Despite some beautiful Madison weather yesterday (almost 70 degrees!), I spent most of the day inside just reading because I feel like I have so much work to do! It was nice actually — I liked feeling like I was being a good student for a change. I anticipate another full day of reading and working ahead today, but with a break to get outside this afternoon.

The best part of yesterday  was that I finished reading two books I checked out for school research projects. I can’t remember the last day when I finished two books — that felt awesome! I don’t feel like doing full reviews of them, but thought they might be interesting for some people to hear about. The first is a short book about a feminist and home economics pioneer that I might write a magazine story about, and the second is for a presentation I’m prepping on how nonprofits and community organizations can work with the media.

Caroline Hunt: Philosopher for Home Economics by Marjorie East

Like I’ve mentioned, my magazine writing class this semester is focusing on food. I went to an exhibit on campus about the history of eating and found out a former Wisconsin professor, Caroline Hunt, was the person who wrote the first set of USDA nutrition guidelines in 1916.

As I read more about her, I discovered she was actually a pioneer in the field of home economics, advocating for a more intellectual approach to the discipline rather than simply practical (ie learning to cook and sew). One quote in particular sold me that she’d be interesting to write about:

I think there is a place for Home Economics in colleges — and that the purpose of this work should be to teach women the social significance of the control which they have over wealth, of the fact that they can determine to a large extent what shall be made and under what conditions it shall be made. I see no place for cooking and sewing in such courses except as they give an understanding of materials and processes.

She wrote than in the early 1900s, I think around 1908. What’s fascinating is that she was thinking about the social implications of consumption and wealth a long time ago, and it’s something we’re still talking about. I’m not sure yet where the story will go, but the book was a big help in laying out her biography and including a lot of her original writing.

Making the News: A Guide for Nonprofits and Activists by Jason Salzman

I read this book to help me prep for a presentation I’m doing for one of my classes on how community organizations can work with the media. I was originally just going to use the stuff I already know about how journalists work, but then decided having some more sources would be good (especially to help me with how tv news and radio news works).  I grabbed this one sort of randomly, but it turned out to be awesome.

I was really blown away by how accurate and helpful the book is. Salzman lays out a huge number of strategies that groups can use to work with the media — everything from planning effective events and protests to pitching feature stories to writing opinion columns. The book was written in 1998, but for the most part everything is still up-to-date. And all of his advice matches what I know about now a newsroom and news processes work. If you’re at all interested in working with the media, I feel like this is a must-read.

And What’s Up For Today?

More reading, I think. I have a book I need to finish for a review Tuesday as part of the Eco-Libris Green Books Campaign, plus a bunch of reading to do for my journalism in theory class and a presentation to get ready for. Then I have to work on writing my magazine story, researching articles for a couple final papers, and then I get to go hang out with friends outside for awhile — yay!

What book(s) did you finish this weekend? How was the weather — did you get to go outside and enjoy it?

I think the crazy kitten picture is going to be my default image for when the world is making me feel crazy — I love that picture

For whatever reasons, blogging has not been a top priority for the last week or so. I’ve had school and personal stuff and some general laziness and panic about the fact that it’s November — all things that have contributed to a general brain-freeze when it comes to writing posts and reading blogs. Excuses, excuses.

Right now, I have more than 600 unread posts in Google Reader, just from book bloggers. I’ve gotten better about not letting unread post counts bother me, but today that number is making me anxious! So I did a “Mark All As Read” for all of my book blogs folder because I need to start fresh.

That said, I know I missed some really great posts. So I’m asking you, dear readers, to leave me some links to visit. What was your best post over the last week? What’s the best post you’ve read from another blogger? Leave me a link and I’ll go read — I want to know what’s been happening!

Image Credit: eva101 on flickr

Welcome to the first day of The Classics Circuit for author Wilkie Collins! Over the next month you’ll be seeing posts reviewing a number of Collins’ books and talking about his life. You can follow this link to see a full list of classics tour spots over the next month.

I somehow got the honor of writing the first post of the tour which is really exciting! Instead of reviewing a book, I’m going to write a little about Wilkie Collins and his contribution to literature through the serial novel. And, I’m going to talk about how you can experience a serial novel today for free! Read on for details.

The History of the Serial Novel

The serial novel got its start in the 19th century when writers would publish their stories in installments in popular magazines. At the time, books were extremely expensive, so only the wealthy had access. Publishing in magazines opened up literature to a much more general audience. This is also part of the reason novels published serially are so long — the more chapters an author wrote, the more he or she was paid, so there was incentive to write a lot.

Charles Dickens is the author credited with advancing the serial novel and publishing a number of authors. Not everyone wrote well in the style, which required that “each installment must advance the plot and offer excitement and suspense.” Not all authors could write in the style because the pace of weekly writing was too demanding. But authors like Wilkie Collins appreciated and even thrived with the challenge.

Wilkie Collins and the Serial Novel

Wilkie Collins was one author who helped popularize the serial novel. Over the course of his career, Collins wrote 25 novels, along with short stories, plays, and non-fiction works. Collins had many of his novels published serially, thanks in part to his friendship with author Charles Dickens, whom he met in 1851. The two authors got along well and had a productive relationship.

Collins first started publishing serially by co-writing couple series of short stories with Dickens and other popular authors of the time — A House to Let in 1858 and The Haunted House in 1859. The Woman in White was published in that magazine in 1859, the same edition of the magazine as A Tale of Two Cities. This was Collins’ major break into the industry, and after that novel he was a household name. He continued to contribute serial novels to that magazine and others into his career. His other most famous work, The Moonstone, was published in 1868.

During the time they were developing the serial novel, Dickens and Collins learned a some of lessons. For example, they learned that the suspense of the novel needs to build over time. In one of his novels, The Dead Secret, Collins gave up the mystery in the first installment, which left readers without much reason to come back. He didn’t make the same mistake with The Woman in White which was probably what made it so successful.

Experience the Serial Novel Today

Although some recent authors have been publishing their work serially, the way I’ve been replicating the experience of a serial novel is through an e-mail/RSS service called DailyLit. At the site you can arrange to have an excerpt from a book e-mailed to you daily for a morning dose of good literature. For each book you can specify when to have it delivered, how often to have it delivered, and how long you’d like the excerpt to be.

About a month ago I started getting excerpts from The Woman in White. I figured reading a book that was originally published serially was a good way to start trying DailyLit. I’m on e-mail 40 of 286, so I’ll be finishing the book sometime next year We’ll see how trying to write that review will go!

So What’s Next?

I hope this e-mail sparked your excitement about Wilkie Collins and you’ll be looking for the rest of the stops on the tour for some books you can try reading. Or if you have the experience of reading a serial novel or using Daily Lit, let me know. Thanks for stopping by!

The “In Real Life” book club I’m a part of meet on Tuesday to talk about The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye by A.S. Byatt. The book is a collection a short fairy stories that we generally enjoyed, although we didn’t have a lot to say about it. I’ll have a review of the book up sometime soon, I hope

But when we went to decide on our next book, we ran into some questions. One person suggested we pick a book and movie combination. This was a great idea, but when it came to picking we had a really hard time!

I mean, we thought of some of the recent obvious book to movie adaptations — Atonement, Revolutionary Road, The Reader — but we kept discovering someone in the group had already read the book.We also briefly considered Little Children by Tom Perrotta and About a Boy by Nick Hornby, but I can’t remember why we didn’t choose those.

The pair we eventually decided on was Capote in Kansas: A Ghost Story by Kim Powers paired with the recent Truman Capote movie starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman. One person in the group has already read In Cold Blood, but the rest of us are going in with just a little background. I’m excited to see what happens — my copy of the book is already in the mail, yay!

But here’s where you all come in! If this book/movie pairing goes well, I think we’ll want to do it again. Since I don’t read a ton of fiction (and rarely pay attention to movies), I was a little useless coming up with ideas when we were brainstorming. So I figured I’d toss the question out to you all: What are some of your favorite book and movie pairs?

Image Credit: HeyPaul via Flickr

Title: French Milk
Author: Lucy Knisley
Genre: Memoir (format — comic)
Year: 2008
Acquired: Library
Rating:

One Sentence Summary: On the eve of her 22nd birthday, Lucy Knisley and her mother take a month-long vacation to Paris where Lucy keeps this diary.

One Sentence Review: French Milk is a unique comic diary/memoir, but doesn’t really have an action-driven plot to speak of (which is fine, just needed to put it out there).

Long Summary: When Lucy Knisley was almost 22, she and her mom took a six week trip to Paris, France. They rented a small, oddly furnished flat, then used it as a base to explore the city. They ate lots of delicious French food, took in the sites, and shopped around the city. There was also some mother/daughter relationship stuff, some young woman trying to figure out her life stuff, and some people missing home stuff.

Wow, that’s probably the worst summary in the history of book blogging!

Long Review: Despite my lackluster book summary, I did really enjoy French Milk. As a narrator and writer, Lucy is warm, funny, and self-deprecating. She appreciates the sites and sounds of Paris, but isn’t afraid to share when she’s upset, missing home, or feeling frustrated with her vacation. That sort of honesty was nice, and kept the book from being too sappy or cliched (especially given the other memoir I read recently).

I have always, always wanted to keep the sort of diary that Lucy keeps while in Paris. She mixes observations about culture, food, and herself with comic drawings and photos that capture a whole sense of what her trip was like. I, sadly, am a miserable artist, so often resort to writing and scrapbooking to approximate anything this cool.

The drawing style is sparse, but also quite funny. I love the way she uses black and white, simple lines, to give a sense of scene and movement. The sparseness of the drawing also emphasizes this is a diary, almost practice drawings, that she just scrawled while laying on her bed or sitting at a cafe with a baguette.

Another feature of the drawings that I love are the arrows and commentary she includes. You get a strong sense of her personality through these notes, almost like another Lucy commenting on what the main Lucy is doing.

The thing is, not a lot happens in the book. Lucy and her mom go to Paris, they explore, they get homesick, they have a good time, and then they come home. There are tons of pictures of shopping and food and whatnot, but this isn’t the sort of memoir that moves along because of action that’s happening. If you’re expecting exciting plot points or tons of action, you’ll probably be a little disappointed.

But if you’re expecting a sweet and funny comic diary about a girl going to Paris and getting to do all the awesome things you would do if you got to be a six-week temporary inhabitant of the city, then you’ll enjoy this book. I certainly did.

Other Reviews: Beth Fish Reads; My Cozy Book Nook; The Boston Bibliophile; Pop Culture Junkie; Lakeside Musing; A Striped Armchair;

If you have reviewed this book, please leave a link to the review in the comments and I will add your review to the main post. All I ask is for you to do the same to mine — thanks!

Unfortunately, I’m not going to get to participate in Dewey’s 24-Hour Read-a-Thon this weekend. I’m back in the Twin Cities for some volunteering and time with friends and family, so devoting a whole day to reading just wasn’t going to work. I’m excited to see family, but disappointed about the Read-a-Thon. Oh well, there’s always April

My one tip for tomorrow is to turn off your word verification — I know it helps protect from spam, but during Read-a-Thon it gets so annoying for cheerleaders and others to type in those letters. As a friendly reminder, check out this cartoon I made last year as part of my mini-challenge:

Have fun, and good luck!

Title: Vera and the Ambassador: Escape and Return
Authors: Vera and Donald Blinken
Genre: Memoir/Autobiography
Year: 2009
Acquired: Free review copy
Rating:

One Sentence Summary: Vera Blinken, a Hungarian refugee, is given the chance to help her country move out of Communism when her husband Donald is appointed ambassador to Hungary by President Clinton.

One Sentence Review: The book’s confusing organization and diplomatic tone take the excitement out of what should be a much more interesting story.

Long Summary: As a child, Vera and her mother fled from Hungary after Soviet control nearly destroyed the country. When she came to the United States, Vera became a proud American citizen, made a name for herself in a number of organizations, and met her husband, Donald. When Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, Donald was appointed to be the ambassador to Hungary, a role he and Vera took on as partners.

Vera’s Hungarian roots and familiarity with local customs won the pair the respect of the Hungarian people. During their tenure, Hungary struggled to move away from it’s Communist roots and towards joining NATO. While Donald worked to bring capitalism and benefits to the Hungarian economy, Vera worked the domestic front mobilizing women and opening the embassy to Hungarian citizens and business people. By the end of their term, Hungary was a very different country from where they started.

Long Review: As my low rating and one sentence review indicate, I wasn’t a fan of this book. Before I try to explain why, I should point out that I have high expectations for memoir, and my patience for things like lack of structure and dry plot lines is very low. Vera and Donald have a fascinating story, but the book doesn’t do a good job of showing me why their lives are so interesting.

I think my problems with the book stem from the book’s structure and overall lack of organization. The book is divided into four sections and the narration alters between Vera and Donald. Within each section, the narrator shares a series of vignettes and scenes from their perspective. It reads almost like a diary, except a diary that doesn’t go in chronological order.

What’s odd is that despite the sections, there was almost no discernible plot-driven momentum to move the story along. There’s some sense of overall chronology — it starts with Vera fleeing Hungary as a child and ends with Vera and Donald leaving Hungary after their diplomatic post is over — but within sections events jump backwards and forwards in time almost at random. It’s hard to follow the various story lines and events because there’s no well-followed internal timeline. I found this extremely frustrating.

The other frustrating part of the book was how, well, diplomatic, the whole thing felt. There’s hardly any negative information about anyone involved — most officials and staff members were either “charming” or “efficient” or “dedicated,” nothing more interesting than that. Take this note from Donald about preparing for a visit from President Clinton:

Many ambassadors, past and present, are wary of presidential advance teams, complaining about their indifference to local advice and their failure to show the embassy proper consideration. During my tenure, we had only positive experience, and we always found the advance teams congenial, very professional, and always courteous. Still, the compressed time frame put all of us on edge.

That’s just, hygienic, in how little it actually says about what it’s like to prep for a presidential visit. That process has to be more interesting than the book makes it sound. Passages like this are throughout the book; the most interesting parts of negotiating with Hungarian officials about military bases or NATO get glossed over in favor of mentions about Vera or Donald’s achievements outside of their work in Hungary. The tone comes off as self-important and dry.

The book does have some good qualities. For someone less bothered by structure than I am, the book does a nice job of showing the varied tasks and roles of an ambassador. It’s not always tense negotiations with uncooperative foreign officials or visits from important U.S. figures. There are a lot of lunches and cultural events, celebrations and state dinners. Vera’s sections got at this side of the ambassador’s role most effectively, which makes the book a good overall picture of what this particular job is about.

Generally though, this book just didn’t work for me. I almost gave up about half way through when there was an extended story about the diplomatic implications of spilling orange juice, but decided to stick it out in case it got better. Things did pick up near the end as the story focused more on Hungary’s interest in NATO and the end of the term, but overall I felt the book didn’t live up to it’s potential. People reading this more for the history and politics angles might enjoy it, but as a plot-driven memoir it wasn’t effective for me.

Other Reviews: The Book Lady’s Blog — (Rebecca’s review is more positive than mine, so please go check it out for a second opinion!)

If you have reviewed this book, please leave a link to the review in the comments and I will add your review to the main post. All I ask is for you to do the same to mine — thanks!

One of my favorite weeks of the entire year is Random Acts of Kindness Week. While the one for 2009 already passed, and 2010 isn’t until February 15-21, I’ve been thinking about kindness a lot lately and felt like I could make it part of the Blog Improvement Project.

This weeks BIP task is to commit a random act of kindness. While I think this is a good idea just because it’s a nice thing to do, there are blogging benefits to being kind online.

This first article — Don’t Be a Greedy Blogger — is about building good blogging karma by doing things like providing useful comments, interviewing and promoting other bloggers, or asking another blogger for help when you don’t know the answers.

The second, What Have I Done For You Lately, talks about how blogging is about building relationships and you can’t expect people to help you out unless you’ve made an effort to be interactive with them. It’s a little more self-interested than random acts of kindness, but brings up some good points.

This last one, 10 Simple Ways to Show Kindness Online is a little obvious, but has some good reminders about how simply saying thanks or acknowledging someone else being nice is a good act of kindness.

The task this week is pretty broad, but that’s because I think kindness can come in lots of forms and I don’t want to limit anyone by saying what counts as an act of kindness or not. The most important part is to be genuine with what you do and make sure that it’s above and beyond what you’d normally do (since we’re specifically focusing on being kind).

These are just some ideas about what might work – implementing, as always, is up to you.

• Leave suggestions in the comments on this post of specific ways to be kind to other bloggers — I have certainly not thought of an exhaustive list.

• Send an e-mail to a fellow blogger. Be genuine with your compliments or thanks or whatever.

• Write a post thanking specific bloggers who have been kind to you recently. Write a post highlighting some blogs or posts you’ve found inspirational or interesting lately.

• Do #followfriday on Twitter, but give each person their own Tweet and share why other people should follow them. (This post talks about what #followfriday is all about.)

• Be sure to thank everyone who mentions or links to you (as best you can).

• Share your random acts of kindness with me — they can stay anonymous, but if there are enough of them I’d like to do a wrap up post (for real this time!)

So, go forth and do good work. I hope the blogosphere will be filled with kindness over the next couple of weeks. Questions, comments, or concerns? Shoot me an e-mail or leave a comment here.

Last week a friend slept on my couch over a night on a drive from the Twin Cities down to Louisville, Kentucky. I had homework, sadly, so we spent a quiet evening around the apartment. As it turned out, he forgot the book he was reading in his car, so I got the chance to make a book recommendation from my shelves and shelves of books.

He’s an English and grammar nerd like I am, so I recommended The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester. My friend said he loved it, enough to buy his own copy of the book when he got back home — recommendation success!

Since I live away from most of my good friends, I don’t get to make reading recommendations in person very often. So getting the chance was really exciting — I felt like I had done a good deed, or something.

What’s your most successful recent book recommendation? Do you find yourself making recommendations people don’t take, or do your friends trust your judgment?

Image Credit: db*photography on Flicker via Creative Commons.

I’m not sure what the picture has to do with the post but I thought it was just beautiful. Check out the rest of her photostream if you have time, it’s quite lovely!

When you’re browsing through the bookstore, reading reviews online, or just chatting about books in general, what makes a book stick out for you? Are there any subjects or themes or character types that make you look more closely?

What follows is a list of things that will pretty much guarantee I’ll give an unfamiliar book a second look, or that will move a book higher up my pile.

Disclosure! I borrowed this idea from Memory (Stella Mautina) who borrowed it from Ms. Bookish who borrowed in from Word Lily. So basically, it’s an idea lots of other people had that I think is awesome.

Journalists: I love books written by journalists or realistically about journalists. I like getting into their process, using the stuff I’m learning about journalism to assess the work, and imagine how glamorous my life could be if I became a journalist who wrote a book.

Precocious Kids: Well written, spunky, smart, and imaginative kids as characters always make me happy. It makes me hope that if I ever have a baby, it’ll be as awesome as these kids. I also like books about high school, but only if the kids are more like the characters in Glee than Gossip Girl.

Feminism: I’m always interested in books about women exploring their relationship with feminism or how feminism is changing for women of my generation.

Embedded People: I’m especially fascinated by books where the author will immerse themselves in a topic or lifestyle then write about it. A.J. Jacobs’ book The Year of Living Biblically is a good example of this.

The Middle East, specifically Iran: I’ve been fascinated with Iran since I read Reading Lolita in Tehran, so any time a book is set there or about that country, I give it a second look. Also, Zimbabwe: Ever since I read When a Crocodile Eats the Sun I’ve wanted to read more about this too.

Reading/Books: I also like books where characters love books or where authors use literary references to explain their characters.

Re-imagined Fairy Tales: I like when authors take a familiar story and rework it in some way, bringing out ignored characters, playing with an ending, making one decisions differently… I think that co-opting of a familiar narrative is fascinating.

Multiple Narrators: I love seeing a story through multiple perspectives, especially when you can see how characters understand and misunderstand each other.

Do you have your own bookish hooks, things that will make you stop and take a second look at a book you’ve never seen? Or, what books would you recommend based on my bookish hooks?