Return to Reviewing?

I'm kind of sorry I stopped reviewing books.  If I note down my thoughts, even in a vestigial fashion, I'm much more likely to remember I actually read the book.  However, I am just not sure how I would find the time.  I actually have no idea if the folks behind the Canadian Review Challenge are still going strong, though I suppose if I really cared, I could find out.  This became too much of a burden.  But maybe somewhere between the one-line reviews that I've been doing lately and then the long-form reviews I used to do, I could write out a couple of paragraphs, maybe of my top 10 or so books of the year.  We'll see.  

I think I am somewhat likely to write down some thoughts on Zevin's Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.  I'll hold off for the moment, as I am only a quarter of the way into it, but I will say that I like the fact that it is about intelligent and somewhat driven people (characters that I could recognize as peers at any rate, and who grew up roughly in my era) who still make mistakes and hurt each other, though generally not intentionally.  There aren't a lot of books like that, though, thinking back, Zadie Smith's White Teeth is in the same vein.  I do wonder if maybe Zevin should have tried to make an on-line version of the video game that her characters develop, Ichigo, but likely it could never match up to the mental version that the readers have of the game.  The internet being what it is, there is a whole thread of people pissing all over the book, so I think I'll avoid that.  There is also someone who has compiled a list of games that are somewhat similar to the games described in the novel.

Now apparently for at least a few months or even years, there was a working version of PsychicCow, the game that features heavily in Lord Vishnu's Love Handles where you guess what color the cow's udders are.  Supposedly, this game was used to identify and then recruit psychics into some secret spy agency.  Given that the game concept is pretty simple (just some random number generator would drive such a game), I can see how setting up a website that actually served as an ad for the book might have been worth it, though this wasn't maintained in perpetuity, which is certainly another notable feature of the internet.

I brought down another short book and added to the piles in the study.  This is Kaye Gibbons's Ellen Foster, which is apparently about a foster mother.  I definitely wish I had a copy with the original Vintage cover.

There's a decent chance I would have held onto it for the cover alone.  But my copy has a much less interesting cover, and I will have to really love the book to hang onto it, given the whole point these days is to read books that I can part with... 

I was surprised at how quickly Kaysen's Asa as I Knew Him turned up (from the UK no less), and it fortunately does have the correct cover.  Both the Gibbons and Kaysen are very short, so I will promote them fairly high in the current reading list.