Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Reading for Pleasure Wednesdays - 1st Ever Tomorrow!

Well, with all of the positive responses of yesterday, I think we should try to get this thing off the ground.

[Aside: you know, I kind of like the "Blog about X on this day of the week" format better than the carnival format, even though carnivals are good. I suppose the reason is that it's easier to be lazy about the "blog about x on this day" thing, and you know who participates (pretty much) and who doesn't, and you can choose to participate or not without having to do technorati tags or let people know or whatever. But maybe this is just because I'm lazy. And because carnivals make me feel guilty because I look at all those links, always intend to get around to reading them, and then never do.]

But so here's the dealio:

1. Wednesday will be Reading for Pleasure Wednesday.

2. Should you choose to participate, you should blog about something that you have read or are reading for pleasure.

  • "Pleasure reading" includes anything that you read for the sole purpose of experiencing pleasure. If you could teach this book, if this book is the "freshman book" at your institution and you're expected to read it, if this book is something that people in your field should/must read in order to be current - I don't care how much you claim to enjoy it, this book cannot be one of your selections. If someone else chooses a book that falls into one of these "not just for pleasure" categories, however, of course you can comment about it. I'm not a total fascist (wink).
  • "Pleasure reading" can include fiction, poetry, non-fiction - even drama, I suppose, though I don't think many people read plays for fun - and it can appear in book form or in periodical-type publications. (In other words, if you read a story you love in The New Yorker, that, of course, can count.) It must, however, be something that has words on the page, as the film people or the "visual text without words" people can find their own day. I would also say that we shouldn't include blog posts, just because, well, obviously we all read blogs for pleasure, and we all can get recommendations by going to each others' blogrolls.
  • You will notice that you need not be reading this book right now. You might choose to blog about the first book that you remember reading for pleasure when you were a kid, books you read for pleasure at other notable times in your life, or you might choose to blog about a book you read three months ago. One reason that this is the case is that of course we'll all read fewer "just for pleasure" texts as the academic year begins again, and so this means that we can use stuff from the "pleasure library" to keep the thing going when times are tough.
  • If you are reading the book right now, it's ok not to be finished with it.
3. Posts can take any form, from bulleted lists to more formal "review" sort of pieces.

4. Posts can focus on any aspect of the text in question, and need not cover every aspect.

5. Probably one should try not to do multiple posts on one text except for in the rarest of cases. (I'm just thinking that if we all got in that habit this thing could become really boring really quickly.)

6. Please include complete publication information, whether in the form of linking to the text or by just providing a bibliographic citation.
  • As somebody who sometimes can be too lazy to link, I figure that as long as we include complete publication information, that will allow people to get their hands on these books should they choose to do so. Because isn't the point that this will also expand our lists of books to read for pleasure? Well, that's one of my points....

9 comments:

marciano guerrero said...

I inivite you to take at my reading list. Plodding my way...with great humour.

PG said...

Sorry - just to clarify. Are we supposed to write a review on our own blogs and just tell people to go check it out or do we put a long review in the comments sections? Or, is there another option that I am unaware of?

Dr. Crazy said...

Good question, Psychgrad. You will do the post on your blog. For those people who subscribe to your blog through something like bloglines, you might want to put something like "RfP Wednesday - Title of Book" as the title of the post, kind of like how I do the title of Poetry Friday posts as "Poetry Friday: Name of Poet" - though of course that's not a rule or anything. Basically, what it means is that all over a bunch of blogs people will do a post that's a little reviewy thing on Wednesdays, so if you read around on people's blogrolls then you can see a bunch of posts that do that thing. Or at least that's the idea. I'm hoping that it works :)

michelle said...

Sounds great. I'm in.

I have been sadly neglecting my book review blog I set up a while back so this will give me a reason to dust that off.

Anonymous said...

it's too bad I don't read for pleasure anymore

Dr. Crazy said...

No, but the beauty of this, Anastasia, is that you can VICARIOUSLY read for pleasure by reading ABOUT the books the people post about. (I didn't read for pleasure as a grad student either, and I didn't have a Kizzy to keep be busy on top of grad school...)

Anonymous said...

hey, good point!

Chaser said...

Darn! I missed the first Wednesday, but I'll remember next one.

I'm an awfully slow reader though. We'll see how it goes.

Dr. Crazy said...

Cookbooks I can totally see. Drama I did admit was a possibility, but I suppose at least for me seems to be something that I'd rather see in performance than read? See what I'm saying?