Category: Blog

Holiday snaps

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Last week Tim and I went on holiday to Pembrokeshire with some good friends and it was perfect. We had seaside, a pretty cottage to stay in, log fires, lots of board games to play and the random heatwave meant we had sunshine too, despite it being March.

The beaches were almost empty.
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I revisited a place that had a profound effect on me when I was younger (17, I think. I read Frankenstein for my A level English while sat on the cliffs outside).
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I fell in love with the fossa, an animal I had never even heard of before.
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And I milked a goat. It only stood in the bucket once, despite my hideously long nails.
Kate milks a goat

The rest of my photos were on film so they will follow soon. Keep an eye out on my Flickr photostream.

Bloggiesta is here!

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Bloggiesta

Bloggiesta is an online event for (book) bloggers in which we are encouraged to spend the next three days working on our blog in any way we see necessary. We Plan, Edit, Develop, Review and Organise – no wonder our mascot is called PEDRO! Olé! Bloggiesta is organised by It’s All About Books and There’s A Book.

The Bloggiesta fun begins here with my vague not-nearly-planned-enough to do list; and there’s a lot to be done!

TO DO
1. Change how hyperlinks appear (I don’t like the current style).
2. Tidy up sidebar.
3. Catch up on book blog posts in Google Reader.[Done for now at least!]
4. Contact some publishers about getting their new releases catalogues.
5. Back up all blog content (thanks to Leeswammes for that idea).
6. Read and join in as much as possible with the Bloggiesta discussions on Twitter and other blogs. (If you’re on Twitter, you can use the hashtag #bloggiesta to keep in touch with what’s happening. I am @Nose_in_a_book.)

For me, that last is the real point of all this. I hope to learn a bunch and meet lots of new book bloggers. So, let’s get started!

UPDATE 1 (Sat): I have changed one of my goals to a more realistic one for this weekend because I am already flagging! And catching up with my fellow book bloggers is way more important than most other stuff anyway 🙂

UPDATE 2 (Sun): I will soon be going out for the rest of the evening so here ends Bloggiesta for me. I have achieved everything I set out to and gathered together a bunch of new ideas, not to mention meeting lots of ace new book bloggers (new to me) on Twitter. Thanks to everyone who took part!

11 random things about me

Whenever I get tagged by one of these things, I am torn. I have an age-old hatred of chain letters (remember when they were actual letters and you were expected to write the whole thing out 10 times?) but I like to learn more about my fellow bloggers and have no problem with sharing more about myself.

So, because Jo is so nice I will half-reply (and direct you to her far-more-interesting answers) but I won’t continue the chain (though if you want to carry it on yourself, feel free!).

Here goes…

1. I had glue ear when I was little and was almost entirely deaf by the time I turned 6. Thankfully, one operation, two grommets and a bunch of unpleasant wax-drainings later my hearing was completely restored. (Theories about how this may have affected the rest of my life or at least childhood could fill a whole series of blog posts.)

2. I was a quite-good gymnast as a child and am a trained gymnastics coach.

3. I have a phobia of fish.

4. My first foray into journalism was at primary school when I wrote, produced and distributed an environmental newspaper that I now sadly not only have no copies of but cannot even remember the name of.

5. I have been a vegetarian – for ethical/moral reasons – since I was 13 but when I was 17 I worked on the deli counter in the local supermarket and had no problem with skewering chickens for the rotisserie; indeed to this day I’m happy (well, okay with) pulling apart a chicken carcass. I am also very careful about food hygiene since that job.

6. My first job was doing my Dad’s filing. He would take me to work on Saturday mornings and before we left he’d log my hours in the petty cash book and pay me my wages. It was such a good gig I continued to work the occasional Saturday for Dad until I left home.

7. As a kid I always had a project on the go. I planned theoretical trips around the world. I made a database of kings and queens of England that was harder to refer to than the books I’d used as reference.

8. I used to cut out pictures from magazines that I thought might inspire my writing.

9. I was, briefly, a member of the Barbie Fan Club.

10. I once adopted a whale (or rather, it was a birthday present, but I asked for it specifically). She was called Scylla.

11. I have read Ulysses. I had to for the modernism unit of my English degree. I recognise its brilliance but did not enjoy the experience.

Apparently most of the things I think might be interesting about me date back to my childhood.

Bloggiesta: coming soon

Bloggiesta

Bloggiesta is a blogathon that is all about working on your blog. I have watched it from afar the past two years and this year I’ve decided to plunge in and be a joiner. It takes place on the weekend of 30 March – 1 April and it’s hosted by Suey of It’s All About Books.

What will I be doing? I have a few ideas I want to investigate but mostly catching up on writing posts, reading up on advice from other bloggers and brushing up my HTML and CSS skills. Which is quite enough for one weekend.

Interested? You can sign up here.

A few days in the Forest

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I was lucky enough to be raised in the Forest of Dean, which may have spoiled me for other beautiful places everywhere. As my folks are still there I went back for a few days last week and took some photographs in the gorgeous February light.

Mr blue sky

Melissa's Tree

Coleford colours

As always, there’s a bunch more photos in my Flickr photostream.

Memorised

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One thing I envy my parents’ and grandparents’ generations is that they were taught, in fact required, to memorise poetry. For me, in the 1980s and 90s, we barely touched poetry at school.

There was one supply teacher who did the scissors poem from Please Mrs Butler by Allan Ahlberg (a collection I still love) and I have a vague memory of there being a “big cat poetry” element to my GCSE English course…and that’s it. Aside from on posters on the classroom walls (which, incidentally, is where I discovered this love of mine) and being encouraged to write our own, poetry was strangely absent.

I am lucky that my family spotted my interest and bought me plenty of poetry books to read at home, but I feel that I somehow lack something by not being able to reel off a dozen of my favourite poems by heart. I know bits of poems – from Night Mail by W H Auden (incidentally, I recently discovered you can buy that film from the BFI), The Second Coming by W B Yeats and the aforementioned Please Mrs Butler – and I think I was once able to recite Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll and Leisure by W H Davies (which I was reminded of yesterday by this amazing piece in the Washington Post), but now in both cases I get lost.

Of course, I could remediate this; it’s hardly too late. I have all the books. And I should perhaps be grateful that I instead came out of school with computer skills and some knowledge of books written outside the UK (I discovered the Yeats poem mentioned above when I studied Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart at A level). I think I need to go read some poetry now.

January fun times

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It was my birthday earlier this month and I seem to have managed to spread the celebrations right out! In fact, I think I still have some books to come…

Make a wish

More bookses

Birthday awesome

2011 in numbers

This was my first full year of book blogging so I thought I’d take a look over what I’ve done.

According to Goodreads I have read 101 books this year (my aim was 100, so yay!) but I have only published 77 reviews, so goodness knows what happened there (actually, I do have a backlog of 10 or so reviews that I am saving to fill the gaps when I start the new year with a couple of big chunksters). Of those 77, one was an audio book and one was a “novelette”.

But what was the gender breakdown? Of the books reviewed, 42 were by men and 35 by women (actually, two were multi-author collections so I have taken the gender of the editor in those cases). As I mentioned here, 44% of books are written by women so my 45% of reviews being of books by women just about scrapes in there.

How international was my reading? It would take some research to figure out where every author lives/lived but a quick count of translations read shows just 13. That doesn’t include foreign (by which I mean non-US, non-UK) authors writing in English, such as Chinua Achebe or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. But it’s still something to work on.

All of which I find fascinating and I think I might just start a spreadsheet for the new year (which I’ve seen a few other book bloggers do). I can include nationality, gender and language of author, plus maybe gender of main character? Anything else?

Most importantly, I have enjoyed the majority of the books I have read and look forward to another year of blogging about my reads. Happy New Year everyone!