she reads and reads

Mailbox Monday (January 9)

2012-01-09T11:10:00.003-05:00

I also picked up second-hand copies of the following books (while shopping for my dad and Mr. B): Black Water Rising by Attica Locke, I Was Told There’d Be Cake by Sloane Crosley, The Sons of Heaven by Kage Baker and Grave Sight by Charlaine Harris.

Finally, Mr. B gave me a red Sony Reader for Christmas (yay!), so I downloaded the following ebooks for free: Emma by Jane Austen, The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie and Tortured by Caragh M. O’Brien.

What did you find in your mailbox this past week? For other Mailbox Monday posts, head over to At Home with Books.

Mailbox Monday (December 19)

2011-12-19T10:55:00.008-05:00

The second is Writing for Your Life: A Guide and Companion to the Inner Worlds by Deena Metzger.

What did you find in your mailbox this past week? For other Mailbox Monday posts, head over to Let Them Read Books.

Mailbox Monday (December 12): The 3rd Montreal Book Bloggers’ Meet-Up!

2011-12-12T00:30:00.002-05:00

Left side (L-R): Amanda from Tales and Treats, Natalia from Dazzling Reads, Ilana from From Smiler, with love, me and Tina from Bookshipper

Left side (L-R): Cat from Beyond Books, Cindy from Cindy’s Love of Books, Lucy from Moonlight Gleam’s Bookshelf, Cindy from Tynga’s Reviews and Emilie from A Beautiful Madness

I restrained myself a bit this time and only brought home four books for me (plus two for Mr. B):

From Amanda (Tales and Treats):

Birthmarked by Caragh M. O’Brien

From Cindy (Cindy’s Love of Books):

Mnemonic: A Book of Trees by Theresa Kishkan

From Lucy (Moonlight Gleam’s Bookshelf):

Black Mirror by Nancy Werlin

From Ilana (From Smiler, with love):

Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case by Agatha Christie

Ilana also gave me American Gods by Neil Gaiman and A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin for Mr. B. (Thank you!)

What did you find in your mailbox this past week? For other Mailbox Monday posts, head over to Let Them Read Books.

Similar Covers: Corsets (Again)

2011-12-07T17:50:00.020-05:00

I know I’ve been neglecting my blog in the last few months (let’s not even talk about how long it’s been since I’ve posted a book review I actually wrote), but I can’t let a week go by without posting another set of lookalike covers (or three).

Here’s the latest batch then, all of which feature a woman in a corset from the back...

The first set: Taboo by Jess Michaels aka Jenna Petersen (HarperCollins, Apr 2009) and Trades of the Flesh by Faye L. Booth (Macmillan, Sep 2009).

The second set (which is my favourite): The Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill, Wild Girls: Paris, Sappho, and Art – The Lives and Loves of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks by Diane Souhami (Orion Books, 2004), Wildthorn by Jane Eagland (Macmillan, 2009) and Bokbindersken (the Norwegian translation of The Journal of Dora Damage) by Belinda Starling (Cappelen Damm, 2010).

Finally, for those of you who have been following my “similar covers” posts for a while, a familiar set (with two new covers): Fever-Hot Dreams by Jaci Burton, Sherri L. King and Samantha Winston (Ellora’s Cave, 2007), Mistress by Leda Swann (HarperCollins, Feb 2008), Private Places by Robin Schone, Claudia Dain, Allyson James and Shiloh Walker (Penguin, Aug 2008), and The Scandal of the Season by Sophie Gee (Simon & Schuster, Aug 2008). Two of these covers appeared in my Seeing Double! post in 2009.

It’s funny because, although all these covers are very similar, only the middle ~~three~~ four appeal to me, which I attribute to the fact that those books sound more like something I’d actually read (the others don’t). I think the cover for Bokbindersken is particularly beautiful (the small image I’ve uploaded in this post doesn’t do it justice). What do you think?

Edited to add:

I added Wildthorn to the second set. I wasn’t sure it was the same image, but when you put it next to the others, it’s pretty obvious that it is!

Similar Covers: Butterflies

2011-11-30T12:05:00.002-05:00

While I was in Indigo the other day with a friend, I spotted a familiar cover: The Language of Letting Go by Melody Beattie (Hazelden, 1990). I’m almost 100% positive it’s the same butterfly (reversed) as appears on the cover of Jane Urquhart’s latest novel, Sanctuary Line (McClelland & Stewart, 2010).

A quick search on TinEye revealed two other exact matches: Chrysalis by the Venice Public Library Poets (Peppertree Press, 2008) and Understanding Change by Malcolm Webber (Strategic Press, date unknown).

I also recently came across two covers that feature the same blue butterfly: Touch (Our Senses) by Kay Woodward (Gareth Stephens Publishing, Jan 2005) and York Notes Advanced: Selected Poems – Carol Ann Duffy (Pearson, Jun 2005).

Finally, here are two butterflies-in-a-jar covers that are very similar though at the same time quite different: The Dry Grass of August by Anna Jean Mayhew (Kensington Publishing, 2011) and A World Away by Nancy Grossman (Hyperion, 2012).

Of all of these covers, my favourite by far is A World Away, which is whimsical and colourful (but may or may not have anything to do with the story, which is about an Amish teen who goes to Chicago for the summer to be a nanny!).

For other “similar covers” posts featuring butterflies, check out Blue Butterfly Covers, More Butterflies (Jar Optional) and Escaping Butterfly.

Mailbox Monday (November 28)

2011-11-28T00:25:00.000-05:00

Mailbox Monday is a gathering place for readers to share the books they received during the previous week. Warning: MM can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and huge wish lists! Mailbox Monday, which was started by Marcia (who now blogs at A girl and her books) is on blog tour—this month, it’s hosted by Marcia at the Mailbox Monday site.

I didn’t receive any books in the mail this week, but found two yesterday in a new-to-me secondhand store.

The first is ribsauce: a cd/anthology of words by women edited by Taien Ng-Chan (anthology) and Alex Boutros & Kaarla Sundström (CD). Alex and Kaarla used to be my neighbours about 15 years ago, so I was surprised and pleased to find this collection.

From the inside flap:

ribsauce is a unique compilation of literature and sound recordings, featuring some of Canada’s best women writers and performance artists. Presented in collaboration with Wired on Words, one of Canada’s premier spoken word recording labels, this combination of book and CD reveals the ways in which language and sound are manipulated and muscled into place by women who push the boundaries of genre and form.

The book delves into a diverse array of genre and cross-genre, from poetry and prose to plays and dramatic monologues, and everything in between. The works in this collection experiment with narrative and voice, text and image.

The second is Girl from Mars by Tamara Bach, translated by Shelley Tanaka.

From the inside flap:

Miriam is fifteen. She has lived in the same little town her whole life, going to school with the same kids who know everything about her—like how in the third grade she once laughed so hard that her strawberry milk came out her nose.

But now she’s in high school—having stupid arguments with her mother, bored to death in class, trying to get excited by the same old parties with the same old friends, and wishing she lived in a big city where she could meet new people, see new things. In other words, Miriam is desperately waiting for her life to start happening. Something, anything...

A first love, perhaps.

And then love comes, in a completely unexpected way, when Miriam meets a new classmate, Laura. And suddenly, life is very complicated...

What did you find in your mailbox this past week? For other Mailbox Monday posts, head over to the Mailbox Monday site.

Similar Covers: Written on the Face

2011-11-23T11:01:00.002-05:00

First a ~~threesome~~ foursome of covers where the book title obscures the face behind it:

A Friend of the Family by Lauren Grodstein (Algonquin Books, 2010)
The Book of Blood and Shadow by Robin Wasserman (Random House, 2012)
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (Random House, 2006)
The Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen by Thomas Caplan (Penguin 2012)

Next, a foursome of covers featuring closeups of (mostly) closed eyes:

Alles, was wir geben mussten (the German translation of Never Let Me Go) by Kazuo Ishiguro (Random House, 2005)
The Strength of the Sun by Catherine Chidgey (Macmillan Publishing, 2005)
Certainty by Madeleine Thien (Little, Brown, 2007)
My Not-So-Still Life by Liz Gallagher (Random House, 2011)

Interestingly, the librarians at Stacked have featured two of these covers (Never Let Me Go and My Not-So-Still Life) with other lookalikes: check out Dystopia Double Take and Double Take: A Wink and a Nudge. Do you know of any others that would match these sets?

Edited to add:

I just added a fourth cover to the first set, which I spotted over at The Book Smugglers. It looks so much like the cover for A Friend of the Family, except the words really are written on her face!

Scholastic Canada Brunch with Author Cecil Castellucci and Montreal Book Bloggers!

2011-11-22T10:00:00.005-05:00

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times already, last Sunday, five other Montreal book bloggers and I had the honour of having brunch with Cecil Castellucci and two publicists from Scholastic Canada, Nikole and Catherine, who were in town for the Salon du Livre de Montréal (an annual book trade show). Cecil is in Canada to promote her latest book, First Day on Earth. Here we all are (click on photo to enlarge):

Front row (L-R): Lisa from starmetal oak book blog and Nikole from Scholastic Canada

Back row (L-R): Cat from Beyond Books, me, Lucy from Moonlight Gleam’s Bookshelf, Cecil Castellucci, Tina from Bookshipper, Melissa from YA Book Shelf and Catherine from Scholastic Canada

It was so much fun to share a meal with such a bookish crowd! Cecil talked about writing her first boy book and how much she puts of herself into each of her books. She answered our questions and signed our books. (I own seven of her nine books and every single one is now signed.) She even drew in my copy of The Plain Janes (read my review)!

She also mentioned that her next book will be a hybrid fiction and graphic novel called The Year of the Beasts (illustrated by Nate Powell—check out the cover!). I can’t wait to read it!

Nikole and Catherine prepared personalized bags of Scholastic goodness for each of us. These are the books I got:

Glory Be by Augusta Scattergood (Jan 2012)
Irises by Francisco X. Stork (Jan 2012)
If Only by Carole Geithner (Mar 2012)
The Letter Q: Queer Writers’ Noes to their Younger Selves edited by Sarah Moon with James Lecesne (May 2012)

Many thanks again to Nikole and Catherine from Scholastic Canada for hosting this event and to Cecil for hanging out with us and answering our questions!

If you live in Montreal (or nearby) and want to meet Cecil, she will be at Babar en Ville this Saturday doing a Writing Workshop for Teens. You can also watch her being interviewed on The Morning Show.

Mailbox Monday (November 21)

2011-11-21T00:15:00.004-05:00

Mailbox Monday is a gathering place for readers to share the books they received during the previous week. Warning: MM can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and huge wish lists! Mailbox Monday, which was started by Marcia (who now blogs at A girl and her books) is on blog tour—this month, it’s hosted by Marcia at the Mailbox Monday site.

I received one book to review in the mail this week, from Quest Books: Sojourns of the Soul: One Woman’s Journey around the World and into Her Truth by Dana Micucci. It seemed like a suitable follow-up to my trip to Kripalu!

From the publisher’s site:

Sojourns of the Soul is the quintessential armchair travel book for the spiritual seeker. Dana Micucci’s touching memoir chronicles seven sacred journeys that span 14 years of Micucci’s life, during which she explores the connection of inner growth to world travel that eventually leads to her own enlightenment. Unlike other inspirational travel books, Sojourns of the Soul provides a rare mix of in-depth wisdom and literary insights from the holistic view of an experienced female traveler.

Fellow Montreal book blogger Lucy gave me The Knife of Letting Go by Patrick Ness...

From the back cover:

Prentisstown isn’t like other towns. Everyone can hear everyone else’s thoughts in an overwhelming, never-ending stream of Noise. Just a month away from the birthday that will make him a man, Todd and his dog, Manchee—whose thoughts Todd can hear too, whether he wants to or not—stumble upon an area of complete silence. They find that in a town where privacy is impossible, something terrible has been hidden—a secret so awful that Todd and Manchee must run for their lives. But how do you escape when your pursuers can hear your every thought?

While fellow Montreal book blogger Lisa lent me The Highest Frontier by Joan Slonczewski...

From the inside flap:

Jennifer Ramos Kennedy, a girl from a rich and politically influential family (descended from the famous Kennedy clan) whose twin brother has died in an accident and left her bereft, is about to enter her freshman year at Frontera College. Frontera is an exciting school built in Earth’s orbit with media money—and a bit from tribal casinos, too—and is dedicated to educating the best and brightest of this future world. We accompany Jenny as she proceeds through her early days at school, encountering surprises and wonders and some unpleasant problems. Deadly microbes that caused AIDS and anthrax are now being modified to cure disease and grow cables for space elevators. Earth is altered by global warming, and an invasive alien species called ultraphytes threatens the surviving ecosystem. Jenny is being raised for great things, but while she’s in school, she just wants to do her homework, go on a few dates, and get by.

I also received a bunch of books from Scholastic Canada during the brunch on Sunday with Cecil Castellucci and her publicists, but more on that tomorrow!

What did you find in your mailbox this past week? For other Mailbox Monday posts, head over to the Mailbox Monday site.

Similar Covers: More Soldiers

2011-11-16T23:58:00.002-05:00

In honour of Remembrance Day, which was last Friday, here are three sets of covers that feature the photos of Alfred Eisenstaedt, who is most famous for his photo V-J Day in Times Square. All three of the photos used on the covers below were taken at Penn Station. (Note that I’ve featured several of these covers in previous posts: Gone to Soldiers Again... and Sepia Couples [Take 2].)

The first set (above) are:

The Last Time I Saw Paris by Lynn Sheene (Penguin, May 2011)
Remembrance Day by Leah Fleming (Harper Collins, 2009)
Consequences by Penelope Lively (Lester & Orpen Dennys, 2008)
The Wreckage by Michael Crummey (Random House, 2006)
The Carpenter's Pencil by Manuel Rivas (Random House, 2001)
Standard Time: Songs of Word War II by Valerie Piacenti (CD, Nov 2011)
A Farewell to Arms: Remastered Edition directed by Frank Borzage (DVD, 2005)

The second set (above) are:

The Winds of War by Denise Robertson (Little Books, 2009)
The Diplomat’s Wife by Pam Jenoff (Harlequin, 2008)
Consequences by Penelope Lively (Penguin, 2007)
El corresponsal (the Spanish translation of The Foreign Correspondent) by Alan Furst (Planeta, 2006)
Gone to Soldiers by Marge Piercy (Random House, 1988)

The third set (above) are:

Half in Love by Maile Meloy (Hachette, 2005)
World War II Songs: As Time Goes By (Dynamic Music, 2006)

Mailbox Monday (November 14)

2011-11-14T17:49:00.003-05:00

Similar Covers: Boys

2011-11-09T20:00:00.000-05:00

It seems to me that the covers I mention in my “similar covers” posts generally feature girls or women (if they feature people at all), and hardly ever boys or men.* So it seemed like it was about time to present you with these boys on lookalike covers!

This first collection is of sailor boy covers: Autumn in Yalta: A Novel and Three Stories by David Shrayer-Petrov (Syracuse University Press, 2006), They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell (Pantheon, 1964) and Youri by Henri Troyat (Flammarion, 1992). You may remember that the French cover for They Came Like Swallows was in last week’s post.

Then I found Torn Water by John Lynch (Harper Collins, 2005), Broken Fever: Reflections of Gay Boyhood by James Morrison (St. Martin’s Press, 2001) and Van venir com orenetes (the Catalan translation of They Came Like Swallows) by William Maxwell (Labutxaca, 2009)...

Finally, a twosome I’d be saving for a while: Our Holocaust by Amir Gutfreund (Toby Press, 2006) and Hide & Seek by Clare Sambrook (Canongate, 2009). (You may remember that I featured another cover of Hide and Seek in my paper doll chains post.)

Unfortunately, I’m not very fond of any of these covers!

*In fact, I checked and other than four posts featuring couples, only three other posts—out of over 100!—feature boys or men: vampire (which I just updated with a fourth cover), boy from behind (the Tineye post) and back of head.

Mailbox Monday (November 7): The Kripalu Edition

2011-11-07T00:10:00.008-05:00

At Kripalu, I bought four more books:

The Florist’s Daughter: A Memoir by Patricia Hampl (which just happened to be available for 75% off)
Into the Heart of Yoga: One Woman’s Journey – A Memoir by Danna Faulds
Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation – A 28-Day Program by Sharon Salzberg
Yoga and the Quest for the True Self by Stephen Cope

I was studying with Stephen Cope and Sharon Salzberg during my retreat, so I had the opportunity to get both of them to sign my books. (I bought a second copy of Yoga and the Quest for the True Self because the copy I owned was an ARC I found at a library sale. Stephen very kindly signed both!)

What did you find in your mailbox this past week? For other Mailbox Monday posts, head over to the Mailbox Monday site.

Wherever We Go Read-along: Author Interview at Books and Movies

2011-11-06T16:40:00.004-05:00

If you participated in the Wherever You Go read-along that I co-hosted this month with Carrie at Books and Movies (or have read this book recently), don’t forget to head over to Carrie’s blog to read her interview with the author, Joan Leegant. I now wish I’d asked Joan a few more questions!

Thank you to all of you who participated in the final read-along discussion. (If you haven’t yet, it’s not too late to add in your two cents!)

Similar Covers: Repeats

2011-11-02T17:55:00.001-04:00

Here are two lots of covers that I’ve featured before (twice each in fact), but I keep finding more to add to each collection!

First, the famous dresses that started my lookalike obsession. I’ve featured four of these covers before, but have since found two more:

The books are:

Relative Stranger: A Life After Death by Mary Loudon (Canongate Books, 2006)
The Easter Parade by Richard Yates (Methuen Publishing, Jan 2003)
The Honey Thief by Elizabeth Graver (Harcourt Books, 2000)
Three Ages of Woman by Sarah Willis (Piatkus, 2004)
Comme un vol d’hirondelles (the French translation of They Came Like Swallows) by William Maxwell (10/18, Jan 2003)
Forgive Me by Amanda Eyre Ward (Random House, 2007)

The second series actually uses a combination of two different stock photos: one of a woman sitting on a suitcase in the middle of a road and the other of a woman running down the middle of a road... I’ve featured three of these covers before, but have since found two more (I’ve included Leaving Unknown twice since it belongs to both sets):

The books are:

Illegally Blonde by Nelsa Roberto (Great Plains Publications, Mar 2010)
The Girl She Used to Be by David Cristofano (Hachette, 2009)
Leaving Unknown by Kerry Reichs (Harper Collins, Mar 2010)
The Best of Times by Penny Vincenzi (Random House, Jun 2010)
Afterwards by Rosamund Lupton (Piatkus Books, 2011)

I like these covers because each is unique: even the ones that are very similar (the first two in each set) are different colours. My favourites are The Honey Thief (which coincidentally is the only book I own out of all of these) and Leaving Unknown.

Wherever You Go Read-along: Part 2 (Pages 126-253)

2011-10-31T13:16:00.003-04:00

Welcome to the second and final discussion of Wherever You Go by Joan Leegant, which is part of the read-along I’m co-hosting with Carrie at Books and Movies. If you missed them, please go back and read the part 1 discussion and Joan ’s guest post. Also, don’t forget to submit your questions for Joan to Carrie as soon as possible at nnjmom at yahoo dot com. Joan will be answering these questions on Carrie’s blog on November 5.

I apologize for the delay in posting this discussion. I mismanaged my time and then got stuck in the crazy snowstorm battering the Northeastern United States—I just got home last night and was too exhausted to finish this post before today. Anyway, without further ado, here are some of my thoughts...

Note that the rest of this post contains major spoilers!

I was struck by the many parallels in Aaron and Mark’s stories: they were both lost as young men; they both had very difficult relationships with their fathers; they both turned to religion to save themselves. They even both changed their hair to mark turning points in their lives: Aaron shaves his head to show his commitment to Adamah; while Mark shaves off his beard to signify his loss of faith. And yet, their journeys go in very different directions (even as the two men meet): Mark’s leads him towards an opening up of possibilities, a chance to start again, meaningful work and love, whereas Aaron’s leads to death and despair. (Considering that he wasn’t going to be punished in any traditional sense for his crime, I can’t think of a much worse fate for Aaron that to have to remain under his parents’ supervision indefinitely.) The obvious difference between their journeys is the direction they are going in during the course of the book: Mark moves away from rigid religious views (he doesn’t, in fact, completely lose his faith, but rather loosens his grip on specific rituals of faith), which leads directly to greater happiness, whereas Aaron’s views become more fanatical—the God he professes to believes in is “the fiery God of the Hebrews who . . . drowned the Egyptians and killed all their firstborn and incinerated the priests of Baal and ordered the slaughter of thousands whenever they got in the Israelites’ way” (p. 85). Did you notice this too? What are your thoughts about this? What did you think of what happened to Aaron?

I was initially a bit disappointed that we didn’t get to find out more about Dena and what motivated her choices, but in the end, I think this really worked in the context of this novel: the reader doesn’t find out more because Yona doesn’t (which totally makes sense). However, I’m curious: Why do you think that Dena did what Yona asked her to, even though Dena refused to forgive her sister? I think Dena couldn’t forgive Yona without reassessing some of her own life choices; however, something of what Yona said got through. (And who knows what Dena will do in the future: maybe she will eventually soften her position and forgive her sister.) What are your thoughts about this?

Finally, my favourite aspect of the novel was how Joan used the quote from the Talmud, Whoever saves one life, it’s as if he’s saved an entire world. (An alternate translation is He who saves one life saves the world entire.) This is the argument Yona uses to convince her sister to save Mark Greengrass, and it’s also the explanation the doctor gives to Mark’s parents for why he (Mark) hadn’t run from the explosion (since Mark can’t remember). This moved me to tears: Because how often does a person have the opportunity to save an entire world? (p. 252).

There is so much more I could say about this book, but I’ll stop here for now. Let me know what you thought in the comments (about my questions or any other aspect of the story), and I’ll be sure to comment back!

Brogan’s Review: Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

2011-10-27T10:14:00.005-04:00

Hmm, it seems like the only person writing reviews for my blog these days is my sister Brogan! Here’s another one for you while I’m away...

I find myself not wanting to say anything critical about Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie because it’s so good, and not only is it a good book, but it’s also an important one. The story is set in Nigeria in the sixties and alternates between “the early sixties” and “the late sixties.” It begins by introducing the main characters, Olanna and Kainene, middle-class twin sisters, Olanna with a revolutionary bent and Kainene with a more business orientation. Olanna has a lover, Odenigbo, who is a university professor; Kainene’s lover is a white man from England, one of the few Westerners who has come to Nigeria not to pillage the country but to try to understand it (he is interested in the historical art of the area). Then there’s Ugwu, Olanna and Odenigbo’s household servant, a poor boy from an outlying village who is trying to make his way (preferably up) in the world.

Enter civil war.

The power of this book for me was twofold: one, it totally transported me to another world, a world of jollof rice, houseboys, and multiple languages and ethnic groups (Igbo, Yoruba, English, Fulani and a number of others); and two, despite their obvious differences at the outset, I saw how similar middle-class Nigerian life could be to middle-class North American life, and therefore as I read about the anomie of war I could imagine and dread my own life being so transformed. This is the greatest strength of Half of a Yellow Sun: it makes you care about people who live half a world away, people whose lives are entwined in our own, given that so many resources that support our middle-class lifestyle come from Africa.

I cared deeply about the characters, who are strong, uncompromising and interesting. When Olanna described being afraid of who would die next, I can only say that I shared her fear.

Knowing that this novel is based on actual events made me want to learn more about the history of Nigeria and the struggle for an independent Biafra. (Adichie gives free reign to a number of political discussions in the book, but since she’s faithful to actual conversations, people do not reference their current political situation with the in-depth background information that would have been helpful to someone like me, who knew nothing about the political history of the area and had only a sketchy knowledge of international politics at that time.)

One thing this book made clear was that in such wars, it is not the side with the most legitimacy that wins, or the side with the deepest conviction among its supporters—it is rather the side with the backing of Western powers (and therefore access to weapons), a support that can depend on the vagaries of international relations at the time. But also, that in war there is no “good side,” and the tools of war are brutality on both sides. The war in Nigeria against secessionist Biafra was the first conflict in which mass starvation was deliberately used as a weapon of war (against the Biafrans).

My questions or slight detractions about the book are more on the personal, character level. For instance, one of the women, Kainene, is said to be ugly and is frequently compared to her beautiful sister (by other characters) because they are twins. As a reader, I cared about Kainene’s ugliness, about how this single fact of her life (which she could do nothing about) affected her and how she reacted to it with wryness and sarcasm. However, I also didn’t quite understand it—Adichie writes of “beautiful” and “ugly” as if they are absolute and universal, as objective as describing one person’s eyes as brown and another’s as blue. But beauty is not an objective quality so I found myself wondering what was ugly about Kainene? Adichie only ever describes this ugliness in the vaguest of terms, using words such as “androgynous” and “skinny”—she gives us no details. (She gives no details as to the beautiful woman’s looks either but somehow this mattered less.) Also, both Western and Nigerian men find Kainene unattractive, which, given that standards of beauty are culturally specific, made me wonder further: what is it about this woman’s appearance that so sets her apart? Because Adichie doesn’t explore these details, it seemed to me that she used Kainene’s ugliness as a device and in that way I felt the telling wasn’t compassionate. Casting Kainene as ugly seemed like an idea imposed on the character rather than an organic part of her reality, which I hope would have led to a more sensitive and complete exploration of that reality.

Overall, Half of a Yellow Sun is a phenomenal book. Part love story, part examination of war, it doesn’t evade subtleties (it’s not because you are surrounded by shelling that you know for sure whether you’ve chosen the right lover), nor does it turn away from looking at the crassness of humanity at its worst—which is war—and how ordinary people live their lives in the midst of it.
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Other reviews:

Book Chatter • Caribousmom • Musings of a Bookish Kitty • pages turned • she reads novels • SmallWorld Reads • The Magic Lasso
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Similar Covers: Dummies + Bird Cage

2011-10-26T12:00:00.009-04:00

Here’s another collection I’ve been gathering for a while: books with a dressmaker’s dummy on the cover.

First, the yellowy beige ones: The Little Giant of Aberdeen County by Tiffany Baker, Floor Sample by Julia Cameron and A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving...

Next, the more colourful ones: She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb, The Thoughtful Dresser by Linda Grant and Self-Help by Lorrie Moore...

And finally, a matching twosome: De water methode man (the Dutch translation of The Water-Method Man) by John Irving and Die Eisheilige (The Spring Snow Storm) by Susanne Mischke (a German writer whose books don’t seem to have been translated into English).

Interestingly enough, Die Eisheilige has been published with another cover, which also has a lookalike: A Doll’s House: York Notes by Henrik Ibsen.

I can’t say I’m particularly drawn to any of these covers, though I did enjoy The Little Giant of Aberdeen County (read my review)!

Really Random Tuesday: The ABCs of Me

2011-10-25T10:13:00.010-04:00

I saw this meme on Marie’s blog, Daisy’s Book Journal (she grabbed it from Cathy at Kittling: Books) and thought it would make a perfect Really Random Tuesday post for you while I’m away at Kripalu (!) for the week. So here goes...

Age: 41

Bed size: Queen

Chore you hate: Pretty much any type of housework, though cleaning the toilet probably ranks lowest (thanks to Mr. B, it’s not something I do very often!)

Dogs: Nope. I’m a cat person. I miss my Thelma every day, but I’m happy to share my life (and my lap) with Cairo.

Essential start to your day: After getting out of bed? Peeing is first on the list, followed soon after by feeding the cat.

Favourite colours: Orange and red

Gold or silver: Silver, though I wear a gold opal ring that used to belong to my nana

Height: 5’5’’

Instruments you play(ed): Piano, once upon a time, long long ago. I also learned to play a djembe, but I’m shy about playing in front of anybody.

Job title: Freelance translator (French to English)

Kids: None

Live: Montreal

Mother’s name: Ann (that’s where the “annschild” comes from in my username)

Nicknames: None. (The only nickname I know of for Avis is Ave, which is my aunt’s name.)

Overnight hospital stays: Can’t remember any.

Pet peeves: Books that contain misused words, sloppy spelling

Quote from a movie: “Yummy yummy!” (from Gosford Park directed by Robert Altman: the Maggie Smith character says it in anticipation of breakfast in bed at Gosford Park)

Right- or left-handed: Right

Siblings: Two younger sisters

Time you wake up: Do I have to answer this question? 9-ish on weekdays. (Thank goodness I work from home.)

Underwear: What about it? (Yes, I wear underwear, if anybody really wants to know.)

Vegetable you hate: Mushrooms (except for portabellas and maybe porcini—I’m undecided about those), though I’m not sure mushrooms qualify as vegetables. Cabbage. Brussel sprouts. Raw tomatoes and onions (cooked are fine).

What makes you run late: Life

X-rays you’ve had: Dental

Yummy food that you make: Vegetarian carbonara (Mr. B and I made up the recipe)

Zoo animal: Giraffe, though zoos make me feel sad. (If we’re talking exotic animals in general, I’d have to go with the blue-footed booby!)

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Really Random Tuesday is hosted by Suko at Suko’s Notebook. Feel free to join in, copy the button and link back to Suko’s blog.

The blue-footed booby pic is courtesy of Hans Stieglitz via the Wikimedia Commons site. It is under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 licence.

Mailbox Monday (October 24): McGill Bookfair Loot

2011-10-24T08:15:00.006-04:00

The books are:

I now own the first nine books in the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series (but have only read the first three). I’m also the proud owner of no fewer than four copies of A Door into Ocean. (The Women’s Press edition is by far my favourite and this copy is in much better shape than the other copy I own, so it made sense to me to “replace” it for only $2—not that I plan of getting rid of the first copy!)

What did you find in your mailbox this past week? For other Mailbox Monday posts, head over to Savvy Verse & Wit.

Telling the Truth While Making Things Up: Guest Post by Joan Leegant, Author of Wherever You Go

2011-10-22T10:00:00.006-04:00

I’m thrilled to be able to offer you this guest post by Joan Leegant, author of Wherever You Go, as part of the Wherever You Go read-along that I’m co-hosting this month with Carrie from Books and Movies. After watching Joan’s videos, I sent her the following message: “I’m curious about your writing process. In one of your videos, you mention that you don’t pre-plan your writing (that you are discovering how the story unfolds as you write it) and I wonder how that works when you’re writing about current and politically charged events. Do you worry about getting it ‘right’? What kind of research do you do?” This is what Joan sent me as a reply.
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Writing about something that’s based in fact or is topical—what some call “ripped from the headlines”—can pose unusual challenges for a fiction writer. You’re writing about an event that’s actually happened (as Jim Shepard does in his terrific story “Love and Hydrogen,” which takes place in 1937 on the doomed Hindenburg airship) or set amid a real political conflict (like Tim O’Brien’s collection about American soldiers in Vietnam, The Things They Carried), and yet you’re also making things up. How does one go about this? How close to the “facts” must one stay? Are there dangers in sticking too closely to the facts? And is it harder if your story is set in 2011 rather than forty or seventy years ago?

Naturally, you have to get your facts straight. For my novel Wherever You Go, I needed to have a pretty thorough understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and of the phenomenon of Jewish political extremism in particular. I needed to have an ear for the rhetoric of the radical settlers and a solid grasp of Israeli society. Fortunately, most of that was readily accessible to me. Since 2007 I’ve lived in Israel part of each year; for decades prior, I was a close observer of the country, following a three-year stint in Jerusalem in the late 1970s.

Beyond that, writing a novel with topical elements isn’t all that different from writing any other novel. Always, your characters have to be believable. Their emotions and behaviors have to ring true; otherwise your reader will set aside the book and not go along with the pact you make with them: I will tell you an invented story, but through it I’m going to reveal the truth. You also have to get the details right. Otherwise the reader is catapulted out of the book, thinking, No, it’s not like that. This writer doesn’t speak with authority. Some years ago, I was at an artist colony and read aloud a part of a work-in-progress. The excerpt mentioned an M-5 bus from Queens, NY to Manhattan. At the conclusion of the reading, a painter from New York said, “Your story is good. But there are no buses from Queens to New York with an M. They’re all Q.” My mistake ruined the flow for this reader. Needless to say, I fixed the error. For a scene in Wherever You Go involving an explosion, I spent hours on the Web researching how to make a bomb (I’m still waiting for the FBI to show up at my door).

How much of what I wrote in Wherever You Go is factually true and how much did I make up? What’s true is that extremist groups exist in Israeli society and operate on the West Bank; it’s also true that some Americans are active in these groups. Also true are the physical descriptions: the thousands of birds dotting the sky over Jerusalem at dusk; the security questioning at Ben-Gurion Airport; what it’s like to be in a taxi stuck in traffic when the bomb robot comes to dismantle a suspicious object.

What I made up are the personal stories I tell in Wherever You Go. For instance, there is a violent incident at the heart of the book that I invented. Could it have taken place? Yes, though I don’t know that such an event ever actually occurred. Likewise the characters. I made them up, they aren’t composites of people I know, but there certainly could be a troubled kid like Aaron Blinder, a religious seeker like Mark Greenglass, a woman trying to forgive herself and reconcile with her sister like Yona Stern. I know this, as a writer, from a combination of observation, research, and intuition.

Sometimes being too faithful to the facts can straitjacket your storytelling. I waited to visit several West Bank settlements until the draft was done so that my imagination could have free reign; only when it was done did I go there to check for accuracy and tweak some small details. Writers of autobiographical fiction struggle with this all the time. Just because something happened in real life doesn’t mean it makes for good fiction.

You can probably play a little faster and looser with the facts if your story is set in the past rather than the present. If Jim Shepard made an error describing the defective cooling system of the Hindenburg (which probably caused the fire that caused it to explode), there aren’t a lot of readers who’d know the difference. But you still have to be careful. You need the reader to feel she’s in good hands and that you know what you’re talking about. One novelist, John Dufresne, titled his book on craft The Lie That Tells a Truth. That’s the fiction writer’s goal: to tell the truth. But you get there by way of believable fabrication.
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Have you ever had the thought, while reading a novel: “No, it’s not like that. This writer doesn’t speak with authority.” (I can think of one or two examples right off!) What about the opposite, when you feel sure that a book is telling you the truth, even though it’s fiction? (I felt that way about The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, for example, and Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis, even though that’s historical fiction wrapped in science fiction.) Thank you, Joan, for this thoughtful post!

For more about Joan and her work, including more guest posts, please visit www.joanleegant.com.

Similar Covers: Female Heads in Silhouette

2011-10-19T12:30:00.006-04:00

I’ve been noticing a cover trend recently: female heads in silhouette, often against a single-colour background. Here’s my collection so far (over half of which were published this year), but I’m sure there are others out there.

First, Bride of New France by Suzanne Desrochers (Penguin, Jan 2011), Clara and Mr. Tiffany by Susan Vreeland (Random House, Jan 2011) and The Girl Who Could Silence the Wind by Meg Medina (Candlewick, 2012), which are busier than most of these covers...

Next, Little Bee by Chris Cleave (Simon & Schuster, 2009), 32 Candles by Ernessa T. Carter (Harper Collins, 2010) and Incendiary* by Chris Cleave (Simon & Schuster, Jan 2011)...

Then, Lies by Enrique de Hériz (Orion Publishing, 2007) and The Whole Truth by Kit Pearson (Harper Collins Canada, Aug 2011)...

And finally, The Story of Beautiful Girl by Rachel Simon (Hachette, May 2011) and Marion Woodman: Dancing in the Flames, a movie directed by Adam Greydon Reid (2009).

What do you think of these covers? Do they grab you? Have you spotted any others that would fit in this collection? Let me know and I’ll add them!

Edited to add:

I just added The Girl Who Could Silence the Wind to this post (spotted over at The Book Smugglers).

*It feels like it’s cheating a bit to include both titles by Chris Cleave (since the second one is obviously inspired by the first), but those three covers look so pretty together that I couldn’t resist!

Mailbox Monday (October 17)

2011-10-17T10:30:00.009-04:00

Alone! Alone!: Lives of Some Outsider Women by Rosemary Dinnage
Jane and the Barque of Frailty by Stephanie Barron
This Body of Death by Elizabeth George

I also received two books I’d ordered this week:

And I forgot to mention that I received an autographed copy of The Glimpse Traveler by Marianne Boruch from the publisher, Indiana University Press. They had previously sent me a galley copy to review, so I’m happy to have a final copy that’s autographed no less! (Read my review.)

What did you find in your mailbox this past week? For other Mailbox Monday posts, head over to Savvy Verse & Wit.

Wherever You Go Read-along: Part 1 (Pages 3-126)

2011-10-15T20:25:00.004-04:00

If you’re participating in the Wherever You Go read-along that Carrie and I are co-hosting this month, don’t forget that this week’s discussion (about the first half of the book) is happening over on Carrie’s blog, Books and Movies. Since this book is short, we’ve decided to post discussions only twice, so the final discussion will take place here on October 29. It’s also not to late to join us—if you’re interested, sign up here.

Author Joan Leegant will be guest posting on my blog next Saturday and answering questions on Carrie’s blog on November 5. So keep track of your questions for Joan and email them to Carrie at nnjmom at yahoo dot com. The deadline for questions is October 31.

Similar Covers: More Girls

2011-10-12T16:14:00.011-04:00

I’m not doing too well with reviewing these days, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, but you can count on me for your weekly dose of similar covers! Here are four sets of doubles for you.

First, there’s Seventeeth Summer by Maureen Daly (Simon Pulse, 1985) and Ein süßer Sommer (A Sweet Summer) by Petra Hammesfahr (Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verla, 2004)...

Next, there’s Stop Pretending: What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy by Sonya Sones (HarperTeen, 2001) and White Death by Tim Vicary (Oxford University Press, 2008)...

Then there’s Children’s Corner: Debussy performed by the Québec Symphony Orchestra (2007) and Up from the Blue by Susan Henderson (Harper, 2010)...

And finally there’s Whisper (the Italian translation of Lament) by Maggie Stiefvater (Fanucci, Feb 2011) and The Twisted Thread by Charlotte Bacon (Hyperion, Jun 2011)!

None of these covers grabs me in a big way, though I like Seventeenth Summer well enough and the freckly girl on Up from the Blue is super cute and The Twisted Thread cover (along with the title) is quite intriguing. (How’s that for a run-on sentence?) Oh, and I dislike both covers with the girl at the window. What do you think?