Three Reasons Why I Blog

Bryan posted a link to Jeanne’s post “Why I Blog” in the Book Bloggers Google+ Community as discussion fodder--and it worked there, but it’s also a topic that warrants an in-kind response. I'm starting to feel like the longer you do this, the more important it is to revisit your reasons periodically, and with 6.5 years and close to 2000 posts here, I think I qualify as having been at this for a pretty long time.

You should go and read all of Jeanne’s post, but here’s this:

“In the last year, a lot of book bloggers have been writing and talking about how much quieter it’s gotten in blogland. Sullivan compared 2008-style blogging to jazz—’jazz and blogging are intimate, improvisational, and individual—but also inherently collective. And the audience talks over both.’ I think that 2013-style blogging, though, is more aptly compared to a solo in a classical concert. There are people in the audience, and they enjoy the music, but some of them are nervous about clapping in between movements, so it’s very quiet in the house.

“Because of the diminishing sense of audience, some bloggers have gone back to the old model of a blog as a ‘commonplace book,’ something a writer keeps for herself. Not a bad model; it’s how I began. I’m not sure I’m ready to go back to it, though.”

commonplace books, via Google Image Search

I started blogging for a similar reason, although I wasn’t familiar with the concept of the “commonplace book” at the time, and so I wouldn’t have characterized my blog that way. It was a place to record what I read and my thoughts about it, since without such a place, most of my reading was quickly becoming forgotten, and most of it didn’t deserve that.

(Sidebar: The flip side of having such a place is that there’s a living record of books you might prefer to forget you read--but fortunately, I haven’t encountered too many of those, before or since. Although I’ve been described, by myself and by those who know me well, as someone who would read anything she could get her hands on, the truth is that I really am fairly selective--usually. And when I fail to be selective enough for long enough, I eventually have to remedy that with a large-scale book purge. When “Will Work For Books” stops becoming an amusing motto and starts to feel like what your reading life actually is, it’s time to acknowledge that “free books” really aren’t.)

If I were starting out with those same reasons today, I’m not sure I’d be blogging; a Goodreads account offers just about everything a reader needs to keep a record of what she’s read and her thoughts about it. However, I started out with those reasons six and a half years ago. They brought me here, but after all this time, they’re not the only reasons I stay here. Here are three more:

• Creativity. There are plenty of places to find “rules for successful blogging,” and those rules been surprisingly consistent over the last half-dozen years, so I guess they’re pretty effective. I’ve tried to follow many of them over the years, with varying amounts of consistency and degrees of success. But this is my blog, and when it comes down to it, I get to make my own rules for it, implement them in any way I like, and change them on a whim. And I don’t have to blog exclusively about books in order to call myself a “book blogger.” There’s no one right way to do this, and I think every blogger can appreciate that.

• Connection. That “diminishing sense of audience” Jeanne mentions isn’t imaginary; much of the conversational aspect of blogging has gradually migrated away from blogs and over to Facebook and Twitter, and without comment conversations, it’s hard to know for certain whether we’re reaching anyone. I’m not sure the audience has truly diminished, though; I think sometimes we’ve just fallen into companionable silence, when we’re not having our conversations elsewhere. Granted, if you’re not keeping up with all the “elsewheres”--I’m getting worse at it, and less bothered by my failings--it might feel like no one’s around any more. But I still believe in the authentic connections I’ve made with other readers and bloggers, and I don’t want to lose them; I can only hope those with whom I’ve connected feel the same way.

• Confidence. Everything that blogging involves--the reading and learning that feed creativity of thought and expression, and produce communication and connection--continues to help me grow as a person. It’s enriched my life in ways I couldn’t have foreseen a decade ago, and strengthens my sense of my self. Why would I not want that?

At this stage in my blogging life, this is why I blog. I’m sure you have your own reasons. I hope you’ll revisit them...and blog about them.

Cross-posted to BlogHer.com 9/12/2013

Read More

WW: Shelved!

We've got a "wild card" week in our Wordless Wednesday linky group, so I thought you might like to see what we did with our dining room this past weekend. It gives a new meaning to the concept of "devouring books."

It may seem like an odd place to put them, but the dining room just happens to have one wall that's the perfect size to line with bookcases.

At intervals between Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon, I filled the shelves...and rearranged the shelves, and re-filled the shelves. 

  

And finally, all the boxes of books were unpacked (although not all of the books ended up on these shelves--we have others!)--and we still have some room for more!

That spot right in between all the books seemed like the perfect place to hang our autographed lithograph of the Rock Bottom Remainders.

I think I'm ready to declare us officially moved into the new house, now that the books have been unpacked. I'll be posting close-ups and explaining the shelving system in my Sunday Salon this weekend, so all of you book-organizing nerds should come back then!

An InLinkz Link-up

Read More

(Audio)Book Talk: BEAUTIFUL RUINS, by Jess Walter

Beautiful Ruins: A Novel
Jess Walter
Audiobook read by Edoardo Ballerini
Harper Perennial (March 2013), trade paper (ISBN 9780061928178 / 0061928178)
Fiction, 368 pages
Source: Purchased audiobook (Harper Audio (June 2012), ISBN 9780062201621; Audible ASIN B008ARPV8Q)
Reason for reading: Personal

Opening lines: “The dying actress arrived in his village the only way one could arrive directly--in a boat that motored into the cove, lurched past the rock jetty, and bumped against the end of the pier. She wavered a moment in the boat’s stern, then extended a slender hand to grab the mahogany railing; with the other, she pressed a wide-brimmed hat against her head. All around her, shards of sunlight broke on the flickering waves.

“Twenty meters away, Pasquale Tursi watched the arrival of the woman as if in a dream. Or rather, he would think later, as a dream’s opposite: a burst of clarity after a lifetime of sleep.”

Book description, from the publisher’s website
The story begins in 1962. On a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline, a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and spies an apparition: a tall, thin woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an actress, he soon learns, an American starlet, and she is dying. 

And the story begins again today, half a world away, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot—searching for the mysterious woman he last saw at his hotel decades earlier. 

What unfolds is a dazzling, yet deeply human, roller coaster of a novel, spanning fifty years and nearly as many lives. From the lavish set of Cleopatra to the shabby revelry of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Walter introduces us to the tangled lives of a dozen unforgettable characters: the starstruck Italian innkeeper and his long-lost love; the heroically preserved producer who once brought them together and his idealistic young assistant; the army veteran turned fledgling novelist and the rakish Richard Burton himself, whose appetites set the whole story in motion—along with the husbands and wives, lovers and dreamers, superstars and losers, who populate their world in the decades that follow.

Comments: I’m not often as thoroughly captivated by a novel as I was by Beautiful Ruins, and that makes it challenging to articulate my response to something more than “I loved it!” but I’ll try. I’m sure Jess Walter’s writing would have captured me on its own--and having read this, I’m now that much more determined to liberate The Financial Lives of the Poets from TBR Purgatory--but I do think that reading it as an audiobook probably amplified (no pun intended!) my reaction. Edoardo Ballerini’s reading was nearly perfect, in both English and Italian.

Approximate location of Beautiful Ruins' Portovergogna, Italy

Beautiful Ruins is a novel of mid-20th-century Italy and old (and new) Hollywood, conveying its characters back to the final days of World War II and forward through the decades into the present, with detours into the Pacific Northwest and a stop at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The catalyst for it all is the location filming of Cleopatra in Rome in the spring of 1962, a production which proved epic in complications and cost overruns while setting the modern template for behind-the-scenes tabloid scandal. Fifty years after, their experiences on the fringes of that production--and that scandal--still impact the lives of an Italian businessman and an American drama teacher, and a Hollywood mogul attempts to create a third act to his own story by producing a sequel--of sorts--to theirs.

I was very impressed by Walter’s weaving of these story threads--as well as others I’m not mentioning, because if I get too far into a plot discussion I’ll never get to anything else--balancing and connecting them into a fascinating whole. That said, the characters that inhabit Beautiful Ruins (pun somewhat intended this time, as I believe Walter intends multiple meanings to the title) are what make all those plot threads so absorbing. They are complex and convincingly human; I loved several of them, and even the least likable ones have characteristics that won me over to some degree. I genuinely enjoyed discovering how characters connected to one another across the novel’s expanse of time and place; I’d try to guess, and I was right more often than I wasn’t, but I was usually satisfied by the outcome either way. The descriptive passages in the novel are vivid, and so are the emotions it portrays.

My husband has given me ten years to learn conversational Italian so we can travel to Italy, my mother country--that is, the country of my mother’s ancestors. (Tall Paul has no Italian heritage himself, but he does have abiding interests in art and food.) I bought some audiobooks and downloaded a language-instruction app for my iPhone, but I’ve been procrastinating about doing anything with either of them, and now I have only nine years left for this project. Listening to Ballerini perform Beautiful Ruins, evoking the scenes and sounds of Italy’s Ligurian Sea coast, just might be what gets me started on it. Granted, only part of the story takes place there...but I drive past Universal City on my way to and from work every day, and I mostly speak Hollywood’s language already. I also have enough command of my own language to tell you that if you love having literary fiction read to you, I strongly recommend that you listen to Beautiful Ruins (and if audiobooks aren’t your thing, you won't go wrong just reading it, either); I listened to this one driving back and forth from Hollywood, but I was completely transported by it.

Rating: Book, 4 of 5; Audio, 4.25 of 5

Other bloggers’ reviews

Book Blogs Search Engine

Read More

Sunday Salon: "Time to Fill the Bookcases" Edition

Time Mid-afternoon on Saturday--trying to get a little bit ahead. I usually write this weekly installment first thing Sunday morning on my iPad, but I left the iPad at the office on Friday (not on purpose, trust me!), so I’m working on the laptop...

Place ...at my kitchen desk, under the ceiling fan. Have I shown you my kitchen desk yet? Here it is...

Eating Just finished a snack of a two clementines and a Kashi granola bar--I’m mildly addicted to the chocolate-almond-sea salt ones.

Drinking Water. I drank an iced Americano and an iced tea at Starbucks this morning, so I’m a little overcaffeinated right now.

Reading I also left my in-progress book on my desk at the office on Friday, so I started something else from the small stack of “books that aren’t in boxes because they’ve just shown up in the last few weeks.” I don't know: In Praise of Admitting Ignorance (Except When You Shouldn't) by Leah Hager Cohen is an odd little book--it feels a bit like a very expanded journal article--but I’m marking a bunch of passages in it, and I could potentially finish it before I get my other book back on Monday. Depends what else I end up doing with the rest of this weekend, I suppose...and I do have a big project underway, so we’ll see.

Watching Not all that much right now besides BBC America, where Copper and Broadchurch are approaching the end of their seasons, but starting to get psyched for the end of rerun season (which we’ve actually used in the old-school catch-up fashion to get Spencer into Arrow). Oh, and Jon Stewart is back!

Listening Even though today wasn’t a commuting day, I actually spent some time reading an audiobook--I was so close to finishing Beautiful Ruins that I didn’t want to drag out the last hour till Monday morning. I hope to get the review written soon, but I’ll say this now: I think I’m ready to start on those Italian lessons my husband’s been telling me he wants me to take!

Pondering What to expect from an online writing workshop I’ll be starting at the end of the month. Just because I’ve been exposing my writing here for over six years doesn’t mean I’m not nervous about exposing it to structured critique from people who know what they're doing!

Blogging I thought I’d post more than I did this past week, but I think I may be right back in the three-post-a-week habit. I’d still like to get up to four, though. With two book reviews to write and some photoblogging, that might happen this week. Or not. I may decide to hold something over till next week. I’m working on balancing consistency with looseness.

Hating The heat. My iPhone says it’s 95 degrees out right now. It’s been like this for a couple of weeks, although the forecast says we’ll cool down to the upper 80s by later next week. I’m not sure I believe it. Summer in Southern California tends to run several weeks behind the rest of the country, so when your leaves are turning, we may still be burning (because Fire Season tends to last into November).

Anticipating Spending much of the rest of this weekend unpacking the book boxes and setting up the new shelves, which arrived this weekend! I’m planning to document the process in pictures, but here’s what I’ll be working with.

The bookshelves are maple, and they smell so good! Also, I want pancakes now.

How’s your weekend going?

Read More

The Annual Alzheimer's Post: Walking to End It in 2013

family photo courtesy of Teresa Lantos DeGagne

(I call this "The Annual Alzheimer's Post" because, with minor changes, it goes up around this time every year, to accompany the annual Walk to End Alzheimer's. Details on the 2013 Walk, and my team's fundraising link, are below.)

On October 8, 1999, my mother, Mary Ann Corsino Lantos, passed away. A New York City native and, after a nine-year detour to southwestern Connecticut, a resident of St. Petersburg, Florida for 22 years, she was 69 years old at the time of her death. She was survived by her husband, two adult daughters, and one teenage grandson. This is what my sister says about her:

My mother was many things: loving, smart, funny, artistic, a voracious reader, and a quiet influence. She overcame many challenges throughout her life--including being born legally blind and losing her own mother before she was six years old. (Her) story is filled with drama, hope, faith and laughter. It would have been amazing to see how it would have played out had she lived fully, longer. My mother passed away at the age of sixty-nine, after being in the full throes of dementia from early-onset Alzheimer's disease for seven years.

But our family had truly lost her well before that. For over seven years, she had been living in a nursing home, incapacitated by early-onset Alzheimer's disease. We had begun to see changes in her health, demeanor, and personality when she was in her mid-to-late 50's--sudden weight loss, strange sleeping habits, difficulty in speaking, disengagement with her family and surroundings, paranoia and hallucinations--but her long-standing fear of doctors and medications caused her to resist our efforts to get her to seek help. My sister and I had both moved away, and geographic distance and the demands of our own lives limited what we could do about her situation; my dad was uninformed, fundamentally passive, and unprepared to force the issue. By the time Mom reached the point where something had to be done, there wasn't a realistic alternative to round-the-clock care for her, and the next several years were spent in a form of limbo. By the time she died, much of our grieving had been long underway; Alzheimer's doesn't take the body quickly, but it does take the intangibles that make a person unique and special.

My experience with Alzheimer’s has left me with feelings of loss, guilt, and fear. I often feel that I didn’t do enough to help with or advocate for my mother. I was a young mother myself at the time she became ill, and lived over 1000 miles away for most of the years until she died, and those facts have helped me rationalize my lack of involvement. But I wonder whether I would have done many things differently if I had been there--and I’m not sure I would have. The distance and denial feel connected, and they both feed guilt, even now.

The fear comes from the scientific facts about Alzheimer’s, including these: it remains difficult to diagnose in a timely manner, lacks effective long-term treatments, and is an incurable, terminal condition. It’s still associated with many unknowns, as the 2010 Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Takes on Alzheimer’s, elaborates:

• What causes Alzheimer’s? Is it inherited? What causes younger-onset Alzheimer’s? Is there any treatment that can delay the onset or slow down the course of the disease?

• What about new tests that may be able to tell you if you’re going to get Alzheimer’s? Are the tests ready for use? Are they accurate? Who would be a candidate to take them? If there are no foolproof treatments yet, what’s the good of knowing?

• What can we do to prevent Alzheimer’s? Do lifestyle changes really help? Should we all be hitting the treadmill, drinking tea, doing crossword puzzles, taking Omega-3 and Vitamin D?

• Why do more women get Alzheimer’s than men? Is it just because women live longer? Does estrogen play a part in prevention? If so, how much and when?

• What exactly is the natural course of the disease? Why does it play out in a few years for some patients, in a decade or more for others? Why do different people have different symptoms: some explosively angry, others hypersexual, still others mumbling or even silent? In other words, why is it that, “Once you’ve seen one case of Alzheimer’s, you’ve seen…one case of Alzheimer’s”?

• And for God’s sake, when will there be a cure?

Those living with Alzheimer’s--not just the patients, but their families and other caregivers--need resources and support now. Those who could find themselves living with it in the future need research to answer some of those unknowns.

The annual Walk to End Alzheimer’s is the nation’s major fundraising/awareness event on behalf of this disease:

"The Alzheimer's Association Walk to End Alzheimer’s™ is the nation’s largest event to raise awareness and funds for Alzheimer’s care, support and research. Held annually in more than 600 communities nationwide, this inspiring event calls on participants of all ages and abilities to reclaim the future for millions. Together, we can end Alzheimer’s disease, the nation’s sixth-leading cause of death.

Walk to End Alzheimer’s unites the entire community — family, friends, co-workers, social and religious groups and more --- in a display of combined strength and dedication in the fight against this devastating disease. While there is no fee to register, each participant is expected to fundraise in order to contribute to the cause and raise awareness.

When you participate in Walk, your fundraising dollars fuel our mission-related initiatives of care, support and research. In addition, your actions, both through fundraising and participating in the event, help to change the level of Alzheimer’s awareness in your community. At a Walk event, you can learn more about Alzheimer’s disease and the support programs and services offered by your local chapter. You will also have unique opportunities to get involved with the cause through advocacy initiatives and clinical trial enrollment."

All of the unknowns can leave a person feeling that there’s little she can do about Alzheimer’s. Participating in this walk every year is one thing I can do, both in remembrance of my mother and in support of a healthier future. My family will be doing the 2013 5K Walk to End Alzheimer's at the Thousand Oaks (California) Civic Arts Plaza on Saturday, September 21. If you’re local, we’d love to have you join us there!

I may not be able to join my sister, brother-in-law, and nephews on the Walk this year due to a schedule conflict, but I do want to help them reach (or exceed!) the team fundraising goal--I hope you'll help me help them with a donation to Team Mary Ann's Mafia!

Previous posts about Alzheimer’s on The 3 R’s Blog (sources for some of the material included in this one):

Remembering Mom: October 8, 1999

Book Talk: *Still Alice*, by Lisa Genova

Walk with me, and remember

A Turning Point: Maria Shriver and a Woman’s Nation Take on Alzheimer’s
Fear of Fifty: Or, Before I Forget

Read More

WW: It's Oh So Quiet...

...quiet as a cemetary. New England is full of these picturesque little resting places.

A small cemetery just outside New London, New Hampshire (June 2013)

An InLinkz Link-up

Read More

Sunday Salon: Live from the Loft!

Time: Sunday morning, in 8 o'clock hour

Place: The “Girl-Loft” (If Tall Paul gets a “Man-Cave,” I get a “Girl-Loft”), in the new house. We turned in the keys to the old place yesterday, and are officially All Moved In to the new one, although we're still unpacking and arranging.

Eating and drinking: Water only right now, but after I'm done writing this, I'll be meeting my sister for Sunday coffee and breakfast. (We usually get together on Saturdays, but for various reasons, it's been a month since we last saw each other, and with this being a three-day weekend, today's like another Saturday anyway!)

Reading: A book of short stories in translation that I'll be reviewing for Shelf Awareness–out of my comfort zone in a couple of ways right there! I'm also pushing through my feed-reader backlog this weekend. Nearly all of the books, aside from some review-consideration ones that have come in during the last few weeks, are still boxed up in the garage, and they'll stay there till the new bookshelves arrive (hopefully, that's just a few weeks away from happening!).

Watching: Not much besides the shows I mentioned last time, Broadchurch and Copper on BBC America–and recently, Seinfeld reruns in the early evenings. But now it's September, so new TV is on the way!

Listening: I just started Jess Walter's Beautiful Ruins, read by Edoardo Ballerini, on Audible this week, and am thoroughly savoring it already. It seems like some of my best reading this year has been by ear!

Blogging: I'm hoping to get back into the swing now that we're done with this summer of house-hunting, house-buying, house-moving, and cross-country travel (that wasn't house-related for us, but did include finding college housing for Kate!). It's back-to-school time…that means returning to the 3 R's, doesn't it?

Enjoying: You can probably guess this one–being DONE with the move, and getting comfortable in the new house! This weekend, we're not doing much besides arranging and hanging pictures. It feels weird not to have a thousand chores!

Anticipating: The arrival of those new bookcases, although I am a bit daunted by the prospect–and possibilities–of getting them set up!

Pondering/Planning: I'm trying to decide whether to sign up for an online writing workshop that one of my Creative Alliance friends, Jane Gassner, is planning for the fall. I've never been part of a formal writing group–or taken a class in it outside of my English curriculum in high school and college, for that matter; reading Beth Kephart's Handling the Truth piqued my interest in doing so, and Jane's class is coming along at just the right time to give it a try. And on a note unrelated to that but quite related to the move, I'm thinking about cooking and eating at home more regularly, especially on weekends--although we did go out to eat last night, I think we'll be dining in-house today.

How's your weekend going?

 

Posted with Blogsy

Read More