Saying Goodbye, Turning Over a New Leaf, and Other Bookish Randomness

It's Sunday, and I've been stocking up on some bookish randomness all week long. A blogger who, you know, stays home once in a while and writes some posts would perhaps divide this all up and write lots of little posts, but you know me, and I'm going to combine it all into one big one. You get a lot of bang for your buck here at Leafing Through Life. It's okay, you can thank me later.

First off, I was really saddened to hear of Brian Jacques' passing this week. Oftentimes when an author passes, their name is familiar to me, but their work is not, but I grew up with Jacques' Redwall series. They were among the first books I ever tried to get my parents to read because I was so taken with the stories of Redwall Abbey and it's characters. These books are brimful of action, adventure, love, valor, and a treasure trove of unforgettable animal characters not to mention epic feasts of the most delicious-sounding foods. Thankfully I fell behind in the series, so I've got a good many still left to read, but the world has lost a great storyteller in Brian Jacques. Matt London says it way better than I can in his Personal Reflection on Brian Jacques on Tor.com.


Consider yourself duly forewarned. I've done a goofy thing that I'm pretty sure I don't regret. I accepted a children's picture book for review. I wasn't going to. I didn't even mean to. I intended to politely refuse, but when I took a look at the cover photo of Peachtree Publishing's Three Hens and a Peacock I got all mushy inside and began whining to myself, "Aw, but I like picture books. I miss them, and it looks really pretty, and it will probably be all kinds of nostalgic fun even though people that read my blog will probably be all like wha??" So I took Emily from Peachtree up on her generous offer of a review copy and will (probably temporarily) be turning over a new leaf (a new leaf? Get it? LOL!) and reviewing it here. I'll post the review other places, too, so that it'll get more mileage than my likely limited children's book reading following here. But come on, look at it. Who could refuse a face like this?





Last but not least in my treasure chest of bookish randomness, are you using Edelweiss? If not and you're the kind of blogger/reader who's interested in finding out what's forthcoming from your favorite publishers, whyever not? A few weeks ago after a serendipitous moment on Twitter, I requested a demo of this online collection of publisher's catalogs. Joe Foster spent a half an hour or so showing me the ins and outs of using the site's many features to scope out forthcoming books, tag them for later reference, filtering the ones of interest, and so on (Thanks again, Joe!). Ever since, I've been gleefully perusing many publishers' spring/summer offerings, tagging books for Waiting on Wednesday posts, adding to my unwieldy wishlist, and using it as a reference point whenever I hear any stirrings of a new book by an author I like. I'm sure that's just the tip of the iceberg, though. If you're interested in what's upcoming, you should definitely be checking out Edelweiss. Need a little help figuring out how to use it? Check out Joe's excellent guest post at The Book Lady's Blog for the nuts and bolts and you'll be ogling exciting new books in no time.

That's all in bookish randomness for today. Hope your week is full of great books and many hours of great reading!

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