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Hayley

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Everything posted by Hayley

  1. I can't actually think of any examples I've read other than French and Latin but I picture Latin phrases as mainly being at the beginning of a book and not within the actual story (or explained within the text, which I don't mind either). I'm not too bad with French words and phrases, but I've never been particularly good with languages. Although, thanks to the French teacher who wouldn't let us do anything if we didn't ask in French, I can always remember how to ask if I can take my jacket off .
  2. I think it was your review that made me want to read it in the first place! I have started reading it and so far I have to agree with you about the language! I have to admit, I don't think I'd heard of it before this book! It's nice to know that it's as interesting in real life
  3. I definitely think Dickens influenced society with his writing, very intentionally so. I think the divorce reform conversations happening in the 1850s are an interesting example. Dickens was publishing other people's articles on the subject, well as his own, in his periodical Household Words for a while. Then he wrote about the unfairness of divorce laws in Hard Times and just a couple of years later the Bill was finally passed. The conversation would have happened without Dickens, but he reached a lot of people with his publications and used them to generate empathy for working-class people trapped in unhealthy marriages because they couldn't afford to get divorced. I definitely think he would have changed a few minds on the subject
  4. I enjoyed the chapters that weren't about the technical aspects of whaling. If those parts could be edited out I think I'd have really liked it!
  5. I think I've read 25 (I can't remember if I read all of Heart of Darkness or not!). There's a couple I read a bit of but didn't finish. Funny (or, maybe more weird than funny) story: I was meant to read Truman Capote's In Cold Blood for university but, even though reading violent scenes doesn't usually effect me, I was nearly physically sick after reading the beginning. I had to put it down and go get some fresh air. I think it was a mixture of knowing that those things actually happened and the very brutal/blunt and descriptive way that Capote tells it. Knowing that Capote was sympathetic to the criminals also made me feel uncomfortable about the book and I just couldn't bring myself to read it all. There are a few books on there that I really do want to read though! Me either to be honest (I also agree with you about Moby Dick!).
  6. I opened a book and in I strode. Now nobody can find me. I’ve left my chair, my house, my road, My town and my world behind me. I’m wearing the cloak, I’ve slipped on the ring, I’ve swallowed the magic potion. I’ve fought with a dragon, dined with a king And dived in a bottomless ocean. I opened a book and made some friends. I shared their tears and laughter And followed their road with its bumps and bends To the happily ever after. I finished my book and out I came. The cloak can no longer hide me. My chair and my house are just the same, But I have a book inside me. I Opened a Book - Julia Donaldson [I hope it isn’t cheating to change a word from the plural because I really like this one ]
  7. I love this game! (And Lewis Carroll!) … You say, O Sage, when weather-checked, "I have been favoured so With cloudless skies, I must expect This dash of rain or snow." "Since health has been my lot," you say, "So many months of late, I must not chafe that one short day Of sickness mars my state." You say, "Such bliss has been my share From Love's unbroken smile, It is but reason I should bear A cross therein awhile." And thus you do not count upon Continuance of joy; But, when at ease, expect anon A burden of annoy. But, Sage this Earth why not a place Where no reprisals reign, Where never a spell of pleasantness Makes reasonable a pain? -The Child and the Sage by Thomas Hardy
  8. It was way back in 2015 (and in a book blog ). It should show up in a search, although I see that it doesn't so thank you for noticing that! I'll bring it up with Invision. My review was: 'I think I mentioned earlier that I found this book in a charity shop. The blurb describes a section of the police force which deals with the paranormal and this instantly reminded me of the Peter Grant novels by Ben Aaronovitch, which I loved. I then realised it was set in the Victorian period so then I just had to get it . While there are obviously some similarities with the Peter Grant novels though I was surprised at how different they were. I don't want to give too much away but the supernatural theme is dealt with very differently. I liked the characters, although the narrator has some qualities which make him quite unlikable at times they fit with his background and don't become distracting. I also liked the setting, it felt real and not over exaggerated. In some novels set in a specific time period (like The Interpretation of Murder!) the author seems to feel the need to shove random historical facts at you that are irrelevant to the story but that is absolutely not the case here. There are references to contemporary issues but they're very subtle and well placed. I found out after I finished the book that it's the first in a series called 'Frey and McGray' (the two main detectives) and the next book, Fever of the Blood is set to release in February. I'm definitely planning to get it. I have a feeling that the series will only improve as the characters develop further.' I'm pleased to note that I was right about the series improving . For context, I had recently read The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld and thought it was terrible. I was clearly still feeling a bit disgruntled about it .
  9. I'm so glad you enjoyed this! I love this series and I actually think they get better as they go. The backstory of McGray that you mention gets really interesting.
  10. Yay! That's excellent news! I hope you'll still pop in to see us though
  11. Aww, thank you Ok, so then in that first introduction you just sort of tell them 'feel free to revive old threads'? I know your situation is much different than ours was but if you think there's any chance that a moderator might be able to take over BGO I'd be happy to talk about what we had to do for that here. You probably already thought of this but maybe you could get your current admin to send you copy of the files and databases, so if one of you was in a position to run the forum in the future you could just restore the site as it is now? That way BGO wouldn't really be gone, it would always be there if someone could put it back online.
  12. I've had this sitting on my shelf for an embarrassing amount of time. Maybe I should take this reminder as a sign to just try it! I do love the nineteenth century and folklore/superstition.
  13. I absolutely loved this book (I think I was hooked from that early moment with the monster and the frying pan...) and it started me off on Terry Pratchett. I was about 13 when I read it, so I might find more issues with it now, but I read the other Tiffany Aching books a lot later so I'd happily second Chrissy's recommendation to try those. If this one put you off though, maybe try one of the Discworld books in the Witches series (the first one is Equal Rites) as they have a lot of similarities but are for adults .
  14. I just wanted to echo what Brian said. If you don't want your past book logs to be on here they're easy to remove but you don't need to worry about them taking up space on the forum. The space used when you make a thread is really, really tiny.
  15. Oh, they were from Postmartin! That makes sense, I remember wondering who the footnotes were being written by but I sort of forgot about it by the time I wrote my review. I like the idea that these accounts suggest something happening in the future of the main series where different organisations are sharing information about magic. Maybe it's a hint for something to come as well as a convenient way to explain slang terms? That could be overthinking it though. It's been a long day .
  16. When they post their introduction? Yes, I think I agree with that. We do get a lot of traffic from guests who don't end up staying. I also agree with this but people might get scared if I start chasing them when they leave . ... I have a funny story for you at a future date. And that's all I'm saying about that for now This is a very good point. I don't really have anything to add, but it's always worth remembering that some things are just the nature of a book forum (and forums at this moment in time). I think it is in exactly this way that the mix of ideas would work.
  17. I hadn't really thought about them but I can't remember there being much of point to them either. Maybe just to let us know who's meant to be reading Abigail's account? Me too! I love Abigail's connection with the foxes and the fact that she can get into situations the older characters wouldn't.
  18. I probably didn't phrase what I said very well (once again, it was past my bedtime!). I didn't mean that we heavily moderate content, we don't take posts down if they don't generate a response, but our rules and guidelines suggest that posts should be created with the intention of generating discussion. For example: 'When starting a new thread for a specific book, series, or even author, it's helpful if you can provide more information, as well as your own thoughts or review. Considering the amount of books and authors out there, simply asking if anyone has read it/them probably won't get much response'. These have been there, as far as I know, since the very start of the forum. So I suppose, although it's not an actual set rule, this forum has just discouraged it. How did you encourage that to happen? I know I said this before but I really am so sorry. It's even more heart-breaking to hear that BGO had already bounced back from so much once. I know it's not the same here but I hope you can at least enjoy the company of other book lovers.
  19. I think this is probably one of the main differences with BCF. The way that we moderate the forum is partly based on the concept that a thread should always have the intention of generating discussion. The worry being that lots of posts nobody is going to respond to might lead to the forum feeling cluttered and potentially stop people from finding the more active threads. Clearly though, BGO is an example of that not becoming a problem. I imagine because there was a pretty constant flow of new review threads? Thank you it was also past my bedtime! I can see that decision to move a thread becoming a complex literary debate pretty frequently but I do see how it works now. We do have a classics section already, so do you think if we were to have century divisions within that it would work in the same way? I am wondering whether there's a chance you might have been looking at a personal blog, rather than a book blog? I could be wrong but those are definitely more like diaries. Most people do just use their book blogs for reviews but some people have personal blogs as well, where they just talk about whatever they want and often things that are happening in their lives (under 'General Chat' - 'Members Threads'). I love this explanation and I absolutely see where you're coming from with it. I suppose because most of us have been talking to each other for years on here we take it for granted that we're comfortable with each other. I don't know if it helps in the slightest but I can assure you that even the personal blogs here aren't actually treated as private spaces. Other members definitely want you to chat on there. When it comes to reviews you'd obviously be spoken to about saying offensive things like 'I can't believe you liked that book, you must be stupid', but that never actually happens. Saying something along the lines of 'I'm glad you enjoyed this, I didn't actually like it for [reason]' is absolutely normal though. For the record, if you hated a book that I loved I promise I would not be offended about it, but I would love to talk to someone with such a different opinion! I do vaguely remember people deciding on the book actually! Can you remember whether the same members ran it every time? Or did that change depending on the book? Thank you! My thoughts exactly I don't want you to feel like you're having to argue in favour of BGO's format, I hope you don't. There's no pressure to explain on this thread either. I just think this a good opportunity for us to take a step back and think of ways we might be able to make the forum better. The fact that some of you have recently joined us from BGO, with the experience of a forum that's similar in some ways but very different in others, seems like a great opportunity to get a different perspective and learn from it though . One of the things this discussion has really highlighted for me is that the forum is complicated to new members. Most of us here have been using the forum for many years and we're used to the way things have settled over time, but that's not necessarily a purely good thing. I want the forum to keep going for as long as it possibly can and for that to happen new people need to be able to join in comfortably. Something I'm definitely going to put together on the back of this is a simple guide to getting started, that's immediately visible on the front page.
  20. Oh, I didn't realise that you didn't use personal blogs at all. I can see why it seems a bit weird over here then! To be fair, that will probably be easier when we sort out the embedded links error! You do fit in and, since you're a BCFer as well as a BGOer now, your opinion on how you're comfortable using the forum matters That's really interesting. We do tend to have a lot of informal, personal stuff on here. Do you think maybe you'd feel more comfortable with the blogs after spending more time here? Regarding the board for centuries; I just popped over to BGO to look at your set up there and I'm not quite sure how it works. If you were posting about a 19th century horror, for example, would you post in 19th century or horror? Or both? That does make a lot more sense. I think you've just basically summed up why we don't really use those threads any more! I love the book blogs and the way they show individual personalities and reading preferences. They're a huge part of this forum and they're definitely not going anywhere. And yet, we have the genre threads, they take up a lot of the front page of the forum, so I do think it's worth considering their use. The above comments have made me wonder whether new members would feel more comfortable using those threads than making/commenting on personal blogs? I do think it would be inevitable, if we did start using the genre threads more, that some posts would get few or no comments. You can see that happening if you go to those threads now and look back when they still were being used a lot. From a very brief browse I think that also happens on BGO. The book blogs do, by their nature, get used a lot more. (There's a lot of things we could do to improve SEO but getting a sudden surge of traffic from being high up a search engine's results really wouldn't benefit us, so that's definitely not a consideration.) This is an interesting but complicated one! I feel like I should point out, in case anybody's worried here, that I'm not going to start trying to tell people how and where they can post. We can have a conversation about using the genre threads more, to see if people would like that, but there's never going to be any pressure to change the way you use the forum right now.
  21. I really wanted to buy this after Talisman recommended it. I think this is the sign that I really do have to buy it now! I know what you mean, I would generally agree but I also love The Hound of the Baskervilles!
  22. I'll have a look at both and maybe the format can be something we all vote on. The Reading Circles were before my time so if anybody does remember those could you let me know . Is the way you would review in the genre threads be the same as the way we review in our reading blogs? Or would they usually have more of a focus on generating conversation about the book? I did notice that someone (maybe Hux?) was posting their review on their book blog and starting a thread for it as well. I do feel that might be better than people putting lots of links to other pages in their blogs, just for ease of reading (and especially since a lot of us do multiple reviews at a time - you don't want to end up with lots of tabs open or having to keep re-loading the page). What do you think? No, I totally agree with that. Everyone should definitely feel that they can post however they want (and I suppose that's part of why we love the personal space of our reading blogs!). We do have a lot of space in those genre threads that we don't really use though, I think it would be nice to see them active again if a few people like the idea of using them as well as our blogs.
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