i can't really sing, so

As promised, back in action this May. I read a whole bunch. I "caught up" with my Goodreads Challenge and then some. And that's not even including all the rereads! I was the reread Queen this April and am still going strong-- I'm not going to blog about them, but I'm in the middle of rereading the Harry Potter series. I read most of the books each a couple times back in the day, but it's been at least since the summer of 2007 since I read any of them-- so that's a good 7 years ago. I forget if I wanted to wait 10 or what until I reread, but my husband and I have been watching the movies. I really felt a strong need to reread the books to "get straight" a lot of what the movie ruins/gets wrong. The deeper into the series I go, the more I notice the movie's lack of that UMPH that makes the books The Best. They really are so fucking good. But I digress. Back to what I read  this month outside of being in the throes of the HP series as the month ...

I saw a bunch of posts over at HTML Giant where bloggers named their summer reads. Summer is fast upon us, less than a month away if we are to believe calendars. Most people there named five books, and though I plan on reading more than five books this summer, it makes sense to only commit now to five, I suppose. Who knows what might strike my fancy as the hot months unfold. Here are five books I will definitely be reading this summer: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy I read Crime &Punishment this winter and was surprisingly enthralled. I've always avoided the Russian giants for the most part, but I think I'm ready. I needed a longer classic to knock out this summer, and so this one it is. I will most likely crowd-source what the best translation is, and I may or may not read it on my Kindle. A friend of mine and past GS contrib, Olivia Kate Cerrone, will also be reading it, so I am eager to swap reflections on it with her. Someone Else's Wedding Vows by Bianc...

We've already announced on the GS Editors Blog the list of contributors for our 5.2 issue, but I'd like to re-announce them here and encourage you to donate some of your cashmoney to help this great issue go to print. This winter, we had one of our more selective if not most selective open submissions period. It seemed like a lot of the writing being sent to us was "close" but not quite THERE. For fiction, stories seemed either well written and the story fell flat or with a great story but not as solid writing. As for poetry, when the rest of the poem seemed to be working towards something whole, a single line or a word or an ending would break our hearts and not in the good way. We rejected a lot of very good-- very "close"-- pieces of work, it seemed. As for non-fiction, we never never never get enough and the two pieces we chose really spoke to us. We held onto some others up until days before our announcement of the contributors, but they didn't work...

THIS WEEKEND IN PHILADELPHIA We like to do things in Philadelphia. We like to do them and we like to go to them and we like to be an audience and we like to listen. This Friday, we will be doing t his , which is going to the TireFire reading series, curated and hosted by the lovely duo of Sarah Rose Etter & Annie Liontas. Friday, May 9th at 7pm  (which means, in special TireFire jive, most likely the reading will start at 8pm sharp) at Tattooed Moms (the first bar I ever drank at legally--) come out to see Roxane Gay (!!), Mike Young, Joseph Riippi, and Tara Murphy. I've read books by at least two of those people and plan to read a book by at least one of them this summer. RSVP here . On Saturday, May 10th from 8pm-10pm (Does that mean the reading really starts at 9pm? I don't know. I would show up at 8pm because that's what I do, but you can do as you wish...) poets Marion Bell, Meg Ronan and Lee Ann Brown are reading at the wonderful Chapterhouse & Verse rea...

Opening Remarks I'd hoped to read more, really. February came and went so quickly, though, that I didn't read as much as I'd wanted. There was no point in posting a blog about what I did read, as it was scarce. A combination of February and March's books read proved a better idea. And then, I made a draft of a post & never posted it. So now April is included to... Books Read (according to GoodReads) 16/52 Notes on Books Read Hollow City by Ransom Riggs This is the second book in a YA series that I began reading way back in the day when I was in a bookclub. I am enjoying the series, but every book ends on such a cliffhanger that as a reader, the books feel like they really should be one long book. This is extremely frustrating, though I understand why this is done. I don't have time to reread the previous books, and I didn't reread the first in the series before reading this one-- that turned out alright, I got right back into it. The cast of charact...