Corrodentia Weekly

On getting bored and moving on

2010-06-02T13:58:00.000-04:00

No surprise to anyone who is still hanging onto this blog or has it in their feed reader or whatever that I...I've lost interest. I've been busy, it's true, but I've made time for other things that I find more interesting at the moment. Like Plants vs. Zombies (awesome game, by the way, totally addictive and time-wasting and distracting). I think my mistake was in making the focus too narrow. I wanted to post about lots of things other that books, and I didn't feel I could do that here because I gave the blog a TITLE about BOOKS. And even if I changed the name, the URL would remain.

I'm not done with blogging, however. I have just decided to make a new blog, for a few reasons. First, I wanted a fresh start with a new title that gives me the freedom to post whatever my heart desires. Second, I feel kind of like I'm baby-blogging over here on Blogger. The big kids use WordPress. I wanted to try it. So...introducing my new blog, about whatever the hell I feel like talking about INCLUDING books but also other stuff, Wishing Heart. Go, read, give me comments. Oh, and this blog is not going anywhere. I'm going to leave it up for posterity as long as they let me, so if you've linked to it or want to reference something from the archives, go for it. It will stick around. Thanks for those who've stuck with me and encouraged me on my very first blogging experiment! I hope you'll join me for my next adventure.

B&N Nook Giveaway!

2010-03-18T13:23:00.002-04:00

Hurry hurry! Momstart is giving away a Nook! http://momstart.com/2010/03/barnes-and-noble-exploring-the-nook-giveaway

SUPER BEHIND

2010-03-16T20:21:00.002-04:00

Life's been busy, what can I say. Sorry, kids! But I'm about to go on a rampage because I'm uncomfortable with how many reviews I want to do! I might skip some that I really didn't like that I don't want to waste your time on - or maybe I'll gather those together and give them shorter reviews :)

The Virginia Festival of the Book starts tomorrow, too, and I'm sadly not heading to anything this year because life is crazy and I'm visiting my Mama for her birthday on Saturday. But YOU! You should be going to some of these events! There are lots of awesome things going on, including events with Lee Smith and Julia Spencer-Fleming, two of my favorite authors! And there are a bunch of other people coming as well, many of whom I've admittedly not heard of, but some I've heard good things about: Dave Cullen, Sheila Curran, Nikki Giovanni, Hermine Pinson (my former professor at W&M!), Elizabeth Strout (author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge)... So make some plans to go to some of the events if you can!

We're following the leader, the leader, the leader...

2010-02-17T19:33:00.001-05:00

We're following the leader, wherever he may go! Tee-dum, tee-dee, a-teedly-dom-tee-day...

Ahem. I may have watched Disney's version of Peter Pan just a few too many times as a child. I actually woke up with this song stuck in my head on Christmas morning a couple of months ago, no idea why. ANYWAY, as you may have gathered, I recently read J.M. Barrie's original story of the children's classic, Peter Pan. This is one of my favorite tales of all time. I loved the Disney animation (as you've already figured out), I loved the Mary Martin production, I loved Hook, I loved every version of the story I ever saw created, performed, or written. Oddly enough, however, I had never read the original story, at least not until a few months ago. I put it on my Fill-in-the-Gaps list for that very reason, and now I have read it.

Interestingly enough, Peter Pan was originally a short story in a book for adults, which was then adapted into a stage play, and then adapted again to be a children's story. You all know the general story of Peter Pan, right? Peter finds his way into the nursery of Wendy, John, and Michael Darling; he loses his shadow and Wendy wakes to find him crying; she sews his shadow on again and he takes them all away to Neverland. There they have adventures with the Lost Boys and the Indians and the dastardly Captain Hook and his crew. What I probably could have guessed (but didn't entirely realize) is that the familiar treatments of this story are prettied up. Barrie's original tale is a bit weirder, a bit wittier, a bit more sinister than we've been led to believe. The story is essentially the same, down to Nana, the children's doggie governess, but there is a distinctly different tone to the story.

Barrie clearly conveys sort of supernatural elements - he refers to Mrs. Darling cleaning up her children's minds when they've fallen asleep, similar to tidying the nursery only with their thoughts. He talks of Neverland being a place in the minds of the children, and yet they seem to physically travel there - they are absent from their parents for months during their adventures, and their parents are very sad. Peter is arrogant in all of the stories - that's part of his infinite boyhood - but he doesn't even make sense in his arrogance in Barrie's story, which I think is very true to the actual arrogance of a child. The story is also more bloodthirsty than the children's tales to which I'm accustomed. There is no shying away on the part of the Lost Boys or the pirates or the Indians about taking a life - they're at war with one another, and that's how it is. I do think children's minds work that way; it's just we as adults want to convince ourselves that they don't, so we try to make children's stories softer than that.

There are also some pretty funny comments in the book, particularly revolving around Peter and Captain Hook. I was particularly amused by the background on Hook and his extreme concern for good form. Barrie has a dry sense of humor, which I really enjoyed. Despite the humor that was clearly written to appeal to adults, the book as a whole seems very childlike to me, in a very honest way. It's not sugar-coated and sweet; it's odd and cruel and innocent simultaneously. I enjoyed it even more than I thought I would, in part because it was different from the other versions of the story I'd seen previously. 5 of 5 stars!

Goth-Emo Teen Angst Sucks In Bookish 30-Somethings!

2010-02-09T22:01:00.000-05:00

Oh, Wet Moon. So angsty and drama-filled. I adore it. I love Ross Cambpell's pudgy little characters with the big eyes and the confusion about their love lives. I love that the most tomboyish main character (beloved Trilby) is also the only outright straight female main character. I love the weird side stories and the feeling that they're all on the point of converging. I honestly cannot put a Wet Moon book down after I open it until it's finished.

So, this is the first time I've reviewed a Wet Moon book on this blog, apparently, and I feel the need to give a little background on it. First of all, it's a comic book/graphic novel series about (mostly) college students in a small Southern town called Wet Moon. The art and culture are very emo-goth, and there is a lot of sexual tension and sexual orientation exploration. It doesn't get too explicit, but it does get sexy, and it's heavy on the bi- and lesbian relationships. My husband introduced me to it, I think because he read the first one and loved it and was confused about why he liked it so much. I read it and also loved it, and then we had a long conversation about the fact that it's so much teenage angsty popcorn fluff, but there's something more to it. And the artwork is flat-out gorgeous.

So our main characters are four high school friends: Cleo (who is probably best called the heroine), Trilby, Audrey and Mara. But the cast of characters seems to grow exponentially with every book, so that I could now name for you probably at least 20 other characters who are also of some significance. Their lives and relationships intertwine, they whine about not getting dates or not knowing who to date, they buy atrocious Hot Topic-style clothing and get tattoos and piercings...it all sounds really mundane, but it is reading crack, I promise you. The first three books really introduce the characters and their relationships and backgrounds - they lay the groundwork. Things started getting weird in the 4th book - a significant character shows some serial killer tendencies, a masked vigilante shows up, there's statutory rape drama and a cat who disappears through weird inky holes in the floor...and then the 5th book just gets weirder. Now, all of the mundane drama stuff still goes on, but there's some David Lynch-like weirdness too. I love these books, and I'd love you to love them too!

So Volume 5, Where All Stars Fail to Burn, is where the shit starts to go down. Things start happening faster. We watch Cleo kinda sorta start to fall in love with a close friend, and also deal with her sister Penny's big secret. We watch Trilby and her geektastic boyfriend, Martin, be just outright adorable, and Martin gets to meet Trilby's parents. We watch Audrey finally stand up for herself. Myrtle becomes even more psychotic, and Fern becomes even more unbelievably weird. We still don't know who the masked vigilante is, though I've got some theories going. And of course, we get to see the big softball game. Campbell, that incredibly talented SOB, leaves the book with a heart-breaking killer of a cliff-hanger - I almost fell out of my airplane seat in shock that he would leave the story like that FOR MONTHS! Until the next book comes out! ARGH! It sets my teeth on edge just thinking about it, even now, and I read this book two and a half months ago!

Bottom line, 5 stars. I cannot get enough of this series. It's killing me that I might have to wait a whole year for the next one. Damn you, Ross Campbell!!!

About e-booky reader-type things

2010-02-06T21:24:00.006-05:00

I told you earlier I felt like writing... :)

So, post number three today. I started formulating this post in my head when news of the iPad was first released last week. Because the world is astir with news of the iPad, which is more than an e-reader but still, and I have personally been debating about getting a Barnes & Noble nook after getting to play with one in my local store. There's also been a huge stand-off between Amazon and Macmillan this week regarding the e-book sales model. So my thoughts have turned to e-books and e-readers of late.

One of my very first posts, just over a year ago, was on paper books vs. e-books. At that time, I was not ready to move over to an e-reader. I have since changed my mind. The sheer volume of books in our house has gotten out of control. I've also had a chance to play with both a Kindle and a nook, and I've been impressed with how they haven't at all jarred me out of the book-reading experience. I have had hesitations about the Kindle simply because they require a different format of e-book than what has become the standard and because they don't have expandable memory. Though the the memory capacity is significant and I could switch out books virtually if I ever got close to running out of room. But the nook has expandable memory, which I just like the option to have, and it uses a standard e-book file format, and it has a pretty cool lending feature.

My hesitation at the moment with the nook is that B&N isn't offering any kind of sales or discounts on it, not even to members, which doesn't jive with my frugal nature, and that it's the first generation. I've made it a policy not to buy first generation electronics - they don't have all the bugs and glitches worked out yet. Add to that the fact that I have about 45 paper books in my to-read stack at the moment. So I've made the decision to wait and get my nook after the second version is released, which may be another year or two, but I think I've quenched my initial gadget lust and can manage to make myself wait.

Now. The iPad. First off, let's just all agree that it is the dumbest name they could have possibly given to this device. Not only is it reminiscent of feminine hygiene products (did they even ASK a woman about the name?!), it's only ONE LETTER different from their most famous new gadget of recent years, the iPod. Did they not foresee how potentially confusing that could be? Anyway. Rant over. The iPad looks like a pretty cool device, all told. I'd certainly like to play with one. But from what I can tell, it's essentially a laptop-sized iPod Touch. I'd personally rather have an iPhone that gives me all of those applications everywhere, available at my fingertips as my cell phone is. My laptop does everything I want in a computer; I want a computer that's as mobile as a cell phone. That doesn't mean that I don't see the value in the iPad. I see, for example, a potential e-reader type device for my husband, the comic book reader. Today's e-readers don't display color or images, so reading comics is not really feasible. But the iPad could be a the way, provided comics publishers respond to the (already great) demand to publish comics for the device. My husband is a lover of the format, not a collector, so he'd happily stop buying paper comics if they were available in a good digital format.

The problems with it at the moment are that there is no comics publisher making comics for the iPad yet and the memory capacity is not great yet. I don't know much about computers, but I do know that 64 GB is nothing for high-resolution image-laden comics. They need to up the memory a LOT to appeal to that audience. Also, there's the first generation problem again; we'll definitely wait until at least the second generation to get it. Finally, I'm not sure how it will handle PDF files or how to put files on it that you already own. My husband has a number of digital comics collections released by the publishers on CD-ROM that are in PDF form, and he'd definitely want to be able to read those on the iPad.

So there you have it. We want to upgrade our reading technology, but we haven't quite gotten the devices we want. Maybe in the next year or two we'll do it!

Review of Ender's Game

2010-02-06T14:53:00.000-05:00

It may be blizzarding outside, but at least that's put me in a mood to write! I might get a few more book reviews posted this weekend and catch up a little bit :)

I had been wanting to re-read Ender's Game for a long time. I first read it when I was in grad school, getting my master's in gifted education, and we focused on literature that would appeal to gifted children. I'd never heard of the book before, even though I was a big sci-fi reader as a child and the book was published around the time I was born. So I read it about 10 years ago and loved it, and bought a copy to keep in my classroom library when I was a teacher. I always meant to read it again, and I got my chance when my book club chose to read it for our December meeting.

Ender's Game's main character is, not surprisingly, a boy named Ender. Ender is actually his nickname because he is the third and final, or ending, child his parents had. He's an exception, a Third. Most families are only allowed to have two children, but Ender's older siblings were so promising to the government for a special project that they allowed his parents to have a third child, hoping he'd be perfect. His older brother, Peter, is essentially a complete sociopath with no human compassion. His sister Valentine is too loving and compassionate. Lucky for the government (and humanity at large), Ender is juuuuuust right. At age 6, Ender is sent to Battle School to learn how to become a fighter for Earth in the coming war against the Buggers. He goes through rigorous military training, and it soon becomes clear that he's expected to be the Great Hope to win the Bugger war.

I've heard a lot of complaints about this book. I've heard that it doesn't portray children accruately, that the children are too smart and too ruthless. I believe those people have never met a truly gifted child and must not remember what it's like to be a child themselves. The old adage "Children are cruel" has its foundation in truth. Children have not developed the emotional maturity to be sympathetic or empathetic; as much as adults try to teach them by saying, "How would you feel if someone did that to you?" they just can't comprehend it. And so they are absolutely horrid to each other when the mood strikes, and they are ruthless. I remember that about childhood. And just as quickly, it's all forgotten and children are best friends again. I remember that, too. Gifted children are no different in that respect; they just have the intelligence to suss out exactly the most hurtful things to say and do to one another. They are logical and have the intellingence of any of the smartest adults, but they don't have the emotional development to temper it.

And that's why I think this book is brilliant. It shows, in what I think is a highly accurate way, what happens when you throw a bunch of crazy-smart children into a military situation and teach them to be soldiers, pitting them against each other in war games. The book is science fiction, and it is ultimately about two races' misunderstanding of each other and the resulting destruction because of this, but the book succeeds because of its exploration of these kids' psyches, and Ender's in particular. It's the reason gifted kids all over the world feel so passionately about the book: they feel like someone finally understands them, that there may be other people like them, after living their whole lives feeling isolated. That, in my opinion, makes the book one of the best ever written dealing with gifted children, and it's reasonably decent sci-fi in addition to that.

On my least favorite season

2010-02-06T12:09:00.007-05:00

Well, we are snowed in. Again. Most of you live in the mid-Atlantic region, so you know. For those who may not, let me explain.

I live in Virginia. It is a state generally considered by its residents to be in The South. That means we do not expect metric craptons of snow (and yes, that is an official measurement term). In my current town of residence, the lovely Charlottesville, our average snowfall per winter is about 17 inches, which is skewed to the high end because of winters like this. This is my tenth winter in Charlottesville, and most of the winters I've spent here have had, at most, two to three snowfalls of 2 inches or less. That suits me fine. It's pretty to look at, doesn't screw up your travel plans too badly, and is gone the next day. I like the climate where I live. We get four distinct seasons; it rarely gets hotter than 90 degrees F in the summer and rarely gets colder than 30 degrees F in the winter. I do not like cold weather, but it is nice to look at pretty snow falling every now and again, provided it doesn't bring the entire world to a halt.

Now let's talk about this winter specifically. We got our first snow the first weekend of December. It was nothing - the kind of snow I like best, just about an inch of accumulation. It was early for us - we don't usually get any snow at all until January - but it was sufficiently cold and it was December. It was within the realm of the acceptable. Then, the weekend of December 18th, we got 18-20 inches. Okay, that's insane for us. Our "deep" snows are 6 inches. It was dubbed the Snowpocalypse by the local media. It took days to dig out. For those from particularly snowy regions who may be laughing at that notion, you need to consider that (a), we don't get enough snow to be used to driving in it; (b), we know no one else knows how to drive in it either; and (c), we get so little snow that our Dept of Transportation doesn't have the equipment or staff or budget or experience to remove it efficiently. So. The parking lot and sidewalks of my condo complex were still treacherous 3 days after the snow stopped falling. At this point, before December was even over, I was done with snow for the year. I wanted no more, and I was ready for spring.

Sadly, that was not to be. We got another small snow in early January. Then we had rain that finally melted almost all of the snow still left from December...and that also flooded all of our rivers. We live in the bend of a river, and we have lived in this condo for almost 5 years, and I have never seen this river flood. It's come close, but never happened. There's a trail behind our complex that winds along the river, and while that has developed large puddles, it's never flooded. Until now, anyway - the entire trail was under 3 feet of river water. So. Massive flooding. A week after the massive flooding, we got another foot of snow. And then 2 days later, another small snow with some sleet mixed in. That brought our running total for the winter to about 36 inches. Remember how I said we get an average of 17 inches per winter, and that most winters we actually get about 6 inches or less? Yeah. This is a lot for us. By the end of January, the Virginia Dept of Transportation had already spent their ENTIRE snow removal budget for all of 2010. In the first month of the year. They'll be dipping into emergency funds next, and then they'll have to start taking from other budget expense funds, meaning they'll have to postpone road repair and construction projects (because those are "non-essential") if they have to remove too much more snow.

That brings us to today. Saturday, 5 February 2010, aka Snowpocalypse II. It started snowing at dawn yesterday, and it hasn't stopped yet. There's at least 14 inches out there (I haven't measured, that's just an eyeball figure), and it's still coming down hard. It's not supposed to stop until tonight. Let's add another 16 inches to that total, conservatively - that brings us to 52 inches for the winter, a record winter for this town. And winter's not over. The forecast already shows snow again Tuesday and Wednesday of the coming week, and then again next Sunday. The kids only had one day of school last week and are clearly likely to miss more this week, and while I don't have kids, it affects my co-worker's work schedules (and as a former teacher, I can sympathize with the teachers who are starting to see their spring breaks disappear). The snow this weekend means we can't attend a party tonight that I've been really looking forward to. I hate winter right now, more than I ever have, and I'd stab it in the heart if I thought it actually had one.

Listography!

2010-01-21T21:55:00.001-05:00

I tried yesterday to write a review of Ender's Game, and I found myself absolutely incoherent. I got about halfway through and realized I sounded like a blathering idiot. I'm not feeling a whole lot more eloquent today. Maybe tomorrow? Not sure.

In the meantime, in order to keep my few but beloved readers entertained, I thought I'd share another part of my life. I am an absolute list addict. I make lists all the time, of everything. It makes me feel like I'm in control, I think. Which makes me a control freak. Anyway, I have a few other friends who also are list addicts, and I found this 2010 planner called Listography that I thought would make a perfect Christmas gift for some of them. And then I couldn't resist getting one for myself, too. Basically, this is a weekly planner that has a prompt to make a list for each week in the year. And I've enjoyed making the lists so far - some of them are dumb, and some are fun, but I like making them nonetheless.

I don't want to share all of the lists with you, because some of them will be extremely boring for you (i.e., names of children I know - YAWN for you), but I thought I'd share some of the others. Maybe this will break my writer's block throughout the year if a good list comes up. So! Without further adieu, a few lists from my Listography planner.

List Your Goals for the Coming Year (28 Dec 2009 to 3 Jan 2010)

Organize the house
Buy a new mattress
Keep losing weight
Get better control of finances
Send real birthday cards
Get a working printer (for home)
Earn Copyediting certificate from UCSD
Reduce to-read pile

List Your Favorite Dance Songs (22 Jan 2010 to 17 Jan 2010)

"Dancing Queen" - ABBA
"Tainted Love" - Soft Cell
"You'll Never Be Famous" - The Clutters
"I Saw Her Standing There" - The Beatles
"Hey Ya!" - Outkast
"Should I Stay or Should I Go" - The Clash
"Graycoated Morning" - David and the Citizens
"Gay Bar" - Electric City
"Hate to Say I Told You" - The Hives
"Purple Haze" - Jimi Hendrix
"Mr. Brightside" - The Killers
"Lady Marmalade" - Christina Aguilera, Pink, Mya and Lil' Kim
"R-E-S-P-E-C-T" - Aretha Franklin
"You Really Got Me Going" - The Kinks
"Deceptacon" - Le Tigre
"I Will Survive" - Gloria Gaynor
"Crazy" - Gnarls Barkley
"Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" - Michael Jackson
"Son of a Gun" - Nirvana
"Oh My Golly" - The Pixies
"Vertigo" - U2
"Blitzkrieg Bop" - The Ramones
"You Keep Me Hangin' On" - The Supremes
"Blister in the Sun" - Violent Femmes
"Technology" - The Whigs
"Hotel Yorba" - The White Stripes
"We Got the Beat" - The Go-Gos
"Nature of the Experiment" - Tokyo Police Club
"American Girl" - Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
"Land of 1000 Dances" - Wilson Pickett

List Your Heroes (18 Jan 2010 to 24 Jan 2010)

My mom: even though she doesn't believe much in herself, she raised me to believe in myself and to think that I can achieve anything if I set my mind to it - she set me up for my greatest successes, and picked me up from my biggest failures
Chet (one of my grandfathers): the sweetest, kindest, smartest, happiest person I have ever known
Jimmie Holland: the founding grandmother of the field of psychosocial oncology and someone I have been blessed to work with for the past six years; a brilliant mind, an unfailing work ethic, and a kind heart, but who won't take no for an answer
Abraham Lincoln: another kind heart, albeit one that had to lead his country to war against itself, he did the worst imaginable task for a President who loved his country with grace, intelligence and eloquence
Albert Einstein: eccentric, brilliant, funny, and not afraid to admit when he was wrong
Gandhi: a man passionate about what was right and fair in the world, but who refused to resort to violence even when it would have saved him severe injury, he turned nonviolence into an action that got more attention than violence
Martin Luther King, Jr: like a combination of Lincoln and Gandhi, MLK used his faith, nonviolence, and the strength of his convictions to move an entire nation to action to attack one of our country's most horrible injustices
Jane Goodall: if you have ever heard her speak, you know that Dr. Goodall is poised and passionate simultaneously; she has contributed significantly to our knowledge and understanding of primates, ourselves, our environment, and our relationship with the other living things of this world
Nawal El Saadawi: a woman of uncommon bravery, she has fought with her writing and her teaching for women's rights and women's modern healthcare in Middle Eastern countries
Frederick Douglass: he educated himself and used his education to better the plight of black slaves in America to the best of his ability, as well as all people; he firmly fought for equal rights of women, African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants - equal rights for all people

Irish Slices of Life Improve with Time

2010-01-14T21:26:00.000-05:00

Argh! I wrote this review two days ago and the internet ATE IT. Ate it right up. It disappeared into thin air. So...here we go with take 2!

I downloaded The Tea House on Mulberry Street by Sharon Owens from Audible.com back when I was closing my subscription with them. I had a bunch of credits to spend on audiobooks, so I downloaded about 10 to get to whenever I had time. I have no idea where I got the recommendation for this particular book, but it must have resonated with me because I have three or four more books by her sitting in iTunes for me to listen to when I get around to it. I've seen other reviewers compare Owens's books to Maeve Binchy, if that's any indication for you (having never read Binchy, it didn't give me a clue).

The story centers on a tea house (Muldoon's Tea Rooms) in Belfast, Ireland, and all of the people whose lives pass through and are affected by the tea house. There's Penny and Daniel Stanley, the proprietors of the tea house whose marriage is on the rocks. There's starving artist Brenda Brown who lives in an apartment next door and comes in to drink tea and write love letters to Nicholas Cage. Henry starts coming more often to get away from his wife's obssessive re-enactments of Victorian literature and ends up falling in love with Rose, the florist across the street from the tea house. Sadie comes in to comfort herself with Daniel's delicious desserts when her husband is mean to her (which is often).

They're a lovely cast of characters - compelling, with believeable quirks and struggles. While I was listening to it, I thought it was a little slow and melodramatic, but two months later, I still remember the characters very fondly. I got attached to these people! Brenda and Sadie were my favorites, but I really enjoyed the entire cast. I don't wonder what happened to them, though, because Owens did a really good job of giving closure to all the stories. The voice actor read with a lilting Irish brogue, which was quite appropriate for the story. This is possibly the first time I have liked a book more two months after I finished it than I did right after I was done. In November, I would have given this three of five stars, but now, I give it four!

Naked Once More

2010-01-07T21:12:00.000-05:00

Oh, lordy be. I have begun another online class - this time Copyediting I - toward my Copyediting Certificate from UCSD. I hope to learn a lot, but this class is going to take more time than the last one. There's a lot more reading. I'm exhausted just thinking about it. But I finished all of the assignments for the first week, so only nine more weeks to go... In the meantime, I'll distract myself by continuing to try and catch up with my book reviews. What will happen if I ever actually catch up?! What will I write about? :)

Today's review is about mystery novel Naked Once More by Elizabeth Peters. I downloaded this as an audiobook when I had an Audible.com subscription because...well, I don't remember why I chose it, exactly. As you all know, mystery novels are absolutely my personal guilty bookish pleasure, so it's not a stretch to imagine that someone recommended it to me and I picked it up for that reason. Regardless, I greatly enjoyed it. Plot summary: Jacqueline Kirby, loud-mouthed, brash, fearless, hilarious, best-selling romance author, needs a vacation from the publishing biz. Unfortunately, she's also out of money. So when she hears about the opportunity to write a sequel to one of the best-selling books of all time, which also happens to be one of her favorite books ever written, she jumps at it. The book's author, Kathleen Darcy, disappeared in the middle of nowhere seven years ago, and she's now presumed dead. Her family is interviewing candidates to write the sequel, and Jacqueline very much wants to get the job. The more she pokes around in their family business, however, the more certain she is that one of them wanted Kathleen dead - and she's determined to get to the bottom of that particular mystery.

This was a fun, fast, entertaining story. The actor who reads the book captures Jacqueline Kirby PERFECTLY, which made the audiobook that much more enjoyable. I believe that this is the second or third Jacqueline Kirby book, and I definitely want to read the others in the series after experiencing this one. When I mentioned on Facebook that I'd read it, one of my friends said she liked to describe Elizabeth Peters's books as a peanut M&M - candy-coated chocolate with a nugget of protein in the center. I think that's a dead-on description. It is a fun, fluffy, cozy mystery story, but there's something weighty about it. It's well-written, and I can tell Peters is a smart woman. Five of five stars from me!

The Eyre Affair

2010-01-01T20:17:00.001-05:00

Tell a former English major who loves mystery novels and has an interest in science fiction that there's a mystery series out there involving sci-fi and famous classic literature and see if she doesn't snap up a copy of the first book in the series as soon as is humanly possible. I certainly did. I laid my hands on a copy of The Eyre Affair, the first novel in Jasper Fforde's series about Literary Detective Thursday Next, less than 30 days after I first heard about it. It combines lots of my favorite genres into one, with the added bonus of being set in Britain (I'll confess to being a bit of an Anglophile). Of course, that does not necessarily make a successful novel, but Fforde has some talent with his pen as well, so the characters are interesting and the plot is compelling, making an altogether successful book.

The Thursday Next series deals with an alternate reality - it's our world, in 1980s Britain, but there are special bureaus in the national law enforcement arena that deal with all sorts of crimes that don't generally happen in our reality, such as crimes against literature and crimes connected to time travel and vampire exterminators. Thursday Next is a Literary Detective in London. Being a Literary Detective is not generally one of the more exciting special agent jobs. It mostly involves desk research and hunting down counterfeit copies of alleged "new" scripts discovered to be written by famous long-dead authors and stopping the counterfeiters. Thursday gets pulled into a much more exciting case, however, when a special bureau unknown to her recruits her to help them catch a criminal she knows from her past. Her life becomes inextricably tied up with a murderous sociopath who used to be her professor. He takes advantage of some new technology developed by her absent-minded professor-like uncle to begin kidnapping and threatening to kill characters from classic novels. She has to stop him before he kills Jane Eyre herself, forever changing the literary canon.

As far as mystery novels go, this is one of the more original and interesting I've ever read. It embraces and combines both the mystery and science fiction genres and turns their focus to classic literature with a writing style that is light-hearted and humorous. It's no classic literary masterpiece itself, but it is a really fun read with an interesting set of characters and an entirely unique plot. I'll definitely seek out the other books in the series. Highly recommended; five five of stars!

New Year's Giftolutions

2009-12-31T09:00:00.001-05:00

So, I read a lot of other blogs. About all sorts of different things, not just books. Some are friends' blogs whereby they update the rest of us on happenings in their lives and daily musings; some are topical, about books or publishing or fitness or entertainment; some are written by authors I really like; etc. I have recently started reading a blog called Cranky Fitness, written by Crabby McSlacker, which really appeals to my feelings about working out - it truly truly SUCKS but we should really try to do it anyway and here are ways to make it a little easier. Anyway. So Crabby wrote a post earlier this month about a friend of hers who's all one with the universe and whatnot. And this friend of hers doesn't make resolutions at the start of each new year. She makes a list of gifts she's going to give to herself. It sounds a little hippity-dippity and corny, but I kinda like it. I mean, making resolutions has certainly never worked for me, so I might as well give the positive spin thing a try.

Therefore, today's post has nothing in particular to do with books or reading. It's just about me and my life. Here is a (short) list of gifts I'm going to give myself in 2010:

The gift of a house I feel comfortable living in. This means organizing so that we don't feel we're bursting at the seams. I think if I commit one weekend day per month to this task (and a little money on organizational tools), I can give myself a house I love to come home to and some peace of mind.
The gift of smaller jeans. I have made no secret among my friends of the fact that I'm trying to be all healthy, both for the sake of my health and the sake of my waistline. I will never be a teeny-tiny waifish person, but I am still definitely overweight. I've lost 25 lbs since June 2009, and I plan to continue that trend by keeping on with my current eating habits (and tracking everything I eat on SparkPeople) and by exercising - either at the gym I'm currently trying out to see if I want to join it or on my own at home. But I kinda like the gym, and I've been good about going, so it may just be worth the money.
The gift of a good night's sleep. Or actually, many good nights' sleep. We need a new mattress. We've known this for about a year. We've put off actually going out and shopping for a new mattress for about a year. It's going to be expensive, and choosing the right one is going to be a pain in the butt. But no more procrastinating - our good sleep (and uncricked backs) is the most important thing!
The gift of financial security. We've done pretty well with budgeting and saving money in the past year - but I think we can do better. And that would make me feel better. I seriously worry about what would happen if one of our cars (both of which are over 10 years old) were to die AND one of us lost his/her job at the same time. Or a major appliance needed replacing or any other infinite number of bad and expensive things. We have a hefty emergency fund - about 6 months of living expenses - but it's still scary. We're young enough that our 401ks and IRAs are not as flush as they will be in 20 years, so borrowing against them (if that became necessary) would be a really, really bad thing and set us back possible decades in our retirement. I want to do everything we can to ensure our financial security, even when things are bad. I think this means a big, scary money conversation with my husband and possibly adjusting our budget to make better financial decisions.

So what are your giftolutions for 2010? Think we can all stick with them?

What I Got for Lootmas

2009-12-29T18:16:00.002-05:00

Joshilyn Jackson, an author I love and adore, has dubbed the gift-giving portion of Christmas as Lootmas. I have gleefully adopted the phrase.

First, before I get started on my multitude of goodies received, I wanted to share what I got for my husband. Mostly because I'm super-proud of my purchases - NOTHING that I got was on his wishlist, which is terrifying and heady all at the same time. I got him:

black leather messenger bag (the canvas one he's been toting around for a few years has a broken handle and he's always complaining about it; leather is much nicer and doesn't break!)
3 months of Audible.com membership (2 books per month - he listens to audio books like a fiend at work, and 2 per month won't even put a dent in what he listens to, but he normally gets free ones which are in the public domain, so this will let him listen to some more modern stuff)
Super Mario Bros. Wii (he said he wanted it but never put it on his wishlist; I obliged)
small chess set (he wanted something that would fit on his desk to practice with when he does chess puzzles and tutorials online, so he'll have something tactile to use to play out the scenarios before he "answers" on the computer)
iTunes gift card
candy and nuts

Now! On to me! I got lots and lots and lots of Lootmas gifts, and they're not all done yet - I have several friends with whom I haven't exchanged gifts yet! But these are the bulk, and I'll add to this post when I get more. But I have quite a haul listed here already!!

Books:

Mental Floss History of the World - the husband
Mental Floss magazine subscription - the parents
My So-Called Freelance Life - the parents-in-law
Tender Hooks (poetry) - the sis- and bro-in-law
Murder and Obssession (murder mystery story collection) - the sis- and bro-in-law
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - Arthur, Yi Ru and family (friends)
People of the Book - Paul (friend) *added 1/1/2010
The Elegance of the Hedgehog - Paul (friend) *added 1/1/2010
Hungry Girl: Recipes and Survival Strategies... - Kristine (friend) *added 1/1/2010
Hungry Girl: 200 under 200 - Kristine (friend) *added 1/1/2010

Games:

EA Sports Active: More Workouts (for Wii) - the husband
Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box (for DS) - the parents-in-law
Rhythm Heaven (for DS) - Kristine (friend) *added 1/1/2010

Music:

Christmas in the Heart by Bob Dylan - the husband
Maybe This Christmas Tree - the sis- and bro-in-law

Food:

Crazy good high-quality dark chocolate bars - the husband
Assorted candy - the parents
Assorted candy - the parents-in-law
Assorted candy - Wanda and Mickey (aunt/uncle)
Whitman Sampler - Steve (uncle)
Homemade Gourmet mixes (assorted) - Janet (aunt-in-law)
Harry and David pears - Paul, Jackie and family (uncle/aunt-in-law)
Small box of assorted See's candy - Lynne (coworker)
Homemade gingersnaps - Peggy (coworker)
Homemade vanilla rum truffles - Erin (coworker)
Small bag of Jelly Belly jellybeans - Emily (coworker)
Merci chocolates - Kristine (friend) *added 1/1/2010

Kitchen/Housewares:

Wine fridge (to both of us) - the parents
KitchenAid food processor (to both of us) - the parents
Flamingo ornament - the parents
Black & Decker cordless screwdriver - the parents-in-law
Silk placemats and chopsticks for six - the parents-in-law
Snowman figurine - Mike and Patti (uncle/aunt)
Angel figurine and teddy bear ornament - Stephanie and family (cousin)
Snowman photo holders - Shannon and family (cousin)
Frog princess ornament - Barbara and Ricky (aunt/uncle)
Girly flask - Jean and David (aunt/uncle-in-law)
Martini glasses and mixers - Allison B (coworker)
Ribbon ornament - Barb (coworker)
Snowflake wine glass - Erin (coworker)
Cocktail party plates and wine glasses - Janet (aunt-in-law) *added 1/1/2010
Cheese board and cheese knife - Janet (aunt-in-law) *added 1/1/2010
Recycled wine bottle bread dipping/serving board - Janet (aunt-in-law) *added 1/1/2010

Money/Gift cards:

Cash - the parents
Real silver dollar - the parents-in-law
Check - the parents-in-law
LOFT gift card - the sis and niece
Target gift card - Mike and Patti (uncle/aunt)
Cash - Wanda and Mickey (aunt/uncle)
Donation to Feeding America - Josh, Lauren and family (friends)

Other:

My favorite foot lotion (from Earth Therapeutics, and ridiculously hard to find) - the husband
LL Bean flashlight that charges in your car cigarette lighter - the parents
Flip Ultra video camera - the parents-in-law
Sweater - the parents-in-law
Two necklace pendants - the parents-in-law
Calendar and small Maglite-style flashlight - Wanda and Mickey (aunt/uncle)
Handmade soap - Jean and David (aunt/uncle-in-law)
Chinese hair accessories - Arthur, Yi Ru and family (friends)
Earrings and frog toy - Allison T (coworker)
Fancy soap - Judi (coworker)
Funny post-it notes - Emily (coworker)
Sparkly bracelet - Arthur, Yi Ru and family (friends) *added 1/1/2010

A Walk in the Woods: Who knew a hiking memoir could be so awesome?

2009-12-22T21:40:00.001-05:00

Oh, Bill Bryson. You intrigued me with your A Short History of Nearly Everything. It took me a couple of months to get through it, but I felt like a better, more enlightened, and more amused person after having read it. So I decided to try another book you wrote on the recommendations of my book club friends. I chose A Walk in the Woods because it featured Virginia in some parts of it, and I grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, spitting distance from your subject matter of the Appalachain Trail. My friends, they did not do justice to how awesome this book is.

Imagine, if you will, a middle-aged, slightly overweight guy living in New England. He's pretty happy with his life, but some part of him wants a new challenge. Don't we all go through that with some regularity? Don't we all want to do something different from time to time so we don't stagnate? Well, Bill Bryson is perhaps more ambitious than most. He decides he's going to hike the Appalachain Trail (or as you'll come to know it in the book, the AT). All 2,000-some miles of it, from Georgia to Maine. He's an amateur hiker at best; a Sunday walker at worst. He has no training and no real idea of what the AT is like when he decides it. After he starts his research, he begins to get very nervous - but he's now told everyone he knows that he's going to do it, so he feels bound to complete the mission. At the last minute, an old buddy asks if he can come along. An old buddy who has driven him insane on previous trips, who is incredibly overweight and out of shape, who is prone to complaining about less-than-ideal conditions. Bryson is so thankful not to have to do it alone that he gleefully welcomes this companion. And the adventures begin.

I loved this book. Every blessed minute of it. It could have me in stitches one second and contemplating earth conservation the next. Bryson is an absolute genius at weaving together hysterical personal anecdotes with meticulous research and poignant observations. My absolute favorite moment of the book comes early - when he is in a camping store purchasing all of his equipment to make the trip. His description of meeting with the store owner, an experienced AT hiker, going through the list of supplies the owner tells him he'll need, complete with items that sound to him like he's going on a moon excursion instead of hiking in the woods. I also learned a great deal, about the history of the AT and how it's currently maintained, about the history of native flora and fauna all along the Appalachains and how they have fared, and how our dear National Parks Service has been responsible for completely eradicating several species of both plants and animals from the area.

The book is both educational and a complete riot. It's like Thoreau and Dave Barry rolled together with a famous biologist (sorry, I was never good at biology, and Darwin seems too cliche!). It works brilliantly. Five stars.

The Magicians: Not So Magical as I'd Hoped

2009-12-17T21:24:00.000-05:00

I am so, so far behind. I know this. It's just that the blog, which I do for fun and not profit, is the first thing to drop from my schedule when life gets hectic. You know, as it tends to do this time of year. In good news, all my gifts are bought and wrapped and all cards are mailed, and I have been going to the gym regularly and doing everything I am supposed to do except write on this blog and clean my house. This comes before cleaning the house :)

The Magicians was my book club's pick for our October discussion. I admit, I was not particularly excited about it from the description, so I did not want to buy it. Unfortunately, BookMooch has a waiting list 300 miles long for this book. I did, however, find a recent review on Goodreads that indicated the reviewer had a copy to sell or swap. I contacted the guy and he was happy to mail me his copy, an ARC he'd received as a librarian, if I'd just pay the postage. He was kind enough to trust me and sent me the book first, and I sent him the postage by PayPal when I received the book.

The book is described as a coming-of-age story about a guy, Quentin, who is invited to attend a magical college when he is a senior in high school because he has some inherent ability to do magic - which of course he never believed in or knew existed until his entry exam when he somehow managed to do a little magic with no instruction. It's normal college - alcohol, sex, etc. - just the students are studying magic. He and his friends graduate with little to no direction in life until they find out the magical land of Fillory from their favorite childhood books is real, and is in trouble, and they decide to go save it.

If the description sounds a little familiar, that's because Lev Grossman borrowed from Harry Potter and from the Chronicles of Narnia, the latter heavily and intentionally, and added an emo, postmodern tone. The Fillory books mirror the Chronicles of Narnia pretty much identically, changing just enough to not incur any legal issues. And the heart of the story is really about Quentin learning that his beloved Fillory is no more clear-cut than anything in the "real" world - there's corruption, power-grubbing, mixed motives, good intentions accomplished through wicked methods, etc. And it deflates him. While I found it easy to read the book and went through it very quickly without ever feeling it was a labor, I ultimately found it depressing. The moral of the story essentially seemed to be that when you grow up, you realize life sucks and people are hateful and corrupt, and you would be better off to just accept it and settle down to the rest of your dull, miserable, disappointing life. I suppose the last scene of the book could be interpreted as hope of some kind, but it felt more like Quentin leaves his job to go off with some of his friends to Fillory again - to claim the four crowns of the land that can only be held by humans - because he has nothing better to do and being a king might at least be better than what he's doing now.

A Bibliophile's Holiday Gift Guide

2009-12-01T23:03:00.001-05:00

Man! I lose at being a diligent blogger. I totally blew you guys off over the long holiday weekend after I said I wanted to catch up on my posts! I really do have about eight book reviews I need to write in order to get caught up - yikes! I'll get to them. I really will. There are a few fantastic books among those reviews, so stay tuned. My online class has now ended and the next one in the series doesn't start until January, so I'm not bogged down trying to keep up with homework. Hopefully this means I will be a better blogger in December, but we all know how those kinds of promises go...

Today, instead of catching up on my book reviews, I have a treat for you! I am offering my first ever holiday gift guide - book-centered, of course! Since it's my first one, I've had the luxury of selected some of my favorites of all time. Next year I'm going to have to work harder and pay attention to some of the better new books for kids and teens that I don't necessarily pay strict attention to normally because I don't have kids and I don't teach any more. I've broken the guide into four sections, with four selections in each (very symmetrical, which appeals to my OCD). The sections are guided by age groups, so there are gift ideas for babies, kids, teens, and adults. SO! Without further ado...

Babies
As I mentioned, I do not have children. I do, however, have a niece and many friends with children. I have a lot of experience picking out books for babies and kids, and I think I've given every single book in the Babies and Kids sections of this guide as a gift to a child in my life at some point.

The Monster at the End of This Book: An absolute classic. Who can resist Grover?

Boynton's Greatest Hits: Vol. 1 (Moo, Baa, La La La!; A to Z; Doggies; Blue Hat, Green Hat): A HUUUUUUGE hit with babies and their parents. Sandra Boynton is a modern-day classic in board books, and they teach the kind of things babies love to learn, like animal sounds and letters and colors, with great illustrations. And they're board books, so they're hard to destroy.

Richard Scarry's Biggest Word Book Ever: Right when babies start talking, they're fascinated with words and language, making this book fantastic. Plus it's Richard Scarry, who was a childhood favorite of almost everyone I know. Be warned, though, they're not kidding that it's the biggest book - it's HUGE. It's an open-it-on-the-dining-room-table kind of book. Don't ship it unless you can get free shipping!

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?: This book explores colors and animals with rhyming words and gorgeous artwork. This is a guaranteed winner with both babies and parents.

Kids
As I said, I don't have kids, but I still read (and buy) kids books! Again, I've given all of these as gifts, and I think I might even own them all myself!

20th Century Children's Book Treasury: This book is incredible. It has a BUNCH of classic children's picture books all bound together. There's Goodnight, Moon, Stellaluna, Amelia Bedelia, Guess How Much I Love You...and a ton of others. You cannot beat this book for the price - it's like giving a child 40 pictures books for the price of 2 or 3.

Piggie Pie: A fantastic read-aloud story about a witch who needs a piggie to make piggie pie and is frustrated at every turn when she can't manage to get one. This one will keep adults and kids alike giggling.

The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales: Fairy tales turned on their heads. The feature story about the Stinky Cheese Man is a parody of the classic story about the Gingerbread Man - only nobody wants to catch the Stinky Cheese Man. This book is hysterical, even as a grown-up, and kids familiar with the usual fairy tales will love hearing them given the funny treatment.

Where the Sidewalk Ends: Who did not adore this book as a child (or as an adult if you were grown when it was first published)? I wore out the library copy of both the book and the cassette tape of Shel Silverstein reading selections from the book until my mom finally gave in and bought me my own copy. I still have it. I still get the poems stuck in my head sometimes. The man was a genius. Added bonus: it teaches lessons, too, about not watching too much TV (or you'll turn out like Jimmy Jet!) and other things kids need a little prodding about.

Teens
I was, once upon a time, a middle school teacher. I also just kind of like reading young adult (YA) literature from time to time because it can be just as good as adult literature. So these were pretty easy for me to come up with, but this is the age when boys and girls tend to be attracted to different types of books, so I've tried to include books that will appeal to both genders, and I'll discuss gender preferences in my description of each.

Ender's Game: I just re-read this for my book club, so a review is forthcoming, but generally - wow. This is a definite sci-fi story, but there's a heavy focus on the pressure that bright kids are under from adults to perform as expected. Smart kids REALLY identify with this - both genders - and any kid into science fiction will probably love it. More likely to appeal to boys than girls, but a large number of girls I taught also loved this book.

Uglies: Another sci-fi story, and again for either gender, but I'd say that this probably appeals to girls more than boys. In the future, people undergo surgery around age 16 to make them beautiful, no matter what their original features are - they become Pretties. All of the Uglies (children who haven't yet had the surgery) live together and dream of the day they become Pretties. Until some of the kids start to question the practice, and learn about a community far away where people have shunned this practice, believing that more than appearance is changed in the surgery and that people are fine just the way they are born. I've read the two books in the series following this, and they're all good, but Uglies is definitely the best one.

Looking for Alaska: A boy goes to boarding school and becomes fascinated by his weird, wild classmate, Alaska. She clearly has some issues, but he has the instinct to both have fun with and to protect her. An interesting twist on the familiar old boarding school books, and highly recommended for both boys and girls.

Dangerous Angels: This is almost exclusively for the girls, I must admit, and be fore-warned that there is sex and foul language throughout. That said, this book (or rather this collection of the Weetzie Bat books) is both a coming-of-age and a somewhat supernatural story without dumbing anything down just because it was written for teens. I would have worshipped this book had I found it as a teenager; instead, I had my gifted middle school students introduce me to it and I strongly liked it as an adult. But I can absolutely see how a teenager would identify enormously with the story and bond with the characters.

Adults
Obviously, I have some knowledge of adult books. I've again tried to consider what might appeal to the different genders, but honestly, by the time most people grow up I find that a good book is just a good book, regardless of whether a man or a woman is reading it. So here are four of my all-time, five-star favorites.

The Thirteenth Tale: A spooky, gothic tale just custom-made for book-lovers. Everyone in my book club - all ages, all genders - adored this book and gave it top marks. I have personally read it twice in the last 12 months.

Water for Elephants: I gave this to my mother for her birthday this year, and she says it's the best book she's ever read. It's story about a guy in a circus, and his life from joining the circus to being an elderly man. It's dripping with plot and character and language.

Between, Georgia: This is probably my personal favorite book of all time. It's the story of a war between families, and of enduring love between families, and of how crazy and wonderful Southern people in a small town can be. It's definitely set firmly in the South, and it's hilarious and heart-breaking at the same time. I think of Joshilyn Jackson as a modern-day Carson McCullers.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: Well, this book won the Pulitzer a few years ago, and deservedly so, in my opinion. It's a long one - almost 700 pages, I think - but the story sweeps you up. It's about two Jewish cousins in New York - one of whom is a refugee from the Europe, fleeing the Nazis - who team up to create comic books in a time when they were first coming to popularity. Chabon is an incredible storyteller.

And that's it! Holiday Gift Guide done! What are some of your favorite books to give as gifts? No really, I'm always looking for ideas, especially for the kids!

Awesome Giveaway over at the Bibliophilic Book Blog!

2009-11-30T10:42:00.003-05:00

Hey, guys - the Bibliophilic Book Blog is giving away a Sony Pocket eReader! Plus two runner-up prizes! WOO-HOO! Here's the direct link to the giveaway post. Now get on over there and see if you can snag yourself some delightfully bookish loot!

Happy Thanksgiving!

2009-11-26T18:41:00.006-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving, friends! I have so many posts that I need to write and get out into the world, but today I just wanted to list some things for which I'm thankful on this day our country chooses to devote to appreciating the good things we have in life. I'm just going to list the most important things; otherwise, I could be here all night!

My husband, who not only puts up with my little habits and hobbies and idiosyncracies but even loves me for them
My family, who has always shown me love and support and spoiled me rotten and called me on my bullshit and generally just made my life good and me a better person
My husband's family, who acted from the start as though I were their own, with whom I can laugh and play games and joke around and have fun and just be myself
My dog, who is the most adorable dog ever and makes me feel better whenever I'm sad or angry
Our friends, who are awesome and funny and good people (and most of whom seem to be making cute babies lately)
All the good food in the world: sweet potatoes, pizza, peanut butter, bananas, chocolate, wine, rosemary pork chops, pastry, pies, french fries, pancakes......
Books, the world's best form of entertainment
The internet, the world's second best form of entertainment
My own little editing business, which keeps me entertained and brings in a little extra money
Trips to all of my favorite vacation spots: London, Chicago, Phoenix, Austin, New Orleans, and more coming as I visit more places :)
Firepits
Kashi Vive
The best purse I've ever owned (a Maruca Worker Bee)
Danskos
Curel Itch Relief Lotion
Amazon.com
My education, both at William & Mary and in life afterward
Excedrin Migraine
Hulu and Netflix
Two good jobs, two driveable and paid for cars, a house with central heat and air, plenty of food to eat, good doctors and easy-to-obtain medicine

We are truly blessed. I hope you all have a fantastic Thanksgiving and find you have lots to be thankful for.

I Got an Award!

2009-11-24T22:36:00.000-05:00

My friend Carrie over at Dog-Eared and Well-Read passed on a Kreativ Blogger award to me! I don't know what on earth I did to deserve it, but apparently she likes reading my book reviews or something :) She's a much better blogger than I am, but thanks for thinking of me, Carrie! There are rules to go with the Kreativ Blogger award:

Copy the picture and post it on your blog.
Thank the person that gave it to you and link to their blog.
Write 7 things about yourself we don’t know.
Choose 7 other bloggers to pass the award to.
Link to those 7 other bloggers.
Notify your 7 bloggers.

Well, numbers 1 and 2 are accomplished, and I'm about to give you number 3. Numbers 4, 5 and 6 are coming in a future post. I'm way backed up on book reviews, too, AND I have a book-based holiday gift guide to share with you! Because of all of that, I am hoping to make a post every day I'm on Thanksgiving holiday. No promises, but I'm going to try to get caught up :)

Okay, now I'll move on to telling you 7 things about myself that you (probably) don't know:

I am a giant, enoromous sap. My husband calls me a Weeple. I have a few tears on my face right now because I'm watching an episode of Designing Women. I have cried at commercials, at blog posts, at What Not to Wear, at bad movies and good movies, at bad books and good books... I can't help it. I think my interpersonal intelligence is overdeveloped :)
During one summer in college, I had a job delivering drugs. I love saying that; it totally cracks me up. I really did, but it was nothing illegal - I delivered regular Rx orders (and special one-time orders) to nursing homes and other health care facilities. It was actually one of the best summer jobs I ever had - I spent most of the time driving around listening to the radio in between stops.
I hate seafood/fish. Except tuna - I do like canned tuna, tuna steaks, raw tuna... Otherwise, though, no thanks. I try it every now and again to make sure my tastes haven't changed, but so far, it just tastes gross to me.
I dated the same guy from the time I was 16 until I was 21. I was crazy about him and ignored our obvious incompatibilities. I was young, and stupid, and I got my heart broken. And it made me a better person and a better partner, despite the missed years of prime dating opportunities.
I eat a peanut butter and banana sandwich at least once a week (and three times so far this week). It's been my favorite sandwich for as long as I can remember and at least since I was 5. I prefer Jif Extra-Chunky and a perfectly ripe banana, just before it starts to go brown. The addition of honey to the concoction is also acceptable.
I have a not-so-secret but guilty love of La Femme Nikita. The TV show, not the movie. I mean, the movie is actually quite good, and I do like it, but that's not what I'm talking about - there's no embarrassment in that. The TV show is terrible, and I love it anyway.
I love kitsch and cult. Those awful, awful horror B-movies from the '50s and '60s? Love 'em. I got to see John Waters give a talk a few weeks ago - was enthralled. I once owned a pair of red velvet-covered cat-eye sunglasses with rhinestones on them. I seek out the weirdest Christmas music I can find and just revel in it (I get the song "Santa Claus Is a Black Man" stuck in my head all the time, all year round). I have been to Graceland and thought it was loads of fun. My family sneaks pink flamingos onto one another's property as a joke. I don't decorate with it - I'd call our home decorating style "classic eclectic library" - but I do adore the weird and wonderful.

Thanks, ya'll! I'll try to get a review to you tomorrow.

Lottery

2009-11-11T22:04:00.000-05:00

Now that my book club has met to discuss this book, I can write about it. I picked up Lottery on the cheap from the Green Valley Book Fair a few months ago. It's about Perry, a man who is NOT retarded, he is just slow. Perry lives with his grandmother, who has raised him and homeschooled him. They love each other and they understand each other. Perry works a job he really enjoys at the fishing shop down the street from his house with his boss, Gary, who appreciates his hard-working attitude, and his best friend, Keith, who has never treated Perry any differently than he treats anyone else. Perry's life isn't perfect; he is constantly made uncomfortable when people get angry or violent, and he gets upset when people treat him as though he's retarded. His brothers make him call them his cousins, his father ran off to who knows where when he was a child, his mother only comes around when she wants something, and his beloved grandfather, who taught him everything there is to know about boats, died a few years ago. On top of all of that, he's in love with Cherry, the cashier at the convenience store he frequents, but he can't tell her. Still, he's pretty happy.

Then his grandmother dies. His cousin-brothers and his mother swoop in, kick him out of his house, sell it and give him his share - all of $500, according to them. Gary lets him move into an apartment over the store, which Perry thinks is pretty cool. He misses his Gram, but he still hears her voice in sticky situations, and he still does his five words a day, and he still buys a lottery ticket every week just like they used to do together. Then a funny thing happens: Perry wins the lottery. The big jackpot. His cousin-brothers and his mother, who make him very uncomfortable, keep coming around, talking about his Power and how he needs to give it to them. And things change - some things for the good, some for the bad.

I really liked this book. It was a little bit of a pat, happy ending - but sometimes I really want a happy ending. And in this book, I really wanted a happy ending. I thought Patricia Wood nailed the voice of Perry. It was very believeable to me, and I liked Perry very much. I also liked Keith and Gary and Gram, and while I was clearly meant to hate Perry's brothers and his mom, they were realistic characters to hate - I know too many people like them. I'm even related to some, too. I definitely thought this was a worthwhile read. 4 of 5 stars.

No time to review, but I'm in love with The Nook!

2009-10-27T17:24:00.002-04:00

Skipping the book review for today. I’m running a conference in Philadelphia this week, which leaves me with not much time for writing. However. I do want to offer a short rant about how absolutely ENTRANCED I am by Barnes & Nobles’ new e-reader, The Nook. If you haven’t seen much information on this thing yet, go take a virtual tour of it. It is almost everything I could want in an e-reader. It might be enough for me to buy it. I will definitely be going to touch and feel one at a B&N near me when they are released at the end of November. They have wireless downloading and free 3G like the Kindle, coupled with the ability to expand the memory with an SD card. There is also a limited lending feature where you can lend books to people for 14 days (if the publisher gives permission to do so) to anyone for a multitude of devices – not just The Nook. The things I’d like it to do that it doesn’t: have a more flexible lending feature (which no other e-reader does at all, so it’s hard to complain), allow access to Word documents, and have a full-color screen for reading comics/graphic novels (which would admittedly reduce the battery life significantly, so I guess what I really want is color e-ink!). But I absolutely believe this is the best e-reader that has been marketed so far, and I am more excited about it than I expected I ever would be about any e-reader. And it’s not just me, either – Gizmodo published this article about the eight reasons The Nook rocks. I wish B&N would send me a free one to review on this site!

If You Can Get It for Free, the Recipes are Pretty Good...

2009-10-20T21:35:00.000-04:00

I did read another book between The Concrete Blonde and this one - Lottery by Patricia Wood - but my book club is discussing that book at our November meeting and I don't want to spoil my contributions to the discussion because I know some of my club-mates read my blog. I'll review it after our November meeting :)

So, my curiosity was peaked about this book, French Women Don't Get Fat, a long time ago when I actually still watched The Today Show and I saw Katie Couric interview the author. I thought, That's a good point. French women really do eat bread and cheese and chocolate and drink lots of wine, but they are almost all thin and well-dressed and adorable. I finally scored a copy on BookMooch and then it languished in my to-read pile for months before I was finally in the mood to pick it up and read it.

Mireille Guiliano, the author, claims that she learned the science behind what most French women do naturally because she gained a significant amount of weight in her youth as a result of studying abroad in America and eating lots of processed food there, then coming home and going to university in France and eating lots of pastry. Her mother sent their family doctor to visit her and he kindly helped her remember the way to be a slender French woman. See, she's trying to identify with her primarily American audience by saying, "I know, I understand, I've been there - America made me fat too; it's not your fault but I can teach you better!"

Unfortunately, she doesn't seem to realize how condescending this is. And that pretty much sums up my feelings about the book. She doesn't say anything revolutionary. Apart from the recommendation for a cleansing weekend of eating nothing but Magical Leek Soup (her words, not mine) to kick-off your reconditioning, and her weird pushiness to eat yogurt all the time, this book largely gives average, common sense advice. Eat a balanced diet. Eat lots of fruits and vegetables. Eat bread and sweets and drink alcohol in moderation. Eat more fresh and fewer processed foods. Get your body moving regularly. Half the time I was rolling my eyes saying, "DUH. I know that already." And the other half of the time I was bristling from the condescension inherit in her stories. She tells these stories about American women she knew and befriended and taught these "French" secrets, and how they had miraculous weight loss and became happy and fulfilled! Hooray! The French have all the answers! Seriously, I know a number of French people who I like very much, who are good, kind, sweet, normal people. This lady, however, comes off as your stereotypical self-righteous Parisienne snob.

The redeeming part of the book is the recipes. She gives lots and lots of recipes. Most of them are pretty easy, and every one that I've tried so far is delicious. I have started making a version of her Baby Blueberry Smoothie for breakfast some mornings, and I love it. I've dog-eared about 25 recipes in the book that I want to try. So I say that if you stumble across this in the bargain bin and are interested in easy authentic French recipes, pick it up. If you get it for free, it's worth it for one or two recipes alone. Just don't read the rest of the book - it's not worth it. Flip straight to the recipes and enjoy those without subjecting yourself to the condescending attitude.

When You Can't Identify with the Main Character...

2009-10-13T22:06:00.002-04:00

Hoo-boy. It's been a while. I know. I've added the blog to my Tuesday to-do list, so hopefully once a week I will really, truly be here, giving you news and reviews and exposing you to fun stuff.

So. First things first. You may have heard something lately about the FCC cracking down on book bloggers. No, I'm not kidding. Apparently, there is some rampant problem with publishers *gasp* giving bloggers copies of their books for free, to read and review, and the bloggers not stating that they got a free book for this purpose. Can you say YAWN?! Seriously? Do our governmental agencies have so little to do that THIS is a major concern? Because I can think of a thing or two that they might do instead. So here's my disclaimer: I have not ever received a free book from a publisher. Ever. For any purpose. And I don't anticipate getting one in the future. With that, I'll jump down from the soapbox.

Okay. I read this book months ago, but I'm going to do my best. The Concrete Blonde by Michael Connelly is a book in his series of mysteries about Detective Harry Bosch. I picked this up because an author I adore recommended it as one of her favorite mystery series, and this her favorite of the series. I am a mystery lover, so I immediately put it on the to-read list.

The premise is that Harry was on a case a long time ago - something like 9 years ago - that was a serial killer case. And he shot and killed a guy who he had good reason to believe was the killer in a situation where he thought the guy was reaching for a gun. Turns out he was reaching for a toupee, but Harry didn't know that until after he had shot him. After the kill, though, all evidence pointed to the fact that he still shot the right guy - the scary Dollmaker serial killer. The guy's family, however, has now brought a civil suit against him for wrongful death. Meanwhile, bodies have started turning up again bearing the marks of the Dollmaker killings. Harry is caught in a courtroom drama combined with a fear that maybe he did somehow, despite the evidence, get the wrong guy and the Dollmaker is really still out there.

Sounds exciting. Didn't really grab me. There are a lot of fans of this series - a LOT - and I am no stranger to the mass market paperback series in the mystery section. I kinda like a lot of them. But this one...was fine. It wasn't bad, but I never bonded with the main character. I was also driven nearly insane by Connelly's habit of "recycling" famous people's names in his characters - something that I'm sure fans find cute, but Heironymous Bosch is already a famous, real-life 15th century Dutch painter. He doesn't also need to be a fictional LA cop in Connelly's books. John Locke also makes an appearance as a fictional psychologist specializing in serial killers and sex crimes. I prefer the real John Locke, the philosopher. And every time I read these names, I was jolted out of the story in annoyance.

I wouldn't discourage anyone from reading this book. The story is well-written and well-crafted; it had me guessing as to whodunnit until near the big reveal. I just...did not identify with Bosch. And have no desire to read more about his life. Maybe that's just a thing with me, but them's my two cents.

A Funny Name and an Excellent Story

2009-08-28T21:52:00.000-04:00

Well, crap. I just wrote a whole, long beautiful review of this and it DISAPPEARED. For no apparent reason. I'm mad and sad at the same time. But I'll try to recreate to the best of my ability...

This is an incredible book. And I don't mean, "incredible for a comic book." While it is a graphic novel, Asterios Polyp is a better book than 80% of the prose books I've ever read in my life.

It's a fairly simple story when boiled down to its basics. A man, our hero Asterios, has a broken heart, and it's really his own fault. So he's depressed and miserable. Then he goes through some mental and spiritual rejuvenation in a small town where he happens to get off the bus. And then he goes and tries to get back his girl.

The genius of the book is in its construction. Everything is laid out in dualities. The book uses two main colors, as you can see from the cover image. The story is told in segments alternating between the present and the past. The narrator is not Asterios himself, but his twin brother Ignazio - who died at birth. And there is imbedded in the story some literal discussion of duality in architecture and design, in art, in science, in human nature, in the universe. Layered on top of all of this duality is the Greek tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice, acted out in the persons of Asterios and his love, Hana, and also making a literal appearance in the story when Hana becomes involved in an actual production of Orpheus, the musical. Add to all of this some insights into the nature of architecture and design, told in a story constructed in an architectural manner and through artwork that is the epitome of good design, and you have a pretty complexly constructed book.

That brings me to the art. The very colors used in each scene are weighted with meaning. In a book where even the colors have such significance, you can guess how important the rest of the artwork is. It's very modern - in a late-'50s/early-'60s kind of way - and very focused on high design. The lines used to draw the characters are frequently used to give the reader insight into their personalities, even when they are minor characters. I have never read a book where the art was so important to understanding the moods, personalities, even souls of the characters.

This book was just amazing. It touched my heart; it made me think; it made me laugh; it made me slow down and study the art; it's stayed with me for weeks. I want to read it at least 10 more times in my life. And I'd highly recommend anyone else do the same. I'd give it 6 of 5 stars if that were possible.

I Love a Character I Love to Hate!

2009-08-25T22:21:00.000-04:00

Man oh man. I wasn't expecting to enjoy this book as much as I did. I thought it would be just another mediocre chick lit book - which is honestly about the level of brain power I wanted to expend - and it didn't disappoint me in being an easy read. But it was so much more clever and well-written than I generally expect from the chick lit genre.

First a description (from Goodreads.com): Like the legendary London Bridge, Diana Lively has been transplanted from England to the Arizona desert. Trained as an architect and top in her class, she makes dollhouses. Widowed at a young age, she distrusted people who were kind to her, and married Ted, the one man who wasn't. Maybe it's a good thing that Diana Lively's life is suddenly out of her control. A brash American billionaire wants to put up a King Arthur Theme Park smack in the middle of the Arizona desert. With dollar signs dancing in its head, Oxford University is only too happy to send Ted Lively, their resident Arthurian expert, to consult on the project. There, in the most unlikely place, in the most surprising ways, Diana is about to discover that the happiness she thought was lost forever can shower down on her again, can flood her dry life like a lake in the desert, and make it bloom. Oh, and Ted. Ted is about to discover that there is justice in the world...

I felt so much for Diana. I couldn't identify with her necessarily - I don't have kids, haven't given everything up for my kids, didn't lose my first husband and love of my life, didn't marry a douchebag as a second husband. But I felt her SPIRIT in there, and I was just rooting for her the whole time to come out and be herself! And her son, Humphrey - man was I cheering for that kid. He was really, honestly too good to be true, but I loved him anyway.

And then there was Ted, her jackass husband. It was so much fun to HATE him. He was a character written expressly to BE hated, and Curran makes it so much fun to do so. I have rarely had a better time watching such carefully laid evil plans unravel...

So, again - easy on the brain, fast to get through, totally chick lit, but a higher quality than what you might expect. And such a good time to read. 5 stars for this one just because I had a blast reading it!

Hypocrite on a Book Blog

2009-08-25T21:57:00.000-04:00

Bad blogger! Bad, bad!! I am so far behind on reviews - I have at least four more books to review after this one, maybe five. I might get through two tonight...maybe.

I'll kick it off with my book club's August selection, Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress by Susan Jane Gilman. This is a reasonably amusing and entertaining memoir - there were moments that had me clutching my gut with laughter. Unfortunately, there were also moments that had my eyes rolling over some of her preteen and teen antics.

I did enjoy reading about her bucking against her hippie upraising. Her parents are quite the individuals... I died over the guy who threw out his back trying to do the stupid "how many hippies can we fit in a VW Bug" stunt, and the whole chapter about her mom trying to force the entire family to learn meditation was awesome. Her reflections on anti-racism being pushed down her and her classmates throats when she lived in an extremely multicultural neighborhood was interesting. But DEAR GOD. The chapters on her high school years were PAINFUL. She was selfish and an idiot. As we all were as teenagers. She had nothing meaningful to contribute to the world from that part of her life, IMHO.

After she gets out of college, though, and gets her first journalism job for a Jewish newspaper, the story picks up again. I love love love LOVED the chapter about how she writes a piece about gay and lesbian rabbis, trying to push the buttons of her conservative readership and do something interesting to her at the same time, and then starts getting calls. From Jewish mothers. Who want her to date their daughters. Because she seems like a good Jewish girl, just perfect for their good Jewish girls. And she doesn't know how to tell them that she's actually straight. HA! And then her wedding planning chapter, from which the book takes its name, was a bit of a let down for me. It elicited a kind of a DUH reaction from me.

So, good, then blah, then really good, then meh. That's how I feel about the book. 3.5 of 5 stars, maybe up to a 4 if you really like memoirs (as I do).

The. Best. Site. EVER.

2009-08-11T07:58:00.003-04:00

DUDES. I know it's been a long time since I've posted. I have three books I need to review for you, and I'll get to them soon, I promise. But I absolutely could not delay sharing this website with you: http://www.bookdaily.com/. It is, clearly, the best website of all time.

You sign up, FOR FREE. You verify your account, and then you add books you want to sample to your "shelf." Every day, this website, this beautiful, awesome, lovely website, sends you the first chapter of the book. FOR FREE.

If you ask me why this is awesome, I am going to ask you why you bother calling yourself a reader. I have, as I'm sure you have, been disappointed by more than one book in my life. I've gotten all excited and geared up to read what I think will be a fantastic story, only to hate the writing style or feel the characters are flat or the pace is too slow or some combination of these and many other problems. I will admit that reading the first chapter is not always a fair assessment of how you'll feel about a book at the end, but it definitely gives you an idea of whether you're excited enough to buy it or if you just want to check it out of the library or just wait until your friend who buys every book offers to loan it to you...or just never read it at all, period. With hundreds of books on my wishlist, the ability to narrow it down to what will really grab me is much desired.

Plus, don't you just love it when an author you love has the first chapter of their next serial book in the back of the book you're reading? I love that! This is like having that for lots and lots and lots of books. They don't have every book ever. I searched for some titles that did not pop up in the search results. But they have LOTS. And if you don't have books on your shelf, they'll send you a link to their book of the day. Generally, I find all of this to be awesome.

A Review and a Meme

2009-07-16T21:36:00.008-04:00

I am a lazy and tired beast lately. I haven't been up to snuff in posting on ye olde weblog. I will try to improve, internet friends, I will. For now though, a review of a monster of a book I recently finished: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson and then a meme from my favorite author of all time (who I am trying to get to do an e-mail interview with me), Joshilyn Jackson.

I have brought this book up about a hundred times in conversation since I finished it two weeks ago. I think my husband is getting tired of my referencing it! It took me a long time to get through it, but I'm so glad I read it. Interesting and funny and frankly just a little bizarre and completely fascinating.

Bryson took it upon himself to write in plain language about a pretty long story - that is, the history of the universe as we know it (or as we don't know it in some cases). He begins quite literally with the birth of the universe. Of course, no human being can really know how the universe began, but Bryson introduces the reader to a lot of theories, both from the past and the present, some based on logic and good sense and some based on...well, rather hair-brained ideas. He takes us through the weights and measurements of the universe and then our planet in particular, and then into the very basis for everything in the universe. He moves through atoms and into molecules and back into subatomic particles and some quantum and particle physics. Then he goes a bit bigger to discuss earth science and then biology, beginning with how life began on this planet. We move through theories of evolution and some really interesting arguments about classifying animal and plant life - and life that seems to fit in no category but its own. He wraps up with the evolution of man from an ape-like creature into...well, the slightly more articulate and less hairy ape-like creatures that constitute modern man.

All along the way, Bryson discusses many theories for everything and exposes the reader the wacky lives of our most important historical scientists and the feuds they had amongst themselves. I got a little bogged down in the physics section, I admit - physics has never been something I understood or was interested in very much - but the interplanetary topics and the earth science and biology topics totally rocked and fascinated me. I learned so much - I kinda feel like this should be a high school science textbook! I would have learned a lot more in high school science if it had been. Totally awesome, and now I'm seeking out more Bryson books to read. Highly recommended!

Okay - now for the meme! Joss posted over on her blog today, Faster than Kudzu, about how several people have told her she looks like Katy Perry, and she thinks they're on crack but is flattered nonetheless. She also posted how someone once told her that she looked like Rod Stewart and she almost murdered them. Cheerfully. She put photos of herself and all of these people on her blog for compare/contrast purposes, and then dared her readers to do the same. I for one am up for it!

I have been most frequently compared to Drew Barrymore. Like most people when someone says they look like a celebrity, I think these people are smoking something special and mind-altering, but I like Drew and I'm flattered by the comparison. Here we are, side by side, me on the left and Drew on the right (in case you wouldn't recognize Drew Barrymore or something):

<---ME

DREW BARRYMORE--->

See the difference? We look nothing alike. At all.

Okay. So, she did also ask for the least flattering comparison. Well, I've never had anyone personally compare me to a celebrity that I was appalled by, but I have done that online thing where you upload your picture and it's supposed to analyze your face and tell you what celebrity you look like? Yeah, that thing pissed me off. It told me I look like this:

Why, yes. Yes, that is Malcolm in the Middle. Grrrr. And on that note...g'night, folks!

Stalled Out

2009-06-28T09:12:00.003-04:00

I'm having a problem lately. I think it has to do with over-committment to very large books. See, I started a group read of George Eliot's classic Middlemarch with the gang over at the Fill-in-the-Gaps Project, and then I also decided to finish A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson for my real-life book club, and to join Infinite Summer, an internet group committed to reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest over the course of the summer. So where am I? Playing on the computer and not reading :)

I have missed the deadlines for Middlemarch already - everyone was supposed to be finished with it this past Monday, and I'm only in the 6th of 8 books. I like the book and I want to finish it, but I've been beating myself up a little bit that I got so far behind and didn't catch up in time for the big finale. It's on the back burner for a bit now, though, because I haven't missed the deadlines for the other two books yet, so I need to turn on the heat to get on schedule with those!

For our July meeting, my book club decided that we'd all read different books by the same author and then discuss the author as a whole. Bill Bryson won the vote for which author, and that was fine with me because I was already 1/3 of the way through A Short History of Nearly Everything and figured that might give me the motivation I needed to finish. And I have read a LOT more of it...but I'm still only halfway through at this point. It's just so friggin' long!! I read it for about three hours on a recent trans-Atlantic flight, and I felt like I got nowhere. I'm supposed to have that finished by a week from Tuesday, July 7.

And then there's Infinite Jest, which is a 1000+ page tome that, if you aren't familiar with it, has been lauded as a contemporary masterpiece, one of the greatest pieces of literature to come out of the current generation of writers, and further idealized because of the tragic suicide of the author, David Foster Wallace, last year. I've never read it, and it was on my Fill-in-the-Gaps list. A friend of mine told me about this organized internet movement to read it over the summer, so I figured I might as well join up. I haven't even cracked it yet. The deadline for the first 63 pages was this past Friday, and the next deadline is tomorrow, and I have not even started.

The moral of that story is that I'm a little burned out and overwhelmed. I took on too many hefty committments at one time, and now all I want to do is read comic books. I am going to devote a significant portion of today to reading these books, though, because I don't like reading to feel like a chore, something hanging over my head, and if I make some headway and get a little caught up, it will be better. I am going to tell you soon, though, about the comic I've been reading recently, Scalped, because it's fascinating. But that's a tale for another day. Off to read some gigantic books.

Chick Lit Worth Checking Out of the Library If Your Brain Needs a Break

2009-06-13T17:45:00.002-04:00

Wanda, the heroine of Time Off for Good Behavior, just can't seem to catch a break. She crashes through a witness box when she tries to take a swing at the defense attorney of the jerks who caused her office building to blow up (landing her in the hospital with severe burns), hits her head on the floor and ends up in the hospital again in a "light coma." She gets fired for missing too much work - because she was in a coma - and she falls in love with the attorney she hires to threaten her former employee for firing her under such terrible circumstances. And then her psychotic and abusive ex-husband - who has tried to kill her before - tells her he's going to kill her, with all signs indicating that he's headed straight to her town. All this and she has a phantom tune that keeps playing in her head that no one else can hear.

Because of all of this, or maybe in spite of it, she befriends a straight-talking therapist who helps her define what she needs to do in order to take back control of her life and, ultimately, prove to herself that she is good enough for the man she's fallen in love with. The reader learns a lot about all of the crap Wanda has been through - some of it her own fault, some of it not - and naturally pulls for her to get her shit together and come out on the other side as a grown-up who actually does something she likes for a living and likes who she is. Which, of course, she does.

I won't pretend that the story isn't a bit predictable and formulaic. But I enjoyed it nonetheless. I did get attached to Wanda as a character as well as some of the other secondary characters (particularly her friend Elizabeth's kids) and I got some catharsis. It was like watching a reasonably good Lifetime movie (I know, those are few and far between). Since I'm currently reading Middlemarch and A Short History of Nearly Everything with Infinite Jest in line to be next, I needed the mental break!

Meet Manny...

2009-06-03T21:23:00.004-04:00

Filled with lots of small, touching, embarrassing, outright hateful human moments, this book is not about a big picture. Last Night at the Lobster is all about the small stuff, and it celebrates that quiet awesomeness of the little guy, and also how he unfairly gets shafted time after time after time...and keeps on being a good, caring guy because that's just the way he is.

Manny is the general manager of a Red Lobster in Connecticut that is being closed down by the corporate headquarters. He and five employees get to move on to an Olive Garden in the next town (with a demotion for him to assistant manager), but at least they will have jobs. It's the last day the place is open, and it's right before Christmas, and a bad snowstorm hits. The whole story is about the history and loyalty and petty grievances of Manny and his crew as he struggles to keep them together and keep the place open until closing time, despite the worsening weather outside.

It's really a very quiet story, and that's why it's wonderful. It's also a really quick read - just a couple of hours, I'd say - and it's well worth the time investment just to meet Manny and get to be his friend for a little while.

My Father Bleeds History, and Here My Troubles Began

2009-06-03T20:59:00.003-04:00

Maus is a two-volume comic book memoir written by the son of Auschwitz survivors, about their story of survival and also the author's story of his somewhat difficult relationship with his dad. (An aside here - I had a hard time coming up with that first part, because I didn't want to say "graphic novel" [it's not a novel] and "graphic memoir" sounds like a Penthouse exclusive, and "comic book memoir" sounds kind of dumb, but it's the best I've got. ) As the inside flap of the book says, it's a story about the Holocaust and also a story about those who survived the survivors.

We've all seen/heard/read a million stories about the Holocaust at this point. It's horrible and heart-breaking every time. It never gets easier to witness in any way, largely I think because most people have a very difficult time imagining how anyone could treat another person in that way. People have treated other humans as animals or worse throughout history, and it still goes on today (which is partly why the stories are still so relevant and raw), so I know the attitude is certainly within the human capacity...but I don't understand it. Spiegelman ups the ante a little by depicting the characters as animals already - the Jews are mice, the Nazis are cats, the Poles are pigs, the French are frogs, the Americans are dogs, etc. It eliminates the hackneyed cliche of "treating people like animals" and it also makes you view the story with fresh eyes because it's told a little differently than usual.

As for style, I thought Spiegelman's style of story-telling was very similar to that of Harvey Pekar (of American Splendor fame), which is to say it's very common man, it's a little self-deprecating at times, it breaks the fourth wall on occasion...and something else intangible that I can't describe. I love Pekar's work, and I love this as well. It's hard to choose which parts of the books I liked most. The moments between the author and his father in the present are so realistic, rotating among frustration/anger at his father's irritating habits and attempts at guilt/manipulation, and worry/tenderness over his father's advancing age and physical/mental deterioration, and admiration for the strength and ingenuity his father had in order to survive the Holocaust.

On the other hand, the historical parts about Vladek and Anja in Poland and the many hells they went through to come out again alive and to find each other were so poignant and gripping - those were the parts that were impossible to put down. I'm still affected by this, two days after I finished the books - I have tears in my eyes as I type, thinking about all the people they lost, including their first son, and all the terrible things they saw, and what an unbelievable miracle it was that they both survived and found each other after they earned their freedom (because they were separated in Auschwitz and didn't see one another or hear from one another for a long time).

It's an incredibly moving story told in a somewhat unconventional manner. It has won several awards and a great deal of recognition. All well-deserved, in my opinion.

Infinite Summer

2009-05-30T23:06:00.001-04:00

I know that I'm probably not the only one with Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace on my to-read list. I'm probably also not the only one intimidated by the modern-day behemoth. Well, some folks have started an internet collaboration to read the book over the summer. They're calling it Infinite Summer. It starts on June 21 and breaks the book up into about 75 pages a week until around September 21 or so. Just thought some of you might be interested - their web page is http://infinitesummer.org/ and they have a group going on Facebook too. I haven't decided yet if I'm going to participate, but I'm thinking about it...

How exactly does one scientifically study ghosts? Now I know...

2009-05-30T22:28:00.002-04:00

I enjoyed Mary Roach's Spook a great deal more than I did her first book, Stiff. Stiff was pretty good. I did learn some things about what really happens to your body when you donate it to science and various ways you can request disposal of your remains when I thought the only options were a regular burial or cremation. But the book wandered a bit and lost me at times. This was not the case with Spook.

Perhaps it was the subject matter - I am inherently more interested in life after death and ghosts than I am in cadavers. But I also think Roach learned a lot about writing a book the first time that she was able to apply this time. Her writing in Spook is tighter; the flow from chapter to chapter is better. Her sense of humor even seems sharper. She's no stranger to writing - she's been a journalist for a number of years, but writing a book is quite different from writing an article for a newspaper or magazine, and I think she's honed her craft in the second book.

Spook is about, as I have implied, life after death. Specifically, it's about the scientific study of life after death. Who knew that my very own Charlottesville is a hotbed of paranormal research at the University of Virginia? Who knew that a number of historically brilliant scientific minds had projects to try and communicate with the dead? Who knew that electromagnetic fields or strong (but too low to hear) sound waves could be responsible for the creepy-crawlies we get when we think something ghosty could be going on? I thought the book was fascinating, and I liked her conclusion very much. Science has not yet proved any sort of afterlife one way or the other - neither that it exists or that it doesn't. After studying the research and talking to lots of scientists, Roach says that the only conclusion she can come to is: who knows? But, as she points out, it's no fun to go to a graveyard with a non-believer.

Report from the Green Valley Book Fair!

2009-05-22T20:35:00.004-04:00

Today, I took a little me time. I left work early and drove 45 minutes out to the Green Valley Book Fair. I wrote about the Book Fair a couple of weeks ago, but this is the first chance I had to get out there. I bought about 15 books, all of which cost me between $2.50 and $5.00, for a grand total of $52.50. If I had bought the same books today on Amazon.com, I would have paid $186.16 for them (I typed the ISBNs into Amazon to make sure I was price-checking the same editions). So - big savings! I'm quite pleased.

First, some observations. The place is in the middle of nowhere, on farm land between Staunton and Harrisonburg. Right after you turn into the driveway, the road you were driving on turns into a gravel road. Even so, it's really only a few minutes off the interstate, so it's not at all complicated to find. They do try to place the books by category, and they succeed in this for the most part, but I found that the fiction section was TOO divided. I ended up looking at pretty much every book in the fiction section because I didn't want to miss something I was looking for and I wasn't sure exactly which subdivision it would be in. I had to laugh because, on the same aisle, two books with "suspicious" titles had been turned around so that the spine faced the back of the shelf and you couldn't see what it was. I had visions of a 50-year-old self-righteous mom deciding they were too risque for the kids to read. I turned them back around so you could see them, of course (for the curious, the titles were Confessions of a Romantic Pornographer and Hideous Kinky).

Book sections I saw while there: science fiction, mystery, popular fiction, gay/lesbian fiction, assorted romance fiction categories (regular, contemporary, erotic, paranormal, etc.), African American fiction, Christian fiction, historical fiction, bestsellers, world literature, classic literature, 20th century literature, literary biographies, literary criticism, poetry, fiction anthologies, drama (including a whole separately labeled section for Shakespeare), manga, game books (like crosswords), reference, business, travel, self-help, personal finance, diet, cooking, crafts, gardening, history, science, a large children's section, and audiobooks. There may have been even more categories; those are just the ones I remember!

Okay, on to what everyone's been waiting for - a list of the books I bought. Some of these were for the Fill-in-the-Gaps project, and some were purely for entertainment.

A Company of Three by Varley O'Connor
Lottery by Patricia Wood
The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell (I would have bought Mr. Bridge too, but they didn't have that one)
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
The Night Villa by Carol Goodman
If Andy Warhol Had a Girlfriend by Alison Pace
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
My Ántonia by Willa Cather
Time Off for Good Behavior by Lani Diane Rich
Diana Lively Is Falling Down by Sheila Curran
The Next Big Thing by Johanna Edwards

My advice for those considering going themselves some time? Go early in their open window - they're usually only open for 2-3 weeks at a time, and a friend of mine told me that near the end, everything is really picked over and the good stuff is gone. Next, give yourself plenty of time. I didn't think I'd need more than an hour, and I was there for almost two...and I didn't even see everything. There was a whole downstairs area that I didn't get a chance to go look at because I had to leave to come home. Set a budget, bring a calculator, and make sure you stick to your budget. Also, if you have a wishlist of books you want, bring a list with you so you don't stand there thinking, "Was this book I wanted? I can't remember if it was called The Little Chair or The Little Table."

And that's all I've got. Their dates for the rest of this year are June 27 - July 12, August 22 - September 7, October 10 - 25, and November 27 - December 13. Anybody else been before? Do you want to go now?

Let's not call it a memoir...

2009-05-12T19:31:00.003-04:00

I'm going to throw out there my perfectly honest gut assessment: this book is funny, disturbing, disgusting, and literally unbelievable. I do imagine that Burroughs had a dysfunctional childhood, and that some of the things that happened to and around him probably left deep emotional scars. I don't, however, believe for a second that every word of this book is truth. It rings of over-embellishment - there's just too much crazy to be real. If you're fascinated by crazy the way I am, though, you just might be highly entertained.

I'm a closet psychology student. I seriously considered a double major in English and psychology when I was in college until my advisor pointed out that I was also in the School of Education trying to get my teaching license, and if I did all three I'd probably be there for five or more years. So I dropped psych, but I still loved it. I'm utterly fascinated by mental illness, even my own minor anxieties and obssessions. And this book...well, let's say I got my fill of psychological studies for a while.

The sorta memoir, sorta novel (the author and his publisher have agreed, in response to a lawsuit from the family represented by the Finches in the book, to call it a "book" and not a "memoir" any more), focuses on Augusten Burroughs' life growing up in Massachusetts. His mother is completely insane at times - we're talking takes baths in broken glass crazy - and completely self-obssessed the rest of the time (focusing solely on writing poetry and exploring her sexuality instead of taking any responsibility for her son). His parents divorce early in his life, and his father essentially never talks to him again. His mother sends him off to live with her psychiatrist's family, which is borderline psychotic and unquestionably unhealthy and disgusting. And riotous (and disturbing) adventures ensue.

The book is not for the faint of heart. There are several explicit descriptions of his first sexual experiences with a man 20 years his elder, not to mention the nasty things he describes his adopted family doing (such as drying the patriarch's bowel movements in the sun and studying them as messages from God). Despite the insanity and grossness, the book manages to be bitterly hilarious at the same time. I am really glad that I didn't have to live through anything even approximating this book, and I'm sorry that anyone had a childhood that led them to write like this, but I was definitely held captive by the humor and the crazy.

Not So Spooky, but Good Fun!

2009-05-07T22:04:00.004-04:00

When it comes to fantasy and mythology, no one but no one living today can top Neil Gaiman. I have read a lot of his work and enjoyed it all. So I was excited when my book club picked The Graveyard Book. It's a tale of a boy (Nobody, or Bod for short) growing up in a graveyard, simple as that. Except he lives there because his entire family was murdered when he was a child and it's the only place he's safe from the man who killed them. He's being raised by ghosts and a creature that is neither living nor dead. He's been given the run of the graveyard, so he can see the ghosts and learn the ways of ghosts like Fading from notice of other people and Haunting and Passing through Objects.

All of these skills could be useful in hiding himself from the man called Jack who wants to kill him, but as he gets older and is told the reason for his confinement, he knows that he may want to kill Jack more than Jack wants to kill him.

Overall, I really liked this book. It was fun and entertaining and kept me interested the whole time. But I felt like a lot of the mythology that Gaiman created was unrealized in the story. I got a snippet of something cool and then it was dropped and gone. It could have been better if it had been longer and taken its time with many of the ideas he started in the book. The only other of his children's books I've read is Coraline, which I think is the superior. I feel like this book may have won the Newbery because someone felt he should have won it for Coraline and didn't, because I don't think The Graveyard Book is really at the Newbery level. But I still really enjoyed it and I'm a huge Gaiman fan!

And Pray Tell Why, but I Do Love to Eat...

2009-05-06T23:24:00.003-04:00

I was actually thinking this book would elicit 3-4 stars from me. I confess - I was a little jaded and maybe just a touch snobby, thinking a crazy popular bestseller of a book would not impress me. I read it only because a friend recommended it and I said I'd read it. Color me humbled. I thought it was awesome - 5 of 5 stars.

The memoir covers the period in the author's life after her divorce when she goes on a worldwide quest to rediscover herself and soothe her mind and heart. She divides the trip (and the book) into three parts - four months each in Italy, India and Indonesia. Her aim is to figure out how to enjoy the pleasure in life, and to be very spiritual, and how to balance the two. The book is structured like yogi prayer beads - 108 stories, divided into three sections, 36 stories in each section.

The section about Italy was crazy and awesome and funny and triumphant. She kicks her depression, makes tons of friends, eats an insane amount of food and learns to speak passably good Italian. It made me want to go live in Italy for a few months, not that it would take all that much convincing. The section about India was deeply revealing about her spiritual life and progress in her meditations. I don't know that yoga is the path to a relationship with God for me, but I don't think it was about that - it was about finding your own path, and her showing what her path looked like. The section in Indonesia was honestly the least interesting to me, but it's very important to the story because that's where she finds love and closure. And it's a really interesting look at Balinese culture, making me want to go to Bali someday!

Part travel guide, part memoir, all funny and touching and human and healing. I enjoyed this book a lot and plan to give it to my husband to read next.

Go get yourself some cheap books!

2009-05-05T22:08:00.002-04:00

A book club friend reminded me tonight that this weekend starts the next open window of the Green Valley Book Fair! If you are anywhere near Harrisonburg, Virginia or can get near there over the weekend when they're open sometime, you really ought to check it out. They're only open for 2-3 weeks about 5-6 times a year, but you can get amazing deals there. They have all sorts of books available at really steep discounts. A friend of mine went the last time they were open and bought about 20 books for less than $50, which is absolutely insane even compared to used bookstore prices. Seriously, go check it out!

Book Contest over at A Good Blog is Hard to Find!

2009-05-01T08:09:00.002-04:00

Mindy Friddle, author of the acclaimed debut novel The Garden Angel, has written her second book, The Secret Keepers, which was released this week. She blogged over at A Good Blog is Hard to Find with a contest imbedded in her post. Go read her post and find the contest and you can enter to win a signed hardback copy of The Secret Keepers. I read her first book and thought it was great; I'm very much looking forward to her new book!

A Smorgasbord of Reviews!

2009-04-27T14:03:00.010-04:00

I have been away for over a week, in San Diego running a long and tiring conference for work. Needless to say, when I'm working 13+ hours a day on my feet and getting up at 5:00 am, I don't really feel I have the time or the inclination for blogging. Fortunately, this only happens 2 or 3 times a year :)

Being away, however, does NOT mean that I haven't been reading my little heart out! After all, I did have many, many hours on airplanes and in airports to get to San Diego and back. Rather than doing these separately, I'm going to give you all three reviews below.

Coward by Ed Brubaker and Sean Philips

This is a fascinating crime story. A criminal known as much for his cowardice as for his talent and intelligence somehow lets himself get involved in a really messy heist that goes bad...and for the first time, he can't run away. The most interesting element of the story to me revolves around why our hero is known as a coward: he doesn't generally carry weapons, if something goes wrong he runs from the scene immediately, he always has a back-up plan to get himself out of any sticky situations. And that is what has caused his fellow hustlers and theives to label him a coward. In the end, though, he reveals that his so-called cowardice has a rather unexpected reason (as he tears to pieces everyone who caused the hell of the last several days, including himself). There are some touchy-feely moments with him and a dead buddy's wife (and her daughter), a bartender friend, a heroin junkie with Alzheimer's who raised him after his dad went to prison...but mostly, the story itself is fascinating and gripping and the art is BEAUTIFUL.

Bound South by Susan Rebecca White

I picked this book up after hearing the author read from it at the Virginia Festival of the Book. Her description of it at that reading felt like it was equally about three characters whose lives were all tied together, but really, I think this is Louise's story. Her daughter, Caroline, and her housekeeper's daughter, Missy, also have stories to be told during the book, but Louise is the tie that binds. She has the most chapters in the book written from her perspective, and she is the character who experiences the most real growth. So I'm going to talk about her last.

Missy's story is the most concise. She's a teenager living in a poor area outside of Atlanta. Her mom has been working for Louise Parker for as long as she can remember, and Louise is kind to her, like a second (wealthy) mother. Her dad abandoned them when she was a small child, and she has hoping for him to come back and have a relationship with her ever since. She finally gets the chance to meet him when she finds out he's starring in a Christian drama on public access out of North Carolina, and she goes on a road trip with Louise's son, Charles, to find him. She finds out the truth about her dad, so she can let him go, and also goes through an experience that will change her life forever.

Caroline is the rebellious wild child of the Parker family. She's the oldest child and has been openly defiant of her mother's proper Southern ladylike ideals since she was five years old. She won't eat, dress, talk, or act in any way befitting her heritage and stature. She and her mother are constantly battling over everything, until she gets caught in a compromising position with her teacher. Then she runs off to San Francisco with her teacher, and their relationship is remarkably improved by the distance. She explores her desires and passions, works in the local theatre community, gets in and out of a bad marriage, gains a lot of weight and finally ends up with someone suited to her. In other words, she grows up. And it's a nice growing up story, but not ground-breaking.

Then there is Louise. Bizarre, struggling, complicated, proper Louise. Her entire adult life has been structured around being a good wife and mother and a wonderful hostess and friend. She believes in being polite at all costs and serving delicious food. The one thing she does for herself is buy folk art. She doesn't care what anyone else thinks of the art she buys; she just buys what she responds to emotionally and intellectually. Her daughter moves out, her son announces he's gay, her husband shares that he thinks his twin brother who committed suicide while they were in college was gay, she turns her house into an art gallery a few times a month, she smokes weed for the first time with her daughter in California, she lets an artist take a photo of her lady parts...and she generally lets go and becomes herself. And becomes happy. Hers is by far the most detailed and interesting transformation.

I really enjoyed reading this book. I'm a total Southern lit junkie, as most of you know, and this is right up my alley.

The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers

Let me just say up-front that I read McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter when I was in 10th grade, for English class with the best English teacher I had ever, including in college. And I loved it. With all of my heart. I've read that book over and over, and I even wrote a curriculum unit on it when I was in college for secondary education. Interestingly, I haven't read that many of her other books. I got The Member of the Wedding for free off of BookMooch, and I decided to do this crazy Fill-in-the-Gaps Project around the same time, so I put the book on my list and knew I'd read it soon. So this is book #2 I've finished for Fill-in-the-Gaps.

I read this book almost entirely on the plane to San Diego. I was about 30 pages in when I got on the plane, and it was over 2 or 3 hours before I landed in CA. It's good to know her writing is always amazing. I adored this book. It's sad and touching and nostalgic and beautiful. Frankie (aka F. Jasmine) is a rough-and-tumble tomboy just entering puberty and feeling desperately alone. Her best friend has moved away, her other friends have all turned into teenagers and she's not ready to do that, her dad works all the time. She spends most of her summer with her dad's cook/maid and her six-year-old cousin. When her brother comes home from the military and brings his new bride-to-be to visit, she falls in love with them because they belong to each other. And she decides that she belongs with them to, that she'll finally not be lonely any more when she goes to their wedding and they will of course take her with them after they're married.

Ninety percent of this book takes place the week before the wedding happens. Not a lot happens as far as action, but a lot happens in Frankie during this week. Her decision to grow up and to belong somewhere, and the actions she takes to make it happen, and her anticipation of the wedding are all so true emotionally, it's hard for me to believe that this could have been written by a grown-up and not by an 11-year-old. And then her utter heartbreak when her brother and his bride leave the wedding without her, and her determination to run away from home are stunning. It's such a simple tale, a child's story of the last vestiges of her childhood being stripped away from her. But it's just so real. And that is McCullers' true talent in all of her books I've read. She puts you through the same emotional paces as her characters, and you come up from the book gasping for air. I can't think of another writer who does this as viscerally, at least for me.

Book 1 for the Fill in the Gaps project - DONE!

2009-04-12T22:46:00.002-04:00

The Awakening is a classic. A wealthy Southern woman, entrapped in wealthy Southern Victorian conventions, decides to start living for herself and doing what she wants to do instead of what her husband wants her to do or what is expected by society. Not such a shocker these days, but wealthy Southern Victorian ladies just did not do such things. Being a proper feminist, the idea of this book was really quite appealing to me.

Unfortunately, I found the heroine to be utterly inconsiderate and self-involved. I mean, it's one thing to want to break free and build your own life; it's quite another to treat a husband who adores you with indifference and your kids who are sweet and adorable like utter crap. And then to kill yourself in the end because life is so boring if you can't have the man you want because he's too decent to want to cuckold your husband.

I still applaud the general sentiment behind the book, even though I wasn't crazy about the woman. In addition, it made me think about how it might still apply in modern times. I mean, we are clearly way more liberal in our thinking about who can marry whom and about marrying for love. But I still think in some wealthy, high-society circles, there is a lot of pressure to "marry well" and to mate with someone "appropriate" - love be damned. Not having come from any money whatsoever myself, I can't swear to that, but I certainly think that if you're a Kennedy, it will be severely frowned upon for you to marry a regular person.

I'm not sorry I read the book. And I certainly was not bored while reading it. But I won't read it again, and I did not at all like the main character. So take that for what it's worth.

"True Life" Crime Story

2009-04-05T16:24:00.002-04:00

I will say up-front that this was not my favorite Denise Mina book. I prefer her more straightforward mystery stories. This book is written in an interesting manner, though - it's the diary of a husband whose wife is currently in prison for murder. She is a psychiatrist, and she was accused and convicted of killing a serial killer she was treating while he was in prison. She swears she didn't do it, and her husband believes her. His diary reveals all of this thoughts - anger, confusion, changing his mind to think she did it and then back again - as he tries to discover the truth of what happened, searching for something that could set her free.

Mina sets it up as a true crime story - there is a foreword describing how she obtained the diary through perfectly legal means and has finally obtained permission to print it. This is all part of the story, of course, but it sets you up really well to believe it might be true. The best part about the story is how she really gets into the head of the husband writing the diary. It's totally believable, the ups and downs he goes through while trying to find the truth and decide what to do about it. It's very real and very human. And the ending was something I did not see coming. Well, I foresaw a part of it, but certainly not the biggest part of the twist. And I always respect an author who can do that for me, surprise me at the end.

I've read two other of Denise Mina's novels before this, and I think she is fabulous at taking a relatively ordinary paperback mystery kind of story and imbuing it with all kinds of character complexities and real human experience. She's fantastic, and I will keep reading her books!

I'm Scared: Project Fill-in-the-Gaps

2009-04-03T22:16:00.003-04:00

At the behest of MoonRat, over at Editorial Ass, I'm taking on a terrifying challenge. I scared of it, really and truly. You have no idea. It's called Project Fill-in-the-Gaps, and there's a whole blogging collective site for posting about this. I haven't gotten permission to post to it yet, but I have asked and will throw my list up there when permission is granted.

The challenge is this: to pick 100 books that you want to read, but somehow never get around to (because they're kinda hard and you're tired and there are other fun and easy things to read). Commit to reading at least 75% of them in the next five years. That's more than one great but tough book per month. I'm not sure I can do it, even with my voracious reading habits. But I do think it's a great idea because, honestly, without something like this, when will I ever be motivated to read these books?

It was actually hard for me to come up with 100 that I felt were worthy of a project called Fill-in-the-Gaps - at least, to come up with 100 that I was interested in reading and that I hadn't already read. As it is, eight of the books on my list are things I've read before, but I read them so long ago and I only read them once; I keep meaning to re-read them but meet the same problems as with the rest of the list that I've never read. I marked the ones I've read before with a little "(R)" in front of the titles.

So here's my list. They're in alpha order by author, but I probably won't read them in that order. I may post about my progress from time to time, but I'll give the nitty-gritty details on the Fill in the Gaps blog. If you're interested, join the fun!

Watership Down, Richard Adams
The Man with the Golden Arm, Nelson Algren
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen
(R) Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin
Continental Drift, Russell Banks
Peter Pan, J M Barrie
The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
(R) Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
The Good Earth, Pearl S Buck
Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan
Running with Scissors, Augusten Burroughs
Possession, A S Byatt
The Plague, Albert Camus
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
My Antonia, Willa Cather
The Awakening, Kate Chopin
Agatha Christie: An Autobiography, Agatha Christie
The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins
The Man in the High Castle, Philip K Dick
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Barrytown Trilogy, Roddy Doyle
Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser
The House of Sand and Fog, Andre Dubus III
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Spartacus, Howard Fast
Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
This Side of Paradise, F Scott Fitzgerald
A Room with a View, E M Forster
Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier
Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy
Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway
(R) The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
(R) Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
The Lottery, Shirley Jackson
We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson
Daisy Miller, Henry James
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling
Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri
The Road to Lichfield, Penelope Lively
At the Mountains of Madness, H P Lovecraft
Of Human Bondage, Somerset Maugham
Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
The Road, Cormac McCarthy
The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers
Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
Promethea, Alan Moore
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, Haruki Murakami
Invitation to a Beheading, Vladimir Nabokov
Everything that Rises Must Converge, Flannery O'Connor
Animal Farm, George Orwell
(R) Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton
The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
Six Characters in Search of an Author, Luigi Pirandello
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
The Wanderers, Richard Price
The Shipping News, E Annie Proulx
(R) The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
The Human Stain, Philip Roth
The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
Fair and Tender Ladies, Lee Smith
Maus, Art Spiegelman
Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne
Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Secret History, Donna Tartt
Short Stories of Mark Twain, Mark Twain
The Accidental Tourist, Anne Tyler
Burr, Gore Vidal
Myra Breckenridge/Myron, Gore Vidal
Candide, Voltaire
Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren
(R) A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
(R) A Curtain of Green, Eudora Welty
The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe
The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe
Orlando, Virginia Woolf
Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
The Book Thief, Mark Zusak

Belated Report from the Virginia Festival of the Book (Part 2)

2009-03-31T20:17:00.006-04:00

So yesterday, I offered a rather long and detailed recap of one session that I attended during the Virginia Festival of the Book. I was going to talk about the other one then too, but I found too much to say and decided to hold this part for another day.

Crime Wave: Historical Mysteries

Authors: Tasha Alexander (A Poisoned Season), Louis Bayard (The Black Tower), Cordelia Frances Biddle (Deception's Daughter), Katherine Neville (The Eight)

Here you find out my other major genre obssession, which is mystery/crime fiction. And in this case, I have just in the last two years discovered Louis Bayard's books and I think they're brilliant. So I was really excited to find out he was going to be in town to speak, and I grabbed a friend of mine who also loves him and we took off to see him. Unfortunately, when we got to the Omni Hotel, where the session was being held, there was no parking left! So we had to find street parking and walk, and we ended up being a little late...and Louis was the first speaker, so we didn't get to hear his whole talk. What we did hear was really interesting though - he was talking primarily about The Black Tower, which is all about the real (and rather mysterious) French detective Vidocq in post-Napoleonic France, trying to find the rumored Dauphin (or rightful heir to the throne of France, thought to be dead and then thought to possibly be alive).

So Louis talked about his research on the real Vidocq, which was utterly fascinating. He apparently pioneered many of our modern detective and forensic procedures. He was a former convict himself, but they couldn't keep him in prison (he escaped every one they put him in). And a lot of the people he recruited to be on his detective force were other former convicts because he said that only a criminal can possibly know how to catch a criminal. He was the first to insist on things like plastering footprints as evidence at a crime scene, and he envisioned fingerprinting hundreds of years before the technology existed to actually do it. So Louis was rightfully fascinated by this historical figure, and he decided to throw him into a mystery. And what mystery could be more fitting than Vidocq tracking down France's greatest monarchy mystery, on a level of the Anastasia mystery in Russia a couple hundred years later. Let me state now, I adored The Black Tower and I think you should all go read it now!

Then there were the other authors. Tasha Alexander writes a series of books about a Victorian woman detective, and she was a delightful speaker. She was perky and funny and honest. My favorite part of her talk was her story of how she realized she could read - that her mother was sitting next to her, reading to her, and all of a sudden, she realized she was further ahead on the page than her mom. I haven't read any of her books, but she was cute and I think anyone interested in a female Victorian detective story should check her out!

Then there was Cordelia Biddle, who I honestly wanted to take home with me. She was just outright hilarious. Her books are also set in the Victorian era, but specifically in Philadelphia, and they feature an heiress who seems to stumble into mysteries either through boredom or pure bad luck. I am definitely going to check out one of her books, because she was such a personality. She is from Philly, from an old family (yes, the Biddles), a member of whom had a feud with Andrew Jackson. She was quite entertaining talking about that particular altercation.

And finally, Katherine Neville, who talked a bit about her books and how they wandered all over time (which is not recommended for a historical mystery writer). Many of her books are apparently fairly intricate and strategic, set up like a big chess game in novel form. Her books sounded interesting, but I'll be honest - she herself was a bit off-putting to me. I thought that she seemed like she felt herself above the other authors on the stage with her, as though she was better than they. And my friend agreed, so I don't think it was just me. She's certainly been writing for longer than the other writers, and maybe her novels are just fantastic, but I was very put off by her stage presence. Because of that, I probably won't seek any of her books out. All in all, though, it was a great panel and I really enjoyed it!

A Summary of My Festival Experience

I really enjoyed the two panels I went to this year. I'd very much like to go to more next year if there are authors and topics I'm interested in! As for the exhibition, I had really hoped to hand out some of my freelance proofreading business cards to publishers there, but most of the tables seemed to be self-published authors trying to sell their books. All in all, I enjoyed the Festival entirely, and I even went on their website and offered to be a volunteer for next year. No one's contacted me yet, but I hope they do! And I'd encourage any of you in easy driving distance to Charlottesville to give it a try next year - it was a good time!

Belated Report from the Virginia Festival of the Book

2009-03-30T21:01:00.007-04:00

Well, I am a little over a week behind in telling you about my attendance at the Virginia Festival of the Book. I ended up only going to two events in the end, but they were both quite worthwhile!

Coming of Age in the South: Novels
Authors: Cary Holladay (A Fight in the Doctor's Office), Jayne Pupek (Tomato Girl), Susan White (Bound South)

I wanted to attend this session because I am a HUGE fan of Southern literature; I'd say it may be my very favorite genre. I'd never heard of Cary Holladay or Susan White, but I've read Jayne Pupek's Tomato Girl (and enjoyed it), plus she lives very near Charlottesville so I thought it might be fun to meet a local author who writes a genre so near and dear to my heart. Well, I got there about 15 minutes early, and it was packed. I ended up sitting on the floor for most of the session, until a little old lady got up during the Q&A, put her hand on my arm and whispered, "I've got to get out of here; I'm not from the South and these people are driving me crazy! You can have my seat." HA!

At the beginning, they made the announcement that Jayne would not be able to come because of a family emergency. I was a little disappointed, but they said that both of the other authors would be reading from their most recent books, and I knew that would be fun. Cary Holladay read first, part of a story that takes place really near to us, in Glen Allen, VA. She was quite entertaining - she had a quotation from a famous author or historical figure for nearly every situation, or an anecdote from her days at William & Mary (go Tribe!). Her book, A Fight in the Doctor's Office, was published because it won a contest, and the prize was getting published. She's had several books published, and they've all happened in some way like that - she said she's never had an agent or been published through the traditional process.

Anyway - her book was about a woman and her parents on a road trip to find her husband (who they all call The Topiary because he's shaped perfectly round and always wears a fuzzy green sweater) because he has run off somewhere. They don't know where and they don't know why. They stop in Glen Allen for a night because her mother has a guide book that is a thousand years old that paints it as a quaint, beautiful town, but by the time they arrive, it's kind of dusty and run-down and in the middle of nowhere (I think it takes place in the 1960s). And the heroine falls in love with a little deaf black child and refuses to leave Glen Allen with her parents. That's about all of the book we got to hear, but it was definitely an intriguing intro!

Then Susan White stepped up to read from her first novel, hot off the presses, Bound South. I felt some connection to her, too, because she got her MFA and started writing this book while at Hollins University in Roanoke, VA, which is near to my family and Hollins has figured in my life at several different times for various reasons. Not to mention the fact that when asked what album she'd choose as the soundtrack for her book, she said she would have to pick different albums for the three different characters from whose viewpoint she wrote the book, but for the first character...(and here she scrunched up her nose and peered inquiringly and doubtfully into the audience of 90% women over the age of 65)...had anybody heard of an album called Exile in Guyville by Liz Phair? And I wooted on the inside and smiled and half-raised my hand on the outside. Anyway, she's moved back home to Atlanta now, and most of this story takes place in Atlanta. She started reading and I could not stop laughing. She read a little bit from each of the three characters' perspectives, and I do not know where she came up with these people, but I was dying laughing.

The story seems to mainly be about the relationship and interaction among these three women. One is the daughter (about 12 years old) of a housekeeper who works for a wealthy Atlanta society lady. This little girl belongs to a fundamentalist evangelical Christian church, and that colors everything in her world view. The society lady her mom works for is main character #2, and she is the archetype of Southern society, where everything has to be proper and just so...though she has an odd modern art collection, we learn, including a portrait of Jesus in a sparkly blue ballgown. Madam Society's daughter is main character #3, and she is a wild child in hot pursuit of tearing down everything her mother believes is right and good. She's the character the Liz Phair album was meant to back up. All three came alive before my eyes with her reading, and I wanted desperately to know their story. So I bought her book and got her to sign it. I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but I will before long, I'm sure.

It was a great session, especially for someone as enamored of Southern lit as I am. I hope for more on this topic at next year's Festival!! And now it's late and this is long, so I'm going to stop. More on the other session I attended at the Festival next time!

Look! I'm a Book Maven!

2009-03-22T21:19:00.002-04:00

Most of you are not Facebook friends and so you haven't seen this yet. Therefore I'm going to share here too and you can take it and fill it in on your blog or Facebook or whatever. Sorry for being lazy tonight. I do have a report to share with you all on the Virginia Festival of the Book events that I attended - that's coming in the next couple of days! In the meantime...enjoy.

"Book Maven" Quiz

You have received this note because someone thinks you are a literary maven. Copy the questions into your own note, answer the questions, and tag any friends who would appreciate the quiz, including the person who sent you this. Don't bother trying to italicize your book titles.

1) What author do you own the most books by?
Unquestionably L.M. Montgomery. I have owned every book ever published that was written by her since I was probably 11 or so, and I still have them all. That's a lot of books; I doubt I'll ever own more than that by any other author just because I doubt any of my living favorites will be that prolific.

2) What book do you own the most copies of?
I don't *think* we own more than one copy of anything at the moment except two books that I have both as hardbacks and as audiobooks (Between, Georgia by Joshilyn Jackson and The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield).

3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?
Not really. If I had been in editing mode for some sort of textbook or nonfiction, I would have corrected them, but since most people talk and write that way in casual conversation, I'm used to it and it doesn't really bother me.

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
That's a hard one for me. Maybe Philip Marlowe (from Raymond Chandler's books)?

5) What book have you read the most times in your life (excluding picture books read to children; i.e., Goodnight Moon does not count)?
Definitely Little Women.

6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?
Again, definitely Little Women. That probably contributes significantly to #5's answer...

7) What is the worst book you've read in the past year?
The Land That Never Was: Sir Gregor Macgregor and the Most Audacious Fraud in History by David Sinclair. BO. RING. And that's even worse because it *should* have been an interesting story to tell.

8) What is the best book you've read in the past year?
Oooo, really tough call for me. I have five that I really really loved, and I'm not sure I can pick just one so I'll give you all five: The Black Tower (Louis Bayard), The Thirteenth Tale (Diane Setterfield), The Girl Who Stopped Swimming (Joshilyn Jackson), The Used World (Haven Kimmel) and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Michael Chabon).

9) If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be?
Yeesh, I dunno. Possibly just because I've been thinking about it lately and planning to re-read it, the comic book series Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis.

10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for Literature?
I have no idea. I don't even know who's won...ever, maybe. I tend to like some of the Booker and Pulitzer winners, though!

11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?
Playing in my mind right now: Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen.

12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?
Well, they're already making a movie of this and I'm terrified of what it's going to be like. I really think it might ruin the story. And that would be The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenneger.

13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.
I don't know that I've ever had a weird dream about a writer, book or literary character.

14) What is the most lowbrow book you've read as an adult?
I absolutely have to agree with Moon Rat on this one - Twilight. Hands down. Even though I enjoyed it.

15) What is the most difficult book you've ever read?
Anna Karenina. It was awesome, and I loved it, but it took a long time and a lot of concentration to get through.

16) What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you've seen?
That I've seen performed? Probably Taming of the Shrew, which is not a terribly obscure play, but there's not a whole lot of variety in performances (Romeo & Juliet, Midsummer Nights Dream, Hamlet, Macbeth; rinse, lather, repeat).

17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
Russians I suppose. I don't have a whole lot of experience with the Russians, but I have even less with the French!

18) Roth or Updike?
I'm about to start my first ever Updike book - we're reading The Witches of Eastwick for my book club, and I'll probably be starting it tomorrow or Monday. I've never read any Roth to date.

19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?
I'll pick Sedaris. I read one of his books for book club and I enjoyed it. I read Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work...(blah blah blah) and hated it; I thought it was incredibly and terribly pretentious.

20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?
Shakespeare.

21) Austen or Eliot?
Austen. I've actually never read Eliot (*ducks*).

22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
There are lots. There is not enough time in life to read everything. I answered a question similar to this a few months ago, and I said A Tale of Two Cities because I started it when I was about 12, hated it, never finished it and never went back to try to read it again. And it's Dickens - I really should have read it.

23) What is your favorite novel?
Dear God. How on earth am I supposed to pick a favorite? Crap. Well, for today, I'll pick Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides.

24) Play?
I saw Tom Stoppard's Arcadia in college once, and it was amazing. Fave Shakespeare is The Tempest, other faves are Hedda Gabler and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

25) Poem?
"Do Not Go Gently into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas.

26) Essay?
Er...not much on essays, so I'm inserting my favorite memoir here, which would be A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel.

27) Short Story?
I think The Killers by Hemingway.

28) Work of nonfiction?
Well, I'm still reading it, but I think A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson is awesome.

29) Who is your favorite writer?
Generally, my answer would be Hemingway.

30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
There are probably quite a few, but not the ones I like the most. Of the ones I've read, I'd say Dave Eggers. (Side note: My mom-in-law answered this with Nicholas Sparks and I went, "Ooo, I wish I'd said that!")

31) What is your desert island book?
Still Life with Woodpecker, Tom Robbins.

32) And... what are you reading right now?
The afore-mentioned Short History of Nearly Everything and Deception by Denise Mina.

Does It Just Elicit Strong Emotions, or Is It Emotional Manipulation?

2009-03-16T20:26:00.005-04:00

I will not pretend. This book is utterly depressing from about page 5. It's also hauntingly beautiful, emotionally raw and pretty much impossible to put down.
What's the absolute worst thing you can imagine happening to you? What if it happened on your watch, seemed to be your fault? What if you still had hope that you could fix it, for a whole year, even though everyone else had lost hope? What if, after even you had given up hope too, you managed to right everything after all? Would it be enough to heal all the damage?

Abby thinks things are going perfectly. She's met an amazing man, who has an amazing daughter, and she's fallen in love with both of them. She and Jake are getting married soon, and he's even entrusted her to take care of Emma by herself for a weekend while he's gone. They're walking on the beach on a particularly foggy morning. Abby looks away to take a picture of something, and when she looks back, Emma's gone.

The emotional torment and tense, frantic searching comprise the rest of the book. Honestly, for most of the book, nothing happens. But the author keeps you eagerly turning pages, wondering and hoping if Emma might be found on the next page or in the next chapter. It is absolutely emotional manipulation, and a part of me dislikes my feelings being manhandled in such a fashion. But I kept reading the book, and I had a good cry at the end of it. That's two books in a row that have sent me to tears at the end...

As much as I enjoyed it, I'm not sure if I want to read more of Michelle Richmond's books. This is the second one I've read, and both were beautifully written and pretty upsetting at the same time. I don't know if I like having my feelings manipulated in that way. At the same time, I guess all books try to do that to a certain extent, and the visceral reaction she causes in me means that she's doing something very well, very successfully.

How about you guys? Ever read a book like that, one that you know is engineered to make you feel the depths of sadness, hopelessness, anger, ? How do you feel about it? Is it okay for an author to do that if it's well done, or is there a difference between writing a good story that causes emotion and writing a good story to intentionally cause emotion?

Learn to Love Comics: Transmetropolitan

2009-03-13T19:38:00.004-04:00

Okay, okay - I suck a little bit. I've already broken my promise to update the blog at least weekly. I was out of town for a girls weekend at the beach last weekend, and spent most evenings this week trying to desperately to catch up on my editing jobs that I would normally have worked on over the weekend. Tonight, I am tired, but I am caught up! So I'm back. I won't promise that I won't lapse again, but I'll do my best to prevent it.

On to the business of blogging. I know a lot of avid readers, absolute lovers of books, who look down their noses at comic books and graphic novels. I read some comics when I was younger, but I didn't really get hooked until I met the man who is now my husband. He is what you would call a comics FAN. Not like the comics guy on The Simpsons, he's not pretentious and dorky like that, but he does love the art form. He's turned me on to quite a lot of comics, and I would like to try and spread the love. Because comics aren't all superheroes and manga; there are a lot of great stories and characters out there, just the same as prose novels, even better than some prose. So here begins your education on some of my favorite comics - one title at a time.

I'm going to start with a great comic I love that has lots of snarky irreverence and social commentary - a series called Transmetropolitan, written by Warren Ellis. The series hero is Spider Jerusalem, a kick-ass gonzo-style journalist in a sort of cyberpunk future. The series starts off with Spider living as a hermit with no technology, no hygiene and no clothes on a mountain outside the big city. The problem is that he has a two-book deal for books he has not written that were due probably years ago, a publisher breathing down his neck for them, and he's spent pretty much his entire advance and has no more cigarette money. So he girds his loins with hatred, shaves his head and beard, puts on clothes and heads back to the city to write some articles again.

With the help of his filthy assistants, Spider fights the good fight, trying to expose the corruption and stupidity that is threatening to ruin the entire world (sound at all familiar?), hating his fellow humans and hating that he has to save them from themselves, but unable to stop himself doing something about it because it drives him so insane. He exposes complete idiots who are mutilating themselves in ridiculous ways in the name of fashion; he successfully exposes severe cases of police brutality and stops a riot; and he takes on his biggest challenge of exposing the evil represented by the jackasses running for public office in the big election.

I like Transmetropolitan because I identify so much with Spider Jerusalem. He gets so frustrated by the way people around him refuse to think for themselves, instead letting the ever-present media tell them what to think and what to do. He hates them for their laziness and stupidity, and yet he really wants to believe they don't have to be that way. I feel that way on pretty much a daily basis. The social and cultural issues that Ellis tackles are extremely relevant to our current sociopolitical situation, as all good sci-fi should be. And on top of all of that, it's irreverent and hilarious and beautifully drawn. I highly recommend the series to anyone who revels in sharp, snarky societal commentary and/or is a Hunter S. Thomspon fan. I love this series, and I think it should be required reading in high schools to hopefully shock some of those kids out of the lazy complacency our society seems to prize these days.

Water, Water Everywhere, and Nothing Left to Drink

2009-03-04T20:18:00.003-05:00

I've finished two books in the last week, but I don't really feel like reviewing them. One was a collection of nonfiction essays on Chinese economics and one was a kind of boring chick lit book. I reviewed both over on Goodreads.com, but I don't really want to talk about them here.

I'm going through a thing right now where I have tons to read - at least 50 books on my nightstand that are waiting for me to pick them up and dive into them - but I don't want to read anything I have. I've started a beautifully written but rather depressing book, but it's hard to get motivated to read something sad right now, as much as I like the main character and the writing. I've got all sorts of things in my to-read pile: women's fiction, Southern lit, chick lit, mystery, nonfiction and memoirs, literary comedy, classics, comics, YA...nothing's doing it for me right now.

Does anybody else ever go through that? Tons to read, but nothing you feel like reading? Any recommendations to kick me out of my funk?

25 Most Influential Books of the Last 25 Years

2009-02-26T20:21:00.005-05:00

So, a someone on a listserv I'm on posted to us all about an article in the most recent Mental Floss magazine about the 25 most influential books of the last 25 years. The list is...interesting. I thought you guys would want to see it and possibly to discuss. Here's the list:

And The Band Played On - Randy Shilts
Maus - Art Spiegelman
Listening To Prozac - Peter D. Kramer
Thinking In Pictures - Temple Grandin
Nickel and Dimed - Barbara Ehrenreich
Into Thin Air - Jon Krakauer
The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho
The Easy Way To Stop Smoking - Allen Carr
A Perfect Spy - John le Carre
What Is The What - Dave Eggers
On Writing - Stephen King
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami
The Known World - Edward P. Jones
Harry Potter and The Sorceror's (Philosopher's) Stone - J.K. Rowling
How Proust Can Change Your Life - Alain de Botton
The Bonfire of the Vanities - Tom Wolfe
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
Beloved - Toni Morrison
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
Freakonomics - Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss
The Tipping Point - Malcolm Gladwell

I've read five of these, which is way fewer than I would have thought. For the curious, I've read Middlesex, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Beloved and Eats, Shoots & Leaves. And while I adore the Harry Potter books...really? Most influential of the last 25 years? I guess it inspired a lot of kids to read, and it's a long time since anything did that...and now all of those kids who cut their reading teeth on Harry Potter when it came out are obssessed with Twilight! And I've never met anyone else who's ever read Eats, Shoots and Leaves, so I'm not sure how powerful that one was either. It would be awesome if it had been though; maybe then I could go to a chain restaurant without seeing the heading "Wine's" on the wine list.

I guess I'm also sort of wondering what is meant by "influential." Influential on what? Popular culture? Academics? Other writers? I'm not sure. Some that I'm surprised are not on the list include Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez), The Joy Luck Club (Amy Tan), Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden), The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay (Michael Chabon), Watchmen (Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons), The Giver (Lois Lowry), The Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro)...I could keep going. I would replace several of the books on the list above with these.

How many on the list have you guys read? Do you agree with the list? Are there others you would have included or any you'd remove? Remember, they have to have been published in the last 25 years, so from 1984 on!

I Thought It Sounded Ridiculous, but I Ended Up Loving It

2009-02-23T20:41:00.005-05:00

Most people I've talked to who have read Bel Canto have loved it or hated it - if they finished it at all. Not much in between. For about the first two-thirds of this book, I thought I was going to be the first person who had ever felt lukewarm about it. By the end, I knew I was going to have to give it 5 stars.

The concept of the book sounds...well, to be honest, it sounds kind of stupid. I read the blurb off the back cover to my husband before I started the book, and we both started laughing as I read it. The story is essentially that a large party of international businessmen and diplomats in a small South American country are at the party to listen to a world-class opera soprano. The entire party is taken hostage by a band of terrorists. Demands are made and the government refuses to budge, the length of the hostage situation grows longer and longer...and the line between "hostage" and "terrorist" grows blurry as the group connects with one another, become friendly, maybe fall in love in some instances... Sounds kind of ridiculous, I know.

So I started reading a little bit warily. It took a little time for me to get invested in the characters. The first one that interested me was Gen, an (apparently amazing) translator who was there with Mr. Hosokawa, the Japanese businessman for whom the party was being thrown. Gen was an easy character to get to know because, being a translator in an extremely international hostage situation, he's in demand all the time for communications. Gradually, I also came to know Carmen and Beatriz (the two girl terrorist who everyone thought were boys at first), General Benjamin (the terrorist general who is actually personable and has bad shingles), Messner (the Swiss Red Cross negotiator who got dragged into this while he happened to be on vacation in this country), Roxanne Coss (the soprano), Mr. Hosokawa, and several other terrorists and hostages. I became attached to some of them, like the youngest terrorist, Ishmael, who taught himself how to play chess really well by watching Gen. Benjamin and Mr. Hosokawa play. And Cesar, the terrorist who turns out to have a natural vocal talent on par with the famous opera singer.

It was getting to know the characters that did me in. The more I learned about them all as people (because they became people to me, more than characters in a book), the more I was sucked in. I will not tell you how everything shakes out. I only realized that I loved the book after I finished it, when I cried uncontrollably for ten minutes.

I guess what I'm saying is...I'm one of the lovers of Bel Canto. And for anyone who hasn't read it, I'm asking you to stick with it until you're SURE you either love it or hate it. Don't give up on it just because you're lukewarm - give it a little more time.

Virginia Festival of the Book

2009-02-17T22:19:00.003-05:00

Who knows about the Virginia Festival of the Book? Besides me? It was mentioned at my last book club meeting, and I was ASTOUNDED by how few people there had ever heard of it, even though it's been held right here, in the town we live in, for a long time. I can't find information on exactly how long from their website, but I know it's been at least 9 years because that's how long I've lived here, and it's been here every year I've lived here!

Despite the fact that I've known about it since I first moved here, I have never actually attended. Well, this year, that's going to change! Two authors I like quite a bit - Louis Bayard and Jayne Pupek - are going to be speaking on panels, and I have business cards for my proofreading and copyediting biz to hand out to the publishers and authors who will be there for the expo! The only thing that makes me unhappy is that it's the weekend of my mom's birthday, so I'll have to wait to go home and see her until Saturday around noon if I want to catch Louis Bayard's panel.

For those not in the know, VABook! spans several days, features lots of authors and agents and publishers talking about books and writing and getting published, and almost all of the events are free. There are some that cost money and are ticketed, but the vast majority are free and are first come, first served as far as seating. They are in various locations around Charlottesville, from downtown to Barnes & Noble to the UVA campus. And the website gives you the schedule and all of the authors, and even has this cool feature where you can add events to your "book bag," creating a schedule for yourself.

I've never actually been to a book show/festival before, and I'm really excited!

What turned you into a reader?

2009-02-10T20:21:00.005-05:00

I've been thinking a lot lately about the books I read as a kid that turned me on to reading. I don't know why, but I've just been considering that. When I was at new-reader age, between the ages of 5 and 8, we didn't have a whole lot of money. My mom had just gone through a divorce, so she was paying the mortgage and all of the other bills for us by herself, often working three jobs to do it. Needless to say, the library figured greatly in our lives as a source for new books. The children's library in my hometown was really cool - it was in this old brick house, with all of the different rooms for different kinds of books, and off of the little kids' book room, there was an old bathroom with the door off the hinges that still had the original claw foot bathtub in it. They put all kinds of cushions and stuffed animals in it and we kids would climb in it to read or play while we were there.

As a kid, of course I started out with the usual great kid's books. I loved all of the Berenstein Bears books, and Dr. Seuss, etc. I started my love of mysteries early with Encyclopedia Brown, and as I got older, I checked out pretty much every Bobbsey Twins book in the library. I also read Little Women, Little Men and Jo's Boys approximately twice a year until I was at least 14. I still own every book L.M. Montgomery ever published and have read them all at least twice, and my copy of the entire Anne of Green Gables series is so well-read that pages are starting to fall out.

I got this great hard-cover set of classic children's books (that I still have) that I read and loved that included Black Beauty, Treasure Island, Heidi, Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass, and Tom Sawyer - I was particularly taken with the last three. I fell in love with Pollyanna, with Pippi Longstocking, with Hatchet and Island of the Blue Dolphins. A Wrinkle in Time introduced me to awesome science fiction. I discovered my love of fantasy and mythology when I went into my elementary school library and picked up the biggest book I could find, The Hounds of the Morrigan by Pat O'Shea. And my mom bought me this children's series of somewhat simplified classic literature, so I realized pretty early that even the "boring classics" have great characters and stories.

So how about you guys? What books turned you into lifelong bookworms?

Why I Will Never Attempt to De-Bone a Duck

2009-02-05T21:35:00.012-05:00

Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously by Julie Powell. I wasn't sure about this one for about the first 100 pages. I mean, the idea is kind of fascinating - a woman (Julie) decides to cook her way through all 524 recipes in Julia Child's classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1 in just 365 days. The rules are simple - she has to make every recipe in the book in a year, and she's blogging about it. But at first I just didn't understand WHY.

I thought she was whiny about everything: her job, her family, her stature, her crappy apartment, her relationship with her husband, and on and on and on. And then it dawned on me that she was having one of those just-before-30 crises that so many of my friends had. I don't think I had one - or if I did, I didn't realize it because I was so freakin' stressed out and busy at work - but a lot of people I know, my husband included, had a really really really hard time with turning 30. And after all, I may not have had an existential crisis with that particular timing, but I have definitely had more than one in my lifetime, so I could identify. Basically, Julie is not what she thought she'd be when she grew up, she's almost 30 and working a crappy temp secretarial job she hates, living in the outer outer outer reaches of what might even begin to be called NYC, having a bit of a rough patch with her husband...and she has a nervous breakdown. And this project is what she devises to keep her sane, even while it drives her to a different kind of insanity.

Once I got it, I loved it. She comes home from work every day with a cart full of obscure shit that no one should really ever have to eat (like bone marrow and kidneys and calves' brains) and she cooks it for dinner, which is usually ready to eat around 11:00 pm. And she starts to get good at parts (crepe-flipping and lobster-killing), and she inexorably fails at some things time and again (mayonnaise and all things gelatinous), and she keeps going through it all. She finds an audience, and a purpose, and her self-esteem (despite the 20 lbs. of butter weight she puts on). It's really a fascinating study of a number of things, like the advent of the blogosphere, and French cooking, and friendship, marriage and insanity (and how they all must dwell happily together).

By the end, I was sobbing with Julie when a reporter tells her (on the eve of the last day of the project) that he's just spoken with Ms. Child herself, and she hates the Julie/Julia project. I mean, it's ridiculous, and who gives a crap what a 91-year-old bat you've never met thinks, but at the same time...you've just poured your heart and soul into this for nearly a year and she tells some reporter you're not serious enough or something? Crushing, and ridiculous. I got it. I ended up loving the book, and loving the author, and even loving wacky nut-job Julia Child. Though I still have NO desire to eat any kind of animal offal ever.

And yes, she does eventually conquer the mayonnaise.

Swift and Sparkly Vampire Romance, or How I Caved in and Read Twilight

2009-01-30T08:07:00.011-05:00

Okay. So I did it. I borrowed the book, I broke down and I read it. Despite the fan-grrrls obssessed with it (which is off-putting), despite the fact that it was a teenage vampire romance (which is trite), despite the fact that it is literally EVERYWHERE in my face these days (which is annoying), I still picked it up and read it all the way through. I was really and truly prepared to hate it. But...I didn't. I actually enjoyed it. Sure, it's not perfect; there are plenty of flaws. Despite its flaws, though, it's a damn decent YA novel.

First off, it won points on the strength of the writing. Either Stephenie Meyer is a solid A writer, or she has an outstanding editor. Writing is a deal-breaker for me - if the story is good and the writing is subpar, I will think the book is awful. It's happened several times. But here...Twilight is well-written. There's a good structure, a definitive style, smooth transitions - in other words, it has good bones. It also has well-defined characters, which is another must for me. Obviously, the main characters of Bella Swan and Edward Cullen have depth, but a lot of authors would stop there. Meyer spent time slowly building the characters of the other Cullen family members - particularly Alice - and some of Bella's other friends, like Mike and Jacob Black. Finally, the story really pulls you in. The plot is good, thought out, engrossing. It's one of those books that's hard to put down once you get started.

All of that aside, there were things that irked me about the book - for one thing, Bella. I have the same complaint about her that I always had about Dawson's Creek when it was on (and all of my friends were swooning over how awesome it was) - TEENAGERS SIMPLY DO NOT ACT AND TALK THAT WAY. Bella acts as though she's 30 years old when she's supposed to be 17! Even the most mature and astute teenagers I have ever known still act like teenagers - they can't help it, it's human nature. Also, how lax BOTH of her parents seem to be about where she is, who she's with, etc. - my parents were in my business constantly when I was a teen. I'm pretty sure most other parents are the same way. Because teenagers and sneaky and generally doing things they shouldn't be, and parents remember how they acted as teenagers. A book about a kid where the parents are virtually absent from the story is just not realistic to me.

So bottom line - it wasn't my favorite book of all time. But - it surprised me. I liked it much more than I really thought I would. I liked it enough that I plan to borrow the next one and read it, too. After that - we'll see. I'm going to commit one at a time rather than committing to the whole series at once. I guess I'm still a smidge skeptical :)

Paper Books vs. E-books

2009-01-25T18:02:00.000-05:00

I had a discussion last night with my husband and his best friend, who was visiting for the weekend, about the advent of digital media. We were particularly focused on books, because music and movies and other types of media seem to be more easily adaptable, and often have already been adapted, to digital formats. I don't know that I learned anything that I didn't already know through this discussion, but it did confirm for me that I'm not the only one with mixed feelings about books moving more and more to a digital format.

I do not currently own an e-reader, but I admit that both the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle have piqued my interest in the last few years. I have my generation's love of tech gadgets, and I also travel several times each year on lengthy trips during which I polish off two to five books. In case you haven't had the opportunity to travel with two weeks' worth of reading material, books can be kind of heavy to tote around in your luggage! There are plenty of other good reasons for moving to digital books as well, not the least of which is the positive impact it could have on the environment - making paper is still widely a pretty toxic experience for our environment, and most inks used in printing are not something you want running off into your water supply. Shipping books and displaying them in a retail store is also not particularly eco-friendly.

I still haven't taken the plunge, though. For one thing, I really don't know if I can get past holding a machine and not a paper book, or pushing a button instead of turning a page. For another, as our friend pointed out last night, human nature seems to have an innate collector mentality that makes it hard for me to imagine my many, many bookshelves filled with beautiful books replaced with just a gadget. While I decidedly do NOT love packing up and moving all of those books, I have an equally hard time imagining buying them all again digitally. Reading e-books also makes it a lot harder to lend a book you loved to a friend for their enjoyment, or to trade a book that you read and don't really want any more for another one (as with sites like Book Mooch and Paperback Swap).

Honestly, I think all of those reasons are fairly universal concerns among book lovers, and if the publishing industry decides (as many industries before them already have) that digital is the way to go, they are going to have a serious fight on their hands to get most readers to switch over. Current e-book prices are only very slightly lower than prices for hard copy books, and that's going to have to change in order to gain more digital fans. They're going to have to make the price point of the digital format appealing enough to offset readers' other concerns. In addition, they're going to have a heck of a struggle with retail book stores, which will have nothing to sell without paper books. I suppose that, theoretically, they could package up DVDs of electronic books to sell in stores, but that just seems to defeat the best parts of digital media, which are not needing to leave your house to buy something and the immediacy of the download - you can shop in your pajamas and not have to wait for something to be shipped to you.

Primarily because of book stores, I have a hard time believing that paper books will be going away entirely any time in the near future. I do believe that my great-great-great grandchildren may live in a world when retail stores in general are a thing of the past and 99% of all types of shopping is done electronically. But until that day, retail stores are going to fight their hardest to prevent widespread digital book sales unless they themselves can get on the train to sell e-books through their websites.

So, I guess I'm curious. I want to know what other readers think about e-readers versus their beloved paper books. Do you buy digital books now? If so, what convinced you that was the way to go? If not, would you be willing to move to digital reading if the cost of e-books comes down? Or are your paper copies just too asthetically valuable to you? Are we all just Luddites, holding onto the past for no good reason?

As Though There Weren't Enough Blogs about Books...

2009-01-21T20:50:00.000-05:00

Hi! Welcome to Corrodentia Weekly. I recently read some advice that if you want to start a blog, you should write about something you are passionate about, something that you can commit to writing regularly about, something that has enough interest and variety and scope that you can continue writing regularly about it indefinitely. Only one topic came to mind for me.

I proudly confess to being a bookworm. Each year, I read for pleasure 75-100 novels, memoirs, nonfiction accounts, comic books/graphic novels, and whatever else takes my fancy. I also read a few magazines regularly, work a regular day job where much of my time is spent writing and editing, and I run a freelance proofreading/copyediting business on the side - which, to be honest, I started because I thought it might be a good way to get free (albeit unpolished) books to read. The order Corrodentia in the animal kingdom is the order to which booklice and other book-eating insects belong, hence the name of the blog. I almost literally devour books. My most-craved diet consists of mysteries, narrative nonfiction, memoirs, women's fiction, prize-winners (I have a special place in my heart for many Booker prize-winners), a variety of comics/graphic novels, and young adult fiction - but I will really read anything that is well-written with excellent characters and a good story. And I will not pull punches if I read something I hate.

My intent here is simply to share my bookworminess with the world. I may write about particular books or authors I love, or I may share websites or other things I come across that are likely to be of interest to fellow book lovers. And I may occasionally just rant about something random that's on my mind, but I do plan to connect everything back to books in some way, some shape, some form. The Weekly part of the blog name indicates that I really do intend to write something at least weekly here. There are times I will not be able to do it more often than that, but at least once a week, you'll hear from me.

So. Welcome. I am excited to share what I know and learn from others. I don't really believe the doom-and-gloom predictions that the death of the book is imminent, but I still plan to do what I can to interest people in books and keep them reading. I'm glad to have you along to help me out.