2015 was the first year I made any real concerted effort to track my reading habits. After having torched my Goodreads account a few years ago, I confess I came crawling back because I simply could not let go of the shelving function, flawed as it was. (Goodreads, I wish I could quit you!)

Kelly and I gave our Recommended Reads in last week’s podcast episode and looking back at my year in reading, I was slightly appalled by how, well, homogeneous my list looked. In the episode, Kelly and I did touch on how our reading tastes have shifted (and possibly calcified) as we have aged, how working in publishing has changed how much of a fair shot we give new books (spoiler: not as much as we used to), what genres and categories we prefer, etc.

Being incredibly specific with what you like to read helps you in a publishing career because it helps you understand niches in an already-incredibly specialized market, but now that I am two years past having worked the editorial desk, I wonder if that mentality hasn’t taken a slight toll on my reading habits. As a young child I was a voracious reader, voracious and indiscriminate. I read anything and everything. Not just books: I read short stories in the Highlights magazine, the Sunday funnies, articles in Time, those slim National Geographic nonfiction paperbacks about whales, etc.

But as I grew older, my reading tastes narrowed. I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing; knowing what you like to read and why is an incredibly useful thing in both publishing and writing. However, while my number of books read is incredibly high, the number of genres, authors of color, LGBTQIA+ authors, disabled authors, etc. is not. I have read 1.5 nonfiction books this year (not including a collection of personal essays, which was a reread). The vast majority of the authors on my list are white. While I am a supporter of diverse voices in fiction, I have done a terrible job of putting my money where my mouth is.

Book Riot and the New York Public Library both have a 2016 Read Harder Challenge. I like the idea of challenging myself to read harder, and not just harder—to read broader. Next year I am going to challenge myself to read outside my comfort zone, and to better support marginalized voices. Author and blogger Dahlia Adler has several lists of recommendations that I think are a great place for me to start:

1. #OwnVoices in Neurodiversity and Disability
2. 2016-2017 YAs by Authors of Color
3. Jewish MG/NA/YA Authors
4. LGBTQIAP+ Books By and About People who Identify as LGBTQIAP+

What about you? Do any of you have reading goals? Do you track your reading? If so, what metrics do you track? Let us know in the comments!

Last summer, when I was on submission with my novel to publishers, I remember being in complete and utter agony with the not knowing and not being in control. There’s a lot written about the query trenches throughout the blogosphere, but not a lot of space is given over to being on submission.

Part of that is because unlike querying, the experience of being on submission varies widely from individual to individual, so it’s hard to generalize. Another part is that being of sub is pretty much entirely out of your hands. Once your manuscript is on the desk of an editor, there is literally NOTHING you can do to influence the outcome. It doesn’t make for easy, digestible blog posts. Query tips are relatively easy to give, but there is no advice you can give to someone on sub, save Patience, young Skywalker.

And that advice sucks.

Being on sub is a bit like being the awkward middle schooler at a junior high school dance. Pick me, pick me! Sometimes you’re the first on the dance floor. Sometimes you’re left the self-conscious wallflower. Junior high—and publishing—can sometimes be cold and capricious.

I find the best thing to do in these sorts of situations is laugh them off. It’s either laugh, or cry, right? I’d rather a good chuckle than anguished sobs, so in order to distract myself, I rewrote the lyrics to “Agony” from Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods.¹

If you aren’t familiar with the song:

DELUSIONAL WRITER
Did I confuse them
With my rabid, insane,
Genius profundity?
Don’t I amuse them
With my witty, urbane,
Pretentious absurdity?

Agony!
Beyond power of speech!
When the contract you want
Is the only thing out of your reach.

DESPERATE WRITER
Here in my tower,
I sit by the hour
Awaiting the Call.
The one that will save me
And soon validate me
In the eyes of them all:
Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

Agony!
All those agents are jerks!
Low esteem, insecurity
Are affecting my work!

BOTH
Agony!
Oh the torment, the stress!

DELUSIONAL WRITER
Why can’t they just buy me—

DESPERATE WRITER
How could they deny me—

BOTH
They don’t know what is best!

DELUSIONAL WRITER
Am I not lyrical,
Luminous,
Radiant,
Brilliant,
Passionate,
Observant,
Upmarket commercial,
Ahead of my time?

DESPERATE WRITER
I am everything agents could wish for!

DELUSIONAL WRITER
Then why no—

DESPERATE WRITER
Then why no—

DELUSIONAL WRITER
They all must be mad!

DESPERATE WRITER
You know nothing of madness
Till you’re tearing your hair.
As you open email,
Yes, refreshing it,
Always refreshing it,
Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah—

BOTH
Agony!

DELUSIONAL WRITER
Misery!

DESPERATE WRITER
Woe!

BOTH
Though it’s different for each.

DELUSIONAL WRITER
Always ten trends behind—

DESPERATE WRITER
Always telling you no—

BOTH
And the dream is just out of your reach.

Agony!
Publishing’s appeal!
I must have a book deal!

Okay, so I went ahead and decide to record the cover for funsies. Apologies for inflicting my voice on y’all. This song is not in my range.

by Julie Eshbaugh

featuring Patrick Jennings!

~~

As readers of this blog already know, PubCrawl is excited to help spread the word about Egmont USA’s spring 2015 list, a group which has banded together under the name Egmont’s Last List. It’s my pleasure to welcome Patrick Jennings as our guest here at PubCrawl today! (And we are giving away of one of Patrick’s books! More on that below…) I’m so thrilled to interview such a prolific writer of children’s books! Patrick’s website lists 25(!) titles. If you’d like to see all their beautiful covers, you can click here. Patrick’s latest is HISSY FITZ, which came out last month from Egmont. Here’s the synopsis from Goodreads:

Hissy Fitz lives with some two-legged creatures who are destined to serve him in every possible way and understand his every whim. Sadly, these creatures are sorely lacking in their skills. For one thing–they touch him when they want to touch him. Don’t they know that the two-legged are there for him to touch when he wants to–meaning when he wants food? Petting wakes him up! They speak to him–don’t they know the two-legged should be seen–so Hissy knows where to order food–and not heard?! It’s becoming intolerable. What is this irascible cat to do?

I understand that, although you generally write for middle graders, this book is for younger readers. What made you decide to move in that direction?
My publisher wondered if I’d be interested in writing a chapter book. The book fairs and clubs had been asking for them. I told my editor about my insomniac cat idea and she liked it.

I never had a story to tell. I’ve considered that this is due to cats not really doing much of anything. Mostly they just sit around the house. Dogs go out and play with their owners, protect their owners, rescue people, hang with their friends. Cats nap on average eighteen hours a day. It was when I struck upon the idea of an insomniac cat that I finally had a cat story. 

Their enthusiasm. They love to read, and they get very excited when they meet an author of a book they’ve read. They have tons of very good questions. They’re often also interested in writing stories. The whole day is filled with excitement. I’m thoroughly exhausted afterward. It’s the best.

Spend as much time as you can with kids. Volunteer to read at the library, or in classrooms. Read to nieces and nephews, grandchildren, whomever. Talk to kids about the books they love. Listen carefully. Feel their enthusiasm.

Thank you so much, Patrick! Also, I want to offer congratulations on the news that Lerner Publishing has acquired all of Egmont USA’s frontlist and backlist titles. We look forward to reading many more of your stories!

To celebrate the publication of HISSY FITZ, we’re giving away a copy of this wonderful book! Leave a comment below and use the Rafflecopter form to enter!

About the author:

Patrick Jennings’s books for young readers have received honors from Publishers Weekly, The Horn Book, Smithsonian Magazine, the PEN Center USA, the Woman’s National Book Association, and the Chicago and New York Public Libraries. The Seattle Public Library awarded his book, Guinea Dog, the Washington State Book Award of 2011. His book, Faith and the Electric Dogs, is currently being adapted for the screen. His new book, Hissy Fitz, will be published in January 2015. He currently writes full time in his home in Port Townsend, Washington.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

by

JJ

__

So…I may have a slight podcast obsession.

It seems to me that podcasts have hit the cultural zeitgeist in a way I’d never seen before, or perhaps it’s simply because I’ve never noticed before. From Welcome to Night Vale to Serial, it seems as though people are tuning in and waiting for the next installment of a podcast now the way we used to sit down and wait for another episode of television. The way we consume media and stories seems to be shifting now, from streaming live TV to audio narratives.

But I can only write from personal experience. I can’t remember the last time I’ve watched a TV show on a regular weekly basis, but you bet I’m refreshing my podcast app every Thursday morning to see if the next episode of Serial is available. It’s like it’s 1935 all over again, with the family gathered around the old cathedral radio waiting for the next installment of The Lone Ranger to come on. Audio storytelling has never been more interesting.

But in addition to narrative podcasts, I’m a huge fan of the chatty podcasts, the nerdy podcasts, as well as writing and publishing podcasts. I’m probably listening to a podcast at any given point in the day: during my commutes to and from work, while I’m walking my husky-dog, while I’m cooking or doing the dishes, etc. Naturally, since I’m subscribed to A LOT, I have some recommendations!

Writing Podcasts

1. Writing Excuses
2. Narrative Breakdown (hosted by Scholastic editor Cheryl Klein and screenwriter James Monohan)
3. This Creative Life with Sara Zarr
4. First Draft with Sarah Enni

Publishing and Book-Related Podcasts

1. Dear Bitches, Smart Authors (a romance-related podcast hosted by Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and Jane Litte of Dear Author)
2. Rocket Talk (A science-fiction/fantasy-related podcast by Tor.com)
3. Minorities in Publishing

Humor

1. The Bugle (a comedy news podcast hosted by John Oliver—yes, that John Oliver!—and Andy Zaltzman)

Other Generally Awesome Stuff

1. Pop Culture Happy Hour
2. RadioLab

I could go on and on and on, but here’s a small selection of podcasts I like that I think might be of interest to our readers.

What about you? Do you listen to podcasts? If so, have any good ones to recommend?

__

S. Jae-Jones (called JJ) is a writer, artist, and adrenaline junkie. Before moving down to grits country, she was an editor at St. Martin’s Press in New York City, where she read and acquired YA. When not obsessing over books, she can be found rock climbing, skydiving, or taking her dog on ridiculously long hikes. A southern California native, she now lives in North Carolina with her doctor Bear, a stuffed baby harp seal named White-Harp, and a husky-dog called Bentley. Other places to find JJ include Twitter, Tumblr, and her blog.

By

Biljana Likic

—

So you’re writing that sweeping historical novel full of war and political intrigue, and you maybe need some inspiration. Where better to turn than to history books? Only problem is that they can be a bit dry, and at times the forced impartiality (“I must present this as facts uncoloured by my opinion!”) can make the prose frustratingly ambiguous. Then there’s the whole “history is written by the victor” thing. The phrase reveals the difficulties readers face when approaching historical writing. Not to mention, it’s practically impossible to write about a historical event in a completely detached way without it sounding like a recipe.

Honestly, it makes me glad I write fiction. The pressure of writing a history book is terrifying. What sources you include, and where you include them, and why…no matter how you organize them, there will always be an expert disagreeing with you.

Enter Gregory of Tours. He was a 6th century bishop of (you guessed it) Tours, France, and is our best contemporary source of the Merovingian dynasty in modern-day France and Germany. He wrote history, but it’s only in very recent times that we started giving him more credit as an actual historian. Why did it take so long? You only need to take a gander at all the wild stuff he says in his most famous work, The History of the Franks.

Here’s the deal. Remember the whole “no such thing as no bias” spiel? This is very apparent in Gregory. A lot of people read the Histories assuming they’re a moralistic work about how those who aren’t Catholic will suffer the demons of hell, and those that are will be saved in heaven. To be fair, it’s not a hard conclusion to reach. There’s one story of a priest conspiring against his superior, and as alleged punishment from God, on the morning the priest is getting ready to betray him, this happens: “He went off to the lavatory and while he was occupied in emptying his bowels he lost his soul instead.”

Lost his soul on the can. He quite literally shit himself to death. There are fewer effective ways to teach someone a lesson about going against a saintly authority.

But then, in another story, Queen Deuteria is afraid that her husband might “desire and take advantage of” their maturing daughter so she puts her in a cart drawn by untamed bulls and the daughter crashes into a river and dies. And this happens in like three sentences with no moral. No ceremony, no “The shadow of sin is cast upon the loveless mother!”, no “Don’t lust after your own daughter or else your wife might kill her (and also, sin)!”, only a few nearly parenthetical phrases, perhaps just to explain what happened to the daughter when the King later takes a new wife and refuses to take Deuteria back. I wonder why he’d do that.

So you have this one priest’s story taking up a few sizable, memorable paragraphs about him conspiring against his bishop, and then you have this other one of a horrific filicide told in a measly three sentences. That’s the fascinating thing about this work. It’s a bunch of to-the-point recitations of facts mixed together with wildly moralistic tales where common sicknesses and coincidences are explains away as God’s doing. In some sections it even reads like fantasy. It’s as full of people having prophetic dreams and being warned about the dangers ahead as it is of short side notes about a perfectly Christian king being poisoned just because…well…he was king, and he was poisoned.

But the reason the Histories are so valuable today, aside from being a long and spectacular feat of story-telling, is because there really is a genuinely massive amount of historical information within them. Every so often you’ll find entire letters Gregory directly transcribed so he could give us the primary source rather than rephrasing an event in his own words. Some of these letters survive in different forms and can be used to cross-reference events in the book. Others only survive through his writing. There is a ton of specificity about the Church, and especially about the history of the bishopric of Tours. There’s stuff in there about the actual daily lives of people living in the 6th century, their traditions, habits, and gossip, written by a person living in the 6th century. That is absolutely invaluable.

Not to mention a freaking amazing read. Merovingian kings and queens meant business. The backstabbing, the stealing of territory, copious amounts of regicide, broken alliances, queens abandoning their husbands for other kings because others were manlier and held more promise as conquerors… These people were ruthless. Contrast that with the general thread of what it means to be a good Christian weaving through the work, and you’ve got some damn awesome dichotomies going on.

So move this baby up your to-read list. Not only is it full of events that actually happened, making it an excellent book to read for personal research, but it’s also a great literary window into the workings of 6th century Continental Europe.

—

Biljana Likic is working on her fantasy WIPs and has just started her MA in Medieval Studies, from which she can’t wait to graduate so she’ll finally have all the time in the world to write. You can follow her on Twitter.

by

Alex Bracken

—

A few months ago, while sitting in a weekly meeting with the Sales team to go over numbers and publicity and marketing plans for books, a question came up about why two of our backlist titles suddenly jumped up in sales. A few people chalked it up to summer reading starting in a few months, but I wondered–did it have anything to do with the fact both of these books’ film adaptations were added to Netflix a few weeks before?

Obviously not all book-to-film adaptations are good… in fact, as we all know, some make you want to die a little inside upon seeing how your favorite characters are being handled. But, thankfully, there are plenty of fantastic adaptations out there–and Netflix has recently added a whole bunch of them. Even if you don’t have a subscription to the service, most of these films and TV shows should be available to rent via iTunes of stream through another service.

Have you watched any great book-to-film adaptations recently? Here are some of my recent favorites.

Orange is the New Black (based on the book by Piper Kerman)

This might be an obvious choice, but for good reason! It is a master class in character study and strikes the right balance between laugh out loud funny and heartbreaking. I’m in the middle of reading the real Piper’s memoir and I’m amazed at how well the TV writers have captured the spirit of her experience while letting their own characters and ideas take flight.

How I Live Now (based on the book by Meg Rosoff)

Teens surviving the outbreak of WWIII together in England–otherwise known as Alex Puts Her Head Down on her Desk for a Good Cry.  Speaking of beautifully shot films, this one fits the bill and does a really fantastic job of elevating the book’s story. It’s harrowing, heartbreaking, and beautiful in turns with one sliiiightly scandalous romance.

The Witches of East End (based on the books by Melissa de la Cruz)

I love me some Buffy, Teen Wolf, and Charmed, and this series fits right in with them–with some awesome (spoiler) Norse mythology thrown in as an added, surprise bonus to the great, heavily female cast. This is a really fun marathon if you’re looking for something a little more light-hearted, than, say, Sophie’s Choice or Legends of the Fall (both of which are also available to instantly stream if you need a good, epic cry).

Tiger Eyes (based on the book by Judy Blume)

It took me a while to work up the courage to watch this film, having lost my own dad two years ago. But ultimately I found this to be a faithful, loving adaptation of the original work. Fun fact: it was adapted by Judy’s son Lawrence.

Now is Good (based on the book Before I Die by Jenny Downham)

This book absolutely destroyed me when I first read it–it’s The Fault in Our Stars before The Fault in Our Stars, the story of Tessa, a seventeen year old who is losing her fight to leukemia and creates a list of things she wants to do before she dies.

Bitten (based on the books by Kelley Armstrong)

Also in the supernatural camp, Bitten follows the trials and tribulations of Elena, the only known female werewolf, as she returns to her pack. While certain elements of the book series were changed–especially on the character front–I found this as equally as fun as the books. (And, let’s be honest, the cast is pretty easy on the eyes.)

Jane Eyre (based on the novel by Charlotte Bronte)

This 2011 adaptation of Bronte’s classic work isn’t new to the world, but it is new to me. I waited way too long to watch it! This is is the perfect vehicle to transport you away from the sticky summer heat to the windswept moors. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m no Bronte fangirl, but the performances in this adaptation really breathed new life into the story for me and made me reconsider the characters in ways I hadn’t before.

—

Alex lives in New York City, writes like a fiend, and lives in a charming apartment overflowing with books. She is the New York Times bestselling author of The Darkest Minds and Never Fade. You can visit her online at her website or Twitter.

By

Biljana Likic

—

Poetry today is pretty much whatever you want it to be. There are different forms (sonnets, odes, ballads, free verse, found poetry) but generally, poetry has become something of a blanket term that can include nearly anything rhythmical or lyrical.

In Sicily in the 1200s , that wasn’t quite the case.

Thirteenth century southern Italy saw the incredible growth of a small community of poets that ended up shaping the history of Western poetry. The invention of the sonnet is credited to the Sicilian poet Giacomo da Lentini in the 1200s. Then the form was developed by the likes of Dante and his contemporaries, perfected by Petrarch, brought to England, and made its way into Shakespeare’s works. Think about all those Shakespeare sonnets you love that wouldn’t have been possible without the form’s inception during the game-changing poetic boom in the court of Frederick II.

The Sicilian school is responsible for the rise of poetry as something that is read, rather than sung with an instrumental accompaniment. Until then, poetry had been nearly inseparable from music, with the French troubadours and jongleurs using their musical talent in conjunction with repetitive lyrics to entertain their audience. The Sicilians didn’t really care about the music, or maybe they didn’t have that kind of talent. They cared more about the manipulation of the language, and the perfection of a lyrical way of posing a question and finding the answer at the end. The poems are really very stunning. They’re masterfully written and flawless.

Well, flawless except for one little thing aptly called Sicilian rhyme.

Sometimes, they’d do this thing where the rhyme would be imperfect. Like rhyming the word grudge with bridge instead of judge, for example. And it was incredibly common. So common that by the time the Sicilian school fell and the 14th century stilnovismo replaced it in importance up in Tuscany (where copies of the Sicilian poems were numerous due to their extreme popularity) people thought it was just something they did.

And it was fascinating. For years, people looked at rhymes like tutto / sotto and gire / gaudere and wondered at how a school so important in establishing the groundwork for contemporary poetry was able to stomach such graceless half-rhymes. The imperfections began to inspire awe in students all over Europe until this flaw became a misunderstood but thereby endlessly mysterious feature. Sicilian rhyme even began to creep its way into the works of greats like Dante, who’s notorious for never using a word without a motive:

Questi parea che contra me venisse

con la test’alta e con rabbiosa fame,

sì che parea che l’aere ne tremesse.

(Dante – Divina Commedia – Inf. I, vv. 48-50)

God, what depth! What thrilling poetic license! To think; you don’t have to be perfect! You can actually use a mistake to slam a point home! You can use flaws to bring out the beauty of your verse!

I mean, Sicilian imperfect rhyme is something invented by the experts. It was honed during the decades of the development of the modern wordsmith. No way it was actually something totally made up by people reading Tuscan copies of Sicilian poems riddled with scribal error.

Scribal error… The two most dreaded words of any paleographer, nay, historian, nay, lover of words of any kind.

Yes, my friends, Sicilian rhyme is a false construct. It was created by accident through copy blunders, something you may have even guessed if you kept the title of this article in mind while reading (spoiler alert, by the way). Why would the Sicilian school be so careless as to fill their poetry with imperfect rhyme? The real culprit was…

Dialect.

In the Middles Ages, Italian in Sicily and Italian in Tuscany were practically different languages. As their dialects developed, Latin vowel sounds morphed differently. The letters i and u in Sicily were more often e and o respectively in Tuscany, so that the words luci and cruci in Sicilian were luce and croce in Tuscan. So the example above, gire / gaudere, was originally gire / gaudire. A perfect rhyme.

How close these vowels are linguistically meant that Tuscan scribes copying Sicilian manuscripts made mistakes. Poetry back then wasn’t written line by line; it was all one big block. You couldn’t compare line endings as easily as you can with how poetry is written now, so things slipped past them. That, coupled with the fact that original Sicilian manuscripts didn’t exist anymore (today we only have one full manuscript extant, and some fragments) meant that the Tuscan copies sucked as points of reference. Still, where scribes failed to notice the errors, any poet reading them immediately caught the differences, but the Sicilian reputation was so rock solid they were interpreted not as mistakes, but as genially unique twists the old masters refined in the court of Frederick II.

And we didn’t even realize until a century ago. It took us nearly 700 years to figure it out.

Sicilian rhyme is human error falsely mediated by imposed poetic license. History is truly created by historians, and poetry by its readers. It is the epitome of the anxieties revolving around the study of manuscripts.

But damn it all if it isn’t the most fascinating piece of linguistic trivia you’ve learned all week.

—

Biljana Likic is working on her fantasy WIPs and in her fourth year of university, where she can’t wait till she’s out so she’ll finally have all the time in the world to write. You can follow her on Twitter.

Ginger from GReads! hosts the weekly meme TGIF.  I haven’t been able to participate in a while because Friday is one of my busiest days and it is hard for me to hold a coherent thought, let alone post a thoughtful response to her questions.  Because I do enjoy participating, though, I decided I would just be a day late. I’m usually playing catch-up, anyway, so forgive me for being a bit tardy with my answers.

This week’s question is:

Book Appeal: When you’re browsing goodreads, the library, or another blogger’s reviews, what grabs your attention to make you want to read it?

This is a great question, because sometimes even I don’t know why a book catches my attention.  The obvious attention grabber when I’m browsing online would definitely be the cover art.  Everybody loves a beautiful cover, and I am no exception.  With the deluge of books releasing every month, there has to be something about the cover – be it the art or the title – that makes me want to stop and read the synopsis.  With the nearest physical bookstore now over ten miles away, I rarely get to browse the aisles of a brick and mortar.  Almost all of my shopping takes place online, and there has to be something to set a book apart in order for me be interested enough to even notice it.

Blogger reviews help me discover books that I might have missed because I didn’t like the cover.  Shallow, I know.  I am drawn to the pretty, and I know that you can’t judge a book by its cover.  So many awesome reads are missed because of that!  Other blogger reviews help pick up the slack.  I get a better idea of the plot by browsing through reviews, and often add titles to my TBR after seeing a book on another blog.  Maybe the blogger mentions a favorite trope, or even a setting that I am curious about.  Typically, it doesn’t even matter whether or not they enjoyed the book, because what doesn’t work for one reader, works well for another.  This is what confuses me about authors attacking bloggers and reviewers on Goodreads – there are so many books to choose from, and even if that particular reader didn’t enjoy a book, that doesn’t mean another potential reader won’t.  The bad behavior of attacking a reader, instead of thanking them for taking the time to read and write about their book, boggles my mind,  and will have me crossing a title off my wish list faster than a bad review.  But that is a topic for another day!

What about you?  What makes you want to pick up  a book and read it?

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By Lauren Appelwick, Blog Editor

Yesterday I was sitting at my desk, pondering…normal things that bloggers ponder…when my friend Cassie shared this link with me.  If you haven’t seen the “Friday” music video, then perhaps the forecast just seems silly, but it inspired me to think about how fast the senses and connotations of words change. For most people, Friday is just the name of a day of the week, but for the moment it’s also the source of many inside jokes and references to Rebecca Black. She is, obviously, a big fan of Fridays because it marks the end of her school week and the beginning of the weekend. We have such acronyms to show our love for the day as TGIF (Thank God It’s Friday), and what seems to be a widespread distaste for Mondays. (*Ahem* Garfield. *Cough* Office Space.)

So the question is: did people always like Friday? Did we choose Friday as the end of the work week because it was already well-loved?

{ASIDE: I was just beginning my research when fellow blogger Levi Asher (Literary Kicks) teased me with this Wikipedia link, encouraging that I “meet [his] friend Frigg.” To this I replied, “How long have you been friends?” and he answered, “Since Thor’s Day.” Well played, Levi. Well played indeed.}

We begin with the OED.

Friday, n.
Pronunciation: Brit. /ˈfrʌɪdeɪ/ , /ˈfrʌɪdi/ , U.S. /ˈfraɪˌdeɪ/ , /ˈfraɪdi/

1. The day following Thursday and preceding Saturday, traditionally regarded as the sixth day of the week, but now frequently considered as the fifth, and also as the last day of the working week and (especially in the evening) the start of the weekend. In the Catholic Church, Friday, along with Wednesday and Saturday, has traditionally been observed as one of the days for abstaining from eating meat, fish being the popular alternative. In Judaism, sunset on Friday marks the beginning of the Sabbath, which ends at sunset on Saturday.

So far, pretty simple. We see that Friday’s position in the week is appears to be most strongly connected to Judeo-Christian traditions. I didn’t really expect to discover anything spectacular, I was just satiating my own curiosity–and why bother the Oxford Etymologist with such small queries? But then I noticed a sense that was new to me.

Friday-look, n.
now rare (Eng. regional in later use). a serious or gloomy face or expression (cf. 0 Comments on A short (and incomplete) history of Friday as of 1/1/1900