The Hunger Games

I am so excited about the Hunger Games movie coming out next year. I read the books by Suzanne Collins in something like three or four days while breastfeeding Baby W. I hadn't swallowed up books that fast in a while - and I found them to be completely riveting and amazing - highly recommended! They are young adult books, though the theme is pretty heavy overall (think "The Lottery" as a survivalist, Huxleyan YA action trilogy). I think the casting looks perfect - and it was a great surprise to see Woody Harrelson in the trailer. Boop boop!

The List of Shame

As part of my recent reawakening to social networking - in an attempt to climb out of that slippery slope of social isolation that is infant-parenting - I have been updating my Goodreads page. Historically I always find list-making and profile-doctoring to be extremely soothing and delightfully compartmentalizing activities. As I added six more books to my "currently reading" list, however, I realized to my dismay that it has turned from a wonderland of possibilities to a overpowering roll call of shame.

Alas, that is the sadly ironic dilemma of the literary life. We spend our lives reading books, yet must read so many of them that one our most valuable skills is learning to be successful at reading partially when needed. Granted, many of those books I have pretty much completely read - but I am a victim of my inability to click on the "read" button unless I've read every single line. Ah, how I lament your lonely dust-filled covers, my friends in "currently reading." May your day also come, when in a golden light of glory I will turn the last page of your final chapter, having read your careful pages sequentially and fully from one end to the other!

Review: Towers of Midnight

My most recent Goodreads review: Towers of Midnight by Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson.

When I started reading The Gathering Storm, the first book of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series "co-authored" by Brandon Sanderson, I found the style difference between the two authors to be pretty jarring - particularly because I had just finished reading Jordan's last book, Knife of Dreams. However, after settling in to Sanderson's somewhat more casual, more quickly-moving style, I am definitely a convert. I thoroughly enjoyed Towers of Midnight, the second book by Sanderson, and breezed through the 1000+ pages (relatively speaking). I find Sanderson's manner of storytelling to be refreshing after the last couple of Wheel of Time books, which I have to say had been getting pretty unruly and tedious, even frustratingly redundant at times. Sanderson's fresh take on Jordan's work breathed some new life into it, unraveling the knots and propelling the plot forward - making it very exciting and gratifying to read after spending so many hours and hours with the characters over the course of 12 books. One of Sanderson's strengths is definitely the battle scenes. My husband and I have previously lamented a couple of battles in Jordan's previous books that definitely didn't give us the payoff they promised after hundreds of pages (or even several books) of lead-in. They were not fully developed and were over much too quickly, almost as if they were paraphrased. It seemed as if they weren't really Jordan's favorite thing to write, so he didn't linger too long on them. Sanderson, however, really does the battles justice. They are detailed to just the right amount of depth, including some descriptions of strategy, fighting sequences and such, and really highlighting the individual gifts of the heroic characters. I'm not hardcore enough to be a big fan of battle scenes generally, so it says something that I enjoyed them so fully. I'm now anxiously awaiting the next volume!

View all my reviews

NaBloMo - what?

Well, it turns out that it's National Blogging Month - and although I'm a week late and not even close to having a regularly interesting blog the likes of my good friends at The Sporadic Post and Bread n Jam for Frances, I'm going to try to up the ante here and eek out a few posts this month, either here or on my other blog as my mommy self. I know these posts show up on various forums such as Facebook, Google Reader, etc. (where I usually read other people's blogs), but I would say that going to the sites directly will give you a more pleasurable viewing experience potentially - and you can see the design changes I made recently. Although, really, does anyone actually go to people's actual blog sites anymore, with all of these alternative access routes?

To follow up on my previous post, I did actually get to try WriteMonkey and I completely love it. I've used it several times now, both on the very large monitors of my home computer and on the small screen of my netbook at a coffeeshop, and was impressed both times with the productivity and focus that resulted. Basically WriteMonkey takes over the screen, making a black canvas that display only the words you type. No formatting buttons, no Windows taskbar below, no distractions. It discourages excessive editing - so I can hit Ctl + I and italicize, but the text won't actually show up that way, just _like this_. I tend to obsess about corrections and overedit, thereby routinely stunting my own creativity and smothering my ideas before they even make it onto the page. This solution really seems to be doing the trick, especially since I don't see the little browser buttons below on my taskbar, daring me to check my email again. I've written several pages of my dissertation on it so far - so mission accomplished! Who knew a black page with rows of green letters could be so beautiful and soothing? Well, I guess they did.

Here's a screenshot from PC Magazine - which included WriteMonkey in "The Best Free Software of 2011":

Sometime soon I'll also need to try out organizational software to put together all of the bits and pieces that I'm writing on WriteMonkey and elsewhere, but right now I'm mainly sorting them in files on my computer by chapter and on Google Docs. I can already sense things getting lost in the mix, though - so I'll probably report back soon with word on one of those writing organization programs that work for PCs.