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Because Your To-Be-Read Pile Isn’t Already Toppling…
2011 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
…Team Bookrageous recorded an episode all about the books we picked up at fall trade shows and can’t wait to read. The good news: there are a ton of them! The even better news: most of them aren’t out until Spring 2012, so you have some time to get caught up.
Please listen, enjoy, subscribe, and let us know what you’d like to hear about in the future. Oh, and order your copy of Zone One from WORD to save 10% (put Bookrageous in the comments of your order) and be all set for the first Bookrageous Book Club.
Show notes, including links to all books discussed, after the jump. Read more
The Sunday Salon 10.30.11—The Nerd-Out That Wasn’t
2011 at 12pm Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
Over at Book Riot (where I write a weekly mash-up of literature and pop culture), we’re running a contest for the best story of a book nerd-out moment. You can win a $100 gift card to your favorite bookstore for sharing your story. Me? I’m just in a confessional mood, and I’m hoping that you, dear readers, can help me get over a certain hang-up I’ve been dealing with.
You see, I’ve had a wicked mad author crush on Nancy Pearl ever since The Husband (who was, back then, The Great-Gift-Giving Boyfriend) gave me a copy of Book Lust. If you’re not familiar with Nancy Pearl (and why the hell aren’t you?), she’s a turbocharged superawesome librarian whose books are the printed version of “If you liked this one book that everyone has heard of, you’ll also like these dozen other books that are just as good but much less well-known.” Seriously. That’s pretty much how they’re broken down, and it works.
So, I Finally Read THE PASSAGE
2011 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
You’d have to have spent 2010 in a bunker somewhere to not know that Justin Cronin’s The Passage was the Big Book of the year. Big in that it was ubiquitous in the way that, say, The Marriage Plot is right now and in that it was nearly as long as the also-currently-unavoidable 1Q84. Oh, and it was about vampires, sort of, and they were still (sort of) all the rage.
And that’s basically all I knew about The Passage. It was everywhere, and pretty much everyone I knew read it. Most of my friends loved it, though the ones who didn’t were fervent in their dislike, and I felt like I couldn’t win. If I read it and hated it, I’d have that awful feeling that I must have missed something vital, or worse, that I simply wasn’t up to understanding something about it, and if I loved it, I’d feel like I had to defend it (and by extension, my taste) to the ones who deemed it less than worthy. Add to all this the fact that I wasn’t really doing genre at the time, and you have the makings of an epic case of bookcrastination.
So I just left it languishing on my galley shelves. I saw it every time I moseyed over to select my next read. I picked it up and *almost* started it a few times. I even took it on two vacations. But I just couldn’t get excited about it. For a while, I thought this failure to launch was a result of the hangover from all the hype surrounding the book’s release. Despite the fact that I knew a great deal of the buzz about The Passage was genuine because it was coming from people whose recommendations and opinions I trust, there was so much talk about it that I was a bit turned off. I needed to put some space between all that chatter—and all those loaded expectations—and my experience with it.
The stars aligned last week, and I finally picked it up (and then promptly hunkered down), and you know what? It was pretty great. Not perfect, but perfectly enjoyable. Read more
You know you’re a book nerd when…
2011 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
You see a dress on a fashion reality show and the first things that come to mind aren’t “Wow, that’s cute, ” or “I think I’d make it a little bit shorter,” but “Hey, that looks just like the cover of this book I read!”
As if enough of my stories don’t already begin with, “So, I read this book…,” I give you Project Runway’s Viktor Luna and the We the Animals dress.
When was the last time your book obsession crept into your perception of something totally un-book-related?
For more books + pop culture fun, check out my Drop It Like It’s Haute column at Book Riot.
Beowulf, Jesuits in Space, and Some Underappreciated Books You Need to Read
2011 at 7am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
There’s a fine line between having a happy reading routine and getting stuck in a rut (not that I really have anything against a nice rut…I mean, I’m writing this from my couch, where this particular cushion happens to be molded to my rear end). If my adventures in genre have taught me anything this year, it’s that sometimes all you need to break out of the rut is a good recommendation from someone whose rut is different from yours.
Enter the good folks at Beyond the Margins and their monthly Page Turner feature, in which guest bloggers highlight books they love and want to call attention to. I’m thrilled to be there today with a post about four of my favorite underappreciated books. Hope you’ll pop over to check it out and discover all of the awesome things (and there are A LOT of awesome things) the incredible team at Beyond the Margins are doing.
