Across the Blogoverse...

I want to highlight a few blogs I've been enjoying lately. These blogs don't appear in this site's blogroll (which desperately needs to be updated again...sigh) because they aren't children's/YA book-related, but they're fun/interesting sites that might interest you, the reader, just the same!

• The Big Picture - This photo blog by The Boston Globe is a treasure. Three days a week, they post about 10-20ish high-res (for the web) photos on a given timely theme. One of my favorite entries was last week's Beating the Heat, 22 photos of people around the world cooling off this summer, from the claustrophobic throng in a Chinese swimming pool to Palestinian women bathing fully dressed to children playing in an Oklahoma water park. Some topics are sobering, others celebrate life, but all of them are a window to life around the world.
• Library Praxis - My associate (for lack of a better term) Emily and some of her cohorts write this blog on the politics and theory of librarianship. They're usually talking about academic libraries, but many of the principles apply to public and school libraries as well. I enjoy the discussions there.
• Ray the Singing Cab Driver - Ray is something of a fixture in Chicago. He's a singer-songwriter who literally takes his show on the road. He also has a stage band, for which my husband is the drummer. Ray is an eccentric character; his life philosophy is to lead the kind of life he'd like to read a book or see a movie about. He's had a boatload of interesting experiences and is also a damn fine storyteller. I greatly enjoyed his recent story about the one and only time he's been arrested.

My blog reading has improved about a hundred fold since I switched from Bloglines to Google Reader. Why did I never know how much better Google Reader is before? Posts don't vanish after I read them. I can "star" posts I want to read or return to later, making it SO much easier to track posts on which I've commented! I can search the contents of one, some, or all of the blogs I read, making it SO much easier to find that post that talked about X but I can't remember when or where I read it! Yay, Google Reader!

In fact, I'm going to use Google Reader's "starred item" feature RIGHT NOW and pull up the link to July's Carnival of Children's Literature, hosted by Read-Imagine-Talk. There are a lot of fun and interesting kidlit-related posts up there, and it's always fun to see what blogs I've been missing all this time.

Did I mention that Google Reader makes it easier to add a new feed than Bloglines does? It's true!

On a completely different note: for all I pick on Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series (I'm on Team None-of-the-Above / Get-a-Life-Bella), I've placed my reserve at the library on Breaking Dawn. Like the Elephant's Child, I have insatiable curiosity. I shudder to think how many hundreds of people may be ahead of me.