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... if while visiting new friends you stand with tilted head because you are reading the titles on their shelves.
To see all my bookaholic posts, click here: You may be a bookaholic
Dorothy Allison will speak at the Conference on Southern Literature here in Chattanooga in April, and I'd like to attend. I've read her novel Bastard Out of Carolina, which was nominated for the 1992 National Book Award for fiction. When my librarian mentioned Dorothy Allison's memoir Two or Three Things I Know for Sure today, I checked it out.
Paul Collins and his family moved from San Francisco to Hay-on-Wye, a Welsh village with fifteen hundred inhabitants and forty bookstores. Sixpence House is a beautiful and neglected old tumbledown pub for sale in the town's center, and he tries to buy it. This book is "a meditation on what books means to us and how their meaning can still resonate long after they have been abandoned by their public."
"In the aftermath of the Iranian revolution, rare-gem dealer Isaac Amin is arrested, wrongly accused of being a spy. Terrified by his disappearance, his family must reconcile a new world of cruelty and chaos with the collapse of everything they have known. As Isaac navigates the terrors of prison, and his wife feverishly searches for him, his children struggle with the realization that their family may soon be forced to embark on a journey of incalculable danger."
I read about this novel, about a child confronted with the private fallout of a public nightmare, on the blog of Amy @ In Consideration of Books. I cannot now find the route that I followed to arrive at her blog, though I presume I read about it on somebody's book blog and "found" both Amy and this book, which I am currently reading.
A young man reads his mother's e-mail and learns about her infidelity. Helen mentioned that her book club is reading Disobedience for their next meeting, so I checked it out. Though the writing was good, I guess I wasn't in the right mood to read about a boy spying on his mother. Rated 7/10, a good book.
I checked this book out in 2010 (read my teaser), but had only seven days because it was a new book. I checked it out again in January, but I never got around to finishing it. I completed it last night (hurray!) and the last part was especially worth reading. This story of the female heirs of the Mongol Empire was lost to history, having been literally cut out of the Secret History of the Mongols. I rate it 8/10, a very good book.
Cannibal version:Words or phrases in a series of three or more need commas between each item, as I've done in the second line. In the first line, she is "cooking her family" and "cooking her dog." In the corrected version, she "finds inspiration in cooking" and "finds inspiration in her family" and "finds inspiration in her dog."
"Rachael Ray finds inspiration in cooking her family and her dog."
With commas added:
"Rachael Ray finds inspiration in cooking, her family, and her dog."
"If your teacher has to die, August isn't a bad time of year for it."This catches my attention, but the book wasn't one of his best. I'm not apt to remember it very long, if at all. This isn't much of a review, but it was somewhat entertaining, so I rate it 8/10.
I'll be reading from this list:
- Create a list of some books you’d like to read or finish this spring.
- Write a blog post including the list of books you want to read and any additional goals you’ve set, and get ready to post it on your blog on March 20th.
- Sign up using the Mister Linky on Katrina's Callapidder Days blog.
- Work on your goals by reading throughout Spring 2011.
- Report your results by writing another blog post in June to let everyone know how you did.
- Have fun! Visit other participants to see what they’re reading. Write reviews if you’re so inclined. But most of all, enjoy your spring reading.
- Disobedience ~ by Jane Hamilton, 2000, fiction
- Winter's Bone ~ by Daniel Woodrell, 2010, fiction
- Cutting for Stone ~ by Abraham Verghese, 2009, fiction
- The Book of Night Women ~ by Marlon James, 2009, fiction
- River Horse: The Logbook of a Boat Across America ~ by William Least Heat-Moon, 1995, travel
- Out of Time ~ by Caroline B. Cooney, 1996, YA fiction
- The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs ~ by David Pryce-Jones, 1989, history
- Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream ~ by Barbara Ehrenreich, 2005, sociology
- The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith and Politics in a Post-Religious Right America ~ by Jim Wallis, 2008
- The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire ~ by Jack Weatherford, 2010, history
- Septembers of Shiraz ~ by Dalia Sofer, 2007, fiction
- The Five Books of Miriam: A Woman's Commentary on the Torah ~ by Ellen Frankel, 1996, religion
- Genesis: A New Translation of the Classic Bible Stories ~ by Stephen Mitchell, 1996, religion
- In the Beginning: A New Interpretation of Genesis ~ by Karen Armstrong, 1996, religion
- Genesis: Soap Opera with a Twist ~ by Bonnie Setliffe Jacobs, 1992, religion
- From Jesus to Christianity: How Four Generations of Visionaries and Storytellers Created the New Testament and Christian Faith ~ by L. Michael White, 2004, religion
- House of Sand and Fog ~ by Andre Dubus III, 1999, fiction
- The Teacher's Funeral: A Comedy in Three Parts ~ by Richard Peck, 2004, YA fiction (Indiana)
- Steal Away Home ~ by Lois Ruby, 1994, YA historical fiction (Kansas)
- California Blue ~ by David Klass, 1994, YA fiction (California)
- Out of Time ~ by Caroline B. Cooney, 1996, YA fiction
- Prisoner of Time ~ by Caroline B. Cooney, 1998, YA fiction
- Whatever Happened to Janie? ~ by Caroline B. Cooney, 1993, YA fiction
- Face to Face ~ by Marion Dane Bauer, 1991, YA fiction
- South of Resurrection ~ by Jonis Agee, 1997, short stories
- Big Stone Gap ~ by Adriana Trigiani, 2000, fiction
- The Lady and the Unicorn ~ by Tracy Chevalier, 2004, fiction
- The Post-American World ~ by Fareed Zakaria, 2008, history
- Rabbi Paul ~ by Bruce Chilton, 2004, religion
- Destiny Disrupted ~ by Tamim Ansary, 2009, history
- A Vindication of the Rights of Woman ~ by Mary Wollstonecraft, 1792, women's studies
- Herland ~ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, women's studies
"Now I had graduated on this bright June Saturday in 1959 and few were the obstacles left between me and my getaway train to Miami -- obstacles that nevertheless must be cunningly surmounted."This isn't particularly exciting, but the reason I got the book from the library still held: Gail Godwin is an excellent writer, and the book would probably draw me in.
"One sunny, crisp Saturday in September when I was seven years old, I watched my father drop dead. I was playing with my favorite doll on the stone wall that bordered our driveway while he mowed the lawn. One minute he was mowing, and the next, he was facefirst in the grass as the mower propelled itself in slow motion down the hill of our backyard."Wow! A visually gripping and powerful image! I wanted to keep reading, of course. Zoe, the main character, is a music therapist. I'm really enjoying what I've read so far.
"Every life has a soundtrack. ... If you ask me, music is the language of memory" (p. 5).