask questions and let you talk about it for an hour and half? Maybe that happens to you all the time, I don't know. But tonight it was awesome.

They wanted to know how long it took me to write, how I came up with the idea, if I had to map out a floor plan of the main character's house (yes, yes I did), among other things. My friend who was hosting also mentioned that they like to make some kind of food and try to tie it in with the book of the month somehow, and she had us guess what she made. People were tossing out ideas and it was fun to hear how familiar they were with the book, and I also realized how much I wrote about food. But she didn't choose any of those dishes. She made a dessert called "Death By Chocolate" because death is a major theme in the story, obviously. I totally, geekily loved that.

It was also so fun to really discuss the book, what things meant, different themes, what people understood from it, and how they imagined the characters. I learned A LOT, and I have ideas for some changes to make it better. And like I said, it was so fun to talk about it with people who were so familiar with the story. They knew the characters almost as well as I did, and that warmed my heart.

They were also curious about the publishing process and where things stand. After I told them, it made me want to get more queries out there and to keep trying. I've taken a long break, but I was motivated to get back at it.

The whole experience was thrilling, and it made me excited to be an author and proud of what I had done. Best of all, they seemed to genuinely enjoy the book. An evening very well spent.

Mediocre March

So yeah. The title says it all. Mega March did not go as planned. I knew my goals were lofty, but wow. I so didn't get as much done as I thought.

But that doesn't mean I did nothing. I did more research and organized my research notes (which was awesome), I outlined the first couple of chapters, and I even spontaneously wrote half of the first chapter one night. So that's something. I haven't sat down and pumped out a night of writing like that in a while, and it was fun to remember what it feels like. It IS fun, and more ideas come as I go. I need to remember that when my ideas start to run dry. I feel like it's been so long since I've really worked on LITTLE SUN that I don't remember how to do it anymore. But this half chapter reminded me.

So all was not lost. But there's plenty more to do. Here's to Awesome April.

What have I been reading lately?

So much on this blog has been about writing, obviously, but a huge part of my writing life is reading—or what I like to call "research." (Mostly I read because I like it, but sometimes I do it to learn.)

Lately, it seems like my interests have been kind of random, but I've had a good run over the last few months and have read several I could easily recommend.

Crispin by Avi. A three-book YA series set in medieval England about a poor, orphaned peasant boy who's on the run. Much of the story happens with him running and hiding in the forest—several forests—starving and cold. After reading this for a while, I got so I was loudly encouraging him to steal and plunder. I just felt so sympathetic. And I slept so much better the night I read that he found a brand new set of clothes on a dead man and stole them. He was finally warm. Avi had me at The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, which I haven't read since I was maybe 12, but I remember absolutely loving it then, and Crispin was fun too.

Extraordinary Knowing by Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, Ph.D. My dad handed me this book one day and told me I should read it, in case there was anything in it I could use for my book, and I totally appropriated a line from the prologue soon thereafter. I did tweak it, so I don't feel as guilty... But the whole book is fascinating. It's about "anomolous knowing," or knowing something but not having any rational reason why. It discusses ESP, telepathy, government "remote-viewing" experiments (where they had people with these special gifts legitimately finding out classified information for them), and how scientists grapple with these ideas when there is real proof. Some of the medical accounts were especially interesting—doctors who knew special ways to help people but were scared to tell anyone about it because it wasn't "scientific." So interesting to read about this from a scientist's perspective. I really liked the writing—it was indeed sciency but still very readable.

The Summer I Learned to Fly by Dana Reinhardt. This was a fun story about teenage adventure and friendship. The main character's father had passed away and she finds an old journal of his, a book of lists, and one of my favorite parts is how this is the way she comes to know him. Very fun. It was clever and a quick, enjoyable read.

Little Bee by Chris Cleave. This one was great. Some heavy themes and some offensive language, but the writing was especially amazing and made me envious on several occasions  It was one of those where you say, "That's such a cool way to say that!" on nearly every page. I learned a lot about dual perspective (and a lot from the author interview in the back, actually), and it has one of the craziest non-linear but sort of linear timelines ever. The way the story unfolds is as clever as the story itself.

East by Edith Pattou. I'm not normally a huge fantasy reader—and, honestly,  I think of it as more of a fairy tale rather than fantasy—but I LOVED this book! It's a retelling of the Norse version of Beauty and the Beast, where a girl falls in love with a polar bear. *** Disclaimer: Whatever you do, do not watch a film version of the fairy tale because it is free on Netflix and you have read the book (The Polar Bear King) to your daughter because it is WEIRD. And campy and dubbed and pretty awful. *** But back to the book. I just thought it was a fun story and quite a page turner. A serious page turner. And those are just good fun, sometimes.

So what have YOU been reading lately?

Word News

A couple interesting things in the world of words happened recently. First, March 4th was National Grammar Day. I know you were probably all out celebrating, but I came across this post on Cake Wrecks and was nerdily delighted by it.

http://www.cakewrecks.com/home/2013/3/4/grammar-geeks-unite.html

Also, the use (or misuse) of the word "literally" has always been an entertaining point of discussion, so I found this Slate article rather interesting and wanted to share.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/03/06/literally_definition_has_changed_over_the_years_dictionaries_recognize_this.html

And in case you were wondering, my goals for March are coming along horribly, thank you very much. (I should note for future reference to not make such lofty goals and then leave town. The goals did not fare so well that week, but I sure had a good time.) But all is not lost! There are still 10 days left in the month! That's enough time to get something done . . .