Month: July 2009

Categories
Other

Links I’ve stumbled across this week

Bookish News

Dovegreyreader has an interview with Sarah Waters. I have renewed enthusiasm for The Little Stranger after reading it.

Amazon are hoping to launch the kindle in the UK in time for Christmas.

How telling the story behind an object’s history can increase it’s sale price on ebay.

Stephenie Meyer was worth more than £12m to the UK book trade in the first half of 2009

Margaret Atwood is embracing new technology to avoid travelling long distances for a book tour. She has invented a new pen which means she can sign books remotely.

A Few Books Which Have Caught My Eye


Sandy discovered another great audio book, The Wordy Shipmates. Unfortunately the audio version isn’t available in the UK, so I’ll have to wait until I decide which audio download company to join. Has anyone found a great audio download company they can recommend?.

 

 

Diane described The Magicians as being an adult version of Narnia. I think I’ll have to find a copy of it soon.

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An Award

Finally I’ve just received this award from Beth Fish Reads. 

The Humane Award is to honor bloggers who are kindhearted individuals. They regularly take part in my blog and always leave the sweetest comments. If it weren’t for them, my site would just be an ordinary book review blog.

I agree that having great comments improves a blog so much. Beth Fish Reads always leaves such thoughtful comments, not just on my blog, but almost every one I look at. Thank you so much!

Categories
Classics

Ulysses, Part I: The Telemachiad, Telemachus

Dovegreyreader is encouraging everyone to join her in tackling Ulysses. I’m afraid that I cannot resist these joint reads, and so have been reading 2 pages a day via DailyLit. I have now completed the first episode: Telemachus.

The pace of this read along is incredibly slow and I am torn between wanting to speed on ahead and keeping level with everyone else taking part. I’ll stick to the two pages a day for now and see how I feel after a few more weeks.

Ulysses hasn’t started off well for me. It isn’t how I imagined it at all. I admit to knowing nothing about it before starting, but for some reason the name Ulysses conjures up images of a strong, brave man heading on a adventurous journey. Perhaps this is what does happen, but I’ve probably got it all wrong!

The book begins with some unappealing men having an animated discussion at the top of a tower. I have no real interest in their lives and wouldn’t continue with this book if it wasn’t a classic I wanted to conquer!

It comes across as a very male book. Do you think Ulysses appeals to men more than women? I have a feeling that I will never bond with these characters, but I hope their lives interest me more as the book goes on.

I am finding it much easier to understand than I thought I would, for some reason I thought Ulysses was written much earlier than it actually was – I told you I knew nothing about it!

Have you read Ulysses? Did you ever bond with the characters?

Do you think I’ll enjoy it more as I get further in to the book?

Categories
Blogging Other

How do you decide which is the best blog?

image14th – 18th September is  Book Blogger Appreciation Week! I wasn’t blogging at the time of last year’s event, so am really excited to find out all about it.

Nominations for the best blogs are being taken until 15th August, but I found it a really hard thing to do.

How do you decide which is the best blog?

Sites like Maw Books and My Friend Amy are incredibly well put together and they clearly put a lot of work into blogging and improving our community, but I rarely feel compelled to leave comments on their blogs as they seem to have a different taste in books to me.

I currently have 22 blogs in my favourites folder in google reader, but most of them aren’t well known blogs. They don’t have hundreds of comments on every post, fancy blog designs or hundreds of book giveaways each month, but what they do have is great taste in books and the ability to persuade me to part with my cash!

I thought long and hard about who to nominate as my favourite blog and decided that it should be the person who has caused me to buy the most books in the last year, and that is Diane from Bibliophile by the Sea.

I’m not sure it’s really possible to decide who has the best blog, as it is such a personal choice. I would love to know how many different blogs were nominated for this category and how they decide on the short list.

I then discovered there were 40 other categories to provide nominations for. I wasn’t prepared for that at all! I soon discovered that my blog reading falls into a very narrow field – I couldn’t even name a romance blog!

Some categories I found really easy, but there were a lot I really struggled with.

Which categories did you find easiest/hardest to nominate for?

Categories
Blogging Other

What do you think of adverts?


What do you think about adverts on blogs? Yesterday I added a google adsense banner to my sidebar and I have to admit that I hate it! I think it looks really ugly and I want to rip it out. Luckily I don’t have to scroll down there very much and so can try to avoid looking at it.

I am going to put up with it for one month and see how it goes. If it makes me enough money to buy a book or two, doesn’t put off people visiting my site and stops annoying me so much then it might stay, but I have my doubts.

My husband thinks that as I spend so much time blogging I should at least try to make a bit of money out of it, so I have agreed to a one month trial.

I like links to Amazon and other book selling sites and always try to use my favourite bloggers whenever I buy books – which is quite often! Are there any other types of advert which you like on a blog?

Would any amount of money persuade you to put such an ugly thing on your blog?

Have you done anything to make your blogging habit more appealing to your partner?

Will you abandon me because I have a horrible advert?

Categories
2009

Lanterns on Their Horns – Radhika Jha

Lanterns On Their Horns is a gentle story about life in rural India. Ramu and Laxmi live in a village which has turned it’s back on modern society, but the couple are ostracised from village life because of the shame of Laxmi’s father’s suicide. They struggle to get by until one day their lives are changed by the discovery of a stray cow in the forest.

Manoj and Pratima live a very different life. Manoj works on a new project to artificially inseminate Indian cattle with European sperm, with the aim of increasing milk yield. Rural farmers do not understand the concept of cows becoming pregnant without a bull being present, and so are deeply mistrusting of him. The book highlights the conflict between modernisation and traditional rural life.

Lanterns On Their Horns isn’t like your typical Western novel, it has a distinctive Indian feel and some unique attributes. Whole sections are written from the perspective of a cow. It sounds really weird, but it actually works:

Being alone was new. From the time she was born, creatures similar to her had surrounded her. Now a nameless dread loosened her bowels. It was of a place to which cows went alone. It made her want to run, but she didn’t know where.

I loved being inside a cow’s mind and as with the amazing mouse scene in The End of Mr. Y I now have a renewed empathy for these animals. The pace of the book is quite slow, but I loved learning about Indian culture and traditions so much that I didn’t mind. This book gets deep into Indian life without the depressing violence of A Fine Balance, but it feels much more realistic than Q and A . I think it is a great average of the two.

If you like to be immersed in different cultures or have always wanted to know more about cows then this book is for you.

Recommended.

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Lanterns on Their Horns was released in the UK today. It isn’t available in the US at the moment, but you can buy it with free international delivery from The Book Depository.

About the author

Radhika Jha is a best selling author in India. Her debut novel Smell, won the French Prix Guerlain and has been translated into sixteen different languages. This is her second novel.

What is your favourite book with an Indian setting?

Have you read any great books which allow you to get inside the mind of an animal?

Categories
Blogging Other

The Most Useful WordPress Plug-ins for Book Bloggers

I have found lots of helpful plug-ins during my time in the blogging world, but have abandoned most of them along the way. Here are the most useful ones I’ve found:

Subscribe to Comments

This adds the little tick box at the end of your post allowing people to choose to receive all future comments on that post as an email. I love this feature – I think it really helps conversations to develop in the comments section and that is one of the best things about blogger outreach!

All in One SEO Pack

Top seo resellers is a must if you want to increase page ranking on Internet searches. It automatically generates meta tags and keywords for all your Niche edits posts and does lots of other fancy things which I don’t really understand. All I know is melbourne based SEO helps your page ranking a lot!

HeadSpace2

A meta-data manager with lots of extra features, including the ability to display special messages to first time visitors to your site. I have to admit that this one is a bit technical and I’m not using it to it’s full abilities yet, but this is a very clever plug-in which definitely needs investigating.

Google XML Sitemaps

This plug-in generates a site-map for use with the search engines. Another great one for improving your page ranking.

AZIndex

This allows you to create a page where all your posts are sorted alphabetically. I used this plug-in to create my Books Reviewed page. It is customisable so you can decide which categories are included in your list, meaning all your memes and other non-book review posts can be ignored.

Akismet

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. I found it a bit hit or miss in the beginning, but the more you use it the better it gets. Using this tool means that my spam is under control without the need for word verification.

Google Analytics for WordPress available at Google WordPress hosting.

This plugin is the easiest way to set your word-press blog up for Google Analytics. If you haven’t discovered Google Analytics yet then you really should sign up, especially if you love looking at your blog’s statistics!

Contact Form 7

A simple, but flexible tool to add a contact form to your blog.

TinyMCE Advanced

Advanced editing tool for post writing, adding 40 new buttons to the toolbar including smilies, styles and visual characters.

Have I missed out any really useful plug-ins?

Do you use lots of different ones on your blog, or do you stick with the standard template?