Fair Week Mish Mash

Phew - this week has been a real marathon, and it obviously hasn't been a marathon I've been running here in blogland. This evening finds me taking a break from the Sunday Scramble, which is my friendly term for my frantic efforts to catch up with everything from blog reading to cleaning in a few hours before the next work week starts, to actually write a post. Fair warning, the first part is me going on about my week, the second is the more bookish part. Choose one or read both (or run screaming in horror!), the choice is yours!

This week was Fair week. Yes, that's Fair with a capital F. You see, each year our town hosts the biggest fair in Pennsylvania starting, oh, usually the last Saturday in September and spilling over into October. One stat I heard this week is that it is the 22nd largest in the U.S. which isn't too shabby considering my town is pretty small. It so happens that I'm generally a lunatic about going to the fair, and this week I proved it with reckless abandon. I think 6 out of the 9 possible days to go, I was there eating deep fried foods, tour guiding fair newbies (mostly my co-workers), seeing Sugarland in concert (excellent!), and watching the Dock Dogs competition which is new to the fair (and also awesome!). What's more fun than devouring a dozen funnel cakes and watching a bunch of dogs jump really far off a dock into the water? Perhaps, you think many other things would be more fun. I, however, had a fantastic week, though I am totally beat. P.S. If you like dogs and the Dock Dog thing comes to some place near year, you should definitely see it. I could have watched for hours. I did watch for hours.

My freakishly extensive fair going didn't leave much time left over for reading, though I'm still plodding (and I mean plodding) through Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Angel's Game for the R.I.P. challenge. It's a little too easy to put down, but not so easy to put down that I would consider giving up on it. The jury's still out on it.

Despite my lack of a considerable amount of reading, more books did arrive at my house this week at a nice steady rate of about one per week day.

First came:



Intertwined by Gena Showalter. It's a giveaway win from Robin at My Two Blessings. I first read about through an ad on Shelf Awareness, where I ended up reading an excerpt from the first chapter. It's just the sort of fast reading guilty pleasure I need from time to time, I think.

Next came:



Black Angels by Linda Beatrice Brown - an ARC from Penguin. Susan at Bloggin' 'bout Books first tipped me off about this book with her excellent review, and I knew it was something I was going to have to read. It's her I've got to thank, in part, for the galley in my mailbox, too, so thanks Susan! =)

Up next:



2666 by Roberto Bolano. I've been curious about this one for a while. Thanks to Frances at Nonsuch Book and her Book Blogger Appreciation Week giveway, now I've got a copy which I will hopefully read when the big old Picador readalong thingy (which hasn't quite launched yet) comes along. Even though it's such a delicious looking read, it should definitely be good to have some conversation and encouragement (read: deadlines) to go along with it since at 893 pages it's quite a considerable tome.

And last:



Fat Kid Rules the World by K.L. Going from a a BookCrosser. I think I remember even from my pre-blogging days Susan from West of Mars just raving about this book, and so it's been sitting on my wish list. Now, I've got it, and let me tell you, it's accomplished quite an incredible feat. I nearly never start reading a book the moment I get it. It gets logged and then it goes to sit on the shelf gathering dust with the rest of its brethren for an indefinite amount of time until a not predetermined time. Well, Fat Kid Rules the World was waiting by the computer for its logging, and don't you know I read the first chapter? And then I read more, and more and I'm totally hooked. Troy the self-proclaimed Fat Kid has an incredibly engaging voice and it just took me right in. This should deepen my conviction that any book that has that Printz medal hanging out on the cover has a 99.9% chance of being totally awesome. Further gushing, I'm sure, to come.


In other news, I've been cruising the 24 Hour Readathon site from time to time thinking maybe, just maybe this will be the one where I actually read. I don't think I have any plans for the appointed weekend, so that's one road block out of the way. I don't think I'll probably be able to manage the whole thing without sleep - you don't even wanna know me without my 8 hours of sleep - but I could probably manage 16 or so hours...couldn't I? It would be a good chance to catch up on all the reading I've neglected, right? And play with all the book bloggers? Oh, I don't know. I'm such a committment-phobe. I need to go think about it a while. I'll probably sign up, like, the day before, or chicken out and settle for cheerleading....

First Comes Love, Then Comes Malaria by Eve Brown-Waite

Once upon a time, and you may remember this if you've been with me a while, before BBAW, I used to, you know, actually review a book from time to time. First Comes Love, Then Comes Malaria has been patiently waiting on my desk for an opportune time that just hasn't come. Its very presence there has been causing me a good deal of guilt and strife. So much guilt, in fact, that I found myself thinking the other morning in the shower about reviewing it, and then I began writing, in the confines of my barely awake mind, what I considered to be an excellent review. Now, I consider myself to be a great multi-tasker, but writing reviews in the shower simply poses some logistical difficulties that are rather impossible to overcome, which is why I'm sitting here now with barely an inkling left in my memory of what it was that I was going to say in my fantastic "barely awake mind review" which means we'll have to settle for this mediocre barely awake blog review.


Eve's joining of the Peace Corps was a long time coming. When the "I'll-be-joining-the-Peace-Corps" line begins to get a little thin, she knows it's time to finally go through with it. She's got one problem, though. She seems to be falling for her clean cut, "epitome of a good guy" Peace Corps recruiter, John. As her departure date nears, she wants less and less to follow through with her pledge to spend two years in a developing nation and more and more to stay with her one true love. Unfortunately, scrapping the Peace Corps probably means scrapping her relationship with John anyway, so it's off to Ecuador for Eve. Once there, she finds the experience to be even less rewarding than she expected as she has more than a little difficulty convincing people to actually put her to work. Finally, she finds a niche taking homeless boys back to their families, but soon after an unexpected tragedy reveals a secret from her past that has her returning to states and her future husband.

The meat of this book, though, is when John takes a job with CARE in Uganda. Here Eve's committment is put to the test as she is forced to take a chance on another developing country and adjust to life in a rural Ugandan outpost noted for its excess of guerilla activity. Here Eve will learn that compared to everyone else she is rich, gigantic bugs are a daily reality, and malaria is much easier to come by than a telephone.

Brown-Waite has an easy, conversational writing style that invites us into a very troubled African nation without simply focusing on the trouble. Brown-Waite truly brings the people of Uganda to life for her readers. Her stories are often laugh out loud funny and point out the quirks and celebrate the culture of a nation, that though struggling, seems to be filled with an unexpectedly optimistic, joyful people. Unlike many memoirs of Africa, Brown-Waite's manages to reveal the many issues facing Uganda without marinating us in a dark, dismal reflection on the "unsolveable" problems of a nation afflicted with extreme poverty and disease.

First Comes Love, Then Comes Malaria is a captivating and heartfelt love story of how Eve Brown-Waite fell first for a man and then for a nation. Brown-Waite's journey from inept bush housewife looking for a purpose to a thriving expat with a passion for this rather backward Ugandan community was a pleasure to read. Here's hoping that she is already busy writing about her adventures in Uzbekistan and beyond, as I would gladly go along for the ride!

Weekly Geeks: Burn Out?

This past week wrapped up Book Blogger Appreciation Week, in which I'm sure many of you participated. In two weeks will be Banned Books Week, in which I'm sure some of you also will participate. I'm also sure that many of you participated, and will participate, with at least a post per day, if not more, on your respective blogs.

Personally, after such weeks, I feel almost burnt out and think, "Why am I doing this? I'm not getting paid for this." Do you ever feel the same way after weeks like the ones mentioned above? If you do, what do you to counter it? How do you keep going? Do you take a break from posts after that, or do you just "soldier on"?

Or if you don't feel burnt out after such weeks, why not? Also why are you a book blogger? From what I've seen and experienced, it's certainly not the fame or the glory that you get. So what is it? Why? Why? Why?

What a timely question that will allow me to engage in some shameless mildly self-pitying navel-gazing! Honestly, I was thinking about this sort of thing as BBAW came to an end and we were asked to consider our goals. I had a great time with BBAW this year. I gave myself some extra time to spend, tried to participate more actively in the daily blogging themes, and it really paid off. I'm sure I discovered a bunch of great new blogs, and I had a great time getting out and about in the book blogosphere all week long.

That being said, though, as much as I enjoyed myself I found myself with a sort of underlying melancholy the whole week long. Even as I attempted to battle the feeling by entering a plethora of giveaways (if you're me, nothing beats bad moods like free sparkly new books!), I couldn't seem to shake it. Whenever events like this come along, I find that along with being excited and engaged, I also feel, well, not good enough. I see everybody's sparkly blogs with their zillions of reviews, their thought-provoking posts, their book reading totals at 100 or above for the year, their thoughtful and numerous comments on others' blogs, and I know I can't keep up, and then I wonder why I bother. What do I have to offer in the face of all that awesomeness? And I think this, and the fact that sometimes sustaining a blog along with all the other things that must be done on a day to day basis just begins to seem like an insufferable chore.

It's at these times that I'm most uninspired to write a good book review or comment on others' blogs. Why bother? I'm never going to have the time to do as good a job at blogging as I want to do, and something in my character just makes me hate doing things or feeling like I'm doing things only halfway. It's on these days, in a fog of undeserved self-pity, that I wonder if maybe I should just pack it in because I don't have anything better to offer here that hundreds of other book bloggers aren't already offering, and both my content and style are both sadly lacking in comparison to what blogs much much younger than my own are putting out. And hey, at almost two years old, this blog is already one of the things I've stuck with the longest of most of my extracurricular endeavors, so it wouldn't be so shameful if....

Ah, but wait, this is not a ploy to gather reassurances (really, it's not!) about the state of my blog and get everyone to tell me how awesome I am, and all that. As a matter of fact, I'd probably feel a little silly and more than a little guilty if you did. This is not a farewell post, not by a long shot, because, you see, I'm about to answer the second question, you know, the one about why I'm a book blogger.

Despite the fact that I don't read nearly enough of them, I love books. I love having them, I love knowing about them, I love making lists of them. I even love trotting out my poor neglected writing skills (use 'em or lose 'em, right?) to write reviews of them. Even so, I could love books all on my own, right? But I don't have to because, as it turns out, I love book bloggers, too. I love that there are all these people that get the same kick out of reading/listing/reviewing/owning books that I do, and I love...love that they're all so nice, and I know that if I really packed it in, I would miss them (you!) all dreadfully.

One book blogger whose giveaway I entered this week asked us for our favorite book blogging moment which got me to thinking, really thinking. I mean, the new bookish friends, the books I never would have read without them, the wider community pulling together in pursuit of bookish goals, are all great. After some consideration though, I remembered the very beginning of of 2008, when my blog was yet young, probably not yet 3 months old, when I posted about a most unfortunate beginning to the year. It had nothing to do with books or blogging, just me all sad and frustrated and ranting at length. Even then, when, if you ask me, people had little reason to care about me at all, a whole bunch of bloggers cropped up in my comments section with an unexpected show of sympathy and encouragement that warms my heart even now. Nobody had to do that. Nobody had to care about me and what I was going through then.

I'm sure we've all come a long way since then, but even so, that is the type of community that we had then and the type of community we continue to have now, the community that crazy weeks like this last one has been celebrate. At the end of the day, when you strip away the stats, the ARCs this or that person got, the reading totals, the impressive giveaways, the pretty layouts, that sort of community is what counts for me and sustains me and helps me soldier on when the blogging blahs come knocking at the door. And, that community *meaningful pause* that is why I have been and will continue to be proud to be a book blogger.

Library Thing's been...Pirated?!?

Okay, so, this may be the most ridiculous thing ever to make a blog post about, but I was over consulting LibraryThing as I often do, and about an hour ago it was all normal as can be. I returned shortly thereafter for yet more consulting and the entire site had been "translated" into pirate-talk, in honor of Talk Like A Pirate Day, I imagine, which is, I think, tomorrow. If you haven't seen it yet, it's definitely something to be seen.

Honestly, I laughed so hard, my mother thought I'd finally gone off my rocker, and if I'd been drinking a beverage, which I thankfully wasn't, it would have been...everywhere. I'm not sure if it's because it's really that funny or if I just need, like, a lot more sleep. You be the judge!

P.S. It's even better if you've got an account and you're logged in.

BBAW: Reading Habits

Whew! I'm a little late on this one, but today's BBAW activity is a little reading meme.

Do you snack while you read? If so, favorite reading snack?

Potato chips. I'm a potato chip junkie.

Do you tend to mark your books as you read, or does the idea of writing in books horrify you?

I'm too horrified by the thought of writing in books to answer this question. Okay, seriously though, I don't mind writing inside the front cover like inscriptions or Bookcrossing info, but the idea of marking within the text still kind of scandalizes me. I'm much more of a post-it note sort of girl.

How do you keep your place while reading a book? Bookmark? Dog-ears?

Definitely not dog-ears. Ugh! I have a ton of beautiful bookmarks but still somehow end up marking my place with whatever junk happens to be at hand - old receipts, junk mail, used post-it note reminders to self. When I do manage to have the presence of mind to actually use one of my spiffy bookmarks it's usually one that I won from Nymeth because they are so super cool (and she made them!).

Laying the book flat open?

Blargh!

Fiction, Non-fiction, or both?

Both, but probably a little more fiction.

Hard copy or audiobooks?

Hard copy. I never have managed the audiobook thing. My dad and I even took a road trip across the country, and none of the ones we picked out ever made it into the CD player.

Are you a person who tends to read to the end of chapters, or are you able to put a book down at any point?

Any point.

If you come across an unfamiliar word, do you stop to look it up right away?

Nope. I usually write it down and then lose it/forget to look it up. =P

What are you currently reading?

The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon and The Center of Everything by Laura Moriarty

What is the last book you bought?

Walking with the Wind by John Lewis for Amy's Newsweek 50 Books For Our Times Project thingy. And it's very long. And I think I might be insane. Maybe it'll be a really good massive tome. I hope....

Are you the type of person that only reads one book at a time or can
you read more than one at a time?

One in my bag to take to work and one at home. Lately I've been trying to have one ARC/review copy and one book from my considerable TBR pile going at once.

Do you have a favorite time of day and/or place to read?

I like to read during my lunch break and generally shun the company of others to do so. My best reading, though, probably happens either in my bed or on the front porch with a glass of lemonade on a beautiful day.

Do you prefer series books or stand alone books?

Stand alones. I have a bad habit of reading the first in series, enjoying it, and yet still failing to read the rest of said series.

Is there a specific book or author that you find yourself recommending over and over?

Hmmmm... The True Story of Hansel and Gretel by Louise Murphy. The Well and the Mine by Gin Phillips. How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff. Oh, wait, you only wanted one? ;-)

How do you organize your books? (By genre, title, author’s last name, etc.?)

I organize my books in such a way that the most will fit on the shelves. AKA - there is no organization, but "AHA! There is a hole big enough for this one!"