From Amazon: After her brother, sister, and father die in a plane crash, Daralynn Oakland receives 237 dolls from well-wishers, resulting in her nickname: Dolly. But dolls are little comfort to a twelve-year-old girl whose world is rocked by the dramatic changes in her life, including her angry, grieving mother’s new job as a hairstylist at the local funeral home.Â
Dolly gets a job, too, where she accidentally invents a fashionable new haircut. But her real work begins when a crematorium comes to town, and someone has to save a dying business, solve a burning mystery, and resuscitate the broken hearts in Digginsville, Missouri, population 402.
1. Read the book!
2. Post about it on the internet*
3. Link me to your post in the comments here
4. I’ll do a round-up post on August 1st-ish (Heavy on the ish this month, eh?) and announce the next book
5. We can have a casual-ass comment party about the book
6. REPEAT
Your site, Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress, even Twitter is fine! (Just Storify and link!) Whatever works for you!
This is a very casual, kick-back, low-expectations, low-effort deal! I just like the idea of reading the same book and then hearing what people think about it. That’s literally it. FUN, YES?! Good.
If you have suggestions for the next book, please please please comment with them and tell me! I’d appreciate if it was available on Kindle, but that’s the only requirement.
Share this with people if you do it! Tell me if you’re going to do it! Tell everyone!
*Even if you don’t get the book finished and posted about by the end of the month in which we’re reading it, do it and link me anyway! I will add it to the round-up post no matter how late it is and you know I always want to talk about things I’ve read!
So, remember how in the way old days, people used to bookmark blogs and then just kind of visit them one by one every day to see new updates? Remember how that was normal? And then RSS went real wide and easy and popular and RSS readers became ubiquitous and life was really grand and quite enjoyable. And then Google made a reader and we all pretty much universally adopted it because it was pretty great. Including me! Even though I am pretty technologically obstinate when it comes to internet stuff.*
Anyway, you probably know that Google is killing Reader and you also probably know that’s a massive suckfest because you’re already all settled in with it. You’ve got tags and feeds and all of it tidy and organized and set up the way you like it. But come July 1st, it’s all going to disappear because, and I believe this pretty genuinely, Google kind of hates us. And even though you’re probably not as bad a procrastinator as I am — oh god do I procrastinate — there’s a good chance you still don’t know what to use after Reader bites it. If you are even a little like me — and I’m so, so sorry if you are, but at least you’re not alone — you’ve probably signed up for like nine different replacement RSS readers and found yourself overwhelmed by it all and then given up and probably gone to bed with a book. No? Just me? Okay, well, I’m still going to tell you about Feedly.
When I started my quest for a new RSS reader, I started with BlogLovin because a lot of great blogs I follow and love use it. But, I hated it. I hated the layout, I hated the functionality — you’re not going to give me an oldest first option, seriously? — and I just think it’s clunky. Sorry, BlogLovin, you just aren’t for me.
Then I read about a million posts about it with people recommending nine million different readers and then I just gave up again. But then I read this post and I signed up for Feedly and The Old Reader. I tried them both out and liked them fairly evenly with TOR pulling ahead just because I found its interface a lot more appealing than Feedly’s (Plus that lovely icon/logo), but then I download the Feedly App for IOS and Feedly launched so far into the lead my head spun.
Being able to read my RSS feeds on my phone has totally changed how much I keep up with them. I used to let my GReader languish until I had more than a 1000 unread items bathed in the daunt and dread of catching up on so much. Reading blogs I love should never, ever feel like a chore and it doesn’t anymore! Because, like Twitter and Tumblr (though the app is genuinely terrible) and Facebook and Instagram, I can do it all wherever I am, whenever I have a free moment to bury my face in my phone. I can read my feeds while I poop! We are living in the future and I love it.
Switching readers also made me go hard on my feeds and get rid of the ones I wasn’t really engaging with anymore. I cleaned up dead feeds and sorted them into categories to help me keep track of what I follow and just generally made me sit down and focus and be really fussy for twenty minutes and now I am much happier and get to read things I really care about in a timely manner.
So, now you go do it too. Go sign up with Feedly and import your GReader subscriptions and settings with one click and clean house and have a happy RSS reading future. Because you’re a good person and you deserve it. Besides, look how cute the little goodbye they made for GReader is!
*: This is actually patently untrue. I am an early-adopter by nature. My Twitter is more than six years old, my Tumblr will be five in November, and I make sure to namesquat every single new social media that launches just in case. I was slow to GReader, but loyal.
since today is the solstice and the first official day of summer and the sun is set to drop at 9:58 pm in my middle-of-nowhere corner of the world, i thought i’d finally throw together my playlist for the summer. i typed this twice on a manual typewriter. a. manual. typewriter. TWICE. my index fingers are furious.
totally top five jamz for summer 2k13:
5. ace hood feat. future & rick ross, “bugatti” – if you don’t wake up thinking “i woke up in a new bugatti” every morning after you hear this, i don’t understand you.
4. austin mahone, “what about love” – this CHILD. i can’t watch or look at him because i get the motts (secondhand embarrassment) so bad that my teeth feel like they’re going to fall out of my mouth, but this is a good-ass song.
3. fake shark real zombie, “paint it gold” – put me on a raft in the middle of a pool and leave me there to die. this is filling the void for pool jamz in my heart, since i don’t have new lana del rey to do it.
2. robin thicke feat. pharrell, “blurred lines” – if i was putting cash money down on the song no one will be able to escape for the next three months, it’d be this one. S U C H A J A M.
1. ariana grande feat. mac miller, “the way” – i legit thought this was a mariah carey song the first time i heard it because it just felt like one. that’s a compliment. straight-up “honey”-esque vibes.
From Amazon: It’s the year 2044, and the real world is an ugly place.
Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes his grim surroundings by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia that lets you be anything you want to be, a place where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets.
And like most of humanity, Wade dreams of being the one to discover the ultimate lottery ticket that lies concealed within this virtual world. For somewhere inside this giant networked playground, OASIS creator James Halliday has hidden a series of fiendish puzzles that will yield massive fortune—and remarkable power—to whoever can unlock them.
For years, millions have struggled fruitlessly to attain this prize, knowing only that Halliday’s riddles are based in the pop culture he loved—that of the late twentieth century. And for years, millions have found in this quest another means of escape, retreating into happy, obsessive study of Halliday’s icons. Like many of his contemporaries, Wade is as comfortable debating the finer points of John Hughes’s oeuvre, playing Pac-Man, or reciting Devo lyrics as he is scrounging power to run his OASIS rig.
And then Wade stumbles upon the first puzzle.
Suddenly the whole world is watching, and thousands of competitors join the hunt—among them certain powerful players who are willing to commit very real murder to beat Wade to this prize. Now the only way for Wade to survive and preserve everything he knows is to win. But to do so, he may have to leave behind his oh-so-perfect virtual existence and face up to life—and love—in the real world he’s always been so desperate to escape.
Last month’s book was a massive disappointment to me, so I am terribly excited to move on to something else. That something else being Ready Player One for mostly selfish reasons because I already had it on hand (I bought it when we were in Bismarck last month. In a Barnes & Noble! An actual building! With stuff in it!) and it was the next thing up that I wanted to read. I’m selfish? Shocking!
So here’s the plan as always!
1. Read the book!
2. Post about it on the internet*
3. Link me to your post in the comments here
4. I’ll do a round-up post on July 1st-ish and announce the next book
5. We can have a casual-ass comment party about the book
6. REPEAT
Your site, Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress, even Twitter is fine! (Just Storify and link!) Whatever works for you!
This is a very casual, kick-back, low-expectations, low-effort deal! I just like the idea of reading the same book and then hearing what people think about it. That’s literally it. FUN, YES?! Good.
If you have suggestions for the next book, please please please comment with them and tell me! I’d appreciate if it was available on Kindle, but that’s the only requirement.
Share this with people if you do it! Tell me if you’re going to do it! Tell everyone!
*Even if you don’t get the book finished and posted about by the end of the month in which we’re reading it, do it and link me anyway! I will add it to the round-up post no matter how late it is and you know I always want to talk about things I’ve read!
