mandarine

Compliments are a good investment, and nobody should keep his/her admiration for someone else hidden: ever since I wrote this dithyrambic piece about Emily’s blog, she has been consistently checking here for new material, commenting on every other post, and sending blogging awards my way. Apparently, the effect has still not worn off, because she just confessed she loved my blog. That means I have to name at least seven blogs I love, in an exponential series of compliments.

Unfortunately, I have been too busy recently to make new blogging friends, so the list will have to revolve around the usual suspects.

I’d love to put Emily’s Telecommuter Talk on top of the list, but apparently, the rules require that I name seven other blogs, so here we go:

Charlotte’s Web is where I go first when Emily fails to post for two days in a row. I love the sense of humour, the writing, the family anecdotes, the viewpoints on Germany (I have been to Bremen, Hamburg, Munich, Berlin, Nürnberg, Darmstadt, Würzburg, but apparently, Charlotte will only write about Berlin and Mannheim) and the rest of Europe, and above all the pieces on her South African upbringing (Charlotte, any clue as to when your award-winning I am From post will find its way to the audio world for real?)

Tai’s Aerophant is a collections of quotes, aphorisms, short musings, accompanied by an unexpected picture or otherwise graphical material. Very refreshing. Sometimes absurd. Always contemplative. And she’s a writer too.

Healingmagichands’ The Havens is the blog of a dream garden (and an indimidatingly romanesque life), by a woman from Alaska that the other woman from Alaska would probably have burned a few hundred years ago (did I hear ‘magic hands?). Forget the other woman from Alaska and read what Ellie has to tell us. As we French people say: she does not keep her tongue in her pocket.

Cori’ Pirate’s Library is outside the usual suspects. Her blog revolves around all her magnificent Librivox projects. If you are looking for free audio versions of classic works, go to Librivox advanced search and enter ‘cori’ as the reader’s name. You will certainly not be disappointed.

Smithereens is almost a professional book review blog. Apparently, I am not the only French person out there reading books and writing blogs in English, but she’s much more assiduous than I am at writing down about the books she reads. Unfortunately, as with most bloggers who publish often, I have fallen behind in the past few weeks (months?). I will try to correct that.

What we Said is nobody’s blog in particular: that’s where we bloggers write about everything feminism. Please have a look, and if you want to join as an author, we’ll be flattered. And for those like me who have not written in a while: what are we waiting for?

And then there’s always BlogLily - but as she’s been very busy with real writing, we have been missing her a lot lately.

How would you feel if you were invited to have tea with friends, and the host, after having done all the talking for half an hour, then turning to the guests for feedback, receives each comment with a mere: “OK, next comment, please”, and then “all right, thank you, what was I saying,…” and carries on? How would you feel if you were attending a lecture by some specialist you absolutely love, and the lecturer leaves the room during the Q&A session, leaving you and your co-lecturees to discuss between yourselves?

In real life, I love to squeeze remarks into a discussion when I feel comfortable with the subject and the people, and if my wittily pertinent attempts meet with indifference, I will soon stop trying and leave the discussion on the first occasion. This is exactly how I feel when I visit blogs in which the author does not reply to comments. I am under the impression that the commenting feature is enabled simply for the sake of freedom of speech. I do agree that few comments are ever written in a way that calls for a reply, but when utter silence follows the comments section, it makes me doubt there’s somebody on the other end of the line.

In short, I just wished to explain that I find it hard to keep up with first-person blogs in which comments never or seldom get a reply. I’ll pick just two examples: the QC report (good thing she’s no reader of mine). Q’s writing is fabulous. I found the blog totally addictive. But when I decided I’d “de-lurk” and give commenting a try, I found my initiative as effective as (pardon the vulgar French expression) peeing in a cello. A couple of posts later I deleted the entry from my feedreader. In fact, I’d probably still be a fanatic reader if comments had been turned off altogether, clearly signifying that this was more like an online book and less like a group of friends. The same happened with Tim’s Mother Tongue Annoyances.

Knowing that my blog-reading time is not stretchable to infinity, you will understand I’d rather spend some time with people who are friendly and act friendly, than with people whose friendliness I can’t assess. Now because I am a fervent observer of the ‘do as you would be done by’ principle, I try to answer all comments here, lest I should lose a single reader. Obviously, this is more work for me, but I must confess I like commenting so much that I love an opportunity to comment on any blog, including mine.

P.S. there is something I have to ask: do you come back to read my replies to your comments (I personally keep coming back compulsively until I get a reply whenever I comment on someone else’s blog) or should I drop the practice because I am the only one who cares?

You may by now know that I am very fond of audio-books in general, and of free audio-books in particular. Among those, I have a clear preference towards the public-domain audio-books which the LibriVox volunteers offer as unconditional gifts to the whole world and all future generations.

What you do not know is that I have come to worship one specific LibriVox voice. Warm and crystalline at the same time, this voice is the ideal bedside storytelling mother’s. If I’d been born to an English-speaking family, my dreams of being read Peter Pan, Narnia or Harry Potter to would feature that very voice.

My greatest luck is that I have had the privilege to edit some of the recordings in which this dream voice had been preciously collected, for subsequent release on LibriVox. Even if it was easy work (there are hardly any bits that need to be edited out), I am proud to have contributed to these priceless presents for humanity.

Dear Cori, I am in love with your voice.

A century ago, Emily asked us to think of ten compliments we received throughout our life.

Warning, severe boasting ahead. [more]

I have been flattered with three awards recently: the thinking blogger award (by Emily and Lorelle) and Liz’s SOB.

I now start a month of bragging-free writing diet. Anyone catching me bragging (even covertly) gets to decide the theme of my next post.

Today, I finished reading all of Emily’s Telecommuter Talk. Ever since I found her blog, I knew I would have to read all of it sooner or later. Here is why: when Emily writes about something, anything at all really, she writes a story. Emily’s blog is not a journal: it is a collection of short stories. You won’t ever find a Telecommuter Talk entry like: ‘Today I hurt my little finger in a door’, no. Instead you will find a small drama about impossible love between doors and fingers, where knobs and hinges are characters with a personality of their own, where creaking door memories meet creaking joints fears. A story strewn with gems of psychology insight, peculiar personal philosophy, or obsessive-compulsive views. A story embroidered on a marvellous fabric woven from skillful language and dyed with colorful wit. I do not know if she’s real of if she’s just a storybook character invented by a skillful writer (maybe Hobs and Dorothy can testify in this respect), but I can tell you the skillful writer has me gripped.
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After a very long indian summer, November has come, with temperatures plummeting into zero (Celsius).

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As I continue to delve into Lorelle’s phenomenal heap of blogging treasures, I found a challenge that I could not resist taking:

I challenge all bloggers to blog about 30 things that can be done to change the world in 30 seconds.[…]There is a lot you can do to change the world in 30 seconds. In thirty seconds or less, what are the things you can do to make the world a better place[…]

Update: Lorelle has now included this one in her official blogging challenge. An excellent opportunity for me to re-read my list, and deeply agree with myself that I should read it more often (how about daily?).

Without further ado, the list I came up with:

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