Category: ragdoll gives props

Ragdoll: The Icon


A friend over at McNally Robinson sent me the most delicious icon that I will now use on a regular basis. He had created a poster in-store to brand the ‘staff picks’ so you could always tell who was recommending which book. And the image to the left is the one that I choose.

How awesome is that? It’s me in t-shirt format.

And if you have a chance, play around with their new site, which launched today. It’s an amazing example of a store pushing the boundaries in terms of delivering content that’s relevant but also intent upon building a community around the books that they sell.

Oprah Schmoprah

I have to admit that I was quite sad when my online book club decided to evolve. I had really enjoyed the discussions I had with the group about the few books I was able to read (I joined late), and found them to be smart, wordy in all the right ways, and a fabulous bunch of readers. Having been stung by the whole book club concept in a previous life, I was quite happy to find a group of people who actually talked about the books, and we even had some author participation for a number of titles, which is always a thrill.

Annnnnywaaay. The group has evolved now into something pretty special: Oprah Schmoprah, the blog. And I just wrote my first post. Hopefully, many more are to come.

Rhymenoceros & Hippy-crites

So, last night we (the RRHB and I) went over to have dinner with Scarbie and her lovely hubbie, as she calls him, the Dog. Dinner was delish, of course, but we were talking about The Flight of the Conchords, which has been cracking me up and is now one of my favourite summer shows (the others, in no particular order, are So You Think You Can Dance, Big Love, and Entourage).

The episode we watched the other night included Bret and Jerome chillin’ and illin’ with their hip-hop monikers, “Rhymenocerous” and “Hiphopopotamus.” I can’t even say how much this cracked me up, but as a girl whose favourite joke is “What’s brown and sticky. A stick,” it obviously doesn’t take much.

And then later on in the evening, the Dog referred to himself as a ‘hippy-crite’ — one who knows what they’re doing to the environment and feels bad about it almost instantly, but still goes ahead and does it anyway. And again, we cracked up. So if that’s not a contender for the Urban Dictionary, I don’t know what is. They we got into a heated discussion about carbon credits, because I’ll often make the argument that yes, I did get my hair dyed, but then I donated x number of dollars to David Suzuki to make up for it. It’s all about balance. In my mind anyway. But that’s besides the point: I’m guessing I’m a self-defined hippy-crite too, doing my very best but still driving my car to the cottage and buying things on the internet.

What’s the point of this post? Oh, the humour, of course! I totally think that the Rhymenocerous should rap about being a hippy-crite. How awesome would that be? And if you haven’t seen it already, check it here:

Facelift

So yesterday I decided to pick a new template for the blog as I got kind of sick of the plain Jane one I originally launched with all those many, many months ago. But I’m still not 100% convinced I like this one either. And I noticed that I picked the same one as Kate’s Book Blog, which was unintentional, of course, but I’m giving her props anyway for working the template to the best of its ability over there. Gosh, I love her blog.

Annnywaaay. I’ve been toying with the idea of late of migrating everything over to Typepad and paying for the blog just to be able to use a slightly better behind the scenes system. Who knows. The summer’s so busy so far that by the time I actually get around to customizing a look and feel, the internet might have blown up.

TRH Updates – Hell Yeah!

I’m probably the only person on my floor that actually shouted “hell yeah!” when I read this morning that Don McKay won the Griffin Poetry Prize. And if you haven’t read Strike/Slip I would highly encourage you to do so, it’s just wonderful.

Other updates include two more books read, #s 39 & 40, Janice Kulyk Keefer’s The Ladies Lending Library, which is a lovely little book about a group of Ukrainian immigrant women who spend their summers up in a group of cottages on Kalyna Beach, a fictional location set just outside Midland, Ontario. Perfect for summer reading. And another book for What Would Harry Read, Skulduggery Pleasant by Derek Landy. I am looking forward to this weekend, though, as my work reading slows down a bit so I can finally finish Alissa York’s Effigy and Love in the Time of Cholera, both of which I am enjoying immensely.

And my RRHB has gone to NYC to play a show on Friday night. I am insanely jealous. Not only will he get to hang out, but he’ll get to see some of fun NYC friends, while I’m home biking and eating by myself.

Last but not least, I watched Breach last night and is it ever a good little film. Based on the life of Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent who sold secrets to the Russians for many, many years, the film stars an outstanding Chris Cooper in the lead role, with Ryan Phillippe playing the part of Eric O’Neill, a young upstart put in place to help take him down. The entire movie is rock solid right up until the end when there’s a bit of a Departed-style rat moment that makes you roll your eyes, but on the whole a sort of overlooked gem of a film.

EDITED TO ADD: And I just found out that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie won the Orange Prize, which absolutely pushes that book up on my TBR pile. It’s the Nigeria entry in my Around the World in 52 Books challenge.

Cormac McCarthy On Oprah: Oh-Tastic!

So last night I abandoned my mandatory work reading an hour early (read: didn’t get any done at all because I got home so late) so that I could watch Cormac McCarthy on Oprah. For his first and only television interview, I felt Oprah’s questions were a bit soft, but McCarthy came across as a hyper-intelligent, charming, and fascinating man.

He did, however, have some wonderful insight into his writing and my favourite part of the too-short interview was when he spoke about his craft. He explains that sometimes writing is difficult because an author has always got a picture in his/her mind of the perfect thing you want to achieve, and it’s frustrating when it doesn’t come out quite right. I’m sure everyone who has ever put pen to paper understands exactly what he’s saying. As McCarthy continued, he said to Oprah that he believes this interior image is your signpost, your guide, and even though you’ll never get there ‘without it you’ll never get anywhere.’

Some of the problems with how the interview may have come across could have been down to the editing, because the clips on Oprah’s site actually bring out a longer, more thoughtful interview. There’s one clip where McCarthy speaks about James Joyce as a model for punctuation, and how he uses the tools of language to write sentences that are easy to understand. Now that’s a very simple piece of solid advice that probably doesn’t need a semicolon. And it might be a sharp insight in terms of rewriting, seeing how you can take punctuation out to clean up your prose rather than punctuate the sense back in.

Fascinating.

Summer Beach Books

Chatelaine has a list of their top 50 Beach Books up this month. Lord knows I love a good list and I’ve actually read 30 of the books chosen. Much better odds than the 1001 Books list, that’s for sure. Oh, and they’ve done the list as a PDF too, which means you can print it off and carry it to the book store when stocking up for the summer. Smart!

But the list got me thinking: are there books that you specifically save for summer reading? Do you tend on the fluffy side or tackle a classic or two? I generally save any new Chris Bohjalian novels for the week I spend up north by myself, and read a lot of mysteries in the summer. I also try to plow through some big classics because reading Little Women as a girl up north from an old library copy found when Havelock actually had a library (am I even remembering this correctly? Probably not) was one of the moments that actually changed my life. I guess I try to recreate that ‘feeling’ each summer with a new classic or two. In fact, I spent so much of my summer up at the cottage that all of my favourite reading experiences actually happened there—and they still continue to do so.

So what’s on your summer reading piles this year?

Thursday Is Link Day

Well, I’m dead sick with a bad cold that travelled from my brother to my husband then to me. I’ve read a couple books (#36, Town House by Tish Cohen [lovely, delightful and funny] and #37, Flyte by Angie Sage for What Would Harry Read) and am in the middle of a really fun kids book called Skulduggery Pleasant by an Irish author, Derek Landy. It’s another titled for WWHR, and once I’m done that I’m hoping to get back to some of my reading challenges, fingers crossed.

Annnywwaaay, some interesting things around the web:

1. A Harry Potter theme park: is it really necessary?

2. BOOKED! It’s pretty exciting that Book Expo Canada, our annual trade show and conference, has opened up to the public in the form of this 3 day festival. I’m not sure if I’ll be attending too many events because I’ll be working the show but if you love books there are some great authors coming to town. Speaking of which, Toronto Life has a great contest to win tickets to see Gore Vidal.

3. Gabriel Garcia Marquez celebrated. I’ve started Love in the Time of Cholera and am enjoying it immensely. It’s so nice to hear of thousands turning out to see an author and, well, unheard of really.

4. Barnes and Noble recommends Paulette Jiles’s Stormy Weather. Like Oprah’s Book Club and Heather’s Picks: does anyone read books that are recommended by the big book stores? I’m curious to know.

5. I heart BoldType, it’s just so classy. Check out their newsletter, gor-geous. And they’ve suggested The Raw Shark Texts as a Beach Read, which is so fitting in an oddly ironic, conceptual fish kind of way.

That’s enough for now, I think. Stupid cold. It’s making my brain fuzzy.