Wanted by Mark Millar

This graphic novel was okay. I can't say it was good but I can't say it was bad either - it was just okay. I loved the movie and sort of expected it to be more like the movie but it wasn't.
The premise was there - young man finds out his father is dead and he inherits everything including a job as an assassin. That's about where the similarities end. In the book, he's an assassin for supervillians all dressed in weird costumes. There's a lot of violence and swearing in this graphic novel - most of it just felt like it was taking up space. There were some interesting twists but this is definitly not a book for children.
It's got some okay reviews but most I saw were not positive. Part way through I almost quit because it just wasn't good. The ending got better but as I said it was all just okay.

The Dark Tower - Fall of Gilead by Robin Furth

*note, The Dark Tower is a Stephen King series but apparently he is not actively writing these graphic novels.

I loved this book. It just moved so well. I did find I had missed the previous book when I was finished but I didn't feel like I was missing anything (helps that it was November when I read the first two).
This is all action. Gilead is preparing for war which concludes at the end of this book. For those who are familiar with the Dark Tower books - you know that the war never really ended but the big battle happens in this story.
This is the core battle that leads to Gilead being destroyed. It's been long enough since I read the actual books that I don't remember when (or if it was mentioned) certain characters die. I had sort of expected Roland to be standing alone in a pile of rubble at the end of this book. That's not the case but the battle will break your heart. Good people die and the bad guys are worse than you can imagine. Some wonderful characters die in horrible ways. It's not for the faint of heart.

Time 4 Learning Review

I feel rather bad that I was selected as a reviewer. I had such high hopes for this program. My 14 year old son is in Pre-Algebra for the second time and still failing it. I thought using a homeschool program would do one of two things - give him the needed information to pass his class or be a substitute for the class with a better grade. My son, however, felt like it was pure torture.
The format of Time 4 Learning is really nice. There are short videos with some "homework" and then a quiz. Each quiz has 10 questions. Every time the child takes the same quiz the questions change. The only complaint I would have is that you can't skip parts of the video if you watch it a second time. I went back over a video with my son trying to find an equation I wanted him to write down. It would be nice if there was a "notes" section where you could just pull up the equations. There might be but I didn't find it.
Aside from my son's unwillingness to participate, I loved this program. I was prepared to pay the $20 a month to keep my son in math all summer. I think it's a great program. He was at the top end of the classes but they didn't seem to capture his attention (I have a feeling he will be stuck in Pre-Algebra forever because he refuses to co-operate with his math teachers - he hates math that much).
I do recommend this program for those homeschooling or for those who want a supplement for their child's education. I love the parent features and the fact that all the scores are stored in a special place for parents to access. There are parent support features that I didn't spend much time looking in to. All my energy was focused on getting my son interested.
I think most children will enjoy the video features. Designers at Time 4 Learning made a good attempt to make the videos engaging and entertaining as well as easy to learn. My son was in the upper grades but he could go back and work on 6th and 7th grade features as well as 8th grade. I had hoped he'd be willing to go over all the years (at least do the quizzes) so we could see where his deficiences lay.
Our experience with the program really was a positive one even if I didn't get the results I had hoped for. Ironically, my son asked about being homeschooled last week so he wouldn't have to get up so early for school. I reminded him of just trying to get him to do math online and he quickly recinded his request.

Angel - Auld Lang Syne by Scott Tipton

I really struggle with books based on television series. There is always something altered to serve the books purpose and it goes against my brain's ability to cope. This graphic novel started up some warning bells in my head but in the end the good story line quelled all that. I enjoyed this little story and the banter between Angel and Spike. I can't remember enough detail from the story line of the tv show (means it's time to get the dvds out for a refresher course) so I was able to relax and enjoy this book.
The story starts with Angel and Spike hallucinating about people from their past. When they meet up in an alley, they believe that the other person is just another hallucination. They fight only to realize that someone is altering their perception through marks on their necks.
The two pair up to fight their mutual enemy who turns out to be some sort of demon/god in another dimension.
The story is entertaining and the graphics are well done. I, especially, liked the dialogue which sounded authentic in my head. I could actually hear Spike saying the words which tells me someone worked hard to portray him.

Booklists

I was cleaning out files on my flash drive (and then subsequently left it somewhere) when I came across a booklist I had copied from facebook. According to this document, the BBC believed that the majority of people would have only read 6 books on this list of 100 (I will add the list at the very end of this post). I had copied it into a word document so I could give it my full attention later and going through the list, I got to thinking - who comes up with these lists? Along with that I have been following some reading challenges (not actually participating yet) and have the same feeling about the titles. I can understand themes, especially themes with few books in the genre - for example I found a challenge this morning to read YA LGBT supernatural books. I can't imagine the list is that long, in fact the person in charge had listed less than 10 books and asked for more suggestions and they weren't coming. But when you have an opportunity to come up with a list of books to comment on the reading quality of the world - who gets to determine what books go on the list? Okay maybe that's too broad of a question - maybe what I am really asking is - how does an okay book get on a list with great books and how does classics compete with newer prints?
On the BBC Booklist, I had read quite a large number of the books or had started them. There was one in particular that I started for a bookclub and couldn't get into and strangely that was the month the bookclub fell apart (no discussion on that book and no suggestions for future reads after that). I feel the same way about lists of books suggested for bookclubs. If you join a book club, does that mean you no longer get to read fun books? I have noticed that. I can't stand most of Oprah's suggestions. Maybe I am being picky but I feel like these lists are designed to punish the every day reader because they don't read "smart" enough.
I believe that reading should be fun and it should be varied. I think that sometimes we find great books where we never thought to look so maybe that is the real purpose of booklists.
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The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible - Too Many Cooks
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert X
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Confessions of the Cleaning Lady by Miriam Newman

I want to start this post by saying I really enjoyed this book. I won a copy of this e-book off of Miriam Newman's blog. The premise was so delightful that I couldn't resist. It was the first book to go on my Nook so I didn't realize that it would get some weird formating issues (something to note when putting pdf files on the Nook). I don't know why but those weird formats were not on the original document so it was something weird with the translation to Nookish.
Anyway, aside from the weird formatting which only popped up now and again, I noticed that this book had some serious editing issues which concerns me for future DCL Publications purchases. There was mispelled words which can't be a fault of the Nook and occassional missing punctuation which may have been the Nook. The language of the book is not as strong as I would have liked. It wasn't the most well written book I have read but it wasn't the worst. (I have been doing a fair amount of critiquing and editing for friends which may have led to my need to edit this book).
Aside from all that, the story is entertaining. Being in the romance genre, it's a fluffy book and you know it's all going to work out in the end.
Shawna marries young due to a teen pregnancy. She loses the baby and eventually her husband. Alone, she works as a cleaning lady to make ends meet. She cuts down a tree in her yard, only to find that it housed fairies who were quite angry at her destroying their home. She helps them find a new home and they bless her with love. Shawna meets her new neighbor Mal, who hires her to clean his house. They fall in love. There's some drama with Shawna's family - her "father" is really her step-father and doesn't like her. Her real father left her mother while she was pregnant due to the Vietnam war and Shawna has never known him. There's meeting of families and some more drama as Mal is hurt in a horse riding accident. The fairies come and go (they sleep through the winters) and add little to the story.
I liked the romance and some of the "drama" was really interesting.
There were things that didn't work for me but I didn't let them ruin the story. The first is - Shawna and her husband get their marriage annulled. I don't remember when she got pregnant but she's 28 when the story starts (and strangly stays 28 through the whole story even though it covers at least 1 year). I can't imagine that someone can get their marriage annulled after 10 years or even up to that number.
I found the fairies were not used like they should have been. For leading the story with the fairies, they could be totally cut out and nothing would change except for the very ending but it wouldn't actually change the ending. I liked the fairies but it would have been nice if they had been an active part of the story.
Timelines bothered me in this story. I mentioned the annullment part but the other timeline that really bothered me (to the point I had to talk this over with my dad to get a real grasp on it) was Shawna's real father's situation. Remember Shawna is 28 and I had to check the publication date which was 2008. The story with Shawna's father was he was a Navy man who met her mother while on leave before shipping out to Vietnam for the war. (Hmm - I was born about 6 months prior to the end of the war and in 2008 I turned 34). I knew this little bit because my dad married my mom after he returned from Vietnam (or there about - don't worry about the details). Because that was personal to me, that timeline really bothered me. The other part of her dad's timeline that bothered me was that he died during this book from a lung disease (smoking related). When she can to see him, he was so old. I was a little shocked because everyone should be fairly young in this story. Her dad may be about 50 which shouldn't make him that old and the disease he was dying from is one that my grandmother and aunt live/d with. My grandmother had it for a really long time before dying in her 90's. My aunt is in her 60's and may not live as long as my grandmother did due to her smoking but I just can't see it killing her young father. It was just weird for me but that's me.
I did feel a little like the author was trying to make as much drama as she could. There were so many things coming at the characters that it felt a little like a greek tragedy. Again, I did like the story and I found myself wanted to see what happens next and I am thinking about when I can get my hands on the sequel.

The Onion Girl by Charles de Lint

I can't say why I picked this book or what even attracted me to this book except that it was a particular audio format that I was playing with for my nook. I knew nothing about this book and didn't have a cover to refer to. Sometimes I think that's the best way to discover a good story.
Part way through this book, I added it to my reading list on a book site (can't remember the exact one at the moment). I was surprised to find that this book did not come highly recommended. I had never heard of Charles de Lint but apparently he writes a series that is popular in some circles. Those who were fans of that series did not care for this book which was an offshoot of the series but not part of it. I even read a few comments that this book should be read after reading some of the series so it made sense. I was already through half the story and I became worried - was I missing something?
I found this story all encompassing and I didn't feel like any information was withheld. Knowing that, I could see how this book would frustrate someone familiar with the series. It was a stand alone book and went through a lot of information about the characters and landscape which might be overkill for those already familiar with the series (this book did not feel like it was a series at all).
With that said, let me share the plot. Jilly Coppercorn wakes up to find she is in the hospital after a nearly fatal hit and run. While in her coma, she discovers she can go into the Dreamlands, a fantasy world that a few friends of hers have been able to enter. When she wakes up, her body is paralyzed but there is hope that her body will heal and she can return to being an artist. She becomes torn between being in the Dreamlands where she is perfectly healthy and able to draw, and being "the broken girl" in the real world. Add to this, her baby sister is out for her blood. The story is told from several points of view and at first they seemed scattered and I had a little difficulty figuring out the relationships (part of this may be due to not actually reading the book but listening to it). It worked, however. I liked the different points of view and the history of the characters. The most interesting part is how two people who had nearly identical childhoods could grow up to be two completely different people.
There are a lot of elements in this book - fantasy, drama, horror. The author talks about some really dark demons - child abuse, rape, drugs, prostitution and murder but it never feels that dark because Jilly has such a positive attitude to all of it.
She is told that she must heal the old hurts before she can heal the new ones and how the author does that is amazing. It was a touching and powerful story that I highly recommend and may lead me to reading more de Lint's books.

Nancy Pearl

I want to apologize for not having anything to post for awhile. I bought a Nook a couple of weeks ago and started doing something that is a big no-no for me (I started several books at once). In playing with the Nook, I ended up trying to read/listen to multiple stories. I am listening to The Onion Girl, reading Confessions of a Cleaning Lady and patiently trying not to start listening to Abarat (a different sort of listening files than The Onion Girl). Sadly none of them are short. I returned a pile of books to the library unread because I knew I wasn't going to make time for them right now. I love the new toy and it will difficult not to overwhelm myself and the device as I get into the grove. I downloaded The Onion Girl and Abarat just to see how to download audio books and what formats I can listen to (and how to load them onto the nook). Fortunately, I haven't upgraded my memory yet so I could only get one audio book on the Nook at a time(I worry about overloading my memory).
Because of this, I am behind in reading. I don't mind audio books but they read much slower than I normally read and I get impatient. This is a great way to get through a book I really want to read but can't seem to get into. The bad thing is I really want to get absorbed into The Onion Girl and find myself tuning everyone else out.
Anyway, so I thought I would share something reading related but not about a book. Last night, I had the privilege of hearing Nancy Pearl speak as part of International Library Week. For the last couple of weeks, I had been patiently waiting for her to come to Pullman. Every time I thought about her visit, I imagined those girls from the 60's screaming and fainting because the Beatles were in town. That's how I felt, I wanted her to sign my chest - I was so excited. Okay maybe that was an exaggeration but I was still quite excited. When I mentioned her, most people replied with "Who?" and a puzzled expression. I understand that I am a huge book nerd but how could they not know Nancy Pearl (do you know?). Nancy Pearl is the most famous librarian in history (so I hear). She's the only librarian to have her own action figure. She is, also, the author of Booklust.
For me, Nancy Pearl represents so much more. She shows the world how cool librarian's really can be. She starts dialogues about books.
What I didn't know was that she lives in my state (in the Seattle area) and she talks about books on NPR. How cool is that?
I would love to spend all my time talking about books. I love books and what Nancy Pearl does is what I want to do. More than that, Nancy is a cool person. She was friendly and great to listen to. She talked about some books she recommends. I can't say that she and I have the same taste in books but that doesn't mean she is any less cool. The great thing about someone having a different taste is you find things you never would have found otherwise.
She had great advice - give a book 50 pages (that is until you turn 51 and then subtract your age from 100 and that's the number of pages you should give) and if it still doesn't grab you then stop reading the book. She also said if all you care about is who the murder is or who married who - read the end of the book. Life is too short and the world of books is too large to waste time on a book you don't care about. I love that permission (just recently I was looking through some reviews I had written and I loved every book. I realized the reason I don't have any bad book reviews is that I don't waste my time on a book that doesn't appeal to me.)
I was impressed by the sheer number of people who came to hear her speak. It wasn't the intimate crowd I expected. There was maybe no more than 100 people in the room but it did mean I wasn't going to be getting her attention especially while my teen was certain the event was killing him slowly and my husband kept nodding off.
Nancy Pearl is a great woman and she just accepted my friend request on facebook - I look forward to sharing book stories with her and discovering some rare gems out there in the world of books.

Fairies and The Quest for Neverland by Gail Carson Levine

I adore Gail Carson Levine and have since I first saw Ella Enchanted. That movie was so great that I had to read the book. I loved the book (one of those situations where I loved both equally). I went on to read more books by her and discovered her fairy tales. She has re-written some fairy tales and they are great. I originally thought the Fairy books were similar to those but soon discovered they were not. I was a little disappointed because I had an expectation and I am not sure I would have picked up this book if I had known. All in all, I enjoyed it.
Now I have been purposely vague because I want to explain what the Fairy books are. This particular series is based on the Disney Fairies from the Tinkerbell movies. I can understand the popularity of the Peter Pan offshoot but I am more of a purist. I don't necessarily like it. I can't explain why and I can't explain exactly what it is I don't like. I just tend to avoid such things.
Fairies and the Quest for Neverland was a great book. Gwendolyn is the great great (maybe more) granddaughter of Wendy. Every generation a girl is selected to take Wendy's place in Neverland for a short period of time and Gwendolyn can not wait for it to be her turn. She waits for years, dreaming about the fairies that live there. When her time comes, she spends her time with the fairies instead of Peter Pan and the Lost Boys. While there, Kyto, the dragon, escapes from his cage and Gwendolyn helps the fairies capture him before he destroys Neverland.
There were some things I really liked about this story but it had a few things I didn't like. I understand it's a fairy tale and it's a juvenile book but I thought the capturing of Kyto was too thrown together. There was a lot of waiting for Peter Pan in the beginning that could have been skipped to give more time to the ending. I, also, found Gwendolyn's obsession with the fairies a little unnerving - she didn't seem to be interested in anything else but the fairies. She, also, had a lot of personality issues. Maybe I am being picky. It wasn't my favorite Gail Carson Levine book and won't be a series I pick up again but I think for young girls who love the Disney Fairies this will be a great series. Disney certainly has some great books coming out and I think that anything that gets a kid reading is worth getting into their hands.

Blog Hopping

It's amazing that I ever get anything done. Quite early this morning (well early for me), I discover a blog hop Fool for Books and found myself sucked into a world of book review blogs. 233 to be exact.
The interesting things about looking at that many blogs in just a few hours is that you start to really get a feel for what works and what doesn't when it comes to a blog. I'm not talking about content - that's too personal a choice to really critique what I am talking about is design. As I went through those blogs, it didn't take long for me to learn what what really turned me off when it came to blogs. Being that these were mostly blogs that pertained to book reviews it was easy to know that reviews of books in genre's I read would be a plus but here are a list of things that immediately turned me off:
1. Too many contests - I was surprised at the number of blogs that were nothing but contests. I agree that they may bring in readers but what's the point, there's no context to the blog. Granted some people might like that. To me, it seems awfully lazy.
2. RSS feeds only - there are so many ways to follow blogs these days but ones that only allow one to follow via RSS feed is not one I will follow. I don't like RSS feeds because I don't really understand them. They make me nervous. I read blogs while I'm at work because I have a lot of free time on the computer (my job is to answer phones) and I just worry what an RSS feed means.
3. Can't find posts amongst all the stuff - there is one blog I read that I feel like I read the same post every day because the author has a block of information at the top of the page that is quite lengthy before you actually get to the post. I have seen others where it feels like a scavenger hunt to find the blog because it's hidden in a cutsy icon or has a clever title that makes the reader feel really stupid (okay maybe it's just me).
4. Swearing - I'm not a prude but using the f-word in a title just because you can doesn't appeal to me especially when you are expecting something a little more professional. Maybe I have a skewed view of blog hopping because the few I have done have been for somewhat professional blogs but today when I came across one that had a post Spring F****** Break I was a little shocked. I gave it the benefit of the doubt but found it was really just a rude post. It immediately turned me off from the rest of the blog.
5. "Sexy" pictures - along that same note as above. It takes a bit to shock me, I did teach sex education at the college level but I don't want to look at pictures of couples in erotic poses while I am trying to read a blog. The man in the pictures was wearing pants but the pictures left little to the imagination. As I said, I read blogs at work and that was not one I was going to follow. You can be suggestive without being vulgar (goodness I sound like an old lady).
6. Too busy - I really don't like blogs that have too many pictures or too many colors. I don't see very well and my eyes get tired easily and blogs with pink writing on a blue background actually give me a headache. I saw some today that looked like a little kid had done them because there was color every where. It's hard on the eyes.
7. Lists - Short lists are okay but a post that has a list of more than 10 items becomes really boring, even if it's a list of your books you are going to read. I want meat in my posts and I was something that keeps my already short attention span.
8. Long Posts - (see above). I have a short attention span and I follow way too many blogs as it is. I don't have the time or desire to read an entire book in someone's blog (I apologize this post is already getting to be too long and it's a list - yikes).
Along with long posts there are things that I think make posts too long:
excerpts from books that are being reviewed - I don't read excerpts because I don't want a sample of the book, I have a good book memory and reading an excerpt confuses me because I can't remember if I had read that book before. I like reading synopsis' of books and then I add the title to my list of books to read. I really hate starting a story I can't finish.
I hate video trailers for books. I don't get them. I think they are a waste of space. I don't want to see a "movie" about a book.
9. One big pet peeve I have is when the blogger doesn't follow through with their part of the blog hop. They are getting traffic because of the hop, they should make the effort to actually participate. Many blog hops have contests and readers are expecting something when they come to that blog. Not all blogs that I visit on a blog hop have a contest that interest me but I may still subscribe to the blog. I refuse to even give them my time if their last post was over a month ago - they made a commitment and didn't follow through. Now I understand that things happen - one blogger had a heartfelt post about why she wasn't able to follow through with her blog - that's understandable, don't leave your readers hanging. I understand life happens but don't participate in a blog hop.
10. Same information over and over - (this has two meanings) I was surprised at the number of blogs that were practically identical. I got the feeling that I visited the same blog more than once. It was the same books being reviewed and the same formats. I understand themed days but who came up with the templates? So many had similar theme ideas that it felt pointless to visit them all. The books being reviewed were interesting but I am not going to subscribe to 10 blogs that have the same content - be original. On the other hand, I hate blogs where every post seems the same. There's a publisher who's blog comes highly recommended. After reading his blog for a month I realized that the information was really all the same. The posts were interviews with different authors and such but when boiled down - it was always about how selling via e-books was a better money maker than traditional publishing. He almost always had the same formula for the last half of his posts just with different numbers.
11. Finally, my last pet peeve is posting everything all at once. I follow a book review blog that has several posters and it seems they all post on the same day. There are days with nothing and then one day - 10 posts. It's overwhelming and I start to skip over the posts because I am not really sure I care for their overall genre. I might actually be interested if the posts were broken up through the week but not reading a bunch of reviews back to back.
I hope that helps those who are writing blogs. I did see some beautiful blogs on that hop and keep thinking I need to spruce up my own so that they aren't so boring.