- Art of the Novella Challenge,
- sending my girls to camp,
- getting 3 kiddos ready for school (and 1 ready for home-school) and then
- conquering the 3-day music festival over Labor Day weekend that my husband runs (which just happens to take place a good 500 miles away from where we're living) and finally
- getting everybody off to school (1st day at a brick&mortar school in the big city for 2 of my kiddos)...
- except for my youngest--who "stayed home" from home-school with a stomach bug,
- and then now jumping into birthday celebrations for my husband....
I have some compulsory reading to get through in the next week or two: 2 book club books and a couple of ARCs. There are a couple of books I finished that I want to chat about soon, but the biggest development with the arrival of September is in regards to the Indie Lit Awards: Nominations are now open! I can't wait to see what newly published fiction everybody has loved this year. Conveniently coinciding with all this fun, Safe From the Sea by Peter Geye (last year's fiction winner for the Indie Lit Awards) was released in paperback this week. Put this baby on your shelf!Check out the site for full details, but the big news is that everyone (readers with or without blogs) can nominate up to 5 different titles in each category this year. I can't nominate fiction books (since I'm involved with the judging) so will you pretty please read my favorites and nominate them for me?? Maybe you are in the mood for some 1980s Straight Edge with Ten Thousand Saints? How about an amazingly humorous view of mental illness with Miss Entropia and the Adam Bomb? Or dive into a book that turns baseball into a universal look at the human condition with The Art of Fielding! I'd love to see one of these pop up on the longlist, but even more I'd love to hear what you think about them. If you're up for some current literary fiction, these three are a great place to start.
Nominations are open until the end of the year, so if you are anticipating some brilliant new releases this fall, there is no need to worry. You can nominate favorites now and save some some of your 5 votes for later. Also, remember that you don't need to be a blogger to nominate this year, so encourage the other readers in your life to pipe up too.
Enjoy the last months of warm weather as we begin to move, once again, towards those crazy end-of-the-year months. And as always, happy reading!
Your recent experience with The Great Gatsby is so parallel with many of my reading experiences. Some books that I read from the 8th grade-10th grade I was just not ready for. I had to reread them for a class later in life, and I loved them, much to my surprise, and wondered how I ever could have had such a negative opinion of them.
ReplyDeleteThen again, and this is important, there are classics I read at 14 that I loved, then had to read in college, and I appreciated them in totally different ways. Jane Eyre has been such a read for me. I've read it three times: at 14, at 21, and in my 40s, and each time it was so NEW! Amazing.
I can well imagine Jane Eyre being like that. I wish that I'd read it when I was young so I could compare! I did read Anna Karenina as a teen and loved it, also read Native Son and hated it--I should give them both another go and see what happens!
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