I heard from Natasha who heard from Bookninja about this story over in Russia. Apparently a writer sued a journalist over a negative review, “claiming that the author and his family had experienced severe mental suffering and that his professional reputation was damaged as a result of the review. The writer stated that after reading the book review, he experienced chest pains, headache, and elevated blood pressure. He demanded to be compensated in the amount of US$150,000.” The writer only won US$1,000, which neither party is happy with so both parties will be appealing.

Does this scare me? Not at all. I think it’s ridiculous and will no doubt be overturned by a higher court. But the best part is the end of the article:

Some have even suggested that if a book reviewer can be sued, a reader who did not like a book can sue the author for making a bad quality product.

HAHA!! How many times have I read a book and lamented over the time I spent reading it that I will never get back. How much happier would I be if I could be compensated for my time when *I* think a book is crap? If I could sue someone for books I’ve read in the past, who would I sue?

Heck, I’d sue myself over some drivel I’ve written.

I’ve been amusing myself the last few days imagining how this whole suing-over-bad-writing would happen. I can imagine witnesses and cross examination and a judge. What do you think would be better punishment than the author paying you for your lost time?

*incoherentmumblingiwoulddefinitelysuenicholassparksandhewhowillnotbenamed butcanbefoundhere*

I WISH I had all the answers! Ah, to be 15 again. But I do have some answers! A few days ago I said I’d answer any questions you have. The lack of comments on the post makes it look like you should probably be able to hear crickets, but there’s 5-7 comments that got accidentally deleted when my site went down. Boy, did I have some choice words at that time! Thank you to all of you who made sure there were no crickets on my blog! Me love you long time.

SO! On to the questions…

From Diane: When did you start your blog, and how did you decide on the name for it??

I started my blog when I agreed to take care of a friend’s evil kitty. I was reading one or two blogs at that point and thought it would be fun to start my own. The idea fizzled after the cat escaped. That was in July 2007. Then in September 2007 I started blogging again about random things like my nightmares, my electrolysis, and my book club. Lisa from Books on the Brain left a comment on my book club post, she became my idol for blogging, and the rest is history. (Lisa’s probably tired of hearing that she was my inspiration, but she was! The other book blogger who I found through Lisa that inspired me was Stephanie from The Written Word. I’ve never told her that but it’s true.)

My blog was originally called Hey Lady! because of something my ex-boyfriend (my ONLY ex-boyfriend) used to say. He used to say “hey, lady” in a funny kind of way and I loved it. So I named my blog Hey Lady! But then I realized some bloggers were getting free books, and *I* wanted free books but wondered why publicists weren’t finding me. So I thought maybe they didn’t know my blog focused on books! So I changed the name to Hey Lady! Whatcha Readin’? I think it’s a cute name because it’s something people actually say. The name change didn’t get me free books right away, but that’s another story.

From Jackie: I’ve always wanted to know why you don’t have a photo of yourself on your blog – only the 60s? girls?

I wanted a cute picture as an avatar, but didn’t have any. I’ve been obsessed with vintage pinup girls since I discovered vintage clothes, and since pinup girls always look super cute, I went with the pinup girl waving. I thought she was cute. I imagine I’m her and I’m waving and saying hi to everyone who stops by.

Then with the header thing, I used to have a picture of my cat peeking out of a blanket, but one day wondered if I could find a pinup girl reading, and I did, so she’s been up ever since.

Then I saw a bumper sticker that said “Reading is sexy” and while I didn’t make it up, I thought it went perfectly with my blog theme of pinup girls, so I adopted it as my tagline.

I’m not opposed to posting pictures of myself…I’m just kind of lazy with uploading the pictures. Here’s one I like:

(the sun is obviously washing me out, but I really am that pale)

From Beth: How is it that you can write up an excellent post on a hot issue so quickly?

I DON’T. It just looks like I do.

One of the benefits to being succinct is that I don’t have to go on and on about a particular subject. I state my point and I’m done. Basically, though, I’m not a fast writer. That’s why blogging sucks so much time from me!

An opinion post can take anywhere from one to three hours. Depends on how thorough I want to get.

From Cindy:

1. What is the one thing you would tell a fellow blogger not to do and/or to do?
2. What is the longest you’ve waited in line to see an author?

1. Don’t put music that automatically plays on your blog. Have an opinion! And start out self-hosting. Or go to self-hosting the second you have an inkling you enjoy blogging. Self-hosting is rather cheap ($10/month, and that’s not even the cheapest!), so it’s a rather inexpensive hobby. Time consuming, but inexpensive.

Also, I caution against doing too many memes. You want original, fresh content on your blog. Of course, many of these things assume that you want to grow your traffic.

Also, go visit people. Being one of the few bloggers who don’t have to do anything to get traffic would be nice, but most of us aren’t like that. Most of us have to go out and make friends.

Also, don’t do partial feeds.

I guess that isn’t one thing. So much for being succinct! But if I had to choose one, it would be go with self-hosting asap.

2. Not that long. I’m a front-row get-there-first kind of girl so I don’t usually have to wait. However, I would wait HOURS to meet Tana French. And then I would offer to have her babies.

From Michelle: What’s your all-time top 3 favorite books (or 5, or 10, if you have the time).

In no particular order:

• I Know This Much is True by Wally Lamb
• The Likeness by Tana French
• Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
• Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive SCRABBLE Players by Stefan Fatsis
• The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
• We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates
• The Help by Kathryn Stockett
• Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
• The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

I feel like when naming favorite books that I’m asked to pick my favorite star in the heavens (name that movie!). By leaving off The Art of Racing in the Rain or The Other Boleyn Girl or East of Eden or Wintergirls or Pope Joan, I feel like I’ve made a Sophie’s Choice.

From Ti:

1. Do you belong to a book group? I don’t think I’ve read that you do. If you do, tell us a little about it.
2. If you could invite 3 authors to dinner, which ones would you choose (and why) and what would you serve?
3. Where do you get you cute T-shirts? LOL. They are book related and I love ‘em.
4. What is the one book that you read over and over again and why?
5. What do you think of e-readers like the Kindle?

1. I do! The road to getting a functioning book group was difficult. I told the whole story at Books on the Brain. But the book club I have now is pretty great. It’s all female. We range in age from 30 to 58 and usually have differing opinions about the books we read, which I like. We range in reading from someone who’s been in another book club for 10 years to some who joined so they’d be forced to read more. We have a salad bar before the meeting, which is delicious. Edamame. Radishes. Onions. Croutons. Pine nuts. Fresh bread. Butter. Mmmm. I’m the defacto leader.

2. I would invite:

Wally Lamb because he’s a fascinating author. He’s generous with his time to a women’s maximum security prison where he teaches a writing class. He’s an amazing person and I wish we were friends.

Joyce Carol Oates because who writes that like?! She pumps a book out about every six months, and I think she’d be really cool.

Katherine Dunn because she’s so awesome. I haven’t had a chance to write up about my experience at the LA Times Festival of Books, but Katherine Dunn rocked my socks. She’s a little off the beaten path and I like that.

I’m kind of a foodie so I’d prefer to take my guests out to dinner. I live in an area that’s saturated with excellent restaurants, and we could always come back to my house for some port or ice wine (my preference).

3. Here’s where I got my librarian girl reading shirt and here’s where I got the smart mudflap girl shirt. I already have shirts with pinup girls on them, so it’s logical for me to have the librarian girl reading shirt. The smart mudflap girl shirt is just cool.

4. I’ve found I don’t normally like to read books over and over again. They lose that je ne sais quoi, that magicalness. But The Wednesday Sisters is a book I know I’ll want to go back to again. I may even read The Likeness at some point again. I definitely want to read Word Freak again. Okay, maybe there’s more books I want to reread than I thought.

5. I think e-readers are awesome! I want one! BUT. The price of an e-book? NOT THAT CHEAP. Really, if I’m going to buy an e-reader, then books need to be mass-market-paperback-cheap, not hardcover-on-sale-cheap.

From chartroose: What are your regrets?  If you had to live your teens/20′s over again, what would you do differently?

CHARTROOSE! You do not know the can of worms you have opened!

For the most part, my life is fairly regret-free. But when I was 23, I left my religion which hurt quite a few people. That’s a big one.

I regret that I hurt my ex-boyfriend when I broke up with him after two years. More accurately, I regret not telling him the real reason why I wanted to break up and not giving him a second chance. Understand he’d already put me through the ringer, starting with when we were first dating, he was best man at his friend’s wedding, and I was with him, and when the last dance was announced, he turned to the girl on his other side and asked her to dance. So I sat there alone, the only person not dancing, and yet I HAD A BOYFRIEND! AT THE WEDDING! WHO WAS DANCING WITH SOMEONE ELSE! I remember it vividly. So while he wasn’t perfect, I’ll never get the picture out of my head of him crawling into bed with me a few days after I broke up with him (we were living together and he had not yet moved out) and holding him while he sobbed. I knew I’d broken his heart, but I couldn’t stay in the relationship anymore. He certainly deserved the truth of that, which I couldn’t articulate at the time.

Those are two big regrets. In my teen years and early 20s, I wasn’t doing drugs, having sex, or drinking large quantities of alcohol. I certainly did my fair share of things I probably shouldn’t have done, but I don’t regret them. I don’t even regret at 17, challenging a 250 pound guy to a drinking contest. I’d never been drunk before, and he had done more than his share of drinking. But I’m competitive and don’t back down, so we did shots of tequila until I basically passed out mid-competition. That’s the only time I got drunk before 21. I think.

If I could do my teen years over again, I would wish that I could introduce myself to vintage clothes. Once I learned about vintage clothes, I got a style that I liked, that I was comfortable in, and that was unique. I think if I could have had that in my teen years, I would have had more confidence.

I grapple with whether I have regrets or not. I mean, I think I owed my ex-boyfriend a second chance, but I wouldn’t have met Dave if my ex-boyfriend and I had stayed together. And Dave is one of the best things to ever happen to me. The choices I’ve made, they make up who I am, so how can I regret them? I think anything I regret has to do with hurting other people, because I would never ever purposefully hurt someone.

From TexasRed: Where is your favorite place to get books (local shop, library, online, publicists, direct from authors, etc?)

My favorite place to get books used to be Borders. But these days it’s my local independent bookstore, probably because I feel good supporting the economy and local business. Free books from authors are nice, but they don’t give me the same satisfaction I get when I buy books from an independent bookstore.

From gentle reader: What’s your favorite guilty pleasure–in books, and/or just in general?

For a while it was Philippa Gregory’s books. Total guilty pleasure because I wouldn’t consider them literary. Then it was the Anita Blake  series, until it just got trashy. Any mystery/thriller is a guilty pleasure for me, something I read to take a break from other books.

In general, my guilty pleasure would be cookie dough. Or sopaipillas (the New Mexican sopaipillas with lots of powdered sugar on top). Or cake batter. Or 31 Belows from Baskin Robbins with extra Oreos. Mmm…

From Lisa: Best vacation ever?

I don’t get out much, but I had a blast with two friends when we went to New York 10 years ago. But my honeymoon was pretty cool last year, since I got to meet some professional poker players that I’ve admired for years now. Maybe I should just say the best vacation ever is the last vacation I took, because the answer is always changing.

Back in January in my Cream of the Crop post, Jeanne asked this: But sometime can you share some more suggestions for how you got more traffic?

Traffic is a tricky thing. I’ll tell you that last year, from January to April, I spent 15-20+ hours visiting other blogs. I put a lot of work in to get people to come to my blog! Once you get the ball rolling, your traffic should keep getting better. Controversial posts help, too. As do rockin’ giveaways. And well-written posts. Does that answer your question? I can elaborate if you want.

Phew! I probably told you more than you wanted to know, but what else is new?

Beside a Burning Sea by John Shors takes place in 1942 near the Solomon Islands. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor less than one year ago, and the United States is embroiled in war. On a U.S. hospital ship are 9 men and women who will survive the bombing of the ship and swim to a nearby island to wait for their rescue. One of the survivors is the person who sabotaged the ship, and the other people don’t find out until it’s almost too late.

Here’s your cast of characters:

• Joshua and Isabelle – married, but separated for all intents and purposes. Joshua was the captain of the ship and Isabelle is a nurse.
• Annie – Isabelle’s single sister who is a nurse.
• Roger – the trucculent American who can’t get along with anyone and has definite anger issues.
• Akira – the Japanese soldier who’d been injured and was being cared for on the American hospital ship. He used to be a professor but was forced to join the Army.
• Ratu – a young Fijian boy who ends up bonding with Jake.
• Jake – nicknamed Big Jake, is an engineer who previously was a farmer. He takes Ratu under his wing.
• Scarlet – a nurse.
• Nathan – an officer in the war.

The friendships and love that are forged during the 18 days they spend waiting to be rescued are heartwarming and moving. But what’s even better is that there’s the traitor in their midst, so while you watch Jake and Ratu forge a beautiful relationship, your heart is pounding as you wonder if they’ll even make it off the island alive, since the traitor intends to kill everyone when the Japanese arrive.

This was an almost-perfect book for me. I loved the character development and watching the group do their best to survive on the island. I loved the suspense of wondering when the group would figure out who the traitor was and how far the traitor’s plans would progress until he was thwarted.

Unfortunately for you, dear reader, I don’t really have any criticisms of Beside a Burning Sea! I hate to give you all good and no bad, because I think a mention of what *didn’t* work in a book is necessary, but I have no complaints!

I’m hesitant to tell you this book reminded me of Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, which I personally thought was fabulous, but I know many didn’t like Bel Canto and I would hate for you not to read Beside a Burning Sea just because you didn’t like Bel Canto (I’m looking at you, Lisa!).

Bottom line: this will be one of my favorite books of the year. After reading Beside a Burning Sea, I’m chomping at the bit to read Beneath a Marble Sky and the author’s newest book, Dragon House, which will be released on September 1, 2009.

Buy the book today! Buy the book from Powell’s | Buy the book from Amazon

Rating: 96 out of 100

If there’s anything you’d like to know, any burning question you have, feel free to ask it and I’ll answer questions in a separate post in a day or two. Beware, though, because I have been known to bite ask questions back. I like to know about you as much as you like to know about me.

I think the reason I was fascinated by Rape: A Love Story by Joyce Carol Oates was because the title is so…so…incongruous. It would be like saying War: A Celebration of Life or School Shootings: How They Benefit Society. I mean really. Rape: A Love Story?

Rape: A Love Story tells the story of Teena Maguire, walking home with her 12-year-old daughter after midnight on the Fourth of July, who cross paths with some local losers who lust after Teena, and next thing she knows they’re both being dragged into a boathouse, Teena to be brutally gang raped and Bethie, the daughter, “lucky” enough to crawl away to a corner. Bethie is able to identify the rapists, but when the rapists hire a hot shot attorney who attacks Teena’s character (because everyone knows that a woman wearing a low cut shirt is “asking for it”) and attacks Bethie’s ability to identify the males (I’m loathe to call them men), Dromoor, a local police officer who was first on the scene when police were called, starts to take matters into his own hands.

I KNOW this book sounds horrific. But it’s only horrific in a Dexter kind of way, where you find yourself rooting for the vigilante, even though you know it’s wrong. These are my favorite kinds of books: those that challenge a previously held belief that something is wrong.

Joyce Carol Oates is a masterful storyteller, and this book is no exception. In particular, Rape: A Love Story was told in a choppy type of narrative, and where I’ve thought this kind of choppy narration didn’t work in other books, I definitely thought it worked in this novella. When you read two books with a similar style, the better writer is easily discernible.

The other quirk in this book is that the narration alternates between various characters, all told in third person, but Bethie’s character is narrated in second person, addressing the reader as “you”.

The love story is Bethie’s, though arguably could refer to either Dromoor or her mother. There was an interesting quote part way through the book while the trial is happening. Bethie observes:

You wondered if in their sick way they loved Teena Maguire. They loved how they’d broken her, made her their own.

Whose love store this is could ultimately be left up to the reader.

I read Rape: A Love Story right after reading Picking Cotton, a book about a woman who incorrectly identified her rapist, and an innocent man was sent to prison for over 10 years. You can see the irony.

Many people might shy away from such a brutal topic, but I challenge you to pick this up and see how it challenges your views of right and wrong. It’s not gratuitous in any scene, though some scenes will make you flinch. I promise you, though, it’s not the rape scenes that stick with you after you’ve finished the book.

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Rating: 89 out of 100

Other reviews:

Bride of the Book God