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Tag Archives: Sarah Beth Durst
Happy New Year (My Year in Review)
Greetings, Gentle Readers. It’s been quite some time since my last blog post. This happened not for lack of ideas but for lack of time. During 2011 I read 152 books, participated in a 100 task book challenge – of which I finished 98 tasks, had a successful first defense of my doctoral dissertation (topic adolescent literacy), got married, went to a slew of author readings and concerts, and managed to miss seeing Ellen Hopkins twice within the space of three weeks when she was near my hometown reading, signing, and promoting Perfect and Triangles. (Of course this list is in no particular order of importance, and if it were my marriage would be first.)
I have many New Year’s Resolutions. One is to post more on the blog. Since it’s been sitting abandoned the only people visiting it are spammers, and I’ll refrain from sharing their comments with you, but I could give you the secrets to unlocking the iPhone 4, sell you some Uggs, and well, oh never mind. I’m hoping to post at least once a week. In a perfect world, I’ll post almost every day. For those of you who do visit the blog regularly (and you’re not spamming me), I do update My Reviews and Currently Reading on a regular basis.
Here’s my year in review:
A Five Star Rating
5 stars of 5 stars
100% approval rating
2 thumbs up
Reviews. In the plugged in, wired world we live in, a person could review anything or anyone. And people do. As a member of Goodreads, as an online consumer, as a teacher, I find myself living via reviews. As a teacher, especially, I’ve discovered the power of the positive review.
Posted in Random Musings, Teacher Tips, Uncategorized
Tagged as: book reviews, Enchanted Ivy, Extraordinary, information literacy, Michael Scott, Nancy Werlin, Sarah Beth Durst, The Alchemyst, The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flammel, YA Lit, YA Literature, young adult lit, young adult literature
Same Auld Lang Syne
As 2010 draws to close, I, like so many others, am taking stock of the year. The good, the bad, the ugly – it’s all there laid out in front of me like books on a shelf for me to view and ponder. Overall, this has been a pretty good year. I don’t know if it’s the best ever since I have more years in front of me. It certainly wasn’t the worst. There were moments of pure joy and moments of heartache. Moments of peace and moments of strife. To paraphrase Ecclesiastes, there is a time for everything, which helps when I set ridiculously unrealistic goals or expect to be able to control everything including the uncontrollable. So as I sit next to a fire that is slowly dying reflecting on a year that is quickly dying, I can say it was a pretty good year.
Escape and Hope
If you were to look up fantasy in the American Heritgage Dictionary, you would find nine definitions of the word fantasy. Definition number 4 reads, “Fantasy – n- Fiction characterized by highly fanciful or supernatural elements,” which doesn’t really do much to capture the genre.
Looking up fantasy as a genre, you can find that fantasy is separated into high fantasy and low fantasy. High fantasy contains the elements one “normally” associates with fantasy novels – heroes and villains, quests, action, magical beings (ogres, fairies, witches, dragons), and magic. Low fantasy deals with things that can’t really happen in the world as we know it but leaves out the dragons and such of high fantasy (think Freaky Friday or Tuck Everlasting).
Posted in Fantasy
Tagged as: Cassandra Clare, Fantasy, His Dark Materials, Maggie Stiefvater, Philip Pullman, Sarah Beth Durst, The Chronicles of Prydain, The Immortal Secrets of Nicholas Flammel, The Mortal Instruments, The Wolves of Mercy Falls, YA Lit, YA Literature, young adult lit, young adult literature