Saturday Miscellany – 8/29/15

Only two posts this week, and three half-written drafts. That’s primarily due to: The Van by Roddy Doyle being harder to write about than I expected, a higher-than-normal level of short-attention span from me, and my daily schedule’s shifted recently and I’m sleeping more. Which is good for me, bad for writing.

But who cares about that? Here are the odds ‘n ends over the week about books and reading that caught my eye. You’ve probably seen some/most/all of them, but just in case:

• Not like I need to be convinced, since it’s basically been a part of every day of my life since I can remember, but it’s always nice to have some justification: The Hidden Benefit of Reading Before Bed.
• In light of the continuation of Stieg Larsson’s series, the CBC asks: The Girl in the Spider’s Web: Is it OK to resurrect a dead author’s fiction? — all in all, a pretty decent and balanced take on the topic as a whole
• BookBub blog has a nice run-down: Here’s How Much the ‘Harry Potter’ Covers Have Changed Over the Years, and once again, I’m tempted to go run out and buy the 15th anniversary set, just for the artwork.
• Speaking of covers, have you Played Judgey?
• MysteryPeople has a Q&A with Brad Parks — for some inexplicable reason, I haven’t read his new one. Still, good interview, worth reading while I wonder what’s wrong with my reading schedule.
• National Dog Day was a couple of days ago, and by an amazing coincidence, I stumbled upon a couple of lists of books about dogs:
  • The Guardian’s Top 10 dogs’ stories — has a bunch of the more literary variety.
  • BookBub Blog has 12 Books That Will Make You Love Dogs Even More — more popular-level, and probably more heart-tugging. I’ve read some of these, I’ve wanted to read a couple more, and have just added a couple of others to my TBR pile.
• Chuck Wendig and The Once & Future Podcast have an important reminder for us all.
• (this is possibly my favorite link that I’ve posted:) An Absolutely Serious Analysis of BUT NOT THE HIPPOPOTAMUS — Once upon a time, I had this book memorized. My two oldest kids lived off of this book.

This Week’s New Releases I’m Excited About and/or You’ll Probably See Here Soon:
• X by Sue Grafton — among other things, this answers the question I’ve been asking for years (even before I started the series), “What ‘X’ word is she going to use?”. I’m sure there’s a decent mystery novel involved, too. #24 is here, folks.
• Randoms by David Liss — A Cline/Scalzi-ish YA SF adventure. Looks pretty cool.
• Koko the Mighty by Kieran Shea — this looks like a lot of fun, wish I’d seen the release of the first in this series last year. Time to catch up.

Lastly, I’d like to say hi and welcome to Lagniappe Literature for following the BookLikes version of the blog this week.