Tuesday Teaser

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
  


• Open to a random page
  
  
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
  
  
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS!
  


• Share the title & author so that other participants can add the book to their Lists if they like your teasers!

"Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy Susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next day it spins and stops at loud rageful, and the next day at wounded keening, and the next day numbness, silence." pg 70

~ Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith by Anne Lamott

Teaser Tuesdays

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read


• Open to a random page


• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page


• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)


• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

My Teaser:

"I was put off by the wolf spiders as well but never thought that they were purposefully out to get me. For starters, they didn't seem that organized."

page 210 When you are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris

National Book Awards Challenge

In honor of the National Book Foundation's 60th Anniversary Amanda and I will be participating in the National Book Award Challenge. (I plan on reading The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor, All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy, and In America by Susan Sontag.)The National Book Foundation has celebrated more than 60 fictional books and authors. If you are interested in participating join the National Book Award Challenge you can join by following the link. It should be a fun time!





National Book Awards List


1950 The Man with the Golden Arm - Nelson Algren
1951 The Collected Stories of William Faulkner - William Faulkner
1952 From Here to Eternity - James Jones
1953 Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
1954 The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow
1955 A Fable - William Faulkner
1956 Ten North Frederick - John O'Hara
1957 The Field of Vision - Wright Morris
1958 The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever
1959 The Magic Barrel - Bernard Malamud

1960 Goodbye Columbus - Philip Roth
1961 The Waters of Kronos - Conrad Richter
1962 The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
1963 Morte D'Urban - J.F. Powers
1964 The Centaur - John Updike
1965 Herzog - Saul Bellow Herzog
1966 The Collected Stories - Katherine Anne Porter
1967 The Fixer - Bernard Malamud
1968 The Eighth Day - Thornton Wilder
1969 Jerzy Kosinski - Steps

1970 Them - Joyce Carol Oates
1971 Mr. Sammler's Planet - Saul Bellow
1972 The Complete Storie - Flannery O'Connor
1973 Chimera - John Barth
1973 Augustus - John Williams
1974 Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
1974 Crown of Feathers and Other Stories - Isaac Bashevis Singer
1975 Dog Soldiers - Robert Stone
1975 The Hair of Harold Roux - Thomas Williams
1976 JR - William Gaddis
1977 The Spectator Bird - Wallace Stegner
1977 Master Tung's Western Chamber Romance - Li Li Chen
1978 Blood Tie - Mary Lee Settle
1979 Going After Cacciato - Tim O'Brien

1980 The World According to Garp - John Irving
1980 Sophie's Choice - William Styron
1981 Plains Song - Wright Morris Plains Song
1982 Rabbit is Rich - John Updike
1983 The Women of Brewster Place - Gloria Naylor
1983 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
1984 Victory Over Japan - Ellen Gilchrist
1985 White Noise - Don DeLillo
1986 World's Fair - E.L. Doctorow
1986 Arctic Dreams - Barry Lopez
1987 Paco's Story - Larry Heinemann
1988 Paris Trout - Pete Dexter
1989 Spartina - John Casey

1990 Middle Passage - Charles Johnson
1991 Mating - Norman Rush
1992 All the Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy
1993 The Shipping News - E. Annie Proulx
1994 A Frolic of His Own - William Gaddis
1995 Sabbath's Theater - Philip Roth Sabbath's
1996 Ship Fever and Other Stories - Andrea Barrett
1997 Cold Mountain - Charles Frazier
1998 Charming Billy - Alice McDermott
1999 Waiting - Ha Jin

2000 In America - Susan Sontag
2001 The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
2002 Three Junes - Julia Glass
2003 The Great Fire - Shirley Hazzard
2004 The News From Paraguay - Lily Tuck
2005 Europe Central - William T. Vollmann
2006 The Echo Maker - Richard Powers
2007 Tree of Smoke - Denis Johnson
2008 Shadow Country - Peter Matthiessen

Eva Luna

Two of my all time favorite books are "A Thousand and One Tales of the Arabian Nights" and "100 Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. "Eva Luna" by Isabel Allende captured the essence of both through story telling and magical realism. It wasn't until preparing for this review that I realized I had already read the follow up book "The Stories of Eva Luna". I think that that book would make more sense now than it did before.

Eva Luna, is born under unusual circumstances and quickly learns her mother's trade. At the age of 8 she is orphaned and with the help of her godmother finds work as a servant. On the other side of the globe Rolf Carle is struggling to grow up in a repressive household. After his father dies his mother sends him to Latin America to help his uncle with his business raising pure breed dogs and repair clocks.

Eva grows up serving various households and meeting a number of different people along the way until Riad Halabai finds her on the streets. A tradesman with a heart of gold, he brings her back to his village as an offering to his barren wife. Rolf Carle discovers his passions for youthful flirtations and film. All grown up Eva returns to the city and rediscovers her inate ability to tell stories. Her stories save her from homelessness, starvation, and eventually leads her to great things including love.

Isabelle Allende manages to draw together strong characters struggling against societal norms through love, war, and stories. Anyone who is interested in romance, magical realism, societal struggles, or good old fashioned story telling will really enjoy this book.

BBC Top 100 books 2008

So a friend of mine found this list on BBC. It is the top 100 all time favorite books of 2008-2009. According to BBC most people have only read 6 of the books on the list. I was curious and wanted to see how many I actually have (and haven't) read. The ones in bold are the ones I've read! Enjoy! (this has been updated from my other blogs listing, Rachel's Rants.)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (this was my favorite book as a teen)

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (we are actually re-reading the series)

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible (I read this front to back when I was in 3rd grade I’m still reading)

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (and I learned the aria from the opera!)

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (wow...seriously?)

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (another one I also learned the aria)

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (if you can believe there is an opera of this)

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (doesn't that fall under #33?)

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert5

3 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (only because I had too…)

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (I was also in this musical)

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (i read it in french & english)

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Tinkers

While I was down in the Village my husband and I happened upon McNally Jackson Bookstore. What a wonderful independent bookstore! When you walk in you feel like you are home. My favorite feature were the staff picks displayed around the 2 levels of the store. This is where I picked up Jessica's pick "Tinkers".

What initially drew me to the book was it's simple book cover with a recommendation from Marilynne Robinson, award winning author of "Gilead" and "Home". I have enjoyed Ms. Robinson's poignant stories about the everyman. Her recommendation for Paul Harding's book "Tinkers" peaked my interest. If his writing proved to be even half as enjoyable as Ms. Robinson's I knew I would be in for a treat.

I was not disappointed. The story centers around 3 generations of a New England family's men and their struggles with mental health, disease, family, and their inter-relationship to each other. Mr. Harding's writing is absolutely beautiful and creates poetic motion where life can sometimes seem still to the unobservant eye. Each man's life was interconnected with his son's through the things he tinkered with.

I actually would like to sit down and reread this book to immerse myself in Mr. Harding's artistic nuances. (I rarely want to do this with a book I have just finished.) I guess the only word of warning I might have for this book is that it is not written like anything I have read before. Which in my opinion is not a bad thing but it may catch the unsuspecting reader off guard. If you get a chance I highly recommend "Tinkers" by Paul Harding!

Alice in Wonderland

You're Alice's Adventures in Wonderland!

by Lewis Carroll

After stumbling down the wrong turn in life, you've had your mind
opened to a number of strange and curious things. As life grows curiouser and curiouser,
you have to ask yourself what's real and what's the picture of illusion. Little is coming
to your aid in discerning fantasy from fact, but the line between them is so blurry that
it's starting not to matter. Be careful around rabbit holes and those who smile to much,
and just avoid hat shops altogether.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

This quiz is strange but true! Wow!

BEA

First off, I have to say thanks to Amanda from The Life and Times of a "New" New Yorker for encouraging me to attend BEA (the Book Expo of America) this past Saturday with her. I'm not sure I would have had the courage to attend by myself. This event was eye opening to say the least! There were so many interesting people, booksellers, publishers, book bloggers, authors, etc. in the book industry there.

During registration I was handed a BEA program book which, no kidding, was the size of the yearly installment of the Entertainment Coupon books. A little overwhelmed, Amanda and I decided to plunge into the heart of the Expo's booth extravaganza. Timidly we wandered the halls taking in the global book contigency; publishing heavy weights; academic presses; independent publishers; non-profit book foundations; author signings; etc.

Around 1pm my stomach started to rumble and we made a mad dash to the Javitz Conference Center's food center. It was a nice break before the 2pm Blogger Workshop downstairs. It was great to hear from more experienced book bloggers about how book blogs can help the industry with reviews of books or bookstores, how they came to book blogging, and various tips on communicating within the book blogging community. If you are interested in hearing the panelists discussion check Book Club Girl's site out tonight at 6pm. Each of the panelists are listed below and have their own (more in depth) insights on BEA:

The Book Blogger Panelists

Stephanie Coleman-Chan from Stephanie's Written Word.

Candace Levy from Beth Fish Reads.

Natasha Maw from Maw Books Blog.

Julie Peterson from Booking Mama.

Dawn Rennert from She is Too Fond of Books.

Amy Riley from My Friend Amy.

Following the workshop Amanda made the rounds to familiar book bloggers in the audience. It was really exciting to meet these people in person. (A special thank-you to Stephanie from Stephanie's Written Word from both Amanda and I!) Then we headed back to the booth mayhem. Not quite so whelmed this time we had the opportunity to chat with some great people in the book industry. I made sure to say hello to the National Book Foundation whom I saw at the Brooklyn Book festival back in the fall, MIT Press my husband's favorite publisher, and AEG my Dad's book publisher. 5pm came too quickly but I was really glad that Amanda and I were able to take in what we could on a Saturday in New York!