Follow Friday - The Temple of Olympian Zeus Was Completed in 130 A.D.

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Reading With a Vengeance and Create With Joy.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: What book are you embarrassed to admit you LOVED? (Try to think beyond Twilight).


I'm not going to go with a single book on this question, but rather an entire series of books: Lynne Johnston's collections of her For Better or For Worse comic strips. I don't know if I'm so much embarrassed to admit that I loved reading these books, but they are the books that result in the most incredulous reactions when people see them on my shelves. They aren't fantasy. They aren't science fiction. They are just a collection of mildly humorous stories about an almost tediously ordinary suburban family. And as a result, people who find the collection of these books sitting on my bookshelves or who otherwise find out that I have almost every single volume of For Better or For Worse comic strips ever produced are often almost dismayed by their discovery.

And even though it is true that this isn't really something that is in my normal reading, and is a bit domestic in tone, I still loved reading them. The salient point is that unlike most other comic strip series where everyone exists in a perpetual time-halted now, the Pattersons, the family depicted by Johnston, age, grow, and change. Each member of the family has a specific birthday, and every year that passed during the run of the strip resulted in everyone getting a year older. This was especially apparent when it came to the children, who would change quite dramatically from year to year, and in the course of the strip's run, grew up, graduated, moved out of the family home, fell in love, got married, and had children of their own. And that's what I love about For Better or For Worse: There is an extended, ongoing story here that runs through years of the lives of the characters.

The story of the Pattersons is mostly finished now: Johnston decided a couple of years ago to stop advancing her character's lives, which in my view robbed her strip of the vitality that gave it its unique flavor in the comic world. And in more recent times, many newspapers have begun simply rerunning older strips, in some cases starting from the very beginning. But that doesn't change the fact that there are a couple of decades of stories about the interweaving lives of the Pattersons and their friends and neighbors. And I loved that ongoing story.

Go to previous Follow Friday: Galen Was Born in 129 A.D.

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: 131 Is a Full Reptend Prime, but Only in Base 10

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