Discussing and Remembering Dewey

[Maw Books]

It is a sad week within the book blogging community. Dewey from Hidden Side of a Leaf passed away this past week. To say that she leaves behind a huge void is a understatement. Not only was she a prolific reader, reviewer and blogger but she was also the founder and organizer of Weekly Geeks, the Bookworms Carnival, and the 24 Hour Read-a-Thon. And I'm sure I'm unaware of many others. We have all been influenced by her amazing energy, creative juices and bringing the community together. She was a wonderful friend. Florinda at The 3 R's: Reading, 'Riting, and Randomness perhaps summed everything up best on this well thought out post. She already has a list of bloggers willing to help.

There has been a lot of discussion on many blogs and twitter about how to cope with that loss.

Some of that discussion has included:

1 - How to best express our condolences to Dewey's family. Many of us have her address in which to send cards/packages. It's been mentioned to donate money/books to her local library, donate money to have her family plant a tree in her name, gather all the online tributes to make sure that Dewey's family doesn't miss them all, send flowers, etc.

2. - How to best carry on the amazing community building events that Dewey started. Many have already expressed interest in taking up some of these projects, includes challenges, Weekly Geeks, the 24 Hour Read-a-thon (this has gotten so big, it probably should have a dedicated blog), secret santa (with Nymeth), and the Bookworms Carnival. Dewey already had a lot of help on many of these projects so I'm sure many feel more prepared than others to step up to the plate.

3 - Raych from Books I Done Read has asked for a RIP button to place on our blogs.

4 - Keeping Dewey's husband in the loop. He mentioned that he would like to either see Dewey's blog continue or just let it rest. Either way, I think he should be in the know how.

So what now? Let's figure it out! Ideas, like to help, etc? I thought that we should get a discussion going in just one place, so it's not spread out among everybody. This certainly doesn't make me the "moderator" here. I just want to be able to talk amongst ourselves. What have I missed?

And if you're reading this discussion that get the word out and direct traffic over here. I'll set up another discussion to list links of our remembrance posts.

[Amy]

I know I"m not b/c I subscribe. Would you add me pretty please? :)

[Terri]

I don't know if I'm in the feeds either. Thanks Natasha.

[Teddy]

Wow, the response is overwhelming here. Thank you for setting up this discussion. It think it is a lot more productive than our individual blogs, but I will be posting whatever is decided here on my blog to help re-route other bloggers. I will start with a post about Becky's Weekly Geeks idea for this week.

[Literary Escapism]

Hopefully you guys all remember, but Dewey and I were working on the Top 10 Books of 2008, which started with Weekly Geeks #19. Well, we had all the nominations gathered and the polling set up and we were going to use that as WG27 last weekend (which obviously didn't happen), but I'm keeping up with it in honor of Dewey and because this will give OUR list of the top 10.

The polling was schedule to open last weekend, but since I hadn't mentioned it to anyone, I never changed the date. However, people have been stumbling across it and have already started voting. Without anyone spreading the word! We already have 211 votes! Becky and Nymeth are going to start spreading the word tomorrow, but I'll be out of town so I'm spreading the word today. Let's go vote for our favorite books!

Polling will stay open until Saturday, Dec. 20th at midnight. I'll post the results no later than the 22nd on Literary Escapism. Here's the link to cast your vote - http://www.literaryescapism.com/wgtop10-2008/

[Ali]

I was wondering if that would still be happening. Nice job!

Something seems odd about the women's fiction category, though, could there have been a glitch? There are 67 votes for one book, which is about 6 times as many as the total number of votes in any other category.

[Literary Escapism]

Maria Murnane (author of Perfect on Paper) promoted the polling on her site and sent all her readers over to vote. Hence the reason I'm not waiting until tomorrow to tell everyone about it. Becky, Nymeth, and I had talked about starting the polling tomorrow and ending after 2 weeks, but after that email, I wanted to make sure everyone got in on the voting. Stupid Google catching my laziness. I didn't want to have to go through and change the open date on all the polls so I left it and thought no one would catch on since I hadn't said anything. :)

[Literary Escapism]

If anyone is interested, American Bibliophile has an interview with Maria Murnane.

http://americanbibliophile.com/?p=260

[Florinda]

Cool. I had wondered about this too. I'll put the link up on my blog tomorrow to help get people over there.

[Ali]

Weird, Marny, I don't know what the problem is, you're definitely listed as a member so it's not a matter of not being subscribed or something, which was my first thought. I'll email you right now and hopefully we can sort it out somehow.

[Ali]

We'd love to have you! The info is here somewhere but it got buried I think. Send a blank email to [e-mail], and come to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Weeklygeeks/ to catch up on messages.

[gautami tripathy]

I wrote a blog post on her:

http://readingandmorereading.blogspot.com/2008/12/weekly-geeks-27-r...

Yes, we have to keep her spirit alive. We will not let the Weekly Geeks, Bookworms Carnival 24 hour Readathon die away.

[Ladytink_534]

Oh no! I really liked her. She was so creative and fun, she'll be missed.