If you were a friend on my old MySpace account and got a new request from me, think nothing of it but do please add me again.  Sorry for the inconvenience; there were some privacy issues with my old account that could only be resolved by starting over completely.

The April issue of readergirlz is now online.  This month’s book is On Pointe (Affiliate Link) by Lorie Ann Grover, a verse novel about a ballet dancer who finds herself getting too tall for her passion.  As April is National Poetry Month, a verse novel is an especially appropriate choice.  My local library system has only one copy of On Pointe, and that copy is on hold for someone distinctly not me.  That’s good; it means it’s getting read!  None of the local bookstores have it, either; I just ordered it from Amazon, and expect to have it read by mid-month.

This month’s issue of readergirlz includes a playlist, community challenge, slideshow, party ideas, discussion questions, author interview, and recommended reads.  The first song on the playlist, “Video” (Affiliate Link) by India Arie, is one of my favorite songs in recent years.

For more books about dancers, take a look at Little Willow’s I Am a Dancer booklist.  To read about real-life dance experiences, read her article Dance Dreams.

Over at Jen Robinson's Book Page I found this meme:

Where do you do most of your reading? Your favorite spot?

I do most of my reading while in motion.  When I go for walks is when I read the most.  Otherwise, it’s a toss up between the couch and bed.  The couch on which I read is big, hideously mustard-colored, and comfy.  It’s one of those weird segmented couches, with a corner pieces, two pieces with only one side to them, and one piece with no side at all.  (When I say side I really mean arm, I guess.)  We’ve pushed these together to create a vaguely bed-shaped thing.  When I read in bed, I use the Bedrest Pillow my boyfriend discarded due to its non-working circuitry.  He got a new one and I got his old one.  It doesn’t have the massage/light/heat functionality, since it’s broken, but it does let me sit up in bed.

I can think of two favorite spots to read.  One is on my grandmother’s patio, in Florida.  When the weather is just right, around Christmastime, it’s a lovely 70ish degrees Fahrenheit and a breeze is blowing.  I sit and I read and no one disturbs me.  The other spot is the porch of my boyfriend’s family’s beach condo.  I’ve only been there twice, but my ritual was to wake up every morning and go sit on the porch and just read until he woke up.  The sound of the waves and the smell of saltwater serve as a perfect backdrop for a good book.

From Emily Dickinson:

I ’M nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there ’s a pair of us—don’t tell! They ’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody! 5 How public, like a frog To tell your name the livelong day To an admiring bog!

…here’s thoughts of health for Little Willow’s cat Hollywood!

This may be the longest I’ve gone between posts since back when I started this blog. I’m going to address a few topics all at once.

Thing One: I’ve a lot of things I want to say, but not a lot of time. I’ve been doing a lot of catching up at work, and it’s used most of my energy. I’m still reading, so here’s my currentlies:

1. Virtual Mode by Piers Anthony; this is a re-read. Due to recent events in life I’ve set it aside for a bit, as it brings up some emotional issues I’m not quite ready to handle.
2. I, Claudius by Robert Graves; this is my read-at-work book but it has been displaced by others for now. About one week a month I have to perform lunch duty, which usually consists of sitting in a chair, watching students go by, and checking hall passes. That’s a good twenty minutes a day I can devote to reading when I’m not checking the passes. It looks good to be a Latin teacher reading I, Claudius, and I, Claudius is a book I’ve always wanted to read. Most recently, though, I have been reading my other books during this time.
3. The Last Dragon by Silva de Mari; reading this because it was a Cybils nominee, and enjoying it thoroughly. It doesn’t go as quickly as many YA or children’s books do, though.
4. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Gatekeeper Trilogy: Out of the Madhouse by Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder. I also walk for twenty minutes a day and I like to read while I do this. I saw one of my favorite professors doing it on campus once. I thought it looked charmingly academic, so I took it up myself. Don’t worry; I’m very careful not to run into or in front of things. Reading this has been a fun flashback and, combined with a recent re-watching of Buffy Season 4, provoked new thoughts about the show’s themes, what I did and did not like about it, and why. As a rule, I love Buffy, in case you were wondering.

Thing Two: A colleague and I were talking about YA fiction a couple of weeks ago and agreed that especially for us as teachers, it’s exactly the right thing. You can read a book with substance to it, but usually YA books don’t bog you down so much as books for an adult audience would. You get through the books quickly but still feel like you’ve really read something. So we’ve decided to start recommending and swapping YA books. I only own two, so I’ll be loaning those to her: Gingerbread by Rachel Cohn and Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen by Dyan Sheldon. These are my two recent favorites, which is why I own them. Because of the aforementioned rapidity of reading, I generally get my YA books from the library. I’m looking forward to seeing what she has for me. I told her that even though I don’t have a lot of books, I can provide her with plenty of lists. Maybe I’ll even tell her that I get most of my YA recommendations from Little Willow at Bildungsroman.

Thing Three: I love the feel of books. At Costco they set the books out in stacks on tables. I touched all of them, and felt that even though I hadn’t read them, the books were part of me. It was a good feeling.

Thing Four: Content I hope to provide soon:

• Elizabeth I review
• Millicent Min review
• The Last Dragon review
• Love in Shadow review

Thing Five: Spring break starts Friday! I will be traveling to Florida for most of it, but hope to find time in the car and at my lodgings for reading.

That is all.

Kelly at Big A, little a tagged me to list 5 Non KidLit Blogs I read. We’ll skip over the part where I gush about how exciting it is to be tagged for a meme. (It very rarely happens to me. So, it’s exciting.)

I’ve been in the blogosphere in general a much longer time than I’ve been in the kidlitosphere, so let’s see what I can come up with.

We’ll start with more plugs for Sonja Foust. Sonja has been my friend since we were in chorus class together in 9th grade. I think we had another class together too, but I’m ashamed to admit I can’t recall which classes were with her and which were with her twin, Joanna. I’ve always been able to tell them apart, though, so that should count for something. Sonja’s blog is about her adventures in the realm of romance noveling. Also, her husband and dog. Sonja is very funny, which is what separates her from a good number of romance novelists.

I’m tempted to cheat by just listing all my livejournal friends from my personal journal but that’s hardly fair, so I’ll only give you one. elfstar18 is another of my real life friends, who talks about lots of different things in a writing style that’s always entertaining. Recently she’s been talking about comic books a lot. I’m sure she has good things to say, but I can’t verify it because I’ve been staying away for fear of spoilers.

Catwalk Queen is a fashion blog, which always keeps me up-to-date on what’s hot and what’s not. Its editor-in-chief, Gemma Cartwright, and its other contributors are avid readers, so many of the posts are more literary than you might find at other fashion blogs. There is even a series of posts about book-inspired outfits. So far there’s Harry Potter, Famous Five, Babysitters Club, Nancy Drew, Miss Marple, and Madeline.

Shoewawa is brought to you by the same people as Catwalk Queen; it provides me with an endless supply of pictures of shoes to drool over and never buy.

Lastly, I give you Jane Espenson’s blog. Jane is one of my top 3 favorite screenwriters (tied, really, with Joss Whedon and Tim Minear) and her blog consists mostly of advice for others who’d like to have her job. She’s always clever and very literary, and one time we both had car maintenance done on the same day. I take this as a sign that we’re meant to be friends.

I tag Little Willow at Bildungsroman, Miss Erin, and anyone else who cares to participate.

Gus: The Theatre Cat by T. S. Eliot

(an excerpt… for the full poem, go here)

“I have played,” so he says, “every possible part, And I used to know seventy speeches by heart. I’d extemporize back-chat, I knew how to gag, And I knew how to let the cat out of the bag. I knew how to act with my back and my tail; With an hour of rehearsal, I never could fail. I’d a voice that would soften the hardest of hearts, Whether I took the lead, or in character parts. I have sat by the bedside of poor Little Nell; When the Curfew was rung, then I swung on the bell. In the Pantomime season I never fell flat, And I once understudied Dick Whittington’s Cat. But my grandest creation, as history will tell, Was Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell.”

This is a reading blog, and my friend Sonja Foust is an author.  She’ll be published on Friday, the same day as the new Ninja Turtles movie comes out.  I think she should be flattered to share the spotlight with some of the greatest characters known to comics, TV, movies, and merchandising.

Sonja is first and foremost a romance writer, and her short story “Love in Shadow” is being published by The Wild Rose Press. I can even recommend it whole-heartedly here, as it was rated PG by ECataromance (sadly no actual cats). It also got 5 STARS. Her dog Sydney, who I’m pretty sure is not a double agent, did not enjoy it as much.

Still, my friend is a published author! I am totally cool by proximity, because we went to high school and college together and we live in the same city. And she’s coming to my show Saturday.

I’m awesome.

Someday, I will have an achievement that is my own.

 Read in 2007:

1. Nothing But the Truth (and a few white lies), Justina Chen Headley
2. The Royal Diaries - Elizabeth I: The Red Rose of the House of Tudor, Kathryn Lasky
3. Millicent Min, Girl Genius, Lisa Yee

Currently Reading:

1. The Last Dragon, Silvana de Mari
2. Capt. Hook: The Adventures of a Notoroious Youth, J. V. Hart and Brett Helquist
3. Virtual Mode, Piers Anthony
4. I, Claudius, Robert Graves

One of the reasons I decided to join the kidlitosphere was the fact that it is so full of conversation-starters. Today I had far too many tabs opened in my browser window, taken from links from other blogs’ entries. What should I write about? A theme emerged, and it’s one that has touched me in more aspects of my life than just reading:

Reviewing.

So the questions driving this conversation (see posts from Meg Rosoff, Kelly at Big A little a, Roger Sutton, Wendy Betts, and fusenumber8) are as follows:

To whom does the reviewer have responsibility? Is it more awkward to write a negative review when there’s a likelihood of you running into the author? Does writing only positive reviews violate a critic’s integrity? Is the author-critic relationship necessarily adversarial?

I first encountered critics when I was 15 and working in community theatre. I received what I took to be a positive review. I thought, “I’m great! Reviews are cool! Critics love me! Yay!” When I was 17, a local theatre critic began to write about my school’s competition play. He hung around our rehearsals a lot and I, in awe of him, became a bit of a hanger-on myself. Over time we formed a real friendship, and I began to think of this critic as my ally. We lost touch for various reasons, but I ran into him again recently. I told him about my current production, and we conversed for a bit about the concept, and the particular strengths of the show’s director.

I made the mistake of mentioning this conversation within earshot of the director himself. I was telling a friend “So I ran into Theatre Critic the other day, and told him about the show…” A grimace came over the director’s face. I had forgotten that critics are The Enemy. We didn’t have any critics opening weekend, sadly. Even a bad review is press, you know.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking critic is the ideal job. You get to consume your media of choice and then write about it. How cool is that? Tester seemed like a cool job, too. So when I was in college, I got a job as a Video Game Tester. I thought this was bound to be exciting - I would get paid to play video games! Woohoo! The job description involved helping a marketing company decide which games to champion. It was quite the opposite. Being a Video Game Tester was the most boring job I’ve ever had, and probably the closest to being a professional critic that I’ll ever come. Whatever they threw my way, I had to play, and it was my responsibility to then evaluate the game honestly. How dull!

What I wanted to do, and what I’ve wanted to do each time I’ve considered a career as a critic, be it theatre, video game, or book, is share things I like with other people. That is not, however, what it actually means to be a critic. Critics have a responsibility to two groups: their readers and their employers. Both of these groups require critics give honest reviews, good or bad, and include the bad along with the good. That’s why I’m a blogger. As a blogger, I pick which books I will review. I still value honesty: I won’t write a good review of a bad book. But I’m not above sins of omission. I probably won’t write a review of a bad book at all. In fact, if the book hasn’t gripped me after 100 pages or so, I’ll just set it aside. I don’t think it would be fair to review a book I haven’t finished reading, and I don’t finish reading books that I don’t like. I don’t think this violates my integrity as a blogger, but if I were hired by a publication to review things and left some stuff out that would definitely be a problem.

Lastly, I like to think that the author-critic relationship doesn’t have to be adversarial. A critic can champion the works of someone who might be little-known for any number of reasons. I think this is when criticism is at its best: here’s something good, and here’s why. Still, it is important for professional critics to warn people away from things that aren’t so good; that makes them the author’s enemy.

The solution, of course, is to be a brilliant author.