News, Announcements & Giveaways! Oh My!

Where to start?!?!

There are so many awesome things that are going to be happening here in the blog within the next few months, I can't even begin to explain how great it's going to be!

First, I am officially apart of Nancy Holder & Debbie Viguie's Damned Book Tour.

I'll be interviewing both of them & hosting an international giveaway on August 24th!

So make sure you all mark your calendars!

This next thing I am SUPER excited about!!

You're looking at a member of the Romancing Your Dark Side Book Tour.

If you haven't heard the buzz about it yet, it's stalk worthy for sure!

7 authors, 3 months, 1 Kindle as the Grand Prize!

August until October these amazing authors will be blog hopping, sharing TONS of goodies & answering all the questions you've been dying to ask!

Jaz Primo

BK Walker

Jamie Magee

Stacey Kennedy

Jennifer Sommersby

Amber Scott

and

A. Jacob Sweeney

Last, but not least, I am going to be having a slight blog make-over here VERY soon!
Just some new pictures, banners and other little tweaks are going to be taking place.
So look out for them and let me know if you like :)

Library Loot 19.9.2010

Library loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire and Marg that encouragers bloggers to share the books they have checked out from the library. If you would like to participate, Mr. Linky is over at Claire's blog The Captive Reader this week. 

I'm sorry to have skipped my planned schedule for R.I.P posts. On Thursday I started reading Room by Emma Donoghue and it kept me in its grip so totally that I forgot all about ghost stories. Then on Friday I bought a new ADSL modem. The deal included also a new digibox, so that I will not only to get my TV channels through the modem, but will be able to manage anything I want to record for later from any computer anywhere. I'm using the new modem already, but have some problems with getting my DVD-recorder to work with the new digibox, so am waiting for some help with that. However, all that was actually only a prequal for this: yesterday I finally, after pondering about it for months, went and bought myself a mini laptop! My old computer, which I'm actually using now writing this, is not a laptop and I've been dreaming of a small laptop that would be easy to take with me when I travel. And I'm super happy with the one I chose. It's small, it has everything I need in a travelling laptop, -and it's berry pink! :) It's a Sony Vaio and I think it was love at first sight! :) :)

Well, excuse me my enthusiasm! :) I'll turn back to books now. I have, in fact, found all too many interesting books lately and reserved many of them from the library. Hovever, as so often happens, somehow the books seem to arrive in groups. On Monday I came home from work with a few holds that had arrived. Then two more arrived on Thursday and three more on Friday! These are the books in English (I also got two new Finnish novels I had put on hold, but will not talk more about those this time.) I got from the library this week:

• Emma Donoghue: Room
  Fiction. The Booker Prize Short List. A-M-A-Z-I-N-G book. I'm reading Room just now.
• Brian Dumaine: The Plot to Save the Planet. How Visionary Entrepreneurs and Corporate Titans Are Creating Real Solutions to Global Warming
  Nonfiction. Found this on Helsinki City Library's online list of new nonfiction books in English & it sounded interesting.
• Andrew Fagan: The Atlas of Human Rights. Mapping Violations of Freedom Around the Globe.
  Nonfiction. I'm very much interested in human rights, especially issues like freedom of speech, women's rights, GLBT rights, and anything done to end discrimination and sensorship in general. This slim book seems to give quite a good general view of the state of the human rights around the globe.
• Howard Jacobson: The Finkler Question.
  Fiction. One of the Man Booker Prize Short listed novels this year & first of the Booker candidates I got my hands on. I have, however, waited for weeks and weeks to read Room, so this must wait a bit for it's turn.
• Panos Karnezis: The Convent. <- This link takes you to a review of The Convent by Ursula Le Guin.
  Fiction. For a liberal minded Lutheran I have always been unusually interested in anything to do with Catholic religious orders. I've more or less read everything I've ever got my hands on on the subject be it then fiction or non. This novel is set in a small Spanish convent where one day the Mother Superior finds a suitcase punctured with airholes at the entrance to the retreat. I'm very intrigued by this book.
• Aiko Kitahara: The Budding Tree. Six Stories of Love in Edo.
  Fiction. These are stories about single, working women in the Japanese Edo period. The Edo period in Japanese history runs from 1603 to 1868, but according to the back cover of the book, these stories are set in the early-to-mid-19th-century Japan. 
• C. J. Moore: The Untranslatables. The Most Intriguing Words from Around the World.
  Nonfiction. And the title says it all! :) It includes some gems from my own mother tongue, too , but more about those later.
• The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories from Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce.
  Fiction. This is for the R.I.P. Challenge.
• Fiona Shaw: Tell It to The Bees.
  Fiction. This is for the GLBT Challenge, a love story between a mother of a small boy and the local doctor, who happens to be a woman. The setting is 1950s. Looks very promising!

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll go back to playing with my new berry pink toy! ;)

Cloud 9 & a Wrap-Up

Yesterday the first grand prix dance competition after summer took place in Turku. Since May we have been concentrating in standard dances only (i.e. slow waltz, tango, Wiennese waltz, slow fox, and quickstep). We have been working very hard and were eager to see how we'd do in the competition. Well, we won!! It was the first time we won the standard section in a grand prix competition and I'm still more or less on cloud 9 here! :)

So, dancewise these past weeks have been very good, but it has also meant that I had not been reading much, or rather, I'm reading a few books, but don't seem to be able to finish them!

I'm reading

• Dubliners by James Joyce for my book club meeting
• The Hammer and the Cross: A New History of the Vikings by Robert Ferguson for fun (I've always been very interested in the Viking period. I even went to study in Norway because of that.)

I'm also slowly reading through two books of short stories:

• Angels beneath the Surface: A Selection of Contemporary Slovene Fiction ed. by Mitja Cander & Tom Priestly
• Love and Obstacles by Aleksander Hemon

In August I did spend almost two weeks with Middlemarch, as I wanted to read it for Nymeth's readalong. Unfortunately could not get further than 200+ pages. In the end I just had to put the book aside and read something else. I'll get to Middlemarch some other time. I guess this just was not the right moment for it.

Here is my August wrap up:

Books read: 3 (only 3 :( )
Books read in English: 2
Books read in Finnish: 1
Finnish books read: 1

Fiction: 3

Nonfiction: 0

Books reviewed: 3 one of which was read already in July

These are the books I managed to finish reading in August:

• The Sealed Letter by Emma Donoghue
• Baby Jane by Sofi Oksanen
• To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis

How was your reading in August?

Oh, I almost forgot! I'm on Twitter now. :)

What Do You Get When You Take 3300 Librarians...

What do you get when you put 3300+ librarians from more than 120 countries in one place for almost a week? A truly amazing conference! I spent last week in Gothenburg, Sweden in IFLA's (=International  Federation of Library Associations and Institutions) 76th World Library and Information Congress. As you may guess from the figures above, the annual congress, which is also the IFLA General Conference and Assembly, is a huge operation! It was also professionally very rewarding! I spent six days listening to numerous presentations, subjects of which ranged from human rights and censorship to copyright, smartphone applications, multicultural services, and digitalizing 18th century book collections, to name just a few. I also heard some really excellent plenary speakers.

On the IFLA website you can find many of the papers presented during the conference & also some videos. Here's just a few, well, let's make it 6 :) links that you might find interesting:

1. IFLA helps the libraries that were hit by the terrible earthquake in Haiti earlier this year. I attended an update session on what the situation in Haiti is at the moment and what ILFA is doing there to help the Haitian colleagues. Here is a video compiled of the National Library of Haiti's security camera footage filmed during the earthquake.
2. The IFLA World Report has loads of information about terms of freedom of access to information, freedom of expression and related issues around the world.
3. World famous Swedish writer Henning Mankell gave a plenary speech about To Be Able to Read and Write -a Question of Dignity. Watch the video here.
4. Emeritus Professor and a member of the Swedish Academy Sture Allén talked about the Nobel Prize in literature. Watch the video here.
5. No doubt the most fascinating presentation of all was, however, Professor Hans Rosling's talk about A Fact Based World View. You simply have to watch this video! You'll never think that statistics are boring after that!! He was given a standing ovation after his speech.
6. An interesting paper about minority ethnic gender fiction in the UK public libraries by Lecturer in Librarianship Briony Birdy from the University of Sheffield, UK.

Being true to my profession I am a fervent book lover (and now also a proud owner of a bright purple "Jag är en bokkramare" (that's "I am a bookhugger" in English :)) wristband!) and I love to visit bookstores when ever and where ever I'm travelling. (I actually don't very often visit libraries, if I'm on holiday, but if, like on the IFLA Congress I'm on a work related trip then library visits are, of course, on the agenda.) I managed to add no less than 5 books to my collection during my six days in Gothenburg! And four out of five are in Swedish. I am rather fluent in everyday situations in Swedish, which is the other national language here in Finland, but I guess I have read maybe one or two books in Swedish before. Well, the books I bought are by Swedish authors and are not (at least not yet) available in either Finnish or English. They all also seemed really interesting, so, I will get good language practise trying to read them in original language! :)

I actually started this post intending to say just a few words about the conference and then finally post my review of The Sealed Letter by Emma Donoghue, but this ended up being a whole post about the IFLA Congress. Nevermind, I hope you find the info interesting. I'll post the review either tomorrow or on Sunday.

Oh, and next year the IFLA Congress will be held in Puerto Rico and (drumroll, please!;)) in 2012 it will be here in Helsinki!! It will actually be held in the Helsinki Fair Centre just across the street from our library! I can hardly wait! It will be very, very exiting!

Have a great weekend everyone!

Chapter 3: Codex Sinaiticus

Since yesterday July 6th all the extant pages of Codex Sinaiticus, or the Sinai Book, one of the two earliest almost complete manuscripts of the Christian Bible (the other is Codex Vaticanus) are freely available in digitised form on the Internet. Codex Sinaiticus was written in the middle of the 4th century. It is one of the most important versions of the Septuagint, the Old Testament version used by early Greek-speaking Christians, and the New Testament. It is the most corrected early version of the Christian Bible, and sheds important light on how the Bible was constructed. It is also an important piece of book history.

Read more about Codex Sinaiticus on the wonderful Codex Sinaiticus website, where you now can also take a look at the manuscript itself. It is thrilling to browse those virtual pages, even if you do not understand 4th century Greek (I don't). Just think about all the centuries the manuscript has survived! There will be a book published for the general public about the Codex Sinaiticus project later. It will surely go onto my to-read list!