On my recent fishing trip, I reeled in a few big ones that should get me through the winter. First, Rough Stone Rolling, the new Bushman biography of Joseph Smith, which I immediately bumped up to my "Featured Book" slot. I'm about 70 pages into it — it's a winner. Still don't like the title though. Second, I finally pulled the trigger on Prince's David O. McKay biography. Seems like I ought to get to know Mormonism's "kinder and gentler" prophet. Third, I bought Arrington's Adventures of a Church Historian. He lived the adventure, the only historian to serve as Church Historian. Makes you wonder how many Church Prophets were prophets. Finally, Carmon Hardy's Solemn Covenant: The Mormon Polygamous Passage, the story of post-1890 LDS polygamy.
I've done some general editing on the book sidebar, too. I pulled the plug on the new blog feeds I have been experimenting with — it is a new Typepad feature, but it just doesn't update frequently enough to be useful. I'm going to start putting links to the publisher's website notes under the book thumbnails on the left sidebar. The thumbnail image itself links to the book's Amazon record, and I link my own reviews at DMI or other good posts from elsewhere in the B'nacle in the notes below the image. It's my attempt to keep some of my better links right on the front page. And I still think it is sort of clever how I can display links in the text below the book thumbnails (it only took me about a year to figure it out).
A final tweak: one of the coding gurus at Mormon Archipelago patched me the code for a comment feed. Your comments at DMI will now appear in the comment box at the award-winning Archipelago page. I swear that site is the handiest thing I've seen in the entire blogosphere for tracking a community of weblogs. Anyway, this new development means your comments here at DMI will get more attention from everyone else. But don't forget there's a comment queue here, so your comments don't show up (on DMI or in the MA comment box) for a few hours.
Comments