Tag: armchair bea 2016

Armchair BEA 2016: Wrap-Up

Share your overall thoughts on the week, list your posts for the week, and/or share your highlights or favorite posts from fellow participants, then link up!

ArmchairBEA 2016

My overall thoughts on the week: awesome! I had a lot of fun writing the posts and visiting different blogs. I suck, though, and didn’t save any of the ones I visited except Meaghan’s post on aesthetic concerns because I actually changed my blog’s font after reading the post. Life changer!

My posts:

[wrap-up-posts week=”19″ year=”2016″ category=”Armchair BEA” listtype=”ul”]

I am super glad I did this. The more I engage with other bloggers and my blog, the more I like keeping up with my blog and the more ideas I have for my blog. And if I’m going to do this thing, I want to DO THIS THING.

I’m looking forward to reading other people’s wrap-up posts because I know I’ll encounter some blogs I missed. Happy ABEA, everybody!

 

Armchair BEA 2016: On Audiobooks & Book Clubs

I love audiobooks, but I have to admit that I was nervous to start listening to them. My concern was mostly that I wouldn’t pay attention and would miss a bunch of stuff as a result. However, I found that to be the exact opposite of my experience.

Still, my first foray into audiobooks started with me listening to a book I had already read: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. I figured that was a safe way to figure out if audiobooks were for me or not. Because, hey, if I found that I couldn’t pay attention, it wouldn’t really matter since I had already read the book.

Well, I paid attention, and I was hooked. In fact, listening to HP in the car is how I finally got my daughter into the books. We listened to the whole series as we did road trips over the course of about a year. We also make it a habit now to check out audiobooks before going on a road trip–whether we wind up listening to them or not.

Audiobooks are a great way to bond with children or other family members because you have a shared reading experience and someone else gets to read to you. So, here are five audiobooks that I recommend for family bonding, using me and my daughter as the foolproof sample:

1. The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling (read by Jim Dale) — I am not 100% in love with Jim Dale as a narrator, mostly because his Hermione and Luna Lovegood are both absolutely horrid. However, his overall narration is pretty good. Plus, the Stephen Fry version isn’t available Stateside. So we just gotta make do with what we got.

2. The Junie B. Jones series by Barbara Park (read by Lana Quintal) — She is hilarious. Also, you can easily listen to multiple books in the series because they’re so short.

3. The Alvin Ho series by Lenore Look (read by LeUyen Pham) — Also hilarious. Also really short.

4. Mr. Chickee’s Funny Money by Christopher Paul Curtis (read by Joe Holt) — Super hilarious. Also, there is a sequel, but my library doesn’t have it in audio form which is the saddest sad to ever sad.

5. Witch Week and Charmed Life by Diana Wynne Jones (read by Gerard Doyle) — These were less funny and more completely engaging and enthralling. Also, there are more books in the Chrestomanci series, but those are the only two we listened to, so I can’t rec the whole series. Plus, the other books may have different narrators and Gerard Doyle is perfection.

I should also note that we listened to most of these books when my daughter was a teenager even though a lot of them are kiddie lit and not YA.

 

book club

 

I belong to two book clubs: one that meets during the school year and is full of awesome moms (The No Rules Book Club) and one that meets during the summer and is full of awesome grad students/academics (Children’s Lit Summer Reading Book Club). The school year one meets once a month from September – May and the summer one meets every week (give or take one or two) May – August.

The pros of being in a book club include getting together with awesome people to talk about books, eating delicious food, and being exposed to books I might not otherwise read. The biggest con to being in book club is assigned reading. Just like in school, sometimes I like the book and sometimes I don’t. And sometimes I’m fine with reading something that someone else has picked while other times I just want to read the book I want to read.

Unfortunately, I have a reputation in the No Rules club for not liking the books. However, it’s not that I don’t like them. It’s more that I’m just critical of them. I studied literature and creative writing. I don’t read like normal people.

And to prove that I don’t always hate the books, I have compiled a list of five book club books I dug that I would not have picked up on my own:

1. The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty — I saw lots of people posting about this after I read it. But I still probably would have skipped it. Not YA and I don’t really care about stories focused on marriage.

2. Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford — This was nowhere near on my radar.

3. One Hundred Names by Cecelia Ahern — See #2.

4. The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd — See #2. Also, this is a book about slavery. I do NOT read books about slavery anymore.

5. Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand (read by Edward Hermann) — A biography of a WWII vet? Absolutely not my thing. Also, I found this book completely boring when I tried to read it on paper, so I checked out the audiobook because sometimes the medium matters and wound up completely into it. Edward Hermann is FANTASTIC. I would listen to anything else he narrates. Plus also, I almost put this on the audiobook list above because my daughter listened to a little bit with me and was also intrigued (not enough to make me wait to listen to it with her, however, hence its exclusion from the list).

Bonus: Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale — See #2. This is also now one of my favorite books of all time and therefore further proof that sometimes magic can happen in book club.

Okay, party people, tell me what audiobooks you recommend for family bonding and/or a book club pick someone else chose that you wound up digging.

Armchair BEA 2016: On Aesthetics

For a period of time back in the early 2000s (aka before the blog), I refused to read book jacket flaps or the back of the book because they always, always seemed to spoil a major plot point. I would go into a book thinking that the basic premise was whatever was written on the flap and then that thing that I thought would be part of the set up would happen three-fourths of the way through the book. Oh, it made me so angry.

So I stopped reading jacket flaps and plot synopses and started picking books based on the cover and title. So, a few of the books I encountered that way are:

covers

  • A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray
  • Jason and Kyra by Dana Davidson
  • Luxe by Anna Godbersen
  • Nzingha: Warrior Queen of Matamba (part of the Royal Diaries series)
  • Dancing in Red Shoes Will Kill You by Dorian Cirrone
  • Slam! by Walter Dean Myers

I didn’t 100% love them all, but they all matched my expectations–even if A Great and Terrible Beauty was more fantasy than the cover let on.

Now that I think about it, though, I was more likely to give books and genres I wasn’t into more of a chance when I went by the cover and title alone. Lately, I have been reading jacket flaps (usually only the first paragraph–just enough to get an idea of the basic premise. Unfortunately, spoilers still abound if I read beyond that) and ruling out lots of books because they’re not what I feel like reading. However, the best way to discover if I feel like reading something is to just read it. A lot of my favorite reads have been outside of my preferred genre.

So. I guess I learned something about myself today.

As for blog aesthetics, I kept thinking that I needed a knockout layout. You know, something that really said ME. And if I had that layout, I would be more apt to update my blog. Yeah, that didn’t happen.

My point then is that I have no real brand except for my content. However, I did redo my Top Ten Tuesday button to match my site. So I guess that’s something.

Armchair BEA 2016: On Diversity Fatigue and Rage

Okay, so I was initially going to be pretty glib in my response to the diversity questions because I have a bit of diversity discussion fatigue (but probably not for the reasons you think). I was just going to post a link to the Diversity on the Shelf challenge I host (which it’s still not too late to sign up for!) and let that be that.

But then this weekend someone called my daughter and her best friend the n-word when they were at the Dairy Queen, and I realized that I can’t afford to be glib.

 

angry Beyoncé

 

Here’s the thing: I am tired of talking about diversity because, for me, it is something that I have spent my whole life thinking about and being angry about. I AM TIRED OF TALKING ABOUT IT. I think it’s good for white people to get in on the action, though, but more importantly, it is time for white people in charge to STOP TALKING ABOUT AND AROUND IT and to start hiring and publishing people of color. Period. That’s it. I’m tired of the bullshit responses of “create your own” and “make your own” like people of color HAVEN’T BEEN DOING THAT. I’m tired of tokenism and I still cannot believe we are having this conversation in 2016 after the success of Lost and the dominance of Shondaland and the numbers at HGTV  and HAMILTON and yet somehow it is always a shock or lightning in a bottle that people crave diverse stories. I mean, seriously.

Daniel José Older has an excellent thread of tweets about diversity fatigue. You can read the whole thing here, but I just want to highlight these two tweets because they basically capture what I am getting at:

It is insane. And infuriating.

I have posted about this before. So you see what I mean? THE SAME CONVERSATION OVER AND OVER AND PEOPLE STILL DON’T GET IT.

Basically what it’s like for me to be a black woman living in America:

 

 

 

It is exhausting. I am tired.

Armchair BEA 2016 Intro

I’m Akilah, and I’ve been blogging here about books since 2009, though I did blog about books on my LiveJournal going back as far as 2002. So, yeah, I’m not new to the game. However, this is only the second time I’ve participated in Armchair BEA (the first was way back in 2013).

Now, onto the questions (I kept the original numbering. Clever or annoying? You make the call):

2.  What is your favorite genre and why? My usual answer to this would be contemporary realistic YA lit, but, well, see #8.

3.  If you could recommend one other book blogger, who would it be and why? I follow a lot of great bloggers, but today I’m going with Crystal @ Reading Through Life. She is a voracious reader who also helps run Rich in Color, a blog devoted to diversity in YA. Also, and more importantly, I discovered her blog during the last Armchair BEA, so it seems fitting.

5.  If you could create a playlist that reflects your bookshelf, what would be the first song you choose?

The chorus is “Back in the day / when I was young / I’m not a kid anymore/ but some days / I sit and wish I was a kid again.” My bookshelf is basically all old books and series I loved as a teenager.

8.  What is the most interesting thing that you have learned through your reading this year so far? I am finding that though I find myself drawn to YA and it still makes up the bulk of my reading, I am less and less interested in it and would much rather read either middle grade or novels with teen/YA protagonists written for adults. Still contemporary and still realistic, of course, but definitely a shift in my preferred target market.

 

ArmchairBEA 2016

 

I’m looking forward to participating in Armchair BEA and reading and encountering everyone’s blogs. Happy posting, everybody!