blog anxiety!

So I'm chatting with a friend the other night, and he asked if I ever read any blogs, and I said I have one. I read a few regularly - I'm especially fond of refgrunt (http://refgrunt.blogspot.com/), though I wish he posted more often. I didn't tell my friend what my blog is called; he needs an occasional challenge. I went to his blog (http://www.thisdarkqualm.com), and it's filled with thoughtful book chatter, as opposed to mine. So I had blog insecurity - why can't I write a clever erudite blog? I realized that I could write one. I just can't be bothered. Most weeks, I'm lucky to have time to write these entries (written between helping patrons at the ref. desk, usually).
And yes, I'm aware that referencing my friend's website could help him find mine, but hey - he told me his address. So a little help can't hurt. And if he still can't find it... .
So. I'm partway through re-reading Robin McKinley's Deerskin. It's not my favorite McKinley (that would be Beauty, hands-down), but it's worth the occasional re-read. I get tired of the animal companions in McKinley's books, with the exception of Talit in The Hero and the Crown. McKinley tends to assume that the reader is familiar with (and possibly also enamored of) the animal characteristics that she writes about so often.
And I started Miss Smithers today. I didn't like Alice, I think much at all (I think the author overwrote the main character. A little subtlety, a little respect for the audience's ability to suss out a character, would have helped). But Miss Smithers has a beauty pageant in it, apparently, and I can't pass those up.
The last book I finished was Wonderland: a year in the life of an American high school. I wasn't wildly enthusiastic about this one; I was never drawn into the students' lives, and I couldn't quite suss out why the author wrote about this school. He never fully established his own reasons for caring, so I didn't see why I should.

light fun books

This week I've read two books that are wildly different, but which share the same casual tone: Film Star Gilly by Monica Disney Ullman and Wolf Tower by Tanith Lee. The casualness is charming and allows one to gloss over the occasional shakiness in plot. Neither one is great literature, but both were fun reads.