Honoring Dewey with a New Challenge: Support Your Local Authors

It was one year ago today that as I opened my Reader, I was greeted with the news that one our best book bloggin' buddies, Dewey, had passed away. The news traveled quickly through the book blogging community and it was an amazing thing to witness everyone coming together to think of ways to honor Dewey, and to keep her visions and projects alive.

As part of that, I've had a wonderful time helping out with Weekly Geeks from time to time, and by participating in Dewey's Books Challenge. I loved every one of those books I read for that one!

And now there's a mini challenge posted by Kailana of The Written World, suggesting that we do something new, or contribute in some way, to the book blogging community as a way to honor Dewey on this one year anniversary.

So, I've been pondering for awhile this challenge idea, and this seems like the perfect time to lay aside all my fears and worries and just throw it out there and see what happens.

My idea is to have a challenge called Support Your Local Authors. I'm always trying to stay up-to-date with what my local authors are writing and I think it would be fun to make it official and get others to join me. The idea is that where ever we live, we try to read the books that authors who live in our area are writing. I think it wold be fun to get to know each other better this way, and learn which authors live near everyone. Besides that, it's just cool to support your local authors!

I'd like to make this one of those ongoing challenges, with really no deadline, and just have it be a goal to read a certain amount of books during the year from your local author stash. You can try to catch up with past books, or simply try to keep up with the new books. You can help discover new authors and promote them, or help to maintain the "old" ones.

If you are interested, let me know in comments and if there's enough people then perhaps I'll go the next step and create a new blog as a place to keep track of everyone. I'm nervous that everyone is overly "challenged" these days, so it will be interesting to see what y'all think.

Hello RIP IV, Goodbye Dewey's Books

One challenge completed and one new one to conquer!

This past week I read two books for the Dewey's Books Challenge (the challenge where we honored the late great book blogger Dewey by reading a book she loved and/or reviewed) and by so doing, completed the challenge! Wow. I know. It's impressive.

So here's what I read complete with links to my reviews:

1. Gossamer by Lois Lowry
2. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
3. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie
4. The Wresting Game by Ellen Raskin
5. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing Vol. 1 by M. T. Anderson



And so without skipping a beat, I'm signing up for the famed Carl's RIP IV Challenge, wherein we read scary (ish) books during the Halloween season. This is one of the challenges book bloggers seriously seem crazy about, so one must not be left out! (Just check out that list of participants! Sheesh, I think I'm late to the game.)

My plan is to read at least 2 books (Peril the Second) from this list:

The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafron

Drood by Dan Simmons

The House on the Strand by Daphne duMaurier

Interview with a Vampire by Anne Rice (it scares me just writing that one!)

The Mist by Stephen King

House by Frank Peretti and Ted Dekker (I know nothing about this one, but ended up with it at my house and it looks plenty creepy.)

Well, that should give me enough to pick from I'm thinking!

Edited to Add:

Putting The Forest of Hands and Teeth on my RIP list now. Don't know why I didn't think of it before. I just started it yesterday, and I see it on so many other lists and I'm thinking... "duh". So yeah, I'm adding it! :)

A Mini Dewey Books Challenge

I just realized that Softdrink over at Fizzy Thoughts is giving us "Dewey's Books Challenge" participants a mini-challenge (so okay, I haven't been being too much attention I guess!) and that is to write a list of something about one of our Dewey books, or authors, or anything along those lines.

So since I love list making, I thought I'd go for this one, and write a list about M.T. Anderson, an author of one of my upcoming Dewey books, and one that I really know nothing about.

M.T. Anderson:

• The M stands for Matthew and the T stands for Tobin.


• He was born in 1967 and is from Massachusetts.


• He writes picture books, middle grade books, and YA books.


• His first book is called Thirsty and is a vampire book, from what I can tell.


• He got a National Book Award, and a Printz Honor for The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Volume 1: The Pox Party which is what I'll be reading shortly, hopefully!


• He also got many awards for Feed, which I've heard is a pretty intense, disturbing book.


• In which John Green blogs about how he thinks Vol 2 of Octavian Nothing is the best book of the past year


• An M.T. Anderson quote: "It's insulting to believe that teens should have a different kind of book than an adult should. Teens like challenges. They know the world is complicated, they can tell when a book is simplifying life. If we're going to ask our kids at age 18 to go off to war and die for their country, I don't see any problem with asking them at age 16 to think about what that might mean."


• Previous jobs include: He worked as a burger flipper, a department store cashier and a radio DJ.


• I can't find any M.T. Anderson blog, and this is what he has to say about THAT when someone else had the same problem: "I have a very New Englandy horror of self-promotion, and for that reason, I haven’t put anything about me online. No real loss
  there. An MTA-blog would be a dismal record of wasted hours and frozen chicken pot pie."

One thing is certain, I can't wait to get reading about Octavian, and then from there, one to some other M.T. Anderson books!

Review: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

Book: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

Genre: JF Fantasy

Rating: A

For: Dewey's Books

I started reading Neil Gaiman's blog while he was writing this book. So it's been fun to watch it come to pass.

So anyway, after all the buzz about this book, I was anxious to get it and see what I thought. And what I think is that this one for sure deserves all the hype. It seemed to take me forever to read it because I guess I had a million distractions, but still, I loved the premise and the whole fun, magical feeling of the book.

For those that don't know, it's about a boy who is raised by ghosts in a English graveyard. He learns some of their magic and has many interesting adventures. But he has to stick to the graveyard because there is something sinister out there in the world that's after him.

To copy what I said over at Goodreads: It's got some magic, some bad guys, some monster-y things, a gazillion ghosts, a girl, a cool dude who I'm pretty sure I know what he was, (but I'm not saying,) a dead witch, and lots of creepy craziness, some of it that made me hold my breath just a little! Oh, and there's great pictures too! Read it!

This is my first book for the Dewey's Books Challenge. You can find her review HERE if the link is working that is. This is also get marked of as my first library book of the year for the Support Your Library Challenge. Also, it's going down as a YA for that challenge too! :)

Other Reviews:

Penny's Pages

Devourer of Books

Book Nut

Maw Books

Books, Books and more Books

1 More Chapter

Dewey's Books Challenge

For Dewey's Books Challenge, I'll be reading five books during this year, 2009, which Dewey reviewed on her blog. For the official rules of this challenge, and to sign up, click HERE.

The five books I plan on reading are:

1. Gossamer by Lois Lowry

2. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

3. The Absoultely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie

4. The Wresting Game by Ellen Raskin

5. The Ashtonishing Life of Octavian Nothing Vol. 1 by M. T. Anderson


Yes, all YA books, so this one will be easy. Right? I can do this, right? :)