1. Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui, Karen Kingston
2. Craft, Inc., Meg Mateo Ilasco
3. Indigara, Tanith Lee
4. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
5. Jessie’s Mountain, Kerry Madden
6. Finding Serenity, Jane Espenson and Glenn Yeffeth, ed.
7. Valiant, Holly Black [Audio CD] 
8. The Twelve Kingdoms - Volume 1: Sea of Shadow, Fuyumi Ono
9. The Lightning Thief, Rick Riordan
10. Fearless, Tim Lott
11. Erec Rex: The Dragon’s Eye, Kaza Kingsley
12. Bronx Masquerade, Nikki Grimes
13. Soon I Will Be Invincible, Austin Grossman
14. It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff, Peter Walsh
15. The Gatekeeper Trilogy, Book Two: Ghost Roads, Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder
16. Getting Things Done, David Allen
17. Y: The Last Man - Unmanned, Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra
18. Y: The Last Man - Cycles, Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra
19. Y: The Last Man - One Small Step, Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra
20. Y: The Last Man - Safeword, Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra
21. Y: The Last Man - Ring of Truth, Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra
22. Y: The Last Man - Girl on Girl, Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra
23. The Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
24. V for Vendetta, Alan Moore and David Lloyd
25. 300, Frank Miller and Lynn Varley
26. Organizing from the Inside Out, Julie Morgenstern
27. The Gatekeeper Trilogy, Book Three: Sons of Entropy, Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder 
28. A Great and Terrible Beauty, Libba Bray 
29. R.O.D.: Read or Dream, Volume 1 : Three Sisters–One Power, Hideyuki Kurata
30. Strangers in Paradise Pocket Book 1, Terry Moore
31. Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson
32. Goy Crazy, Melissa Schorr
33. The Amulet of Samarkand, Jonathan Stroud 
34. Return to Labyrinth, Volume I, Jake T. Forbes and Chris Lie

1. Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui, Karen Kingston
2. Craft, Inc., Meg Mateo Ilasco
3. Indigara, Tanith Lee
4. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
5. Jessie’s Mountain, Kerry Madden
6. Finding Serenity, Jane Espenson and Glenn Yeffeth, ed.
7. Valiant, Holly Black [Audio CD] 
8. The Twelve Kingdoms - Volume 1: Sea of Shadow, Fuyumi Ono
9. The Lightning Thief, Rick Riordan
10. Fearless, Tim Lott
11. Erec Rex: The Dragon’s Eye, Kaza Kingsley
12. Bronx Masquerade, Nikki Grimes
13. Soon I Will Be Invincible, Austin Grossman
14. It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff, Peter Walsh
15. The Gatekeeper Trilogy, Book Two: Ghost Roads, Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder
16. Getting Things Done, David Allen
17. Y: The Last Man - Unmanned, Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra
18. Y: The Last Man - Cycles, Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra
19. Y: The Last Man - One Small Step, Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra
20. Y: The Last Man - Safeword, Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra
21. Y: The Last Man - Ring of Truth, Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra
22. Y: The Last Man - Girl on Girl, Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra
23. The Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
24. V for Vendetta, Alan Moore and David Lloyd
25. 300, Frank Miller and Lynn Varley
26. Organizing from the Inside Out, Julie Morgenstern
27. The Gatekeeper Trilogy, Book Three: Sons of Entropy, Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder 
28. A Great and Terrible Beauty, Libba Bray 
29. R.O.D.: Read or Dream, Volume 1 : Three Sisters–One Power, Hideyuki Kurata
30. Strangers in Paradise Pocket Book 1, Terry Moore
31. Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson
32. Goy Crazy, Melissa Schorr
33. The Amulet of Samarkand, Jonathan Stroud 

1. Do you have a favorite author?
Yes, Piers Anthony.

2. Have you read everything he or she has written?
Goodness no!  He is immensely prolific.

3. Did you LIKE everything?
I think so.  I did stop reading one of his series (Apprentice Adept) because it got too many generations in.  I made it through 3, and that was about enough.  Piers also writes a lot of stuff that makes me distinctly uncomfortable, but I think it’s good for me to read.

4. How about a least favorite author?
Maybe J. D. Salinger?  I really don’t like Catcher in the Rye.  Or William Faulkner.

5. An author you wanted to like, but didn’t?
The Terrys: Terry Brooks and Terry Pratchett.  Terry Brooks bored me, and Terry Pratchett’s humor is too self-aware for my tastes.

This post is part of Colleen’s initiative for people to blog about giving books as gifts, which is a fine thing to do. (I myself have made a pledge to buy handmade, and I haven’t learned bookmaking yet, so I won’t be giving these.)

I am going to talk about some books I have read in the past year, and specific people in my life to whom I would give them. You’ll notice that these aren’t in tidy categories; sorry. I’ll try to give you a picture of what each person is like, so you can understand my book selections. I’ll talk about one person’s selections per day.

The first recipient of my imaginary book gifts is my friend Alana. Alana is a big fan of things morbid, creepy, goth, and sort of old-worldy. I would purchase A Drowned Maiden’s Hair by Laura Amy Schlitz for her, because its combination of historicity with eeriness would suit her taste well, I think. Just the fact that “A Melodrama” is part of the full title suggests to me that this is a book for Alana. I think Maud’s orphan-to-con artist transformation would amuse her greatly. Alana is in school to become a teacher, and it is for this reason that I would give her Bronx Masquerade by Nikki Grimes. Through the alternating poetry and prose, Nikki Grimes shows how one teacher’s recognizing a “teachable moment” can snowball into a community building effort. This is the kind of inspirational book that future teachers need to read.

Return here for future links to the other posts in this series. Visit Colleen’s post collecting recommendations from around the kidlitosphere.

Welcome to my new home on the web.  Please take a look around!

From Booking Through Thursday:

So–just for today–how about sharing 7 things that you’re thankful for?

I have so many things to be thankful for! Here goes:

1. My family, and
2. How they always believe in me
3. My fiance, and
4. How he always knows just what I need to make me feel better when I’m down
5. Cats
6. Creativity
7. The Internet, where you can make friends, find a job, and be a published author just by hitting a button in some blogging software

So this year my sister said to me, “I’m not even gonna pretend I’m gonna do NaNoWriMo.”

Well, I started my NaNo on Nov 2, and I have yet to break 10,000 words - but the 8500 or so I’ve written is more fiction than I normally write in ANY month.

And that is why, even though I’ve never made it to 50,000 words and don’t know if I ever will, I try every year. Because the 2000, 8000, 10000 or 20000 words I actually get through are more than I do any other time of year. And I feel like each time I do it, even though my word count has actually gotten lower in recent years, I get closer to something, some intangible place wherein I am a writer.

From Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast:

“As a reminder, our 7 Kicks posts are the weekly meeting ground for taking some time to reflect on Seven(ish) Exceptionally Fabulous, Beautiful, Interesting, Hilarious, or Otherwise Positive Noteworthy Things from the past week—whether book-related or not—that happened to you.”

Please, please, please go to their post and look at the beautiful illustrations by Jackie Morris. I adore the Story Dragon and the picture from The Guardian.

1. This week I have been doing a lot of reading about how to be a better blogger, and it has really revitalized my attitude towards blogging and I hope within the next month or two will revitalize my actual blogging, too. I have at this point 5 blogs, 4 of which I’m going to treat as more personal journals and 1 of which I’m hoping to treat a bit more like a public forum.

2. I have come up with an idea for a sixth blog that is really exciting to me.

3. As a result of researching for that blog, I have discovered a local speaker/author/consultant who is exactly where I want to be when I am at his point in life. I’m working up the courage to drop him an email.

4. The universe has been sending me the message that I need to stop waiting for things to be right before beginning anything new - that I should allow myself to be messy and to fail.

5. My friend Sonja is a one woman tribute to the power of the internet, which is very exciting. She is a published romance writer thanks to the internet and also recently got a job by combining 15 second pitch and Twitter into a monster networking hybrid of Frankensteinian proportions. (Ok, there was maybe some hyperbole there.)

6. This is not from this week - it’s actually a few months old - but I never mentioned it here at lectitans - back in August my boyfriend of 10 years asked me to marry him. It was pretty exciting, and I had to step away from wedding planning for a few weeks to get my head on straight, but I’m back into it now and thanks to our extreme low key style I think it is going to be a lot of fun.

7. I love to make fruity quick breads, and this past week I made two loaves of pumpkin apple spice bread which were a big hit both at work and at home.

Don’t forget to post your own kicks!

via Lifehacker:

What a Lovely Name is a new website that lets you select multiple tags for personality traits associated with a name, as well as a gender if you wish, and it will suggest names for you. I selected romantic, creative, wise with no gender and got 12 names, the most boring of which was Jacqueline. Highly recommended if you’re looking for character names and don’t want to do lots of searching of baby name sites by meaning.

Looking at my list of books read and unreviewed, I find both The Golden Compass and Twilight.

I think it’s of interest that each of these is the first of a trilogy I haven’t finished, and each has a movie adaptation. I bought Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist when the movie came out and haven’t read it yet.

When I was reading The Lord of the Rings, I was careful to read each book not too long before the movie came out, so that I would have the book fresh in my mind when I saw the movie. I’m not a big re-reader; I have re-read only a few novels in my life (The Incarnations of Immortality series and the Harry Potter books). So it’s important to read a book-to-movie source close to the movie release.

It’s been a year since I read Twilight, which I enjoyed at the time but found flawed later. (I maintain that it is a good time, though, if you are looking for sickly sweet romance.) I donated my copy to a thrift shop. I hope it made someone very happy.

So the question is, do I go on and read the others now, or do I wait until New Moon the Movie is close to release, and so on? For His Dark Materials I will clearly have to go on and read them without waiting for more movies, because they aren’t happening. (Quick review of The Golden Compass movie: It was a very good book trailer.)

What do you do with big deal or popular books that are bound to be adapted to movies? Do you read them in the height of their popularity? Do you wait? Are you such a contrarian that you don’t read them at all?