2 posts tagged “christian fiction”

Note: This is the first in a series of posts looking back at 2007, in some key areas of my life that were important to me.  

I read this year.

This was a year of rediscovery of books, something I started on last year, but really took it up to another level this year.  In previous years, I did a lot of rereading.  This year, I took advantage of our library and learning more authors.  Although I primarily read Christian fiction, I also got in a lot of instructional books, like knitting and crafting books.

This allowed me to try out interlibrary loan to get some that weren't in our system.  I expanded on my knowledge by creating wikipedia pages or enhancing existing ones for some of the most prolific Christian authors out there (my wikipedia profile lists the most important pages I've worked on).  I have been so helped by having comprehensive lists of the books that any given author writes, and so this is a super thing for me to participate in improving to help others who can't easily find this info elsewhere. 

Because of my reading, I helped out other aspects of my life (craftyness) and started to give of myself as a Library volunteer for the first time since I was a teenager.  This opened new doors for me as a knitter (building my confidence and becoming a help to others), and as a library volunteer, accepting a role for the Friends of the Library group (I'm now the secretary).

Recap: 232 books (plus a few more on my nightstand not yet recorded), with 139 Christian Fiction and 73 knitting (and other ones of other random categories)  There were a few I reread and couldn't reenter into Vox from my personal collection at home, too.

Pictured: My favorite writer this year was Lauraine Snelling, because of reading several series she wrote, but primarily the Dakotah Treasures.  Tracie Peterson's A Slender Thread was probably my favorite standalone book.  Besides those two, I read just about everything Lori Wiki and Beverly Lewis have written this year as well.  The most outstanding knitting book I read this year was Big Girl Knits because it had such valuable information about sizing, and I plan to buy it.

Bonus, a Vox Tip: You can add the year into any URL of tagged items to see just the items for that year with that tag.  For example, if you are looking at books tagged knitting, the URL shows http://kristine.vox.com/library/books/tags/knitting/.  Put 2007 after the item type as follows: http://kristine.vox.com/library/books/2007/tags/knitting/.  Voila!

Where do you get recommendations for new books to read?

Mandie and the Secret Tunnel (Mandie, Book 1)

My favorite resource is actually looking at what other authors write for other publishing houses that I like.  I've been reading books by Bethany House Publishing since I was 8 years old, when my mom first bought me a Mandie book.  She read Janette Oke (tagged books), the first few books of multiple series, and then when I got old enough, I bought the rest of the books to those series and read more from the library.  So now, it's easy to recognize the spines of other Bethany books on the library shelf.  They have expanded their number of authors all the time, and so that makes for a larger selection too! 

As far as my novels go, I don't tend to read what other people are reading, so it's not as easy to just skim through sidebars here at Vox.  So things like going to the bookstore and browsing the aisles is a good way for me to learn of new authors that I may not have heard of yet.  This is true in the crafting/knitting area, and the Christian fiction (tagged books).  I did used to troll the romance aisles, but I just can't find anybody I love as much as my favorite Romance author, Jude Deveraux (tagged books), so I stopped trying.

When I'm trying to see what new knitting books I want to read, I like to go  to a site that sell knitting books and see what is the most popular, like Knit Picks' bestseller list.  Then I search for those on the library site to see which ones we actually have.  General crafting books or cookbooks (other book loves of mine), I'm more likely to go browse the library shelves until I find something interesting and somewhat current.

I organize my reading here on Vox, and then in the last year or so, I've enjoyed working on author pages on Wikipedia (my wikipedia profile has some links) to keep up the book lists and info about the authors I'm enjoying the most.  I tagged all of my books here on Vox with the series name and the author name so it's easier for me to see them when I'm looking to remember what books I've read from which author or whatever.

I'm interested to see if anybody in my neighborhood answered this qotd, it was definitely interesting to me!