Random things

I wish Blogger didn't oblige me to title these posts made up of semi-random thoughts, because giving them formal titles makes me feel I should be saying something profound.

Over the past couple days I've added many new HF-related blogs to my sidebar. When I first started blogging for real - three years ago tomorrow (gulp, I have an anniversary coming up!) - there were only five or six other historical fiction blogs out there. It's exciting to see so many new bloggers coming on board!

I've noticed that some bloggers have little widgets set up telling blog visitors where other recent visitors are arriving from. Oddly, these widgets seem to think I'm in Casey, Illinois, which is a small town (pop. 3000) half an hour away. It's just off I-70 and has a couple decent restaurants, but neither I nor my ISP lives there.

My three-month-long reading slump is over, after having finished two real page-turners I've just reviewed for May's Historical Novels Review... Rebecca Dean's Palace Circle and DeVa Gantt's Decision and Destiny. I'm also having an enjoyable time reading Eilis Dillon's Wild Geese, about an Irish Catholic brother and sister sent to Paris in the late 18th century to live with other expatriate relatives. I hope to review it here in due course. It's fun to discover unexpected cross-references between it and past reads. For example, Arthur Dillon, father of Henriette-Lucy Dillon from Sheila Kohler's Bluebird, or the Invention of Happiness, is a secondary character, and I'm curious if the author (a noted Irish novelist) is herself a distant relation. About 120 pages in, there's a slowish episode in which the male lead makes his way to the American colonies aboard ship, but once he and I both escape these doldrums, I expect the pacing to pick up again.

I'm still pretty busy with conference planning, writing up peer evaluations, and teaching large groups of high school students how to use the library, but I've also finalized plans to attend BEA in New York City the last weekend in May. I'll be there for four nights. Anyone else attending? It would be great to meet up!