Howdy, howdy! I’m back this week with all the news that’s fit to print. Last weekend, we took a quick trip back to Illinois to celebrate my dad’s 60th birthday. I swear I’m not old enough for my dad to be 60, but that is neither here nor there. We had a great weekend, eating Chicago-style pizza, swimming at my brother’s community pool and hanging out. It was a quick but fun getaway.
I shared with the Twitter and Facebook crowd the big news at work. We were hit with this bombshell at 8 AM on a Friday. I did this five years ago and managed to surf the turmoil. Hey, I was able to get my recent promotion out of the situation, so it wasn’t all bad. Now that Jim and I both work for the same company, this news has definitely caused some concern. We won’t hear anything final for the next four to six weeks, but as I told Jim, all we can do is buckle up and enjoy the ride. It’s going to be an interesting one!
In other news, I found out that someone has been plagiarizing at least one of my reviews. 1001 Books is the culprit, and they stole my review of Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street, of all things. Don’t worry. I’ve already reported them to Blogger. This is not just lifting of a post. It is taking my words and incorporating more than 75 percent of them into his/her “own” review. A little research showed me that almost all of the book reviews posted at this site are stolen from other bloggers or other media reviews and passed off as original works. Awful. Since there is no way to contact this person directly, I hope that if you find your own words on this site, please report them to Blogger so that we can get this person taken off the Interwebz for stealing.
On to the reading portion of the report – since I didn’t report in last week, there have been a ton of reviews over the past two weeks.
- Forbidden by Tabitha Suzuma
- Grave Peril by Jim Butcher
- The Secret Lives of the Four Wives by Baba Segi
- Ellis Island by Kate Kerrigan
- Feast by Merrie Destefano
- The Sweetness of Tears by Nafisa Hagi
- Never Knowing by Chevy Stevens
- Overbite by Meg Cabot
- Long Gone by Alafair Burke
- Men, Women & Children by Chad Kultgen
- The Books of Lies by Mary Horlock
- Wildefire by Karsten Knight
- A Long, Long Sleep by Anna Sheehan
- The Story of Beautiful Girl by Rachel Simon
- The Reservoir by John Milliken Thompson
My reading has definitely slowed down this summer. I think I need all those practices to up my reading time. As of Friday, we have one more month before school starts. It will be here before we know it.
Speaking of the kids, Connor finally shared a little bit about his trip to Washington, D.C. earlier this month.
He still raves about it, so even though it was an extremely expensive trip, it was worth every penny.
Last but not least, I decided to make my Read My Own Books Month a true event and opened up sign-ups this week! I hope you all check it out and sign up. I am a firm believer that the more, the merrier.
With that, I am off to try to stay cool in this miserably hot weather and see if I can up my reading tally today. At least the heat is making it easy to do nothing. Have a cool Sunday and happy reading!
Isn't that awful? You can totally tell when the blog owner is writing his or her own reviews and when s/he is taking them from someone else. Original ones are about one or two sentences long, and the verbiage is simplistic. Plagiarized ones are much longer and go into greater detail with a better appreciation for the details of the novel. To me, it is fairly obvious but without specific proof, all I can do is report my own examples, which I did.
I will definitely be keeping people informed about the work situation. It will be the biggest news of 2011 for us if things happen the way they possibly could.
Thanks, Jenny! Waiting and hoping is all we can do. Patience and hope are not exactly my strengths, but having been in this situation before does help.
LOL! I think library books are perfectly acceptable. I'm all about the non-review books in August.
Hope all the goings on at work do not affect either you or your husband negatively. I would still be nervous too, but there's nothing to do but wait and hope it's all good. I am trying to read my own books, but sadly not succeeding very well. When I turn down ARCs, the library bug bites me. Oh well!
Have a wonderful week 🙂
Thanks, Amy! My last experience was painful but it still caused great things for me. It is still too soon to find out if it will be the same for this acquisition. We shall see. Since Jim hasn't gone through this before, my biggest challenge will be keeping him calm.
I can't wait for August! I am so excited and keep eyeballing my shelves to try to determine which book I am going to pick up first!
It is a poor site, isn't it? I think it just screams that the entire site is plagiarized in some way, shape or form. I hope they are taken down soon too. Something that blatant deserves to be banned from the Internet.
Thanks, Chris!
I actually found the blog through FairShare. I can get any stolen feed directly into my feed reader. I just downloaded it about a month ago, so I have no idea how many other posts have been stolen.
Eecks good luck with that blogger, and with work. My company was acquired last October and it's still causing changes and odd things but so far so good job wise luckily. I hope it all works out well for you.
I am definitely joining your August pledge, though my reading has been way down this summer too. I think because I've been home and there is so much to do here!
My recent post Random Updates
I'll keep my fingers crossed for you and Jim.
How did you discover that blog? I checked the reviews to see if any of mine were there but I don't think so. Some did sound familiar to me though- like I had read them elsewhere.
My recent post Friday Bookish Buzz: Summer Breeze Edition