So apparently on my birthday, a little over a week ago, the Kidlitosphere exploded with people having identity crises and struggling to keep up with their blogs.  Jen Robinson summed it up nicely in this post, and then added her own thoughts on the matter here. 

It’s heavy stuff.  I have a personal, friends only LiveJournal, a craft/design blog, this blog, and I recently added a new blog to chronicle my own personal Happiness Project.  I have tried in the past to give myself schedules, so that I will post more regularly, because I’d like to really develop an audience.  I want to keep people coming back to my blogs, and when I have a month-long hiatus like I just did, that doesn’t really happen.  At the same time, there’s almost always a lot going on in my life.  I have a very demanding job in terms of energy if not always time.  (I work rather efficiently, so I often leave school before other teachers do.  I feel guilty, leaving only half an hour after our official off-the-clock time.)  Writing is a creative task.  Other blogs are updated frequently, and I like to read them, but I get overwhelmed.  And so with each of the blogs I write, I have to keep my mission for that particular blog in mind.

Here, the mission is to record my reactions to books, and book-related things.  When I started the blog, I reviewed every book I read, and focused on YA.  Now, I’m realizing that no one is asking me to do that except myself.  So I will post reviews here only of particularly noteworthy books, or publish reviews over at The Edge of the Forest when I’ve agreed to do that.  I’ll keep any commitments I make to things like the blog tours, and I’ll post responses to interesting things I see in my reading.  And anything else book-related that comes to my attention.

And that’s it.  That will be all.  And that way, this will stay fun for me.

Here’s the thing that keeps me from worrying I’ll lose readers: aggregators.  Things like Google Reader, or the LJ friends page with a feed on it.  If people want to read me, they can subscribe.  Then, when I have a month-long gap, they won’t miss a thing.

So, it's been almost a month.  Most of which I've spent unpacking, preparing for a play, doing the play, then recovering from the play with more unpacking.

And, I'm back.

I've got three or four books on the go right now.  I'm reading Erec Rex 2 (can't recall the proper title) to review for Edge of the Forest, Ghost Roads from the Gatekeeper Trilogy (yay Buffy!), and Soon I Will Be Invincible.

One of the things I've discovered while unpacking is that I have too many books to fit them in my house attractively.  So I'm going to create a to-read box, I think, and take all the books from my shelves that I might want to release once I'm done with them, put them in that box, and move on through them.  After that, I will ask myself the questions posed in this post at Unclutterer.  If after asking those questions I decide to keep the book, it will go back on the shelf.  If not, I will use one of the ways in this post at Zen Habits to get it out of my house.

How do you deal with your book habit?

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 

I'm plugging it everywhere today: my friend Joanna's new blog, Library Pendragon.  Joanna is a media specialist (which always reads to my mind as "school librarian" but I know they do much more than just deal with books) and is going to write about organizing your home and/or library.  She has already revolutionized my life with her spice storage tips, and I'm delighted to say as well that she has put up a summer reading post and recommended to many adults who probably wouldn't see them otherwise a list of notable children's and YA novels.  (You've probably read them all, but I think it's exciting that she's posting about them anyway.)

Before we get to the poetry, first:
1. I have a review in the new issue of The Edge of the Forest.
2. This quiz result makes me very happy:
Your results:
You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man 75% Supergirl 75% Superman 70% Wonder Woman 70% Green Lantern 65% Robin 55% Batman 45% Hulk 45% Iron Man 45% Catwoman 40% The Flash 35%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

 
Click here to take the “Which Superhero am I?” quiz… 
 
And now, poetry.  This week I am in Baltimore, which was the home of Edgar Allan Poe for many years.  I love Edgar Allan Poe.  Unfortunately, I will be visiting neither his grave nor his house here, because of other plans and my brother’s distaste for visiting graves.

I’m here with my sister, whose name is Mary Elisabeth.  This poem by Poe, dedicated to his cousin Elizabeth and presumed to  be written in the Baltimore Poe House, reminds me of her:


Would’st thou be loved? then let thy heart
From its present pathway part not —
Be every thing which now thou art
And nothing which thou art not:

So with the world thy gentle ways,
And unassuming beauty
Shall be a constant theme of praise,
And love — a duty.

The associations our brain makes are funny things.  I went looking for a poem about sisters, because I love mine.  Instead I found The Mermaid in the Hospital which did make me think of my sister, because it's 2 years tomorrow since I went to the hospital to have my gall bladder removed and she was with me for a long time there, and while there I found some shell-shaped hair clips and some glittery lip stuff in my purse, and I put them all on and insisted that I was a mermaid.  So you see, I myself was The Mermaid in the Hospital.

The Mermaid in the Hospital

It occurred to me just now that reading and writing are so very intertwined, that you can’t really tease out just one from the other, if you do both. So I’m probably just going to let

 lie fallow, and post here about writing when I have thoughts about it.

Kerry Madden (  ) wrote a beautiful post about all the different places she’s paid the rent. Each place had stories to go with it, and each of them made me think of my own stories. As a reader of primarily fantasy and science fiction, I tend to forget that even the wildest of stories have to come from a place within ourselves, and that the things that happen to us in real life, whether or not they seem extraordinary, are what our stories are made of. I remember this every once in a while, and use it to write something with some emotional truth. I feel like most recently (i. e. in the past 5 years) this has been in my Firefly fanfiction, where I use the sibling relationship of Simon and River to explore the emotional truth behind what I think has been and hope always will be the most important relationship in my life: my relationship with my sister. Sibling stories speak to me more than any other stories, more even than love stories. Not because romantic love isn’t an important part of my life, but because my sister has been with me since she was born and I was 4 years 6 months 4 days and 30 minutes old. So those stories will always be older and I think the things that happen to you as a kid shape more of the stories that speak to you.

Kerry Madden is one of my writing heroes. She loves the classic Southern authors like Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty, both of whom touched me the most of any American authors I read in school. Her stories are about home and family and little things that don’t necessarily seem like stories when they happen to you, but later you realize that is what stories are. 

I hope when I write, I will write things that are as real and right to other people as Kerry’s stories are to me.

Update: This post is about reading programs for summer 2008.  If it's helpful, you might also enjoy my post about summer reading in 2009.

The school year is officially finished for me, and I am all signed up and ready to go for my local library's reading program: Catch the Reading Bug, which it turns out is part of the larger Collaborative Summer Library Program.  My goal for the summer is to read 22 books, which would catch me up by the end of August on my 4-a-month plan which I made in December.  Right now I've read less than 2 books a month; sad but true.  If you include magazines that ups my count by quite a bit, or books with recipes in them that I didn't read.  I don't feel comfortable listing those because I didn't really read the whole book, you know?

 If your library's reading program is lacking or if you just love to pile it on when it comes to reading, the internet is full of options for you.

 Reading Is Fundamental has a Summer Reading Guide.  You'll find crafts, booklists, and more.

 Harper Collins is sponsoring the Reading Warriors Summer Reading Challenge.  This challenge is targeted at 8 - 12 year olds and challenges them to read at least 10 books this summer.  The website is rich with content.  This challenge includes a rewards program.  For adults, there's a whole section on the site on being a reading mentor.  Promotional material like posters and bookmarks abound.  There's plenty there to explore!

 Over at Scholastic, they've got the Summer Reading Challenge going on.  Readers can register to log their reading and "feed the reader meter."  Much like at the Reading Warriors challenge, there's plenty of supplemental content for adults who want to encourage kids to read.

 If you're looking for specific recommendations of books to read, the web has a host of lists.

Little Willow is my favorite recommender of books.  You can find her summer reading list here.  Parents Magazine has a list here; Education World has one here.

 For tips on helping kids read this summer, see these articles:
Summer Reading Tips @ The Children's Book Review [via Jen Robinson's Book Page ]
Summer Reading @ The Post and Courier [via Jen Robinson's Book Page ]
How to Raise a Book Lover @ Parents [via The Children's Book Review ]
Hot Tips From Cool Authors @ Becky's Book Reviews

 What are your goals and plans for summer reading?  I'm going to catch up on old readergirlz issues and read some Buffy novels.

As I haven't collected any links this week, I don't have much for you today.

First: J. K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement My favorite thing about this speech is how many times she makes reference to her college Classics major, and the variety of quotes she uses from classical sources.  I was so fond of this, I sent it to my Latin teacher colleague, who has added it to her course website so her students can read it next year.  Our school did an event called May Fever, where 64 authors competed to be the school's favorite.  Students and faculty made predictions and voted; the championship was between J. K. Rowling and Shakespeare - a Classicist and a Latin teacher.  Yay!  (Shakespeare won, against my prediction but to my delight.)

Next: I'm a big fan of etsy, a site which enables artists to sell their handmade goods online rather easily.  So I popped in the search term "literary" and here are my favorites of the items it turned up:


 My severest critic hand embroidered tote bag, $27 from shinyprettythings

This bag immediately made me think of Lisa Yee.








 Leather Shakespeare Memento Bookmarks, $5.50 each by immortallongings If you can't get over to Shakespeare's Globe, you can at least have a souvenir.  immortallongings creates original artwork based on Shakespeare and is one of my favorite etsy sellers.  All of the art is in a vaguely Art Nouveau style.












 And of course, I would be remiss without mentioning this shirt from the kidlitosphere's own Leila of bookshelvesofdoom.  $19









That's all for today!