Book Blogger Appreciation Week: My Guys

I read dozens of book bloggers and love them to bits.  You know who you are.  If I talk to you, I love you.   I celebrate you all, but for Book Blogger Appreciation Week, I'd like to focus in particular on some male bloggers that always make my bookish day.

1. Sam from Book Chase.  I've been following Sam's blog for a few years now.  He reads like a house afire and loves to talk about country music history.  I always tune in when he reports library and bookstore news.  Sometimes I have trouble keeping up with him because I'm not very political, but I always learn something.  One of these days I'm going to make Houston my connection between Seoul and Kansas City just so I can shake his hand and maybe exchange a book or CD or two.

2. Peter from Collecting Children's Books.  After finding Peter's blog about a year and a half ago, I spent an entire weekend in my pajamas and in front of the computer and ignoring my phone calls so I could go back and read every single one of  his postings about Children's Literature.  And boy howdy, does he post!  This guy just knows and knows AND knows about that field and can make the most dazzling connections to other genres.  He's the trapeze artist of  bloggers.  I'm going be one of the first in line to buy his book when it's published.

3. James from Ready When You Are, C.B.  James never fails to entertain me.  I love his regular features "Dakota's Favorites", in which he discusses books that his dog has eaten, "Friday Picture Reading" which spotlights a painting or a photo of someone reading and his latest, "Tuesdays with Dorothy", when he posts a picture of Dorothy Parker and an accompanying witticism.  I enjoy his occasional take on movies.  I also admire him for taking on a book I've always been too intimidated to try:  Tristram Shandy. We're both educators, but I wish I could time-travel and become one of his students.

4. Chris from Vitamin Brock.  Chris was my co-worker and neighbor in Korea.  He tried to make me love Faulker, but I don't think I'll ever really be ol' Bill's sweet-ass gal.   Chris did get through to me with his credo that medieval literature very rarely ever disappoints.  I won't go so far to say that it's the pause that refreshes, but it's definitely worth more time than I've put into it.  Although Chris had the temerity to quit Korea (not to mention my book group Cracked Spinz!) and head for Yellowstone, we've been keeping up our connection through a friendly race to 100 books this year.

5. John from The Book Mine Set.  John got me into reading Canadian Literature with all those wonderful challenges he's hosted, and I'll always be grateful.  I was a big fan of the literary smackdowns he used to host every week as well as his Saturday puzzles.  I admire both how breathtakingly well-read he is and how he's always improving on himself and above all, I'm humbled by his dedication.

6. Ron from Buddies in the Saddle.  As an expat living really far east from where I was born, I'm prone to bouts of homesickness.  Ron helps to make it all better with his blog which covers all things Western -- novels, movies, memoirs, folklore and best of all, regular installments of his Old West Glossary which usually have me laughing and shaking my head and trying commit these colorful words and phrases to heart so I can (sometimes successfully) work them into conversation.  A little time at Ron's blog and I'm cheered up again and glowing like an Oklahoma sunset.

Thanks for serving up so much bloggy goodness, guys.  I guess it would be awkward to extract a promise from each of you to keep on blogging forever and ever, but as long as you do, you'll have a home on my sidebar.

A Reading Habit Leads To Habits While Reading

This is a BBAW meme. What a fun week!

Do you snack while you read? Yes, because it seems as if people are always eating something in whatever book I'm reading. It doesn't seem to matter what -- porridge, Snickers bars, whale blubber -- the minute food is mentioned, I'm all about the snack.

Favorite reading snack? Crunchy and salty carries the day.

Do you tend to mark your books as you read, or does the idea of writing in books horrify you? I don't often mark my books, but I like to read copies that total strangers have marked, while squinting and muttering WTF?

How do you keep your place while reading a book? Bookmark? Dog-ears? Laying the book flat open? Dog-ear is a cute term for something heinous.

Fiction, Non-fiction, or both? The score so far this year is 40-31, fiction.

Hard copy or audiobooks? I've relaxed my stance against audiobooks.

Are you a person who tends to read to the end of chapters, or are you able to put a book down at any point? I stop when my eyes slam shut and I'm overpowered by that creep, Sleep.

If you come across an unfamiliar word, do you stop to look it up right away? If it's strong enough and strange enough to gum up my optical cruise control.

What are you currently reading? Toji by Park Kyung-Ni, The Log From The Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck and A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway.

What is the last book you bought? White Tiger by Aravind Adiga.

Are you the type of person that only reads one book at a time or can you read more than one at a time? More than one. I wish my eyes worked independently, and that I had an extra one. I could hide it under my bangs.

Do you have a favorite time of day to read? 10:41 p.m.

Do you have a favorite place to read? Bed, with something like Style Her Famous droning in the background.

Do you prefer series books or stand alone books? Stand alone.

Is there a specific book or author that you find yourself recommending over and over? Don Robertson's Morris Bird III trilogy.

How do you organize your books? (By genre, title, author’s last name, etc.?) I have a few distinct categories: The Pulitzer shelf, the biography shelf, the Canadian shelf, the Korean shelf, the teacher shelf and the graphic novel shelf. The rest is chaos.

BBAW: Who Do You Love?

One of the BBAW questions this week is "What blog that you really enjoy didn't make the shortlist?"
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That's an easy one: I've been reading Book Chase for a couple of years now and I'm stunned that it didn't make it to the show. Sam is a voracious reader and, well, he's the Joyce Carol Oates of blogging. His tastes are eclectic -- I look forward to seeing what he'll post about next. Not only does he satisfy my incessant need to know about books, he and I see eye-to-eye about country music. (I wish I were as knowledgeable about bluegrass as he is.) As if all that wasn't enough, he keeps readers up-to-date with news from the book world. If I didn't love this blog so much, my theme song would definitely be Hey Jealousy.


What? You're still here? Go visit Sam's blog!

Book Blogger Appreciation Week

Happy Book Blogger Appreciation Week! I've been nominated in the category listed above. To get this far is really flattering because I've got fierce competition. Thanks so much to Booking Mama for this nifty button. Congratulations and good luck to everyone who made the shortlists.

I wish I could just disappear into my stack of books right now. Work is breathing like Brainy all over my life. I want to Helga it. Do I really love being a native speaker? Well, I do like being a native reader at any rate, and I'll prove it first chance I get -- this weekend, for example. There's a hermit in my future and it's me.