Week One: Background Knowledge

A couple of fun assignments from week one of Be More Bookish Training:

First up: recognizing books by their covers. Sporcle has both an adult and children's version of this visual quiz, though there were still plenty of children's books in the adult version. On the adult book quiz, I got a respectable 18/24 and on the children's book quiz the slightly better score of 17/20. While some answers (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or Lord of the Flies, for example (highlight text to read)) came quickly to mind, there were a few stumpers in each quiz (even ones like Bridge to Terabithia, a book I have read more than once. I even own the same edition that was used in the quiz! D'oh!).

Variations on the first: judging books by their covers. While I'm average at guessing titles, I did marginally worse at guessing genres: only 8/12 correct. I guess I need to work on the finer points of sub-genres. Taking the quiz was the first time I'd come across "Cipher" or "Techno" thrillers. And then on some questions I really wasn't sure: does a flag in the background make a book spy/espionage, or military? Does the difference between Contemporary Fantasy and Urban Fantasy lie in how many tattoos are on the character on the cover? Definitely something to explore.

New resources:
I'm choosing to follow the happenings on the Daily Beast's book blog, Book Beast. Book Beast seems like a good mix of topics and has a variety of authors contributing to the site. Additionally, I was drawn in by the presentation of the site in several different categories: the week's hot reads, articles, highlights, cheat sheet, videos etc. etc. They seem to cover both topical/popular nonfiction as well as trending/literary fiction, both genres which I am interested in exploring further.

The RT Book Reviews blog/website seems like a good introduction to the Romance genre and its various subgenres, which are not usually my choice of reads. However, the few articles I've read so far were engaging and intriguing - they might make a Romance reader of me yet! As an added plus the website itself had fewer glitches than some of the others I previewed, so that put it high on my list of possibilities.

Extra:
Why couldn't I have read this 6-year-old's version of the Great Gatsby in high school? Haunted theme parks and magical magic guys: sounds much more exciting than the original!

Welcome to Olivia's Books!

Assignment #1: Complete! I'm ready to get started with Be More Bookish training. :)