I was remiss to blab about this at that time when you were supposed to sign up for the book blogger HOLIDAY SWAP.     oops.    Did you?  Sign up?   Well, I just got back from shopping and I purchased a book which I can’t tell you about because you might be my Secret Santee.

I bought myself one, too.   So when it arrives and you post about it, then we can do a read-along together!  Won’t that be swell?

I also bought Simon Van Booy’s Love Begins in Winter because Nancy the BookFool told me to.      I looked for a few other books but couldnt’ find them.    Which is probably a good thing.  (Maybe my husband called the store and told them not to sell them to me so I wouldn’t spend the money?)

NOW.  The next thing you need to know about if you don’t know about it already is Beth Fish’s idea to unplug and be proud of it! She has an excellent post explaining it, but in the meantime, just know that if the following button is displayed on my blog, then you know you’ll  see read? me sometime later.     That I really am trying to stop checking Twitter all the time!

That said, do check the Women Unbound Challenge for a Guest Post on Women in the Bible!     Clicking on the button will take you right there…   Post is scheduled for Monday, November 23.

Happy Let’s-Be-Grateful Week!

[Yippee!  I'm avoiding review-writing by finding something else worthy of posting about!   Since this is Saturday, we have a Weekly Geeks to shine the spotlight on.     I also want to give a shout-out to Melissa the Book Nut for celebrating her FIVE years blogging about books.   (visit her and enter her giveaway!)]

Now, on the to Geekiness.    Jackie of Literary Escapism is organizing the official Book Bloggers Best Books of 2009.      She also has a lovely tribute to the legacy of Dewey;  this time of year is bittersweet when thinking about our friend Dewey – may we continue to celebrate all that she started and all that we have embraced in sharing our love for reading.

Click this line to get to this week’s Weekly Geeks and Jackie’s explanation of gathering best books for a big vote…

In order to help with this task, I must see if I even read any books published this year.    So I hereby present that list in order of my favorites listed first:

The Help by Kathryn Stockett  *****

The Only True Genius in the Family by Jennie Nash ****

Nothing But Ghosts by Beth Kephart ****

Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel ****

One True Theory of Love by Laura Fitzgerald ****

False Witness by Anita Rodgers ***

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen & Seth Grahame-Smith ***

____________________________________________________________

Jackie also wanted GENREs and I’m not good at this nor do I even know how to look this up!

The Help – contemporary fiction?  or historical fiction!?  – women’s issues?
True Genius – Contemporary fiction and/or family dynamics
Nothing But Ghosts - YA, grief
Last Night in Montreal – Contemporary fiction
One True Theory -  Contemporary fiction / chick lit?
False Witness – mystery
P&P&Z – steampunk, Austen-spinoff

__________________________________________________________

Now for those books that I have in house but haven’t read yet but I see on a lot of lists for BEST?

Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder

31 Hours by Masha Hamilton

Undiscovered Gyrl by Allison Burnett

P.S.  I’m actually impressed that I’ve read so many.   Considering how many books I have toppling in Mt.TBR, seven books is quite an accomplishment.

Question(s) for my readers:    If you have read The Help, do you agree that it is worthy of mention in a Best of the Year list?
and/or
Do you have a different book you hope to see on such a list?

I thought I would quickly list off the books I know I want to read in the next few months;  some to finish challenges and some to start new challenges.   This list is more for me to help me get organized – my book to-do list.

Dewey’s Reading Challenge
John Green’s Abundance of Katherines – have but loaned to my next door neighbor
John Green’s Paper Towns – need
The Virgin Blue / Tracy Chevalier – have in house
The Sea – John Banville – need

Science Challenge
I wanted to read a book about bees and have narrowed it to A Spring Without Bees:  How Colony Collapse Disorder Has Endangered Our Food Supply by Michael Schacker and Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honeybee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis by Rowan Jacobsen,   I’m hoping the library can find these.  I have yet to search.

I should finish my Einstein book, too.

Books I just want to read now ‘cuz’: The Mandarin and Other Stories by Eca De Queiroz (thanks Nymeth!) and Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (thanks KB!)

Now, for upcoming commitments, I have officially and unofficially decided to read The Hobbit, Mrs. Dalloway and just maybe Moby Dick.   Of these, only MB is in the house.     I believe I said yes in Twitter to the Really Old Classics but honestly, I’m just a wimp.   But the book IS in my goodreads – unfortunately, I will have to order it.     The library, yes – even the I.L.L. – does not show it in the system: Two Zen Classics: The Gateless Gate and The Blue Cliff Records by Sekida, Katsuki.

Anyone care to talk me into any other challenges?     The Historical Fiction one, perhaps?     I could read Moby Dick for that, right?

I believe it was a Twitter Tweet that announced that Oprah Magazine had an article listing books that influenced John Cusack .    Come to find out that I had only read ONE of these books!    [Guess which one?   To Kill a Mockingbird.]

I have had a crush on John Cusack since the movie Say Anything 1989.     We are about the same age, so I have always assumed that he and I would have been friends if we had gone to the same high school.   He’s that smart guy who doesn’t run for class officer but hangs at the fringes and knows everyone but you can’t tell what clique he belongs to.    He’s too cool to be one of the popular kids.    Too edgy to be in the smart college prep group.    (I was a college prep geek.  I think.)

After reading this article, I am assuming that if he and I bump into each other at a party, I wouldn’t be able to talk books with him unless it was TKAM.     And that would be a shame.

I’m personally challenging myself to read the other seven books sometime in 2010.   Join me?   no prizes, no rules, no Mr. Linky, extremely informal.

Until I get this list read, I’ll have to avoid going to any Hollywood parties, I guess.   (Though, come to think of it, he doesn’t seem to be the Hollywood party type, does he?)

Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72
By Hunter S. Thompson

To Kill a Mockingbird
By Harper Lee

Chronicles: Volume One
By Bob Dylan

The Great Thoughts
Compiled by George Seldes

The Shock Doctrine
By Naomi Klein

Franny and Zooey
By J.D. Salinger

Tropic of Cancer
By Henry Miller

Rites of Spring
By Modris Eksteins

Thank you to the Novel Challenge Blog for listing this challenge and thus making it ‘official’!

[Updated :    FLASHBACK CHALLENGE website is HERE!!      Buttons maybe sometime later.  ]

I’m challenging myself in 2010 to re-read a few books.

I never re-read books!

So.   Since Jenny seemed so upset to hear this, I decided I needed to try this strange experience with more study.  Besides, somebody somewhere said to really read a book, it must be in the second or third time.     (I’ll go look up that quote – I’m butchering it, I’m sure.   I think it was Nabokov.)

Here’s my list:

Mrs. Dalloway / Virginia Woolf

Wind, Sand and Stars – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (my review of reading it the first time)

Are You There God?  It’s Me, Margaret / Judy Blume

Jane Eyre – because I feel like I’m lying when I say I’ve read this but surely.  Surely!  I did read this already, right?   maybe not.   I can’t really remember.    I know I know the story, so let’s see if I can get through a ‘read’.

and… after finding out about a LOTR challenge, I’m considering diving into The Hobbit.

sigh

“Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting.”

-Nabokov’s Lecture on Literature

and another quote for you entertainment:

“Tell me what you read and I’ll tell you who you are” is true enough, but I’d know you better if you told me what you reread. ”
— François Mauriac

Yea, I don’t think Frank would bother getting to know me very well.

The official Challenge site offers up a few levels to commit to (My FIVE books fits into the Scholar level) and also suggests re-reading books from various time periods of your life:   childhood (AYTGIMM – first read in 1976 of 1977), high school (Jane Eyre – early 80’s), adulthood (Mrs. Dalloway – 2002 when I was prepping for the full The Hours movie experience).

For the latest Book Menage sponsored by Citizen Reader, we are reading The Restless Sleep and The Borden Tragedy.   Discussion will be starting the week of November 30, 2009.   You still have time to read these!

The Geary book on The Borden Tragedy is wonderful.   This is my second time to attempt a graphic novel* and I have come to realize that I read the text and have to remind myself to stop and look at the drawings.    Though not an expert on the story of this crime, I very much remember the very scary movie when I was a child and was so shocked at that song.

“Lizzie Borden took an ax; gave her father 40 wacks…”

How could she do it?   Oh yea, DID SHE?     This book only gives facts and does not quite influence the reader to believe her guilt or her innocence.     I really enjoyed the history and the research that Geary obviously poured into this project.   I especially appreciate seeing the layout of the house – where the rooms are and how the members of the family typically accessed the rooms from which staircase.    But the one thing that stands out the most is how little time passed between the last person (other than Lizzie) to see Dad alive and finding him slaughtered.     To pull it off, she had to be violently quick and yet so carefully composed.

I live within 40 minutes of Fall River, Mass and I just might have to plan a little road trip to visit the house and cemetery.   Anyone want to come along?   (please?   I don’t want to go by myself…)   Also, must add that Mr Geary spent his childhood in Kansas City and Wichita, Kansas – my ‘home’ town.   I love finding out silly little things like this that are totally unrelated to anything else.

I very much enjoyed the straightforward inquisitive style that Horn uses to present The Restless Sleep.  I really do love nonfiction when we get to see the process from the author’s perspective – how she came to write THIS book and how she small-talked with the people she writes about.   She sets up the book well – right off the bat we are pulled in to the concept and philosophy of death.   Her words grab you by the heart and make you face the idea of dying by violence.    She first invites us to consider each case with only a bit of background and structures each chapter to explore more deeply over the time involved.   We are introduced to the victims of a specific unsolved crime and then we are drawn into more details of the investigation, way back when the case was fresh and how the latest detective attempts to catch the killer.    Very well done, if maybe a bit too factual at times.     I must say I was surprised but shouldn’t have been with the politics and procedures of police organization.   And I was oddly comforted by the statistics;   I’m not likely to be a murder victim in an unsolved case.   But still, just typing that gives me the creeps.

* I have read Persepolis. The Borden Tragedy: A Memoir of the Infamous Double Murder at Fall River, Mass., 1892 (Treasury of Victorian Murder (Graphic Novels)), ComicsLit 1997, no page numbers in the book but goodreads.com says 80 pages.

**  The Restless  Sleep:  Inside New York City’s Cold Case Squad by Stacy Horn, the edition I read was a Thorndike Press Large Print 2005, which might explain the 515 pages (567 with appendices)   I couldn’t find an image of the cover from the edition I read, so I took a photo.

Both from the library and need to be returned.  Hope I won’t need to reference when we get to the discussion.

Thoughts   The Victoria’s Secret Catalog Never Stops Coming and other lessons I learned from breast cancer by Jennie Nash, Scribner 2001, 153 pages

MOTIVATION for READING:    I’m a fan of Jennie Nash and wanted to read her nonfiction.      I was brainstorming how to spend some of the many points I have in bookmooch and checked to see if could get any more Nash books and sure enough!  this one copy was available.     I didn’t know much more about it other than it was her sharing of her battle with breast cancer;  I assumed it would be an honest and brave account featuring wisdom and humor.

It is.    Honest, brave, endearing, focused, and celebratory.

Four slices of pie  

Just a quick note to say hello and share an interesting spam comment I got:

WALL PAPER BOOKS!

Cracks me up – due to my listing of The Yellow Wallpaper for the Women Unbound Challenge!   ah, must have sense of humor….

I’ve got pet therapy, email/internet tutoring, Mac training, and grocery shopping to do today and must. not. waste. time on blogging and twitter!  But I want to write a few reviews and see what everyone is listing for the challenge.    Is anyone else struck by the variety and broad encompassing of issue we consider important as women?    so many and not one more important than another.   Comes down to choice and respect.   Or is it boils UP to choice and respect?

Chat at ya later, Dearies,

I just wanted to post something/anything.     * Bizzy = I abhor the word ‘busy’.    We are all so busy, busy busy busy.   blech. We CHOOSE to do what we choose to do.    no excuses.     or at least that’s what I strive to remember.   

Thoughts   Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden, Viking 2008, 359 pages, Winner of the Scotiabank GILLER PRIZE

MOTIVATION for READING: This is a classic BOOK-FOUND-ME example.    I was cruising through blogland, found a post somewhere on Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, bounced to a blogger who had commented on that, saw another comment suggesting this book, opened up the InterLibraryLoan website and requested it.     Since it was a library book, I HAD to read it and not throw it under the bed for “some day.”       Maybe it is more of a ‘Follow the Breadcrumbs’ example.

WHAT IT’s ABOUT:    How to describe this….    It’s about a guy, Will Bird, who has been a bush-pilot in Northern Ontario;   he’s maybe what they call Native American (even in Canada?   Am I US-centric or what?!)  Ok, he’s Cree.     And we are in his thoughts while he shares what’s been going on with him as if in a letter to his sister’s two daughters.     In the meantime, we are introduced to Annie, one of the nieces and she’s trying to talk this uncle into waking up from a coma.    Am I sharing too much?    Annie is tough – she lives off the land with her wits and smarts.   And yet somehow she goes on a trip to Toronto and NYC, lives the life of a fashion model and finds herself a mute guy with whom she has an interesting relationship and he is also quite endearing.    And we have a sister who is missing (Annie’s, so the other niece), some BAAAAaad dudes, some awesome friends, some old school Indians and most of this was a pleasure.   Although it has some very brutal violence to propel the story along.

WHAT’s GOOD: I was so impressed!   I loved the story construct:  this overlapping, intertwining of memories between uncle and niece.    We go back and forth and yet in two different points or spans of time that somehow meet at the end.      I loved Annie – she’s kickass and true to her roots and she’s cool.    Will is a dear, too and you can’t help but root for the guy.      I also love how they said, “Ever!”  a lot.      I enjoyed this exposure to a different culture in a different part of the world.

WHAT’s NOT so GOOD: Tiny, picky?      I don’t quite love the ending.   It works; but it just seemed to run out of steam a bit and wrap up.   But overall, I loved this book very much.      Oh yea, in the beginning, I almost started keeping track of how many times I read “Black Spruce”.    OK, I get it!    Certainly these issue of mine are not worth  you not trying this book if it intrigues you in the slightest.

FINAL THOUGHTS: Though the story resolution was not as strong for me as the building of the tension of what the mystery is all about, I loved the weaving together of the conversations to each other even though they have no idea the other is listening.   Sort of .     Here’s what I wrote in goodreads.com:

“A skillfully constructed story told by weaving two characters memories together. Quiet yet packed with violence.”

I’m going to add LOVE, too.   The respect and love that this family holds for each other and their heritage is strong and affirming.

RATING: Four Pie Slices of Fruit of the Forest Pie

Softdrink reviewed this in May.

WOMEN UNBOUND Challenge

I am a feminist;  I believe in equal rights.    I know that the world has many places where women do not enjoy the freedoms I do in the US and yet we have some more work to go here in treating all humans with respect and providing opportunity and positive expectations of ability and brain power.     I admit that I have some work to do and am so looking forward to the learning experience of this challenge!    I absolutely love all the lists and everyone’s thoughts on feminism and women’s rights and the highlighting of awesome women all around the world.    Amen, Sister!

I’ve already read The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimarera.    This is a story of a little girl born into the family of a Māori village chief but he is extremely disappointed that she wasn’t born male.  She has a role to fill and does it with can-do spirit.    I look forward to re-viewing the movie.

I wanted to see if any in house books might also work for my options and these are the ones I came up with:

Fiction:  Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser, undiscovered gyrl by Allison Burnett,  The Center of Everything by Laura Moriarty, Alias Grace by Atwood, I am Madame X by Gioia Diliberto, A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick.

Nonfiction:  Shooting the Boh* by Tracy Johnston, Dead Man Walking by Sister Helen Prejean, and Eleanor of Aquitaine by Alison Weir.

My past reading in this extremely broad category includes a few of the more well known works:  The Feminist Mystique / Betty Friedan, The Beauty Myth / Naomi Wolf, and The Awakening / Kate Chopin.    But I really am looking forward to diving into books by Virginia Woolf,  Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Audre Lorde, Tillie Olsen, Nancy Friday, Simone de Beauvoir…

And not just women’s issues books, but I would like to read bios of fascinating women:    Sandra Day O’Connor, Mae West, Margaret Mead;  and possibly that Geo Johnson book about Miss Leavitt’s Stars.

I’ve always wanted to read The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.     I’m curious about Escape by Carolyn Jessop.   I am keenly interested in society’s expectations in the choice to have children or not (I don’t have any book titles in mind  yet.)

Thank you to everyone who has suggested books!    I’m still not committing because I keep changing and my mind when I read the other participants lists.

* I’m reading Shooting the Boh and can justify it with this sentence from the back of the book:  ”…perhaps the most frightening discovery that Johnston made was what she learned about herself:  about what it means to be an adventurer – a WOMAN adventurer – on the wrong side of forty, hampered by a changing body and the fear, loss, and envy that haunt any woman in a world that – even in Borneo – seems made exclusively for the young.”   This fits my desire to read about amazing women.

Updated to add this great quote I found at RENEGADEconversations

“I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a door mat or a prostitute. (Rebecca West, “Mr Chesterton in Hysterics: A Study in Prejudice,” The Clarion, 14 Nov 1913)