Goodbye, October

October was a really good month for us and most of it was due to Adam's LGBT reading event, The Literary Others. It was the best introduction to LGBT literature we could have hoped for. We got a list of books we can't wait to read. (Who doesn't love a good list?) We revisited some old favorites (Death in Venice and Angels in America). We discovered two excellent writers (Isherwood and Baldwin) and organized our first giveaway. We met great people and found some awesome new-to-us blogs. Oh yes, and we read and reviewed these books:

• Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson 
• A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood 
• Orlando by Virginia Woolf 
• Death in Venice by Thomas Mann 
• Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin 
• Angels in America by Tony Kushner 
• The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault

We'd like to thank Adam for organizing this event. We knew it was going to be great, but it really exceeded all our expectations. Towards the middle of this month, this event also took on a personal significance for one of us. So, Adam, thank you!

In different news, our tumblr project, Reader Shaming, took off nicely, thanks to Book Riot. Make sure to visit it and see all the new submissions and send your own. It warms our hearts to see how much we have in common with other readers. (We also may or may not have a happy dance routine for every submission, but the less said about that the better.)

Sample from Reader Shaming

So do we, and that's pretty much what we plan to do this November.

Top Ten Tuesday & Our New Project

Today's Top Ten Tuesday won't be entirely on our blog and here's why. A few weeks ago, the topic on TTT was Bookish Confessions. We had an idea for that topic, but we were too late to actually put together the post that week. So we decided to do it for freebie week instead, and also launch a project related to it. You see, our idea was to put our bookish confessions in the form of notes like the ones they use on Dog Shaming (or if you want a site that's actually about humans, Philosopher-Shaming, that Claudia can't find enough good words about). We asked around and it turned out some of our friends had their own bookish confessions to share, so we decided to start a tumblr and call it - you guessed it - Reader Shaming.

So here are some of our confessions and some the pictures we have some far. We would love it if you submitted our own here:

 

You can find the rest on tumblr. More pictures to come, as we do have a bunch of bookish secrets. And we would love it if you submitted your own "reader's shame note." The more, the merrier.