Archive for the 'Books' Category

Don’t miss “Sisters Singing” anthology of women’s writing

Published
by
beccataylor
1 year, 5 months ago
in Books
. 0 Comments

Another first for me this week! My first published book review is available at the Story Circle Network Book Reviews web site.

I love this book. Sisters Singing: Blessings, prayers, art, songs, poetry and sacred stories by women is an awesome collection of spiritual and soulful women’s writing. It’s broken into ?? sections: White Lotus, Ode to the Mother, Song of a Luscious Wench, Everyday Offerings, The Coming of Grace, I am Nothing without My Dead, Songs of My Sisters, In the Oak Grove, In Praise of Water, In the Name of Raven, and Prayers for My World.

Um, can I say that now I totally want to be a Luscious Wench? You don’t want to miss that poem, titled “Song of a Luscious Wench,” on page 65. Some other favorites of mine (dogeared and marked) are: “Circle of Women,” “Avalon Priestess,” “When I am Silent,” “What the Moon Knows,” “Prayer for What Must be Done Next,” and “Prayer of Thanksgiving.” And so many more spoke to me that I can’t excerpt them here. Just take my word for it and buy the book. You won’t regret it!

HerStories Memoir Challenge

Published
by
beccataylor
1 year, 7 months ago
in Books and Current Reading
. 1 Comment

badge-memoirbookchallenge-125x125Over at Telling HerStories, we’re hosting a book challenge that starts on January 1. The challenge is to read four women’s memoirs in 4 months. I’m having a hard time settling on my list, primarily because I really want to find a good woman’s memoir on spirituality. I’ve found plenty of titles about journeys in Christianity, but I want something more focused on a perspective of the feminine divine or even on earth religions. So, assuming I don’t find such a title, here is my list of four books for the HerStories Memoir Challenge.

  1. Mosaic: Pieces of My Life So Far by Amy Grant
  2. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
  3. A Year by the Sea: Thoughts of an Unfinished Woman by Joan Anderson
  4. Grace (Eventually) by Anne Lamott

1% Well-Read Challenge

Published
by
beccataylor
2 years, 2 months ago
in Books
. 1 Comment

Since I’ve been participating in Booking Through Thursday, I’ve found about a dozen book blogs I read regularly. Lots of these blog authors are participating in reading challenges. So far I’ve managed to stay away, figuring I didn’t need yet another thing to keep me busy. ;) But I ran across a challenge today that really grabbed me: the 1% Well-Read Challenge. From the challenge web site:

The goal of this challenge is to read 10 books in 10 months from the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list. For you non-math people, 10 out of 1001 is approximately 1%, hence the title. The challenge will run from May 1, 2008 through February 28, 2009.

According to a nifty spreadsheet provided by Arukiyomi, I’ve only read 25 of these books, or 2.50%. And, statistically speaking, as a western female, I need to read 20 books per year in order to check off all of the books on the list.

So, figuring I won’t read all 1001 of these books (I’m sure I’ll find others!), I figure the 1% challenge is workable. :)

Using the nifty spreadsheet and relying on fate, I ran a random number generator and came up with these 10 books:

  1. The Names by Don DeLillo
  2. The Inferno by Henri Barbusse
  3. Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson
  4. Everything You Need by A.L. Kennedy
  5. Mrs. ‘Harris Goes to Paris by Paul Gallico
  6. Unless by Carol Shields
  7. The Sea by John Banville
  8. A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham
  9. Billy Budd, Foretopman by Herman Melville
  10. Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey

I haven’t read any of the books that fate (and random.org) chose for me, so I’m really looking forward to this! And bonus–some of these are available for Kindle! :)

Booking through Thursday with manual labor

Published
by
beccataylor
2 years, 2 months ago
in Books
. 1 Comment

Writing guides, grammar books, punctuation how-tos… do you read them? Not read them? How many writing books, grammar books, dictionaries—if any—do you have in your library?

Who-whee, this is when a grammar nerd like me gleefully claps her hands! *squee* :D I have writing guides, grammar books, punctuation how-tos, all coming out the wazoo. What don’t I have? And I still don’t have enough. *sigh* Good times. Here’s a section of my shelf devoted to writing books:

Writing books

I have text books from my technical communication courses–tomes on usability, information architecture, document design, editing, publication management. So, they’re what some people would consider dry and boring educational books on writing, creating documents, and managing their production.

I have books on the art and practice of writing, like Bird by Bird. Books on grammar, like Eats, Shoots & Leaves, and books on language, like Speaking Freely. Books on unleashing your creativity, like the Artist’s Way. Books about how writers write, like Journal of a Novel about how John Steinbeck used letters to spark his writing. And buried somewhere in me is a novelist, so I have several books on writing novels.

Now, as I sit writing this post, I realize that most of these books have just been skimmed, not read and thoroughly enjoyed. Shame on me! I really need to take more time to feed my writing soul, and stop starving it because I’m too busy focusing my energies on mundane realities like washing laundry or watching mindless TV. Thankfully, I’ve begun feeding my reader’s soul again after a long dry spell. Who knew Booking Through Thursday could be therapeutic?! :)

P.S. The compulsive organizer and list-maker in me is twitching because I’ve realized that I haven’t cataloged my writing books in my LibraryThing catalog yet. Ack! I sense a weekend project coming on…

Booking Through Thursday with an emergency

Published
by
beccataylor
2 years, 2 months ago
in Books
. 4 Comments

Quick! It’s an emergency! You just got an urgent call about a family emergency and had to rush to the airport with barely time to grab your wallet and your passport. But now, you’re stuck at the airport with nothing to read. What do you do??

And, no, you did NOT have time to grab your bookbag, or the book next to your bed. You were . . . grocery shopping when you got the call and have nothing with you but your wallet and your passport (which you fortuitously brought with you in case they asked for ID in the ethnic food aisle). This is hypothetical, remember….

Ah ha! Remember all that time I spent agonizing over whether I would like having an e-book reader? I wondered if I’d miss the feel of turning the pages, the heft of the paper in my hands, the smell of the book. After all, you lose those things with a Kindle. But what you lose in nostalgia you gain in convenience.

I now carry 23 books and 2 magazines with me wherever I go, with access to 115,000 (and counting) more within minutes. I’m a mood reader–I like to carry several books with me so I have something interesting no matter my mood or inclination. That can make a suitcase very heavy!

And I’m lazy, I’ll admit that. If I have to choose from sitting in my hard-won chair close to my gate or hiking through the craziness of the terminal to a cramped newsstand with a cranky clerk, I’ll take the former. It would take longer to walk from my departure gate to the newsstand than to download a new book on my Kindle.

So although I sincerely hope to never have to rush from the grocery store to the airport for a family emergency, at least I know my bibliophilia can be sated since I carry my lovely Kindle in my purse. My portable collection of digital books will tide me over until I can bask in the comfort of my paper books at home.