Friday Finds (12/12)

Unfortunately, I didn't get to post what I'd found last week, so this one's a double-shot...

Bookopolis reviewed
An Exact Replica of A Figment of My Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken - This memoir talks of the loss of her child in her ninth month of pregnancy and how she dealt with her grief.

Bookopolis also recommended In the Land of Invisible Women by Qanta A. Ahmed, MD, who spent two years working as an ICU doctor in Saudi Arabia and offers an insider’s account of the restrictive society and the challenges faced.

Gautami reviews Booth's Sister by Jane Singer, a book about Asia Booth Clark, the sister of Abraham Lincoln’s assassinator John Wilkes Booth, and the shameful legacy she was forced to carry with her.

Bermudaonion reviews See You in a Hundred Years: Four Seasons in Forgotten America by Logan Ward, is the story of Logan and Heather Ward who felt like they didn’t have time for anything anymore and consequently decided on a year-long experiment where they would live like Americans did in the year 1900, without electricity, cars, or any other modern conveniences.

Rebecca
posted her review of, (and highly recommends) The Declaration by Gemma Malley (first in a trilogy) on the Science Fiction Challenge site

Vertigo has another series of graphic novels! Chris reviewed volume 2 recently, and now has me hooked *shakes fist at Chris*: Fables, vol. 2: Animal Farm is completely unrelated to Orwell's work.

These two Don't Hex with Texas and Enchanted, Inc. by Shanna Swendson came up in the "recommended" bar on amazon while I was gathering information for some of my other Friday Finds. And yes, they're exactly what they sound like: Magickal Chick Lit. I'll have to see if any of my RL friends have read this series, and see what they think about it.

Queen of the Road by Doreen Orion was one of the selections from Book Giveaways (from which I have never won a book, is there a secret?). I'd love for my RVing friend Linda to see this book.

As I was cleaning out my feed for Early Word last night, I found the following titles:
The fourth book (Princeps’ Fury) in the Codex Alera by Jim Butcher (yes, the same author who has given us The Dresden Files), but of course I'd want to start at the beginning, with this title: Furies of Calderon. Battles in a magickal kingdom--perfect!

American Farmer: The Heart of Our Country by Katrina Fried and Paul Mobley "Photographs of 300 farmers in 35 states. Subjects are farmers who work 50 acres of organic vegetables and those who keep 3,000 acres of cherry orchards; many are barely getting by and no one says they are getting rich, although some are doing very well with everything from avocados to alligators. Fried transcribes their stories into engaging narratives."

Why We Suck, by Denis Leary is probably as un-PC as it gets, but I find myself in the mood for that sometimes. There is, apparently, a bad riff on autism, but Leary's apologized and clarified his position, and I'm willing to give him the benefit of doubt for now.

I'm sure there will be a big stampede for this one: The Tales of Beedle the Bard by J.K. Rowling.

Early Word also pointed me to Stephen King's column in Entertainment Weekly, and in his "Best of 2008" were these two: The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney (Bookmarks magazine describes it as "a murder mystery with many plot twists, the novel most successfully reveals complex human desires, motivations, and relationships.") and The Garden of Last Days by Andre Dubus III (King says "this book is so good, so damn compulsively readable, that I can hardly believe it. ")

And lastly, a Christmas book that I'll try to get hold of for next year's holiday season (although I could really use it now, see yesterday's post): Christmas Sucks: What to Do When Fruitcake, Family, and Finding the Perfect Gift Make You Miserable by Joanne Kimes. Latest in her "Sucks" series, the title pretty much says it all.

And that, my friends, adds at least 3 months worth of reading (counting the unlisted books in the 3 series noted here) to my already-burgeoning life list.

I hate you all.

;)

Friday Finds (11/28)

A little bit of everything this week! Part of me says that I really need to stop torturing myself by finding more books to add to a growing-faster-than-I-can-whittle-it wishlist. The other part says "shut up and code it pretty." Meet my evil twin, y'all...

A Dog Named Christmas by Greg Kincaid from mizb17

Digging to America by Anne Tyler and Company of Liars by Karen Maitland from Beth F

The Rose Labyrinth by Titania Hardie from Kylee

Nose Down, Eyes Up: A Novel Written by Merrill Markoe. I found this ad while browsing one of the other books.

Fair and Tender Ladies by Lee Smith from Kim

North of Beautiful by Justina Chen Headly and ABC3D by Marion Bataille from earlyword.com

The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and
Saffron And Brimstone: Strange Stories by Elizabeth Hand from NYT Book Review 10/26/08

Salon Fantastique: Fifteen Original Tales of Fantasy by Ellen Datlow (Editor), Terri Windling (Editor) from an ad I found while browsing the previous titles.

Mighty Queens of Freeville, The: A Mother, a Daughter, and the Town That Raised Them by Amy Dickinson from Marcia

I hope that everyone is in the midst of a wonderful (holiday) weekend and that no one has any Black Friday horror stories.

Friday Finds (11/21)

The wishlist took a bit of a hit (as in upwards) this week, but I can't help browsing!

Honeymoon in Tehran by Azadeh Moaveni from Callista

33 Things Every Girl Should Know About Women's History: From Suffragettes to Skirt Lengths to the E.R.A. by Tonya Bolden (Editor) from Kylee

Dating da Vinci by Malena Lott and The Uncommon Reader: A Novella by Alan Bennett from gautami

Madeleine Is Sleeping by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum from Joanne

King Rat by China Mieville from Nymeth

Friday Finds 11/14

I haven't been browsing my book blogs, or checking my Google reader lately, so I had to resort to checking my amazon "recommends" list. Here are a few new releases I didn't have on my TBR list yet:

Mother Warriors, by Jenny McCarthy

Look Me in the Eye, by John Elder Robison

Brisingr (Inheritance, Book 3) by Christopher Paolini

Cat in a Sapphire Slipper: A Midnight Louie Mystery, by Carole Nelson Douglas

A Lion Among Men, by Gregory Maguire

Plum Spooky, by Janet Evanovich

Friday Finds

These are the books I've added to my TBR and wish lists this week:



Atonement by Ian McEwan

"We meet 13-year-old Briony Tallis in the summer of 1935, as she attempts to stage a production of her new drama "The Trials of Arabella" to welcome home her older, idolized brother Leon. But she soon discovers that her cousins, the glamorous Lola and the twin boys Jackson and Pierrot, aren't up to the task, and directorial ambitions are abandoned as more interesting prospects of preoccupation come onto the scene. The charlady's son, Robbie Turner, appears to be forcing Briony's sister Cecilia to strip in the fountain and sends her obscene letters; Leon has brought home a dim chocolate magnate keen for a war to promote his new "Army Ammo" chocolate bar; and upstairs, Briony's migraine-stricken mother Emily keeps tabs on the house from her bed. Soon, secrets emerge that change the lives of everyone present....
The interwar, upper-middle-class setting of the book's long, masterfully sustained opening section might recall Virginia Woolf or Henry Green, but as we move forward--eventually to the turn of the 21st century--the novel's central concerns emerge, and McEwan's voice becomes clear, even personal. For at heart, Atonement is about the pleasures, pains, and dangers of writing, and perhaps even more, about the challenge of controlling what readers make of your writing."

Atonement qualifies for the Lit Flicks Challenge I signed on to recently



The Dangerous Alphabet
by Neil Gaiman (Author), Gris Grimly (Illustrator)

"A is for Always, that's where we embark . . .
Two children, treasure map in hand, and their pet gazelle sneak past their father, out of their house, and into a world beneath the city, where monsters and pirates roam. Will they find the treasure? Will they make it out alive?
The Dangerous Alphabet is a tale of adventure, piracy, danger, and heroism told in twenty-six alphabetical lines—although even the alphabet is not to be relied upon here."

Props to Carl at Stainless Steel Droppings for posting this one. My boy is letter-obsessed, and this will be one of the 26 alphabet books we read for the A-Z Challenge.




The Faerie Queene, by Edmund Spenser

"Epic poem that was published between 1590 and 1609 by Edmund Spenser. It is the central poem of the Elizabethan period and is one of the great long poems in the English language. A celebration of Protestant nationalism, it represents infidels and papists as villains, King Arthur as the hero, and married chastity as its central value. The form of The Faerie Queene fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic epic. The plan was for 12 books (of which six were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for Elizabeth I herself. Arthur, in quest of Gloriana's love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court festivals and reworked it through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knight's adventures and loves build into a complex, multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza (see SPENSERIAN STANZA), and Spenser's archaic language frequently rise to an unrivaled sensuousness. The first installment of the poem (Books I-III) was published in 1590; the second, which contained Books I-III and Books IV-VI, in 1596."

I'll read this book to fulfill the Really Old Classics Challenge.

[descriptions from amazon]

Grimm’s Last Fairytale (Haydn Middleton)

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were collectors of fairy tales (amongst other scholarly pursuits) and Middleton has created a novel telling the parts of their story where history has been lost to us. I’ve no idea what they would think of the Disney-fied versions of their people’s folklore, but from reading this novel, I have a feeling they’d shake their heads in despair for today’s society.

Middleton fills out the Grimms’ story by using 3 threads: a “current” narrative about Jacob’s homecoming tour, flashbacks to his childhood and early adulthood (especially in regard to his brother), and a very different version (one on the grisly end of the spectrum) of Sleeping Beauty than any I’ve yet to see. Middleton did very well with the transitions between them, and each was flavored distinctively enough that I had no trouble following each of the threads and seeing their connections.

Another sub-plot which I found both interesting and informative was Auguste’s quest for truth (and for love), and what Kummel’s place was in the overall metaphor of the story. I won’t ruin it, but will say that for some authors, there are truly no minor or useless characters, and that Middleton demonstrates this very well.

In the Author’s Note at the end of the book, Haydn suggests several books for further reading, one of which is Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment, which, coincidentally, I had chosen as another read in the same challenge for which I’d read this book. Other titles are: The Complete Grimms’ Fairy Tales (Routledge and Kegan Paul), The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ fairy Tales (Maria Tatar), Paths Through the Forest (MUrray B. Peppard), and The Brothers Grimm and Their critics (Christa Kamenetsky).

I made this my bedtime read for several days, but I still managed to stay alsert enough to take note of the following significant passages:

“A long time ago, when wishing was still of use...”
This seems to be the traditional opening for the tales collected in the Grimms’ home country. Sets quite a different tone than what we use today (“once upon a time...”), and is also indicative of the people’s mood at that time in their history.

“Boys don’t tell stories. Not men either. There’s no Father Goose, is there? Only maids and mothers.”
Another societal indicator, as seen through the eyes of young Wilhelm, long before he knew what he and Jacob would do to make a living. I for one am glad that they shattered this stereotype so that other men could add their voices to the mix. My world would definitely be lesser if Gaiman and deLint weren’t writing.

“...there were far better things to love than a country. A country, after all, can never love you back.”
An especially touching quote, given today’s state of veteran care; a few good developments, but thousands un- or under-treated.

“...never be distracted from the written word. Talk can always wait.”
*sigh* A girl can dream. Too bad society takes the opposite stance.

“The pure good and the pure evil--it’s right for children to know all about that, and in such beautiful language, too.”
I could craft a lenghty rant about how we’re doing a disservice to our children when we neglect to prepare them for encounter with evil, but I won’t, for the sake of staying on-task. I hope to give my children version of fairy and folk takes that haven’t been Hollywood-ized to death.

“Not law, but literature--spoken, written, shared, passed on--that is the common bond uniting the entire German Volk.”
I’ll agree that one gets a very different sort of society when its focus is on the first to the detriment of the other. I often wonder whether a return to a study of the classics would be appropriate or desirable to today’s students, or if our culture is too far gone to take anything positive from them.

“Taken as a whole, the tales’ range of raw emotion was almost overwhelming. Spite, envy, malice, dread, obsession, love: they all roiled up off the pages like steam.”
I think that this is the mark of a good story, that it actually touches us on an emotional level, instead of just demonstrating the tribulations of the characters.

“For what was national pride but a hollow form of ancestor-worship? And what did natonal differences really mean?”
So, is there no other (new) place for the immigrant? How many generations does it take before a family is made welcome? Why have Americans so conveniently forgotten who was here first?

“What a people says is, after all, essentially what that people is.”
For me, this ties together two of the quotes above: a people’s common bond through literature, and Americans’ apparent lack of cohesion due to a variance of voices.

“The tales contain our volkisch spirit, our vital soul. The fact that we share them helps to make us a Volk in the first place.”
A few months ago, I read and reviewed Fahrenheit 451, and was deeply affected by Bradbury’s take on a society that had ceased sharing stories. As I’d said in the review, that thought makes me cling to my books and my writing all the harder.

“It was Schiller who claimed that the fairytales of his childhood had a deeper meaning than the truths taught by life.”
I don’t know the quote verbatim, and I’m not sure if my source is the original, but it has been said that the best part of a fictional work is the truth it holds, or reveals about life. After having read this, I think about my reading material very differently.

“ ‘Thought is the lightning,’ he once said, comically waving his arms for her like a spoof shaman, ‘words the thunder, consonants the bones and vowels the very blood of language.’ “
Aside from being very poetic, this reminds me of another quote about how easy it is to write, and all that’s necessary is to open a vein.

“Nothing would be the same once he was gone. A door to the past would be closed forever.”
As it is with all who die. No matter how insignificant we can come to feel, our presence here matters not just to the here and now, but to the past we’ve known.

“His mistake perhaps had been to stay in a world already mapped out by others, and not gone on to chart one of his own.” This is one of the basic themes laid out in many fairy tales, and one which people struggle with now. Are there new courses to chart anymore?

“But he was not her prince, and her heart was not at home on this map. Love was another realm again. A country whose borders she guessed she would only ever cross for visits, just long enough to satisfy herself that it was there.”
Just as there are those who aren’t suited to conventional professions, there are some people who simply aren’t geared toward committed lifelong relationships. It seems to me that a society that doesn’t allow for this creates a lot of problems when pairing-off is legislated too strictly.