Weekly Geeks 2009-15: It's All About Animals

How many of us remember a favorite pet from our childhood? Or have enjoyed visiting the zoo? Or relish in walking in the woods and hearing birdsong, or seeing a deer leap away through the brush? How many of us have been thrilled by a soaring eagle? How often have we sought the comfort of a dog or cat, or wept tears of loss when forced to say good-bye to a furred friend?

We are surrounded by our fellow creatures and often our lives are enriched by their presence, whether it be sharing our homes with them or simply being blessed to see them in passing.

This week you are asked to share books (fiction or nonfiction) and/or movies which center around an animal or animals.

• Which are your favorites?
• Which touched your heart the most?
• Which have found their way onto your wish lists or TBR stacks?
• Is there a childhood favorite?
• Have you ever named a pet after an animal from a book or movie?

You get the idea! Have fun with this; use your imagination. Share your thoughts!

As an adjunct to this post, consider sharing photos of animals (domestic or wild) which have inspired or thrilled you, or graced your life with their presence.

Finally...Create your post and come back here to sign Mr. Linky. Be sure to enter the direct URL to your post, not your blog's main URL.

Remember to stop in and say hi to other Weekly Geeks!

Read more...

A Geeky Menu (aka WG round-up for 2009-14)

This week's assignment involved cookbooks. And I discovered that it's entirely possible to create a (very diverse) menu from your posts!

Appetizer

Trisha discusses an interesting cookbook: The Original White House Cook Book: Cooking, Toilet and Household Recipes, Menus, Dinner-Giving, Table Etiquette, Care of the Sick, Health Suggestions, Facts Worth Knowing, Etc. Etc.: A Comprehensive Cyclopedia of Information for the Home. So while I have no appetizer recipe to offer, I figure that book is enough to whet your appetite for what is to come.

Soup

Kim shares pictures of her cookbook collection, mentions her favorites and ends with a link to recipe for a yummy looking chicken tortilla soup.

Gavin discusses Middle Eastern cookbooks and offers up a recipe for Pumpkin Soup.

Come to find out, Claire is married to a chef (lucky!). Her beautiful post features photos of handwritten recipes and books that "evoke a sense of place." And bonus...we get a recipe from her husband, Chef J, for Seafood Miso Soup.

Main Dish

Frances focuses on two of her favorite cookbooks, and provides a recipe for some delicious looking meatballs (I don't even like meatballs and these looked tempting).

Vegetarians might prefer Erotic Horizon's recipe for Rice and Peas, while carb-o-holic's (like me) need to go check out Rikki's post with a recipe for Bucatini alla Carbonara.

Dessert

Care's choice of cookbook cracked me up. No recipe, but I'm sure if you track down this cookbook you'll find something you like:


Jackie (of Literary Escapism) introduces us to her other website, Open Source Cook, and then gives us a recipe for Strawberry Pastries.

And if you still haven't found a recipe that interests you, I bet Debbie could suggest one (or two or ten thousand!).

*****

A few other things...

If you haven't read this post about the sad demise of our beloved tree, please go read it. When I was working on the round-up, I noticed a few trees still out there...so please, do us a favor and take down the tree.

And just a reminder that tomorrow (4/18) is the Read-a-thon, so there will be no Weekly Geeks. If you are suffering withdrawals, feel free to go participate in a past week that you might have missed. Otherwise, we will see you next week!

Read more...

If you have posted the tree...

Hi Geeks,

You may notice that the lovely badge with the tree is no longer posted anywhere on this site. You know the one I'm talking about? It had a tree, a book, and the words "Dewey's Weekly Geeks." We received an email asking us if we had permission from the artist to use the artwork. Rather than researching fair use and contacting the artist, we're taking the easy way out and removing it from everywhere it was used on the site.

Please...if you have it posted anywhere on your site, will you either remove it or replace it? We wouldn't want you to get an email, too!

Thank you!

Read more...

Weekly Geeks 2009-14: What's Cookin'?

What shall we cook today? It seems that for most of us, a bit of our book obsession would carry over to the cookbook genre, so this week for Weekly Geeks, let's talk cookbooks! Here are some ideas to get you started:

--Describe your cookbook collection. How many cookbooks do you own? A lot? Just a few? None at all?
--Do you even buy cookbooks? Or do you gather family cookbook compilations and/or recipe files instead?
--Do you like to collect certain types of cookbooks? Say, from certain chefs? From places you visit? From a particular food group or style?
--When buying cookbooks, what do you look for? Does it need to have pictures? Spiral binding? A specific type of font?
--What is your favorite cookbook? Tell us the story behind it.
--Tell us about your most well-used cookbook. Is it different from your favorite cookbook? Or are they one and the same?
--Take a picture of your collection. How and where do you organize it?
--Share a recipe from one of your favorite cookbooks. Include a picture if you can.

Be sure to add the link to your specific WG post on Mr. Linky below. Then visit other Geeks' posts and share with us if you find someone with the same "taste" in cookbooks as yourself. Also, if time allows, try a recipe and let us know how it turns out.

Happy cooking!

Also, next week, because of Dewey's Read-a-thon, there will be no Weekly Geeks. Instead, we hope that you either participate in the Read-a-thon, or cheer on the readers!

Read more...

Round-up for Weekly Geeks 2009-13

In honor of International Children's Book Day and National Poetry Month, we had a wide variety of geekly choices this week, and it was fun to see geeks running off in all different directions to comply (many were so inspired they did two challenges!).

For children's literature, Claire takes us down memory lane with a revue of favorite children's poetry, and GreenBeanTeenQueen, shares fond memories of the books she would have picked if she'd ever been on Reading Rainbow. Meanwhile, Melody shares a touching story about how a reading the picture book You Are All My Favorites together is helping her daughter adjust to having a baby in the family.

The poets among us include Unfinished Person and Covers Girl, who share poems about reading, and newcomer Sam, whose poem contains images of marines (in their little berets) scouting out his brain for suitable words.

I loved the way Jodie of Book Gazing used the haiku idea as a sort of "Get Out of Jail Free card" of a book she can't seem to finish. And please welcome Calissa, who wrote a haiku review for a Phillipa Gregory book.

Thanks to all who participated this week!

Ali

Read more...

Weekly Geeks 2009-13

April 2nd was International Children's Book Day. And April is National Poetry Month. In celebration, I have two lovely options for you this week:

Option A: Be a kid!

You could read a picture book (or two or three) and share what you read.
Write up a post sharing your favorite books from childhood
Write up a post about reading together with your child(ren)

Option B: Be a poet!

Write your own poem and share with us!
Write bookish ABC poems--ABC's of favorite authors, favorite books, favorite characters, favorite book blogs, or any combination of the above. Maybe even an ABC's of a bibliophile or book addict. (A is for...B is for...etc.)(For example, ABC's of Dr. Seuss)
Review a book you've read recently in haiku. (It doesn't need to be a poetry book you're reviewing, any book will do.) See Emilyreads for an idea of what I mean.
Read a poetry book and review it
Participate in Poetry Friday (This week's host will be Carol's Corner.)

Read more...

Weekly Geeks 2009-12 Round-up: It's a Link-up!

This week in Weekly Geeks, Chris thought it was a good time to revisit one of the original Geeky assignments: book review link exchanges.

1. Write a post encouraging readers to look through your archives (if you have your reviews in a particular place on your blog, point them there), and find the books that they have also written reviews. Tell them to leave a link to their review on your review post. For example, I've written a review for Gods Behaving Badly and Jane Doe leaves a link to her review of Gods Behaving Badly in the comments section of my review.

2. Edit your reviews to include those links in the body of the review post.

3. Visit other Weekly Geeks and go through their reviews. Leave links for them.

4. Leave a note somewhere on your blog to let people know this is your new policy.

5. Write a post later this week letting us know how your project is going!

(I've kept this policy on my own blog since the original assignment, and recently edited my Book Review Policy to mention that I participate in review-link exchanges, but other than that I didn't officially participate in WG this week.)

One reason for re-visiting this topic was so that newer arrivals to Weekly Geeks who might have missed this assignment the first time around, as well as Geeks who just haven't gotten around to it before, would have the opportunity to join in and start link swapping themselves. Joanne (Book Zombie) was excited to get this going for her book reviews, and so were Dreamybee (Subliminal Intervention), Farm Lane Books, and Heather (Belle of the Books).

Some of this week's WG players adopted the link exchange in May of last year and have stuck with it since then, but took advantage of the opportunity to re-state the policy. Geeks in this group include Jackie (Literary Escapism), Nymeth (Things Mean a Lot), Nicole (Linus's Blanket), Ali (Worducopia), Heather (Book Addiction), and Gautami Tripathy (Reading Room),

Some Geeks who have fallen off the link-exchange wagon seized this opportunity to catch up or reinstate the practice on their blogs, like Kim (Sophisticated Dorkiness), and Megan (Leafing Through Life). Softdrink (Fizzy Thoughts) loves the idea, but confesses that despite her best intentions, she's probably going to keep forgetting to do it.

Check out the Mr. Linky on Weekly Geeks 2009-12 to see who else participated this week, and visit them to find out if you have links to share - but please be aware that this policy was never meant to be exclusive to Weekly Geeks participants. The idea behind it is community building, so you're encouraged to seek out links to any other blogger's reviews of the books you review, and to offer your own review links freely to other bloggers as well. Fyrefly has created a custom Book Blogs Search Engine for Google that makes finding other reviews quick and easy.

Happy linking!

Read more...