BlogTour.org now up.

My friend Bryce has started a website for authors!  I had to spread the word, because I know a lot of writers.    Go check out Bryce’s new site, sign up!  Do a blog tour if you have a book!  A great way to spread the word and I’m looking forward to seeing what’s next. 

So if you have a blog and you’d be willing to let book authors do a tour stop on your blog, please go sign up and help me test the thing. Or if you have a book for sale, do the same thing.

BlogTour.org now up.

Brad Thor meet & greet

I did it!  I went to the author meet at my library and got to meet Brad Thor.    I got my book (courtesy of Ben & Kristy!) autographed, and I took a picture so I could prove to you that I went. 

I was nervous, and naturally Darc had to give me a hard time because I was looking for decent shoes to wear, and I put on make-up.  “Doin’ the fangirl thing for the author man?” he quipped?

“Uh, no, I just don’t want to look like trailer trash.”

“Well, those shoes are in the wrong direction, they scream trailer trash.”

So I put the sequined sandals away with a sigh. 

It was an entertaining adventure.  Mr. Thor was engaging and funny.  He told stories of writing and researching – for instance, he told a story of going to Afghanistan to research a book and how the Special Ops team he went with wouldn’t let him wear sunglasses.  He spoke a little on what his latest book is about, whetting our appetites.  After speaking, he answered questions for a while, then signed books for those of us who came.

He was nominated for Best Thriller of the Year award at Thrillerfest last night, and I think that’s pretty cool.  Seriously, if you’re looking for some edge of your seat reading about a real American Hero, Brad Thor is the writer for you. 

And if you ever read this Mr. Thor, thank you for an enjoyable, and fun, afternoon. 

~~Ness~~ 

From the edge of the world to your town

Back to our regularly scheduled mundanity …

(Quick, WIGSF, you’re the musical whiz kid around here – do you know the song referrenced in the blog title today?)

Remember a few weeks ago when I was telling you about a new author I’d found?  Sure you do!  Here, let me refresh your memory … The Last Patriot.  Remember now?

Okay, here’s the deal, and this is kind of important … this author is coming to my local library in a few weeks.  How cool is that?!  I could get to meet Brad Thor in person!

There’s a couple of catches though.  I’d sort of like Darc to go with me, because I don’t want to go by myself and my writer friend Sherri‘s too far away, but I don’t think my husband wants to go with me.  Even if he did, I don’t know what we’d do with the kids.  Can you take kids to something like that?

Who else has met an author at their library before?  What happens?  What do you talk about?  What do they talk about? I’ve never been to anything like that before, so any hints would be welcome.  :)

I’ve been reading through the rest of this guy’s books, as my library stocks them, and I love, love, love them.  Good guys vs bad guys with lots of action in between.  The hero in the books is like Jason Bourne in some ways, but certainly more modern, and dealing with a post 9/11 world.  Bourne was dealing with a Cold War world.  Plus, this guy (Scot Harvath) has all kinds of technology at his disposal that hadn’t even been invented when Bourne was written.  Way cool stuff people, and I highly recommend these books.  :)

But really, should I go to an author meet when I’m not even in a posistion to buy the guy’s book right now?  I sort of wanted to get a look at what goes on, you know, for when Darc gets published and does this kind of thing too.  (And doubt me not, it’ll happen.)  And I have no clue what I’d ask the guy either.  Heck, I put the guy on my Twitter follow and still haven’t even said hello.  You know, ’cause I’m all shy like that.

What do to, what to do … I have 3 weeks to figure it out.

~~Ness~~

What have you read lately?

I stole this list from my friend Sherri.  Looking through it, and the comments on her blog, make me wonder if there was a website that had a list of literary classics.  I am happy to report, I found a few, and I thought I’d share them with you.   

http://www.classicauthors.net/

http://www.americanliterature.com/

http://www.americanliterature.com/ARCHIVES/ARCHIVES.HTML

http://www.literature.org/authors/  (their main page, http://www.literature.org/, describes their purpose.)

http://www.literatureclassics.com/

 

The Big Read, an initiative by the National Endowment for the Arts, has estimated that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. How did you do?  (I got 21)

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.

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
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 Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’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
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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
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
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
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 Night-time – 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
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
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