It seems an age since I did a Weekend Miscellany, doesn’t it? But it’s back – and I’ll be spending my Saturday in London playing bookish board games with blogging folk! I’m not exactly sure who’ll be there, I think it might be a select few of us, but of course I’ll report back in due course – and if it’s a success, perhaps we’ll get some more people involved next time. My gift to you is, instead, a book, a link, and a blog post…
1.) The blog post – over the past three or four weeks I’ve seen so many blog posts that I wanted to draw your attention to, and vowed that they would be the one I’d choose. I thought I’d dedicate a whole post to saying how wonderful these posts are. And naturally I’ve forgotten nearly all of them – but I *do* remember one. Over a month ago, Hayley wrote a fab post entitled ‘A sweeping family saga set against the background of a dystopian future…‘ Basically, it’s about blurbs and recommendations which put you off books… I adore this sort of discussion; go over and add your own thoughts. I’ll kick off: ‘It’s Ireland in 1880…’
Oh, and I must say thanks to everyone who participated in my One Book, Two Book meme – I loved seeing them pop up everywhere, and got quite peculiarly excited about seeing something I started spread across blogs – as well as fill my head with recommendations.
2.) The link – is to this idea about posting photos of your bookshelves to Flickr, and telling the world a bit about them – as well as gazing at other people’s bookshelves, of course. The article emailed to me by my friends Lucy and Debs – thanks guy!
3.) The book – of all the review books which have arrived at my door in the last month, requested or unsolicited, the one I’m most excited about is Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi, which came courtesy of Picador. I loved The Icarus Girl; I was baffled by White is for Witching; I still haven’t read The Opposite House. But I think Oyeyemi is a rare talent nonetheless, and now she’s turned her attention to a 1938 novelist whose imaginary muse turns up… well, I’m sold. It also reminds me that I have Barbara Comyns’ novel, also called Mr. Fox, waiting to be read.
I posted a photo to the Guardian's flickr group on Thursday, and the response has been overwhelming. Not only is it great to see other people's bookshelves and what they read and how they display or organise their books, but I've had lots of nice feedback myself.I can only emphasise the potential of that site. I've also had about 10 times the normal number of visitors to the blog since.
The library has The Icarus Girl so me booking it right away!
thanks for the link to the discussion over at Desperate Reader. it was an interesting post, for sure.
and i loved your One Book, Two Book idea. it was rather brilliant and i had fun with it! it was great to see the response from the blogging community, too. lots of great books to add to the TBR pile.
It was good to see your little meme popping up all over the place on blogs.
Did you realise what you had started?
Does that game exist?!?! I must have it. I love the idea of looking at other people's bookshelves. I'll go check that out right now.
Katyn – what fun! I don't have a flickr account, so I haven't joined in…
Mystica – enjoy!
Lisa – you're welcome :) It was lovely to see it everywhere.
Jo – I must confess, when I thought of it I thought it might get somewhere, because it was easy but interesting, but I wasn't expecting so many, and from people I'd never heard of!
Ash – well, we played, and it is impossible! So difficult… but fun.