Po(sey) Sessions

Eleanor and Park is making almost every best YA of 2013 list and I hated it. I read it because of the awesome cover, where the kids are sharing music. I have really enjoyed books that featured music in the past. I also read this because I started seeing in on so many best of the year lists.  I also found a great piece by Kit Steinkellner over on Book Riot defending Eleanor and Park. Her post got me thinking about my experiences reading the book. How was the book for me as an adult verses how it would have been if I was still a teen? I had mixed feelings about Eleanor and Park the whole way through. I liked how well Rowell showed that silence that happens in a home of abuse. I like how even Park's seemingly good life still had uncomfortable moments. But I hated Eleanor. I hated her for being like me and I hated for all the choices she could have made that would make her better than me, but she was still wallowing in the sad parts of her life. I hated that I neve...

My whole life my father owned his own business and it was it's own kind of annoyance. He could come pick me up from school when I was sick as long as he didn't have a meeting. But he couldn't go with me to visit family on Thanksgiving. I remember thinking to myself, he is the boss, he can do whatever he wants. But know I own  my own business and I understand all the things I never did when I was younger. Getting an hour or two off in the middle of the day is easy. Asking your staff to work the day after Thanksgiving is hard. I work at the bookstore 6 days a week. I love being there, but the days start to run together. I can no longer remember who was present for which conversation and I tell one person the same thing 4 times and another never hears wind of something I am planning. This is what it means to be a grown up. It is official. In the past year I have left childish things behind and I am officially a big person. Today was a great week in the store. Lots of ...

Today when I was in the bookstore a book on the shelf caught my eye. The first reason it caught my eye was that it looked like it was in the wrong section. I saw it in Fiction and Literature and I was wondering if it may belong in Mystery & Action or Science Fiction & Fantasy. One of the many, many things I have learned since buying a bookstore is that more often than not you can tell the genre of the book by the look of the cover. There are always outliers, but certain colors and fonts lend themselves to different places in the bookstore. The first give away with this book was the title, Harm. The second give away was the color scheme. And the third thing was that I was pretty sure I knew the name Aldiss before. Another thing I have noticed about books is all the ways that the book itself is marketed. There are so many elements that go into the packaging and branding of book. But understanding on an intellectual level is different from really experiencing. For over a de...

I have been working on a blog post to mark, in part, my triumphant return to blogging. But it is being more challenging the originally expected. I have been working on the the top ten books that have influenced me. I think it could be easy to throw a list together, but I don't think I could really do an honest defendable very quickly. So I decided I want to do more than list some books on Facebook, I wanted to try and defend it. As you may have guessed, this was probably a mistake. I am determined to both stick with it and not let it hold me back! The timing could not be better for me to do a salon post as interim. It has been occuring to me more and more how many things have changed for me and how much time has passed since I was blogging regularly. I have been exploring all the things that drew me to blogging in the first place and found that I am having a deep desire to reconnect with some of those things. I especially want to reconnect with what blogging does for me and not...

I sat down to write a blog post the other day and I COULD NOT REMEMBER my password. That is when you know it has been too long! Well, as you can see I got it figured out. This is just a quick post to say "Hi" and let you know that I am hoping to be blogging a little bit more. Expect to see new items about the bookstore and my dystopian research. I remember all the times I hated myself for having a blog because I couldn't find the content to update it. But over the past few months living without the blog has felt like living without one of my arms. Now if only I can actually stick to sitting down and actually writing. Figuring out the password was step one.