I am looking forward to this. I am planning on re-reading the Chronicles of Narnia in 2012 and am eager to review these books from an adult perspective. I haven’t read this series in over a decade.

This coming year I am signing up for the 2012 Harry Potter Reading Challenge and am planning on re-reading all the Harry Potter books and re-watching all the Harry Potter movies! I’m pretty excited about it as I have meant to get back to these books for a long time.

Just in time for the holidays a fantastic way to find that perfect book for someone. Enter in the name of an author and a “map” will generate of other authors that are similar based on reader taste. Perfect to find similar authors to your faves or the faves of someone near and dear.

Book Drum is offering a new service: “The Book Drum World Map”. You can use it to browse the globe and find books set in countries around the world. There are over 150 books entered already and since it’s crowd sourced you can always submit more. A great way to go international with your reading.

The Golden Ass was written in the late 2nd century and was the only latin novel to survive in its entirety.

In the course of the story, told in several “books”, many other inset stories were related including, in book four, the story of Cupid and Psyche. This rendering of the story is the oldest recorded telling of this ancient fairy tale and is presented as a retelling so its origins go even farther back. It has been suggested that the tale was changed slightly to suit what was going on in the novel so how the myth originally went no one knows anymore.

In the novel the protagonist was transformed into, well, a golden ass and in this particular book he has been stolen by thieves. The thieves throw the protagonist into a cave along with a young woman they had also kidnapped. The young woman is scared and crying so an old woman, in league with the thieves, tells her the story of Cupid and Psyche.

For me it was a rare Thanksgiving this year in that I got to celebrate it with both my family back in Pennsylvania and my in-laws in both Pennsylvania and here in Missouri. Last week we made the 14 hour drive to see my family and stayed there for a week, we got to see my brother-in-law and his rambunctious and fun family on Saturday and celebrated Thanksgiving with my family on Sunday. Then we drove back on Monday to find that I had managed to catch my Dad’s cold, so I have been sick and recovering most of this week. It is a nasty one too, I’m still on cold medicine and still feeling pretty miserable. Yesterday we hosted Thanksgiving in our own home, for the first time in the new house, and invited over the in-laws. We had good food, good company and enjoyed watching a fantastic parade! I even forgot how miserable I felt for a few hours.