Saturday Miscellany-8/24/19

Gotta make this quick, off to the Boise Library!’s annual Comic Arts Festival to hopefully not spend all my spare change.

After a blunder last week that probably caused a little unintentional offense, I’ve tweaked my template for this post (specifically, the placeholder text). Invariably, when I do that, something goes awry—if something looks odd, would someone drop a line?

A pretty eclectic mix this week, hope you enjoy these odds ‘n ends about books and reading that caught my eye. You’ve probably seen some/most/all of them, but just in case:

• ‘My nerves are going fast’: The Grapes of Wrath’s hard road to publication—As with many books that have entered our zeitgeist, it’s hard to imagine that they didn’t exist/weren’t published easily and with great fanfare. Interesting read about a book I’ve read at least two too many times (and probably won’t again).
• In defense of reading the same book over and over again—As someone who finished the Potter series (again) last week, maybe this seems a little self-justifying, but whatever. I also just finished a re-read of a book I don’t remember liking at all (liked it somewhat this time…).
• We Did It For The LOLs: 100 Favorite Funny Books—This is a great list, I should make this a reading list for 2020. 99 of them, anyway—gotta skip the Jeeves/Wooster.^*
• ” A thread on why book snobbery isn’t cool, how it harms the publishing industry, and why it discourages reading.”—Some good stuff here (a little flummery, too)
• Curing Homesickness with Crime Fiction: Crime fiction can take us outside ourselves—and in resolution, return us home.—The central premise here is fantastic. Gonna have to add Elkay Ray to my TBR list.
• Narrator Interview: Kathleen Wilhoite—In honor of Where’d You Go, Bernadette hitting theaters, Libro.fm reposted this great interview with Wilhoite, the narrator of the audiobook (one of my all-time favorite audiobooks, I’ll add)
• Ender’s Game – Where Do We Go From Here?—I bet my list of issues with OSC is different than Tabler’s, but she raises an important question in our current climate. There are a myriad of people you could insert the name of here rather than OSC, too. If I only read/bought/blogged about people I agreed with/liked/would vote for/would let my daughter marry, I’d have more money and a lot more time on my hands…
• Why Hype Is Overrated and Unpopular Opinions Are Not That Unpopular—thanks to a recent follow, I’ve spent some time on Bookidote.com this week (and could easily spend a lot more). Things like this are why.
• Defining Terms: “I liked it, but didn’t love it.”—I try not to use this phrase, but I do (and could much more frequently).
• Book Characters That I’d Like as Best Friends—I’ve only read one of these on the list (and I don’t think we’d be good friends, but great acquaintances), but I like the idea of the post.
• How Do You Remember What You Read?—something from Bookidote that was on my list for this week before I realized it was on Bookidote (not trying to stuff the ballot box)

^*Yes, I threw that in just for Bookstooge’s reaction. To play along, watch the comments.

A Book-ish Related Podcast Episode you might want to give a listen to:
• Episode Eighty Five – Steve is Live from North Carolina with Adrian McKinty—I shouldn’t have listened to this at work, I probably got a couple of strange looks from laughing. It’s one thing to read Adrian McKinty’s story about The Chain, it’s another to hear him tell it. He is a riot (and, as usual, when Steve Cavanagh isn’t increasing my blood pressure through his prose, he’s laugh-inducing, too)

This Week’s New Release that I’m Excited About and/or You’ll Probably See Here Soon:
• The Warehouse by Rob Hart—The Real Book Spy says: ” Set in the confines of a corporate panopticon that’s at once brilliantly imagined and terrifyingly real, The Warehouse is a near-future thriller about what happens when Big Brother meets Big Business–and who will pay the ultimate price.” and that it has ” has legit best-book-of-the-year potential.”

Lastly, I’d like to say hi and extend a warm welcome to Tammy (great site logo), Curled up with a good book, Kathryn Speckels and ChadeeMañago for following the blog this week.