7 Quick Takes Friday

Welcome to 7 Quick Takes Friday, the linked edition...

 

1.  This was a big week for The Book of Helen!  She got two good reviews and I hope she'll receive a third from a friend over at Shelfari known as Nighthawk who runs a reading group called Paging All Bookworms. 

2.  Here's the first link, to a review over at Catholicfiction.net!  It felt nice to get a review, there is a sense in which the book becomes less real the further away from publication date it falls, and so having someone read it and enjoy it, brings me back to that moment when it first launched.   There will be a posted interview at some point in the future, I'll let you know.  

3.  The second review came from an editor over at Eat Sleep Write!  You may remember I did a podcast there last September.  Here's the link to that discussion as here. 

4. This makes me beyond sad. There is a prediction of Barnes and Noble closing. There is something dying in a culture where there are no book stores, and it's not just the economy, it's the culture of reading, it's the culture of browsing to discover, it's a community that we will mourn as a phantom limb of life, long after the stores are exchanged for other places. 

I still look at where the Border's was, and grieve that the Big Lots is there instead. I don't need Big and Lots, I need books, thoughts, words and the quiet joy of discovering something in the pages of another person's mind.  I think it symbolizes what is replacing what we are losing. Boo. 

5.   Larry D of Acts of the Apostasy is back in blogging business again!   Go over and say Welcome back, or if you've never visited, say "Hi!"

6.  I have a few friends I need to pray for, so I'm linking to this Novena site. I invite all of you to participate, because I don't know anyone who doesn't need prayers.  

7.  And the last of the 7 Quick Takes involves plugging a long time friend of this blog, the Ironic Catholic, also know in her alter-ego as writer/professor/theologian extraordinare, Susan Windley-Daoust has written a book:  Theology of the Body Extended: Signs of Birth, Impairment and Dying, and it looks really good!