Erin Reads – Page 34 – Notes on Books & Life

BBAW: Finding and Keeping Community

Book Blogger Appreciation Week 2011 Badge

Here we are at the midpoint of Book Blogger Appreciation Week! Today’s topic revisits Monday’s theme of community:

“The world of book blogging has grown enormously and sometimes it can be hard to find a place. Share your tips for finding and keeping community in book blogging despite the hectic demands made on your time and the overwhelming number of blogs out there. If you’re struggling with finding a community, share your concerns and explain what you’re looking for–this is the week to connect!”

I love this topic, because it gives me a chance to pick your brains! I have questions for you, but first, a couple of ways I’ve found work really well for building and keeping community. If you want to get on with the questions and skip all my blabbering, scroll down to the bottom and answer away!

Commenting

The best way I’ve found to find community within the larger book blogosphere is to comment. I know of no blogger who doesn’t love thoughtful, quality comments, the kind that open up conversation and let you know someone, somewhere has read your thoughts. After all, without comments, blogging would be a one-way activity, with bloggers tossing content out there onto the Internet with no feedback or interaction whatsoever! It’s a great way to meet other people and for them to meet you. From my own experience I know that repeatedly commenting on a particular blog I like is a great way to feel like I’m getting to “know” someone, since to comment I must read the blog, and by reading the blog regularly, I’m following at least a little part of that person’s life. It’s a neat feeling. If you’re short on time, just pick a couple of blogs you really enjoy reading and get involved.

Circle of Hands — Click for photo credit

As much as I love book reviews and recommendations, though, I find it hard to comment on them if I’ve not read the book. Am I alone in this? What to say besides “This sounds so interesting, thank you for bringing it to my attention!” and the like? Some bloggers are excellent at responding to such reviews, but it’s never been my strong point. I love the Sunday Salons, the opinion and musings posts and the glimpses of personal lives. (Unfortunately, it’s much easier for me to write reviews than to write those “other” posts!) If you’re looking to build community, to me those are good posts to start with, because they offer everyone an opportunity to contribute. I also love update/stat posts; when I’ve been busy and am feeling out of the loop, they’re a great way to catch up on what other bloggers have been up to without reading every post I’ve missed.

Reading Together

Reading with others is another fantastic way to find and keep community. One of the first things I did once I started blogging in earnest was to participate in Trish’s Odyssey readalong and Jill and Heather’s Dueling Monsters (this year’s picks to be announced shortly!). These events give you something in common with the other participants, plus a list of blogs to visit who are working on the same book(s) you are. If formal readalongs aren’t your thing, you could even hook up with another blogger and coordinate an informal read together, via email or blogs or some other avenue. I’ve done that some through Reading Buddies, and I love it! Books offer a great opportunity to get to know other people. I mean, if you’re going to read anyway (which, clearly, we all are!), why not do it with someone else?

Twitter: Help Me!

I feel like I’m figuring out the blog-to-blog community bit, as described above. However, I struggle with stepping beyond the bounds of blogs. I know many of you thrive in that area, so I’d love your advice! I feel like so much happens on sites like Twitter. I keep seeing reference to Twitter friends all over these BBAW posts: people meeting on Twitter, finding a common interest, having Twitter parties. But when I open Twitter, all I feel is overwhelmed! I think I’m missing out on a huge opportunity, but I’m not sure how to seize it.

So, I will enlist your help! (Hey, that’s another way to build community, no?) Oh wise readers: what are your best Twitter tips? How do you find new people? Keep your own tweets interesting? Organize lists of people you follow (or not)? Decide who to follow in the first place? Anything, anything at all. Or any community building tip you might like to offer, but especially Twitter. I would very much love to hear your thoughts!

BBAW: Meet Lisa from Lit and Life!

Welcome to day 2 of Book Blogger Appreciation Week! Interview day is always a favorite. It’s so much fun to meet new bloggers as well as learn something new about bloggers you’ve been reading for a long time.

I’ve been reading Lit and Life for close to a year, and though I always enjoy Lisa’s insights, I never knew much about the blogger behind the blog, making Lisa a perfect BBAW interview partner!

Before we get to my questions, here’s a bit about Lisa, in her own words:

I’m a lifelong Nebraskan and will proudly tell you that I love it here (except for a couple of months in the winter!). My favorite genre is literary fiction but I’m pretty open to anything, I’ve been reading a lot of non-fiction this year. Besides reading, I love watching football, volleyball and swimming and cooking/baking for my family and anyone else who wants to pull up a chair. You don’t even need a reservation at Cafe Shepp!

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I have to start with the classic question: how did you come to be a book blogger?

My friend, who was at the time the leader of our book club, started doing a blog about 8 months before I did to track her own books and to try to develop connections to help us connect with great books and authors. I started following her blog and then discovered the wide world of book blogs. It looked like so much fun and I thought it would be a great way to record my thoughts on books for my own records. It has turned out to be so much more!

I think it’s safe to say you enjoy participating in challenges. Why do you think you are drawn to them? What are some of your favorites?

I’m kind of a challenge junkie when it comes time to sign up but I’m getting worse and worse about completing them! One of the reasons they appeal to me is that they give me the incentive to read books I already own, books I already own or have an interest in reading. I always enjoy the challenges that have me reading more classics; I love the classics but sometimes, particularly as a blogger, it’s easy to get caught up in reading just the most current books.

One feature of Lit and Life that I particularly enjoy is Fairy Tale Fridays. Can you explain a bit about what Fairy Tale Fridays is and how it came to be?

Fairy Tale Fridays came about after I attended the Omaha Lit Fest last year, the theme of which was fairy tales. The fairy tales that I read my kids growing up were nothing like what the panelists were talking about and I became fascinated with what fairy tales had been and how they have changed over time. When I decided to do Fairy Tale Fridays, it really was just something I was doing for myself; I’m so excited that so many other people really seem to enjoy it!

Do you have any odd or quirky bookish habits you’d like to share?

I don’t think so–not that I don’t want to share but I don’t think I have any. My family just thinks it’s odd that I read so much and that I keep a dish next to both of my favorite reading places that have sticky notes, note cards, book marks, pens and my reading glasses. But we all do that, right? I am seriously considering adding one of those setups on my kitchen counter for when I’m reading while I eat breakfast. Would that be odd?

What books do you find yourself recommending again and again?

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, City of Thieves by David Benioff, all of Jane Austen but only to those readers I know like the classics, and The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar.

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Thank you, Lisa, for sharing a bit about yourself! To anyone who hasn’t yet seen Lisa’s blog, I highly recommend you head over and check it out. Perhaps you’ll learn something new about me while you’re at it!

In the spirit of getting to know one another, what fun or interesting things might I not yet know about you?

BBAW: Community, Part 1

Today kicks off Book Blogger Appreciation Week (BBAW for short), a week devoted to recognizing the awesomeness of the book blogging community. More eloquently stated on the event’s website, BBAW was created “to recognize the hard work and contribution of book bloggers to the promotion and preservation of a literate culture actively engaged in discussing books, authors, and a lifestyle of reading.” It’s been going since 2008. It’s also the event I so fortuitously stumbled upon by accident last year, the one that gave me a glimpse of the amazing breadth and depth of the book blogging community and convinced me to take my first faltering steps into it. So, obviously, it is an event that is rather dear to me.

Each day of the week brings a new theme on which bloggers around the world write. Today’s centers on community, encouraging bloggers to “highlight a couple of bloggers who have made book blogging a unique experience for you.”

Now, book bloggers as a group are generally some of the most friendly, welcoming, and supportive people I have ever encountered, which makes it hard for me to highlight just a few individuals. So instead, I’m going to focus on something a little different: my Reading Buddies. (Not sure what that means? Check out the Reading Buddies page.)

Kids being read to — Click for photo credit

I started Reading Buddies because I love to read books with other people. I like knowing there’s someone I can discuss, gush, or ponder with. I like being able to do more than just write reviews, to dig into the characters and talk about plot points that would spoil the book for those who had not read it. I also love the different perspectives each reader brings to a book, how the thing one person may not even notice is the very thing on which another reader’s experience focuses. I’ve found that reading a book with someone, even informally, allows me to learn a bit about them, to have a sort of conversation, however brief, that goes beyond reading one another’s blogs.

When Reading Buddies began, I was prepared for it to fall flat. There are so many fantastic readalongs and online book groups out there that I doubted there would be room for one more. Eight months later, though, I continue to read a Reading Buddies book each month…and people join me. I love it! I cannot thank you enough, all of you who have read with me or who plan to. Thank you for supporting Reading Buddies and for sharing a little bit of your precious reading time with me. Each of you has absolutely “made book blogging a unique experience” for me.

Any attempt by me to list all my Reading Buddies would result in someone getting left out, since no formal list of participants exists. However, if you’ve read a book with me, I’d love for you to say so in the comments.

So, what bloggers have made book blogging a unique experience for you?

Sunday Salon: “That Day in September”

Before I left for my August travels, an author named Artie Van Why contacted me to see if I’d like to read his short memoir, That Day in September. Unsure of how much reading I would get done during my trip, I was reluctant to commit to another book, but I loaded it onto my Sony Reader anyway. Sitting in the airport on my way home, I read the book’s 50-some pages in one go, unwilling to break it’s spell. Today, as we remember the tragedy that occurred ten years ago today in New York City and the many lives that were lost, I want to share that book with you.

We all remember where we were when we first heard the news that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center. I had just started college and was sitting in my dorm room, watching the news unfold on my roommate’s tiny TV, my class-ready bag forgotten by my desk. I was lucky enough not to know anyone who was directly involved in the tragedy, but some of my new friends did, and the mood over campus, just a few weeks into my freshman year, was devastated.

Artie Van Why was at work, just across from the towers, when the planes hit. His short memoir, That Day in September, traces how he came to live in New York and work near the towers, his own experience of September 11, 2001, and his recollections of the days that followed. It is a brief but beautiful personal story, one man’s struggle to process and deal with a national tragedy, yet it feels universal. Van Why’s candid prose bring the reader to him, so that I felt his story as my own. In the couple of hours I spent with That Day in September, I lost count of the number of times tears came to my eyes. I’m so glad the author somehow got his story into my hands.

However you spend today, I leave you with these final lines of That Day in September:

“No, I will not forget what I lived through, what we all lived through, that day in September.
“And to honor those who are gone, I will not forget to live.”

Thoughts on “Still Life With Brass Pole” by Craig Machen

Still Life with Brass Pole by Craig Machen (cover)

Still Life With Brass Pole by Craig Machen was sent to me for review by the author. I read it on my Sony Reader while traveling last month. The views expressed below are my own.

About the Book:

“Dean is driving the Porsche. In the passenger seat, I am drunk, coked to the gills, stoned and completely at ease. The car belongs to my dad, and so does Dean, figuratively speaking. He is Dad’s lover.”

So begins Still Life With Brass Pole. From these attention-grabbing first lines, the memoir works its way through Machen’s early life: his repeated problems with drugs and alcohol, his jobs at strip clubs and his relationships with said clubs’ female employees, his foray into steroids and bodybuilding, his conflicts with his mother’s much younger new husband, and his occasional struggles to turn his life right-side up. When the story leaves us, the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel has at last come into sight.

My Thoughts:

Some of you are probably thinking that Still Life With Brass Pole does not sound like the sort of book I tend to read. And you’re right, it’s not. Though I enjoy memoirs, I often find it difficult to read about topics like drug addiction and sexual escapades. So, I surprised myself a bit when I accepted Craig Machen’s memoir for review. It took me a bit outside of my usual comfort zone, but it’s not an excursion I regret making in any way.

Machen writes candidly, seeming to hold nothing back. In most places his words flow easily, and aside from a few rough patches that could have used some editing, I often found myself enjoying his prose. I appreciated how Machen’s narration seems free from regret, ulterior motives, or moralizing; instead, he writes in a way that gave me the impression he is tracing his own journey as he recalls it, leaving judgements and undue drama aside. This tone soon put me at ease and won my trust. As a character, Machen is the likable sort you hope will succeed, despite his misguided ways. As a narrator, he is the kind of voice you warm up to quickly and follow willingly.

We know from the beginning where the story will end up: Machen does, indeed, succeed in turning his life around, as evidenced in part by his long career as a writer in Hollywood. Still Life With Brass Pole, then, sheds light on the path he walked before the change occurred. It is because of this, perhaps–this knowledge that the story has a happy ending–that I was able to read Machen’s story without much of my usual reserve. That, coupled with the author’s straightforward, friendly tone, made Still Life With Brass Pole a much more comfortable read than it might otherwise have been for me.

That is not to say I would recommend this book to everyone. If you have issues with drugs, alcohol, addiction, sex, abuse, and/or strong language in books, I would caution you that Machen’s memoir contains all of those. However, I can also say that I found it rather more accessible than I had expected, and I think there are plenty of readers out there who would enjoy Still Life With Brass Pole very much.

Those are my thoughts. Check out Still Life With Brass Pole on Goodreads or LibraryThing, or read other bloggers’ reviews:

The Blue Bookcase

If I missed your review, please let me know and I’ll add a link!