Happy Wednesday!
Y’all, I am tired. This week has been so weird and we’re only halfway through it. Anyone else feeling off-kilter?
At the very least, it’s Cadbury Creme Egg season. My favorite time of the year. However, I’ve heard that the Cadbury chocolates, in general, are of better quality across the bond. Maybe one day I’ll get to taste test!
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This link was sent in by EC Spurlock:
This is a virtual tour company I have been following since COVID. It’s a great way to tour the world without leaving home! All tours are free to zoom, they just recommend that you tip the guide at the end. The guides can be hit or miss sometimes, and sometimes they can’t fit everything they want to in the hour format, but most of the guides I have seen have been very good and informative. All in all a worthwhile experience for $10-$20 depending on the guide and what you get to see.
If you sign up and can’t make it, most all of the tours are recorded now and they will send you a link to watch the recording at your convenience. You do have to sign up in advance the day before so be sure to spread the word!
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If you love and miss bonkers vintage romance reviews, I highly recommend the Tattered Pages newsletter. They wrote a review on reddit and I was dying.
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For those looking for more whimsy in their lives, check out this artist who draws/paints some wonderfully plump birds. The hummingbird has been my favorite thus far. I believe he does sell them as prints.
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Not a link, per se, but Sarah and I are kicking around ideas to revitalize the Smart Bitches Book Club. It’d be more like a read-along where people can engage as they read rather than trying to wrangle a Zoom or virtual chat across so many time zones and schedules. The tentative idea would be to run them quarterly and offer them for four different subgenres: historical, contemporary, SFF/paranormal, and dark/romantic suspense. Readers can participate in as little or as many as they’d like.
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Don’t forget to share what cool or interesting things you’ve seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we’d like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way!
Thanks for the shout out! I’ve been a SBTB fan for ages. 🫶
Science Friday does a book club like you’re imagining. There’s a discussion board, and they post one or two prompts for each week/chapter. They also host online events, including author discussions. It’s a pretty good model. https://www.sciencefriday.com/about-scifri-book-club/
@Tattered Pages: Aw, thank you!
@Kim: Good to know! I want it to feel manageable for us and for readers.
Yes to the off-kilter feeling! I was thinking that all day yesterday and when I woke up in the middle of the night that everything just felt wrong somehow.
Thank you for mentioning Tattered Pages today because I didn’t know /somehow missed noticing and oh, my. The writing is delicious and such fun to read the review of Watch the Wall, My Darling because I read every book by Jane Aiken Hodge in my library. I actually remember this one, and so interesting to read a review from an adult (I was probably middle-school age when I was reading J.A.Hodge) at a distance of years.
Does anyone else miss having all the time in the world to read when they were school-age? I went to school, I had chores, I had friends and activities, but somehow there were still long weekend afternoons and vacation days to read and read and read.
@LML: YES! There are too many things I want to do and not enough hours! Reading a book, playing video games, watching Sinners (which I’ve been putting off for MONTHS at this point because everything else is competing for attention).
Yes please to the book club!!!
Last night I thought I was supposed to be at a zoom meeting, but no, it was something similar but different on the calendar. Tonight I was supposed to hosta zoom meeting, and I was an hour early. I guess that’s better than being an hour late, and it’s Arizona’s fault, since they don’t do daylight savings time and I’m never sure whether I’m in the same time zone or an hour later. But yes, I’ve definitely felt discombobulated!
On the bright side, I got to use the word discombobulated today.