Tags

I won’t deny that I get loads of ideas and inspiration for posts and blog improvements from other blogs – don’t we all? A huge thank you to everyone who’s inspired me in this way. Something a lot of bloggers do, and I haven’t so far, is a regular round-up post.

Doing a quick survey, Simon at Savidgereads does his Bookish Bits on a Saturday, whereas Jackie at Farmlanebooks does an end of the month summary, and Teresa at Shelflove gives us weekly Notes from a Reading Life as part of her Sunday Salon posts.

While I like the idea of the Sunday Salon it is closed to new sign-ups having reached the number of contributors that the software can cope with. Looking for an USP, I thought I’d make my round-up ‘Gaskella’s Midweek Miscellany’. It won’t happen every week, but it will appear on Wednesdays. So here goes …

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Simon T’s Ten Random Books Meme, is spreading. It was such fun to do, and my version is here, and here are more fascinating results for your delectation …

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Last Thursday I took part in a Blog Blitz organised by Kelly at YAnnebe to highlight great YA novels that not many people have read. Kelly used the power of the Librarything tagging system to analyse the numbers of LT users that owned each YA tagged book. Over 25,000 LT users own Twilight for instance, but there are thousands of books owned by 500 people or less. Then invited LT users with public catalogues who are bloggers to highlight some of their favourite rarely owned YA titles, and even gave us personalised lists to work from. This must have been a massive project and nearly 50 bloggers took part by posting – and I’ve added to many to my wishlists from others’ posts! To sum it all up, Kelly is publishing some final data from all the books highlighted. Go Kelly!!!

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Lastly this week – Incoming. New arrivals at Gaskell Towers include:

  • The Bookman by Lavie Tidhar – it’s steampunk. A masked terrorist is putting bombs into books – oh no!
  • Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada. First published in 1947 in Germany, this book chronicles the horror and terror of German life during WWII. It’s also a chunkster with over 500 pages.
  • The Mayor’s Tongue by Nathaniel Rich. Scott Pack said this reminded him of Paul Auster . Well anything Austerish will attract my attention.
  • Intuition by Allegra Goodman, a novel of Bad Science. This medical thrillerish novel was bound to appeal to the scientist bit of my brain.
  • Brooklyn by Colm Toibin – I finally gave in on and bought this one – in hardback too even though the paperback is out this month.
  • The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins – after all the posts and comments around on this book – I succumbed.
  • And finally, with many thanks to the lovely Dovegreyreader, a boxed set of Oxford Bronte essentials arrived. I won this set in one of her Twelve Days of Christmas giveaways. Jane Eyre, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Wuthering Heights in nice new Oxford World Classics editions will now grace my shelves.
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