World Book Day meme

My internet friends tell me it’s World Book Day, which looks to be mostly in the UK and rather like Free Comic Book Day, but with fifteen years of history and recognition by UNESCO. Cool.

Anyway, to the meme that’s going around!

Books I’m Reading:

  • Middlemarch, by George Eliot. Reading this via email thanks to Daily Lit. I’m about halfway through or a little less, and it’s so good! I often hit the “please send me another installment RIGHT AWAY” button two or three times, which never happened with Moby Dick.
  • Just now on the bus I finished Zora and Me, by Victoria Bond and T.R. Simon. So I’m between books, actually. No designated bedside, bathroom, or bus books at the moment. World Book Day, you have caught me out.

Book I’m Writing: mumblemumblemumble not really talking about it yet. But it’s set more or less at Girl Scout camp!

Book I Love Most: Let’s see, which part of my DNA do I love the most? I sometimes try to list the eleven books that together form the most complete reflection of my reading brain: here’s the latest version of The Shelf, but it’s not quite right, is never quite right.

Last Book I Received As A Gift: Travelin’ Through, the coursebook Ken put together for the poetry group he leads during Lent.

Last Book I Gave As A Gift: Purple Hibiscus, by Chimananda Ngozi Adichie, a Christmas-Eve book for Sanguinity. I bought it in San Juan, so I was relieved to have found a promising book in English. Neither of us has read it yet.

Nearest Book: As of just before I began this meme, since I’ve been collecting a nest of books around me while I type: Pick-Up Game: A Full Day of Full Court, ed. Marc Aronson and Charles Smith Jr. It’s a novel-in-stories about basketball, with each chapter written by a different YA author. Strong start with Walter Dean Myers, looking forward to Rita Williams-Garcia and Joseph Bruchac and…hey, weird, Bruce Brooks is in the contributor list but I can’t find his chapter. Anyway, I guess this should have gone in the “Books I’m Reading” list too.

Happy World Book Day!

good reading that I make myself do

An update: I am very happy with my subscription to One Story. I’ve gotten three issues now. The typography and layout is the same for all the stories, except for the title and author’s name on the front. They’re pretty, pretty little booklets, and the stories have been good too. There are author interviews on the blog. There’s nothing I don’t like so far.

Despite all this, and despite the little thrill I feel when I see the One Story envelope in the mail, I can tell it’s the sort of thing that I could easily let pile up on my desk. (When is the perfect time to read an 8,000-word story?) But I think I solved this inadvertently: I got my dad a subscription for Christmas! It’s fun to think we’re reading each story at more or less the same time, and I’ll have to stay caught up so we can compare notes.

In another instance of slightly-forced reading, I signed up with Daily Lit to have Moby Dick sent to my email in 260 installments, one per day. It’s a sweet service, and free for the classics: you can choose email or RSS delivery, skip weekends if you want, change the length of the installments, and so on. I’ve read 17 now and they haven’t started piling up. Maybe I’ll finally redeem myself as an English major and finish Moby Dick!

Further bulletins as events warrant. ;)