The Sunday Salon: I'm Seeking Your Input! Also, TV, Books, etc.

Hi everyone! I hope you had a good week and are recovering from the loss of your hour. My week was pretty good but it flew by.

BBAW
I've been starting to think about BBAW and what to do about the awards. Every year this gives me a bit of a headache, trying to sort through the problems with the previous year's system, recruit new volunteers (high turnover!) and trying to figure out a way to make the awards appealing and fun without completely taking over the week. Every year, of course, I fail. One thing I thought might be nice is to give the awards their own name, something that would differentiate them from BBAW a bit. I mean, BBAW stands for Book Blogger Appreciation Week, but a lot of times people will get confused and call it Book Bloggers Award Week, which...well that's problematic to me. Anyway, I think a lot of you have been with me since the beginning (love you!!!) and even if you haven't, I feel like you all understand the intent behind BBAW the best, so what do you think? I would be forever indebted if you could give me your thoughts on renaming JUST the awards part..like naming them after either a blogger who was influential in the early days, or a concept bloggers generally endorse or something. I realize this might work against name recognition, but also, considering the baggage of past award years, it might help, too. If you are more comfortable emailing me about this than commenting, please do! mypalamyATgmail.com

Some Links I Enjoyed

I grew up in an environment where we listened to a lot of Christian music and Steven Curtis Chapman was one of them. While I was never a huge fan personally, there were a lot of times throughout my years when we'd crank up his music and listen to it. As such, I really enjoyed Andrew Peterson's piece on the recent tour. Basically, though, I always end up inspired and hopeful after everything AP writes--he has a gift. This is a link heavy on the Christian speak, be forewarned.

Harvard University Press recently learned about the real world impact of one of the books they published. It's a really fascinating story, and worth the read.

Lenore has provided a list of several upcoming dystopian novels for those of you that can't get enough.

The Blue Like Jazz trailer!

Yes it has Alex from Lost and Rebekah from TVD in it!

TV This Week

Switched at Birth
Okay so remember how I was all annoyed by jealous Emmett? I get it now. Jealous Emmett makes sense because Emmett himself is a CHEATER. Ugh. I hated that so much, because I really thought Bay was doing the best she could with his family, I mean she was in an impossible situation. And everyone had unrealistic expectations for how she should behave. Here's the thing. I really hope when Bay finds out she's allowed to just dump Emmett and that's it. I mean I am SO tired of girls forgiving these really big things on teen soaps. And this show had made me happy for the most part, but this could be the beginning of the end. I'm guessing they went this route because they wanted Emmett and Bay to break up for reasons not related to Emmett being deaf or Bay being hearing, but this was too much.

On the flip side, I actually felt sorry for Simone for the first time ever. I mean clearly she's self-destructive and starting to realize she loses everything when she tries to manipulate it all for her own gain...so...I don't know, I felt for her. I can't even blame her for Emmett, because I think they both just made a bad decision, I don't think she was purposely setting out to destroy Bay or anything.

I really liked the Daphne in the basketball tournament, but I was a little...let down? by the speech she gave her father about why there was so much pressure on her. She said being deaf defined Emmett, and I thought the show was trying so hard to say the opposite. I think what they were going for was that being deaf might define Emmett to the hearing world, but it was poorly written and clumsily handled dialogue.

Awake
I was nervous I wasn't going to like this one since the reviews for the second episode weren't that great, but I actually did. I mean..the structure of the episode felt much like the first one, but I liked that he didn't actually solve the case in one of the realities and that it might be a clue to the accident. There's obviously a larger mythology at work here--who knows if we'll ever get to see it pay off! I even liked the little side story with his wife finding the motorcycle...but based on the writing for the two realities, I would guess the reality with the son was real except all that other stuff...about the little guy and the case that didn't get solved happened in the reality with his wife, so I'm not exactly sure. Even so, I wasn't bored and the show is still interesting to me so yay for that. It's harder to come by than you'd know.

I'm so glad The Vampire Diaries is coming back this week. I haven't loved the show as much this year, but it's still enjoyable to me for the most part. I'm also excited about the final two episodes of this season of The Walking Dead

Reading and Books and Stuff

I'm actually hoping to read a lot today! There's a certain YA zombie book I'm hoping to completely devour and a few other books on deck I want to get to. I completely did not read a word at all Saturday, so. Other than that, I did read The Messenger this week, A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness, and I finished up Feminism is for Everybody (which was like 100 pages and took me foreverrrrr, nonfiction ugh), and read more of The Bronze Horseman which, I'm not loving, but is still pretty easy, entertaining reading.

I think that's all! I hope you all have a wonderful week!