Daily Thoughts 9/1/2010 (Blogs, The Defector)

Image of American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882). The engraving was made after a painting by Longfellow's younger son Ernest Longfellow. The original portrait still resides in Longfellow's study at the Longfellow National Historic Site in Cambridge. Image taken from Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow by Samuel Longfellow (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's brother). Published by Ticknor & co., 1886

Daily Thoughts 9/1/2010

I took a little bit of time to look through places that had links to my site.  There is http://www.shakespearewroteformoney.wordpress.com/ which is a book review site and http://www.morevikings.com/ which is an entertaining site on books, comics and speculative fiction book reviews. Speculative fiction is an all encompassing term for writing that speculates about the nature of reality; it includes science fiction, horror, magical realism, fantasy, and other books with fantastic elements in them. I rather like the More Vikings site.




I put in the reviews of material from May 2009 today.  When I am done, I may go back and pull out links to create a resource list of the internet sites which I have written about. 




On the way to work, I found a paperback copy of Daniel Silva, The Defector.  It is a spy novel with quite a bit of style and art in it.  The author mentions Caravaggio, Vogue, chess, and a villa in Italy in the first 23 pages.  I rather like it. 




Today has been a very busy day.  I put together a bookmark for starting a business today as well as had several of my older bookmarks printed up for distribution.  I also printed up a new form for tracking missing items and had several flyers printed for the Womens Enterprise Development Center sessions on small business.  I also took some time to sort through the donations for a few minutes.  There was a new copy of Before I Fail by Lauren Oliver which is a fiction title, some classsic paperbacks, and a few Naruto graphic novels. 



The requests for the book mobile came in as well.  There were a number of requests for books on the bounty mutiny as well as works by David Niven, books on Leonardo Da Vinci, and biographies.

Daily Thoughts 6/11/2010

Front view of a plant sculpture of a green bookworm reading a book with a B and C on it. Photo from Manchester.11 July 2008 (2008-07-11), 15:09:08, Taken by Terry from Wikimedia, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic

Daily Thoughts 6/11/2010

Today, I looked at my stats. I looked at Webmaster Tools to check on search queries related to my blog. http://www.google.com/webmaster/tools/

The number one search term which my blog comes up under is Rosie The Riveter. There is a certain irony in this. It is exactly the type of thing which I don't mind being attached to. This is followed by monopoly pieces. I am rather partial to the hat. Then comes Mary Shelley. I do rather like Frankenstein. The internet can be both silly and amazing at times.

The keywords are almost on target. The number one keyword is thoughts followed by book. I do think a lot and read a lot of books. The keywords are not that far off.

I also like to look at http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ Yahoo's Site Explorer. I find it to be more interesting and accurate than most other site exploration functions including the hit counter on my blog. I usually find out about some rather interesting sites that are linked to my blog.

Here are a few that are not in my blogroll. I wonder sometimes if I should include a set of links for non-book related sites in my sidebar. There are a few blogs which follow me very regularly which have other functions than books. Chicago History Journal is where I get the majority of inbound links for my blog. I find it rather interesting. http://www.chicagohistoryjournal.com/ .

Another blog which I enjoy a lot is Cromely. The pictures of gardening, travel and conventions are wonderful. He has some excellent comic book material, material on Star Trek, and a few book reviews. If a blog has a lot of book reviews, but is not purely a book review blog, is it a book review blog. Blogs are very flexible in their content. http://cromely.blogspot.com/

There were also a few book blogs which linked to my site in their blogger profile, but not necessarily in their blogroll; Bookish Ruth, http://www.bookishruth.com/ , Lexie, http://lotuseyes.livejournal.com/ , Magdalena ball, http://www.compulsivereader.com/html/ , and Sandra http://freshinkbooks.blogspot.com/ .

The Viscount Who Loved Me by Julia Quinn came in for me to read. This is for me to read for my Readers Advisory 101 class. Occassionally, we have to step out of our normal reading habits and try books which are a bit different, not necessarily our favorite subjects. Reading it would be part of my continuing education as a librarian.

Today, I focused a bit on getting the Bookletters page ready, took one more look at the Suggestion an Item form for our library website, and printed up some flyers for the upcoming poetry program. I also talked to someone about a table they set up in the lobby. They are offering computer classes for adults something which a lot of people have been asking for at the library.

We finally have a new bestsellers page put together from Bookletters and a suggest an item for purchase form up on our website. I have worked a little bit more on evance which is an online sign up form for summer reading. It is the second year we are going to be doing the adult section of the summer reading program.

I also picked up a short paperback called Food Rules An Eaters Manual by Michael Pollan. He is the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma.

I read some of The Viscount Who Loved Me. It is easily one of the most atrocious books I have ever attempted to read. The rakeViscount Bridgerton father dies after being stung by a bee and his love interest reads gossip sheets. It is awful. On the cover of the book are the words USA Tdoay Bestselling Author. It made me sleepy.

I do occassionally read romance titles. I like Elizabeth Lowell and Linnea Sinclair. I am even intrigued by some of the settings in romance, the Harlequin NASCAR romances seem like they would be interesting. We get lots of requests for romance, especially African American romance, Brenda Jackson and Rochelle Alers are asked for a lot. We get a lot of historical romances. Kathleen Woodiwiss is very popular.