Jennifer at Crazy-for-Books is hosting a Book Blogger Hop. Here's how she describes it:
In the spirit of the Friday Follow, I thought it would be cool to do a Book Blog Hop to give all us bookies a chance to connect and find new blogs that we may be missing out on! Let's connect and make new book bloggy friends!!
Check out her blog for a great list - over 100 and growing - of book blogs to check out. While you're there, add your blog to the list so people can discover how fun your blog is, too. I see an overloaded reader in our future!
According to Book Page, fans of Robert B. Parker will have three more opportunities to enjoy his work. Along with recently released "Split Image", a Jesse Stone novel, Parker's western heroes, Hitch and Cole, will appear in May in "Blue-Eyed Devil". In October we will be treated to one more date with Spenser in "Painted Lady" and finally, a holiday book to be released in November. I'm so glad Mr. Parker was such a prolific writer and left us these few final treats.
Ever notice that some books have titles with absolutely no meaning? You get done reading, probably without ever giving the title a thought, and then close the book, look at the cover and wonder "What does that title have to do with story?" Not the case with Robert B. Parker's aptly named Split Image - It's two... two... two books in one!
Two murders in the little town of Paradise, MA, lead Police Chief Jesse Stone to a set of identical twins with matching mobster husbands and a fetish for tag-team sports. A missing teen leads P.I. Sunny Randall to Paradise and a religious commune that may not be what it seems. A double mystery, a pair of investigators and duplicate suspects = one good book.
But wait...there's more! It's a crime novel AND a romance novel. The developing relationship between Jesse and Sunny is actually half the story. As I have mentioned at least twice before (here and here), I admire Parker's knack for writing characters and relationships that are not one- (or even two-) dimensional. Both Jesse and Sunny make progress in dealing with their "ex" issues, Jesse gets a better grip on his drinking, and their relationship matures, but this is not a sit-com where everything is wrapped up neatly in thirty minutes. Unfortunately, with the passing of Mr. Parker, we will probably each have to write our own ending.
I give this book two thumbs up!
Here's a handy book-reading tip: Don't read multiple books by one author at the same time - tends to cause great confusion, especially in readers of a certain age. I have been listening to the audio of Potshot by Robert B. Parker in my car, while reading Promised Land by the same author. To further befuddle myself, I now moved on to read Mr. Parker's latest, Split Image, which - although part of a different series - is very similar in style. And just in case there was any note of sanity left, I listened to Rex Stout's The Doorbell Rang on my mp3 so now four detective stories are jumping around in my head like pinballs and writing reviews is a challenge.
I am all over this week's lesson. I've been a Twit.....uh, Tweeter?....Twitterer, maybe?....whatever - I've had a Twitter account for quite a while. Microblogging is exactly what it sounds like, blogging on a smaller scale - 140 characters per entry or "tweet", to be exact.
There are many uses for microblogging. I have to be honest and say that my favorite use is entertainment. When I was a pre-teen/teenager there were ads in the back of teen magazines where you could send away for the name of a pen-pal. I loved having pen-pals, especially those from other countries - sending and receiveing letters, learning about their life and their culture. Twitter allows me to have cyber-penpals. I "follow" and am "followed" by (which just means we can view each others' tweets) an up-and-coming fashion designer in New York, a YA book author in England, a radio d.j. who's only an hour away, and the publisher of the premier K-State sports magazine, among others - all people I would not communicate with otherwise.
Twitter is also useful for making contact with fellow librarians and book-related types. I follow a variety of publishers, authors, book stores and book bloggers who send out information on and reviews of soon-to-be-released books, which helps with collection development. I also follow librarians from across the nation and share ideas, tips, and web sites pertaining to the library world.
The third category of my Twitter use is celebrity "cyber-stalking" (Dave's term). I follow them, but due to their huge number of followers, they do not follow me - so basically I receive mini-messages from them, but I can not respond. For the most part I find celebrities pointless and annoying, and many are actually just self-promotion tweets sent out by an assistant, so I don't follow many. However, there are a few - like country singer Blake Shelton - who are just hilarious and I can always use another laugh in my day.
Microblogging is a handy tool for communicating in small doses but, like many networking tools, it can also be addicting and time-consuming. It's all a matter of balance.
Not liking a Nero Wolf mystery is absolute "flummery"! Nero Wolf and Archie Goodwin are two of my favorite sleuths. Wolf is an eccentric genius - he weighs in at "a sixth of a ton" (which figures out to 333.3 lb. for the math-challenged), spends hours every day in his greenhouse tending to his prize orchids, rarely leaves his house, is a lover of beer and gourmet food, and a champion of deductive reasoning. Archie is Wolf's 20-something cohort - part detective, part ladies' man, part bodyguard. Archie does all the leg work, gathers the information and reports back to Wolf, who solves the crime. It's a unique set-up that sets Rex Stout's amazing series apart from the average who-dun-it.
In this particular episode, #41 in the series, Wolf is hired by a wealthy society widow, Rachel Bruner, who writes him a check for a whopping hundred grand. The oversize genius and his able assistant soon find out why the prize is so generous as they lock horns with the FBI. And these highly trained G-men have a way with threats , tails, and bugs that could give even sedentary sleuth Nero Wolfe a run for his money. (synopsis from Kansas Audiobooks site).
As always, the joy of a Rex Stout novel is in the characters more than the actual mystery. Archie Goodwin narrates his own escapades through1940's New York as he gathers and reports the evidence, deals with Wolf's quirks, and sets up Wolf's master plan to trap the bad guys. Stout is a master at pulling the reader inside this strange relationship and getting you to fall in love with his characters. The series can only be described as classic. Highly recommended for all mystery fans.
Now, two side points: I listened to the audio version of this book narrated by Michael Prichard. His voice and reading style are perfectly suited for the genre and for Archie Goodwin's character. A+
Also, in 2001 and 2002, A&E produced a tv series based on the Nero Wolf books starring Timothy Hutton and Maury Chaykin. It ranks on my list of top five things ever on television. It's no longer running, but you can get the episodes on DVD. Well worth the money.
Week six's lesson is on Delicious. I'm a big fan of Rachael Ray - De-Lish!!! - but I had no clue about social bookmarking. Ok, bad pun, I know, but it was the best I could do.
If you are also among the social bookmarking clueless, it is basically the same as adding sites to your "favorites" list on your browser except it stores your bookmarks online, allowing you to have access to your bookmarks from any computer with internet access. Puts an end to that frustration of bookmarking a site at work, then trying to find it from home, only to discover that my brain really is over 40.
Tagging is a method of organizing and sharing your bookmarked sites. By adding a "tag" when you bookmark a site, you can then group similar sites together and search for them by the tag. For example, I can bookmark other library home pages and tag them "libraries", or something equally as creative, and then access my list of favorite library sites by searching for "libraries".
Tagging also allows me to share my favorite sites with others of similar interests. For example, if I have a group of friends who are all interested in cooking, we can create the tag "cool recipes" (cause we're dorks and that's how we roll) and tag any sites that we want to remember and that we think others might like also. Then I just search for the "cool recipes" tag and find out what discoveries my cooking friends have been making.
So far I haven't actually accomplished any of this except creating a Delicious account and looking around a bit, but I get the gist and can see numerous possibilities for work and home.
