Saturday Stuff #1

This is that Saturday post I promised to write weekly about three months ago, and no I'm not that fussed that it takes me ages to get around to doing things I plan to do. Life gets in the way!

So. This week has been pretty uneventful except that I finally posted about our epic blogger meetup in Leeds and a schedule for my A Tale of Two Cities readalong which starts next Sunday and which you can still sign up for here. I also learned that people lie when they list things as being in 'very good condition' on Ebay. Several ranty emails later, I'm still waiting for a response from what are supposed to be a fairly reputable, well known company who trade on there. 

Blogwise, I'm in the middle of thinking about trying to write a review of The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult, but it's about the Holocaust and parts of it were great and other parts were a bit rubbish and I kind of don't want to say that in detail in case I get bashed for having negative things to say about a book about such horrific things. I did have trouble reading it, as I always do with Holocaust related things, because it was far too real. With fiction, even fiction about stuff that happens to people (like all of Jodi Picoult's books ever) I can usually distance myself from it because it's mostly not happened to me, but I can never do that with Holocaust stuff, and I guess that's a good thing because while people, even people who are totally unrelated to it like me, still feel it so deeply it makes us extra defensive against that kind of thing ever happening again, but still, not easy reading! So yeah, there may or may not be a review of that coming up!

The other thing I finished this week was waaaaaaay more light, thank goodness! Relish by Lucy Knisley is a graphic novelly food memoiry type thing, not dissimilar to Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, but about food. I discovered it through the Nonfiction November event that's going on at the moment and it was awesome. There is a great page of facts about cheese in it, so I was very happy. I am going to write something about it at some point. 

The big thing that I decided this week while pondering my lack of Christmas charitability (totally a word) in the past year or two is that I'm going to ask people, including all you lovely readers of my blog to sponsor me for my reading in December. To that end I will make an effort to read consistently and you can either sponsor me per page I've read (like, a penny per page or whatever) at the end of the month, or just an amount at whatever point you want. At the end of the month I will also be making a donation of my own. Originally I was going to match whatever I raise through sponsorship, and if that's £50 or less then I still will, but otherwise it will be an amount determined in discussion with my husband! All the money I raise will be going to the fabulous Great Ormond Street Hospital, who you can find out more about (if you don't know!) here. They're the people J.M Barrie left the copyright to Peter Pan to when he died and they do great things for sick kids, basically. 

If you want to sponsor me, now or later, you can do so at my fundraising page, here. For some reason Just Giving still think my name is my maiden name and I can't get it to change. Never mind. I know reading is something I'd be doing anyway and not particularly ground breaking or energetic of me, but I'm doing things of my own which are groundbreaking and energetic enough at the moment and this is a way to do some good so help me out! :-) 

So yeah, that was basically my week. Tomorrow we're having a lazy day and possibly going to a Christmas craft fair, which I'm obviously very excited about, in between knitting crocodiles and salami. My life is a whirlwind :-p