BBAW: New Treasure

It's Day 3 of Book Blog Appreciation Week! Each day we share the blogger-love and describe posts, bloggers, and relationships that have shaped our experiences as readers and writers.

Wednesday’s Topic: We invite you to share with us a book or genre you tried due to the influence of another blogger. What made you cave in to try something new and what was the experience like?

I've added a huge number of books to my TBR pile thanks to wonderfully thoughtful reviews by fellow bloggers, but unfortunately I've only been able to actually read a couple of them :(

I laughed out loud when I read English Major's Junk Food's review of Ophelia Just Joined the Group Maidens Who Don't Float: Classic Lit Signs on to Facebook by Sarah Schmelling, and then I immediately logged on to Amazon to order a copy. I loved the idea of this book (perhaps more than I loved the book itself) and couldn't wait to share it with my students. What a great way to 'modernize' the canon! A couple weeks ago I assigned Hamlet to my first-year English class and then had them read the 'Facebooking' of those characters. It really seemed to bring home some of the relationships and emotions from the play.. plus is was so much FUN to talk about. I asked my students to pick characters NOT represented in the Schmelling book and to write their own Facebook interactions. It was the most energetic and engaged class-period we've had all semester!

The other review that made me jump off my seat and run directly to the used book store was Things Mean a Lot's reading of Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair. The review gave a great, intriguing plot summary without giving too much away, and then gave a list of similar works and provided a number of (fabulous!!) quotes. I was hooked as soon as I read this paragraph:

 "But before I go any further, let me tell you a little more about the alternative world that Thursday inhabits: this is a world where dodos have been brought back from extinction thanks to cloning and are popular pets (Thursday has one named Pickwick); a world where the boundaries between reality and fiction are malleable at best; a world in which a device called a Prose Portal allows people to enter works of fiction; a world in which the interests of the giant Goliath Corporation have pretty much trumped democracy; a world in which Wales is an independent nation behind a sort of Iron Curtain; and finally a world in which artistic and literary matters are the subject of debates so heated that they can lead to imprisonment or to terrorist acts."

I LOVED this idea, and ordered the rest of the series before I'd even finished the first one. I've been sticking pretty exclusively to classic and 'academic' literature, so the playfulness and chaos of Fforde's books was a bit out of my norm... But I'm so very glad I was encouraged to go there!

How about you? What "New Treasures" have your blogging adventures led you to?