Thursday, August 3, 2017

Lit: Uniquely Portable Magic

Time again for the periodic "Lisa needs to clean up her saved links on Facebook" post. Let's see what I've got, shall we?


First up, a fun look at children's picture books from The Millions: Are Picture Books Leading Our Children Astray?  When I first saw the link, I wondered if someone seriously thought I'd screwed my children up by reading them Ferdinand The Bull and Caps for Sale!

Had you heard that PBS has ordered a new series called The Great American Read? It will feature people from all over the country talking about their favorite books and will culminate with a vote to choose American's best-loved books. Sadly, we have to wait until spring 2018 for it to start.

From Penguin Random House comes this list of 40 Books To Read Before You're 40. This poses a bit of a problem for me since I'm well past 40. Also, quite a lot of these books weren't even published before I was 40. Still, it's a good list to look at and maybe there's still time for you.

From The Man Book Prize page, comes the long-list of finalists for the 2017 prize. As usual, there are books on the list I haven't even heard of; but, unlike some years, I've actually read at least a couple of them.

Book Riot has given us their list of best books of 2017, so far (and looky, there are a couple of my faves so far this year) and The Millions has given us a list of books to look forward to in the second half of the year. I need to get over to Netgalley and see what I can pick up from this list.


From Literary Hub comes a list of 10 Famous Book Hoarders. Karl Lagerfeld, with his 300,000, might actually have a problem. Otherwise, I think these are just famous people who really like books. It does make me feel better about the number of books I have.

Riot New Media gives us a list of 25 Nonfiction Favorites Out Now In Paperback and Electric Lit gives us a list of 34 Books by Women of Color To Read This Year. Definitely adding at least a couple of these to the bookshelves. Quite a lot of these will be coming to my house sooner rather than later.

Books that actually did get added to my shelves last week:


Of course, I want to read all of them right now. Which would you read first?

Oh, yeah - guess what I did? I actually DNF'd another book. At better than 20% into The Locals by Jonathan Dee, the book didn't remotely seem to be about what I thought it was going to be about and I really, really did not like the narrator. I've already quit more books this year than I did in the five years before this. Pretty proud of myself!

4 comments:

  1. I avoided that 40 before 40 list because I figured it was a bit too late for me. Besides, it's just going to make me want to buy any that I have not yet read and I don't know if I can afford the shelf space anymore!

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    1. I know - and the list of books I already own or want to read is already so long it will take much of the rest of my life to read it even if I don't add another book!

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  2. Yay for DNFing a book! I'm getting better about it but it's hard to make myself do sometimes. Love all the book lists though this is dangerous for my productivity!

    You asked a question about feeling guilty about not buying books on my blog that I thought was interesting. It's definitely an issue I struggle with somewhat. I've never really been much of a new book buyer because I just couldn't afford it. Pre-kids I read about 200 books a year and even now I'm around 120 or so. Because I was only buying used books or getting books from the library NetGalley and review books just didn't feel all that different to me. Now that my budget is a little more forgiving it's something I've been thinking about a lot. I've been buying a lot more cozy mysteries and doing more pre-orders because the cozy market is really being slimmed down by publishers and I want to help my favorite authors get their numbers up. I've been thinking about buying more books for that same reason but lately I've been inundated with publisher requests and that's kept me from reading my own books and I'm getting quite the stockpile! I don't have quite the struggle with publisher requests and NetGalley because obviously the publisher finds it worthwhile to have bloggers read their books. So basically I do have some really mixed feelings about the review book thing but I'm not quite sure what to do about it all!

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    1. I do try to buy most of my book club books (if I didn't already own them) so I at least feel like I'm doing that much. I guess we just have to hope that we're reaching non-bloggers who will be interested enough after reading our reviews to go out and spend money on the books.

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