Absolutely insane weather here today - winds that drove trees down all over the Pacific Northwest and left us without power for 5 hours - basically all afternoon. Since it was so dark and stormy out that meant we were in pretty much semi-darkness all day until the little man and I finally just laid in bed and played with flashlights until the lights came back on.

This day lasted forever and nothing got done.

I just finished reading The Girl I Wanted To Be and there is a lot of food for thought in this one. I'm not sure where I will review it - I'm not totally sold on it as a coming-of-age story, it's more of a major dramatic family situation story. That pushes it back to a column this spring for the review, but I want to put it with other books that will make it shine. Suffice to say, some of us don't grow up even after adulthood and there are hard lessons in there for everyone when that happens. It's a stinging story but a heart breakingly honest one. Now I need to read something happy....I'll get back to you on that. (I'm also reading The Lost Men for my polar exploration column and that has just been dead dogs and stupid decisions so far - not exactly uplifting!)

There has been more said about the whole "lit bloggers reviewing for free books and not honesty" thing, mostly over at Metaxucafe now. I weighed in - I had to weigh in - and Ed weighed in a lot. There seems to be a division in opinion here between folks who actually get a ton of ARCs and those who have only received a couple. I keep thinking that maybe there is a lot of truth to this issue as so many of the commenters are agreeing with the pretext that the lure of free books is too hard to resist. But I can't see it - why give good reviews to bad books when all you're going to get is more bad books? I mean good grief - the library is there for a reason and lord knows I have loved it throughout my life. Get free books there or buy them cheap at garage sales! Don't read a piece of crap from beginning to end just so you can own it. (This is starting to sound like an addiction situation to me "My name is XXX, I'm a lit blogger and I give good reviews for bad books. Someone please help me.")

Just so you all know - officially - pretty much all of the books I receive are given to me. That doesn't mean all the books I mention on this site were given to me, but the ones at Bookslut, Eclectica, Voices, etc. are.

There, I've outed myself. I'm a reviewer and I read free books and most of them I like. Feel free to disagree with me whenever you want. Oh and also maybe we should be thinking more about Harriet then about lit bloggers. Twelve thousand books reviewed for amazon in six years. WTF?

I do not know if either of these books are good or not, but I love that the authors wrote them and that there are still writers out there interested enough in history to even tackle subjects like these.

And just in case you aren't familiar with Subterranean Press, now is a great time to visit their site. The 4th issue of the magazine (edited by John Scalzi) is downloadable for free and Cherie Priest also has a short story online there. Plus - Poppy Z. has agreed to do a short story collection in the near future for them! I just got an ARC for Peter Crowther's collection - no idea when I will get to it, but get to it, I shall.