Happy 5th Anniversary to Redeeming Qualities
March 4, 2012Five years ago today, I was hanging out in my dorm room thinking about how all I wanted to do was talk about A Woman Named Smith and nobody cared. Obviously the only thing to do was to start a blog.
So, if you’re reading this, thank you for being the kind of person who cares about books like A Woman Named Smith. Thanks for being here and reading Redeeming Qualities and recommending things and making me feel like it’s not that weird to love forgotten popular fiction.
I usually forget to commemorate Redeeming Qualities’ anniversaries, but I wanted to do something cool for the fifth one, so I’ve created a sort of virtual bookshelf over at Pinboard. There you’ll find almost all of the books I’ve reviewed here (excepting a few era-inappropriate ones that have crept in by accident) and some I haven’t, sortable by author, decade, and a whole lot of more ridiculous categories. Looking for books featuring vehicular accidents, or Boy Scouts, or bears? How about naughty and uncontrollable children? Or Cinderella stories? Or complicated families where everyone seems to have the same name? You can even sort by source if, say, you only want to read things from Project Gutenberg.
This is a work in progress, and it’s entirely possible that I forgot a tag while bookmarking something, or overlooked creating a tag altogether. It took kind of a while to bookmark everything, even with some much-appreciated assistance from my brother. So if I failed to add the ‘servants‘ tag to something you think ought to have it, or if you really wish I had a category for smart-aleck orphans from New York, or whatever, let me know.
Thank you for your wonderful blog, Melody. Thanks to you I will never run out of good books to read from the era I like best. That Pinboard list is great. I’ve already found a few books that I overlooked in your blog.
by Cathlin March 4, 2012 at 1:12 pmYou’re welcome :) Thank you for reading and commenting all the time! Did you know you’re the top commenter here by an enormous margin?
by Melody March 4, 2012 at 4:25 pmThis is one of the few blogs I DO comment on!
by Cathlin March 4, 2012 at 11:27 pmCongratulations!!
I have been enjoying this sight. It’ has been an education into a whole world of reading I never explored in my own literary travels.
Thanks,
Enid
by Anonymous March 4, 2012 at 1:22 pmThanks!
by Melody March 4, 2012 at 4:26 pmI love the Pinboard!
With regard to The Career of Katherine Bush, you ask whether there’s an earlier novel with a woman who isn’t punished for having premarital sex. There is, and the plot is even more astounding.
The Yoke, by Hubert Wales (1908):
http://www.archive.org/details/yoke01walegoog
I’m currently working my way through the Molly Brown series on PG, as well as Smith College Stories on archive.org – all worth a look.
by Tracey S. Rosenberg March 4, 2012 at 1:27 pmThanks! I think I’m off to read The Yoke right now.
by Melody March 4, 2012 at 4:26 pmCongratulations on five years. :) Your pinboard is amazing, by the way–that’s a lot of work!
by heidenkind March 5, 2012 at 12:01 amThanks! I’m hoping now that the pinboard is up and rnning, it will be really easy to maintain.
by Melody March 5, 2012 at 7:41 amYay! Happy fifth anniversary to you!
by Evangeline Holland March 8, 2012 at 11:21 pmThank You!
by Melody March 12, 2012 at 12:11 pmLate to comment (catching up on the internet!) but I wanted to say how much I adore this blog (hint: a lot!) — Happy blogoversary!
by kali March 23, 2012 at 7:56 pmThank you so much!
by Melody March 24, 2012 at 12:08 pm