by Charlene Teglia | Jan 7, 2011 | Uncategorized
So far this year, I’ve read The Tempest (Shakespeare Can Be Fun series) and I Shall Wear Midnight (Terry Pratchett, Discworld series). The Tempest is really so much richer in the original version so I’ll be reading that, too, but we wanted the kid-friendly book for the little readers in our midst. Then they can really get into the movie, which we’ll be buying since it never played locally (sob).
Also on my reading list:
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Dragon Bones (Hurog Series #1), Patricia Briggs
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Dragon Blood (Hurog Series #2), Patricia Briggs
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The Iron Duke, Meljean Brook
- Home for the Holidays, Rebecca Kelly
- Complete Book of Greek Cooking, St. Paul’s Greek Orthodox Church
- Garden Spells, Sarah Allen
- Frostfire, Lynn Viehl
- Spook Country, William Gibson
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Forgotten Skills of Cooking, Darina Allen
The Hurog books because I hadn’t gotten around to them yet, and it’s A. Patricia Briggs and B. dragons, what more do you need? Home for the Holidays because I need to get over my anti-inspirational fiction snit and also I expect it to be a very good story. The Iron Duke because steampunk is fun, Garden Spells because I’ve never read anything by her before and it caught my attention in the bargain books section, Spook Country because Gibson is always interesting. Frostfire because it is more Viehl and I think I’ve mentioned my Viehl-hoarding on the blog before.
For the nonfiction, I picked up The Complete Book of Greek Cooking because I love Greek food, there are no nearby Greek restaurants (unless we go to Seattle), and because it was one of two titles highly recommended for Greek cooking. I want to be more adventurous in the kitchen this year, and this book is a good start. Forgotten Skills, I’d read a review of and it sounded right up my alley for practical culinary techniques and also I’m interested in the history of food and time-honored ways of preparing it. When I got a book gift-card for Christmas, it was all the nudge I needed to go buy myself this hefty volume.
To kick off my year in writing, I’m doing a short project that is sort of a test-run for me to see if I enjoy writing the hot stuff enough after a break from it to come back to the Shadow Guardians. If not, I will have to retire that series because the whole basis is extremely erotic and trying to rework it as other has failed. Red Queen I’ve made peace with as a hot urban fantasy romance and I know I’m comfortable with that level. So, my test project will really help me determine the year’s work flow and future projects.
How are you starting your year of reading and/or writing?
by Charlene Teglia | Jan 5, 2011 | Uncategorized
My kids have always had wild imaginations and made up all kinds of fantasy tales. One of the worst effects of the oldest kid’s year in public school was that she stopped telling stories, stopped writing. This year we started off following the writing assignments in her curriculum, but pretty early on I dropped that in favor of simply getting her to write anything at all, on any subject she could get interested in.
Here we are at about the halfway point in the school year. Yesterday I gave her an assignment: write a story. It could’ve been a single page and that would have fulfilled the assignment. Instead, she wrote until her arm was tired. Then she wrote some more after she rested. She got up to write some more this morning and she’s still at it.
She has a princess, a prince, a servant, a witch, a guard, a rescue bird and a dragon in her cast of characters. They’ve been all over on wild adventures from flying to being lowered into a volcano.
I really don’t care that her story’s resolution includes a deus ex machina. She’s writing, and having a ball. She’s let her imagination loose in the world of story. That’s what I wanted her to relearn this year.
by Charlene Teglia | Jan 2, 2011 | Uncategorized
Last year, I decided to use Goodreads to track my year in reading. I logged books as I acquired them, tagged them as currently reading, to read, or read, and mostly remembered to mark them as read when I was done in a timely fashion.
The stats: I read 106 books, have 5 I’m currently reading, and 10 to read. Some of those aren’t finished yet because they’ve been in boxes for most of 2010. (I failed to log 2 of the books I read, both nonfiction, and I need to look up their exact titles in order to enter them.)
Books read: this was a pretty typical year for me in terms of what I read. Science fiction, fantasy, romance, urban fantasy, nonfiction, poetry, comics, mystery, thrillers, classics, YA. And one or two literary novels.
Some of those 100 plus books were borrowed from the library or gifts, but most were purchased, which is why we’re more and more buying just ebooks. See the boxes issue above; when you buy that many books a year and everybody else in the family is equally book-crazy, you either live with rooms made small by all the wall to wall bookcases or you start finding space-saving alternatives.
2010 was really the year we vowed as a family to start going electronic on media before it buried us.
On the plus side, young readers are adaptable; once the 5 year old figured out any new Berenstein Bears or Ivy and Bean books could be had just by hitting a button on the iPad, she’s been in book heaven. (No, we don’t let her hit the button. She’d buy 500 books in ten minutes.)
If you want to track your reading for 2011, Goodreads is a user-friendly way to do it. I will continue to use it this year.
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