Portland Book Blogger Conference
Blogger peeps at the Portland Book Blogger Conference!!
From left to right: Juli (Suzi) from Whimpulsive, Gabe from Reading Local, Wendy from Caribousmom, Gilion from Rose City Reader, Ali from Worducopia, Kristen from We Be Reading, Teddy from So Many precious Books, So Little Time, Bethany (in front) from Dreadlock Girl, and Trish from Hey Lady! Whatcha Readin’?
This last weekend bloggers from Oregon, Washington, California and Canada joined up and we had a grand time! I roomed with Trish from Hey Lady! Whatcha Readin’? and let me tell you....she is completely as way cool as she seems. I chatted her ear off and she just sat there and took it!!! She was just fab, and let me stay with her for the weekend. I was going to just drive up for the day and she (most graciously) offered to let me room with her.....her treat!! Yes, she is even way cooler in person than online. If you ever get to meet her you will be blown away by how down to earth she is, but that never compromises just how cool she is. THANK YOU TRISH!!!!!
We loved our tour of Powell's Books, following around our amazing tour host, Bruce. He gave us the history of the coolest bookstore ever!! I have been to Powell's so many times, and never knew to look at it in the light that Bruce shared with us. Here are some of my personal highlights:
The Powell's City of Books Column
One of the signature walls, this is the Fantasy/Science Fiction wall
Tour of the Rare Book Room
First Edition of The Hobbit (for $9,000)
Bruce telling us all about the Lewis and Clark Journal (worth $35,000)
(Check out Trish and her photo skills!!)
It has an original map to make it over to Oregon!
We all gushed over this other book Bruce showed as well, the pages look normal until you bend them
then you can see the incredible fore edge paintings!! We gasped.
After a good lunch and chit-chat time we meandered over to the Multnomah County Library Rare Book Room with Jim Carmin.
Trish geeked out over this hand painted Geek Love cover. Too cute!
He then showed us a Book of Hours woven in silk, here is the cover
Silk pages? I know....crazy.
More pretty pages: handwritten pages. Yep, these are HANDWRITTEN!
A Happy Pair book
Illustrated by HBP. Do you know who that is??? Beatrix Potter!!
After more than our fair share of rare and beautiful books Gabe introduced us to Molly Gloss, which whom we talked for a couple of hours. What a delightful meeting! (thanks again Gabe for making that possible!)
Here are the book bloggers I got to meet, next time why don't you come too??
Wendy from Caribousmom
Trish from Hey Lady! Whatcha Readin'?
Gilion from Rose City Reader
Gabe from Reading Local
Teddy from So Many precious Books, So Little Time
Juli from Whimpulsive
Kristen from We Be Reading
Ali from Worducopia
Pretty Paper Book Club: Corvallis, Oregon.
Alyce, Susan and Jandi
Susan
I started a book club almost two years ago, it has changed and morphed, but just gotten better and better. It has made it through the season where all my friends wanted to come just to hang out, and now only my friends who actually want to read and live in the area come. It is a perfect size now (not that we would ever not welcome other peeps!!) Alyce, a fellow book blogger from At Home With Books is local and is a member of the group as well!
I love it, we go out to eat first and just hang out, then we go to coffee and dessert and talk more and then talk about the books. We all love books, and most of the time we all read the book, our only fault is that sometimes we have a hard time getting (and staying) on the subject of the book we actually read. After we talk and discuss the book and are full to the brim we have been known to go out to a movie (if we can get that figured out) or over to one of the members house to sit and relax in the hot tub.
Our book club I think is a little different than most in that we actually are friends outside of book club, and our relationships go deeper than books. I love my local book club...it is nice to meet once a month for girl time, an evening to just hang.
This month we are going to read Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, next month Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins!
Becky and babe 
Alyce & Susan
Susan & Jandi
I was there too, but I never end up in the pictures, bummer.
These are the books we have read so far in our bookclub, with links to my book reivews:
Half a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith (Not reviewed yet)
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (not yet reviewed)
Plain Truth by Jodi Picoult
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom
March by Geraldine Brooks
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Watership Down by Richard Adams
There are more books, but I'll stop there.
Is your book club as fun as ours????
Sunday Salon: One Thing I Love About my Library? Preloads!
I am currently reading Amy Tan's, The Kitchen God's Wife and it is excellent! I love getting the preloaded audio books from my library. Does every one's library have these? It is the size of a deck of cards and lighter and you just have to plug in your headphones and hit play. No need for an ipod or to put it onto your computer and then transport it into a different format to work on your MP3 player, it fab.This is what they look like:
It really is a great idea. So far I have listened to two of them, last week I listened to Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, before that John Green's Paper Towns and this week I loving The Kitchen God's Wife. For my little ones I checked out The Island of Blue Dolphins, and Charlie and the Chocolate factory two books I enjoyed as a kid. Our library gets them through Playaway, and the quality is good, you can even mess with the settings and speed up the reading if you want. They are marketing to the military, schools and libraries, places where more than one person would benefit from the usage of the pre-loads, I tell you....I can't get enough!
I have enjoyed the online download audiobooks that our library has, but these are even way more fun!
What about your library? Do they embrace new technology or is your library slower to accommodate the changing times? Tell me something you love about your local library, I'd love to hear it!
Paper Towns
Images courtesy of Penguin Young Readers Group
Paper Towns
by John Green
320 pages
YA Fiction
Dutton Books Publishing
Margo Roth Spiegelmen is the average hip girl at school who seemingly has all that she wants and then some, she has the cool friends, the designer jeans and a boyfriend. Late at night, a couple of months before prom and graduation of her senior year she barges into Quintin Jacobsen's life begging him to do some pranks together (probably because he has access to a car). He is the opposite of cool, he hangs out with geeks, is cautious and is bullied. He has loved her for years and any time spent in her company is a dream. He agrees, they go, it is fun and the Paper Towns goes on from there.
Filled with high school-esk relationships and issues, from parties to prom, this book is deeper than one would expect from the initial chapters. Yes, it still is about high schoolers, but the themes are deeper and more intense than other feel good YA books. I can't quite nail down why but I really didn't like it as much as I was hoping. I liked the beginning and the end chapters, there was a certain lul in the middle that almost made me give up the reading. I am glad I stuck it out because the nuggets are at the end, but it was a close call several times for me.
It was entertaining, but I just didn't come away feeling like it was that good. It was a Young Adult book that may be just that, designed so perfectly for Young Adults that the rest of us really should keep our noses out.
What did you think of Paper Towns? How did you like Margo?
60/100
If you want some Young Adult book recommendations, here are three of my favourites:
The Hunger Games
The Boy in Striped Pajamas
The Invention of Hugo Cabret
What did you think of Paper Towns? How did you like Margo?
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