Booking Through Thursday: Illustrious

How do you feel about illustrations in your books? Graphs? Photos? Sketches?

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Obviously,  the illustrations/sketches/photos have to fit the topic of the book or else, why are they there?

I prefer my photos and such to be spread throughout the book. If I'm reading a history book, I like to have the photos stuck right in with the text instead of clumped together in a bunch of glossy sheets in the center of the book. I'm not a big fan of those big photo-clumps.

What about you? Do you like illustrations in your books?



 

Booking Through Thursday: Grammar

In honor of National Grammar Day … it IS “March Fourth” after all … do you have any grammar books? Punctuation? Writing guidelines? Style books?


More importantly, have you read them?

How do you feel about grammar in general? Important? Vital? Unnecessary? Fussy?

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In a way, I'm embarrassed to admit the answer to this question...

I have several grammar, writing and style books in my house. I have a few MLA guidebooks, a few AP stylebooks from my former life as a reporter, several grammar books and a bunch of other random writing and grammar books. Most of them come from my college years, where writing and style books often were required course books, but I keep them around because I think having references is important.

I don't refer to/read them particularly often, mostly because I've internalized many of the grammatical rules. I'm not being elitist here or anything, I just spent so much of my life writing and teaching others how to write that the rules just became second nature.

Grammar is incredibly important in my book. I cringe when I see misspellings and blatant grammatical errors in my reading, whether it be books, newspapers or blogs. I've been known to point out errors on signs and in advertisements to friends (Most notably, the "20 Items or Less" checkout at Wal-Mart - AHHH!). It bothers me when I hear obvious grammatical errors on TV and in movies, except when a character's background supports poor grammar. These people are professional writers and should know their stuff, but many don't.

Unfortunately, grammar is overlooked far too often in schools now. I have friends who went on to become teachers and were told, during their student teaching tenures, not to "worry" about proper grammar on papers. It was the ideas that supposedly counted. As a result, we have kids who cannot form coherent sentences but who spend so much of their time writing through text, instant message and blogs. It's just sad and makes me fear for the future of actual writing.

I could go on for a lot longer on this subject, but I will spare you all my grammar diatribe. In short, yes, grammar is vital and I strive to use proper grammar at all times.

Booking Through Thursday: Why I Read

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I’ve seen this quotation in several places lately. It’s from Sven Birkerts’ ‘The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age’:
“To read, when one does so of one’s own free will, is to make a volitional statement, to cast a vote; it is to posit an elsewhere and set off toward it. And like any traveling, reading is at once a movement and a comment of sorts about the place one has left. To open a book voluntarily is at some level to remark the insufficiency either of one’s life or one’s orientation toward it.”
To what extent does this describe you?

I don't feel as if this describes my reasons for reading whatsoever. I read because I enjoy learning about new people, places and things. I read because I want to be able, in some small way, to experience things so remote from my own life that I could never have knowledge of them first-hand.

I guess, though, if you view the desire for more knowledge or experiences different from your own to be an "insufficiency," because it technically is, then this quotation would describe me and all others who read.

Hmm... Two sides of the same coin... What do you think?

Booking Through Thursday: Olympic Reading

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You may have noticed–the Winter Olympics are going on. Is that affecting your reading time? Have you read any Olympics-themed books? What do you think about the Olympics in general? Here’s your chance to discuss!

I'm not big into sports at all, and we don't have any sort of a cable hookup on our TV, so I haven't watched a single second of the Olympics, and I don't plan to. If I did have a TV with cable hookup, I still probably wouldn't watch them.

What do you think? Is the Olympics influencing your reading at all?

Booking Through Thursday: Encouragement

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Suggested by Barbara H:


How can you encourage a non-reading child to read? What about a teen-ager? Would you require books to be read in the hopes that they would enjoy them once they got into them, or offer incentives, or just suggest interesting books? If you do offer incentives and suggestions and that doesn’t work, would you then require a certain amount of reading? At what point do you just accept that your child is a non-reader?

In the book Gifted Hands by brilliant surgeon Ben Carson, one of the things that turned his life around was his mother’s requirement that he and his brother read books and write book reports for her. That approach worked with him, but I have been afraid to try it. My children don’t need to “turn their lives around,” but they would gain so much from reading and I think they would enjoy it so much if they would just stop telling themselves, “I just don’t like to read.”

I think that, in order to encourage a reluctant reader, you have to make reading a major part of the home environment. Leave books all around the house, especially books that might be interesting to that child. Talk about books at the dinner table. Take weekly trips to the library or bookstore. Turn off the TV and computers for a certain amount of time each night and have the whole family read. For a really reluctant reader, get him/her engaged by reading books featuring favorite TV or movie characters (They're everywhere!) or read a book as a family and then watch the movie so you can talk about the differences. This last trick works really well with longer books such as the Harry Potter or Narnia series.

Personally, I think it's dangerous to force a reluctant reader to read. The likelihood that s/he will become resentful of reading as something that's forced is pretty high. It's a rare child who will be forced to read and then take off with it on his/her own. Instead, show the child how much fun reading can be. That'll speak volumes.
What do you think? How would you encourage a reluctant reader?

Booking Through Thursday: Winter Reading

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The northern hemisphere, at least, is socked in by winter right now… So, on a cold, wintry day, when you want nothing more than to curl up with a good book on the couch … what kind of reading do you want to do?

 I really don't have a preference when it comes to reading in inclement weather or when I'm stuck at home. I'm usually just so glad to be home and have the reading time that I'll read pretty much anything!

Of course, that's assuming that housework doesn't get in the way of my reading time. That's an all-too-common problem for me.

Booking Through Thursday: January 28, 2010

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Jackie says, “I love books with complicated plots and unexpected endings. What is your favourite book with a fantastic twist at the end?”

So, today’s question is in two parts.
1. Do YOU like books with complicated plots and unexpected endings?
2. What book with a surprise ending is your favorite? Or your least favorite?

Here's my answer, in two parts:

1. Yes, I do like books with complicated plots and unexpected endings. In fact, I prefer them to books with easy plots and predictable endings!

2. The books that have surprise endings that are my favorites are Kate Morton's two books, The House at Riverton and The Forgotten Garden. Although they're really not "surprise" endings in the sense that I never saw the ending coming at all, she leads the reader through enough twists and turns that, by the time you get to the ending, you're not sure you've figured it out.
What about you? Do you like surprise endings?

Booking Through Thursday - Favorite Unknowns

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Today, I'm procrastinating on writing reviews of the two books I finished yesterday by doing a Booking Through Thursday first. Yes, yes, I know: Work before play. However, I just can't seem to wrap my head around the reviews at this moment, so hopefully this will help clear the pipes.

Who’s your favorite author that other people are NOT reading? The one you want to evangelize for, the one you would run popularity campaigns for? The author that, so far as you’re concerned, everyone should be reading–but that nobody seems to have heard of. You know, not JK Rowling, not Jane Austen, not Hemingway–everybody’s heard of them. The author that you think should be that famous and can’t understand why they’re not…

I read a lot of classics, so finding an "unknown" author is kind of difficult for me. However, there were two or three that sprang to mind. They're all kind of well-known, but they aren't the big bestsellers that I think they should be.

Kate Morton

I first got a copy of Kate Morton's The House at Riverton through an ARC program
on Barnes & Noble's Web site. It hadn't come out in the United States yet, but we were asked to read and participate in a book discussion.I loved how she writes what I call "family mysteries" -- You know, those books about skeletons in everyone's closet and one person is trying to figure it out -- instead of a traditional murder mystery. More my style.

She draws the reader in with some great dialogue and even more fascinating characters. And, once she's got you, she twists and turns the story so that, just when you think you've got things figured out, you start to question your judgment.

Her second novel, The Forgotten Garden, came out in the middle of last year and was just as fabulous and engrossing as the first. This one, though, had a little touch of magic and fairy tales which made it seem a little more fantastical, but no less real.

Luckily, everyone at my library I've given these books to have loved them.





Stephanie Kallos

I purchased Stephanie Kallos' second novel, Sing Them Home, for my library early in the fall. I had seen it in bookstores, and it kept popping up in my Amazon recommendations, so I took a look.

The premise sounded just off-the-wall enough for me to be interested -- A woman disappeared during a tornado several years ago, and her children must struggle to come to terms with her disappearance. It's got a little bit of fantasy, a lot of realism and a lot of great characterization.

The three children are all very different, and each deal with their mother's disappearance and the resulting change in family dynamics in their own way. Ultimately, though, it is their father's death that makes the siblings realize that they can't keep living in the past.

I'll admit, there were times when this book seemed as if it was going in too many directions. Kallos, however, sews things up nicely in the end.

I have since purchased her first novel, Broken for You, for the library, but haven't had the chance to read it.








Haruki Murakami

I know, I know... Murakami is pretty well-known across the book and reading world, so he doesn't technically count. However, I don't know a whole lot of people who read him, and I know people who read a lot of really obscure stuff.

I think a lot of what scares people off Murakami is that he tends to blend the fantastical and magical right in with the realistic, and his fantastical and magical is kind of out there.

Take Kafka on the Shore, the only book of his I've read to date (Although I do have at least one or two others sitting on my shelves, waiting). There are talking cats. There are ghosts. There's an Oedipal curse. But, the whole time, you're always left wondering: Is this really happening in the novel, or is it just one big hallucination?

The thing I really like about Murakami, at least from Kafka, is that he gives us a taste of Japan without it being Memoirs of a Geisha. It's subtle, but it's there.

Booking Through Thursday: Flaps

I've decided to join in on the Booking Through Thursday meme that I've seen on so many other blogs. For other responses to today's question, go here.


Suggested by Prairie Progressive:
Do you read the inside flaps that describe a book before or while reading it?

My answer: Yes, I read the flaps/backs of books before I read a book. If it strikes my fancy, I'll pick it up. If not, I won't waste my time with it, especially since there are so many other books out there I could be reading!

What about you? Do you read the flaps/backs of books?