she reads and reads

Apologies for mislabelling part 2 as part 1

2009-11-11T14:29:00.003-05:00

Some of you may have noticed that part 1 of my sister Brogan’s guest post on the rules and gifts of reading seemingly appeared in your readers twice. This is because I sleepily copied and pasted the title for part 2 last night and forgot to change that one little number. Sorry about that!

What is the nature of reading, what are its “rules” and its gifts? – Part 2 (Guest post by Brogan)

2009-11-11T10:34:00.004-05:00

This is part 2 of a guest post by my sister Brogan, who has contributed reviews to this blog in the past as well as last week’s Teaser Tuesday post. Read part 1 first!

What happens, then, when you project a book onto the path ahead of yourself and it really isn’t what you expected?

I’ve experienced this twist in expectation as both neutral and negative. The Perpetual Ending by Kristen d en Hartog and Good to a Fault by Marina Endicott (read review) were both books that I read with particular expectations, and then halfway through I thought: “Oh. Wait a minute. That’s not what this book is about.” And I could then let the books be what they were, and let myself be open to what they were offering.

With Good Things I Wish You by A. Manette Ansay, I anticipated a totally other journey than what the book was about, and when I finished it I was actually annoyed because I had thought it was promising one thing (a romantic journey) and it gave me another (an intense exploration of non-affection and selfishness in love relationships).

When the agreement is broken in this way, whose fault is it? My expectations are my responsibility; a book cannot possibly please everyone… but at the same time, there are some books that will displease readers in similar ways, so it’s not just accident or personal taste.

How fragile is that promise then, how tender the line between writer and reader! How amazing when the accident happens in the other direction: When I read The History of Love by Nicole Krauss, I had no idea what to expect at all—I don’t even know if I had read the book jacket—and I thought the story was enchanting (if a little uneven).

Or how strange when you find yourself reading a book at breakneck speed, and then finish it and decide you didn’t even like it.

I think, in the end, the mystery is intact. I will continue to stumble upon books, like some, dislike others, and sometimes, by astonishing good luck and to my great surprise and satisfaction, find some of those gems that make me remember why I read in the first place.

What is the nature of reading, what are its “rules” and its gifts? – Part 1 (Guest post by Brogan)

2009-11-10T22:29:00.009-05:00

This is part 1 of a guest post by my sister Brogan, who has contributed reviews to this blog in the past as well as last week’s Teaser Tuesday post.

Since I started writing book reviews, I’ve been thinking about books: what makes one choose a book, what makes a book work, and just what is this business of reading all about anyway? I feel that reading a book is about entering into an agreement with the writer. The writer extends a promise, a lure, and the reader agrees: I will enter into your fantasy. I will follow the roads you take me down; I will let you determine what happens next. And in exchange, the writer gets the reader’s time and attention.

This has nothing to do with the actual monetary exchange for the book, because many books are borrowed, some are bought without being read, some are chucked halfway through. The agreement then is more about the art of the book than its commerce, the why of the author writing it in the first place, the tender wavering of nerve cells rearranging themselves as a reader is impacted by what they’ve read.

This agreement is entered into on often seemingly tenuous grounds: someone reads a book jacket flap, someone is drawn to the cover of a book or its title. Sometimes the reader chooses based on a blurb or a review, or a friend saying a book is fabulous.

Being someone who has 50 books out on my library card at any one time, I know just how important the selection of a book is (those are, after all, just the ones I bring home!)—and yet I still think there is something deeply mysterious and elusive about finding a good book. It’s an incredible feat of chance when the meeting of reader and text hits that note of harmony.

To declare the biases on my side of the agreement: I am not one who is easily pleased. Where some people might like 90% of the books they read and love 50% of them, I probably like 50% of the books I read and love about 5% of them. But that love, when it is there, is an experience so intense that it is in the realm of alchemy—it’s the magic of a response, of an interrelationship between two things, self and text, and in that sense it is even intimate, between self and writer.

The other part of my bias is that I also write, which means that I sometimes confuse where someone else is taking a story and where I would take it. Not that I relinquish control with difficulty: once, when my sister told me she rewrote the endings of books if they really didn’t work for her, I was both horrified and amazed at this possibility. It is quite unusual for me to feel that I can do that, after the fact. Although I do have to say that since this suggestion was made, it has happened to me on occasion that I’ve said to myself that X didn’t happen and Y did at the end of such-and-such a story—or in one exceptional, but very clear case (The Petty Details of So-and-So’s Life by Camilla Gibb), I allowed the whole thing except for the very last page, which I arrogantly treated in my mind as an editorial error—I willfully pretended to myself that the last page did not exist and was just not part of the story.

But I think I may have been unclear with this last declaration, in saying that I’m a writer. It isn’t that I’m constantly considering how I would mould the text. It’s that when I read the description on a book jacket, I’m immediately heady with the expectation of how I will feel as I read the story.

There’s that great story by Ron Evans (a Canadian Chippewa storyteller)* about how electricity is first brought to an African village, and a westerner is there to witness the arrival of the first community television set. Everything stops in the village for about two weeks because everyone is watching TV. Then life goes back to its usual pace. The puzzled westerner asks why no one is watching the TV anymore. “Oh, we don’t need it, we have the storyteller,” someone tells him. “But don’t you think the TV knows more stories than your storyteller?” “Oh, yes. The TV knows lots of stories. But the storyteller knows us.”

I think that is the same magic of a very good book: as a reader, you feel known. You feel that in some way the story is either about you or for you. This reminds me of an E.M. Forster quote I saw on the wall of a big-box book store: “I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.”

What happens, then, when you project a book onto the path ahead of yourself and it really isn’t what you expected?

Come back tomorrow for part 2 of this post!

*This story was created by Ron Evans in 1982 in the context of storytelling revival.

Mailbox Monday (November 9)

2009-11-09T18:29:00.006-05:00

I received a box in the mail this week, which contained two hardcover copies of the same book: In Hovering Flight by Joyce Hinnefeld, sent to me by Unbridled Books. Why two copies? Well, it seems that very few people participated in the scavenger hunts organized for Book Blogger Appreciation Week, because I won a prize for both the Literary Scavenger Hunt and the Spiritual Scavenger Hunt. (I tried to pass on the second prize to someone else but there was apparently no one else to give it to.) While I’m a bit sad that so few people did the scavenger hunts (I thought they were a great idea), I’m happy to have an extra copy of this book to eventually give to one of you. I like to do giveaways in conjunction with reviews, though, so you’re going to have to wait a little while for it...

What did you find in your mailbox this past week? For other Mailbox Monday posts, head over to Marcia’s blog, The Printed Page.

Book/blog stats for October 2009

2009-11-05T18:53:00.002-05:00

October was a so-so month for both reading and reviewing: I read nine books (six of which were graphic novels) and reviewed two (both of which were negative reviews). The books I read were:
When Autumn Leaves by Amy Foster
Owly: Just a Little Blue (vol. 2) by Andy Runton
Persepolis 1 and 2 by Marjane Satrapi
La Perdida by Jessica Abel
Aya de Yopougon 2 and Aya de Yopougon 3 by Marguerite Abouet and Clément Oubrerie
When the Body Says No: The Hidden Cost of Stress by Gabor Maté
Boys, Girls and Other Hazardous Materials by Rosalind Wiseman

The books I reviewed were (click on link for review):
Chiggers by Hope Larson
A Change in Altitude by Anita Shreve

My friend Louise guest posted a review (click on link for review):
Close Encounters of the Third-Grade Kind: Thoughts on Teacherhood by Phillip Done

If you missed any of my “similar covers” posts this month, they were:
Balancing acts
More women from behind (in which I also explain how I find these covers)
Two couples
Headless woman in a black dress
Red and white robe

A few blog stats:

Top viewed post: More women from behind

Number of books acquired: 53 (I blame Book Fair Week!)

Similar covers: Red and white robe

2009-11-04T12:17:00.003-05:00

When I was at the book fair in Quebec City this past Saturday, I spotted a lookalike pair: The Sad Truth about Happiness by A nne Giardini (a cover I’m very familiar with) and Lucca by Hans Christian Grøndahl, translated from the Danish by Anne Born. What I didn’t realize is that the cover image is a painting: Betty by Gerhard Richter. (I always thought it was a photograph.)

Unfortunately, I didn’t think to check who had published these books (as requested last week by both StephanieD of Misfit Salon and An Anonymous Child of Bibliobio). However, according to what I could find online, Lucca was actually published first, in 2003, by Canongate Books (in the UK), while The Sad Truth about Happiness was published at the earliest in 2005 by Harper Collins Canada. (The trade paperback version came out in 2006; I’m not 100% positive that the hardcover used the same cover image.)

I also had in my collection several other covers that remind me of these two because they all feature a red and white sari-like robe: Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle and The Anna Papers, both by Ellen Gilchrist, as well as Sophie and the Rising Sun by Augusta Trobaugh and The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim.

Edited to add: It turns out that the cover for The Enchanted April has an exact lookalike: The Garden Party and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield. As far as I can tell, The Enchanted April was published with that cover in 1991 by Virago, while this edition of The Garden Party was published in 2007 by Penguin Classics. Thanks, Claire, for pointing out this lookalike!

Books Bought + Teaser Tuesday (November 3)

2009-11-03T11:38:00.015-05:00

As unbelievable as this may sound, in between my two book fairs last week, I actually went into a secondhand book store and bought two more books: Probability Moon by Nancy Kress and The Evolution of Jane by Cathleen Schine. As if I needed more books!

The Books Bought meme is hosted by Cindy at Cindy’s Love of Books.

_____________________________________________________

Should Be Reading hosts the Teaser Tuesdays weekly event.

My modified rules are as follows:

Grab your current read. Pick two or three “teaser” sentences more or less at random from the book, anywhere on the page. You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your teaser from… that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given! (Please avoid spoilers!) (Read the official Teaser Tuesday rules.)

My teaser:

“She didn’t feel sober enough for O’Connor, so she continued beyond Park Town, walking the things that Mark had told her like dogs on a leash. Walking and walking and wishing that she could bend down and loosen the collars of her thoughts and slip free of them. But she couldn’t; they stayed with her, walking obediently at her heel” (pp. 282-283).

This is from Bloodless Shadow by Victoria Blake.

Book Fair Week 2009 (part 2)

2009-10-31T23:37:00.003-04:00

As I mentioned in part 1 of my Book Fair Week posts, I was in Quebec City this weekend for the Quebec City Women’s Club Book Fair, which took place on Saturday. All their books are $1 each with the exception of a few they consider special books (usually bestsellers in great condition, art books and other coffee table books), which are anywhere from $2 to $10 each. I stayed away from the special books, so this is what I got for $24:

The books are:

3 Willows: The Sisterhood Grows by Ann Brashares
A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright
A Wrongful Death by Kate Wilhelm
Another Thing to Fall by Laura Lippman
Bloodless Shadow by Victoria Blake
Creating a Life Worth Living by Carol Lloyd
Death in the Garden by Elizabeth Ironside
Factoring Humanity by Robert J. Sawyer
Ill Wind by Nevada Barr
Kiss the Sunset Pig: A Canadian’s American Road Trip (with Exotic Detours) by Laurie Gough
Memories of Anne Frank: Reflections of a Childhood Frien d by Alison Leslie Gold
Obstruction of Justice by Perri O’Shaughnessy
Old Books, Rare Friends: Two Literary Sleuths and Their Shared Passion by Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern
Pay It Forward by Catherine Ryan Hyde
The Doctor’s Wife by Elizabeth Brundage
The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim
The Genius Factory: Unravelling the Mystery of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank by David Plotz
The Girls by Lori Lansens
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Petty Details of So-and-So’s Life by Camilla Gibb
The Secret Life of a Schoolgirl: A Memoir by Rosemary Kingsland
The Tall Pine Polka by Lorna Landvik
The Three Miss Margarets by Louise Shaffer
White Teeth by Zadie Smith

My friend Michelle, who gave me a lift to Quebec City (and bought 83 books at the book fair!), gave me two more books:

My best finds are A Short History of Progress (recommended by my sister R.), The Enchanted April (which someone at the book fair said was one of the best books she’d ever read) and Old Books, Rare Friends (which sounds great!).

Have you read any of these books? Are there any you’d recommend (or disrecommend)?

A Change in Altitude by Anita Shreve (a review)

2009-10-30T22:17:00.001-04:00

A Change in Altitude by Anita Shreve is the story of newlywed Margaret, who follows her husband Patrick to Kenya shortly after their marriage. Once there, they meet a British couple, Arthur and Diana, who invite them to join a climbing expedition up Mount Kenya with another couple. The trip ends in tragedy, which causes Margaret to reevaluate her life and her marriage.

Last year, I read Testimony, Shreve’s previous novel, and was quite disappointed to find myself not enjoying it because I consider Shreve to be one of my favourite authors (read my review). Unfortunately, I felt the same way about this novel: the story failed to engage me. Although Margaret is a sympathetic character, I never connected with her. It seemed to me that Shreve kept her at arm’s length; I wanted to get into her head more. And the tragedy unfortunately struck me as a bit ridiculous—I felt impatient with the character who felt responsible for what happened, when it seemed clear to me that responsibility lay elsewhere (how’s that for not giving anything away?). Worse still, despite the liberal sprinkling of African words throughout the novel (so much so that I wished there was a glossary included in the book) and despite the fact that Shreve actually lived in Kenya for several years, the country never really came alive for me. Instead, the subplot involving Arthur and Diana’s servants felt predictable and forced. Overall, I wish I’d followed my own advice (which I mentioned in my review of Testimony): skip the latest Shreve book and read one of her earlier ones instead.

To read other reviews (many of them more favourable than mine), head over to these blogs:
A Novel Menagerie
Bibliophile by the Sea
Book Nook Club
Foreign Circus Library
Jo-Jo Loves to Read
Laura’s Reviews
Luxury Reading
S. Krishna’s Books

Thank you to Hachette for sending me this book to review.

Book Fair Week 2009 (part 1)

2009-10-29T13:05:00.013-04:00

As I mentioned last year, this week—the last week of October—is “Book Fair Week”: every year, the McGill Book Fair is held on the Wednesday and Thursday (i.e. yesterday and today), and the Quebec City Women’s Club Book Fair is held on the Saturday in Quebec City (which is where my dad lives, so it’s always a great excuse to go for a visit—plus he loves Book Fair nearly as much as I do!).

As you might imagine, I like to get to these events early, so yesterday Linda and I (along with a non-blogging friend of mine) lined up outside the doors at McGill for about 25 minutes before we were let in at 9 am. I managed to snag eight books, then Linda had to go to class. (I recommended two books to her, which she bought, so I hope she enjoys them: The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield and Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life by Natalie Goldberg.) Almost as soon as Linda had left, Tina called me: she was ready to check out the book fair on her lunch break. I of course had to join her... and I bought another six books!

All these books only cost me $40 and many are in near-perfect condition (although I bent the cover of one book on the way home, which really annoyed me). Here’s all my loot:

The books are:

The only one I’ve already read is Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson, which I remember loving.

I’m especially excited about The Heart Specialist by Claire Holden Rothman, which both Cindy and Linda recommended to me, and Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, which I’ve read good things about on many blogs. I’m also happy I found a copy of Specials by Scott Westerfeld, as he’s going to be in town next week, but I still need the first two books in that series!

Come back on the weekend for part 2, my report from Quebec City!

Similar covers: Headless woman in a black dress

2009-10-28T10:35:00.004-04:00

I swear I’m not trying to pick on A. Manette Ansay, who has the misfortune of having two books with lookalike covers (see my lookalike post two weeks ago). This time, the culprit is Limbo: A Memoir by A. Manette Ansay and the lookalike is A Good Woman by Lisa Appignanesi. (Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out which book was published first.)

Two other fairly similar covers are The Mystery of Breathing by Perri Klass (which also features a yellow font as on the cover of Limbo) and The Photograph by Penelope Lively.

Teaser Tuesday (October 27): The first rush of an airplane ride

2009-10-27T10:16:00.000-04:00

Should Be Reading hosts the Teaser Tuesdays weekly event.

My modified rules are as follows:

Grab your current read. Pick two or three “teaser” sentences more or less at random from the book, anywhere on the page. You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your teaser from… that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given! (Please avoid spoilers!) (Read the official Teaser Tuesday rules.)

This is actually my sister Brogan’s teaser:

“Once in a while, however, my parents bought takeout from a Mexican restaurant a few miles from our home. . . . I don’t remember any of the other food. The reason I don’t remember the other food is that their salads were so damned good . . . The dressing was tart and puckery—my mouth always bunched around each bite after I took it in. The oil base beneath it was rich and slithery, like nothing I had ever experienced. And there were layers of taste after the vivid sharpness of the first bite. It tasted like the first rush of an airplane ride, when the wheels lift off the ground” (p. 34).

This is from Gluten-Free Girl: How I Found the Food That Loves Me Back and How You Can Too by Shauna James Ahern.

Brogan’s comment to me regarding this excerpt was: “It made me think a lot of things are like the first rush of an airplane ride, as in, that moment when you lift and feel half-elated, half-heartbroken, like you might burst into tears at the sheer miracle of being alive.”

(I love her statement at least as much as I love the excerpt she chose.) What is like the first rush of an airplane ride for you?

Mailbox Monday + blogger meet-up (October 26)

2009-10-26T16:01:00.016-04:00

Although I’m eagerly awaiting a bunch of book wins (yay!), I only received one book in the mail this week: Dusk by David Doub, another BBAW Scavenger Hunt win. This one was sent to me by Jackie at Literary Escapism. (Thanks, Jackie!)

Yesterday, I got together with my blogging buddies, Cindy, Donna, Linda and Tina. (I’m still hoping that one of these days we can include Lucy in our gatherings!) There were fewer books exchanged this time, but I still came away with two, both from Tina: Cold Case by Kate Wilhelm (the latest book in the Barbara Holloway series) and Boys, Girls and Other Hazardous Materials by Rosalind Wiseman. We spent a good chunk of time trying to figure out our BEA accommodations (yes, all five of us are hoping to be in New York City next May!). I think some of the other patrons in the tearoom may have found us a bit annoying as we pulled out our computers (thanks to Donna, who had brought two, I had one to play with too) and began calling out the names of various websites of interest in loud, excited voices!

What did you find in your mailbox this past week? For other Mailbox Monday posts, head over to Marcia’s blog, The Printed Page.

Library Loot: More graphic novels (October 22)

2009-10-22T16:34:00.018-04:00

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Eva at A Striped Armchair and Marg at Reading Adv entures that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post—feel free to steal the button—and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries! Want to share your loot? Marg has the Mr. Linky this week!

OK, I guess it’s official now, I am obsessed, because I’m still only taking out graphic novels from the library. (The fact that I own 500+ unread books, none of which are graphic novels, might also be influencing what books I’m borrowing, but anyway.) So here’s this week’s loot:

First off, I found Persepolis 1 and 2 by Marjane Satrapi, which was a pleasant surprise because every time I’ve checked before, all the copies have been out. These are in French, so this is only half of the story (it was published in four volumes in French).

I also got Maus: A Survivor's Tale — And Here by Troubles Began (vol. 2) by Art Spiegelman. I loved the first one, so I have no doubt I’ll love this one too.

Finally, I picked up La Perdida by Jessica Abel, a graphic novel I hadn’t heard of before, but which looks really good.

Because I could only take four graphic novels out (there’s a 10-book limit on graphic novels at my library and I still had 6 at home), I also read two more while I was there:

Aya de Yopougon 2 and Aya de Yopougon 3 by Marguerite Abouet and Clément Oubrerie are obviously the follow-ups to the first volume, which I got out of the library last time.

Similar covers: Two couples

2009-10-21T16:04:00.001-04:00

Here are another two sets of lookalike covers for you. First up, two different covers for Fred & Edie by Jill Dawson as well as The Nation’s Favourite Love Poems: A Selection of Romantic Verse edited by Daisy Goodwin. Below are Queen of the Underworld by Gail Godwin (also with two covers) and Sights Unseen by Kaye Gibbons.

I stuck both these sets in the same post because both feature a couple; it was only after I put them side by side that I realized they also feature similar colours: turquoise, orange and lavender.

Last week, I mentioned that I collect book covers—what I didn’t mention is that I started my collection by going through other people’s libraries on LibraryThing (when I was sick at one point), and I remember finding Fred & Edie and The Nation’s Favourite Love Poems in one person’s library!

I feel like that top photo is one that I should be able to identify, but I have no idea how. Does anyone know what it is? (If anyone has either of these books, please check!)

Close Encounters of the Third-Grade Kind: Thoughts on Teacherhood by Phillip Done (guest review)

2009-10-20T10:18:00.013-04:00

I recently received a surprise book in the mail, which I passed on to my friend Louise, as it sounded like her type of book (and I already have a towering pile waiting for my attention). Happily, she also agreed to review it. Here then is her review...

Both as a former third-grader and as an adult who reads stories to children, I thoroughly enjoyed Close Encounters of the Third-Grade Kind: Thoughts on Teacherhood by Phillip Done (rhymes with phone). Parts of Close Encounters are laugh-out-loud funny, others are moving, and one chapter in particular is downright sad. Done’s sense of humour had me giggling out loud on the bus and gasping with laughter at my desk. His descriptions of the trials and tribulations of a male third-grade teacher are priceless.

One thing bothered me though—the author’s tendency to address his female students as sweetheart and honey. It creeped me out. Maybe I’ve just gotten used to the professional stance now expected of adults working with children, but I wouldn’t dream of calling my audience members by anything other than their names.

Aside from that, I would recommend this book to anyone who knows a third-grader, remembers being in the third grade or just needs a good laugh. The stories in this book ring true, and the author is honest and generous in his telling of them. Done says that he started this book when he wrote some tips for a niece who was going into teaching. I think other new teachers might benefit from his 20-plus years of experience.

For other reviews of this book, head over to these blogs:
A Bookworm’s World
Bambi Reads
Bonggamom Finds
Fabulous Miss S
Mama’s Mouth
Selfish Mom
Starting Fresh

Thank you to Hachette for sending me this book for Louise to review!

Mailbox Monday + Books Bought (October 19)

2009-10-19T14:40:00.011-04:00

I’m so excited that I received a copy of Simon’s Cat by Simon Tofield in the mail today, thanks to the generous folks at Hachette. I loved the movies featuring Simon’s cat and from the little that I’ve seen of the book so far (I peeked at the first dozen pages), I’m going to love the book too.

I also received Bundles of Letters Including A, V and Epsilon: Poems by Arlene Ang and Valerie Fox not long ago, and it took me a while to figure out that this was one of my wins from a BBAW Scavenger Hunt. Many thanks to Arlene Ang for sending me this book. I don’t normally review poetry, but I might have to make an exception this time!

I also completely forgot to mention that Cindy gave me How It Ends by Laura Wiess during our September get-together. (I also failed to blog about that get-together, but you can read all about it at Cindy’s Love of Books or Bambi Reads.)

Finally, I bought myself two books recently: The Margarets by Sheri S. Tepper and Original Love: Poems by Molly Peacock (inspired in part by the fact that I’ve started to write poetry again).

The Mailbox Monday meme is hosted by Marcia at The Printed Page.

The Books Bought meme is hosted by Cindy at Cindy’s Love of Books.

Similar covers: More women from behind + how do I find these covers anyway?

2009-10-14T14:12:00.005-04:00

Here are two more exact lookalike covers featuring women from the back: Becoming George Sand by Rosalind Brackenbury and Good Things I Wish You by A. Manette Ansay. Both were published this year: according to Amazon, Ansay’s book came out in July, while Brackenbury’s came out in August.

For those of you who asked how I manage to find similar covers such as these (particularly Diane and Staci—I apologize for not answering your questions last week!), the first few I stumbled across completely by accident, but then I started collecting cover images by theme. At the moment, I have 176 folders with 1854 “possible lookalike” images in them... And that’s not including some two dozen folders with definite lookalikes! It turns out there are lots out there. (And did I mention I’m a wee bit obsessed?)

If any of you find any and want to pass them on, feel free to shoot me an email!

Friday Finds (October 9)

2009-10-09T16:41:00.017-04:00

What great books have you added to your wish list this week? Share your Frida y Finds at Should Be Reading.

I haven’t posted any Friday Finds in over two months, so some of these were not added to my wish list this week, but I figured that doesn’t really matter...

Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea mentioned Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt by Peg Streep in a Waiting on Wednesday post. I’m always interested in books that explore the darker side of the mother-daughter relationship, and this one sounds like a good one.

I was recently contacted by Eco-Libris, an organization that promotes green books. They are currently organizing an event called It’s Time for a Green Book: 1 Day, 100 Bloggers, 100 Green Books, 100 Reviews, which will take place on November 10. Small Beneath the Sky: A Prairie Memoir by Lorna Crozier (one of my favourite Canadian poets) is one of the books being reviewed. (Unfortunately, by the time I checked out the list of books, all the ones I was interested in were already taken, so I’m not participating in this event, but I noticed that Jenners at Find Your Next Book Here just announced that she will be.)

Finally, Cathy at Kittling: Books mentioned The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf by Stephanie Barron (who wrote the Jane Austen mysteries) in one of her Bookfinds posts. I love this type of book (novels that fictionalize authors’ lives) and I’m a Virginia Woolf fan, so this one sounds right up my alley.

Similar covers: Balancing acts

2009-10-07T11:05:00.004-04:00

I’ve been collecting book covers that feature girls walking on fences (or something similar) for some time now, but only recently came across an exact match: Driftwood Summer by Patti Callahan Henry and No One You Know by Michelle Richmond. While I like the colours of the first cover better, I think it’s a shame that the author’s name sort of blends into the girl’s dress. I also don’t think the cover of No One You Know matches the book. (This is the only one of these books that I’ve read.)

The other books featured above are: Girls in Trouble by Caroline Leavitt, The Moons of Jupiter by Alice Munro (see note below), The Way Life Should Be by Christina Baker Kline, The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters by Timothy Schaffert and Towns Without Rivers by Michael Parker. Of all of these covers (including the first two), my favourite is Girls in Trouble by Caroline Leavitt—the colours are just so vibrant and I like the fact that the girl is facing us.

Have you spotted any other covers with girls walking on fences?

Edited to add:

It turns out that, as Claire at kiss a cloud pointed out, my favourite cover above has an exact lookalike too: The Moons of Jupiter by Alice Munro (which I just added to this post). Now I’m torn as to which of those two covers I like best!

Chiggers by Hope Larson (a review)

2009-10-06T17:22:00.007-04:00

Chiggers by Hope Larson is the story of Abby, who goes back to the same camp she’s been going to every summer, only to find everything is different this year. Her friend Rose is a cabin assistant and doesn’t have much time for her, and her other friends don’t like the new girl she’s been asked to show around. My main problem with this graphic novel was that, although I like Larson’s crisp drawing style, some of the characters looked so similar that I had trouble telling them apart (even on second reading). I also found that I didn’t “get” parts of the story. For example, it wasn’t clear to me why Abby’s friends disliked Shasta so much. (They say she’s annoying, but I didn’t really see why.) I also didn’t understand the significance of what happened at the very end of the story. I did enjoy the fact that the book included the rules of a card game played by the characters as well as instructions on how to make a friendship bracelet. I also thought the magic realism elements of the story were intriguing, but unfortunately not fully developed. I can’t recommend this one, although lots of other folks enjoyed it.

To read other reviews, check out these blogs:
Bookworm Readers
Comics Worth Reading
Eva’s Book Addiction
In the Tower
Maw Books
Miss Shortskirt
Things Mean a Lot
Welcome to My Tweendom

You can also read interviews with the author:
Comic Book Resources
Newsarama

I read a library copy of this book.

Book/blog stats for September 2009

2009-10-02T09:41:00.004-04:00

September was another excellent month for reading and a terrible month for reviewing: I read 21 books (20 of which were graphic novels) and again didn’t review a single one. (I promise this won’t happen in October too!)

The books I read were:
Summer Blonde by Adrian Tomine
Y: The Last Man (vol. 1 to vol. 9) by Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra et al.
Aya de Yopougon (vol. 1) by Marguerite Abouet and Clément Oubrerie (in French)
Aya (vol. 1) by Marguerite Abouet and Clément Oubrerie (translated by Helge Dascher)
Lillian the Legend by Kerry Byrne
Dykes and Other Sundry Carbon-Based Life Forms to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
The Summer of Love by Debbie Drechsler
Owly: The Way Home & The Bittersweet Summer (vol. 1) by Andy Runton
Maus: A Survivor's Tale — My Father Bleeds History (vol. 1) by Art Spiegelman
What Girls Learn by Karin Cook
The Big Skinny: How I Changed My Fattitude by Carol Lay
Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine
Pride of Baghdad by Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon

I also participated in Book Blogger Appreciation Week this month: I interviewed Hannah of About Books and gave away four books (winners were announced on Wednesday).

If you missed any of my “similar covers” posts this month, they were:
Kids on swings
Another bathtub cover
Flying book

A few blog stats:

Increase in number of unique visitors (compared to August): 62%

Top viewed post: A bevy of skirts

Number of books acquired: 5

Congratulations, BBAW giveaway winners!

2009-09-30T10:49:00.025-04:00

Congratulations to Alessandra at Out of the Blue, who won a copy of The Wishing Year: A House, a Man, My Soul by Noelle Oxenhandler, in my first BBAW giveaway...

Jo-Jo at Jo-Jo Loves to Read, who won Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos, in my second BBAW giveaway...

Rebecca, who won The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House by Kate Summerscale, in my third BBAW giveaway...

and Brogan, who won The Little Giant of Aberdeen County by Tiffany Baker, in my fourth and final BBAW giveaway!

I’ve emailed all the winners so please send me your addresses asap and I will order your books from The Book Depository. Thank you to everyone who entered. I wish I could have sent each one of you a book!

Similar covers: Flying book

2009-09-25T14:30:00.001-04:00

Doesn’t the book on the three covers below look like it’s flying? Hopefully not in a thrown-across-the-room kinda way, though... Anyway, these three books are: Scribner’s Best of the Fiction Workshops 1998 edited by Carol Shields (1998*), A Writer’s Book of Days: A Spirited Companion and Lively Muse for the Writing Life by Judy Reeves (1999) and The Muse Asylum by David Czuchlewski (2002). Of the three, I think my favourite is Reeves’ book (although the wiggly subtitle in yellow is a bit weird)—and it’s also the one I’m most interested in reading.

*All dates of publication are based on information provided by Amazon.

Some thoughts on burnout, BBAW and blogging goals

2009-09-24T18:14:00.003-04:00

It’s unlike me not to post on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, so I think can officially say that I’ve caught Blog Angst Flu, as Jen Robinson calls it. Or blogger burnout. Or in my case, maybe it should be called blogger paralysis, because every time I think about writing this post (or any post), I feel paralyzed and wind up doing something else (like reading other folks’ blogs, which is a great way to procrastinate!). Whatever you choose to call it, I’m in good company: Lenore, Wendy, Diane, Megan and Lilly have all recently blogged about this too.

So where to begin? Book Blogger Appreciation Week is hardly the beginning—I’m sure more than a few of you have noticed that I’ve fallen behind on reviewing and am failing to respond to most of the comments left on my blog. And this has been going on for a while now. However, though I enjoyed much of BBAW, I also completely identify with what Megan at Leafing Through Life said:

I see everybody’s sparkly blogs with their zillions of reviews, their thought-provoking posts, their book-reading totals at 100 or above for the year, their thoughtful and numerous comments on others’ blogs, and I know I can’t keep up, and then I wonder why I bother. What do I have to offer in the face of all that awesomeness?

And I know, I know, it’s not about comparing myself to others—I’m not out to write the best of anything; I really just want to add my voice to the chorus of book lovers out there and share my thoughts about books I love (and some I don’t). So what is it? I think it’s panic at the mounting pile of unreviewed (or unread) books, the 1000+ unread posts in my reader, all the comments I’ve received that I’m so happy to read but haven’t managed to respond to—in other words, the general feeling I have of being a bad blogger. And instead of doing anything about my mounting to-do list, I’ve been ignoring the problem. But if BBAW brought the issue to the fore for me, it also provided me with a glimmer of hope: I can set new goals for myself.

And so, inspired by three different bloggers, I’ve come up with three overlapping goals:

1. To keep blogging

Inspired by Lenore’s post, “The Future of Presenting Lenore,” my first and most encompassing goal is just to keep blogging. My task is to ignore the inner critic who says I’m not good enough or not doing enough (or have gotten so far behind as to be hopeless), and, as Elizabeth Smart said, “to bash on regardless.”

2. To reduce my post frequency

Jenners at Find Your Next Book Here recently posted about the kind of blogger she is (“steady, slow and loyal”) and I think I could learn from her example. I’ve therefore decided to limit myself to three or four posts per week: one book review, one “similar covers” post (because I love doing those!) and one bookish post or meme.

3. To catch up on my reviews

Kay at The Infinite Shelf is running The Review Challenge for folks like me who are reading faster than they are reviewing. I desperately want to catch up so I can start the new year with a clean slate. Realistically, I’m not going to manage to review all the books I’ve read this year, but this challenge will prompt me to go through the pile and weed out the ones I don’t want to review (or don’t have to) and narrow my pile down to a more manageable size. Plus encouragement from others in the same boat will help.

Anybody else out there feeling overwhelmed too?
_____________________________________________________

Given my feelings of overwhelm, I know it’s ridiculous that I’ve added to the 123 blogs that were already in my Google Reader, but I couldn’t help myself (this is what BBAW is all about after all). New additions to my reader include*:

A Book Blog. Period.
A High and Hidden Place: Tales of a Capricious Reader
Angieville
As Usual, I Need More Bookshelves
Book Addiction
Dolce Bellezza
falling into words
Jenn’s Bookshelves
Jen Robinson’s Book Page
Lit and Life
Nonsuch Book
Raging Bibliomania
Rhapsody in Books
Serendipitous Readings
Steph Su Reads
Stuff As Dreams Are Made On
The House of the Seven Tails
We Be Reading

BBAW is a great opportunity to meet new bloggers, and I’m hoping to find a few more favourites among these!

*I may have missed a few.