I have been passing this story along since it is such a hoot! It has gotten such a reaction that we thought we would share it with everyone. It comes from the book The Girl Scouts Triumph,

I picked it up several years ago. As a fiction story, it is totally implausible. It just turned out to be true and has a direct connection to Knoxville's Girl Scout Museum of the Tanasi Council. For those of you that haven't read it yet, the story gives you a snapshot of the WWI era. It could never happen now. Everyone would be locked up! Childrens Protective Services would put all the kids in foster care!

This link, Link..., will take you directly to the page on Art Museum Touring.com (Link...) where the story is located.

Sherrie

My friend and novelist extraordinaire Cyn Mobley is writing another novel (she has about 45 under her karate black belt so far). But this time she is podcasting about the process.

The novel is titled THE CALLING. Cyn started in late January and promised to have the first draft done in a month. Since then, she has dealt with a new puppy and a touch of the flu. Still, she's making real progress, and she's telling us about it.

If this doesn't make you old bookworms feel ancient, nothing will.

“They don’t read works by professional writers because their sentences are too difficult to understand, their expressions are intentionally wordy, and the stories are not familiar to them,” she said. “On other hand, I understand how older Japanese don’t want to recognize these as novels. The paragraphs and the sentences are too simple, the stories are too predictable. But I’d like cellphone novels to be recognized as a genre.”

Link...

One of my neighbors is a travel agent and she introduced me to the books of a man who celebrates his birthday today. Bill Bryson is a travel writer. Born in Des Moines in 1952, he writes, "Much as I resented having to grow up in Des Moines, it gave me a real appreciation for every place in the world that's not Des Moines."

I started with A Walk in the Woods, the story of his attempt to trek the Appalachian Trail. He was amazed at what he saw in Gatlinburg. At that point he abandoned the trail for a time and flew home.

An Associated Press-Ipsos poll looks at who is reading, what they're reading and breaks readers down into several catagories. I thought this reference to Southerners was interesting. Link...

"People from the South read a bit more than those from other regions, mostly religious books and romance novels. Whites read more than blacks and Hispanics, and those who said they never attend religious services read nearly twice as many as those who attend frequently."

PLEASE DO NOT PUBLISH SPOILERS HERE IN THIS THREAD.

Just finished reading HP and the Deathly Hallows last night after receiving it in the mail yesterday morning.

I thought it was an excellent book and enjoyed it throughly. If you have not read it yet, DO! If you have not bought it yet, it is worth the money.

I am asking you all to not put any spoilers on this thread, just tell folks if you liked the book or not. We can always start a different thread to discuss the book if you like, but this is mainly for those who were trying to decide if it was worth the time or money to pick up a copy and read it.

So, a friend handed me a copy of "The Reagan Diaries" and said, "Some summer reading for you." My first impression was this: Reagan was not of the Faulkerian bent. As far as that goes, he was a definitely the short, declarative sentence type -- a Hemingway man. This speaks a lot of his popular appeal as a politician, but these diary entries, which filled several volumes, are chock full of short jots of thoughts as mundane as complaints about getting older and as shocking as getting shot, which passes with a brief mention as to how much getting shot hurts. The mind one saw delivering those folksy, avuncular speeches delivered personal thoughts in the same manner

Actually, I am a keeper of a regular diary and fill up one of those Moleskine journals about once every two months, and I have bought or read many other diarists or the collected letters of writers, academics and the like. Two favorites are Collette and Kierkegaard. As infuriating a "blogger" as I might be at times, you can rest assured that all the insecurity, fury and, honestly, difficult thoughts about myself go in my own journals. One can also rest assured that I do not write in my journal about blogging. (Though right now I am blogging about journals.) The point is that what goes in there might be all that "really important" stuff, but also the mundane, everyday matters that no one other than me could ever care about. Some of it is "Daughter punched other daughter. Why can't they get along?" or "Cut meat back to 5 oz a day and eating 60% raw foods now."

Herein lies the problem with "The Reagan Diaries." No matter your opinion of the man -- admittedly my opinion is low -- one would expect meat in those pages. There isn't any. It is such a shame, but the aforementioned simple manner of its diction, contents and emotional force only bolsters the myth/reality of Reagan: He was a rather simple man who liked to sleep on the couch and wasn't afraid to give control of his life over to others. Some, after reading such, may reinforce their belief that this was a great quality of Reagan -- he was such a delegating, confident leader who loved his wife and his personal time. Others will just see Reagan as a man who was too old, too feeble and just not up to the intellectual task of being President of the United States.

If you are in Borders, Barnes and Noble or your local independent bookseller, pick it and turn to a random page. The admirer of Reagan might quickly put this on his or her shelf, but as a historical document of Reagan's presidency it is wanting and will most likely be used to by historians to come in not such flattering ways.

Anybody know of some local resources for someone looking to publish a non-fiction travel book?  I've gone thru the KC library and the internet but would love to talk with someone here in Knoxville about the proposal and publishing process who is familiar with both (as I am not).  Any recommendations?